My lips taste of salt, like the breath of a breeze that caresses the surface of the ocean.  The kiss of the coast, the mistress of sand and surf.  My lips taste of blood.

“-crzzzt- we have a fire”

“-nack-nack- just laying here”

“broken”

“no identification”

“Maggie said-”

Do leaves feel like this, swept up by the wind, buffeted by nothing so common and yet so precious as air?

“-snrack!  FZZZZT!-”

I cannot breathe.

“-seriously, the same guy.  Dairy Queen, remember?”

“I was birthed in thorns, and buried in ashes.”

No, that voice was just in my head.

I felt myself being pulled up onto the gurney.  I felt movement, and I felt pain, but I also felt disassociated.  This wasn’t me – the real me was kicking closed doors until it was just me and a Dragon.

“-fire under control-”

“Started in the kitchens–”

“It is one of the three ways I will assist.”

That left one more, and I thought it would sound better if he said, “It is the second of the three ways I will assist,” but I didn’t argue it.  I couldn’t move.  I was strapped down again.  I guess since the words were all in my head I could argue quietly.  Were the words speaking to me or just memories of sound?

I couldn’t hear anything.  My head was made of fuzzy muffins.

“No, small potatoes.”

In a hashbrown world.   I remembered grinning at that.  My head was made of small potatoes.   Was I good for baking, maybe a russet, or better for boiling, like a red nordland?

“If soaking your head was boiling.  Maybe a fingerling?”

That was a response to my thought.  Or maybe I said it aloud.  Or maybe I answered myself.

I am like a potato because to a Dragon I am crunchy and good with ketchup.  And that’s pretty much the only time to eat ketchup.  I am a french fry.  A lost potato.  Peter, Peter, potato eater, had a French maid but couldn’t keep her… put her in a ketchup bowl, and made up for all the time he stole.

I might have been delirious.

Someone up front was shouting numbers for a moment.  I hoped they were good numbers.  Maybe they were Jenny’s phone number.  I hated that song.

There were too many lights and too much sound and all I wanted was my friend back. 

She hadn’t been a very good friend, but that was alright, because she hadn’t had a lot of experience being a person.   I can be forgiving in that case.

“But did you love her?”

Love her?  What kind of question was that?  That’s the kind of thing your id sneaks in when you’re not paying attention.  It always wants the spotlight.  It’s like little fantasies of being recognized by fame and/or people you admire.   We all have them, and unless we’re some weird groupie type, we know they’re pretty dumb.  It’s the kind of rational rationale that keeps us reasonable folk from showing too much enthusiasm.  Goodness knows, we can’t like anything.  That’d be bad for our too cool for school image.

“But did you love her?”

Love her?

How do you answer that?  I can’t.  I can’t answer, “Yes,” because I wouldn’t have described it as love.  The language doesn’t have the right word.  I cared for her in all the meanings of the phrase, “cared for,” which might be a kind of love.  I liked it when she laughed at the meerkats.  I knew her favourite flavour (not that “anything chocolate” was hard to grasp) of ice cream.  I knew she always scanned the crowd for dangers only she could detect.  I knew she was an entity that did not belong fully in my world, and that she was a temporary thing, mine until her promise was fulfilled, and the whims of her makers could just as easily unmake what consciousness she had.    Can a group be said to have a consciousness (or a conscience?) different than the make-up of its individuals?

I think I had a headache.

But did I love her?  If I was going to go to bed with anyone soon, it was probably going to be Sylvia, provided she liked me without the influence of the incubus.  Doloise was too different.  You don’t go to bed with an entity without ending up owing it a favour.   Someone told me that once.  Or maybe I read it in a book. 

“E?”

I recognized that voice.  It was Maggie.  She sounded like she’d been crying.  Or arguing.  Or both.  I don’t get women.  I wonder why they made Doloise a woman.  I would have listened if it had been a man.  Or a tree, apparently.  I saw what Artur had done, trying to help me.  I guess it takes two bites by a Dragon to get to the center of a lesyie pop.

“Let me have a minute with him, alone, please?”

She was talking to someone else.  It was quieter here, but the lights were still too bright.  My eyes weren’t working.  Maybe I left them in the dark of the cavern.  Maybe they were just resting.  Yeah, I was just resting them.

“What have you done?”

The screams of the Dragon still roared in my ears. 

It’s odd, not knowing where you are, what position you’re in, if you’re still alone in the dark of a cavern while a Dragon spits out thorns and curses you for closing off access to its power, or if you’re in a hospital bed far from home.  Is that moss, or a tiny stream, or a cold IV dripping into your arm? 

Then the presence was gone, gone, and I was alone.  Alone inside my head, where I was away from the pain.  Alone away from my friends, the short fellow with the tree-like legs, and the tall one who smelled like dandelions, and the velvet bat, and the witches, and the smell of Ivan burning, and the wolves.

Don’t leave me.  There are wolves out there.

“I’m not leaving.  I’m here, E.”  A cool hand against my forehead and I started to feel my body again.  I curled up rather than scream. 

The wolves were inside me, weren’t they?

“I’ll protect you from the wolves.”

Who protects me from the Dragons?