Images of his mother’s dancing by candlelight in the sacred precinct of her temple, mingled with the image of this girl dancing beneath the strobe light.
In the untold centuries of his childhood, George had watched his mother lure lover after lover to his death.
Now, he, himself, had been lured, betrayed by a code ingrained in his loins; pulled by a need woven into his genes.
Fear and excitement coursed through him; dread and heat played his nerves like skilled fingertips drumming music out of a fine harp. His throat twisted and worked, seeking to shape a song the world hadn’t heard for millennia.
If he could still the madness of his own desire, perhaps he could wander off into the night, unnoticed, like the waiter. He closed his eyes and groped in his mind for a memory of a safe time.
George remembered the blind worm he’d once been; the fledgling who had slumbered beneath the temple’s floorboards, receiving tidbits from whatever his mother savaged—princes in their silk wrappings, merchants redolent of spices, priests perfumed with incense and fire.
He could almost feel the mattress of rubies, diamonds and coins of that first nest. But not quite. Reality pressed him on all sides. The metal chair held his body at an uncomfortable angle. The wood of the table felt too warm against his hands. He heard the soft music playing over the sound system of the bar, the steps of men coming and going. He knew that the challenges went on. From outside came the sounds of giant wings, the shaking booms of sudden falls.
He opened his eyes
Only the small oriental man in the jade green suit remained.
With his back to the girl, he stared at George. From beneath his heavy eyelids, his eyes shone an incongruous green.
Fear and excitement brought George upright. Hot in his belly, cold in his heart, he stood up to take the challenge.
He glanced at the girl, then back at the other male.
At this point, the female was irrelevant. What mattered was the fight and the surge of power and blood in your mouth, and strength in your minds. What mattered was siring the new generation.
This wasn’t love; not human love. He’d longed for love, once.
Love, as humans knew it, with lifelong companionship. He’d been quite young, then, yet he still remembered his Elisha, his bride, dead centuries ago, killed by the drake who’d emerged from George and taken her sacrifice in his own way.
He’d tried love the human way, but drakes could not love humans.
The oriental man nodded to George.
George nodded back.
Outside, the warm air stank of burning flesh and scorched hair, mixed with briny sea and damp sand.
Waves whispered against the soft shore. Far in the horizon myriad lights glowed. Closer, giant, malformed corpses burned on the sand, their flickering light sputtering between orange and blue.
Moloch. The Phoenician word for burnt offering came unbidden to George’s tongue. He’d first learnt human speech back in Tyre, and it still felt more true to his tongue than any other words it had shaped it the endless centuries since.
George’s foe stopped and bowed, a neat bow. He undressed, folding each piece of clothing and setting it down on the sand.
The smell, nerves and fear, spun George’s stomach into a tight knot of nausea. Smoky air stung his nostrils and burned his lungs.
He didn’t care about his suit or his appearance after the fight. His preparations were more urgent. He must change; he knew that. He must summon the drake. Not being fully drake, he couldn’t simply command the transformation, but he must woo it, tempting it to him, like a distant lover.
He clenched his fists and tried to feel the surge of emotion that would trigger the shift.
But his muscles hurt from their long journey and his mind felt detached, much too human, strangely amused by this alien game of lust and death.
His opponent finished rolling his socks into a neat ball, and setting them on the sand, atop his patent leather shoes.
George tried to force his heart to beat faster, longed for the pulse of madness in his blood. Nothing happened. He willed his muscles to writhe and twist. They did not respond.
A slow panic, a useless horror paralyzed him.
As from a long distance, he watched as his opponent started coughing; his body writhed and twisted and changed.
George would die now. His centuries-long journey would end here, on this beach. His body would be only one more bundle of burning flesh on the sand.
His adversary’s face twisted into a long, golden muzzle; his eyes flashed jade-green under their heavy lids; his arms distorted into heavy paws. Wings grew on his back as he tripled in size and essayed a lumbering leap on the verge of flight.
He was larger than George expected. Which explained how he managed to kill all the others. The true advantage in dragon fights was the difference between the human form and the dragon form. Only the spacing between atoms changed in the transforming, but the mass remained the same. A small man who became a large dragon would weigh less and therefore have the advantage of agility in aerial combat.
George had never compared himself to other dragons. He did not know how his size measured up. All his life, he’d been too busy avoiding drakes. His knowledge of them was only that which came through the flesh, not the brain—the blurred sort of knowledge that filtered, imperfect and fractured, from his sinews into unformed thoughts.
The newly formed dragon must have thought that George didn’t change because he was afraid. He gloated with triumph. In lumbering steps, half-man, half-beast, now biped, now four-legged, he advanced on George.
He’s not even going to use fire, George thought. Why use fire on the halfling, the half-human one? I’ll live as nothing but a pitiful joke in the racial memory of my people. He took a step back, another, trying to stop himself from running. If George ran, he would seized. If George ran he would be rent limb from limb by the drake’s diamond claws.
He should never have lived. His mother had told him so. Centuries ago, she’d let him know that he should have been killed at birth. Half human, half drake, he lived as an abomination to both races. But it had pleased his mother to let George live. As what? Her joke on the world?
In his memory, George heard his mother’s silvery laughter.
His belly twisted, in mingled revulsion and need.
Staring at the maddened drake advancing on him, George wondered for the first time whether his mother had lured his human father with drake magic to her deadly embraces. Or had he come obediently in cold-blooded sobriety led by his family to the temple to become a victim to the sacrifice, great Ashtoreth’s ephemeral lover?
George knew nothing of him, except his end. However he’d arrived, he had become a Moloch, a burnt offering.
George cringed and reared.
Something awoke in him and uncoiled. A blind emotion, half-rage, half-pity, flooded his mind at the thought of that human father he’d never known, who’d been killed for the pleasure of the drake.
He was his father’s son and he would not be killed.
Cough shook him and pain ran through him like an electrical shock. His hands and arms spasmed. Bone grated on bone, as the bones changed shape. Muscle twisted and augmented and wrested from its own substance the alien. Wings grew from his back and spread, a lacework of blood vessels and intricately knotted skin and nerves.
George grew. And grew.
George’s opponent backed up, one step, two, his gloating dance cut short.
The smaller golden dragon stepped back, abashed. Like a cornered cat, it hissed and spit. It hunched into itself seeking to appear bigger. It snarled impotent threats at its larger foe.
George advanced, preparing to fire.
The golden dragon lifted off, at a panicky tilted angle. He flew above George, darting tongues of flame downward.