The Lamb and the Gray Battle

October 22, 2022

Dylan yelled, "Are the two of you done arguing?"

Evie nodded.

Dylan yelled at Brantley, "Gran hasn't been dead very long. Be nice to Evie."

Dylan started listing out various sightings of the Red Dragon over the years. The first was the witch trial of Alse Young. A woman with blood red hair walked out of the mist and cut Alse down. While the witch ran away, the devil woman was seized. They demanded that she confess and pricked her with iron nails. The devil mewed like a gentle bird, but the Pure and Clean settlers weren't fooled. She was bound to a pole and a fire lit. It took three hours as the people watched her body burn to ash.

"'A queer fog rambled out of the woods and choked the spectators. When the spectators woke in the morning, the pyre was a mountain of ash. The devil woman was gone.'"

Dylan showed the picture of the red-haired woman tied to the pole.

"Oh, that could be anybody," Brantley said of the pencil sketch. "Red hair doesn't equal Red Dragon."

Evie snatched the book. "You're a spoiled sport." She held the picture to her face. "Looks just like me."

"Jesus, Evie, stop it."

"No really," she said. She flipped her hair over her shoulder. "I'm the Red Dragon. I made a huge mess of the Salem Witch Trials. With Goody Garlick, I bewitched John Winthrop into defending her."

"Who would name their kid Garlick?" Dylan said, wrinkling his nose, as if it were the first time he'd read the book.

"It's the surname, kiddo," Brantley said. "Elizabeth 'Goody' Garlick."

"Still a stupid name," Dylan said.

"Ao Guang would agree with you," Evie said, ticking her feet back and forth. "He thinks all those names like great, red and mighty are stupid. Guang means light," she said, "by the way."

Evie wished she could have done more, saved more people. Her powers those first couple of centuries were unreliable. Sometimes she could entrance. Sometimes the victims would drown themselves. Sometimes, the accused witch was so afraid of her that they would run back to the authorities and beg to be burned alive.

Dylan said, "The book ends with an ominous threat. 'Though the Red Dragon hasn't been seen since the trial of Lucretia Brown in 1878, evil still lurks in the corners of the Pure, Clean land. Be sure to hold your mother tight and your child tighter. Or you might be the next to be cursed by the Red Dragon.'"

Evie paged through each drawing of the Red Dragon. "The resemblance is terrifying," she said. "You'll have to cleanse this house with holy water."

"Evie, the joke isn't funny anymore," Dylan said.

She bowled him over, more like Tigger than Winnie the Pooh. "I'm not joking." She deepened her voice, growled at him. "I'm the Red Dragon. I'm going to eat anyone who persecutes my followers. Bleh-bleh-bleh!"

Brantley said, "That's Bela Lugosi. Vampire. Not witch. Or dragon. In fact, none of the above. Actor."

"The reason I'm so fat is because I like to eat children. Roar!"

"I wish we could see Dracula here," Dylan said. "It sounds like a great movie."

Evie rolled to her back. She rubbed her belly. "The movie is pretty old now," she said. "But if you really want to watch it, we can do that the last day I'm here."

Dylan whined, "Don't talk about leaving."

"Okay," Evie said. "We'll talk about something else."

"How about where the Red Dragon might be now."

"I'm right here," Evie said.

Brantley chose to ignore her. He said, "The first sighting of her was in mid-sixteen hundreds, so she'd be four hundred years old now. That would be kind of old."

"So now you admit I'm too old for you," she muttered. "And I'm six-hundred and sixty-eight years old."

As if Evie said nothing, Brantley said, "The Red Dragon is probably in USW or in Canada."

"New Canada," she said. "And I'm not very old at all. I could live for thousands of years. Gran was one thousand and forty-seven when she died, but her demon blood was relatively thin."

"But," Brantley said, "the Red Dragon, the ghost woman of legend, might not be real at all. It might be that Nathaniel Moore made the whole thing up and actually let the accused witches go. Like the Goody Garlick story, a Pure and Clean human being decided she wasn't really an evil witch at all and released her."

Evie said over him, "Because I bewitched him. I had a good day. I bewitched all the magistrates."

"The last Red Dragon was a Welsh Red that was exterminated in 1380," Brantley said.

"That was my father," Evie said. "He was the last pure blood dragon. I'm half. Apollo was my grandfather. Who knows what else is lurking in my blood. Rumor said that Gran was ogre, but she'd hit me any time I brought it up."

Dylan giggled as Evie continued to insist that she was an ancient creature.

"Jesus, Evie," Brantley said, using the worst curse he could. "Just stop. You're not a dragon. You're not a descendant of Apollo. You don't have demon blood. You're like all of our other friends who think they're making a statement by dying their hair. Rowan is DEAD because of this crazy shit."

She smirked. Brantley expected a bigger reaction out of her.

"I told you I was too old for you," she said. "Am I too scary for you too?"

"Evie, don't be like that."

"Brantley, you're no fun. Get out of our fort."

Dylan echoed, "Yeah, Brantley. Get out of our fort."