by S. W. Clarke
“Yes, I remember my ruined stakeout.”
I ignored her frustration. “He was carrying a satchel. A black satchel.”
“I remember that, too.”
“Well, that man was part of the gnomeling trafficking ring. He’s also a close friend of Peter’s.”
“What’s that got to do with the bag?”
“Peter gave him that bag. It’s got a tile in it.”
She paused. “A what?”
“It’s a tracking device. As long as I’m within a certain distance of it with my phone, I can track the tile.”
“And what’s that distance?”
“About two hundred yards.”
She avoided snorting. “Do you know how large New Orleans is, Ms. Drake?”
“Thing is, Officer, I have a whole bunch of those tiles. And I’ve laid them all over the city. Any time one gets triggered, it can piggyback the signal onto the next-closest tile, and the next closest … I imagine you get my drift?”
She made a noise of surprise. “I think I do.”
“I’ve got other business to take care of, so I’ll drop one of my tiles off at the police station today, in care of your name. I trust you, Officer Aubert. I hope you’ll be the one holding onto that tracking device.”
On the other end, a brief silence. Then, “Why me?”
I stood, starting down the street. “Because you’re trying to take down the Scarred, just like me. And because you treated those gnomelings like they were deserving of respect.”
“All right, Tara,” she said after a pause. “I’ll tell the officer on duty to look for you and your tile.”
I hesitated on what I was about to say next. I hated asking for favors, especially from law enforcement. But I didn’t feel like I had a choice right now.
“One other thing,” I said.
“Yes?”
“I happen to have lost my ride and I’m stranded here in the French Quarter. Do you have a second car I can borrow?”
“Why would I have a second car?”
I shrugged. “You’re a cop. At least half the time you spend riding around in a cop car anyway, right?”
She paused. It was a weird request, after all.
“I’ll pay you to rent it,” I offered.
“I’ve got something here at the station. But …”
“Whatever you’ve got. Doesn’t have to be fancy.”
“How long do you need it?”
“Maybe a day or two.”
“Fine. I’ll have the officer on duty hold the keys for you.”
She didn’t ask any other questions. We hung up as I started toward the precinct. I didn’t want to hand over my best lead on Peter, but I didn’t have anyone else in this city I could trust.
And I had a feeling, what with Percy flying off during our show and Ferris’s mention of the matriarch, that I had to refocus my energies for a time.
Ever since Ferris had mentioned that matriarch, a growing feeling of inevitability had settled onto my shoulders like a heavy blanket. It was rare I felt such a thing, as though life had a prescribed course, but when I did, it often panned out exactly as I’d expected.
My eyes lifted to the sky as though I might spot a dragon up there. Of course, nothing but spotty clouds floated overhead.
Ever since the world had become a magical place—one with dragons and vampires and gnomish ninjas—I still imagined I might see an Other fall from the sky the way they were supposed to have that day the gods left.
Apparently they were all expelled from their heavens and hells, dropped to Earth with all the indignity of a discarded rag. Some landed on houses, crushing them.
As for me, I’d witnessed vampires become human again.
I squeezed my eyes shut, walking faster toward the precinct. When I arrived, I’d put that night as far from my mind as possible. I delivered the tile onto the desk of the dead-eyed officer I’d spoken to on the phone. “Please ensure Officer Aubert gets this. It’s very important.”
He glanced up at me with lidded eyes. Nodded.
“Did Aubert leave anything for me?” I prodded, eyes on the obvious set of keys laid on the desk next to him.
“Oh.” He plucked the keys up, handed them over. “Yeah. The thing’s outside on the curb. White, two wheels.”
White with two wheels?
When I came back out and walked to the curb, I found the only white vehicle with two wheels on that block:
A moped.
It had been a long, long time since I’d ridden one of these babies. A bit kitschy, not exactly great for picking up guys.
But two wheels were better than no wheels.
As I climbed on, I thought—not for the first time—how the presence of magic in this world was exactly what it needed. My life had truly begun when a dragon entered it. I knew from that moment that anything was possible with him by my side.
And now it was time to find him.
Chapter 12
I rode that moped all over the French Quarter and the Garden District and the Lower Ninth looking for one blue dragon. No dice.
Around dinner time, I rode out to the barn. Percy wasn’t there, either, and he never missed dinner.
I waited an hour, and he still didn’t appear. Dusk had arrived, the sun was beyond the trees, and Percy wasn’t anywhere.
After an hour, I grabbed my flashlight and set off into the surrounding fields. The barn we’d rented was surrounded by some twenty acres of grassland and trees, and he’d taken to exploring them for an hour here and there each day. Sometimes he came back fresh off a hunt, and I didn’t ask about what he’d eaten. He didn’t tell, either.
It was better that way. I didn’t want to know if he’d eaten a bobcat, and he’d prefer not to tell me he had. We were human and dragon in that way.
But he was never gone for more than an hour.
I struck through the fields, headed for the trees. The whole way I called his name, alternately whistling with two fingers in my mouth. “Hey hey, little egg,” I’d say, or, “Perci-v-aa-al.”
I tried every variation on his name, all the nicknames I had for him. None got me a response. “Come out, Percy,” I said as a last try, “and I’ll tell you at least one Percival you weren’t named after!”
Even that didn’t work. He really wasn’t around.
The sun had gone fully down and my flashlight cast its pale cone into the trees as I kept on. Truth was, the dark did scare me; all the worst things in my life had happened in the dark.
But it didn’t scare me as much as losing Percy.
What an idiot I’d been, walking the boardwalk and contemplating our relationship. All the while he’d probably been waiting for me at the barn. And I was an even bigger idiot for even considering how I felt about him.
It was in these thorny, terrifying moments you knew how you felt.
I couldn’t bear to lose him.
“Percy!” I called again, casting the flashlight back and forth through the trees. On I went, deep and deeper. At some point I’d resolved not to stop walking until I found him or dropped from tiredness.
Finally, after a half hour of searching, a child’s voice responded, faint and far away. “Tara?”
The moment I heard it, I was running. I poured through the trees, the flashlight offering a juddering view ahead. Nothing but trees and leaves and branches …
And then, finally, Percy.
He came into view as the absolute dictionary definition of a dragon. And when I say that, I mean his wings were fully extended. Except he stared back at me with wide, terrified eyes reflecting the light back at me.
I rushed up to him, clicking off the flashlight. Darkness swept in, only the moonlight visible in swatches through the canopy. “GoneGods, what’s this about?”
“I was hunting, and I swooped down, and …”
I stroked his neck. “Yeah?”
“And my wings got stuck. I couldn’t make them fold back. I couldn’t walk out because my wings are too wide, and I
couldn’t make them fold properly to fly, and …”
I kept stroking his neck as his calm evaporated with the knowledge that he was safe.
He burst into a wail. “I thought I would be stuck out here forever!”
“Oh no,” I said, wrapping my arms around him. “No. Absolutely not.”
“What do I do, Tara?” I could feel the muscles in his sides working to retract his wings, to no avail. “I’ve tried everything.”
Truth was, I didn’t know.
I sat back on my haunches, gazing at him. “We’ll figure it out, Perce. Believe you me, we’ll get you right as rain.”
“I want to go back to the barn,” he moaned.
“We will. Just give me a minute.” I straightened, tracked my way to about twenty feet off.
“Tara?”
“I’m right here,” I said over my shoulder. “I’m not going anywhere.” When I inserted the Bluetooth piece into my ear, I’d already dialed Ferris.
He picked up on the second ring. “Tara?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“It’s late. Don’t give me problems.”
I glanced back at Percy. “You know me so well already.”
He sighed on the other end. “What is it?”
“Perce was hunting. His wings got stuck fully extended. You know what to do about that?”
“Of course. It happens with dragon hatchlings entering adolescence, sort of like growing pains in humans. The wings get stuck because of anxiety—you just need to calm him down.”
I stared into the woods, my eyes unfocused. An uncomfortable acknowledgement had seeded in me. “That’s all, huh?”
“That’s all.”
My lips folded to a straight line. “I guess I really don’t know all that much about dragons.”
Ferris made a noise like blowing a raspberry. “Nonsense.”
But it was true. After all those hours spent researching them on the internet, I didn’t even know this little thing.
When I hung up with Ferris and came back to Percy, I knelt in front of him. “Percy, lay down. Can you put your head in my lap?”
“But Tara. My wings.”
“This’ll help. I promise.”
He did as I asked. When his head reached my lap, he sighed warm air onto my torso. That was my cue to begin stroking his head.
“Tell me a story from my childhood,” he said.
I smiled in the darkness; he was at that age when children began to think they weren’t children at all. “When you were an egg, I knew you were going to be a wonderful, super-special creature, and I wanted to meet you more than anything in the world. You could say that my soul burned hot with the desire to meet you and then, crack, out you came.”
Percy paused to think about this. “You’re joking, aren’t you?”
“I am, but not as much as you think.”
Then I began to sing a song my mother used to sing me before bed. I wasn’t as good a singer as her—not by a long shot. But Percy always asked me to sing it—less often, now—when he went to sleep.
The song was, of course, my mother’s favorite. She had sung it to me so many times as a girl, I sometimes still heard it in my dreams. Strange that it should be about blackbirds, and that I should go on to sing it to a winged creature hundreds of times after she’d died.
Or maybe it wasn’t strange. Maybe there was some intelligent design to it all.
Once I’d gotten to the second verse, his wings began to fold as he dozed. Naturally. Easily.
My eyes lifted to the moon, and I could finally appreciate the acknowledgment I’d felt earlier. The one that had made me uncomfortable.
Maybe I alone wasn’t enough for a young dragon.
Maybe Percy did need his mother after all.
I couldn’t bear to wake him right now. So I resettled on the ground, fortunate to have a tree to lean against. I went on humming the song as my own eyes closed.
Truth was, I didn’t want tomorrow to come. Not with the conversation it would bring.
Until then, it was still just me and Percy. Safe, even if we were alone in the woods. We were together.
↔
The building before us spread geometric across the block, perfectly angular and enormous and gray.
Percy was thrilled.
“The Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress was the first Boeing with the distinctive tail for improved control and stability during high-altitude bombing.” He craned his neck left and right as we came inside. “They have two on display.”
“Today’s your double-lucky day, Perce.” We came to the ticketing area, and a wide-eyed teenage girl stared at him. “Two tickets,” I said. “One adult, one child.”
She blinked sky-blue eyes. “Child?”
I nodded at Percy, whose tail scraped with excitement over the tiled floor. “He’s five in dragon years. Twelve in human years.” I leaned closer, set a hand at the side of my mouth. “But don’t tell him that when he’s mad.”
The girl exhaled through widened nostrils, though I couldn’t tell whether she was amused or just nervous. Maybe both. She was staring at a talking dragon.
Definitely both.
“Oh … ahhh … OK,” she finally murmured.
When we came into the main hall, it was middle-of-the-day, middle-of-the-workweek empty. By which I mean it was largely older folks—those who had any shot of being alive when WWII actually took place. Really the best crowd to appreciate this kind of museum.
Except for Percy, that is.
He stopped, staring up at the ceiling with an open mouth. It was lined with strung-up bomber planes. “That’s a B-29 Superfortress. And over there, the one with the red dots is a Mitsubishi A6M Zero.”
I set my hands on my hips, followed his attention. “Yeah? Tell me about that one, the silver beauty over in the corner.”
He did. He told me all about the make, what battles it was used in, what years, and why it was a positively brilliant airplane for its time.
Did I mention that Percival is a history nerd?
It all started that Christmas he asked me for an encyclopedia. And I don’t just mean one book—I mean every letter, A to GoneGoddamn Z. He wasn’t much for the internet. I wasn’t sure if it was a dragon thing or a Percy thing, but he was super tactile and liked the feel of the pages under his talons.
At the time we’d started with the first letter of the alphabet, renting it out from one of the branch libraries in Nashville. We expanded from there, moving from letter to letter as we traveled to new cities.
When he got to W, Percy became obsessed with the world wars. And as soon as he found out we were headed to New Orleans, he’d begged me to take him here.
We walked the whole place, not missing a single exhibit. I didn’t have the heart to bring up what I knew we had to talk about—not while he was the happiest I’d seen him in weeks.
After a few hours of whirlwind thrill, we sat on an outside bench with cafeteria food between us. Lots and lots of chicken, I’ll say that. Percy would stab a chicken leg with one talon, eat it with surprising daintiness.
As we were eating, I sat forward, staring out over the grass. Much as I’d been putting this off, now was the time. “You’re right, Perce.”
“About what?” he said through a mouthful of fried bird.
“I’m not your mom.” I paused. “And you do need a mom if you want to be raised as a dragon.”
He swallowed the chicken down. “I’m sorry, Tara. I was just angry that day.”
I nodded, still staring ahead. “Sometimes the harshest truths come out when we’re angry.”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t reach for any more chicken, either.
“Percy, a few days ago one of the ninjas mentioned your mom,” I said. “Yaroz.”
He didn’t speak at first. Then, “My egg mother?” he said in a whisper.
Here it was. Time to be an adult, Tara.
“Yes, your egg mother. I think she’s still alive, and Ferris may know where she’s
at. We could go see her.”
I could hear the bellows of his lungs quicken beside me as he contemplated. He always was one of the most thoughtful people I knew, and that was saying a lot for a kid.
I knew someday he’d be a tremendous grown dragon.
I glanced over at him. He had a glassy-eyed, faraway look.
When he met my gaze, a mixture of emotions swirled there. “What if I don’t like her?”
I shrugged one shoulder. “Then you don’t like her.”
“But do I have to go with her?”
“Absolutely not.”
“What about parental rights?”
I snorted. “What?”
“If she’s my egg mother, then she would have parental rights over me.”
He was too quick for his own good. I patted his shoulder. “This is the GoneGod World, Perce. Other rights—and that includes dragon rights—are still in flux, and the government certainly wouldn’t give your egg mother custody over you if you wanted to stick with me.”
And if the government did give his egg mother custody over me, I would do whatever I needed to do to get him back. Provided, of course, he wanted to be back with me.
“Do you want to stick with me?” he asked softly.
The question pierced me as efficiently as a blade. One hand went over my chest. “Of course I do. Never doubt that. Never.” I drew in a breath. “I just thought you deserved to know your egg mother’s out there, and to have the choice to meet her. She could teach you a thing or two about being a dragon, I expect.”
A glint of intrigue reached his eyes, and now I knew his curious, eager side had overtaken the uncertainty. “Like what?”
I managed my best smile. “You name it—flying, hunting, fire-breathing. I bet she’s got lots of tricks up her wing.”
This perked him up. He regained his interest in the chicken again, began eating as he considered all that he could learn. “When will we meet her?”
“We’re going to do a show in the Central Business District tomorrow, and we’ll find your mom there. I’ll call Ferris, and he’ll set up the meet.”
“OK.” Percy decimated another chicken leg, bone and all straight down the gullet. “And Tara?”
I sat back on the bench, the deed done. My stomach felt tied in a knot. “Yeah?”
