Jeremy Bayer, Dragon Layer Pt. 07

"W-What do I do?"

Morgan blinked, then drew back, cocking her head as she examined Gwen. She shrugged. "I dunno! Ethics and morals are complicated enough even without dragon fuckery going on. But, like..." She clicked her teeth, then shrugged. "If you hurt Jere's feelings, I'll rip your throat out. So, you know, keep that in mind." She patted Gwen's shoulders, then sauntered past her and out the door -- leaving Gwendolyn Bayer more unsure than ever.

"...well, that's fucking helpful," she muttered under her breath.

***

Jeremy panted and tried to sit up while having two twins cuddling against his sides. He managed to get his shoulder blades off the bed despite the caressing hands of Jen and Jes, and was just about to get his arms free too when the door to his room bust open and Cinder Red sprang into the room, then dropped herself down onto his belly. Either she used some kind of dragon magic to cushion the impact, or she was a lot lighter than she looked, or Jeremy was getting preposterously strong on his pretty steady diet of dragon girlcum.

Either way, Cinder's weight forced him back down as she pressed her nose against his nose, her voice a quiet croon.

"They're almost here."

"Who's almost here?" Jen asked.

"Quiet you," Cinder said.

"Uh-" Jeremy started.

"Quiet you? Quiet you?" Jes sat up. "That's my sister you're talking to, you know."

"Girls, please," Jeremy said, then grabbed onto Cinder's hands and pushed her backwards, sitting up as hard as he could at the same time. This resulted in the red haired girl tumbling back in a swirl of skirts and clattering of hair braids, her rump skidding against the rumpled sheets of the bed, and allowed Jeremy to get his head above his balls for the first time in a while. "Who is almost here? The dragon hunters?"

"No, door to door Mormon book...guys," Cinder said, sarcastically. "Of course it's the dragon hunters!"

"Hey, my life has been pretty fucking weird lately," Jeremy said, then scrambled around, looking left, looking right. "Where's my pants?"

A few moments later, he was out the door, his sisters following after him, and he came to the second story theater. The same place where he and his dragon girlfriends had watched more than a few nerdy movies that Jeremy liked was now the best place to observe the incoming attack: The windows had been boarded up to provide some additional cover and the only way that Jeremy could see out was by peering through the thin slits left between the boards -- and through those slits, he could see the dragon hunters on approach.

He started counting trucks. Then he tried to count people emerging from trucks -- the lot of them all parked in the street, on the curb, and on the corner of the street -- and started to lose track when he hit double digits.

"...that's a lot of dragon hunters," Jeremy whispered.

The dragon hunters were armed, but not armored -- they looked, for all the world, like they were people going out for a day about the town -- jeans and t-shirts. Which, Jeremy realized, did make a lot of sense. It wasn't like dragons could permanently hurt them, and it wasn't like any armor they wore would do much to slow down a dragon's damage. It was better, in fact, if they took as much damage as possible so they could die, then snap back once the Working pinged right back on. Their weapons were a motely collection of magical gear: Swords, crossbows, javelins, nets, shields, all of them shimmering with a faint irridescence. They fanned out into a narrow chevron -- swordsmen taking up the center, archers jogging to the sides to take up cover by the trees.

"Okay," Jeremy said, rubbing his neck. "I'll go out the what the fuck is that?"

He pointed at the little widget in Cinder's hand.

It looked alarmingly like a detonator.

"Oh, don't worry, I planned the defenses while your sisters distracted you," Cinder said. "We're starting with the C4!"

"Starting with the-"

Cinder twisted a tiny red knob on the alarmingly detonatorish looking widget.

Orange light flared through the thin slats on the windows and Jeremy learned the main reason for the boarding. It had very little to do with incoming arrows and far, far, far more to do with the fact that everyone window on the mansion shattered at once as concussive force slapped the building like a large kitten playing with another, smaller kitten. Jeremy stumbled backwards as glass shards clattered against the boards and Cinder cackled. "Ahhhahahahah!" She threw her head back, bouncing.

"You used LANDMINES!?" Jeremy shouted as the upper torso of one of the dragon hunters landed on the roof with a meaty thump and a severed arm slapped against the boards, smearing a line of red against it. "That's a war crime!"

"Only if they're victim detonated-"

BOOM!

"-like those, those are war crimes," Cinder said, nodding, as the entire house shuddered and shrieks of shocked pain came from the back of the mansion.

"Jesus Christ, Cinder!"

"What?" Cinder asked. "I'm a red dragon, Jeremy, god. Oh! Oh! He's still twitching." She thumbed down another button and a dragonhunter who's legs had been blown off went up in a flare of white light. Jeremy snatched the detonator out of her hands and smoke wreathed the ruined, smoldering, cratered landscape that was his front lawn.

"Cinder!" Jeremy snapped. "Working or no working, you cannot comit war crimes. That's...that's basic human decency!"

Cinder huffed. "Well, that's just silly," she said, shaking her head. "I'm not-"

The front lawn's craters were gone. The smoke, seeming faintly confused by the Working, stuck around. From the smoke came the perfectly intact dragon hunters. The swordsmen charged towards the front door, screaming at the top of their lungs to psyche themselves up, while the archers started to fire their crossbows. Glowing bolts slammed into the wooden boards and the front door splintered. Another roaring explosion ripped through the air, the floor shaking as Cinder beamed at Jeremy. "See? They're fine." She said, waving at the bolts. "Skye! Hit it!"

Skye, who had been lounging beside the huge entertainment system in the room, beamed and slammed her palm into the play button on the speakers -- and booming from them came the opening strings of Ready to Die by Andrew W.K. As the synths started to blare (oddly upbeat and optimistic considering the lyrics were about being beaten to death), Skye and Rayne picked up bike helmets, buckled them on, swept on their shoulder pads and knee pads, then snatched up a golf club and a baseball bat.

"How do we look?" Cinder asked.

"Like punk maniacs," Jeremy said as Skye picked up a duffel bag and tossed it at him, grinning.

"Here, you got this!"

Then she sprinted out of the door as more arrows thudded against the windows.

Jeremy ran after the two dragons -- and found that the swordsmen were moving up the stairs, slowly, carefully. At their lead was a huge, burly looking dude with incredibly long hair, his eyes wild and confused.

"Do you want snacks?" Penny asked from the other side of the curved balcony that swept above the stairs. She was dressed in a Las Vegas showgirl bunny suit and holding out a tray covered in crackers and cheese. The dragonhunters gaped at her -- and then Cinder vaulted over Penny's head, her thighs spreading wide as her skirts flared and she flashed her panties at the lot of them before dropping a full story and bringing her bat down on the head of the rearmost swordsman.

"BONK!"

"Kill the red!" the long haired, Samson looking motherfucker shouted, then pointed the tip of his sword at Penny. "I'll gut the slut!"

"Uh, I'm a Copper, so, that's just redundant," Penny said. "Besides, our chaotics want to fight -- me, Rayne and Nova are-"

Samson ran up the stairs and swung his sword at Penny, slicing the tray in half before Jeremy had even shook himself out of his shock. He started to run forward as Penny huffed. "Rude!"

"Hey, buddy!"

Samson turned.

Skye stepped out, her grin wild. "GOLF!"

The golf club she held cracked into his jaw and sent teeth skittering against the wall with a spray of blood.

"No, no, Skye," Penny said as another dragonhunter went hurtling up and over the banister with a crash. "You say fore."

"Oh, right. It's Scots, right? To warn people about incoming?" Skye shook her head, then swung her golf club back down onto Samson as he started to sit up, cracking his head back apart. "Hey, Jeremy! Come on!"

Jeremy tore his gaze away from the violence, then looked down and saw that he was holding a duffel bag, yes. But the bag was full of zip-ties. Plastic, bright green zip-ties. He blinked, then it clicked into place what his job was. He hurried forward, knelt down, then grunted and rolled Samson onto his side. The corpse that he was working with flopped around limply and he winced under his breath as he forced an arm back, put wrists together, then clapped the zip-ties on and tightened them with a barely audible clickclickclick. Once he had done so, he stepped back -- and between blinks, Samson went from a corpse to a very much alive dragon hunter.

He snarled, then wriggled, jerking at his zip-ties. "What the..." he craned his head back, then writhed on the floor like a worm. "You lousy little scale fucking fuck!" He snarled up at Jeremy, who laughed.

"Guilty as charged," he said, cheerfully.

"I will kill you so much!" Samson shouted as Jeremy stepped around him and to a barbecued corpse that looked like it was missing most of its entire front thanks to a blast of fire breath from Cinder. Jeremy winced, looking away, turning his back on the corpse.

"Cinder! No fire breath!" He shouted down the stairs.

"Aww, but-"

"It's gross!" Jeremy added.

"Fine!"

A meaty thunk behind him caused Jeremy to turn and he saw that the dragonhunter had gone from burned to a crisp to just having a golf club embedded in his temple. The club wasn't even bent, thanks to the Working snapping it back from damaged every time. Jeremy smiled at Skye. "Thank you," he said, then zipcuffed that dragon hunter.

Behind him, Penny knelt beside the writhing Samson, holding up a new tray of cheese and crackers.

"Want some brie?"

***

The dragonhunters, once collected and tied to a collection of lawn chairs that were set out on the front of Jeremy's lawn, were alarmingly normal looking people.

Oh, well, okay. Jeremy stopped himself, paused, thought back to a life before he had met the dragons, then reconsidered them. Looking at them from a human perspective and not a 'my girlfriend regularly becomes a scaled half-human, half-dragon hybrid with tits the size of my head' perspective, and the dragonhunters were fucking weird. Samson (Jeremy was proud he'd guessed that right) was a burly brute of a man with incredibly long hair. Theodora was a woman who seemed to be made entirely of angles and bladed edges, with a neck so long that it looked as if someone had taken her vertebrae and stretched every single space between them to the possible limit. Ted? And Ted...jeeze, Jeremy wasn't even sure where to begin with the dragonhunter named Ted, who even the other dragonhunters seemed to be a bit unsure about.

"Well, that was fun!" Skye said, panting softly. "So, which do we girlify first?"

"Him?" Nova asked, pointing at Theodora.

"We can't girlify her," Skye said. "She's a girl."

"No, she smells like a he/him," Nova said, leaning in close, sniffing at Theodora, who gaped at the dragon.

"I, um...I actually do prefer masculine pronouns," Theodora muttered, her...er...his voice husky.

"Oh, you're trans," Skye said.

"No, I'm a woman. I just like he/him pronouns. They sound nice," Theodora said.

"Shut up, Theodora!" Samson snapped. "Don't tell the dragons anything that they might use against us!"

"If we can defeat you with pronouns, then you weren't that big of a threat," Nova said, in that tone of voice that would have been mockery for anyone else. But from Nova, it was just her...being Nova.

Samson glared daggers at her.

"Okay," Jeremy said, crossing his arms over his chest. "Last time we fought a dragonhunter, we ended up letting him ago."

"You corrupted him with your dark influence!" Samson growled.

"I did not!" Jeremy said. "I...fuck it! Fine! Let them go!" he turned to Skye, who pouted at him.

"But...but..." She stammered. "Girlification!"

"Girlification is fun, Skye," Jeremy said. "These guys are joyless jerks who don't know how to deal with someone showing them genuine kindness. So, we're going to not girlify them cause they don't deserve the girlification and the no consequences hypno-kink funtime. They can go right on home and get super pissy about how we kicked their asses, and then we can all go back to bed!" He turned back to the dragonhunters, glaring at the confused looking Samson. "Actually, no, wait, before I let you go, I just...you know, you fucking assholes, like, we have dragons and these dragons can do incredible things for people if humans work with them to get around the Working. We could be at a hospital right now, curing cancer! But you're too busy trying to stab us! Fuck you! You're an asshole!" He kicked some dirt from the lawn at the dragonhunters' shins. "You're all assholes and I'm sick of dealing with you! So, go, and...fucking think! About things! You've done!" He kicked more dirt at them.

There was a long silence.

"That was more eloquent in my head," Jeremy admitted.

Samson blinked at him. "...c-cancer?" he asked, sounding faintly shocked.

"Yeah, I was just pulling things off the top of my head," Jeremy admitted. "but, like, dragons can do permanent magic by working through a human. That's how...Morgan, where are you?"

Morgan glanced up from where she was collecting the various weapons of the dragonhunters and arranging them into piles -- she had organized all the swords, it seemed. "Yeah? Oh! Right!" She sprang through the air, backflipped twice, and landed on the ground beside Jeremy, grinning impishly at the dragonhunters. "Tada."

"Yeah, Morgan got this way cause of dragon magic," Jeremy said. "And she's permanent."

"Grab my ass," Morgan whispered in his ear. "I wanna make them flustered."

"You just want me to grab your ass," Jeremy said.

Penny grinned, stepped close, then grabbed Jeremy's ass with both hands, giggling quietly. Jeremy ignored her with long practice...and then noticed that Samson was looking at him with increasingly wide eyes. Then, to his shock, the big man started to blubber.

"P-Please, please, please, tell me you're not l-lying!"

"What? No! We're not lying, Penny, we can cure cancer, right?" Jeremy asked, suddenly deeply concerned as he turned to face Penny. Penny shrugged and spread her hands.

"Yeah, pretty easily. It's just...you know, kind of a bummer, cause, like, if we cure cancer, the cancer just comes right back cause of the working. But by working through you...I mean, yeah! Totally!" She nodded, then reached over to pet Sasmon's shoulder.

"Why?" Jeremy asked.

***

St. Aquinas Charity Hospital for Piteous Children wasn't exactly where Jeremy had expected to end up in the dead of night, let alone being guided through the corridors by a burly dragonhunter. And yet, here he was, all five of his dragons laying on his shoulders, tucked into his pockets, and sprawled on his head -- each of them concealed in their kitten forms.

Samson had kicked in the door to the hospital with a single blow before Jeremy had pointed out the dragons had the ability to magically unlock the door, and now he was striding through the darkened corridors, moving from shadow to shadow with a stealth that Jeremy was fairly sure wasn't actually required.

"Do we have to sneak?" Jeremy whispered to him.

"I'm wanted in four states, actually," Samson breathed.

"For what!?" Jeremy hissed.

"Uh..." Samson coughed. "Well, dragon protectors...are human and... "

"You dick!" Cinder hissed. Since she was in a kitten form, she was able to flare out, floofing upwards, while Samson looked pained, his broad features twisting into a mask of pain. Jeremy reached up and petted Cinder, careful to not dislodge any of the other dragon kittens, while Samson brought him to room 3C-BA.

"H-Here..." Samson said, opening the door.

The interior of the room had a child -- maybe twelve or eleven years old, though it was hard to tell -- webbed in thick bundles of cables and tubes and bits of medical gizmos. The soft hiss and wheeze of machines, the bleep bleep bleep of heart monitors, the ragged, barely functional sound of a human breathing when their bodies were riddled with more cancer cells than they had functional ones. Jeremy stepped inside next to Sasmon, who's face was a stern, iron hard mask. The child, despite his sickliness, managed to open one eye and mumble, softly.

"Daddy?"

Jeremy had figured that part out, but...it still hit like a sledgehammer to the heart. He stepped past Samson, then picked Cinder off his head, holding her out. "O-Okay, dragon girls," he whispered. "Lets do this to this."

Cinder nodded, solemnly. Well. As solemnly as a kitten could. Magic glimmered and flowed and Jeremy felt the tug of it against his veins, against his nerves, his skin. It was like...fire. Harder than other spellcasting, he was sure. His brow furrowed and then he saw the warmth of it touching the child -- their flesh filling out, their skin going from papery and thin to healthy pink. Hair regrew and his eyes opened more. He started to sit up, stretching, while all the machines made confused chirruping noises, as if even they were aware of what had just happened.

"Daddy...I feel good?" the child said, and Samson charged forward, then threw his arms around the kid, hugging him tightly.

"It's okay, it's okay, honey, it's okay..." Samson said, while Jeremy smiled and nodded, feeling a thick, heavy lump in the base of his throat. He felt as if he had just...lifted a big weight and thrown it away, and was free to stand and bask in the sunlight. Samson turned his head away, his eyes filled with tears, streaming down his cheeks. "H-How can I ever repay you f-for this?"

"Uh, stop trying to kill me!" Jeremy said, clapping his hand over Penny's mouth before she could say anything to ruin the moment.

Samson paused. He looked down at his child, then up at Jeremy. "I...I can't speak for every dragon hunter in the world..." He said, his voice thick with emotion. His eyes closed and he lifted one hand to his chest, placing his palm there, over his heart. "But this? I swear that I and none of my fellow associates will attack you or hunt your dragons again. For this...for this, I will protect you with my life, against any enemy, any peril, and any danger."

Jeremy nodded.

"Cool," he said, awkwardly.

He shuffled back, out the door, and into the corridor.

There, he stood, surrounded by dragons and young people with cancer.

Jeremy did that thing that some people did -- where he snapped his fingers while slapping his palm against his knuckles, so that it was like the clicking of his thumbs made his hand turn into a flat top to the can of his other hands. It was a super common hand gesture, at least in Jeremy's circles, but he had no idea how well it translated to words. He hoped whoever was going to read Penny's account of this day would get it. Or, maybe she'd skip it. It was kinda pointless.

He clicked his teeth.

"...so, who wants to cure more cancer?" he asked.

"Me!" Penny said.

"Yeah!" Skye said, bouncing excitedly.

"I guess," Rayne sighed.

"How much will we charge?" Cinder asked.

"Okay," Nova said. Then she blinked. "Wait, what were we going to do again?"