Page 11 of Dragons & Dumplings
“You owe me nothing. A dragon of frost always repays his debts,” Yuri commented.
A week ago, I might have thought he was being rude. But now, I was pretty sure he only meant that I didn’t have to share if I didn’t want to. But I wanted to.
“Sometimes, I get a little…overwhelmed,” I whispered, the admission coming with a sense of guilt. “When lots of little problems start adding up into a mountain, or a huge issue is suddenly dropped on my head, I start to panic. And then I can’t breathe, and sometimes… Sometimes I start to lose control of my magic.”
Just like what happened when I was little, when I couldn't control my fire and burned myself and everyone around me. I still lived in fear of the day I lost my temper like that again.
He went silent long enough for my stomach to go on a wild flight of twists and turns, until I just couldn’t take it anymore.
“Ridiculous, I know.” I gave a self-deprecating laugh. “A fire drake, panicking like that?”
Yuri’s steps slowed. “There’s nothing ridiculous about it.” His voice was soft, and devoid of its usual icy edge.
“There…isn’t?” That was definitely not what I expected to hear from a dragon who always seemed to have every hair perfectly in place, and not a speck of lint on his blazer.
“When was the last time you went flying? Just for the sake of flying?” he suddenly asked.
I frowned, and actually had to think about it for a minute. “I don’t remember. Why?” But what did that have to do with anything?
“Because that’s what helps me.”
My lips parted in surprise. “What?”
Yuri stopped, hands in his pockets, and turned to face me. Little snowflakes caught on his hair and eyelashes, and a light dusting now covered his shoulders. “Whenever it became too much and I was about to have a panic attack, I would slip away to go flying for an hour or two. Feeling the wind in my face helped calm me down, and gave me a better perspective on things.”
I was having trouble picturing the ice dragon as anything other than cool, calm, and collected. But the openness in his normally iced-over expression made me think that he really was being honest with me.
“I never imagined an ice dragon could ever lose control.”
Wrong thing to say. Yuri’s blue eyes shuttered, and he turned away to continue walking. I mentally kicked myself, and tried desperately to think of something to say that would melt the ice away.
“Would you go flying with me, then?” I blurted out, catching his sleeve.
He glanced around us at the flurry of snowflakes with raised eyebrows. “What, now? Isn’t it too cold for a fire drake?”
“I like the cold.” I held his gaze, matching his earlier sincerity with mine. “It’s comforting.”
Without breaking eye contact, he slowly removed his blazer and hung it neatly over one arm. Leathery white wings grew from his back and flapped once, sending snowflakes my way, almost like a challenge.
I removed my coat as well, and my own ruby wings expanded through the concealed slits in the back of my shirt. I flapped them once, testing the muscles I hadn’t used in far too long.
A slow grin spread across his face. We both bent our knees and raised our wingtips to the sky. On some unspoken signal, we launched into the air with a powerful downstroke, leaving mini maelstroms of snowflakes in our wake.
I laughed giddily as we raced into the heavens, the sting of the cold air against my cheeks waking me up more than ten cups of coffee ever could. Once we were so high above Willowmere that the town looked like a miniature in a snowglobe, we leveled out.
Suddenly, I understood why flying had helped Yuri when he was panicking. When the world looked so small, so did all of the problems it contained. From a dragon’s eye view, daily or even yearly problems were as troublesome as the snowflakes rolling off my wings; they would pass.
To my utter shock, Yuri executed a barrel roll in the air above me, tapping my back with the edge of his wingtip, and then went into a steep dive. I hadn’t played aerial tag since I was a hatchling!
And it wasn’t as if anyone would see us up here…
With a grin, I tucked my wings and dove, Yuri in my sights. Like a missile, I homed in on him, and clipped his wing with mine as I plummeted past him. When he raced after me, I snapped my wings out so that he rushed past, and laughed at the surprised and mildly offended look on his face as he pumped his wings to regain altitude.
“That was very sneaky of you!” he called out, huffing a bit.
“That’s what makes it fun!”
I waited until he was nearly upon me before I dove again, and teased him by pretending I was about to pull the same stunt again. So when he hesitated to dive, I ended up with quite the sizable head start. But despite his muffled cursing, I could hear him laughing, too.
