Dragon Witch ✔️

51 - Plans

The room went deathly quiet. Everyone was staring at Piper, including me.

"Really?" Kyton asked at last, his voice faint with hope. He had to be thinking the same thing I was. A solution for getting dragon's blood couldn't have come at a better time. His dad didn't have much time left if the second potion I gave him hadn't worked well.

"Would I joke about something like that?" Piper scoffed and gestured at the book she'd been reading. "Come on, take a look."

The three of us stood and crowded around her as she started to read aloud.

"Flejit par doos dek kator soor, illal kator pripta dek urynk. Do you know what that means?"

Kyton and Nissa were nodding. I hated to sound like the idiot in the room, but this was more important than my pride.

"No, I only know three languages, and that wasn't one of them."

"Ooh, sorry." Piper paused. "You're trilingual, but you don't know Common Spritish?"

I rolled my eyes. "My parents hate magic, remember? They only let me learn useless languages, like Spanish and Chinese. Gah, I can only talk to a few billion people. How terrible is that?"

Grinning, she shoved at my shoulder. "I get it, you're brilliant at human things, terrible at dragon things. You're the definition of irony." Without looking at the book, she added, "it says During the day of small moon, dragons of moon lack the power."

Now I felt like an idiot in Spritish and English. "Let's just say I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about."

"In Spritish, dragons are named after whatever element they get power from. For fairy dragons, it's the moon. So this is talking about fairy dragons, and the day of small moon is the opposite of the day of great moon, which we call the full moon. Get it?"

"You're saying fairy dragons lose their powers on new moons?"

She nodded estatically. "Yeah, they're totally weak on new moons. All we need is to get a bunch of dragonsbane and tranq darts, and we can go after the dragon next new moon."

Even without counting the days in my head, I instinctively knew that the new moon was a little over a week away. We should've been able to wait that long. The dragon was only a threat to people like me who were stupid enough to wander into the forest. But Kyton's dad might not have that long.

"How long does your dad have?"

Kyton's wings slumped. "Not enough time. The potion you gave me already wore off. Another one might give him a week max before there's permanent organ damage. He won't- won't be around much longer than that."

"I'll make another potion as soon as we get home, but that still won't give us enough time. We need eleven days until the new moon."

Nissa slammed her fist down on the table. "So we go before then." Dark shadows flickered around her fists, but the other two seemed too surprised by her outburst to notice.

I put my hands over hers, trying to subtly draw her attention to the shadows. "Ok, we go earlier. It'll probably help a little if we wait as long as possible, but we'll only have one chance then. We still need a solid plan. We should all just calm down a little and think this through."

"Fine, I'm fine." Nissa pulled her hands away. They were back to their normal shade of green. "I'm calm." She sat back down. "We need a weakness to exploit, something more solid than hunting the dragon almost on the new moon. Don't you know anything?"

For once, I wished I was closer to my changeling roots. My lack of knowledge about my heritage might get someone killed by slow-acting poison.

"I'm sorry, but I don't know any more than you do. I probably know less, actually." The hopeful looks of the others made me wish I could give them some better information. My stomach grumbled. "I'm hungry, so I'm going to grab a snack. When I come back, we can all focus on dragon weaknesses."

***

Downstairs, the line for the coffee shop wound out of the shop and down the hall. I joined the end of the line. I wasn't a huge fan of coffee, but they would have scones at the counter. It was nice to have a moment to myself to think. Even though I hadn't been part of Piper's and Kyton's planning sessions over the weekend, I'd still been thinking about the problem.

Even without his wings, the dragon was incredibly powerful. A fairy, a changeling, and a witch with a tranq rifle hadn't been able to stop it.

Eva chirped on my shoulder. I there too.

And you were very helpful. But that's not the point. Even with all of us, we couldn't stop it. What's changed since then?

You dying, fairy no fly, shadow fairy not there.

She might've had a point. Me and Kyton were in pretty bad shape the last time we ran up against the dragon, and Nissa had joined our group now. Still, I wasn't sure if it would be enough. This was a dragon we were talking about. Killing him wouldn't be easy. Though, we didn't actually have to kill him. We just had to get his blood. His blood...

A thought hit me. It was a crazy thought, and I hardly even let myself think it. If I was wrong, I didn't want my hopes dashed. I pulled up the OPSA app on my ID. When I went to the cafeteria section, it showed me options for navigation and a menu. I scrolled through the menu, scanning the blood options.

Come on, let there be fairy dragon blood. There was fairy, sphinx, barag, pegasus, behemoth, and human, but no dragon blood. No monster blood at all. I guessed it made sense. Monsters didn't smell appetizing to me, so they wouldn't be on the menu. Yet another plan dashed to pieces.

"Be careful, Lilly," someone said.

I spun around to see Dorian, our housekeeper, standing behind me in line. He smiled, revealing his forked tongue and stretching the tattoos around his mouth.

"Your ID is on public mode. Be careful not to show off secrets better kept secret."

I scrambled to turn my ID to private mode. Had he seen me looking through a blood menu? What would he think if he had? And what the heck was he doing here?

He chuckled, as if he could read my thoughts. "I'm sure you have a few questions, sister. First, I have one for you. Did you really think it would be that easy to get the blood you need? No fairy dragon would give up their life force, especially to an academy of weaklings like this one."

"How did you-"

He hissed, and I stiffened. No one else seemed to notice what was happening. Magic drifted off him in waves, forming a thick glamour. He was making himself invisible. Only I could see him.

"Keep quiet, sister. You should know that Clastor, the dragon you've been planning to hunt, has returned to the homeworld." He grinned at my horrified surprise. "If I know you as well as I think, you'll search for him tonight. You'll fail to find him. When you do, find me. I am in the forest, waiting by the waterfall where you hid two days ago. I'll tell you how you can get the blood you want. See you soon."

He started to fade away like a mirage. I lunged at him, but he disappeared before I could touch him. There was no trace that he'd ever been there, not even a scent. There had never been a scent. And he'd said "I am in the forest," not "I was in the forest" or "I will be in the forest." He'd never actually been here. What I'd seen had to be an illusion, some type of long-distance glamour message. There wasn't any point in trying to catch him.

I had to tell the others. We were all planning to take down the dragon living in the forest. If he was really gone, we had to change tactics. At the very least, we had to find a way to keep Dorian out of my house. He had to be a changeling or a dragon. A powerful one, since I hadn't been able to see through his glamour or detect any unusual scents around him before now.

Why so scared? Eva asked, barely clinging to my shoulder as I spun back around.

I'll explain in a second. I sprinted toward the nearest air elevator shaft.

I see your mind easy. She dug her beak into my shirt to keep from falling off as we jetted up through the shaft. Oh, you see bad man. He tried find me in closet. Creepy.

He's a little more than just creepy. He's probably a changeling, and he's been living in my house. My territory. Who knows what he wants with me? With my family? I stepped off on the third floor and sprinted down the hall toward our study room.