Chapter 1
VERN DID NOT TRUST HUMANS WAS THE LONG AND SHORT OF IT. Not a single one. He had known many in his life, even liked a few, but in the end they all sold him out to the angry mob. Which was why he holed up in Honey Island Swamp out of harm’s way.
Vern liked the swamp okay. As much as he liked anything after all these years. Goddamn, so many years just stretching out behind him like bricks in that road old King Darius put down back in who gives a shit BC. Funny how things came back out of the blue. Like that ancient Persian road. He couldn’t remember last week, and now he was flashing back a couple of thousand years, give or take. Vern had baked half those bricks his own self, back when he still did a little blue-collar. Nearly wore out the internal combustion engine. Shed his skin two seasons early because of that bitch of a job. That and his diet. No one had a clue about nutrition in those days. Vern was mostly ketogenic now, high fat, low carbs, apart from his beloved breakfast cereals. Keto made perfect sense for a dragon, especially with his core temperature. Unfortunately, it meant the beer had to go, but he got by on vodka. Absolut was his preferred brand. A little high on alcohol but easiest on the system. And Waxman delivered it by the crate.
So Vern tolerated the swamp. It wasn’t exactly glorious, but these weren’t exactly the glory days. Once upon a time, he had been Wyvern, Lord Highfire, of the Highfire Eyrie, if you could believe that melodramatic bullshit name. Now he was king of jack shit in Mudsville, Louisiana. But he’d lived in worse places. The water was cool, and the alligators did what they were told, for the most part.
If I tell you fuckers to dance, then you goddamn well better synchronize the hell out of a routine, Vern often told them in not so many words. And it was truly amazing what common gators could achieve with the right motivation.
So he spent his days in the bayou blending in with the locals, staying downwind of the swamp tours, though there were days he longed to cut loose and barbecue a barge full of those happy snappy morons. But putting the heat on tourists would bring the heat on him, and Vern hadn’t gotten to the age he was now by drawing attention to himself. Shining a spotlight on your own head was the behavior of an idiot, in Vern’s opinion. And his opinion was the only one that mattered, in his opinion. After all, Vern was the last of his kind as far as he knew. And if that was the case, then he owed it to his species to stay alive as long as possible.
He also wasn’t feeling suicidal just at the moment. He often did, but mindfulness helped with that. A guy had plenty of time to meditate floating around the swamp’s little feeder tribs.
Still, it got lonely being the last dragon. Vern could drink about fifty percent of the blues away, but there were always those nights with the full moon lighting up the catspaws on the Pearl River when Vern thought about making a move on a female alligator. God knows they were lining up for a shot at the king. And once or twice he’d gotten as far as a little nuzzling on the mudflats, which was not a euphemism for anything. But it didn’t feel right. Maybe the alligators were close enough to him on the DNA spectrum, but no matter how much vodka he consumed, Vern could not drink himself into believing that he wouldn’t be taking advantage of a dumber species. Not to mention the fact that gators had no personalities to speak of and were uglier than the ass end of a coyote.
They were cold-blooded. He had a molten core.
It was never going to work out.
Vern spent his nights in a fishing shack on Boar Island, which had been abandoned sometime in the middle of the last century. The shack sat back from the shore on a little side bayou and was being slowly crushed by the curling fingers of a mangrove fist, but it would do for now, and Vern had it set up pretty nice with a generator and some of the basics. He had himself a little refrigerator to keep his Absolut chilling, and a TV with a bunch of cable. Waxman up the bayou had set up a supply line to the outside world so Vern could keep himself occupied during his nocturnal hours.
It was all about survival, and survival was all about profile, or the total lack of one. Absolute zero. No credit cards or cell phone. No trips to Petit Bateau and no online presence. Vern had set himself up a social media account a while back, cobbled together a fake persona calling himself Draco Smaug, which he thought was pretty cute, but then Facebook started adding location services and some Lord of the Rings fanatics began asking probing questions, so Vern shut it down.
Lesson learned.
From then on, he contented himself with reality shows and surfing the net. All the information Vern needed was out there; he just had to find it.
But no one could find him.
Ever.
Because whenever humans found him, to paraphrase Maximus Decimus Meridius, hell was most definitely unleashed.
And Vern carried hell around inside him, so he could survive it.
But the human who found him would not.
SQUIB USED TO have a daddy.
And back in those days his daddy said things along the lines of:
Don’t you go sneaking dollars outta my pocket, Squib, or I’ll tan your hide.
And:
You seen my beer, boy? You better not be sipping on my Bud, Squib, or I’ll tan your hide.
Or:
How come you ain’t minding your business, Squib? You heard about the curious cat, right? That cat got its hide tanned and then some.
It didn’t take Squib long to figure out that Daddy’s sayings usually ended up with someone’s hide getting tanned, and generally that hide was his. Squib reckoned it was probably mostly his own fault, as he did have a little trouble keeping his nose out of other people’s business.
It’s a free country, he reasoned in his defense, so everyone’s business is my business.
But then his daddy left on Squib’s thirteenth birthday, as apparently buying a gift card for his kid was more responsibility than he cared for, and none of his talk mattered much anymore. And in actual fact that daddy wasn’t even Squib’s real daddy no matter how much Squib conned himself that he was. Waxman, who lived on a houseboat across the river, said that Squib’s real daddy had found this world a bit too much for him, and this guy was just some freeloader who turned up when Squib wasn’t much more than a rug rat and his sainted mother was a mess. This replacement poppa was nothing but a goddamn fool who was always shooting his mouth off, as Waxman told it—prison jabber that he most likely picked up in Angola or some other state farm, judging by the ink crawling up outta the neck hole of his T-shirt.
“You and Elodie are better off without that no-account loser,” he told Squib when the boy delivered his groceries. “Most he can read is off cigarette cartons. Just taking advantage of your momma’s kind nature is what he was doing.”
Mostly Waxman was full of bullshit swamp wisdom, but this time he hit the nail on the head, especially where Elodie was concerned.
Squib’s momma surely did have a kind nature, nursing folks like she did all hours for two dollars above minimum wage, then coming home to his delinquent ass. Squib was overly familiar with that particular term, “delinquent,” being that it was read to him off a report card or charge sheet often enough. Sometimes he thought he should dial it down a notch, the bad-boy act, for his momma’s sake, because he loved her so much that it made him furious at all the assholes who had broken her heart: His own original poppa, who had checked himself out when he had folks who relied on him. And then Fake Daddy, who left when he had sucked Elodie’s heart dry, like he was some kind of vampire but with a taste for love instead of blood. So Squib tried to rein himself in, but it never took.