I Am Darkness

V

Author's note: I've been trying to upload on a weekly schedule (every Saturday or Sunday) but I'll be away from my phone the next two weeks, so I'll miss an upload.  Because there's a lot of chapters left to go, I'm going to start releasing chapters on a biweekly schedule.  Thanks for reading!

I had slept past lunch.  Although I was a light sleeper, my naps were long and disoriented me beyond belief.  There were no clocks at camp, at least none past the watches on the wrists of some.  Rarely people had phones.  There was too much to do for them to worry about texting people or playing Flappy Bird, one person had told me.  Too much to train for, too many places to sail, too many people to learn about, too many stories to read to be occupied by mind-numbing devices.  I was beginning to like the dragon way of life more and more.
When I woke up the cabin was empty once more.  There was a deafening silence in the air that led my ears to begin ringing.  Subtle ambience played in the background, but not loud enough to stop the ringing.
My eyes had adjusted to the stripes of light that stabbed through the windows.  I had woken up from the kind of sleep that leaves a yawn in your throat and a droop in your eyelids.  I stumbled out to the porch and let the sunlight wake me the rest of the way up.
My eyelids still felt better closed as I walked toward the water.  The sunlight seemed to sparkle off the bay, and it was the only thing I hadn't seen in its entirety.  I only realized I wasn't wearing shoes when my bare feet plunged into the sand.  Sand on bare feet has a rather calming effect, especially when the glittering bay is right in front of you.
Everyone who was on the shore looked at me as I walked toward the water.  I heard their questions, however muffled they were.  "Is that the new girl?"  "Ellen MacLauren's daughter?"
"Shut up."  It was definitely a girl's voice, given the pitch.  Strong girl, who stood for no bullshit.
When I turned she was walking toward me.  She had beautiful, almost black skin and her hair was weaved into long, box braids that reached halfway down her back.  Her hair had no definite part to it.  If there was one it was jagged and faint and to the side.  But she had it pushed back, the breeze tossing it around.
"Hey," she said, stepping beside me so we couldn't have a proper, face-to-face conversation.  She followed my gaze, out to sea.  My eyes were pointed toward it, but I wasn't seeing it.  My mind was focusing on something else, probably the amount of "hey"s I'd hear today.
"You like the bay?"  She had the same social awkwardness as me, which I appreciated.  Apparently talking to a human being is just too much to ask of my mind sometimes.
I nodded.  I had heard her comment like I might see something out of the corner of my eye.  I recognized its existence, responded to it, but overall didn't really care all that much.
"Have you ever sailed before, or even been out on the water?"  Another thing we were both terrible at: small talk.  How am I supposed to know what mindless thing to say or unimportant question to ask?  Like, I don't frickin' care what your favorite whatever is.
I took a breath of the salty air in and blinked the blur out of my eyes.  I often overdramatize my coming-back-to-reality moments, as if I had just surfaced for my first breath of air in ten minutes.  "Yeah, my mom taught me before she left."
"She was a good sailor."  She nodded, smiling nostalgically.  If she was around when I was ten, when she was probably eleven or twelve, she must've been here for a while.  I couldn't imagine getting my period for the first time here, or having to go bra shopping with Astaroth.  "Do you remember how to sail?"
"Some."  I nodded.
Then, up the beach, a deep-voiced beast growled, "Ripley!"
I swiveled around on my heel, catching a mock-nervous look on the brunette's face.  "What?" I shouted back.
"You need to train!" Sebastian yelled at me.
I rolled my eyes and let my gaze fall on the sailor girl.  "I've gotta go," I told her.
She gave me a sympathetic smile, a sentiment I only caught a second of before I began to run.  I turned around halfway up the Waterfront, nearly tripping over a pine cone.
"Do you have a name?"
She laughed.  "Kayley."
I stopped mere inches from slamming into Sebastian and his unforgiving face.  I swear, he's going to get premature wrinkles from looking mad all the time.
"What are you talking about?  Doesn't that start tomorrow?  And if it doesn't, can we make it?"
"Every morning before breakfast, every night after dinner."
"Its before dinner."
"There's a campfire.  You and the rest of the hooligans will want to go."
"Hooligans?"
"That's what I said."  It could've been funnier if he said it like he had just learned the word and how to use it.  But he said it matter-of-factly, and made it extremely obvious that the word "joke" wasn't in his vocabulary.
I followed him to the training gym, still barefoot and still in what I wore to DreamLand.  I hadn't even noticed it until I got there  The entire atmosphere of the camp or thunder or whatever was overwhelming, and it wasn't something I was used to.  I was used to bullies and mental illnesses.  I was used to the comradery that came from letting someone copy off of your homework or vice versa, not the one that came from living in a cabin together.
"What are you wearing?" he asked, turning around with another one of his many variations of angry.
"This is all I have."
"You can't train in that."
"Yeah, I know, but it's what I've got."
"Kara will have something."  He began to walk toward the Dining Hall.
"Wait!"  It took, like, four of my strides to match one of his, and he was just walking.  I considered myself quite tall, and I was a tree in any form of heel.  But he was just a skyscraper.
"Why are you going to the Dining Hall?"
"Because air has kitchen duty this week."
"Air, as in the air cabin?  So like, what do you do for when it's fire dragon time?  Do it all yourself?"
"Because there is only one fire dragon at camp all year, I don't get assigned kitchen duty."
"Wait a minute, so you're just exempt?  How is that fair?"
"We are not talking about this right now."
I held my hands up in surrender as I stepped with freakishly long strides.  "Okay, whatever."
Kara was wearing a hairnet over her snowy hair when we found her, but she still managed to look flawless.  I didn't know how she did it.  He pale skin seemed to glow or something  And get this, Sebastian smiled when he saw her, raised a hand to her crossed arms just to brush against her.
"Hey."  Hey?  Hey!  What does that even mean?  I mean, was that word even in his vocabulary?  He is not a "hey" sorta person.  But I guess Kara made him that kinda person.
"Hey," she responded.  So that was their thing?  Hey?  Strange.  "What's up?"
"Ripley—"
"It's Rip," I corrected.
"Rip doesn't have anything with her but this.  Do you have any extra . . ."
"Yeah, just give me a sec.'  She pulled the hair net off her hair, and the straight, ash blonde strands fell down gracefully to her collarbone, creaseless.  She raked it back with her fingers and called out to the other air dragons, telling them that she'd be leaving.
We walked briskly to the air cabin, not picking up our feet but rather gliding them, sweeping them off the ground.
The air cabin was like the Dining Hall, screened in so wind could sweep through, picking up papers and light pieces of clothing.  The ceiling was glass, so if you were on the top bunk and you looked up at night you'd see the stars.  And the cabin looked lived in, unlike the barren wasteland of the fire cabin.  Still, everything was neat and tidy, under Kara's orders probably.
"Aren't we, like, not supposed to be in here?"
"It's just you guys," Kara assured me.  "No one's gonna really care."
"Still, it smells too much like Yankee Candle in here.  Can we hurry this up?  Not that I'm in any rush to get to training or anything."
Kara pulled out a large trunk from under her bed.  I should've guessed it was hers.  It had white sheets folded crisply over a white comforter.  It looked like it belonged in a furniture store, despite the fact that the mattress was a cot at a summer camp.
She handed me a set of sheets and stack of neatly folded clothes.  I took them, careful not to let it tip over.  I gave her a half-hearted smile from behind the stack.
"Five minutes," Sebastian told me.  "You should be in the training gym in five minutes."
"Bash!" Kara protested.
"Fine, ten."
She groaned.  "You are impossible."
I smiled and thanked Kara, then scurried off to the fire cabin to change.  She didn't have many clothes that were my style, but after ripping the sleeves off an old T-shirt I felt more myself.
"You're late," he said to me as I entered the hot and humid training gym.  The air smelled of sweat and blood.  The left half of the gym had wrestling mats that covered the floor.  The other had targets and those football dummy things.  Sebastian was on a mat all the way in the corner, arms crossed like always
"Can we just get this over with?"
He nodded, probably the first time I heard him say yes.  "Ten laps."
"What?"
"Ten laps around the gym."
"But how is that supposed to teach me to fight?  I didn't come to learn how to run away."
"Run, now."
I sighed.  "Fine."
I was walking by the end of the first lap.  I hadn't run since gym class last semester, and even then I'd just so happen to start with my shoes untied.  I had a feeling that trick wouldn't work on Sebastian.
"No walking."
"I'm not you!  I am allowed to walk."
"Draconic humanoids are the pinnacle of earth's creature's, only to be rivaled by shape-shifting dragons and the occasional strong dragon slayer.  You can survive ten laps."
"That's not what my legs are telling me."  But I tried to pick up the pace.  After all, the gym wasn't that large and ten laps couldn't have been that much.  I was sweating buckets by the end of it.  My chest stung, heart beating rapidly at the unexpected change.  I could feel it without placing a hand over it, beating a million times a minute, rattling my raw and beaten body to the core.
"Good enough," he told me. Good enough?  I had run ten laps around some gym when the last time I ran had been away from the cops.
"Now come here."  He stepped back, making the wrestling mat shift to accommodate his weight.
I reluctantly stepped onto the mat, letting it sink beneath my weight.  I wasn't excited to embark on whatever terrifying exercise he had in mind for me next.
"Let's see what you know," he said."General sparring rules apply."
"Which are?" 
"No wings.  No weapons.  Crotch hits are invalid.  First to knock the other out of the ring wins."
"Alright."  I held my hands ready at my chest, in what I thought was ready position.  It certainly was not my first time fighting.  My mother used to train me whenever she could.  I always heard her talking about how she didn't like to do it, give me lessons and all.  She didn't want that life for me, she always said.  But if she wanted a life at all for me, she'd have to teach me how to defend myself.  Astaroth insisted that I'd take training in the year my mother was away and I was at camp.  But since then the only people I've had to beat up are assholes who called me, "Easy Freshman" or something to do with whatever race they thought I was.
"Go," he announced to us and the few people throwing knives on the other side of the room.  I wasn't eager to fight Astaroth's so called, "best dragon."  I inched forward, keeping my hands guarding all my important parts.
"You know, I'm not the physical wreck you think I am.  I was trained by Ellen MacLauren."  He swung a swift fist at my face.  I caught it just in time, bewildered at my ability to save my face.
"Ellen MacLauren is dead."  He pounded his other hand into my left cheek.  On instinct I closed my eyes, and by the time I opened them I was on the ground.
I rubbed my sore cheek. 
"Do you have no respect for historical figures?"
He stood, waiting for me to get up.  He didn't seem concerned that I would make a move on him.  "You haven't been trained in five years."
I started to get up, then surprised even myself by trying to sweep my leg through Sebastian's.  Keyword try.  No give, as if I was kicking at a marble statue.  "Fine, be like that."
I quickly stood and drove my elbow into his stomach.  This time I surprised him, and he took a little bit to recover
"Just like riding a bi-ahh!"  I was side kicked out of the mat.  My shoulder hit the rubber floor hard.  I looked up at him, standing with his hands on his hips and the wisp of a smile on his face.
"Lesson one: you can never be sure that you fully incapacitated your enemy."
I rolled over, holding my shoulder with one hand and my face with the other.  "Are you proud of yourself?"
"Get up."
"I'm broken."
"I said, get up."
"Jeez, give me some time to recover!"
"If I was a dragon slayer, you'd be dead by now."
"Don't be ridiculous.  I'm not going to face any dragon slayers after this."
"Then why are you here?"
"On the off chance that a dragon slayer does show up to my doorstep, I want to be there to protect Peter and Dad, no matter how much of an idiot they both are."
"You know he's not your actual father, right?"
I groaned and started to get up.  "Yes, I know."  I had heard this a million times before from idiots who couldn't keep their mouth shut about my dysfunctional family.  Why does your family look nothing like you?  Why do you call your stepdad Dad?  Wait, Peter Galloway is your brother?  Why don't you have the same last name?
"Why do you call him that?"
"He single handedly kept a moody teenager who had just lost her mother alive and well for five years after losing his wife.  Dad is an understatement."
I put my hands back up in ready position.  "Wrong," he said.  He adjusted my fists to the correct position.  "Like this."
He walked to the other side of the room and grabbed a bag to punch on. 
"What're you doing?"  I asked, lowering my hands from their ready positions.
"You're not fighting me anymore."