Page 10 of Her Dragon Outlaw

Our conversation sits heavy in my mind, especially the serious parts. I shake it off and down the rest of my drink. I am still on edge, though, so I travel up to the roof of my house and shift, hoping a flight to the nearby valley will clear my head. At the very least, stretching my wings will keep my physique in check, especially with the number of bacon cheeseburgers I have been eating lately.

Unfortunately, it does not clear my head. I land in a clearing with the conversation still in my mind. I look out at the great lake, sparkling under the light of the half-moon. The lake has always been a safe place for me, with its seemingly endless depths that I swam to when my dad and I came out here, some 20 years ago now. My dad used to take me fishing here, but somehow I always ended up underwater with my shirt and shoes off, trying to touch the bottom of the lake. I was a happy kid before all the troubles began, and this lake symbolizes a lot of what made me happy.

“Son,” he used to say, as though I would ever forget who made me. “There are three things in life that are for sure: taxes, death and trouble.”

I never knew what he meant. I still do not know, if I am honest. He would come out with these rejoinders that made perfect sense to him but didn’t mean much to anyone else.

“You might look at yourself one day and wonder how everything could have gone so wrong. It’s because you didn’t have the knowledge you needed to make the right choices. But making the wrong choices gives us the knowledge we need to make the right ones. Do you see what I’m saying?”

When he told this to me, I was a bright young thing of roughly 11 years, 2 months and 15 days. All I could do was nod and pretend it made sense. Maybe I was making the wrong decisions, but lying to him felt worse, somehow.

I tip my head to the sky and let my shifter take over. The roar I let out causes the birds to fly from the nearby trees in a great plume of wings and shadow. I chuckle to myself, but the joy is short-lived. As much as I am having fun, there is still a murder investigation going on, one that involves shifters and humans in ways that I have never seen before. Sure, I can take time off to relax, but I got into this profession to help people and I cannot help them if all I do is fuck around.

And the woman. I cannot forget about the woman, even if I want to. She might be the clue I need to crack this case wide open—if only she could see it. My thoughts spin on her for most of the night as I sit by the lakeside in my human form. The water is cool on my toes and the air is nippy on my bare skin, but it is always nice to be reminded I am alive. On this glorious night, I am living my simple little life.

“I am doing great things,” I whisper to myself, too afraid of the judgment of the night to say it any louder. The shadows have always been my friends, but tonight they are cold and uncaring of my inner turmoil. “I am doing great things,” I repeat. I want to believe it. I screw my eyes shut and think about it very hard while repeating it under my breath. What will it take to get me to believe it?

The stars twinkle like fairy lights and captivate me with their beauty as birds twitter in the trees. I do not often get the chance to come out here, but it is one of my favorite places to be. Usually the peace of the twitter-loud birds and the fairy-light stars calms me, but tonight, not even my shifter can be calmed.

Getting in touch with him is difficult. He is, underneath the human suit, a beast of id and lust. When I met the woman at the clinic, my shifter called to me, saying what—I do not know. I am still not as in control of my shifts as I want to be, and I still have trouble getting in touch with my dragon.

One thing is for sure. My dragon conjures images of the clinic with a sharp, demanding sense of fear. The woman might be there again. She might fall victim to whatever Miller is doing to these people. Even though I pray she does not, there is something about her I need to know.

9

LORI

When I open the door to my sister’s apartment, I expect her to jump out from the shadows and surprise me. I hope she tells me that disappearing was one big joke and she did not mean to scare me. She was just having fun. Anything but whatever is waiting for me on the other side of that door.

That is not what I get. I get the cold, stony silence of an apartment barely lived in. I get the smell of week-old baozi sitting on the kitchen counter, turning green around the bite taken out of it. I get instant regret that I have not been checking up on her as much as I should. But I do not get her.

“Tammy?” No answer. “Tammy, it’s your sissy. Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

Nothing. The pit in my stomach sinks lower as I pick through the apartment. I’m a problem solver by nature and, despite my misgivings, looking for clues comes naturally to me. The open door of the fridge, the oven turned on and blasting heat, and more food left to rot in the bedroom fit into a pattern I put together as the day wears on. She would not leave these things unattended, not my Tammy.

Then I find the slip of paper with that fucking number on it.

“Shit.”

Miller Labs.

This is not good. Whatever I got myself involved in, my sister is messed up in it too.

My sister is the kind of person who will pay for your groceries and then take them to your car.

She is not the kind of person who just disappears, and she is not the kind of person who would get messed up in this experiment shit—if that’s what it is. I do not harbor any delusions that whatever Miller is doing, they are doing for the good of humanity. Whatever is going on, it will not be good for me or my sister.

“Oh, fuck, Tammy. No…”

I peep through the apartment one more time—just in case she is passed out in the bathroom or asleep in a closet. When I finally give up, the accompanying pit in my stomach only grows heavier. I step outside of the apartment into the weak sun. It seems ominous, really, that there would be a lot of light but no heat behind it. My sister is missing and the sunlight stretches on, uncaring. So what if I have a little cry about it on my way home? There is nothing else I can do.

I put my earbuds in to call my mom but stop with my hand hovering over the button. At a stoplight, surrounded by cars attempting to traverse rush hour and the sun in front of us, I can barely hold it together. Great, fat globs of salty tears run from my eyes, down my cheeks, and into my shirt. Soon I am sobbing at the thought of losing Tammy, the one person in my life who has never let me down. Even when we went to sleepaway camp and I made all the counselors mad at me, she told everyone she was the one who put the dead rat in the laundry room. She has been saving my bacon since we were born, and now she is—I cannot call my mom like this. I cannot worry her with my despair.

As I drive on, the sun sinks lower until it leaves us drivers alone. My tears slow to a trickle until my shirt is soaked. But as I turn into my driveway, I remember something. That guy yesterday—that PEACE agent. What was his deal? He wanted into that lab so badly that he was willing to—oh god, he was propositioning me. He wanted me to be that informant he needed. I pull into the garage space and sit in my car for several long minutes thinking about him.

He was cute, my intrusive thoughts invade my rational mind. You should drug him and steal all his money. He’ll never know.

“Shut up,” I say out loud. “Fuck, Tammy. What have they done to you?”

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