"Shon?" the woman asked and the boy left her behind to run to the woman.
She doubted that was his mother, but he seemed happy to see her.
Turning slightly, she looked around the tent with curiosity. There were four perches but they were all empty and four beds hidden by a divider in a corner.
They all lived there it seemed.
"Isn't she one of the vampires wandering around the forest?" the oldest of the men asked, a long purple beard streaked heavily with grey.
Shon nodded.
"I went out to capture her and bring her back! But then she captured me and told me to bring her here anyway," he said, seeming proud and then rather sheepish.
Etani snorted, crossing the tent to peer behind a divider and a large wash tub.
"What do you want, vampire?" the smallest man demanded, a long scar running down his face.
"Do you want the easy version or the full version?" she asked, picking up a book and examining it. She could read this one and she found it to be a book on keeping a dragon clean.
Making a sound of delight, she began flipping through the pages to see them wonderfully illustrated.
"Who are you?" the woman asked and she turned to look at them, the book still in her hands.
"Well, I was Etani the royal assassin of Ayathian," they seemed to tense at that. "Then I was Etania the Winter princess of Faerie. Then I was Etani the human and now I'm Etani the vampire."
They blinked at her and she smiled, snapping the book shut and they all jumped.
"So, short or long?"
"Might as well go long," the eldest man said and she grinned, her teeth giving them pause.
"Alright. I'm not here to kill you, I have little interest in your people aside from a fascination with your species and dragons. Especially the white cat out there," she pointed over her shoulder with her thumb. "But that's not the point. As I'm sure you all know, nine hundred years ago, or thereabouts, the Creators came to this world and decided they were going to pull it down," she had begun to pace around the room, the book still in her arms.
"As you won't know, because apparently none of us figured it out, that whole attempt failed because of a single little Fae girl was born and sucked up all the magic of those Creators, and the Protectors, and pulled it into herself. That girl was me, if you weren't getting the reference. When I stole all that magic, the Creators couldn't bring down the human world and many of them were killed. A few weeks ago, my husband decided that the best way to get obedience was to make me into a human. In doing so, he released all that magic back into Faerie and the Creators, who will be ecstatic to have it back with all new Creators coming into their powers. Now you see, that's where we start having issues. Because if you think about it, what are they going to do when they realise they again have the power to destroy the weighted anchor that is the human world?" the woman gasped and she smiled. "The lady gets it. We all get vanished into oblivion. And I don't know about you lot, but I like living," coming to the table, she rested her hands atop it, the book seeming to have vanished in the time it took her to get to them and the back of her pants were feeling oddly heavy.
"So as you can imagine, I'm real keen to get my magic back. Both so I can kill my husband, and so I can keep the Creators from making us all disappear. That's where you all come in. You see, there is this demon who thought it would be real fun to start messing with the lineage of my family and he intentionally bred each girl with a new species. Demon, vampire, Dragonkin, harpy, you get the idea. Now we've already hit up one and two, you are three," she grinned widely, enjoying their fear. "I need your magic, and you're going to give it to me, or I'll kill you all and take it that way. Your choice."
There was absolute silence at the end of her speech, and she had to wonder how many times she would have to give it. She would have to cut down the words next time.
"You're insane!" The oldest man said, and she laughed, moving to stand behind him and her hands came down on his shoulders
"Perhaps, but do you really want to risk it? I only need a little bit. Just enough to trigger that part of my brain that was dragonkin. Now if you could do it enough that I could have a dragon, I'd be extra happy. But beggars can't be choosers,"
She crossed her arms atop his head and dropped her chin onto them, smiling at them all.
"And if we refuse?" the woman asked.
"I kill every last person in this cave while you watch, then kill you too. I'm quite good at it,"
The man under her arms was shaking though she didn't know if it was rage or fear.
"Do it," the woman demanded and they all turned on her, but she wasn't going to argue with them.
"What is a small bit of magic to you? We don't use it once we have our dragons."
"There's a good girl," Etani said happily, everyone ignoring that the woman seemed to be almost twice her age.
"Just give her enough to get this to work and we can all live. How many do you have?"
"After you? Forty-nine," she shrugged at her look of horror. "Got to start somewhere."
"Do you know how long we have if you fail?" she whispered and Etani bit her lip.
"We can only guess."
The room was tense and the woman stood sharply, coming around to her.
Turning to the shorter woman, she tensed at the touch on her hair and face, the woman fixing her hair in a motherly way, and then pulling her down and their lips met in a gentle kiss.
Inside her, her mind warped and she could feel a part of her streaking out as though it had wings, touching on a million lights and then retreating back to her and settling as she felt the warm glow of a million lives she had never known before.
They were everywhere, all around her on the walls of the cavern and sprinkled about on the ground. Over a thousand dragons, all of them alert to her and her to them.
"You see this all the time?" she whispered and turned to the woman who nodded.
Turning in a slow circle, she could feel them all around her and she smiled.
"It will be a shame not to have one," she breathed.
"Perhaps you will one day," the woman said but she doubted it.
***
Finally she had decided it was time to leave and she thanked the woman, making a quiet promise to do her best in the means of getting her magic back. It wasn't like she wanted to die any more than they did.
The woman kissed her cheek and she had smiled, leaving the place but she had not found the cat dragon again on her way out.
She had stopped outside to see if she could coax down any of the dragons in the tree, but they had only looked at her like she was an idiot. She felt like one.
Heading back in the direction of the camp, she knew they would have discovered her missing long ago and so she wasn't in any particular hurry to get back to the moody bunch.
As she approached though, she could hear her name being yelled and she ignored it, tired of having to be a good girl.
She was only a few minutes from the camp when someone hit her from the side and she was sent sprawling, Kai atop her and pinning her to the ground with his teeth bared.