Fragment 17

Old Jose spotted a patrol car, and ducked into the alley. He moved far enough in to stand in line with the fire escape, and then leaned against the wall and heaved a sigh. The new quarantine rules meant that only those who held a permit were allowed to move around outside of their homes. It meant that people like him who didn't have a home stood out like sore thumbs.

He was better off than most, since he had a small monthly income from his years of service. In this life you had to choose your battles. Jose usually chose food and medical expenses, except during the most bitter winters. When those came he bought tickets for wherever was cheapest, followed the birds south, and hoped for good foraging opportunities.

The government liked to know where they could find you though, so it was easier to return with spring than to make the move permanent. Plus, cockroaches couldn't survive this far north. Jose had faced down many foes over the years, but he still had a few things that he'd rather not face. Cockroaches still utterly creeped him out, nasty little plague vectors that refused to die.

He could see his breath, and the wall against his back was cold enough to feel through his coat. The stillness and the chill of his surroundings slowly brought a patch of warmth against his hip to his attention. He stuck his hand into his coat pocket, and touched the surface of the shell the stranger had given him. An instant later he yanked his hand back out of his pocket and held his coat away from his body.

Warm, it was still warm. After a moment he warily reached for it again, and pulled it out. It didn't look any different, wasn't glowing or anything. It simply warmed his hand with the same feeling of remnant body heat that it had held when the stranger had handed it to him.

He ran his fingers over it, searching for any trace of a seam. There was nothing that he could detect. It felt exactly like the rather ordinary shell that it appeared to be, except for the warmth. Another source of warmth occurred to him, and he froze. What if it was radioactive?

After a moment he shrugged. If it was that hot, hot enough for him to feel, he was probably already dead. The frighteningly curious stranger hadn't seemed like the right kind of strange to be packing lethal radioactive samples, and he'd been wearing the shell against his chest. Not that humans didn't do the stupidest things sometimes, but Jose somehow didn't think that this was one of those times.

Probably best to keep away from women and children until he'd had it long enough to prove that it wasn't going to make him sick anyway. A laugh huffed between his lips. Everyone was keeping their distance anyway. With this virus sweeping across the world, just the fact that he was touching something that someone else had touched was probably the most dangerous thing about the shell.

After a moment he straightened and tucked the shell into his waistband, against the small of his back. It was a comfortable warmth. A silly speculation flitted to the surface of his mind. If the shell magically maintained this temperature indefinitely, wouldn't it feel cool during the height of summer? He blew the stray thought away on another huff of laughter. If the shell could do that, it'd be worth more than its weight in gold.

--

The youth followed him out of the den of the mankind. When he came to a halt, the child took a step back and regarded him warily, but at the same time, he seemed to radiate hopefulness.

He let out a sigh, to carry his luck away. He didn't need this kind of luck. He was still hungry, but the middle of this hivelike city was not a good place to stop and teach a little one.

The young dragon used its broken standard to ask, "What your name is?"

He gazed at the youth, momentarily stunned by the enormity of what he'd just promised. He should have just sought out one of the younger busybodies who liked to chatter and told them that there was a child who could not speak living here. Doubt whispered through his heart. Finding his kin might not be so easy with the fragmentation he'd felt in the strings.

The youth continued, "I name Chris T'andy, false name for this woken, not know true name of me."

"Dragon," he replied after a moment, using the modern variant of the word to prevent further confusion.

"Dragon name?" the young dragon asked doubtfully.

"Dragon is my identity in their tongue, and yours," he clarified simply.

The child appeared to chew on his words while he considered whether it would be better to take the young dragon back up the mountain, where he knew there was space or to continue downriver to the ocean where there would be more to eat.

"Dragon, I think I not understand well this flavor," the child confided, and then said more, in the current language of the mankind of this place.

He couldn't pick out any of the few words he already knew in that quick babble, but he replied dryly to the first sentence, "Agreed. Not well."

He examined the youth, again impressed by his skill in mimicry. The child was obviously at home among the mankind, and spoke their current language much more fluidly than he spoke the standard tongue of the conquerors. After a moment he decided to ask the little one's opinion before deciding their course.

"I am hungry. This is not a good place to learn. Better the mountain, or the sea?" He tried to keep things simple and repeated it in their own tongue, which the child had seemed to recognize even if it couldn't speak.

"Hunger?" the young dragon asked worriedly, and took a couple of steps back, as though he expected to be considered as food.

It was an exasperating reaction, for many reasons, and he growled softly. The faint memory of old blood that lingered beneath the more recent scent of greens and nuts on the young dragon's breath, told him that it had been eating the hearts of animals. Even if he became desperate enough to eat such things, he would never eat one of his own kind. That way lay madness. Even the hearts of the mankind or the seafolk carried too much of an echo of their self to be worth the amount of energy gained.

"I will not eat you," he stated clearly.

--

The vampire, Chris T'andy, eyed the being who had given 'Dragon' as his name. His Latin was too broken, because the 'taste of my identity to you' just didn't quite make sense. He suspected he'd mistranslated the word that related to tongue.

Dragon seemed to be angry. It was no doubt supposed to be reassuring when he declared that he would not eat Chris, but it made him more afraid that he'd been considered as food. The meaning of hungry in the other language, the one he didn't remember but understood somehow, had been sharp and clear, and a bit frightening. It had felt hungry.

It reminded him of his own forgotten hunger, and he almost turned back to enter the bar, but that wouldn't be good either, since he had no money. The mountain or the sea? Did Dragon intend to go hunting?

"If you have any money, we could just go to a supermarket?" he suggested, before realizing that he needed to translate that into Latin. Maybe hunting would be easier.

Mac had told him about how the coast was being heavily patrolled because people were idiots who thought that time off work due to an epidemic meant they had time to take a vacation.

"No money," Dragon stated after a moment.

So much for the life of the rich and entitled vampires as portrayed by the media. "Let's try the mountain I guess, er… mons?" he suggested.