I Am Darkness

III

Apparently, because I was a sixteen-year-old dragon who still couldn't fly, I was a complete disappoint.  I had flown before, of course, and not just after falling from a roller coaster.  Years ago, before high school or even middle school.  Before I was popular, and before I cared what people thought of me.
    But I wasn't going to do it.  It wasn't that I didn't know how, although I still didn't remember.  It was that normal girls with bright smiles and iced coffee cups don't fly with the wings of dragons.
    So, after shoving the limp body of the agent in the backseat, we drove there in a car confiscated for evidence.  I sat, slumped in the passenger, staring out the window as Pennsylvania passed.  There was no conversation on the drive.  They say silence makes people uncomfortable, but it didn't seem to bother whoever the mystery dragon was.  As I sat there, replaying whatever song I heard last as some sad excuse for a radio, I realized I had probably been kidnapped by a dragon whose name I didn't even know yet.
    "Why should I trust you if I don't even know your name?"
    He was a parent's perfect driver, with his hands at ten and two on the wheel and his eyes trained on the road.  He wasn't much of a talker, and I guessed he did all his homework in school too.  After a while of the uncomfortable silence, he answered, "Sebastian."
    "Like the crab?"
    No response.  Did someone bully him in school about it or something?  I mean seriously, dude.
    The sides of Church Street were crowded with cars.  People came and went as they pleased, which made driving up to my house a hell of a lot harder.  Music blasted from some kid's house.  As we neared closer I realized that kid was my idiot brother.  I was going to kill him.
    Before the car even stopped I swung the door open and hopped out.  Red plastic cups littered the lawn that my dad had painstakingly crafted.  Kids stumbled, drunk, out of the door I used to smile and take pictures in front of for my first day of school.  My face was stuck in a permanent scowl, like that myth that parents told their kids about how your eyes would get stuck if you crossed them for too long.
    I heard the door slam behind me along with some angry marching.  I didn't have to open the door to enter my living room.  It was already wide open with Drake's charming-but-heavily-annoying-at-the-moment voice flooding out.  I pushed through the teenagers doing things that would probably mess up their brain forever and thundered up the stairs.
    When I yanked my brother's door open both him and Grace Simmonds literally jumped up from the bed.  That didn't stop me from concluding that less than a second earlier they were sucking each other's faces off.
    "Rip!"  Grace didn't seem enthusiastic in the slightest.  Despite the fact that she was a year older than me, she must've been terrified.
    "I can explain," she pleaded.
    "Go."  My eyes didn't stray from Peter and his smug grin.  Grace gave me an apologetic smile before scurrying out of Peter's bedroom.
    "Peter, you're a freshman.  What gives you the right to have a party in our house?"
    "Yes, but I'm on the varsity football team.  And besides, no one knows I'm a freshman."
    "Football season's over.  And what about Grace Simmonds?  She's a junior!  Does she know that you're a freshman?"
    "She knows that I'm your brother."
    "Oh, so that's why the entire school is at our house?  Because you piggybacked off of my popularity?"
    "Just like you piggybacked off of Michael's?"
    I bit my lip, digging my teeth into my already-deep cuts.  My hand rubbed my forehead as I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to forget Michael and Ashley and popularity and everything.  "Where's Dad?"
    "He's at work late to—"  Sebastian entered Peter's room.  His eyebrows turned down even further than I thought possible.
    "Alright.  We did what you wanted.  Now we need to go," he ordered.  He didn't pay attention to Peter, and up until my brother said something I didn't even think he saw Peter.
    "Oh, is this your new keychain?  You're with a college guy and and you're yelling at me for being with Grace."
    "I'm not with him."  Peter raised an eyebrow.  We're not related by blood at all, but growing up together certainly created some similarities between us.  "Well, I'm with him, but not like that."
    "Do not talk to me like that, human," Sebastian argued back.  So not the time, by the way.  "I'm eighteen, and will probably never go to college."
    "Oh, that's even better!" he said sarcastically.  "So you've found another one of your disgusting kind!"  If he was in his right mind, and sober, he would've never said it.  I would've cursed it myself though.  I'm pretty sure I have before.
    But I gasped and looked at Peter with terrified eyes.  Sirens sounded from outside.  The silence finally let us hear it.  It got louder and louder until we saw the cop car outside the window stop outside our house.
    "Shit," Peter cursed.  He shoved me and Sebastian out of the way and entered into the party.
    "We can't let them see us," Sebastian warned.  I nodded.  I walked into the crowd, trusting that Sebastian was following.  I led him out the back door and into the darkness.
    I can't remember how long we ran.  It shouldn't have been that long of a distance.  The car was parked right out front of my house.  Unfortunately, the police car was too.  We looped around my neighbors houses until my lungs burned and my legs grew weak.  I could tell Sebastian didn't like the fact that no one knew Annapolis like the girl who was severely out of shape.  The last physical activity I engaged in was first semester of freshman year when Ashley convinced me to do volleyball because I was tall.  I didn't make it past tryouts.
    We didn't look back once we swung the doors of the Jeep open and clambered our way in.  I glanced up at the rearview mirror to make sure that the agent was still there, and still knocked out.  Sebastian started the engine in record time.  The sound of sirens faded away, as well as the darkness that night brought.
I didn't sleep on the ride to the thunder.  I couldn't stop the thoughts and the anxiety that flooded over me.  And besides, Sebastian drove too fast for me to ever get comfortable enough to fall.
By the time we got there the sun had just barely peeked its head above the horizon, casting what looked like a summer camp in a rich, golden light.  The Chesapeake bay sparkled at the end of the long path that wound down through the center of everything.  We parked the car near the entrance of the camp and walked the rest of the way.  This time he led.  This was his home, maybe as long as Annapolis was mine, I realized.
On the left side, four different cabins were lined up, connecting to the main path.  They were facing opposite of the lush woods and greenery behind them, all but the dark red one.  The woods behind that was was scorched and blackened, but no one there seemed to mind.
The cabin closest to the entrance was the blood red one.  It had white trimming like all the others,  but it looked lonely and desolate.  None of the others had the same feeling to it.
The one next to the red cabin was painted a pure white.  You could see the light turned on inside the cabin, kids opening suitcases and trunks, putting clothes on.  No one was in the red cabin.
The other two cabins followed a similar pattern.  A green cabin was next to the white one, and blue next to that, closest to the water.  They each had kids getting ready for their days in them.  Not all the kids had smiles on their faces, but the cabins had the same "well this is life, might as well make the most of it" kind of atmosphere.
On the right side of the path stood the activities.  Volleyball nets and tetherball poles.  There were two blood red buildings near the entrance, a matching set that included the cabin.  One of the buildings was tiny, almost like a shed of some sort.  Next to that the other building, which was much larger, stood.  It was large, like a high school gym, taking up a lot of space, both with height and width.
On the other side of that was a tall and skinny building painted white to match the cabin of the same color.  Unlike the red buildings, it had a flat roof with railings fencing three out of four sides of it.  The railings were white-picket fence with the paint chipping and the wood slightly rotting.
Then there was the large, forest green building.  When I say forest green, I mean the scarce pillars holding the massive building up and framing the entire thing.  The rest of it was screened in so wind could sweep through it without hitting anything but the faces of hungry children.  All except the small room at the back of it, which had no windows or screen.  It only had one door going in from the outside and another from the building overlooking the bay.
At the end of the path was a blue-bird-colored building with large windows on the three walls it had.  The fourth lack of a wall faced the water, and was open so that boats could come and go.  In front of it was a huge H-shaped dock with dark, rotting wood and posts that would've stuck up above my head level.
We stepped into the small room tangent to what looked like the Dining Hall of the camp.  Despite the sweltering heat and the lack of windows, the air felt uncomfortably cold.  A tall man stood from his desk, towering over both me and Sebastian.
"Welcome, Sebastian.  I see you have brought a new dragon."