Page 82 of Dragon Unhinged

They’re not monsters.

My Declan. My dragon.

What’s wrong with him?

Why doesn’t he heal?

Why is he broken still?

Has he always been this way?

It doesn’t make sense.

“Declan?” I kneel in the grass, tentatively reaching toward him.

But I don’t touch.

Why are his scales jagged?

His wings scarred, filled with holes, and bent at awkward angles?

His eyes look wrong. Black, swirling smoke fills them, as he tilts his head and opens his mouth with a roar.

The roar shakes me to my core, feeling it all the way into my soul. I’m breathless as I snap out of the nightmare and try to sit up. Instead, I push myself up slowly, painfully until I’m sitting up against my headboard. My hand on my chest, trying to ease my racing heart. I don’t even have to look down or feel it, I know my stomach, and therefore my baby, is bigger already.

I’m drenched in sweat. My pajamas, my hair, my sheets, all of it is clinging to my slick skin.

The room is dark, barely any light seeping in from the hallway outside, but as my breathing starts to return to something resembling normal, I remember the nightmare I’m stuck in while I’m awake.

I’m in my room. Only it’s not my room. It’s the room Grey replicated for me. I’m locked in here.

Declan isn’t with me.

He isn’t the broken shell of a dragon from my dream.

Is he?

I get up slowly, my body aching, and trudge toward the bathroom. There isn’t an inch of my body that doesn’t hurt in some way. My skin feels too tight. My hips ache with the pressure of a baby I didn’t get the chance to grow used to over several months. My legs are sore, my ankles are swollen, and my lower back feels like I’ve been walking for hours by the time I make it to the toilet.

It’s not until I turn on the light and see the streams of black trailing down my cheeks that I remember that I wasn’t able to wash up before I went to bed. I’m crying. I didn’t even realize it.

Sinking down on the closed lid of the toilet, I wipe away the tears, but it seems like I’ve opened a floodgate, one that I’m not sure how to turn off. I run my hands over my protruding belly and wish I hadn’t gotten us into this situation. And more than that, I have no idea how I’m going to get us out of it. The tears keep coming, as I sob through my grief, fear, and rage of what we’re going through. I’ve never felt so alone. So isolated, and that’s saying something after living with my father all my life.

I must figure out a way to get back to my dragon. I can’t live like this. I can’t be a vampire’s fucking puppet, nothing more than a vessel for a baby I might not ever even get to hold, might not ever get to care for.

The tears don’t stop, but I slowly strip out of my clothes, push the sweat-soaked hair back from my face, and turn on the shower. It feels like I have bruises inside, deep in my muscles, all over my organs, as everything shifts and spreads making room for a baby growing far too fast inside of me.

Even my skin looks stretched thin, like it’s just a matter of time before I can’t contain the growing child anymore and she pops out like a chest burster from theAlienfranchise.

I wrap my arms around my middle for a moment pissed at my own imagination and curiosity for watching science fiction horror when I was sixteen when my father explicitly forbade it. After another sob and gasping breath, I get into the shower.

The hot water feels good, and it helps with some of the aches. I’m grateful for the bench in the shower so I can sit when I need to rest again.

Once I’m cleaned, a little more relaxed from the hot water washing away some of the terror and pain, I plug the tub drain,hoping that maybe soaking in the hot water will ease some of it. It fills quickly and I turn off the water and lay in the warmth.

If this is only the first day, how in the hell am I going to make it through to labor and delivery? How is my body going to survive?

Or maybe that’s just it. Maybe it’s not supposed to.

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