Fly

Chapter 14

~Fiona~

I turned the brightness up on my phone and looked at the email from Dane again, just to make sure I was reading it right.

From: DaneGuy20

Subject: This is not a drill

Fiona,

I found something out about why people are disappearing. I don't want to say too much while I'm here at the library - you never know who's watching over your shoulder. But come as soon as you can, it's worse than we thought. 

p.s. thank you for the meal, I'll be dreaming about it for weeks!

I slumped back in my overstuffed chair, a slightly ragged, creaking monstrosity that had been my dad's before mom got him a new one for Christmas a few years back. It was still extremely comfortable, despite it's appearance, but that comfort didn't help me now. 

How am I going to go down there again so soon? It hasn't even been a week yet! I know my parents haven't made me go back to school yet - there's hardly any school left in the year anyway. But they're bound to be suspicious if I keep running off like this. Maybe if I play the 'recovering victim' card again, they'll leave it be? Or maybe.... 

Suddenly, an idea popped into my head. I picked up my phone again and called my best friend, Raven, who I hadn't spoken to very much since I had returned. She answered immediately. 

"Fiona! Thank goodness, I've been hoping you'd call. I've been worried sick about you but my parents said not to bother you because you'd been through 'a traumatic incident' and that you needed space and I'm just REALLY glad to hear from you because I'd die if anything happened to you and-"

"Raven!" I interrupted, trying not to laugh, "breathe, dear."

I heard a gasp on the other end, then she started laughing, which made me chuckle as well. "Calm down," I continued as she subsided, "I'm fine. I need your help with something though - someone that I met after I was... kidnapped... has some possible information about the kidnappers. I've set up a meeting with them down there (because they don't have a car), but I need you to cover for me. I don't want my parents to worry."

Silence met me from the other end for a moment, before a surprisingly serious voice emanated from my best friend. "Of course I will. You can always count on me, I'll keep all your secrets. You know that! As far as they'll know, you're at my place the whole time. Just.... be careful."

I nodded, even though she couldn't see me. "You got it!"

Several hours later, I was back in the air, racing on a high, cold current to the south. My wings felt like huge parachutes, floating effortlessly on the breeze, glimmering like silk with a hundred colors layered over white. I could feel the pull of gravity in my keelbone, my hips, rippling up and down my spine with every flap of my wings and flick of my tail. I had never had a good sense of my center of gravity before as a human, but as a dragon, it felt like a living point in my body, like a burning shadow. Something about the way it twisted told me which direction I was facing, and where I was in relation to the ground below. The air shimmered around me in almost invisible waves, like heat off a desert, and I saw them shift and turn and swirl and realized that they were the wind, the effect almost like a pale imitation of oil on water. I could see through it clearly, but it was constantly there if I wanted to look at it. In the same way, I could see the very real effect it had on the ground - where the waves of air pushed the branches of a tree into motion, or tumbled across a field of grass. And I rode it as if it were a solid thing, cutting through it like a shark through water. It was glorious. I felt as though I had only just begun flying when I reached Chicago.