Dragon King by Sara Fields

CHAPTER1

Hayleigh Ward

The light flickered for a moment, illuminating the room in an eerie, sinister glow. Then it went out completely and plunged me into total darkness.

Because fuck my life.

Why not this too, right?

Because nothing could go right this week. I’d just gotten home from college on winter break to nothing more than a quickly scribbled handwritten note from my dad telling me he had to go to a law conference in Hawaii and was going to miss most of it.

That was a big fat fucking lie.

He wasn’t at a conference or even doing any work as a lawyer. He was probably spending it getting laid with his too-young-for-him girlfriend rather than with his daughter.

Asshole.

A clap of thunder rumbled so loudly that it vibrated the marrow in my bones, and I sat back on the couch with an annoyed huff. There wasn’t a single flashlight in sight. There wasn’t a candle in the room either, but it would be useless without a lighter.

A few months ago, my dad had uprooted and moved to a big house in Greenwich, Connecticut without asking my opinion, not that it really mattered. He’d checked out of my life pretty much the day I turned eighteen. I’d never understood why. It didn’t really matter though. Understanding it wouldn’t make up for any of it.

I tried to blink a bit more quickly so my eyes would adjust faster, but that didn’t work as much as I hoped it would. A flash of lightning lit up the room again, cutting through the windows and casting the whole house in a ghostly, supernatural hue before that disappeared too.

With a rising sense of gloom, I glanced around, trying to figure out what I could do to pass the time until the power went back on. I had an overwhelming amount of classwork to do, but I still had plenty of time to complete it. My college classes didn’t resume for another two weeks anyway. I was never the type that got my homework done earlier than the night before it was due.

I had this big mansion to myself. Back home in Arizona, I might have invited my friends over and had a party, but I didn’t have any friends here. I could order Chinese or pizza, I guess. I picked up my phone off the side table, glaring at the television for a second for having the absolute audacity to shut off too before I tapped the screen. I didn’t have much battery left. I was always pretty shit at keeping it charged. Back at school, my friends would constantly ask for my battery percentage updates. Sometimes they even made it into a drinking game.

Not knowing how long I was going to be stranded here, I did a quick search to see what kind of hellhole had weather like this just as another round of thunder shook the walls. Apparently we were smack dab in the middle of one of the biggest winter storms that Connecticut had experienced in the past one hundred years. Tonight, there would be thunderstorms and freezing rain, but tomorrow the snow would begin, and it wasn’t forecasted to stop for at least two days straight, dumping nearly three feet of snow by the time it was over.

Great. Just fucking fantastic. The only thing that could make this whole thing even better would be getting my period too.

I hated everything.

My birthday was in a week, and it wasn’t just any birthday. I was finally turning twenty-one. I could finally go out to bars and meet people and I was probably going to be stuck in a snow apocalypse for all of it. Since I was going to be stuck here, I might as well start exploring. My cell phone battery had already ticked down another percentage point, so I was working on borrowed time.

I forced myself to get off the couch and turned on the flashlight on my phone. I wouldn’t be able to rely on it forever, so I needed to find some other form of light, be it candles, flashlights, glow lights, whatever really. Maybe dear old Dad had a lantern and a secret camping addiction he never told anyone about. I wandered down the hallway, opening a few doors. I found a barely decorated office, what could be the lamest guest room I’d ever seen, several closets, and the kitchen. I searched all the drawers, cussing my father out several times when I came up empty handed.

I continued exploring the house until I eventually stumbled on what appeared to be the basement. It didn’t look especially promising. It was dark and especially creepy, and my phone only had like ten percent battery left. I stared down, unable to see anything at the bottom of the stairs. With an exaggerated, annoyed sigh, I descended one step at a time and kept my phone flashlight up so I could at least make out where I was going.

At the bottom of the stairs, the room opened up into a big space. There were several storage racks to the right and a bunch of unpacked boxes to the left. I steered in the direction of the racks, seeing at least some semblance of organization. I scanned over the shelves, and I finally squealed in victory when I found a box of unused candles. I frowned when I realized there wasn’t a lighter or even a pack of matches from some dingy bar.

I continued pawing through everything until I found one of those large utility flashlights on the back of one of the shelves. With a triumphant grin, I reached for it and my elbow brushed against an unlabeled cardboard box that was teetering on the edge to the right of me. As I wrapped my hand around the handle of the flashlight, the box lost its fight with gravity and tumbled to the floor.

I pulled the flashlight out and looked down, initially not caring enough to even think about cleaning it up. I wasn’t the maid, after all.

Then I stopped cold.

Right there on the floor by my foot was a picture of my mother. I stared at it for a long time before I knelt and hesitantly picked it up. She was smiling. I never remembered her being happy, only her sadness. Even when I was a little girl, there was this lost look in her eyes, like she had demons inside her that were chasing her all the time and no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t outrun them. I’d always attributed that to the fact that she had given birth to me when she was young, that somehow, she was depressed that she’d missed out on life by having me. That was my best guess, at least.

I brushed my thumb over her face. She was young here, maybe nineteen or something. I turned it over, finding a legible date written in the upper corner. I did the rough calculation in my head and figured out she’d been only seventeen in the picture. She’d had me a year after that. I turned the picture back over, staring at her face and trying to commit it to memory. It had been so long since I’d seen it.

My mom had died in a car crash when I was ten. The circumstances surrounding the whole thing in my head were hazy, but I remember visiting her in the hospital once with my dad. He never took me back after that, and he never told me anything else about it. A few days later, my nanny had laid a black dress on my bed. The funeral had been later that day.

With a hard swallow, I glanced down at the rest of the contents strewn out all over the floor. There was a bunch of old books, manila folders stuffed with papers, a vintage ruby necklace, a silver pendant, and a bunch of other stuff. There was a pretty leather-bound journal too. I knelt and flipped it open. It was my mother’s diary. Immediately, I wanted to get back upstairs so that I could read every single page.

In a hurry, I gathered everything and tossed it back in the box. I saw a box of batteries and tossed them in too, thinking I might need them in case the ones in the flashlight went out. I’d probably thank myself later—if they happened to be the right ones, that is.

I carried everything back up into the living room and camped out on the floor with the big utility flashlight in the middle of the rug. It was still dark outside, and from the wet look of things, the freezing rain had started. There was no hint that the power might come back on and honestly, I just hoped it wouldn’t be out for this dumb once-in-a-lifetime storm. Wasn’t the northeast supposed to be equipped for this sort of thing? Like… with power grids and whatnot?

Once I was all set up, I didn’t waste any more time before I dove into the box. I carefully spread everything out, trying to take it all in at once. The necklace sparkled when it caught the light just so and the silver pendant shone in places and was tarnished in others. Did they belong to her? Where had they come from?

I picked up the necklace first. The chain was made of gold, the links thin enough to be dainty but thick enough to give it strength. The glimmering pendant itself was quite large. The ruby was oval shaped and showcased the advent of time, but the gemstone sparkled still as if it had a flame inside it. It was surrounded in what I expected were diamonds encased in a border of gold set off with silver filigree. It was exceptionally beautiful for something that looked like an antique.

I reached up and clasped it around my neck, somehow feeling closer to my mom and more at peace than I had been in a long time. The pendant settled right at the center of my chest, and I traced my finger over the ruby. It felt warm and especially comforting.

Rain pelted against the windows outside and I settled in. I reached out for my mom’s journal, opened it, and started to read from the first entry. It began on the day of her twentieth birthday.

I can’t stop looking at her.

The happiness in her eyes and the way she can experience everything with the untainted innocence of a life unlived.

How do you go about living when you know the day your life will inevitably end?

Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve been told that day would be my twenty-first birthday. I’ve spent all my days trying to figure out how to stop that from happening. I’ve read and collected everything I could find of all the women before me, and all their stories end the same way. They’ve tried it all. What hope could I have to escape what they couldn’t?

I’m going to end up like all the others. On the dawn of my next birthday, I’m going to be taken. I don’t know where; all I can tell is that it’s a terrible place from the broken renditions of what happens to all the others.

Do I tell my daughter what’s coming for her that day? Do I take away her innocence? Would it be cruel to wrench that away from her?

I don’t know.

I don’t even know if I’m going to tell her father what’s coming. I’ve kept it to myself all these years.

I wish I had the answers. I wish someone would tell me what to do.

I kept reading, trying to understand what she meant. She didn’t really go into detail about what she meant. Who was going to take her? Did she have a debt of some kind? Did our family owe someone else money? I couldn’t tell.

Hour by hour passed as I read through the pages looking for answers. At times, it seemed nonsensical. She mentioned dragons and other terrible monsters from time to time, but as the day of her twenty-first birthday loomed closer, the entries grew more and more unhinged with her growing panic. I had known she had battled with various mental illnesses in the past, but I hadn’t quite known it had gotten this bad. Her fear was palpable. I kept pressing forward, wanting to find out what happened next. When I finally got to her birthday, there was no entry. There was nothing but blank pages until at long last, there was one six months later.

I’m never going to tell her.

She deserves to live a happy life, at least with the days she’s been given. Henry hates me. He thinks I disappeared for six months and left him with a toddler, but he doesn’t know what it was like.

He’s never going to know.

And neither will she.

After that, the entries got shorter. Sadder. More broken.

Before, there were at least some happy memories and that bled through with her words. Now, there was only ruined sorrow. She spoke of going to sleep and never waking up, and just how peaceful that would be. Dad had made her go to endless therapy appointments. There was even a point that she was in danger of getting committed and she vowed to never tell her story to anyone again.

One more year.

More broken entries.

More talk of the peace that would come with ending it all.

Then I reached the final entry. It was dated the day before the car crash that took her life. Before, I’d simply assumed that it was an accident, but now, things started to come together. She’d been the only car involved. The funeral hadn’t been well attended. No one had looked me in the face that day, as if they were too ashamed to meet my eyes. Now I understood why.

My mom had taken her own life.

I sat back, the weight of that knowledge settling on my shoulders so heavily that it hurt. I kept rolling the circumstances over in my head, knowing it all tied back to whatever happened during the time she had disappeared. I looked through everything piece by piece, searching for answers. There were old journals belonging to other members of the Ward family, all of them women. Every account was the same. All of them disappeared on their twenty-first birthday.

Every single one.

Some of them were gone for simply a few hours. Others were gone for week, or months—there was even one that vanished for a whole year. But they all came back the same.

Shattered. Shells of the women that they once were. All just like my mom.

I wrapped my arms around my knees.

What did that mean for me?