Chime and Claim

Erika had a rule about herself, and the rule was this: she was never surprised. Thirty years old, tattoo artist, own shop for three years now, and nothing had ever knocked her sideways. Not the time her apprentice quit by text. Not the time her landlord raised the rent two hundred a month. Not any of it. She prided herself on that. She walked through the world as if she had already seen everything.

So of course the universe was about to test that rule, though she didn't know it yet.

The bus had dropped her at the end of the gravel road an hour ago, and she'd walked the rest with her duffel over one shoulder and the gift wrapped in an old flour sack under her arm. Pine and diesel. The entire smell of the place, pine and diesel, hit her the second she stepped into the yard of the lumber camp. The bunkhouse sat low and rough, logs chinked with moss, and the evening sun threw long shadows across the dirt. Somewhere a crane was calling. The sky up here in northern Finland just refused to get dark in the summer, and she loved it.

Kane had worked this camp for two years now. Bridge painter, of all things. He'd tried to explain it to her once, hanging off cables sixty meters above a river, scraping and priming, and she'd said that sounded like a nightmare and he'd said it sounded like being paid to be alone, which honestly was very him.

Ten years this month. Ten years since two twenty-year-olds had met in a college drawing class and decided, without ever discussing it, that they were friends for life. They had never dated. Not once, not even a messy almost. People asked sometimes and she never knew what to tell them. He was just Kane.

She found the nail just inside the bunkhouse door and smiled. He'd put it up for a chime two years ago, she remembered, and it had stayed empty until now. Well. Tonight it wouldn't be.

She knocked, then let herself in, because that was what ten years bought you.

"Delivery!" she called. "One artisan wind chime, handmade by a professional, which is me, I made it myself!"

Kane was sitting on his bunk with his boots off, and he lit up so fast it was almost embarrassing. Thirty years old, six foot three, forearms like bridge cables themselves, and he still grinned like that when she walked in.

"You actually made it!" He got up and crossed the room in two strides and hugged her, careful of the flour sack. "What is it, what's in the sack?"

"Did you not hear the part where I said wind chime?"

"I heard it, I just wanted you to say it again." He took the sack and unwrapped it like it might bite him. Inside were a dozen flat copper pieces she'd cut and hammered and tuned over the last month at her kitchen table, hung on waxed cord from a driftwood ring. "Erika. This is. Wow."

"You have had an empty nail by your door for two years. It was driving me crazy. Every visit I look at that nail and think, he needs a chime, and then I go home and forget, and then I think about it again. So. Happy anniversary to us."

He held it up and it caught the light. "Can I?" He nodded at the door.

"Obviously."

He hung it on the nail and it gave one soft clank and settled. He stood there looking at it a while longer than she expected.

"It's perfect," he said finally. "Thank you."

"You're welcome. Now sit down, I walked four kilometers on gravel and my feet are done. Show me pictures. You promised pictures of the bridge."

He dug his phone out and she squeezed onto the bunk next to him. The photos were good, actually. The river below like a brown ribbon. His crewmate waving from a platform. Kane himself in a harness, paint-speckled, squinting into a sun that never quite set.

"This one's my favorite," he said, thumbing to a shot from the top of the pylon. "You can see the whole valley."

"That's so high. I get vertigo just looking at it. How do you eat lunch up there?"

"Very carefully. One guy dropped a whole thermos of coffee off the side last week. Just watched it go."

"Did it hit anything?"

"Gravel. Pure luck."

Then, because they were both giddy with the reunion and neither could remember who started it, they ended up swapping phones to look at each other's dating apps. It was an old bit of theirs. The matches were always, always terrible.

"Oh no," Erika said, scrolling. "Oh no, Kane. Not the guy with the fish photos again."

"That was last year," he protested, reaching for it. "Give it."

"Six photos of the same trout. Not one of his face." She was laughing so hard the bunk creaked. "And your bio just says 'I like heights.' That's it? That's the whole pitch?"

"It's efficient. It filters out people who'd worry about me." He got the phone back and opened hers. "Okay, let's see yours. Oh no."

"What?"

"'Looking for someone who doesn't take themselves too seriously.' Erika, you take yourself extremely seriously. You have a waiting list and a waiting list for the waiting list."

"That's called being in demand."

"There's a guy here whose opening line is 'hey.' Just hey. And you matched with him?"

"I was being generous."

They went back and forth like that until the light in the window went honey-colored and the chime clinked now and then in a wind neither of them had noticed starting. It was good. It was always good, this was the thing. Ten years and the conversations just kept working.

Then it happened.

It was so small, at first. Kane stood up to get the coffee pot off the shelf, and the shelf bracket, old and rusted, chose that exact moment to give. The pot came down and he caught it, fast, way too fast, and his hand closed around it wrong and the hot side pressed into his palm.

And he didn't flinch. Didn't yell. And his hand, his actual hand, did something a hand should not do. The skin flushed dark, almost blue-black, and the fingers thickened, the knuckles pushing out into something heavier, wider, with claws where the nails went. It lasted maybe three seconds. Then it was just his hand again, human, ordinary, holding a coffee pot.

The silence went on a lot longer than three seconds.

Erika stared at the hand. Then at his face. He was frozen halfway between the shelf and the bunk, white as paper, still holding the pot.

"Okay," she said slowly, mostly to herself. "Okay. So. I was not expecting that."

"Erika." His voice cracked. "I can explain."

"Can you? Because I've got exactly one theory and it sounds insane out loud."

He set the pot down very carefully, like it was the only solid thing left in the room. "Then maybe you should say it, and I'll tell you if you're right."

"Are you not human?"

He let out a long breath, the kind a man lets out when a weight he's carried for years finally shifts. "No," he said. "I'm not."

And Erika, who was never surprised by anything, sat there completely surprised, and found, to her own shock, that under the shock was something hot and fierce she had absolutely not planned on feeling.

"Sit down," she said. "And start from the beginning. All of it."

He sat. She waited. The coffee pot steamed faintly on the table between them, which felt absurd, like the room hadn't noticed anything had happened at all.

"You were twenty when we met," he said. "I'm thirty now, and I've been this since before then. Before everything. Before you."

"Before you even knew me? So it's not, what, a curse that started at camp? Nothing bit you out here?"

"Nothing bit me. I was born this."

"Okay." She nodded. "Okay. Born what, though? That's the part where I need words."

He rubbed his jaw with his human hand and looked at the door, at the chime, anywhere but at her. "Dragon," he said finally. "Mostly dragon. The word sounds stupid in Finnish and it sounds stupid in English too, so there you go."

"It doesn't sound stupid."

"It sounds like a bedtime story."

"So does a guy catching a boiling coffee pot without a flinch. Kane, I watched your hand turn into a claw and you just stood there like you'd caught a bus schedule. Do you have any idea what that looked like?"

"Not from the outside, no."

"It looked insane. It looked amazing. I have goosebumps right now, look." She shoved her arm across the table at him, and the goosebumps were real, every one.

He did not look at her arm. He looked scared, which was worse and stranger than the hand had been. Ten years of knowing a man and she had never once seen him actually scared.

"I need you to understand something," he said. "Nobody knows. Not my crew, not my family in the way that matters, nobody. I've kept it for thirty years. I moved to a camp two thousand kilometers from anywhere partly because of it. You are the first person in my entire life who has seen that and not run."

"So run where? It's four kilometers of gravel back to town and I'm not going anywhere anyway, my feet are wrecked. Also I'm not running. Why would I run?"

"Because I'm not the guy you think you've known for ten years."

"You're exactly the guy I've known for ten years. You're the guy who owns one plate and drops everything he paints off bridges. Your hand has extra hardware. That's it, that's the whole change."

He laughed, but it came out thin. "It's not the whole change."

"Fine. Then show me."

That landed on him like a dropped thermos. "No. No, Erika, absolutely not, you just found out I'm not human five minutes ago, you don't need to see the full thing, it's a lot."

"How much is a lot?"

"Six foot three is the small version of me. You do the math on the rest."

"I like big things. I've been tattooing eight-foot men since I was twenty-five, I'm not fragile. Also, and I want to phrase this correctly, I own a shop, I have a waiting list for my waiting list, and I have never once in my life been scared off by something for being too much. That's my whole career. People walk in and say 'can you handle this sleeve' and I say sit down."

"This is not a sleeve."

"Then show me and I'll decide." She was on her feet now and she couldn't remember standing up. The hot thing under her shock had teeth and it wanted things. "Kane. Ten years. Ten years you've been carrying this alone because you thought nobody could take it? You thought I couldn't take it?"

"It's not about you."

"It's a little about me."

He put both hands flat on the table, human hands, and breathed. Outside, the chime clinked twice, patient, like it was giving him time. "You don't know what you're asking."

"I know exactly what I'm asking. I'm asking my best friend to stop hiding in front of me, which I think is fair, since I walked four kilometers to see him."

"If you flinch. Even once. Even a little."

"Then I'll flinch and we'll deal with it. I'm thirty, I've seen worse things in a shop chair than any dragon can show me. You want to talk about backs? I've seen what people do to their own backs."

"That's different."

"It's all different. Nothing is the same as anything else. Stand up."

And maybe it was the tone she used, the one she used on clients who kept second-guessing line work.