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Eventually, a girl’s voice did appear on the other line, youthful and playful and not creepy at all. “You must be in the shit if Big Daddy gave me the phone,” she said. The voice was distinctly Cajun. “Come on, spill it to Lil’ Mama. What’s got y’all all stirred up?”
Murtagh explained what had happened, somehow only taking about five minutes to get through all the details.
When he gave me a nod and hiked his thumb towards the hall, I took the phone off the speakerphone, and Murtagh walked out of the room with it and into the hallway. I could hear him pace back and forth and discuss something with the girl on the other end of the line.
Zazie made eye contact with me. “What happened to me?” she whispered, seeming to shake with worry. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything. We don’t know. There are so many things we don’t know. But we’re trying to find out, alright?” I stroked her hair down her back, petting her to keep her calm.
I was beginning to feel silly. She didn’t want to hurt me. I was unsure if she knew how. I imagined that if she’d known how to fight me, she wouldn’t have let us dominate her all evening. She had seemed to try to fight back at several points, and she had never succeeded. Had never even come close.
I rested my cheek against the top of her head as I waited, wondering what I’d do now. I was so close to having everything I wanted…
Murtagh eventually came back into the room. “She’ll take about three hours to get here, but she says one of her partners will be here in five minutes, give or take, and not to get spooked by him.”
“Why would we get spooked?” I asked him, finding myself still rubbing soothing circles across Zazie’s naked back as she pressed her body against mine, her eyes distant, thoughtful, and unhappy. “And how can he make it here in five minutes if she takes hours?”
“Because I ain’t got a body,” said a deep voice that was suddenly right next to me.
When I leave my human form, I can become the size of a house. Not many things can kill me. I heal quickly, even if by some crazy circumstance I do get injured, and Murtagh is the same way.
Yet, we both screamed—like women—when we heard the voice. I immediately crossed the room, taking Zazie with me and pulling her as close to my chest as possible. She might be a djinn, but I wasn’t going to let whatever fucking boogeyman that had just come into the room eat her!
We stopped screaming after a second, and we searched in the direction of the voice only to find a giant man-shaped shadow on the wall. It was frankly ghoulish. I didn’t like it at all, and I didn’t let Zazie turn her head to see it. It was too much; I didn’t want her to go catatonic or something; for God’s sake, she had just started to calm down!
“I thought she told you not to get spooked!” said the shadow defensively.
“W…w…” I tried to form words to ask what he was and why he’d come into my house without knocking and ‘What the fuck?’, but words weren’t forming in my mouth very well. I was hoping they’d start to form in Murtagh’s.
“Aw, I thought you were a dragon,” the shadow said with disappointment easily audible in its scratchy, deep, spooky voice. “She promised I’d get to see dragons, but you’re just as scared as anyone!” He flicked his shadowy arms up with exasperation, and then seemed to plop down on the shadow of one of my armchairs. “So which one of you is the dragon?”
Murtagh found his words first, I’m embarrassed to admit. “We’re both dragons, actually. Me, and my partner-mate, Caspian,” Murtagh said, his voice raspy. He gestured to me.
“So you say!” it said, sounding amused. “You know that lady you carry? She has fear comin’ off her so thick, I can’t even think. It’s making me feel a little crazy. Don’t you worry, though. Not one bit—Lil’ Momma is comin’ with The Boss Man, Samael. And there ain’t much Samael can’t figure out—he’s seen just about everything in creation at least once. But he isn’t gonna want to deal with a shaking little lamb like that. Not only that, but it’s gonna be hard for him to ferret out her story if she smells so much like dragon jizz.”
I curled my lip at this crudeness, but his words made me feel better. For some reason, when the shadow spoke, it humanized him more and more. He was not at all like the voice on the phone—if I closed my eyes and pretended really hard, I could almost imagine he was just a human playing parlor tricks.
“If she looks at you, she’s not going to be any less frightened,” I assured him firmly. She was literally shaking in my arms so hard that my own teeth were rattling.
“Well, I ain’t goin’ away,” the shadow said, almost apologetically. “Boss always sends me ahead when he’s afraid about safety for Lil’ Mama, and I stay until she goes.”
“You know I’ve met with her a half-dozen times now, and she’s made it out fine? She and her ‘cat’?” Murtagh put up finger quotations around the word ‘cat’.
I whipped my head towards Murtagh. He hadn’t said shit about cats! Where did cats come into this equation?
My lip curled with disgust. “Cats?” I demanded, incredulous. I fucking hated cats.
Murtagh ignored me.
The shadow shrugged his shoulders. “Well, it ain’t Lil’ Mama making the decisions right now. When she saw you before, it was behind Boss’s back more or less. You’re a card she keeps close to her chest on account that demons and dragons rub each other the wrong way. You know, traditionally-speaking.”
“Oh God…” I was so distracted by talking to the big creepy shadow and listening to it talk back like it was a person that I had completely forgotten that I had been trying to keep Zazie from looking right at it. Her body felt firm now, stiff, and I almost worried she had actually died of fright.
I looked down to see her stare at the being like the boogeyman that it was.
“Don’t worry, don’t worry. Obviously, this is something we can handle,” I cooed to her—complete lies. I had no idea if this creature could even die. How could it die without a body? There were a lot of questions there, even for me. But I pet her hair, trying to soothe her like a spooked horse. “Shh, shh…”
“That’s normally the reaction I get,” the shadow admitted, seeming to turn his head to stare at us. It then stood from its shadow-chair and seemed to dig around in its pocket. “Here,” he seemed to plop something onto the shadow of the nightstand. “I have one of these from Lil’ Mama’s.”
