Page 27 of Nobody Told Me Thrift Shops Sell Stolen Dragon Heirlooms

My father had it built for my mother.

Not for transport, though it served that purpose often enough. He had built it because when he first brought her home after their marriage, she’d stood at the edge of the roofline and looked out over the hills with a melancholic expression because she missed the sky.

He’d noticed, of course. My father had many deficiencies, but in the matter of loving my mother, he was offensively attentive.

So, he’d built her a place to take off and to land again.

And, in the private mythology that forms inside marriages, he built it for any heirs who might take after her. That was how love worked in this house. It imagined a future, then made room for it.

There had only been me.

And my mother couldn’t use it now.

So the platform remained, broad and pale against the old stone, built first for my mother and now used mostly by me, with the occasional helicopter tolerated only when necessity called for it. The place still belonged to this family, just not in the way my father had imagined when he built it. In that version, my mother still tilted her face into the wind. In that version, grief hadn’t yet moved in and rearranged the furniture.

I stood at the edge of it now and let the cold evening air move over me. The sky had begun its long descent into color. The western edge of the horizon was washed in apricot and bruised rose. Higher up, cool violet thinned into blue so clean it almost looked polished. The first stars hadn’t yet committed to showing themselves, and the air held that suspended quality it acquired just before night, as though the day were taking one final breath.

I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply.

There was always a moment before I shifted when my body seemed to gather itself around the decision. A tightening, then an opening. Bone and muscle and heat finding an older shape, one my human form only ever approximated. It wasn’t pain, exactly. Pain implied injury. This was something more intimate than that, a rearrangement so complete it felt like truth. My shoulders widened, my spine lengthening and rolling with the change. Power rippled under my skin.

The world sharpened.

When I opened my eyes again, the platform looked smaller beneath me. The wind slid along the long curve of my body and gathered beneath me. This was something I knew well, the first language my body had ever understood. I stepped forward off the edge.

The drop lasted only a second.

Then the air held me.

Relief moved through me.

Flight had always done that. It stripped everything down too quickly for self-deception. On the ground, I could fake competence, make myself a necessity. In the sky, there was only the fact of being alive inside a vast and beautiful thing. It was humbling in the least charming sense of the word.

The manor receded below me, its slate roofs and long windows becoming mere pinpricks in the landscape, the formal gardens a pattern of green stitches. Beyond them, the grounds opened into dark trees and the silver suggestion of the river. The air cooled, sliding over my scales as I gained height.

My mother had loved dusk flights.

She preferred evenings like this, when the sky looked hand-painted and the world below seemed, briefly, less concerned with ownership and rank and all the other inventions people used to make themselves miserable.

She used to turn slowly just to watch the color shift across her scales.

I still remembered flying beside her as a child, trying and failing to match her ease, my turns too eager, my climbs too sharp. She would glance over at me with open amusement, then trace one slow, effortless spiral, telling me without words: you’re overdoing it, darling. And I would immediately overdo it in a different way.

The memory arrived so whole it nearly undid me, so I pushed higher.

Cloud-strands drifted above the valley in faint ribbons, their undersides touched pink by the sinking sun. At this height, the wind had teeth. It passed over my face and into my lungs like ice water, clean enough to hurt.

I stopped thinking. All that existed was altitude, color, and the long muscular stretch of my body across the sky. I curved east, then back west, climbing until the manor had fallen away behind me and the world below had gone soft with distance. Roads became threads. Ponds caught the last of the light like held breath.

Gradually, I let myself drift lower to warmer air. I closed my eyes for one reckless second, letting the cold move over me, letting memory do what it always did when I was alone in the sky.

When I opened them, a striped, absurdly cheerful balloon was directly in my path. Close enough that I could make out the wicker basket and the woman already leaning over the side with her phone in her hand.

Swearing, I dropped hard, rolling to the side so sharply the sky snapped sideways around me.

The basket passed near enough for me to hear the burner hiss.

When I righted myself, the woman was waving at me with both hands as though we had arranged this in advance. She was beaming so widely I could see it even from several yards away. Her phone was out again in seconds. A man in a blazer stood beside her, one hand braced on the basket. The other was raised in a gesture universally recognized to mean I’d ruined his evening.