“Get a shovel and get diggin’. What the pigs don’t eat, we bury tomorrow. We got two dead ones in there.” He picked his teeth and sneered as if he didn’t know I’d be the one chopping the bodies up… Again.
I made a gesture over my head with both hands, mimicking ears, and tilted my head.
“Nah, for sure humans this time.” He handwaved me off, and I nodded. When I headed out to the maintenance shed that doubled as my home, nobody followed, and I went about my business gettingthe kit.
The duffel bag weighed heavy on my shoulder as I marched off toward the burning shack. Brow furrowed, I waved my hand before my mouth before tucking my shirt over my nose. The smell wasn’t much better there, but the stink was preferable to the burn.
Fleeing people and bobcats swarmed around as two limp forms got dragged out into a spot where I went about unpacking my bag. I pulled out a tarp and unfolded it beside the bodies, thinking a prayer of some kind for them, sorry it happened. Sorry, they didn’t know better, that they didn’t have no family to care for them. Sorry, I had to clean up the mess, mostly. I transferred the bodies one by one and flinched when the first shout rang out.
“Burner!” Bobcats scattered, and I didn’t bother. I’d seen the critters flying above a dozen times a year since I was a kitten. As long as I wasn’t doing nothing wrong, I was good. Following orders.
The moon darkened above me as the wind whipped. With a bugling call echoing out, like the groan of steel, the dragon announced itself and landed somewhere outside of the clutter of piecemeal buildings. I merely had to keep my head down and do what I was told, and the mean lizards would leave little old me alone. I liked that the best, when nobody noticed me, like my namesake,Whisper.
I reached pale fingers out, chapped pink from the cold as I tied the tarp fastidiously and carefully tugged, walking away from the burning building. I trudged on, feet slipping in my too-big shoes over slick earth, the layer of frost enough to shake me. Still, I carried on, accustomed to it all. This was the way of life for me. For a bobc—a throwback. I wasn’t technically anything if I couldn’t shift. Just some slick ass and free labor.
The biting breeze whipped by, throwing the hood of my sweatshirt off my face, and I flinched, dropping the tarp to get the fabric back over my head. I reached for strings that had long snapped and flustered. I didn’t get myself covered in time and glanced up to lock eyes with a beast of a man. My heart seized in my chest as I waited for a shout, a raised hand, anything to put the blame on me. I was a good scapegoat, couldn’t even fight back.
“What happened?” No anger, no shouting, just a question as dark eyes met mine, impossible voids amid white that sucked me in as stringy, pale hair flopped into my eyes.
I shrugged and raised my hands. I didn’t know no signing language, and even if I did, nobody round these parts knew how to read them. As long as you nodded, shrugged, or shook your head at the right times, nobody needed much else.
“Smells like a meth lab exploded.” The stranger held his chin up slightly, and I bobbed my head side to side in an approximation ofprobably.
“What’s in the tarp?” He gestured, and I glanced down as if I hadn’t just wrapped up two dead humans for disposal. I froze like a deer in headlights, all autonomy stolen from me like the voice I never had. Another reason my pa named me Whisper.
“Don’t pay that fool no mind. Throwback’s dumb as mud.” Goober, the clowder’s alpha in charge, came strolling out, hands in pockets. He sneered, revealing a row of crooked teeth, and I kept my head down.
With the attention taken off me, I excused myself with a little nod and tugged my load in an angle away from the path of the dragon, earning a command that made me halt in place.The dragon’s voice was hypnotic, so soft and well-spoken. Didn’t sound nothing like one of us. “Don’t move.”
“Don’t pay him no mind. I done said he’s dumb. Ain’t gonna answer you. He’s cartin’ off the dead’ns.” Goober approached the dragon with a wide grin and that genial posture he got when CPS came to the clowder sometimes. With enough sweet talk and promises, they always went away. The dragon didn’t sway, though.
The beast sniffed the air and shook his head. I flicked my gaze up and elsewhere a few times, waiting for the opportunity to get away. He spoke, though, words few but meaningful. “Human or…”
“Humans. Run-of-the-mill rabble we hire out. Santa’s little helpers. Won’t be missed.” What Goober left unsaid was the fact that the mountains ate men often. Humans wandered in, never came out. Occasionally a piece of skull or part of a body surfaced, but they rarely earned a call to police. If we buried them by a farm, they weren’t dug up till next season, and no farmer in their right mind would close off a field mid-planting season just to report a body. Rule of the land—“if you seen a body, no you ain’t.”
The dragon approached me, waving his hand for me to step back and I glanced to Goober for confirmation. He waved me off, and I stepped back with a cower.Don’t make eye contact.I chanted to myself. Dragons could read minds or some shit, couldn’t they? He smelled nice, though. I liked the smell above the rankness of bodies in our village. Above the sour chemicals of drugs.
He stepped forward and twitched the tarp to the side, staring them down. He rifled their pockets and pulled out two phones and wallets before pocketing them. “I’ll be back.”
In a flash and twist of flesh, he flew off, whisking into the skyline, and I glanced around, ready to flee.
“Keep your ass right there, Wampus.” That nickname. They never used my real name. They called me Wampus, the old legend of the half cat that attacked people, cursed for meddling in affairs that weren’t its business. I hadn’t done none of that.
I cowered under Goober’s gaze as he watched the sky until the dragon returned, shifting midair to land on the ground with a thud that seemed more like a show than necessary. “Phones are off in a lake with the wallets. If the authorities track them, they won’t find anything.”
Not like anyone got signal up the hill this way, anyway. Pointless to track any of them satellite doohickeys with phones and the like. Goober said the things made your mind turn to mush and leak out your ears. I didn’t believe it, but then again, humans weren’t that damn bright.
With a sharp inhale of breath, the dragon threw his head back, rounded out his cheeks, and leaned down, belching fire down upon the corpses in a thunderous display that sent the first kiss of warmth I’d had in days over me, and it was all I could do not to step into it and bathe in the fire. Wouldn’t burn me none. All shifters had their gifts, and mine? Mine was fire. I couldn’t make it, but I couldn’t get burned, and embers died when I wanted. I held onto the gift like a precious thing, the only connection I had to prove I wasn’t one of the monkeys. Human.
Charred skeletal remains lay in place over the melted remnants of the very edges of my tarp. I’d have to get another one, and that’d cost me eleven dollars and twenty-two cents I didn’t have. But I didn’t make a stink about it. Saved me a day’s work of chopping up bodies for the pigs. He stared at the skeletons and gave me a gesture. “Should be very brittle. Break it up as much as you can and toss it in the reserve. Fish need calcium.”
I’d do just that.
“I’m Marcus from the Flame’s Sovereign clan. You are?” The dragon gestured toward Goober, who introduced himself by a kinder name than what we knew him by, Gordon. The dragon’s tone grew haughty as he spoke, telling our alpha off about what he was doing, like bobcats were good at much else. Truckers, druggies, and poverty. All we were good at.
I took the lull in conversation and used it as an excuse to sidestep and go get my cleaning gear. I returned with a few trash bags, a shovel, and gloves that I used to gather the bones, kick the dirt around, and move on, my goal to recover any locked boxes in the building. Bring those to Goober, make sure all the glassware that survived got moved off to be cleaned, the broken stuff needed to be smashed, and any chemicals moved or destroyed as needed.
With all the excitement dying down, I went about my duties, my skin prickling at the presence of the dragon who eventually made his way to my area again and kicked around the ashes.
