Dragons in the Earth

by Judith Tarr

  I threw every scrap of it into Caro’s drumming. The hunter shot by overhead. I’d aimed the thing right: it was blasting straight toward the jagged eruption in the desert that was Picacho.

  My part in the gamble was just about done. The hunter had lost us. It couldn’t slow down easily, any more than an ocean liner can—unless it hits an iceberg. Even so, it braked faster than I would have believed possible, and started to veer—southeastward, damn it. Toward the ranch.

  It couldn’t know. The ranch was locked up tighter than we were. But anything coming that close was a threat.

  The dragon under the mountain was still asleep. I thought—hoped—it was starting to wake up. But not soon enough, if the hunter kept on going toward Tucson. The dragon wouldn’t care about a flyover. I needed a landing—here, or close by here.

  My heart was drumming louder in my ears than Caro’s feet on the earth. I threw myself back up into the sky. That was going to cost me, but the alternative was much, much worse.

  I sang out to the hunter. It didn’t matter what the words were. Mocking and taunting, and laughing in its ginormous approximation of a face. Maybe I gave it the greatest hits of XXX-rated Catullus, with the dancing body parts and the sluttiest of the slut-shaming.

  I’d do penance for that at the altar of the woo. Tonight it brought the hunter around again, banking on a wing and screeching rage.

  It slammed me down so hard the world went black. Caro’s drumming and the stone horse in my fist kept me conscious, just. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t see. I had one thing left to do. If I couldn’t do it—

  I had to.

  I threw the sound of the drumming the way I’d thrown my energy, straight toward the dragon.

  The hunter took the bait. Most of it was still in the air, but its lower reaches plowed a furrow through the sand.

  The sting on my face brought the stars back. Elissa and Philippe had thrown themselves flat. Caro was still dancing, still drumming. Iron woman. She never lost rhythm, never faltered.

  There was no way I was giving up as long as she kept up the fight. I couldn’t stand, but I could sit on my heels. The sand was surprisingly warm. I dug my fingers into it and took deep breaths of sharp cold air.

  With each breath I grew bigger, till mountains curved down my spine. Rivers washed my feet. Stars stabbed my eyes with light, a million million pinpricks when I reared up over the desert. My desert.

  When I’m reading animals, I can get far enough in to channel, but I’m in control. I can stay separate. Even reading horses or elephants, there’s still me out here and the animal in there.

  The dragon was bigger than anything I’d ever read or ever expected to read. So big it swallowed me up.

  I was still aware. I knew I wasn’t a dragon myself. But it didn’t matter. I rose and rose and rose, miles and miles of me, and I was mad. Earth-shaking, sky-splitting mad.

  The hunter buzzed around my head like a fly. I snapped at it, and it grew.

  Damned bloody thing. It was drawing my power, from my desert. Gathering every scrap of moisture and every atom of energy, blowing up a thunder cell that lashed me with lightning.

  I ate lightning. I crunched it into tiny sparkly snapping bits. I wound myself around the cloud with the hunter in its middle, squeezing out rain and icy pellets of sleet.

  The hunter raked me with claws that burned like acid. Its beak stabbed at my eyes. It battered me with wings so wide they dwarfed mine.

  Wings so wide they stretched the limits of the hunter’s powers. The skeleton was ice and sand fused into glass. The webbing was as thin as a sheet of fog.

  I ripped it apart. Its dying howl was the sound of wind in the empty desert. My desert. The cloud collapsed on itself and fell in a squall of snow.

  22

  The dragon went back to sleep. Its stomach was full and its desert was free of invaders. I was still somewhere in between midair and my cold, stiff body, with a hammering headache and a serious case of the shakes.

  I came all the way back to myself in time to help Philippe catch Caro. She was out cold. But breathing—she was alive. She mumbled when we picked her up, flailed a little bit and then started to snore.

  We crunched through the already melting snow to the truck. Nobody had anything to say. Elissa got the truck started, and eventually the cold air roaring out of the vents turned into beautiful, blissful warmth.

  I sat in the back with Caro’s head in my lap, rubbing her hands till they started to feel alive again. I should be out, too, I supposed, but I felt remarkably all right. A bottle of water helped the headache; so did the bag of cookies Philippe passed back from the front seat.

  The hunter was completely gone. Its cloud had broken up; the wind carried the last rags of it away to the north, where it had been going before we pulled it off course.

  “Something else will come,” Elissa said. She didn’t sound worried. Just practical.

  “Not for a while, I hope,” I said. “And if we did our job right, as far as TMA knows, their pet monster poked its beak where it shouldn’t, and got what it deserved.”

  “It’s a respite,” she said. “A breathing space.”

  “Breathing’s good.” I practiced for a minute or two myself, good deep breaths, the kind that cleared the mind and opened up the gut. Emma would be proud of me.

  I looked down. Caro looked up. “You’re wiped out,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”

  “Eventually,” she said.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  She didn’t ask what for. “Before we go home tomorrow,” she said, “I’m getting a massage.”

  “I’ll book one for two.” Then I rethought. “Or four.”

  “Four,” she agreed. We owed Philippe and Elissa for everything they’d done tonight. An hour’s worth of pampering was the least we could do.

  We took our time leaving Phoenix. Caro and I were both moving slowly even after our massages. We had a cooler full of food from the restaurant, a pair of tickets to the Cirque Equestre for Emma and anyone she wanted to bring with her, and a promise from Elissa that she and Philippe would come down to the ranch during the next break in performances.

  I couldn’t relax, not totally, but I felt quite a bit less anxious than I had on the drive up. The desert was quiet, its powers asleep. Nothing hunted either earth or air.

  When I dropped Caro off, Max serenaded us with his mezzo-soprano whinny. It sounded like a salute to the victors.

  Caro’s not a hugger, but she pulled me in and held me for a good long minute. “You watch yourself,” she said.

  “I’ll try.” I jangled my keys, not quite ready to go yet, though I was antsing to get back to the ranch.

  I took a deep breath. There was something I had to commit to, for all our sakes. “Next Monday night? Witching circle? Usual time, usual place?”

  “More than ever,” she said.

  I climbed into the truck. She stood in her yard with Max’s big old head over her shoulder and watched me go.

  The sun was almost down when I made that last familiar turn and saw the pastures spread out ahead. I’d been driving on autopilot, suddenly so tired I could just about see straight enough to keep the truck going where it needed to go. My ancient four-poster with its forty-year-old, third-hand mattress would feel better than a dozen fancy pillow-top hotel beds, and I could not wait to fall into it.

  But first things first. My own equines were waiting for hellos and scritches. They’d get both, and fancy organic rainbow carrots from the Cirque crew, too.

  The truck slowed down and stopped beside the front pasture. Six mares and a round little white stallion clustered around the hay feeders, finishing off their dinner.

  They looked so very ordinary. Nice horses, well put together. Well fed, and as clean as pasture horses can be.

  They were doing that thing horses have in common with cats, which was to ignore me while being completely aware of me. It felt good. Right. Comfortable.

  “Good night,” I said. “
Keep safe.”

  Always.

  It could have been one saying it, or it could have been all of them. Their thoughts were warm, peaceful and content. The world was a tiny bit less dangerous tonight.

  I didn’t take any more credit for that than I’d strictly earned. “Just doing my job,” I said, firing up the truck again and cranking it into gear. Emma was waiting for me to check in. My equines wanted their piece of me, too, and the cats wanted dinner.

  Just before I drove on past the pasture, Bel sent me a picture. Me. Saddle and bridle. Arena. Tomorrow morning.

  That was my job—for him right then, in his still mostly horse brain, my most important one, because it was all about him.

  But then, from his point of view, just about everything was.

  Copyright & Credits

  Dragons in the Earth

  Horses of the Moon, Book I

  Judith Tarr

  Book View Café September 20, 2016

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-625-7

  Copyright © 2016 Judith Tarr

  Production Team:

  Cover Design: Leah Cutter

  Proofreader: Sheila Gilluly

  Formatter: Vonda N. McIntyre

  This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Digital edition: 20160730vnm

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Book View Café Publishing Cooperative

  P.O. Box 1624, Cedar Crest, NM 87008-1624

  About the Author

  Judith Tarr has written historicals and historical fantasies and epic fantasies, contemporary fantasy and science fiction. She has won the Crawford Award, and been nominated for the World Fantasy Award. She lives near Tucson, Arizona with an assortment of cats, a blue-eyed spirit dog, and a herd of Lipizzan horses.

  About Book View Café

  Book View Café is a professional authors’ publishing cooperative offering DRM-free ebooks in multiple formats to readers around the world. With authors in a variety of genres including mystery, romance, fantasy, and science fiction, Book View Café has something for everyone.

  Book View Café is good for readers because you can enjoy high-quality DRM-free ebooks from your favorite authors at a reasonable price.

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  Book View Café authors include New York Times and USA Today bestsellers, Nebula, Hugo, Lambda, Chanticleer, and Philip K. Dick Award winners, World Fantasy, Kirkus, and Rita Award nominees, and winners and nominees of many other publishing awards.

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Living in Threes

  Sample Chapter

  Judith Tarr

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Book View Café Edition

  November 20, 2012

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-208-2

  Copyright © 2012 Judith Tarr

  Chapter 1

  That was the absolute best and the absolute worst summer of my life, the summer I turned sixteen.

  Sixteen is a weird year. Make it sixteen with your dad off finding himself again—not that he’d been around much even before the divorce—and your mom in remission from ovarian cancer, and you can pretty much figure you’re being dumped on from somewhere.

  What I didn’t figure, and couldn’t ever have figured, was how bad it was going to get—and how completely impossible both the bad and the good part would be.

  Magic. It’s dead, they say. Or never existed.

  They aren’t looking in the places I fell into, or finding it where I found it, that wonderful and terrible summer.

  I had plans with the usual suspects: Cat and Rick and Kristen. They had their licenses already, got them before school let out. I was thisclose to mine, with the September birthday and being the class baby.

  It was going to be our summer on wheels, when it wasn’t on horseback or out on the beaches. We had it all mapped out.

  Then Mom dropped the bomb.

  I came home from the barn early that day, the day after the last day of school. Rick had the car, but his dad wanted it back by noon. So we’d hit the trails at sunup, then done our stalls and hay and water in a hurry with him already revving up the SUV.

  When I got home, wringing wet and filthy and so smelly even I could tell I’d been around a manure pile, Mom was sitting out by the pool.

  That wasn’t where she usually was on a Thursday morning. She still had her work clothes on, but she’d tossed off the stodgy black pumps and splashed her feet in the water.

  Her hair had all grown back since the chemo. It was short and curly, and still a little strange, but I liked it. I thought it made her look younger and prettier.

  She turned and smiled at me. She looked tired, part of me said, but the rest of me told that part to shut up. “Good ride?” she asked.

  “Good one,” I answered. “Bonnie only threw in a couple of Airs. And that was because Rick was riding Stupid, and she was living up to her name. Bonnie had to put her in her place.”

  Mom laughed.

  As long as I was out there, I figured I’d do the sensible thing. I dropped my shirt and riding tights and got down to the bathing suit any sane person wears under clothes in Florida summer, and dived into the pool.

  The water felt absolutely wonderful. Mom watched me do a couple of laps.

  Finally I gave in. I swam up beside her and folded my arms on the tiles and floated there, and said, “All right. Tell me.”

  She was still smiling. It must be something really good, to bring her out of court and all the way home.

  “I’ve been talking to Aunt Jessie,” she said. “She’s staying in Egypt this summer, instead of coming back home to Massachusetts.”

  I knew that. I talked to Aunt Jessie, too. She Skyped in at least once a week. Checking on me, and on Mom through me.

  But Mom was in story mode. I kept quiet and let her go on.

  “She’s really excited,” Mom said. “She’s made some discoveries that she thinks are very important, and with everything that’s been going on over there, she hasn’t been at all sure she can keep getting the permits. She actually got a grant, which is just about unheard of these days.”

  “She must be over the moon,” I said.

  “Oh, she is.” Mom paused. “It’s a big grant. Big enough for a whole team.”

  “Including you?”

  That came out of the way Mom was smiling—excited, as if she had a secret and she couldn’t wait to share. She’d been dreaming about Egypt for years, following all of Aunt Jessie’s adventures and reading and studying and talking about maybe someday, if she had time, if she could get away, if—

  There were always reasons not to go. First she had to make partner in the law firm. Then she got asked to be a judge in the county court, and that needed her to be always on. Always perfect. And then there was the cancer.

  So maybe she figured it was now or never. I could see that. Even get behind it. But I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.

  Mom away for the whole summer? Was she really ready to leave me for that long? I didn’t have my license yet. How was I going to—

  All that zipped through my head between the time I asked my question and the time Mom answered, “Including you.”

  That stopped me cold.

  Mom grinned at my expression. “You really thought it was me? I wish, but there are a couple of big cases coming on trial, and I might be called to the bench for another one, and—”

  “You said you were going to take it easy this summer,” I said. “We both were. What would I do in Egypt?”

  “Learn,” said Mom. “Explore. Be part of something big.”

  “Florida is big enough for me,” I said. “What about Bonnie? And the trip to Disney World? And turtle watch? Turtle
watch is important. The college needs us to count those eggs. That’s big, too. It’s real. It’s now. Not fifty million years ago.”

  “Four thousand, give or take,” said Mom, “and Disney World will keep. So will the turtles.”

  “Bonnie won’t. Bonnie needs me. She just got bred. We don’t even know if she’s pregnant yet.”

  “We will tomorrow,” Mom said. “You’ve got a week till you leave. It’s all taken care of. Visas, everything. Aunt Jessie’s been working on it for months. It’s her birthday present to you.”

  She’d never said a word to me. Not even a hint.

  “I hate surprises,” I said. “I hate her.”

  “Hate me,” Mom said. “It was my idea.”

  “It’s your dream. Mine is to spend the summer with my friends and my horse. Not baking in a desert on the other side of the world. There are terrorists over there. Revolutionaries. Things get blown up. People get blown up.”

  “You will not get blown up,” Mom said.

  I pulled myself out of the water. “I’m not going,” I said.

  Mom didn’t say anything. I grabbed a towel off the pile on the picnic table and rubbed myself dry, hard enough to make my skin sting, and marched off into the house.

  For once in the history of the universe, none of the usual suspects was answering their phone. I barricaded myself in my room and went laptop surfing instead.

  I surfed for horse stuff and beach stuff and turtle stuff. Nothing whatsoever to do with Egypt. Who cared about sand and terrorists and old dead mummies? The only sand I wanted was right underneath me in Florida.