Paloma triedto focus on the screen in front of her, but it was a losing battle. She hadn’t been able to focus on much of anything since Artem waltzed, naked and glorious, into her house.
She glanced at the glowing numbers in the corner of her screen. By her count, he’d been asleep for twelve hours.
It was late and she was beginning to feel the strain of sitting in front of her screens for so long, but Paloma hesitated to go to bed. She wasn’t sure she could. No one beside herself and her father had slept in the house since she stopped having sleepovers. It was strange knowing that there was someone else in her space, breathing her air, using her blankets, after so long.
It’s not bad, she allowed, staring blankly at a readout of m-signatures gathering over the Sacramento delta. Normally she might feel a small thrill at the sight, her intellectual curiosity drowning out any physical discomfort she might feel, but not at that moment. Paloma’s mind wandered back to the dragon in her living room. Definitely not bad.Just… weird. Like I didn’t notice how empty the house was until he got here.
She felt like she could hear him even when she knew that was impossible. There was no way she could pick up on the rustle of blankets all the way across the house, or smell the distinct, crisp scent of him through a closed door. Logically, she knew that. But it sure felt like she could.
Sighing, Paloma pushed back from her desk, the wheels of her old chair squealing, and rubbed her tired eyes. It had been a long, tense day, and she needed rest.
The Protectorate Weather Service could wait a few more hours for her report. Not that they really cared about the fluctuations in rainfall or tamer atmospheric phenomena. They really only wanted to hear about one thing: spontaneous sapience.
That was the reason she got the funding she did, and why the PWS was so quick to snap her up after she got her doctorate. Paloma was an expert in the study of m-weather and sapient events. So far, she’d managed to locate three different hot spots before touchdown — an unparalleled success rate.
Squinting at the cluster of numbers and vivid, hot pink lines on her screen, she made a mental note to keep an eye on the movement of the cluster headed inland over the delta. It wasn’t worth worrying about yet, since m-weather happened in pockets all the time, but if it merged with another cluster on its way toward the Sierras, she’d need to get on the phone with the Spot Unit so they could intercept it.
A spontaneous eruption of magic, in just the right conditions, could create breathtaking new life. It could also destroy whole cities if it wasn’t wrangled away from a population center in time.
After what happened to San Francisco in 1906, no one took chances with that sort of thing.
Still, it wasn’t worth worrying about yet. There was no immediate danger of a merge with another cluster, so she felt confident enough leaving it for the night. She would just have to check on it again in the morning. So long as her emergency alert didn’t go off, of course.
Powering down her screens, she crept back through the house, straining to hear any hint that he was awake. Of course, Artem warned her that he could sleep for days at a time, but she struggled to imagine it. A day seemed reasonable enough, especially when she could see the way he flagged as the minutes ticked by over breakfast, but days?
Carefully closing her bedroom door, she leaned against it for several long moments. Not for the first time that day, Paloma wondered what exactly she had gotten herself into.
Sure, Artem seemed nice enough, but she got the uneasy feeling that she’d made a mistake somewhere. The proprietary way Artem viewed her home raised her hackles, but the way he looked at her…
I’ve definitely missed something.
Finger combing her hair back from her flushed cheeks, Paloma nervously edged away from the door to change into her pajamas. All the while, her eyes flicked back to the door. Did she feel safe sleeping with a strange man in her home? The door wouldn’t stop a human, let alone a dragon.
But Artem doesn’t seem dangerous. Paloma scowled. That’s ridiculous. Of course he’s dangerous. He can turn into a SUV-sized dragon at any time!
Except, she had trouble picturing him trying to hurt her. The more she tried to imagine it, the harder it became. Artem’s blazing smile, the glimmer of humor in his eyes — all of it put her at ease. Would someone dangerous really smile like he did? Would they say thank you for breakfast? Would they look at her like she hung the moon?
She didn’t know. Worse than her general social inexperience, she felt her lack of understanding was somehow tied to her ignorance regarding dragons. It was galling.
Pulling one of her father’s old sweatshirts over her head, Paloma padded over to her nightstand to pick up her old tablet. The right corner was cracked, and the back had been pried off and resealed so many times it was more dented than her ancient truck, but just like every piece of tech in the house, it ran beautifully.
She sat on the edge of her bed and, with a furtive glance at the door, typed her query into the search bar: Dragons + roaming.
Chewing the edge of her thumbnail, she scrolled through the results with a critical eye. There were several hits, including a few academic articles on the subject of Magnetic Directional Dysfunction, which she quickly realized was the technical term for what Artem called the roaming sickness.
Huh. Paloma blinked several times as she absorbed the information scrolling across her screen.
A rogue dragon suffers from MDD, or the sudden misalignment of the part of the brain that interprets their visualization of the Earth’s magnetic field.
She read on, her brow furrowing as she processed exactly what Artem suffered from. The misalignment led to a cascade of internal misfirings, including the instinct to find home. Dragons were ten times more likely to go rogue if they didn’t have an established roost. Neurologists connected that number with the ability to then circumvent the misalignment, effectively resetting the dragon’s sense of direction with the roost as their starting point.
Paloma frowned, recalling what Artem said about her “roost”. Had he somehow fixated on her home and used it to restart his dragon homing beacon? If so, what exactly did that mean for her?
The more she read, the more the sinking feeling churned in her gut.
According to the experts, there were two ways for a dragon to be free of MDD: either they died of exhaustion or they settled on a roost.
Slowly lowering her tablet to her lap, Paloma turned her head to stare at the door. No, she didn’t like the way he talked about her home like he owned it, but she didn’t think he actually meant to stay. The way the article described it, it sounded like a dragon picking a roost was a permanent sort of thing.