Vivian gasped, her heart twisting with helplessness and loss.
A small crystal sphere arced upward, splintering the light into a myriad of rainbows, falling with a soul-shattering chime into the flames. A dreamsphere. It would have taken her into Dreamworld, locked doors or no, and he had just destroyed it. Still the man wasn’t done. He reached up and lifted something over his head, a pendant of some kind. Vivian was close enough now to see what it was, to reach for his arm and try to hold him back. Again, she was too late. He flung this too, directly toward the fire.
At the last possible second the raven swooped down, caught the thing in his beak, and flew to a nearby tree, where he perched, feathers ruffled, radiating disapproval.
“Damn you,” the man said, “give it back.” His body language changed with the outpouring of rage. He no longer appeared shambling or broken, but surprisingly vigorous and straight given his apparent age. Stalking over to the tree, he shook it until the dry leaves rattled and fell. The raven merely fluttered up a few branches higher and peered down, croaking disdainfully.
“I don’t think he’s going to surrender it,” Vivian said. The raven reminded her of Poe and she knew that look. Stubborn.
“We’ll see about that.”
The man strode away from the tree and around to the side of the house, returning with a shotgun in his hands. Putting it to his shoulder, he aimed it up into the tree. Instinct told her it was essential that both bird and pendant be preserved, and she needed to stop this deranged idiot from firing his gun. But behind them the fire roared and snapped. A hot wind gusted in her hair. The hotter the fire got, the more her dragon blood responded. She could feel the change trying to take place—the dragon shape stretching her from within, her mind moving toward the angles and planes of dragon thought.
I am Vivian, I will remain Vivian. Her will was sufficient to hold back the shift, but there was none to spare for speech.
The raven took care of the problem. Almost lazily, dripping evident disdain, it took flight, keeping the tree between itself and the shotgun until it was well up into the sky, where it flew in tantalizing circles. The man lowered his weapon with a muttered curse.
Vivian heaved a sigh of relief. She could move away from the fire, ease the pressure to make the shift. But before she could take a single step, the lunatic dropped the gun and broke into a headlong dash, straight toward the fire.
It was already a raging inferno, flames shooting out through all of the windows, reaching toward the sky. Vivian wasted a precious instant frozen in disbelief before she raced after him. She was younger, but he was stronger and faster and was lengthening his lead. Head down, legs churning, arms pumping, his long gray hair blowing out behind him in the wind created by the fire.
The heat was intense, a solid wall of wind and energy that pushed Vivian’s control to the breaking point. There was no time to fight it. All that existed was the man chasing self-immolation and her need to stop him. Everything turned into a blur. The distance between them shrank at speed. She intercepted his path and bowled him over backward, wrapping her arms around him and dragging him away from the flames. There was a muddle of air and grass and fire and flesh.
The next thing she was conscious of, she knelt over his body stretched full length on the ground. His eyes, coffee dark, were wide with fear and confusion. His long gray beard had been singed by the fire, his nose and cheeks slightly reddened. A scorched smell wafted off him.
“What the hell are you?” he asked.
This was not a good beginning to the conversation she needed to have with him, but the dragon flare was too recent for her to be able to invoke some therapeutic professional technique that might have de-escalated everything.
“Like you have a right to ask questions. Any questions. You lit a house on fire. Then you tried to run into it. Are you sane?”
“No. Let me go.”
His gaze turned back to the fire, and she read longing and desire.
“Oh, hell,” she said. “Suicide? Maybe next time you could just use the gun like a normal person.”
“Like a—did you just say normal?”
“Look—you feel the need to off yourself, fine, but first tell me why you just destroyed a perfectly good dreamsphere?”
“No such thing as a good dreamsphere. And you can’t stop me from killing myself forever, no matter what sort of twisted mutant creature you are.”
It dawned on her that they were a lot farther from the conflagration than they should have been. Also that her vision was extraordinarily clear and that the backs of the hands pressing on his chest were marked with a pattern of scales. Oh, shit. Mutant indeed.
“I need you,” she said. “Needed that dreamsphere too, but it’s too late for that.”
His eyes narrowed. “I’m not helping a sorceress with anything.”
“You will—”
“What are you going to do, kill me? Please, be my guest.”
“Are you always this obnoxious? I bet you’re not even Morgan Weathersby. In fact, you know what? I think you’re Weston Jennings. So what I could do, here, is call the cops and get you arrested and then when you can’t kill yourself, because you’re on suicide watch in the jail, we’ll talk about how you aren’t going to help me.”
“You think they’re going to believe that I’m Weston Jennings? Still alive and kicking at a hundred and three? I think not.”
Vivian smiled at him. Quite pleasantly, she thought, although his face reacted as though she’d just done something threatening. “So you do know about Weston? Do tell.”
His jaw clamped tight. “I’m not telling you anything.”
She shrugged. “Fine. You committed arson. And when I tried to stop you, you turned the gun on me and tried to shoot me.”
“You wouldn’t—”
“Try me.”
He sighed. “And if I tell them that you grew scales and wings and carried me away from the fire, then I get locked up in a mental ward. Is that it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The scale pattern on her hands had gone. Her eyes felt normal; her vision had returned to a more ordinary level. “I’m a well-respected member of the community. Doctor who works in the ER.”
“And I suppose every well-respected ER doc has a penguin following her around.” He was looking over her shoulder now, and she could only guess that Poe had made an appearance.
The raven chose that moment to flutter down and land beside the man’s head. In his beak still dangled the leather cord with the black pendant hanging from it. “May I?” Vivian asked, and the bird released it to her before running his beak tentatively through Morgan/Weston’s fire-frazzled hair.
The pendant was much like her own, a raven rather than a penguin, and Vivian saw why this bird had reminded her so much of Poe. “You tried to destroy this too. Why?”
“Don’t want it, don’t need it.”
There was more in his face, a deep despair that moved her despite herself. She thought of the scroll and the newspaper. Weston Jennings, gone missing in 1925. Weston Jennings, presumed to have massacred his family. A lot of years to live with that sort of guilt, to try to come to terms with the whole thing.
“Why did you do it?”
“What, burn down the house?”
“No—kill your family.”
He had lain still and compliant, but now he began to twist and struggle. “Just let me go.”
“Can’t.”
But he had both weight and muscle on his side and she couldn’t hold him. She looked around for something to subdue him with. No sticks, no rocks; the gun was out of reach and even if she could get to it, what good was it to threaten somebody who wanted to be dead?
He flung her to the side and scrambled up onto hands and knees. He was going to run back into the fire, and she could not afford to let him go.