by Finley Aaron
Foundlings
The Lost Dragons
Book One
This is a work of fiction. It is not meant to serve as an argument that dragons either do exist, or have existed. All references to historical events, real people, or actual events are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, events, and locations are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual places, events, dragons or persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 2016 by Finley Aaron and Henry Knox Press
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before.—Edgar Allen Poe
Chapter One
Hastings, Nebraska, USA
Monday, December 18, 1989
The north wind blasts me with such force, I stagger half a step back through the library doors before bracing myself and pressing forward.
It’s going to be a long walk home.
Three whole blocks. Normally three blocks is nothing, but today, in this wind, with fine pellets of snow assaulting my eyeballs like tiny ice bullets, three blocks is forever.
I soldier on, clutching my library books, angling my arms higher so the books cover the left side of my face. I hate to make the books bear the brunt of the weather, but if any of us are going to get home through this, we’ll all have to sacrifice a little. Besides, I’m holding them spine up. The pages are protected, more or less. And since they’re library books, they’ve got that plastic coating that may not be bullet-proof, but it’s at least ice-bullet-proof.
At the corner, I glance both ways before heading straight north, into the wind and icy sleet.
Now there’s no way to angle my face to stop the wind. I can look straight down at my shoes, but then I can’t see anything of where I’m going.
I just want to get home.
There’s a shortcut through the alley. Instead of walking a full block north, I could turn off halfway, take the alley for two blocks, and go in through the back door.
Not only would it be faster, but the buildings on that route block the wind, instead of funneling it toward my face.
The only reason I don’t take the shortcut every time I walk home from the library, is that’s where the seniors like to hang out and smoke.
I am a freshman. Worse than that, I’m a freshman carrying library books.
As I’m considering the option, a particularly forceful blast of wind shoves me back, peeling the hood away from my head.
For a second, it’s all I can do to stand strong against the gust without slipping on the pellets of ice accumulating on the sidewalk.
Then I tuck the library books between my knees, wrestle my hood back into position, pick up the books again, and press on, turning at the alley.
Shortcut it is.
I mean, what are the chances the seniors are out there smoking today, in this weather? They’d have to stand up tight against the buildings just to keep their cigarettes lit. Besides, I’ve only ever seen them there on my way home immediately after school. Today I stopped home first, then went to the public library for almost an hour. Surely, even if they were there earlier, they’re not there now.
Right?
I walk faster. If I wasn’t wary of slipping and falling on the ice, I’d break into a run. Even being careful, I nearly slip and fall twice, flinging my arms out wide to keep my balance, exposing the library books to more sleet. I should have brought my backpack, but when I left the house an hour ago, the sun was shining.
I’m halfway through the first block of the alley when I see them, stepping like shadows from the back of a building, the tips of their cigarettes lit like burning eyes.
Like six burning eyes.
With six bulky seniors behind them.
I glance side to side, but the topography of the alleyway hasn’t changed since the last time I walked it. Buildings line both sides, blocking the wind, and blocking my escape. Unless I want to turn around and go back the way I came, there’s no way out but to keep going, past the seniors.
I consider my options.
Honestly, I would turn around and run if it wasn’t for the likelihood they’d come after me. These might not be the kind of guys I want to walk past while carrying an armload of library books, but they’re most certainly not the kind of guys I want to turn my back on. They’re faster than I am even when it’s not icy out.
“It’s that Rude Boy.” One of them recognizes me.
I keep walking toward them, nodding to acknowledge his greeting, because I know from experience if you don’t acknowledge their greeting, they will hold you by your collar with your feet off the ground until you apologize.
“Rude Boy,” another one calls as I draw closer. “Why you so rude, Boy?”
“It’s Rudy,” I explain in my most non-confrontational voice, because if you don’t answer a direct question like that, you might end up with a black eye—which is a much more difficult injury to explain to your parents than bruised ribs or skinned knees. “Short for Rudyard.” I’m named after Rudyard Kipling, one of my dad’s favorite writers. It’s not a great name, especially from the perspective of the alley guys, but we have cats named Tolstoy and Keats, so I know it could be worse.
The guys all laugh.
Laughter is good. It might even mean they’re in a jovial mood today. Maybe I will make it through the alley after all. I’ve almost reached the place where they’re standing. I’m maybe ten feet from the senior closest to me.
“Rude Boy,” another one of them calls, as if daring me to correct him.
Here’s the thing—I have an overbite. It’s not so bad most of the time. I don’t even notice it, really. But growing up, it gave me what I guess you’d call a speech impediment. It wasn’t bad. My teachers could all understand me. Anyone who was actually trying to understand, could understand me.
Of course, these guys aren’t trying to do anything but pick a fight. They don’t want to understand me, so they exaggerate the way my words sounded.
I guess when I said short for Rudyard, it didn’t come out sounding like short for Rudyard. Not to their ears.
“Rude Boy? Oh, what’s wrong, Rude Boy? You’re short of yum yums? You’re short of dum dums?” They’re not particularly bright when it comes to witty taunts. Now they’re just mocking me.
That, by itself, would not be so bad, but they’re also lining up across my path, forming a solid wall of seniors, blocking the alleyway.
I stop five feet from them, just out of arm’s reach.
Clearly, I should have run when I had the chance. Now it’s too late. I don’t even have a head start.
“Rude Boy’s just short.” One of the taller guys announces with a chuckle.
I chuckle, too. Maybe they’ll decide I’m not hurting anything. I’m not worth their time. Maybe they’ll let me pass.
I’ve talked to Master Sparks, my taekwondo instructor, about what to do in moments like this. He’s taught me all the typical self-defense moves—plenty of kicks and punches, but mostly evasive maneuvers. Master Sparks is big into avoiding confrontation, especially when outnumbered.
His most recent advice? Visualization. Pinch your eyes shut, and picture the place you most want to be.
Though I can’t imagine it will do me any good, I try it. Maybe it’s because I trust and respect Master Sparks, but more likely, it’s just because I have no better options. I’m not going to win a fight against six guys bigger than myself, nor am I likely to outrun them on the ice.
And I don’t even want to think about what might happen to these library books if they get ahold of them. If nothing else, maybe picturing home
will make it not hurt so bad when they hit me.
I pinch my eyes shut and picture myself on my bed in my room at home, out of the sleet and blasting cold, with the hand-stitched quilt my grandmother made of blue and green and red cotton.
My warm room, out of the wind, with the radiator under the south window sending out heat in visible waves.
I can almost feel it.
“Ahhh! Rudyard! You dummy, don’t scare me like that. You’re squishing me.”
It’s my sister. She’s on my bed—of course she is. Her bedroom, though bigger and prettier than mine, is a terrible place to be on a blasting cold day like this, because it’s on the north side of the house and the wind rattles straight through the windowpanes. Judy loves to sneak into my bedroom and read, lying backward atop my bed so her book sits in the puddle of sunlight that would have been streaming through the south window up until the storm hit.
I don’t have any problem with my sister being in my room.
I do, however, have a huge problem with me being in my room.
How did I get here?
I shouldn’t be here. I’m supposed to be in the alley.
What just happened?
Judy’s kind of freaking out and squealing. “It’s not funny to scare a person like that. I didn’t even hear you coming. How did you get up the stairs without making them creak? Or were you hiding out up here the whole time? I thought you were at the library.”
“I was at the library.” I hold out the books in my hands as evidence, and there it is. “Do you see that?” I step closer to my sister so she can see the ice crystals before they melt. “It’s sleeting outside.”
“You let library books get sleeted on?” Judy sounds aghast.
I’m staring at the sleet as it melts into tiny puddles and even starts to evaporate in the warm room.
“I didn’t bring my backpack,” I explain. “When I went to the library, it wasn’t storming yet. I got caught off guard.”
Judy squints down at the melting ice crystals. “How did you get upstairs without me hearing you, before the sleet melted?”
How much do I tell her about what happened? Do I admit I was just in the alley, and now I’m here, and I have no idea how I got here? Or will she think I’m crazy? But she saw the ice and she didn’t hear me coming. If anybody’s going to believe me, Judy will.
“Are Mom and Dad home yet?” I glance furtively around the room.
“Still at work. It’s not after five yet.” Judy’s sitting on the edge of my bed now, her book on her lap, one finger slid between the pages to mark wherever she left off reading when I landed on her. She loves books just as much as I do, but lately, she’s stopped visiting the library with me. I don’t even think it’s because she’s afraid of the seniors in the alley.
She just likes to stay home. Dad says she’s going through a melancholy phase. I think he secretly hopes she’ll funnel her brooding feelings into poetry.
Not that any of that’s important right now.
“Hey, Jude?” I address her with the nickname only family members are allowed to use, a name that gets at a sort of honest place that says I’m not joking around. “Do you want to know how I got up here without creaking the stairs?” I sit on the edge of the bed beside her.
“Yeah.”
“I was walking home from the library. The wind was blasting me, and my library books were getting sleeted on, and I thought, I need to hurry up and get home, so I took the shortcut down the alley.”
“But what about those guys—wait, no, it’s storming out. They wouldn’t be crazy enough to be out there in the sleet.”
“They were out there. They started giving me a hard time. I thought about turning around and running back the way I came, but it’s icy, and if I slipped and fell—”
Judy shudders so hard, the bed shakes and the floor creaks.
I continue, “You remember what Master Sparks said to do?”
Judy’s in taekwondo with me, so she was there when Master Sparks gave his advice.
She rolls her eyes. “He said to close your eyes and imagine yourself in a safe, peaceful place.”
“Did he say safe and peaceful? I guess I don’t remember his exact words.”
“Something like that. Whatever he said, I don’t see how it could help. You didn’t try that, did you? Those guys would probably tackle you if you did that. You’re not hurt, are you?” Judy leans around and looks in my face.
That’s when it occurs to me—maybe they hit me, and I got a concussion and walked home the rest of the way in a daze, and only snapped out of it when Judy started screaming at me. “Do I look hurt?”
“No. You look perfectly fine. Maybe a little red from the cold.”
There goes that theory. If the guys hit me hard enough to knock me out, it would have to leave a mark.
“How did you get away from them and get up here without creaking the stairs?” Her question is a good one, right up there with the problem of how I got up here before the ice crystals melted on my books. My concussion theory doesn’t explain either of those.
I look my sister full in the face. We’re twins, so in some ways, looking at her is like looking at myself, except a girl-version of myself. Sometimes she understands what I’m thinking and feeling, and reflects that back to me. Occasionally, it’s handy. Other times, it’s annoying.
Right now, I feel like I need her help, because I honest and truly do not know how to explain what happened.
“I did what Master Sparks said to do. I closed my eyes and pictured myself here.”
“And then what? Those guys just walked away and left you alone?”
“I have no idea what they did. One second I was in the alley, the next second you were screaming at me for jumping on your back.”
“It was a mean trick, Roo.” Judy uses the nickname for me only she and our parents are allowed to use. Yes, on our birth certificates we’re Rudyard and Judith, named after our English-professor father’s favorite authors, but when it’s just the two of us, we’re Roo and Jude. “You shouldn’t jump on people. You could have hurt me.”
“I didn’t jump on you. I just closed my eyes and I was here.”
Judy gives me a skeptical look that says she’s not amused.
“You don’t have to believe me. I just answered your question. You wanted to know how I got up here without creaking the stairs, so I told you. I didn’t take the stairs.”
As I’m finishing talking, I hear the sound of a key in the back door lock. Mom and Dad are home. They both work at the local college, so they share a car and drive home together, or on nice days, they sometimes walk.
Obviously today was not a good day to walk.
I hear the distinctive sound of the lock disengaging.
“The back door was still locked,” I note.
Judy’s wide eyes tell me she’s listening. She heard the lock, too. “I didn’t even hear you come in the door earlier.”
Besides which, if I had come in the door, my parents wouldn’t be unlocking it right now, because I’d have already unlocked it.
“But you heard me leave for the library.”
“It’s not humanly possible for you to—”
Before she can finish, Mom and Dad call upstairs to us, asking if we’re home and okay, and all that.
So we holler back down, and Judy jumps off my bed and goes to greet Mom and Dad.
I set my library books on my desk and wipe off the puddled bit of melted sleet.
Maybe Judy’s right. Maybe what just happened is not humanly possible.
But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Chapter Two
Judy more or less ignores me through supper, acting like her usual brooding self, until it stops snowing and Dad offers us each two dollars if we can get the driveway and sidewalks scooped before bedtime.
We bundle up against the cold and go scoop the new-fallen snow. When we’ve got the front walk done and the driveway off to a good start, Judy stops and leans on
the handle of her shovel.
“Okay, Mister Weird-Trick-Roo. Want to know the freakish thing I did the other day?”
I scoop the swath of snow between us and hurl the white stuff toward the bushes. “What freakish thing?”
“Let me see if I can do it again.” She tugs off her gloves as she speaks. “You know a few weeks ago when we had that crazy cold snap, and I was out here raking the last of the leaves?”
“Yeah?” Of course I remember. She got paid four whole dollars, and I got nothing because I had homework and my parents wouldn’t let me help until I finished my geometry, and by then Judy had raked and bagged all the leaves herself.
She hasn’t let me forget.
“My fingers got cold. So cold they were numb. So cold they stung.” She holds out her hands right now, with her gloves off, and cups her fingers a foot or so in front of her face. “I wanted to warm them up, so I breathed on them.”
Judy exhales a cloud of moist air, made visible by the cold temperatures around us. It swirls like smoke around her fingers.
“Freakish,” I say, sarcastically.
She makes a face and breathes again.
This time, a flicker of golden flames fills the air between her lips and her hands. She gives me a look that simultaneously says, I told you so, and I’m scared.
I stand there in stunned silence and Judy tugs her gloves back on. I’m breathing slowly and trying to think. Ever since I arrived in my bedroom earlier, I’ve been trying to figure out how I got there.
Even though I don’t know how it might be related, or what good it could possibly do us to speculate, my thoughts keep going back to the great unknown in our history.
See, Judy and I are not our parents’ biological children. Way, way back in the fall of 1974, a teenager found a duffle bag at a rest stop along Interstate 80 just north of Hastings, Nebraska.
The duffle bag made crying sounds.
Judy and I were inside.
The teenager called the police, who took us to the hospital, where they decided we were in fine health and probably about a week old, and the newspapers and TV stations ran stories about us in hopes that someone would know where we’d come from.
