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  The Dubious Gift of Dragon Blood

  Synopsis

  High schooler Crispin Haugen already has so many identities to sort through—Asian, Scandinavian, not to mention gay. Then a messenger from another world arrives to tell him he also carries the blood of dragons in his veins.

  Transported to the Realm of Fire, where dragons and humans live in harmony, Crispin falls for Davix, a brooding, nerdy scholar. But dark mysteries threaten the peace of Crispin’s new world. Without warning, dragons from the Realm of Air unleash a bloody war.

  With everything he cares about on the line, Crispin must find the courage to fight...for justice and for love.

  The writing of this book was supported by the Toronto Arts Council with funding from the City of Toronto.

  The Dubious Gift of Dragon Blood

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  The Dubious Gift of Dragon Blood

  © 2020 By J. Marshall Freeman. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-63555-726-8

  This Electronic Original Is Published By

  Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 249

  Valley Falls, NY 12185

  First Edition: December 2020

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Credits

  Editors: Jerry L. Wheeler and Stacia Seaman

  Production Design: Stacia Seaman

  Cover concept by J. Marshall Freeman

  Cover Design by Tammy Seidick

  eBook Design by Toni Whitaker

  Acknowledgments

  This book has had many loving hands helping me raise it from infancy. First and foremost, I would like to thank the other two vertices of my reading triangle, Matt W. Cook and A. M. Matte. They read every chapter as it emerged and let me know that a character had died while I sputtered, “Maybe he’s just wounded!” Matt continued on as the book’s godfather through all its drafts.

  Thank you to beta readers, Béla Hegedus, Laura Kuhlmann, Stephen DeGrace, Matt Gordon, Stanley Freeman, Martin Cohen, Jojo Carreon, Steve Hutton, and members of the Toronto Writers’ Co-operative.

  Much appreciation to Stephanie Fysh for her insightful review of the second draft, and to Jerry Wheeler, my editor at Bold Strokes Books, for his keen eye and deep understanding of my book.

  Two wonderful authors acted as mentors: Michael Thomas Ford, who offered kindness, advice, and encouragement; and David Demchuk, who gave generously of his time, experience, and knowledge of the publishing world.

  Thanks also to author Michael Lyons of the Glad Day Bookshop for his help with market analysis.

  The writing of this book was supported by the Toronto Arts Council with funding from the City of Toronto.

  To Béla. You are the realm I fled to, and where I found my true home.

  Prologue: Davix, the Realm of Fire

  Davix told himself it wasn’t a scream; it was only the wind howling outside the Atmospherics Tower. But the windy season was not yet upon them, and the seasonal fog was thick and still. Shaking off his worries, Davix lowered his head and continued filling the rows and columns of the workbook with meticulous notations. All the other apprentices had headed home for the night, but Davix had been busy with the Prime Magistrate for the past four days, helping to prepare for the upcoming festival of Sarensikar. Now he had almost a week’s worth of weather data to enter in the log before he could go to sleep.

  “Why is the sheep fog so heavy this cycle?” he had asked the Atmospherics Master. “Could it be spinward wind off the lava pools?”

  The old man had grunted sourly in response. “These days, nothing is as it should be.”

  It couldn’t have been a scream, could it? Davix rose to his feet, listening, every muscle taut. He tried to tune out the noises around him: the rattle of the spinning wheels that recorded wind velocity; the trickle and drip of graduated cylinders filling with rain water; the flaps and coos of the kingsolvers in their cages. Davix knew his ears had not fooled him; there was no wind. It had been a scream.

  He stepped from the measurements room into the stairwell, closing the heavy door behind him to preserve the stove’s warmth. Descending one level, he stood on the landing outside the charting room. The sturdy chair where Lraga, the chaperone, had been sitting all evening was empty. Odd.

  He leaned against the door of the charting room and called. “Rinby?” The Lead Apprentice did not answer. “Rinby! I’m coming in, all right?” Looking around to make sure he wasn’t observed, he pushed open the door. Notebooks like the one he had been filling were open on her desk. Drawing tools lay scattered around a half-finished chart. Rinby’s cloak was hung on a wall peg, and her pack lay by her chair. But she was gone.

  Davix peered down into the stairwell. The younger apprentices had forgotten to carry their lanterns with them when they left, so while it was bright on the landing, the steps spiralled down into shadow. A finger of dread rose with the cold from below. He took a lantern off the wall, the large torchstone within glowing bright, and made the circular descent in superstitious silence.

  Halfway down, his light illuminated four parallel scratches in the stone wall, dark spots at their leading edges. He touched a finger to one of the spots and brought it back with a drop of blood on the tip. A terrible certainty grew in his chest. He ran down the stairs two at a time, as if Rinby was still arcing through the air in mid-fall and a swift enough boy might still catch her.

  She lay twisted at the bottom of the stairwell, legs sprawled on the last steps, blood pooled beneath her head, soaking into her braids. Davix kneeled beside the body and listened. No breath, no pulse.

  He knew what he had to do. He had to speak her full name aloud so her spirit would know who it was as it crossed into the Vale of Memory. But Davix wasn’t ready to accept the finality of the act. Not yet. Not like this.

  “Rinby,” he coaxed, touching her shoulder as if she had just fallen asleep at her desk, running formulas on wind speeds and temperature differentials. He had been jealous of her being chosen Lead Apprentice instead of him. But she never acted superior. Davix had hoped someday the Arbiter of Blood would allow her to pair with G’sander. Anyone could see how tangled they were. That would never happen now.

  He was shivering. Just below him was the tower’s vestibule, and he saw the main door was open, cold fog pouring in. At that moment, Lraga stepped inside, shoulders hunched against the damp. The chaperone screamed when she saw Rinby’s broken body.

  “What happened?” moaned Lraga. “Poor girl, poor thing!”

  “She fell…” Davix heard himself saying as the chaperone began to sob. It was time to speak Rinby’s full name and let her go. “T’lexdar-inby-thon,” he said, his voice choking on the last syllable, her discipline name, the same as his. The tears he had been holding back began to fall.

  Through the pull of emotion, Davix tried to rein in his mind. Twisting around to peer up the stairwell, he could clearly imagine Rinby slipping on the steps, braids flying, fingers scratching at the stone as she scrambled for a handhold. But Rinby was a nail biter, chewing them ever shorter when concentrating on her work. And ev
en if they had been long, he thought, how could they have made those scratches in the ancient stone? He examined her hands and found no blood on the fingertips.

  The chaperone was babbling through her sobs. “I was only gone a moment. I had to relieve myself! Please, Davix, you are close to the Prime Magistrate. Tell him I’m not to blame!”

  He ignored her. In his head, Davix heard the voice of the Atmospherics Master. “These days, nothing is as it should be.”

  PART I

  Heritage

  Chapter 1: The Monster Inside

  “Criiispiiiin?” Sylvia mewed like a cat in the rain as we contemplated the blank canvas of our poster board. “What colour should the headline be? Something confident.”

  “Teal?” I suggested, swallowing a phlegm ball of annoyance. Hi! I’m the gay. Ask me style questions!

  It was eleven fifteen a.m. of that most depressing day (Wednesday) of that most depressing month (November), and we were in grade eleven history class, divided into workgroups to draw War of the Roses recruiting posters. The members of my group—Karen Parkenter, Liza Chen, and me, Crispin Haugen, the only boy—were orbiting the social centre of gravity that was Sylvia Dubrowski. How I ended up with this group of popular girls as my friends still confused me. I spent most of middle school in social isolation, not that I can really blame anyone but myself; I’m mostly too shy to put two words together. I mean with actual humans, not in my head. There, as you will soon realize, I never shut up.

  “Teal, yes!” she said. “Someday, and I mean this, you’re going to colour-coordinate my whole wedding.”

  I had accidentally shown up on my high school’s gossip radar the previous March because of a disastrous breakup. Dražen was my first boyfriend, the first guy I kissed, the first guy whose name I wrote on my notebook over and over, surrounded by fireworks and coded banana doodles.

  Everything was going fine until the day his parents went away and he asked me to come over to his house so he could “put it in me.” When I said, “Ugh, no!” we had a major fight, and the very next day he decided to come out in a simultaneous detonation across all social media. His status changed to “in a relationship,” and since I was known to be his only friend, it didn’t take a genius to solve the mystery.

  Dražen, I should point out, didn’t take any of the shrapnel in said detonation. He was two days away from moving with his family to Vancouver. That’s why he had been so eager to accelerate our sex agenda. But I wasn’t lucky enough to be flying three thousand kilometres away, and for the rest of the school year, I woke up with a stomachache about the day to come.

  Have you noticed how in any TV show where the gay kid is immediately and unconditionally accepted, he is also outgoing, white, and possessed of some extraordinary talent? He’s a piano virtuoso or the star quarterback or the tragic victim of some enviable cancer. Well, dorks like me—half-Asian introverts with postures like question marks—don’t fare as well. I didn’t get thrown into lockers or anything. I wasn’t really bullied, but the homophobic f-bomb was scrawled on my locker along with random racial slurs, because why not?

  Contemplating my hollow eyes and full array of facial tics, my mom had asked with probing insight, “Is everything okay, Crispin?”

  “Couldn’t be better,” I said, nibbling at my bleeding cuticles.

  Then suddenly in the first week of school this year, after a summer of isolation and dread, Sylvia Dubrowski had swooped down like an eagle, and I was the little queer mouse borne lovingly aloft in her razor-sharp talons. Apparently, her social circle had acquired a hole in the shape of “gay friend.” I was lucky. Liza Chen was already occupying the Asian hole, but I’m only half-Filipino, so Sylvia bent the rules. Get it? Bent?

  Out in the hall after class, Sylvia did her signature Euro air-kisses with Karen and Liza and then hugged me like I was the big, pink teddy bear that lives on her bed.

  “You’re my best friend, Crispin!” she shouted for all to hear, and I could only think she probably knew more of the pink bear’s inner life than mine. Anyway, I was too distracted to care, because Altman Shendorf, captain of the hockey team, was moving in our direction. He rolled down the hall in his big, shiny shoes like a celebrity who can’t be bothered to wear a disguise, his green eyes lighting up the school’s drab interior, the bulge of his crotch shining like the star in the middle of the Christmas tree.

  I tried to keep my breathing even as he and Sylvia kissed sloppily. He adjusted his hair and seemed to notice me for the first time.

  “Oh, hey, Crispin. You ready?”

  “Unh-hnn,” I grunted, swinging my knapsack around to the front to hide my hard-on, which had come on so fast, I was amazed I didn’t black out.

  Sylvia turned to me, her face full of concern. “You take good care of him, Crispin. He has to get at least a B minus on his English paper, or they won’t let him play hockey next term.”

  Altman was already hiking away down the hall, and I had to scramble to catch up. By the time we were crossing the parking lot, I had matched his confident pace, bouncing along beside him, my grin splitting my face in two.

  When I bumped against him, he muttered, “Don’t touch me, man. Not while they can see us.”

  The jock clique was hanging out, hip-hop pounding from one of their cars, trying to impress the assembled girls with impromptu and frankly homoerotic wrestling moves. They greeted Altman with a howl. Him and one of his teammates traded coded monkey gestures and suggested vulgar things they would do to each other’s mothers. As usual, I was not included in this male bonding. Yes, I was protected by Altman’s status and not to be messed with, but I was also definitely not one of the gang.

  While I waited for them to finish their boy rituals, I noticed a woman peering in through the chain link fence that marks the edge of school property. Her coppery curls were cut short, and her tailored silk suit billowed in the wind, too light for the damp chill of this November morning. The suit jacket’s shoulders were wide enough for fighter planes to land on, as if she had just stepped out of some 80s music video.

  Even at this distance, I felt totally x-rayed by her gaze. Did I know her? Clearly not. And yet she looked familiar, like an aunt you meet at a wedding, and she tells you how you stayed at her house for a week when you were five. But how could she be looking at me? I was the great nonentity of the universe. It was obviously Altman’s grace and beauty that had her attention.

  As we left the parking lot, I told him, “Some perv’s perving on you.”

  He looked over at the woman and frowned, not doubting for a second that he was indeed the object of her attention. “What’re you staring at, creeper?” he shouted, and the woman turned and hurried away down the sidewalk, disappearing around the corner.

  “My hero,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, sorry.”

  We walked the single block to Altman’s house, buzzing with our growing excitement, and bounded up the front steps in perfect unison. Inside, he called his mother’s name, then the names of his four siblings. As usual, no one was home at lunch time. We headed straight for his bedroom on the second floor of the chaotic house, hopping over piles of clothes, schoolbooks, and sports equipment that littered the floor like landmines.

  Under the dull, watchful eyes of his hockey-hero posters, Altman pushed off his shoes, threw his jacket over a chair, and began unbuckling his belt and tugging at his fly. In a flash, he was naked except for his T-shirt, dropping back onto the bed, feet on the floor, eyes focused on the ceiling. Meanwhile, I was busy opening my own pants, tearing back the curtain on the little Wizard of Oz who called the shots in my brain. We began, my mouth on Altman, my hand on myself—fast, wordless, well-practiced.

  Sometimes I think there’s a monster inside me. Maybe I’ve always known. I can clearly remember that jarring, molten feeling that flowed through me at six years old when I saw Kevin Singh’s wiener at YMCA camp. How did I already know I should look away quick, only contemplate this picture in the pr
ivacy of memory? It wasn’t like I understood the ramifications of my curiosity yet. I didn’t know what I was. “Gay” was just a magic word kids intoned to cast a spell of shame on each other. But if I didn’t understand that this word described me, why didn’t I block the spell like the other boys? Why didn’t I just respond, “Shut up! You bite farts in the bathtub” like they did? No, I was the one who blushed crimson and asked for a bathroom pass, running out before anyone saw me crying.

  You know how it goes from there. You deny and deny and grow weird hair and deny some more. But eventually you have to admit that maybe you are…different. Eventually, the truth rises like the tide around your ankles, or else it crashes down on your head like a mighty wave. Either way, there is no unknowing. Either way, you get soaked.

  Damn, I interrupted a sex scene with a bunch of journaling shit, didn’t I? Sorry, where was I? Right! Crispin is on his knees, um, what’s the word? Servicing Altman, who swears with gusto, though little imagination, when he ejaculates. This splat-tastic event is followed by Crispin’s own orgasm, which can only be called poetic. He arches his back like a dancer, hand reaching into the air to thank God, nature, the cosmos. Altman lies on the bed, spent and panting, and Crispin slides up beside him, devastated and grateful. He drops his thick, two-tone hair on Altman’s pretty pecs and twists around to kiss Altman’s jaw. Altman lifts his head from the mattress to bring their lips together. They laugh conspiratorially at the genius of their illicit love. For it is love. They exchange those magic words that are the simplest and richest of poetry. “I love you.” “No, I love you,” and everything is perfect.

  Except that last part didn’t happen. Ever.

  No, after the splatty bit, I dropped to the floor, thrashing in post-orgasmic spasms, graceful as a trout on a dock, while Altman sprang to his feet and climbed over me on his way to the bathroom. The speed with which Altman could be in the shower after he finished was as impressive as it was depressing. His clean-up usually lasted long enough for me to get chilled and thoroughly marinated in self-hatred.