Interlude 3: LANDON
"So, how'd it go?" asks Charlie. His human appearance is that of a small person, under five feet tall, with dark hair and bushy eyebrows. Landon doesn't know Charlie's true name; lesser species like to keep them hidden.
"Fine," he replies curtly.
"Annoyed, are you kid?" Charlie says haughtily. "You have any idea how hard I worked to be this close to Summervell? I'm a fucking salamander, for crying out loud, we don't get power handed to us."
Landon looks back towards the school. "You don't shut up about it, either."
"And now I've got fucking babysitter duty," Charlie continues. "Remind me again why you won't get this over with?"
"It's not ripe yet," Landon says for the hundredth time. "If I try to now, I'll only end up destroying it. This gives me plenty of time to ready the ground..."
"Ready the ground for what?" asks their driver with a heavy Brooklyn accent and an open sneer. "Why is this one so important? What's different from the others?"
Landon doesn't even know what Dianne is, she's just one of those generic dragon lackeys, platinum blonde hair, porcelain features. The only reason he could tell her apart from the others is that she drives him to school.
"That's none of your concern," he says, inwardly berating himself. He should've kept his mouth shut.
"How could I not be concerned, hanging around a terror like you?"
He scoffs in reply. He's used to people treating him like an atomic bomb that might go off at the slightest provocation. Any other monster with his power would have sucked all the magic out of the world by now. There's no use trying to explain that in all his lives, he'd used it only twice before.
"Don't learn your name in a hurry," Dianne continues. "We don't need that kind of tension."
"Shut up," Landon hisses in reply. It's moments like this when he feels unbearably cramped as a human. His wing muscles ache with a vengeance. The temperature in the car rises as the fire of his magic blazes angrily from its constraints.
"Calm your tits, kid," Charlie says.
There's a tense silence for a while. Then, Charlie, who obviously didn't get to where he did by irritating dangerous monsters, nudges Landon. "You didn't tell us what she's like."
"Different," he snaps in reply, but the air around him cools significantly.