Page 26 of Catastrophe

“We will be very powerful now that I am awake,” Dralie replied. I couldn’t tell if he saw the vengeful thoughts rattling my brain, or maybe he was just replying to my enthusiasm for our new powers.

Sharing a body with a dragon was fucked.

“Have you been inside me all this time? Asleep? Or watching?” I asked.

“No. My soul lay dormant next to yours until now.” Dralie took another sharp turn with the wind, and this time, my stomach didn’t roll. I felt like I was on a rollercoaster.

“So why now? You kind of came out of nowhere.”

“Because our life was in danger. Magic surrounded us and awoke me enough for us to change and survive the threat.”

In the silence, I thought about that. Flashes of a witch attacking me and Elizabeth, my birth mother, walking into the shed and also hurting me felt like fog, but it was the pinch of betrayal that made me turn my attention elsewhere. I didn’t want to know any more. Not when I was just starting to enjoy the flight.

“Where are we going?” I asked the dragon.

“We do not need a destination. We are drakorian.”

I laughed. “You keep saying that like it means anything.”

“I only mean we can fly, so why do we need to follow a path or head toward a destination?”

“How poetic.”

I let Dralie enjoy his time floating about in the clouds. I wasn’t in any rush to be human again. But it nagged at me, the feeling that I was missing something.

Is it just my memories? I remember feeling hurt. Dralie asked if I was well …

Past the fear of flying, there was something else, something deep down, which ached and pulsated like a wound. But what could that be?

I searched my mind as I admired the view of the clouds. One of them looked like a cat jumping onto a desk, and it made me laugh. And sparked a memory.

A cat.

Clawdia.

Clawdia!

Memories flooded my mind, our mind, of the island, of Karin trying to kill me and take my magic, of Elizabeth attacking us, but more importantly, of Clawdia. She’s what I’ve been missing. My bond with her is gone.

Missing. But how?

She can’t be dead. She can’t be.

Pain struck my heart at the thought of her death, and the memories of my life spilled over into Dralie’s mind. It must have been too much for him to cope with and fly at the same time. He roared as his wings failed and we spiraled down into the thick green of the trees on a tiny island.

I didn’t feel the collision with the branches on the way down. I didn’t know if that was because of Dralie’s takeover or because of the thickness of our new scaly skin, but either way, I was grateful. Yet I cringed when we hit the ground like a ton of bricks, and dry dirt flew into the sky as we created a new dragon-shaped hole.

“Well, fuck. We crashed,” I said in a dazed shock when we could lift our head from the hole.

Dralie coughed or sneezed, huffing a cloud of dust around us. “You … I—I wasn’t expecting to see such memories. Or feel such pain.”

“Clawdia,” I reminded him. The dust settled again, and I tried to get him moving, jumping around in his mind like I could puppeteer him or get his brain cells doing a Zumba class with me. “I—We need to go. Back to the island. We need to find her. She can’t be dead. Get up, Dralie. Fly.”

“Why do you assume she is dead?” Dralie asked but didn’t move.

I answered quickly, “She’s my—our familiar. She dies without us.”

He scoffed. “Drakorians don’t have familiars.”

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