“Mr. Scales, perhaps we should put the photo away for now. People may begin to notice.” The red-haired woman was clearly nervous.
“You’ve obviously upset him,” Jennifer whispered harshly. “Couldn’t this have waited?”
Her father suddenly noticed her, which broke him out of his trance. He slipped the photo into his breast pocket. “You’re right, ace. It can wait. You shouldn’t be seeing this sort of thing anyway.”
Jennifer slid away, irritated. Again, guilt at not feeling worse gnawed at her. She felt sorry for Jack, of course, but she was uncomfortable here and wished her parents had let her stay home.
She caught a glimpse of Eddie, sandwiched between his parents as they droned on with some strangers, and saw the same wish on his face. It almost made her smile. Then he turned and caught her gaze, and her face froze in a frown. The relish tray on the buffet next to her had carrots, and she decided to count them until he looked away.
…sixteen, seventeen, eighteen…
“You eating those, or hoarding them?”
She gave a start. Rather than disengaging, Eddie had come right up to her. His expression betrayed no emotion, but the attempt at a joke felt like a try at friendship.
It was a try Jennifer wasn’t ready for. “Hoarding them. Back off or I’ll shove one through your eye socket.”
“Hey.” His palms went up, facing her. “How about a one-day truce? I know you’re still angry at me, but—”
“Angry isn’t even a start, Eddie. Your mother was ready to dice me, and you stood there like a statue.”
“I didn’t have—”
She picked up a baby carrot and gnawed on it. “What is that, anyway, some kind of family code of conduct? My mom hasn’t had time to go over the full Beaststalker Happy Fun Camp Handbook, yet. Maybe there’s a chapter toward the end about how to betray your friends and act like a creep. You must be ahead of me. Star student.”
Eddie winced. “I don’t expect you to forgive me right now. I’m still working through what happened that day. This is so confusing, Jennifer.”
“You know what’s not confusing? Your pathetic excuse of a friendship. I don’t even know who you are anymore.”
“I know who I am,” he hissed back. “The question is, do you know who you are?”
Jennifer bristled, not least because part of her suddenly realized she didn’t have a very good answer. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’m not the only bad friend here. You hid yourself from me last year. It hurt when my parents told me what they’d learned about you. They had to piece it together from what Otto Saltin was doing, but when they figured it out, they knew more about you than I did.”
“Gee, you’re right, Eddie, I’m sorry. I should have come running to you right away, just as soon as I was in the shape of a dragon. Then you could have betrayed me right away to your mom and dad. I mean, they’re sooo understanding. They probably would have stitched a lovely corsage to my wing before slicing my head off.”
“They don’t want that,” he insisted. “Not if you’re part beaststalker. Mom even said the other day there may be hope for you.” He was trying hard to look as though he wasn’t really talking to her. Jennifer scanned the room and saw the Blacktooths spot them. Their expressions were pure poison.
“Yeah, she seems really delighted to see me. Your dad, too. They probably can’t wait to embrace me as the daughter they never had. Listen, I don’t want you to knock yourself out trying to make nice. You’re already avoiding me at school, so just stay the course. And keep your family away from mine.”
With that, she flicked a carrot at him and strode back to her parents.
The Wednesday after the funeral was the first day of tenth grade, with new teachers and classes. High school this year was only slightly less scary than it had been last year. But she was just glad to be experiencing it—last year she didn’t think she would be able to ever go to any normal school ever again, since most weredragons had to keep to a strict schedule of changing with every crescent moon.
But as the Ancient Furnace, Jennifer was different—and at Winoka High, “different” could be a harrowing experience. So she stuck close to her best friends, Susan Elmsmith and Skip Wilson. Skip, son of the late Dianna Wilson and Otto Saltin, had put his life on the line to defend Jennifer against his own werachnid father.
Because of Skip’s bravery, she always wore the necklace he had given her, with a Native American wood carving of the Moon of Falling Leaves. Since her father told her that he and Dianna Wilson had been good friends before Otto Saltin came on the scene, Jennifer felt that there was history to build on—and that maybe some weredragons and some werachnids could be good friends instead of mortal enemies.
Right now, however, she just wanted her geometry textbook back.
“Come on,” she pleaded. He returned a mischievous grin and used his wiry frame to hold the book high above her head while Susan rummaged through her own locker. “Susan and I need to get to math class. Don’t make me kick your ass for it. It’ll embarrass you.”
“All I want is a date to the Halloween dance.”
She ignored Susan’s resigned hiss and gasped with transparent indignation. “That’s blackmail! Are you really that desperate?”
His green-blue eyes twinkled with mischief. “Desperate to hear you say yes. C’mon, Jennifer, I’ve asked you twice and you said you had to think about it. You’re killing me.”
“And you’re killing me,” interrupted Susan grumpily, slamming her locker shut and twirling her brown curls with a well-manicured fingernail. “Both of you. For heaven’s sake, get a room.”
“Well, gee, Skippy, I dunno.” Jennifer gave a coquettish smirk and rubbed the floor with her toe. “The dance is almost two months away, and it’s only the first day of school! I could still get a better offer.”
His smile disappeared and the textbook came down. “Are lots of guys already asking you?”
She stammered a bit at the question. “Um, well, yeah. A few. But no one I like has asked me yet,” she hastened to add.
At Susan’s gasp and Skip’s fallen expression, she talked even more quickly. “I mean, no one besides you! Ah, geez, Skip. Yeah, okay, I’ll go to the dance with you.”
“Don’t do me any favors,” he sulked.
“What do you mean?” Jennifer began to panic. This had started all in jest, but she began to feel a fun night slip through her fingers. What was going on?
“I know you could get better offers,” he explained. “If you just want to be friends, just say so. But I don’t want your pity.”
“Oh, Skip, no! Don’t take it that way. I thought we were just playing around. I want to go with you, really! Look, see, I’ll ask you.” She cleared her throat and straightened up. Her voice came out throaty and serious. “Skip Wilson, will you go to the Halloween dance with me?”
He paused. Susan stared at him with impatience, and then smacked him on the back of the head with her pocketbook.
“Cripes, loser, say ‘yes!’”
“Ow! Okay, yes.” His easy smile returned, wider than ever, as he rearranged the chocolate strands of hair at the back of his head. “Cool. Um, here’s your math book back. So, um, I guess we’ll talk more about the dance later, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
Susan glowered at them both. “Okay. Hit the road.”
Still sporting a goofy smile, Skip practically pranced down the hallway and out of sight.
“Boys are so sad,” Susan commented.
“What the heck was he talking about, better offers?”
Her friend turned and began walking down the hall. “Oh, just quit it.”
She scurried after. “Quit what?”
“This false modesty…it doesn’t become you.”
“Susan.”
“Okay, you didn’t know. Whatever you say…I mean, you can’t be this dim.”
Jennifer restrained herself
from picking Susan up by the ankles and banging her pal’s head on the floor a few times. “What. Are. You. Talking. About.”
Susan stopped in the middle of the hallway, causing Jennifer to run right into her. “You’re only the most talked-about girl at school nowadays. It’s irritating beyond belief—you dye your hair platinum blonde and the boys just fall all over themselves.”
“I didn’t dye it! You know I can’t control my hair.” This was true—Jennifer’s hair, which used to be a darker blonde, had developed more and more streaks of silver throughout ninth grade, as her weredragon nature emerged. Over the summer, the last of her old hairs had turned, and the sun had toned what was left into platinum.
“Yeah, whatever, you’re a freak and your life is miserable. Cry me a river. You’re all anybody can talk about. Your shiny hair, your perfect legs, the way you’re already a starting wing on the varsity soccer team…”
“You made the team, too! And you’ll be a starter next year for sure!”
“Hmmph. Anyway, it’s day one of tenth grade and you’re already everyone’s favorite person. Good thing no one knows you’re really a lizard in disguise.” Susan softened her comment with a ruby grin, but Jennifer still panicked.
“Susan, you can’t tell anyone what I told you last spring, you swore you wouldn’t, please…”
“Easy there, camper. Susan Elmsmith doesn’t do gossip. I’m not that desperate for popularity.”
Jennifer sighed with relief. At Winoka High, only Susan, Skip, and (unfortunately) Eddie knew about her weredragon heritage. Everyone in her family agreed that was dangerous enough. “Honest, Susan, I’m not trying to attract attention. If the dye would stick, I’d color my hair pale green to match these lockers and disappear. I thought freshman year was bad, but in some ways this year is terrifying!”
The class bell rang. They hurried, falling naturally into step with each other.
“I know what you mean. Have you seen Bob Jarkmand yet? I hear he’s bigger and uglier than ever. Get the net!”
Jennifer giggled at her friend’s remark. Bob Jarkmand, a fellow sophomore, had been the class bully in ninth grade last year until a certain girl had laid him out in front of the guidance counselor’s office with a single punch. Now he was reportedly large enough to be a starting offensive lineman for the Winoka varsity football team.
“In three summer months he converted what was left of his brain into more muscle,” Jennifer commented. “I saw him at the mall a couple of times over the summer. All he does is stare at me now.” She shivered. Bob was much bigger. Jennifer didn’t know many students taller than her, not even juniors or seniors. But this fellow was a tower—a big, unsightly tower (and one missing a few bricks at that). She wondered to herself why she had bothered to pick a fight with Winoka High’s hugest denizen.
You did it for Skip, she reminded herself warmly. Because he was sticking up for you.
“What’s that?” Susan sounded amused.
“What’s what?”
“That goofy smile on your face.”
“Eh, nothing.”
“Sure, right…”
Well, Jennifer thought as they slipped through the classroom door together, if Bob decides to pick another fight this year, I might at least get some exercise in before he floors me.
“Ladies. Nice of you to join us.”
They both flinched. The classroom was incredibly quiet, and they were the only two people standing. Embarrassment clove their feet to the floor.
Whhhrrrt.
A slight man dressed in a sharp black shirt and neatly pressed pants rolled up to them in an electronic wheelchair. The polish on his designer shoes was exquisite. His blond hair was swept to one side and stuck there as if ordered. Beneath it, his handsome, tanned smile did not extend to his piercing black eyes.
His voice was smooth and quick, with a hint of somewhere in eastern Europe. “When Principal Mouton offered me the position of mathematics teacher over the summer, I wasn’t aware that I would have to review curriculum like How to Read Schedules and Tell Time. My naïve hope was that we could skip such harrowing topics and dive right into, oh, say, Euclidean geometry. If you’re willing?”
“Sorry,” they both mumbled, scampering to their seats through a sea of smirks and titters.
“As I was saying,” Mr. Slider addressed the entire class, “My name is Edmund Slider. I will be your geometry teacher this year. Geometry has multiple practical applications. It also has some uses that may seem a bit abstract, but help us answer some big questions. Take, for example, the size of the known universe. Most of you have heard of the Big Bang Theory…”
His chair spun to face the chalkboard, which had been lowered before the school year started so the new instructor could reach it. As he talked, he drew circles within circles, and rays that stretched from the innermost circle outward. Everything was labeled with stuff like z+1B years and such. Jennifer thought herself fairly good at mathematics, but that had been in algebra last year. Her parents had encouraged her to keep pushing herself in advanced classes, but geometry was so different from what she was used to…
Someone tapped her shoulder. She turned. One of her classmates—a junior girl she didn’t know—was holding out a folded piece of paper, with a mixture of boredom and disdain.
“Someone back there handed this up. I guess for you.”
“Thanks.”
“Eh.” Apparently, this girl wasn’t in the Jennifer Scales Fan Club that Susan was insisting existed.
Jennifer unfolded the note and read it:
Will you go to the Halloween dance with me? I don’t want to tell you who I am in case you say no.
She looked behind her, but there were five rows back there, full of unfamiliar, unfriendly-looking boys. None of them even glanced at her; they were either listening to Mr. Slider or (in Bob Jarkmand’s case) staring listlessly out the window.
A bit off to the left, however, was a new sight—a boy she’d never seen at the school. Angelic, was her first thought. He had wavy, shoulder-length blond hair, a smooth face with sparkling blue eyes, and soft peach skin. He looked up and caught her staring, so she quickly spun around and felt herself blush.
Glancing to her right, she saw Susan, two desks over, rolling her eyes in a correct guess of the note’s intent.
Sighing in exasperation, Jennifer folded the note back up and shoved it in her pocket. Susan’s right. Boys are so sad.
“This is so sad!” Jennifer pleaded to her father that evening at home. “We just get back from the funeral of this friend of yours I barely know, and now you want me to go to some dumb dinner party tonight?”
“Your mother got called into surgery.” Jonathan smiled gamely. “And I’m supposed to bring a date.”
“I’ll be so bored!”
“I don’t think so! The hospital here in Winoka wants to build a new rehabilitation center for people with blindness or vision disorders. I’m the architect. Customers will use this center to learn how to live with no sight, and some of them will be at the fund-raiser tonight—including kids.”
“So this lame event is at the hospital where Mom works?”
“No, the fund-raiser’s up in Minneapolis! Where the money is. I swear it won’t be like the funeral at all.”
“But I don’t know how to act around blind people—and even if there are kids, they’ll still be strangers! What will we talk about?”
He scrunched his nose. “I dunno. You should find some common ground in agreeing you all have lame fathers.”
“That’s a start. What will I wear?”
“You can wear the same dress you wore to the funeral.”
“Daaad…”
“Please, sweetheart. You’ll make your father happy. Isn’t that what every teenage daughter really wants?”
She glared at him without a word.
He patted his own chest. “Deep down inside?”
Still no response.
“Thanks, peach. You’ve got ten minutes to g
et ready.”
“Aaargh!” She spun around and stomped up the stairs.
CHAPTER 3
Aunt Tavia
In fact, the fund-raiser was not at all bad. First, it was an excuse to go to Minneapolis, which was lively and elegant at night. Second, the event began with an enormous dinner. As she worked through her roasted pheasant and wild rice with steamed vegetables, Jennifer began to understand why her father thought she might not hate it.
Third…
“Skip’s here!” She practically upended the table when she saw him sitting across the room. Jonathan did not protest, so she maneuvered through all of the cloth-covered tables until she rested an arm on her friend’s shoulder.
Then she saw who he was sitting with, and slowly removed it. Skip looked and sounded nervous.
“Jennifer, I don’t believe you’ve met my aunt Tavia?”
Even before he gave the name, it would have been easy enough for Jennifer to guess who this woman was. After Otto Saltin died—no one beyond the Scales knew exactly how—his sister had moved to Winoka to take care of Skip. Tavia Saltin, like her nephew and her late brother, had dark chocolate hair and hazel eyes. Her long, maroon-painted fingertips curled around Skip’s neck where Jennifer’s hand had been, and her face betrayed recognition at this girl’s name.
“Jennifer Scales?”
“Yes.” Jennifer had no idea whether to shake hands, make a grab for the birthday daggers she had strapped under her dress, or run.
“My goodness!” Tavia stood up, and without warning, warmly embraced her startled prey. “I’ve been dying to meet the girl who saved my sweet nephew! Oh, bless you, sweetheart! Thank you so much!”
Jennifer tried to return the hug, but this woman was quite spindly. It was like trying to grab a bundle of sticks. She settled on a shoulder pat. “You’re welcome. What are you two doing here?” She tried not to sound too suspicious.
“Oh, I’m an eye specialist. Some of my patients are here tonight. I saw your father’s name as the architect—but I didn’t realize we’d see you here tonight! This is delicious!”
Jennifer Scales and the Messenger of Light Page 3
