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Rollo nodded. He knew that he more than any of the rest could relate.
“Do what you gotta do, we got this.”
“Wait, what old story of the scorpion?” Clint said.
Dax looked at him, “Really?”
“So sue me, I don’t know it.”
“Fine. So there’s a scorpion and a frog, and they both want to cross a river, right?”
“Yeah, so?”
“So the scorpion says, ‘hey let me climb on your back so you can take me across the river.’ And the frog is like, ‘What so you can sting me halfway across?”
Dax acted out each character as he said their parts.
“’I won’t sting you, that would be suicide. We’d both drown.’ So the frog agrees, and the scorpion climbs on and they head across. Then halfway across the scorpion stings him.”
Clint looked affronted.
“And as they are both going down, the frog says to him, ‘why did you do that? Now we are both dead?’ and the scorpion replies, ‘I can’t help it, it’s my nature.’”
“So you are saying the fae are like scorpions?” Clint asked.
“I’m saying they are how they are,” Dax said, setting his jaw.
He wasn’t sure how he had held it together through the meeting. But with business handled he headed out behind the bar…he knew where he wanted to go.
* * *
The quarry wasthe place Dax went to think. To walk and think. But it was also the place he went to smash. It was of course abandoned, but wreckage for years past lay everywhere. Rusted out cars, empty graffiti covered concrete shells of buildings whose original functions were long since forgotten. Gravel and rock and ponds lay everywhere, crisscrossed by bike trails now.
He had shifted as soon as he got out the back of the Grizzly Den. He really didn’t give a shit who saw, though he knew he was asking for problems that way. What did anything matter anyhow?
He swooped down on a relatively freshly dumped car. With one huge clawed arm he smashed in the hood, before lifting the entire thing and tossing it the length of a football field. Tilting back his great scaled head he bellowed fire into the sky.
The torment was almost too much to bear. Yet even in this form, with his dragon in full control, he knew there was no going back. She had violated all he held dear. All his kind stood for.
Loyalty.
Trust.
He took to the air again and this time immediately whirled and dove, coming down feet first into what remained of some sort of earth moving vehicle, crushing it completely as if it were no more than a Tonka toy.
But it wasn’t enough. The pain still remained in his heart and he pummeled, and he ripped and bent and tore until all that was left were scraps and bits of metal.
But still the pain remained. No matter what he did, it would not soften. He tore at the ground, and then beat it to exhaustion.
He had tried. Done all he could. To protect the town. To protect her. To catch her father’s killer.
Frederick.
He could not be certain but he was all but sure.
And he couldn’t tell her.
Definitely not now.
