A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters - Martin Harry Greenberg [47]
This morning, Hamlet, Carlotta, and Zell manage to sit equidistant from each other, forming a perfect equilateral triangle. They are getting out the first story for critique when the door opens again, and Margarite Lawson sweeps into the room.
She’s taller than I imagined she would be, blonder, and prettier. Or maybe that’s just how her human covering manifests itself in person. She wears a gauze lilac tunic over black pants, and manages to appear imposing and charming at the very same time.
I can see the magic flickering off her, sending sparks around the room. And inside that marvelous human form, I see the TrueSelf, spiny, scaly, and moss green—rather like an upright alligator with tusks.
She surveys the room and sees exactly what she should see: surprise, shock, and dismay. Surprise because she’s hours early. Shock because no one picked her up at the airport. And dismay because most of us were looking forward to our last few private hours with our sad sack western writer.
“Well,” Margarite says, “what a motley crew.”
She actually licks her lips, but it doesn’t look out of place unless you can see those tusks like I can. Everyone else just stares at her, no one more than Raj. I don’t have to be an empath to know he’s worried about losing his job. Somehow he failed to escort the most important guest writer of the workshop to her accommodation. Never mind that no one told him she’d be early. Never mind that she probably didn’t tell anyone that she’d be early.
Margarite doesn’t seem upset by the reaction to her appearance. If anything, she’s probably pleased by it, although she doesn’t show that pleasure. She doesn’t dare. It would ruin her entire plan.
How do I know her plan? Because if you chart the appearances she’s made before a murder, you can see a pattern of twenty- two months between unfortunate events.
The twenty-two months are the tip-off to the fact that she’s a chaos dragon. The first part of the name fits—she does thrive (and I mean thrive, as in need it to live) on chaos. The second name is a misnomer given by someone like me who can see the upright alligator in these imposters and somehow mistook it for a dragon.
More accurately, you should probably call her a chaos reptile or a chaos demon—but again, you find yourself in linguistic hell. Since she doesn’t have as many powers as the average demon, and she has considerably more than the average reptile.
Still, the bottom line is that every twenty-two months, she needs to snack on the distress caused by the release of a soul. That soul must die by murder most foul, and there must be some kind of investigation in which at least five people are suspects. If the chaos dragon doesn’t get her negative emotions within a two-year window, she will waste away.
Unfortunately, for her, she can’t overindulge either. The handful of chaos dragons who become police detectives or defense lawyers tend to explode—quite literally. These deaths are usually blamed on bombs or car accidents or, in one rather dramatic case, some weird kind of poison.
The disciplined chaos dragons feast every twenty to twenty-two months, which gives them two to four months leeway should the earlier feeding go wrong. And the disciplined chaos dragon also has a cover story for why she’s near so many horrible homicides.
She needs the cover story because the real story is more sordid. The real story is that the actual homicide itself is triggered by the chaos dragon’s presence.
In fact, she’s probably triggering someone right now. I watch her work, see her make eye contact with half a dozen people in the room, including—not surprisingly—my triumvirate. She doesn’t make eye contact with me, for which I am grateful.
Then Margarite smiles. She’s seen what she wanted to see. I know this