Arousing a Dragon Read online

“Why the hell would I help you?” Ryker demanded, bitter fury saturating his words.

  “Because I need someone that I trust,” Aurora said. A touch of despair crept into her voice. The memories of what had happened last night were knocking at the back of her mind. The ramifications of her little drunken workplace episode becoming clearer and clearer by the second.

  “Please, Ryker,” Aurora said, managing to hold in the sob that was building in her throat.

  “Aurora,” Ryker yelled down the phone, so loud that the female police officer’s eyebrows almost disappeared into her hairline, “if you think I’m lifting a finger in any way to help your ass, you are dreaming!”

  The phone line went dead.

  Slowly, Aurora replaced the receiver back in its cradle.

  The police officer looked at her.

  “Damn,” the woman said, gesturing for Aurora to follow her back to the cell. “I don’t know what you did to him, but that guy was pissed.”

  Aurora took a seat back on the hard wooden bunk. The reek of her cellmate’s epic bowel movement had dissipated, and the woman herself sat against the wall opposite Aurora, looking at her from under heavy lids.

  Another woman cleared her throat and said, “I could hear that phone call from here, girlfriend. You hardly managed to get a word in edgewise! Who’d you call? And why’d he leave you hangin’ like that?”

  “It’s not a good story,” Aurora sighed.

  “You mean it’s a story that don’t make you look good, huh?” said the woman. She cackled at the look on Aurora’s face.

  “C’mon, girl,” said the peroxide blonde, “you don’t think we haven’t done a whole lot of shitty things in our lives? Look where we are! You don’t look like the city has crushed you just yet. What’s your deal? And why was that guy on the phone blastin’ you so hard?”

  Aurora sighed and leaned back against the cinderblock wall.

  “Well, basically,” she said, “Ryker – that’s the guy I was trying to talk to – Ryker and I were engaged to be married. This is back in Nebraska. We’ve known each other practically forever. Grew up together in the same little town, went to the same schools. All that stuff.”

  The two women had settled back to listen to her story. The other three women in the drunk tank, though uncommunicative, were also clearly listening.

  “I remember when he first asked me out on a date,” Aurora told her audience. She was gazing blankly at the wall opposite her, looking not at the roughness of the cinderblocks, but back in time. “We were in an elevator at the mall, and he had to wait for this other person to get out. Then he asked me out. It was great. He was so awkward – even though I’d known him forever, you know. And that was it. Next thing I know he’s asking me to marry him, and what else was I going to say to him but yes? I mean, he’s the only guy that I’ve ever been with.”

  “Wait, what?” said the peroxide blonde. “You ain’t never gone to the boneyard with anyone else? Ever?”

  Aurora shook her head, hoping that the blush she could feel creeping up her neck wouldn’t make it all the way to her face.

  “And?” the skinny woman prompted.

  And so Aurora regaled them with the day of the wedding. It had been a simple affair in their local church. She’d changed into her dress at the chapel, had peeked through a crack in the door and watched as friends and family took their seats. There were smiles and hugs all round, and she saw Ryker dressed in a pair of sand-colored chinos, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a pair of suspenders. He looked very handsome, carefree and nervous.

  Aurora paused, trying to bring order to her jumbled thoughts.

  “And then what the hell happened, girl?” the skinny woman urged.

  “Well, I was looking at everyone there; all these people that I’d known all my life, and I got scared, I guess.”

  “Scared?” asked the peroxide blonde.

  “Yeah… It was like, I could see my whole life just stretching out ahead of me from that point, and it was all so predictable. I’d never even left Nebraska before and here I was getting ready to settle down.”

  “So, you…?” asked one of the other women, who’d been silent up until that point.

  Aurora took a deep breath, like a woman who was about to rip a wax strip off her armpit. “Then I ran away,” she said, simply.

  “Oh no you did not!” said the skinny lady.

  Aurora nodded, not looking at her audience. “Yeah,” she said, “but it wasn’t like a melodramatic movie moment – running down the road with my wedding dress streaming behind me sort of thing and kicking off my heels as I went.”

  The others snorted and giggled.

  “No?” the peroxide blonde said.

  “No. No, I changed back into my street clothes, let my hair down, and hung my wedding dress on the back of the door. Then I snuck out through a side entrance and got into my car and just drove away.”

  “Shit, girl, that’s an ice-queen move!” declared the third woman, who was wearing a ragged cardigan and had dark circles under her eyes.

  “So, that’s why your boy was so pissed?” the peroxide blonde asked.

  “Yes. That’s why.”

  “You left your soul-mate, left your home, so that you could come out here and get shat on like the rest of us?”

  “Seems like that, huh?”

  “Yeah, it does a little bit.”

  “It’s just sometimes it’s worth rolling the dice, you know?” Aurora said. “I didn’t want to spend my life thinking ‘what if?’”

  There was silence while all the women digested this tale.

  “Man, you had some motherfuckin’ balls ringing that guy,” the skinny lady snorted.

  The others laughed.

  Aurora smiled sadly. “Yeah,” she said, “that’s exactly what he said.”

  The talk turned to what her cellmates had been picked up for, and the peroxide blonde was just getting started on an extremely juicy-sounding tale involving a taxi, a bag of speed and a stolen police officer’s hat when the cop that had escorted Aurora to the telephone rapped on the cage bars.

  “Laurent?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  The women unlocked the door and stood aside. “You’ve been bailed,” she said.

  Frowning, Aurora got to her feet.

  “Guess Mr. Nebraska don’t hate you as much as you thought, sugar,” the woman in the ratty cardigan said, winking at Aurora.

  “But, I never told him where I was,” Aurora muttered.

  She walked out of the cell, leaving her temporary companions behind.

  “Who was it?” she asked the police officer leading Aurora to the front desk to claim her possessions.

  Her only answer was a shrug.

  The desk sergeant handed over the plastic bag containing Aurora’s phone, keys, belt and handbag, pushing a form across for her to sign.

  “Excuse me,” Aurora asked the desk sergeant, pushing the clipboard back through the gap in the partitioned window, “but who posted my bail?”

  The desk sergeant shrugged and then consulted another sheet of paper. “It was some posh guy. Was wearing a nice suit. Spoke pretty fancy. Abraham Travers.”

  Who in the world is Abraham Travers? Aurora thought.

  As if in answer to the unspoken question, the desk sergeant slid a card across the desk.

  “The guy told me to give you his card.” He swiveled in his chair and started tapping away at a computer on his desk.

  “Alright, miss,” the cop said, indicating the door that led out to the sidewalk, “you’re free to go.”

  Aurora scooped up the business card and hurried outside, cursing and screwing up her eyes as she stepped out into the unforgiving daylight. Once she was a block away from the police station, she stepped out of the stream of foot traffic and looked down at the crisp business card she had clutched in her fingers. It was high quality, and exuded wealth

  All that was on it was a phone number. That was it. No name. No email.
>
  Aurora flipped the card over and there was a handwritten message on the back, penned in a beautiful flowing script.

  Your job has gone up in smoke. Would you care for another?

  Brow furrowed in contemplation, Aurora toyed with the idea of calling an Uber, but then realized that her credit card was maxed out, and her phone was probably dead.

  She wandered past a hotdog cart, and the smell made her empty stomach growl so loudly that she was amazed people didn’t turn their heads. She rummaged in her wallet and found a five-dollar bill. Overcome with another wave of despair, she grabbed a dog and sat down on a low wall, her handbag between her feet. She chewed morosely on the hotdog, thinking about what the hell she was going to do now. Her rent loomed over her like a shadow, her general lack of funds pressing on her chest like a great weight.

  A few coins landed suddenly in her bag, pattering in like metallic hail.

  “What the…?”

  Another passer-by dropped a dollar bill into her bag.

  “Wait –” Aurora began, but the old woman who’d dropped it had already rounded the corner.

  Another few coins dropped in. “Look, I’m not homeless!” Aurora tried to say, but the man had disappeared into the crowd.

  These acts of misguided charity did nothing to improve her circumstances. She stuffed the last of the hotdog into her mouth and leaned back against the iron fence that divided the street from the alleyway behind.

  Someone clearing their throat behind her made her lean forward and turn.

  A rough homeless man had wandered up and sat himself on the other side of the fence. He had very few teeth and the smell coming off him was a nasty mix of urine and halitosis. Aurora leaned away.

  “You know,” he croaked, “it ain’t so bad being homeless.”

  “Yeah. Okay,” Aurora said, not knowing what else to say. “It’s just – I’m not homeless.”

  “Why’re you beggin’ then?”

  “I’m not. It was a mistake by those people.”

  The grubby man wagged his head understandingly. “Sure. Right. You got a job then?”

  Aurora sighed. “Well, no, not exactly. I was just fired.”

  “Right, right. You got a place to go?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Oh, okay. It’s just that, you know, if you ain’t got nowhere to go, you’re welcome to share my box with me.”

  Aurora blinked. “Sorry?” she said.

  “I said you can always share my box with me tonight. You know…we can keep each other warm…” He leered at her with his greying gums.

  Holy shit, Aurora thought. Just when I thought things couldn’t get any more depressing.

  “Um, thanks for the offer and everything but I’m just gonna go…”

  She got to her feet, smiled and then walked briskly off, ignoring the pleas of the homeless man for her to come back and be his wife.

  Aurora continued down the street until she came to Tompkins Square Park – only then realizing where she was. She found a free bench where she could sit and take stock of her surroundings, and her life in general.

  “Okay, Aurora,” she said to herself, brushing hotdog bun crumbs off of her front, “just take a moment. Take a breath.” She fished in her purse for a pocket mirror, glanced into it and recoiled.

  “Jesus,” she said, “prison does nothing for a gal’s looks!”

  She busied herself for a few happy minutes, cleaning her face with a packet of face wipes, making sure that she was free of last night’s make-up and then applying a neutral lip balm to her dry lips. A tiny spritz from a little perfume bottle that she never left home without and she felt almost human again. This soothing bit of feminine grooming had taken about ten minutes and had distracted her from the very dire reality that now faced her. No job. More bills that she could shake a stick at. Rent that she could not pay.

  “Christ,” she whispered staring up into the trees that branched over her head.

  She pulled out her phone automatically. It looked as dead as she feared. She pressed the power button without any real conviction, and was amazed when the screen came to life. The phone started up and she saw that she still had more than half her battery.

  Alright, she thought, if little victories are all that it’s going to be today, then little victories I’ll take.

  One of the cops at the police station must have turned it off after getting sick of it continuously going off, because when Aurora checked her texts she found that she’d received almost forty messages and missed calls. Most of them were from Brodie, with a couple from Harper. Looking at Harper’s name sent icy tendrils of guilt squirming through Aurora’s insides. She hoped that her best friend hadn’t been fired by Fiona.

  Aurora flicked through Brodie’s messages, but they were mostly in the same vein as the one he had sent her last night.

  The one where he broke up with me, she thought, numbly.

  The messages got ruder and ruder, with less care taken about spelling and grammar, as Brodie had clearly gotten drunker. Aurora skipped to the last message – received at about four in the morning – and she could barely understand it at all. With another huge sigh, she put the phone in her lap and looked out at the pleasant greenery. She liked New York’s parks. They reminded her of home. She sat and listened to the starlings as they chattered happily in the trees.

  What the hell do I do? What do I do now? Universe, give me a sign! Do I call this mystery number? I mean, who just posts a stranger’s bail and leaves them a business card? What do I do?

  She held her phone up to the cloudy sky, willing God to cut her break.

  And then she saw one of New York’s most loved and rarely seen avian residents sitting in a tree, regarding her sternly through a pair of gorgeous yellow eyes. A red-tailed hawk.

  The eyes of the creature seemed to pin Aurora to the bench and suck the thoughts out of her puzzled head.

  “Wow,” she breathed, “you’re pretty.”

  She’d heard that the birds lived in New York, but she hadn’t ever thought that she’d see a bird of prey in the middle of a metropolis like this. The sound of the city played in the background, and the hawk watched Aurora as if she was a particularly large and delicious mouse.

  “Yeah, I guess that could be a sign,” Aurora murmured to herself. “But what’s it a sign of?”

  Oh, come on, stupid, how many options have you got to choose from, huh?

  Aurora held up the business card and looked at it again. There was nothing that indicated who it belonged to. All she had was the card, a number, a note, and a name; Abraham Travers.

  Aurora looked back up at the red-tailed hawk, but the imperious bird had disappeared.

  “Alright,” she said to herself. “Alright. I’ll just call.”

  She dialed the number. Her thumb hesitated over the call button. Small town girls from Nebraska didn’t do this, did they? This is how you ended up on the back of a milk carton. She pressed call.

  The phone rang only once before it was picked up. A crisp, English accent answered.

  “Good morning, this is Abraham Travers speaking.”

  Aurora’s mouth had gone suddenly dry. She licked her lips, tasting the vanilla of her lip-balm.

  “Hi,” she managed after a second. “Hi, this is –”

  “Miss Laurent, I presume?”

  “Uh, yeah, that’s right… Um, do you mind my asking who you are?”

  “My name is Abraham Travers, miss.”

  Aurora frowned. “Well, yeah, I got that. It’s just that I was more wondering how it was that –”

  “I apologize most profusely for interrupting you, Miss Laurent, but I feel that the most expedient way in which to clear up any questions that you might have regarding this telecommunication, and the payment of your bail, is for me to tell you that Mr. Hawthorne would very much like to sit down and explain things himself.”

  “Mr. Hawthorne?”

  “Yes, miss. Mr. Finn Hawthorne the Fourth. I believe he made y
our acquaintance very briefly yesterday evening at the Soft Summer Night Dream art gala.”

  “That Mr. Hawthorne?”

  “Indeed, miss.”

  “But – but – what does he want me for? I mean what – what’s this all about? If it’s about his suit, I’m sorry but there’s no way I can pay for a new one if I ruined it.”

  “No, miss. If I may use the expression, you seem to have got the wrong end of the stick. Mr. Hawthorne would like to offer you a job.”

  Aurora was speechless. She hadn’t realised it, but in her nervousness she had gotten to her feet. She sat back down heavily on the bench.

  “A job?”

  “That’s correct, miss.”

  “What d’you mean a job?”

  “An employment opportunity is perhaps another way that I could phrase it, Miss Laurent. As a caretaker?”

  “Caretaker?”

  “That’s correct. I’m aware that it’s somewhat enigmatic but, should you consent to the meeting, I am sure that Mr. Hawthorne will clarify all the particulars.”

  Aurora wasn’t sure what to say to this. This Travers guy seemed to be well-spoken, polite in a reserved sort of way, and competent. There was nothing about his tone or phone manner that suggested that Aurora was chatting to someone with private designs that involved turning her head into a lampshade.

  “Miss Laurent?” Travers asked.

  “Um, hi. Yes?”

  “May I inform Mr. Hawthorne that you acquiesce to the meeting?”

  Aurora bit her lip and considered her other options.

  Her brain said, you don’t have any other options.

  “Okay,” she said into the phone. She had the strangest sensation of listening to herself agree to this meeting, as if she was a spectator in her own body.

  “Excellent,” the plummy English voice said, crisply. “Is now a convenient time for you, Miss Laurent?”

  Aurora gaped. “Uh, now?”

  “That’s right, miss.”

  “As in right now.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Well, I kind of need to go home and shower and change. I’m not going to lie to you, but a night in the drunk tank plays havoc with a girl’s complexion. I’d also really enjoy brushing my teeth.”

  “At the risk of sounding a touch unoriginal, Miss Laurent, I regret to inform you that this invitation is of the now or never variety,” Travers said.