Diarmuid was cruelly adept at sensing which part of my body I could still move, when another had given out. And no more sexy wall presses. Even though I had a knife and wolf strength, I’d found myself on my back underneath his dragon foot every day with a talon on either side of my neck. He couldn’t communicate with me while in dragon form, but his eyes glowed in a way that definitely translated to,See how easy it would be to kill you, little she-wolf?before he lifted his giant front claw to let me up.
I swear, if he had balls, I’d kick him in them.
Yet, he always knew when to stop.
Every day, just as I was about to give in to the urge to either cry or vomit, he dismissed me with a, “You may retire to your bath and write of this day in your journal.”
While I spent most of my meals grilling Aengus, I limped out of every session with Diarmuid with no questions asked, just happy for the torture to be over.
I sometimes get the feeling he is trying to tire me out. Like a dog with too much energy,I wrote in my journal after being informed during one particularly grueling workout that breaks were “not a thing we will be indulging.”
I was so tired most days that I could barely stay awake for last meal, much less put together a cohesive escape plan beyond,Keep on playing along and hope you get an opportunity to slip away and find that door.
Which was not going to work. Every moment we trained outside, Diarmuid’s eyes stayed on me.
But even the dragon’s cruel taskmaster personality was better than Orpheus.
I soon found out that second visit hadn’t been a dream.
Every single night.
Every single night, my sixth wolf sense jerked me awake, and I found him sitting at the end of my bed in seiza.
With a knife gripped in his hand, glinting in the low light.
It was almost as unsettling as the octopus tube toilet, and I guess I did need that knife Sadie’s armorer had given me. Not only did I use it for my training, but I’d taken to sleeping with the weapon under the pillow.
“Go away, Orpheus,” I had to mumble before turning over. “No killing me. That’s an order.”
It said a lot about Diarmuid’s workouts that I still managed to fall back asleep after he left the room, which he always immediately did when I gave him the order.
But seriously, eggplant that guy. He was the worst.
Which made Aengus the easy winner of the three-personality contest.
He fed me, walked me through every piece of god tech in the grotto bath, and often asked me questions instead of the other way around.
He was especially interested in my job as a holoscribe, and I guess my old boss at theWolfNet Gazettehad been right about the much-shortened attention span of the general public.
Because here in the Pleistocene Age, Aengus acted like every story I told him about my boring life as the writer behind the Kiwi Koala avatar was his favorite holo series.
The truth was, he asked way more questions than he answered, but of all three personalities, he was the one most likely to reply to my queries.
Not that I ever tried to talk to Orpheus, because, you know—that part about him being theworst.
But still, after two weeks in the Pleistocene Age, the running list I’d made about my captors was embarrassingly short for a trained journalist.
Things I know about the Drakkon
They’re called Drakkon, NOT dragons. I don’t think they have plurals. Hard to tell since their language appears to be made up of hisses, roars, and truly unsettling Predator clicks. I only heard it once, and the memory still haunts me.
Uses we/us/our pronouns—but singular when referring to anyone that isn’t him. Unconfirmed diagnosis: Multiple personality disorder???
Drakkon —> biologically wired to be hunters.
Drakkon = Aliens??? Aengus said something about hailing from the planet closest to our fire star. But Mercury is uninhabited. Maybe he means another solar system. The our/we thing is so confusing.
He also said Earth has two moons, but won’t let me out at night to see them. For my “protection.”
