Ancient, Strange, and Lovely

by Susan Fletcher

  I’d always assumed there wasn’t a mother. Not alive, anyway. I’d assumed that if he’d had one, she’d have been with him. I’d assumed that if there was a full-grown phaging dragon cruising around Alaska, I’d have heard about it. Everybody would.

  Dr. Jones’s eyes met mine. There was something that had to be done—something megahard—and it filled up all the space between us.

  The critter’s mother would know how to care for him. Could save him, maybe.

  “If only I could go,” Dr. Jones said. “I’d give anything to see, but—” He pointed to a folded metal contraption leaning against the front seat.

  A wheelchair.

  I swallowed. “You mean, it would be just me and—”

  “Sasha has volunteered to go up there with you.”

  Oh, God. I looked at him, pleading. “I can’t. No, I really can’t. That dragon—you saw her—she’s …” A monster. A full-out seismic monster.

  “You wouldn’t have to go near her, or even see her,” Dr. Jones said. “You could merely leave her baby at the mouth of the cave.”

  Merely?

  The critter moaned, snorted out a puff of smoke.

  And what if some wild animal found the critter at the cave mouth? What if his mother rejected him? What if she caught me messing with her baby and burned me to a crisp? All kinds of bad things could happen.

  “Don’t you have a safe place we could keep him? I could help you ken with him or whatever, and—”

  “Bryn,” he said. “He should be with his mother. Only a dragon can properly raise a dragon.”

  I knew that. I did. Nobody should be separated from his mother. And I’d never meant to keep him. From the very start, I’d been running around trying to figure out some way to offload him. But now that I had, it seemed impossible to let him go.

  “Anyway,” I said, “people will come after them, try to kill them. How can we be sure they’ll be safe?”

  “The mother came here from somewhere. She must have a home. The world is still big enough, Bryn. There may even be others.”

  But for how long? With satellites taking pictures of every square centimeter of the planet, putting them up in cyberspace for everyone to see. With all the people who knew about the critter now. Thanks to Anderson. Little twerp. Now they’d all be searching.

  Sasha opened the door, tossed in a bag of groceries, jumped inside. I scooted back behind Dr. Jones. Her phone rang; she checked it. “Gandalf again. What’s with him, I wonder?”

  “Sasha, it’s best you turn off your phone at this juncture,” Dr. Jones said.

  “Okay.” She did. “Did you tell her?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said, and at the same time, Dr. Jones said, “No.”

  No?

  I looked at Sasha, puzzled.

  “We have one more matter to attend to,” Dr. Jones said. He dialed. Waited. Then said, “It’s Mungo. Is she there?”

  He held out his phone to me. All at once, I was afraid.

  “Go on,” Dr. Jones said. His voice was very, very gentle. Which scared me even more.

  I took the phone gingerly, between my forefinger and my thumb. “Hello?” I asked.

  “Bryn? Is it you, Bryn?”

  And then I began to weep.

  38

  MAGIC MAN

  EUGENE, OREGON

  Gandalf tried Sasha’s number again. Got the recording. Left another message. Beeped off.

  What was going on? Was she dissing him on purpose? Still miffed about the little incident with the egg?

  And what was she doing up in Alaska, anyway?

  If she didn’t pick up soon, Quinn was going to be ticked. And that would be bad.

  Gandalf went back to the client, still straddling the chair. It was a standard flash design—an eagle, on the biceps. Not exactly art, but it was a living. If this thing with Quinn worked out, he’d never do flash again. It would be his own designs or nothing. Freehand. Forget the stencil—just pick up the marker and vamp. Imagine in red, refine in blue. Clients standing in line, totally stoked to be getting a piece of his work. Gandalf: Magic Man!

  “Sorry,” Gandalf told the client. “Had to make a call.”

  The client shrugged. “No worries.”

  Gandalf set his phone faceup on the shelf beside him. He washed his hands again, drew on new gloves, wiped the tat with green soap and a paper towel. He picked up the machine, hit the foot switch, buzzed the needle into skin.

  He was still into the line work. With flash, line work was basically just tracing. Nothing to trip out the imagination. Once you got to the shading, though, all sorts of factors came into play—dimensionality, intensity, luminescence, blacklight reactives. It was hard for clients to micromanage shading. And even with some spam flash design, even with gray work, you could shade it into something totally spawn. You could make that tat pop right off the skin.

  His phone rang again. He looked to see who it was.

  Quinn.

  Crap.

  Gandalf had had to talk fast to convince Quinn that the dragon was for real. But now Quinn was a full-out fiend for it.

  “Gotta get this,” Gandalf said. “Be right back.”

  The client frowned at him. Not so happy this time.

  Gandalf drew off his gloves, tossed them in the bin, grabbed his phone, and left the room. He picked up. “Yeah,” he said.

  “Did you raise your cousin yet?”

  “No, man, she’s not picking up.”

  Quinn groaned. “We had them. Your cuz and that girl from the blog. We were seriously that close. But they took off too fast. We missed a turn or something, and now we can’t find them.”

  “What about the dragon?” Gandalf asked. “Did she still have it?”

  “It was right there. Right before our phaging eyes. Keep calling. Get her on the line. Get her to tell you where she’s going.”

  And how was he supposed to do that? Gandalf wondered. He didn’t see how it was his fault if Sasha didn’t want to talk to him or kept turning off her phone. She was in Alaska; he was in Eugene.

  “Gandalf?” Quinn said. “Talk to me: are you with me here? ’Cause—” He broke off. “Wait a minute. Don’t go away.” He put Gandalf on hold.

  Gandalf plucked nervously at his beard. Another thing he hated: Quinn didn’t seem to respect his time, didn’t seem to consider that he might have something else to do. Might, just for instance, have a client in the chair.

  He sighed, flopped onto the couch. Something else was bothering him. Quinn wouldn’t even know about Sasha if it weren’t for him. Somehow, he’d told Quinn more than he’d meant to. It had just slipped out. He’d described what Sasha looked like, and Quinn had recognized her.

  Gandalf wanted his share of the dragon money—no question there.

  A dragon!

  What would that be worth?

  Gandalf: Magic Man!

  On the other hand, he’d never thought it would lead to this. To Sasha all the way up there in Anchorage, with those poacher friends of Quinn’s tracking her down.

  Sasha could be annoying. But still. She was his cousin. He’d known her like forever.

  Quinn was kind of creepy. The more Gandalf talked to him, the creepier he got. Reminded Gandalf, for some reason, of a fox. And poachers, Gandalf knew, could be brutal. Sasha wasn’t the type to back off, which could make things worse.

  Maybe it was good they couldn’t find her.

  The phone beeped back. “We thought we saw them, but we were wrong,” Quinn said. “We’ll keep looking, but you better do your bit. We’re counting on you to raise her.”

  39

  A FALL

  ANCHORAGE, ALASKA

  It was a long time before I could talk. Coherently, anyway. At first I could only choke out a few words into the phone.

  To Mom.

  Who was alive.

  I was able to choke out a few words to Dad. Who was there with Mom.

  And also alive.

  Some choking-out on the
other end of the line too. We all sort of choked there together for a while.

  Dr. Jones started the car, took the ramp to the highway. Driving like a sane person this time. I leaned back and watched the lights from night traffic wash through the dark, rumbling space we were in—the snug hollow of Dr. Jones’s car. They swept across Sasha, who sat there smiling. They flowed over the critter, draped across my lap.

  Finally, I asked, “What happened?”

  There had been a fall.

  I could hang on to just parts of what they told me, one at a time, taking turns with the single phone they had between them. Dad’s voice, gravel-edged, and Mom’s fluty-bright one. I couldn’t take it all in. Not right then.

  Mom had stepped off the edge of something, and there had been a fall.

  This was after Dr. Jones had given Mom the critter’s egg, and she’d put it in the storage locker. Then someone had taken her to the cave where the egg had been found. She’d taken some samples her first trip—including the petrified egg. But she’d wanted to go back alone.

  And there had been a fall.

  Two teenage boys, on a hunting trip, had found her unconscious. They’d somehow managed to get her to their borrowed truck. The boys had wanted to help Mom but had made a bad decision. They drove right past the hospital in Seward. A friend of theirs, or maybe a relative, had died suddenly in a hospital. They didn’t trust hospitals. The boys had lifted Mom into their little motorboat and had ferried her all the way to the tiny island where they lived, to the healing woman who was there with Mom now.

  “No one knew who I was,” Mom said, and for a long time, she couldn’t tell them. For a long time, even after she woke up, she couldn’t remember anything.

  The healing woman had found Dr. Jones’s card in Mom’s coat pocket, but they hadn’t been able to reach him. No electricity on the island. No phone service. Bad storms. It had been a while before a skiff could safely make it to the port on Kodiak Island, where they could call. But at last, a messenger had made it to Kodiak. He had called Dr. Jones. Who had called Dad.

  “‘Onto something,’” I said. “Was that what it was?”

  “Yes,” Dad said. “I didn’t realize it would be so long before I could call again. But your mother wasn’t ready for travel, and after I found her here on the island, I couldn’t leave her.” Eventually, Dr. Jones had managed to get them a sat phone with a solar charger. The phone they were talking on now.

  A truck whooshed past, making the car rock. Sasha reached to scratch the critter’s eye ridges. He opened his eyes and watched her warily but seemed too weak to hiss.

  “How is Piper?” I asked. “And Stella?”

  Holding up, Dad told me. Hanging in.

  “Tell me about you,” Mom said. “Tell me about the dracling.”

  Dracling: baby dragon. So there was a word for him.

  I didn’t know where to start. I told them he was sick, told them that he flamed, told them that he floated in his sleep.

  “Bryn, please start at the beginning,” Dad said.

  So I did. I ended with now, with the sick dracling breathing shallowly on my lap, with my fear that he would die, and soon.

  Mom got on the line. “I think he needs his mother,” she said.

  Right. I knew all about that.

  Dad got on the line. “Listen, Bryn. Wait for me. We’re arranging things here. We can be back in Anchorage in a couple of days. I’ll take the dracling up there.”

  “He might not last a couple of days. I think he’s really sick.”

  Dr. Jones caught my eye in the rearview mirror. “Tell him the word is out,” he said. “Tell him we don’t have time.”

  I did.

  “I’m not letting you go up there without me,” Dad said.

  It would be good to have Dad with us. So good. If only we could wait.

  But if the critter died, or the poachers got him …

  How could you live with that, if you could have prevented it?

  The critter had bonded with me. No one else could do this. Only me.

  I sighed and felt something deep within me unclench. In a weird way, it was freeing to know that. To accept it. To quit scrambling around looking for someone else to take over, and just know it would have to be me.

  “Sasha will be with me,” I said. “We’re going, Dad. We’ll be fine.”

  Muffled murmuring on the phone. Dad came back on the line. “We don’t like this, Bryn. Not at all. But we’re trusting you to do as Mungo says. Don’t get within sight of that other dragon, do you hear me? Just set the dracling at the opening of the cave and leave. Promise me.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  When we finished, I handed the phone back to Dr. Jones.

  “What now?” Sasha asked. “Where to?”

  “To a little inn in Seward.” Dr. Jones glanced back at me. “I was hoping you would agree. We’ve been heading in that direction all along.”

  40

  PET SMUGGLERS

  SEWARD, ALASKA

  Millie Penobscot was wise to the ways of pet smugglers. You wouldn’t believe the shenanigans they pulled. You had your Coat Stuffers, who zipped their parkas over their pets, supporting them with their arms, figuring that hotel desk clerks were maybe blind as well as stupid. You had your Pocket Poachers, who tried to cover up the telltale yaps and squeals of their little darlings by coughing, or laughing, or talking really loud.

  Then there were your Midnight Skulkers, who waited until late, when the front desk was closed. You’d think, in this day and age, they’d just assume that the inn would have security cameras. But apparently it never crossed their minds.

  Your Satchel Stashers could be more challenging to detect. In her twenty-three years at the front desk of the Seward Inn, Millie had dug pets out of purses, duffel bags, fishing tackle boxes, backpacks, briefcases, musical instrument cases, baby carriers, cardboard boxes, suitcases, and trunks. Satchel Stashers sometimes drugged their pets, so there was considerably less to go on.

  Still, over the years, Millie had developed a nose for smuggled pets. Literally. Most people didn’t actually educate their sense of smell, but Millie had worked at it. It was possible, she’d found, to train your nose to identify smells most people would never notice.

  You’d be amazed.

  It wasn’t that the pet smugglers didn’t know what they were doing. Though some of them feigned innocence when caught. Really? No Pets? I had no idea!

  Unfortunately, there was a sign on the front desk, large as life: NO PETS. Could it be any clearer than that?

  Excuse me? I don’t think so!

  But usually, all Millie had to do was look hard at the smugglers’ faces. Guilt, in Millie’s experience, was exceedingly hard to hide.

  This man tonight—the black man in the wheelchair—had come in with two girls. He’d booked two rooms. Claimed to be a family friend. Honestly, you never knew. Millie used to try to find out if guests were who they said they were. Mr. and Mrs. “Smith.”

  Really? Don’t insult me. Could you at least try to be a little bit plausible?

  But management frowned on Millie’s efforts to get at the truth. And if management didn’t care who was staying here under false pretenses, why should she?

  One of these girls was very, very strange. Millie had heard about this fad. What did they call themselves? Oh, yes. ’Tants. But she’d never actually seen one before. Webs between the fingers and hanging off an ear. Fake skin-cancer tattoos. Bleached-white hair. It hurt Millie’s eyes to look at her.

  What was this girl’s mother thinking, to let her carry on like that?

  But the other girl was the smuggler. A Coat Stuffer, and not an especially skillful one, at that. If people only knew how ridiculous they looked, it would stop them in their tracks.

  It didn’t seem like a dog in there, under the girl’s parka. Could be a cat, maybe. More likely, to Millie’s practiced eye, it was a ferret.

  Millie had sniffed, tried to get a whiff of it.

&nb
sp; Fish.

  Dead fish.

  That was strange.

  Millie would have stopped the girl right then and there. Would have come out from behind the desk, stood directly in front of her, and asked what in the world she thought she was doing.

  But there had been something familiar about this girl’s face. Millie had seen it before, and recently. If only she could remember where.

  Millie was good with faces. People had noticed this about her. She never forgot a face. Lately, though, more and more, she forgot where she’d seen the face.

  Millie let the girl pass. Usually, she preferred to catch the smuggling right away, nip it in the bud. Before the fur and fleas and heaven knew what-all else had a chance to infest the rooms. But she could always do it later. Come up to the room with some extra mints or towels. Listen to them scramble when she knocked.

  Just when the three guests stepped into the elevator, it came to her. Channel 2. Alaska’s News Source. It had been on when she was checking in some other guests. Millie hadn’t heard what the announcer was saying, but she’d seen the girl’s picture. She remembered the face.

  Now she logged onto the Internet, found the Channel 2 site. And there she was. The very one. Millie clicked on the link and read the article. Then clicked on the link to a blog. When she was done reading, she leaned back in her chair.

  Well. That was a first.

  It didn’t surprise her as much as you’d have thought. Millie made a point of not being surprised by much. She’d actually heard about something like this before. There had been rumors around here for years. Earlier this spring she’d heard someone mention them, talking about eggs. It was a young man who’d stayed here before. This time he’d checked in with an older man and his two teenage sons.

  The older man had hushed the younger one—but not before Millie had heard quite a bit. She remembered the older man’s face, all right. An extremely handsome face. Graying at the temples. Strong, masculine jaw. Distinguished. Rugged yet refined. He was well-spoken and had been very polite to Millie. He had looked her in the eye—not looked right through her, the way most of them did. He had such a remarkably handsome face that Millie had made an exception and broken the rules herself: she’d searched for him online.