Ordinary Girl (The Dark Dragon Chronicles Book 1)

by Ripley Harper

  “How could I have known? There were no signs.”

  “She told us about the fire! And then that phone call from school. Earthkeepers don’t lie; we should’ve believed him.”

  “I didn’t think it was possible. She seemed so weak, so unlike her mother.”

  “Weak? How many others have faced the White Witch and survived?”

  “You’re jumping to conclusions, Gunnar. We can’t be sure it was the Witch.”

  “How can you say that when the stench of deathmagic still clings to her—I can smell it even now, in this room, in this house!”

  “I know what you smell. But the Witch is dead.”

  “We can’t be sure; her body was never—”

  “I can be sure. I’m sure because my sister was the one who killed that bitch. It cost her life, and I will not have you disrespecting her memory.”

  “Jesus, Ingrid. I’m not trying to disrespect anyone, least of all my own grandmother. But Jess’s wound reeks of deathmagic. I don’t understand how she’s even still alive.”

  “She did well. Amazingly well. Whoever attacked her couldn’t have scored a direct hit. Her training must have helped.”

  “We haven’t even started her real training. It must’ve been sheer dumb luck.”

  “Or she’s stronger than we thought. Stronger than anyone suspects. Bella might have been right after all.”

  “This is my fault. I should’ve been honest with her. I should’ve told her everything from the start. We’ve put her in danger by—”

  “You need to stop this, my boy. The promises we made still stand, and they bind you as much as they bind me.”

  “For God’s sake, she could’ve died.”

  “Perhaps. But she didn’t. If I’m correct about her being in her resting state right now, she’ll recover soon enough, and when that happens, you’re welcome to intensify her training. Until her eighteenth birthday, however, you’re bound by that oath. You know it as well as I do.”

  In the tense silence that follows, I slowly become aware of my surroundings.

  I’m lying in bed, in my own room. Ingrid and Gunn are here. I’ve been listening to their conversation, and even though I realize they’ve been talking about me, their words are so strange I suspect I might be dreaming.

  Then I remember the woman. And the lightning. And the pain. That desperate flight through the cornfields.

  I try to speak but my throat is too dry. I swallow hard, try again.

  “Who’s the White Witch?” I ask, my voice scratchy. “And why does she want to kill me?”

  They turn to me at exactly the same time with exactly the same look on their faces, the family resemblance suddenly crystal clear despite their great age difference. Both stare at me with dark-blue eyes full of concern. Both frown slightly, their lips pulled into hard, worried lines.

  “You’re awake,” Ingrid says.

  “What happened?”

  “You were attacked,” she continues. “And you’re injured. But you’re going to be okay.”

  “I don’t feel any pain.”

  “Really?” She shoots a quick look at Gunn. “Nothing at all?”

  I glance down to find that my upper left-hand side is wrapped up in white bandages, from the middle of my elbow right to my collar bone. I rotate my shoulder carefully, testing the movement. When I don’t feel anything, I press against the bandages, softly at first, and then harder. “No,” I say. “It feels totally normal.”

  “Well,” Ingrid says after a slight pause, “that’s probably because you’ve been given enough painkillers to tranquilize an elephant.” She smiles. “But I’m glad you’re feeling okay.”

  “How did I get here? I can’t remember what happened.”

  Gunn smiles reassuringly. “Don’t worry about it. All you need to know is that we found you and you’re safe.”

  As the events of the afternoon come back to me more fully, I feel myself beginning to shake. “Oh my God, Gunn. Who was that woman?”

  He leans forward. “Tell me what you remember.”

  “It was insane. There was this woman at the pool, and she was… It was… She didn’t have eyes, Gunn.” A hysterical little giggle escapes my lips, a harsh, high sound, and I press a hand over my mouth. “No, I mean, she could see, she looked right at me, but her eyes were entirely white. Like, she didn’t have any pupils. And she had lightning coming out of her hands! And she was screaming at me, all these weird, horrible things—”

  Ingrid ignores my hysterics. “What did she say, Jess? When she was screaming at you. Can you remember?”

  I take a deep, shuddering breath, try to bring myself under control.

  “Well, mostly it was just lame insults, like ‘daughter of Satan’ and ‘revolting worm’ and stuff. It didn’t make much sense.” I think for a while, try to remember. “And she also tried to… I don’t know, banish me or something. Like she could send me to another dimension, or whatever, by screaming those insults.”

  I make a circling motion with my hands, trying to convey the craziness of what happened. “The whole thing was just so weird, you know? Almost a bit... fake. Like the evil emperor from Star Wars had an even more evil albino sister who randomly decided to show up at the town pool.”

  I look at their grim faces, feel my neck hairs rise. “It was real, wasn’t it?”

  Neither of them says anything.

  I suddenly feel sick. “But how? Why? Who is she?”

  Silence.

  “I know you know. I heard you talking. You called her the White Witch.”

  “Excuse me.” Ingrid moves to the door. “I’ll be back in a second.” She gives me a stiff, awkward little smile, and I notice for the first time that she looks terrible: sick and old and deathly pale.

  “Is she okay?” I ask when the door closes behind her.

  “She’ll be fine. She’s just tired.”

  I glance around the room, notice that Ingrid’s laptop is standing on my desk. There are several dirty coffee cups too, and a pair of her shoes kicked under the chair.

  “Have you guys been up all night looking after me?”

  He rubs a hand across his face. “It’s Friday night, Jess. You’ve been out for three days.”

  Three days?

  My mouth gapes open, but before I can say anything, Ingrid returns with a steaming mug in her hand. “Here, drink this.” She holds out the cup to me. “It’ll make you feel better.”

  I take a few careful sips, then gulp it down greedily when the milky sweet taste makes me realize how starved I am. “Thanks,” I say when I’ve finished the cup. “But now you really have to tell me what’s going on.”

  Ingrid nods slowly, as if she’s trying to convince herself of something. “I realize that. Only… it’s not time yet.”

  “Not time for what?” I look at the clock on the wall.

  She sighs. “You’re wounded, Jess. You’ve been unconscious for three days; I cannot tell you how worried we’ve been.”

  “I feel fine. I promise.”

  “That’s good to know.” Ingrid gives a tired smile. “But you’ll start to feel drowsy soon. Try to get some sleep. Everything will look different in the morning.”

  “Ingrid,” Gunn says, his face hardening. “What have you done?”

  “What’s necessary.”

  “What? No. No. Please tell me you didn’t.”

  “I had no choice, Gunnar.”

  “That’s how you keep justifying this to yourself, but it’s not true. I can’t believe you would…”

  But then I don’t hear anything else because the room starts spinning and the walls melt into the floor as the ceiling rushes towards—

  Chapter 7

  My mother is sitting next to me, basking in the dying rays of the warm African sun. She is completely healthy and still young enough to paint each of her toenails a different color.

  We’re staring into the desert. My mother’s got one arm around my shoulder and one hand pointing to some dry shrubs a few
yards away. She’s lowered her head to my eye level and she’s pointing, whispering into my ear about something amazing you don’t see every day.

  I don’t see anything for a long time, though I pretend that I do. I’m not really that interested anyway; it’s my mother’s closeness that’s important—her familiar voice; her fresh, earthy smell; the reassuring strength of her arm around me.

  But then, almost without my noticing, the brown and gray and yellow lines of the shrubs in front of me start to shift, very subtly, and my brain slowly begins to make sense of what I’ve been staring at all along.

  I gasp when I finally see it.

  It’s a monster.

  A humongous African python: as tall as a man and about half as thick.

  The snake is undulating on the desert floor, rubbing its powerful, sleekly muscled body against the shrubs in slow, mesmerizing circles. I gape at it with a mixture of wonder and horror. It’s a beautiful thing, in its way, delicately patterned in olive and chestnut and yellow swirls, although now that I look closer, the large scales seem strangely dull, reflecting almost no sunlight at all.

  “Look,” my mom says. “It’s shedding its skin. The old one has become too small and limiting; it’s time for it to show its true colors.”

  I watch, fascinated, as the snake begins to turn and twist and slowly slide out of its skin. The moment it pulls loose, the old scales look completely different, gray and ugly and dead, but the new skin that emerges is not, as I expected, glistening with color and health.

  Instead it looks kind of… doughy. Pink and soft. Almost like a …

  I scream out loud.

  It’s not a snake emerging from the old skin! It’s a human being, a girl, her eyes shut tight against the sunlight and her mouth gaping in a desperate…

  *

  When I wake up, I’m so disorientated that it takes me a few seconds to remember where I am. Then I see the winged snakes on the ceiling, neatly arranged in circles, eating their own tails, and I sigh.

  Of course.

  I’m in Ingrid’s house and my mother is dead.

  She died years ago.

  My mother is dead, but I’m okay now. I’ve got friends and plans and a life of my own.

  I rub a hand across my face, trying to erase the disturbing dream, then I reach for my phone. For some reason it doesn’t recognize my thumbprint this morning, so I impatiently type in my code. When the screen lights up, I frown.

  Five hundred and twelve notifications. Holy Moses.

  I squint, try to get my brain to focus. Something really major must’ve happened overnight; social media only gets this crazy when someone famous dies or someone at school does something they’ll never live down. I scroll quickly to get to the good stuff, my mind still foggy and thick with sleep, but there’s nothing out of the ordinary: just an endless collection of highly filtered photos and unfunny tweets and boring stories and random texts. I glance at the time, hoping it’s not—

  No.

  I sit up immediately, my head now crystal clear and my heart beating rapidly.

  It’s Saturday, August 19.

  I’ve blanked out four whole days.

  Again.

  I get out of bed, a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. In that dark, hazy time after my mom’s death, I would sometimes lose days, even weeks, with no clear recollection of where the time had gone, waking up confused and dizzy and completely blank, like an amnesia victim in a telenovela.

  But that hasn’t happened in years; I thought I’d put it behind me forever. My insides grow cold as I remember how bereft I felt in those days, how utterly lost.

  No. Not again.

  I clench my jaw, ball my fists.

  I have no idea what’s been happening to me lately, but I refuse to turn into that grief-stricken, lonely, miserable weirdo again. I’d rather freaking die.

  And so I push down the fear the same way I used to push down my sadness, and I force myself to go through the motions of a normal morning.

  Bathroom. Shower. Teeth and skin. Hair and clothes and make-up.

  After a while, the reassuring everyday routine calms me down to the point where I’m almost ready to face the day, but before I leave my bedroom, I pause in front of the mirror to repeat my old mantra one last time.

  I am not crazy. I am a normal girl going through a difficult time. But I am strong enough to handle this. I can handle this.

  The girl in the mirror looks so confident that I almost believe her.

  When I’m dressed and ready, I begin to search the house, hoping that Gunn may still be around. If this is really starting to happen again, he is the only person I trust to help me deal with it.

  But as I’m making my way down the stairs, I see that someone is waiting in the entrance hall. A girl from school: Chloe Fischer.

  Of all people.

  I’m so surprised that I freeze in my tracks, looking from her to the front door and then back again, like some kind of idiot.

  “Hi,” she says. “Your grandmother let me in.”

  “She’s not my grandmother.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  There’s a long, awkward pause as we both just stand there, looking at each other.

  “So.” Chloe frowns, as if she’s as puzzled by her being here as I am. “I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Okay.” I finally remember my manners, motioning her toward the kitchen. “Would you like a Coke or something?”

  “No, I’m fine.” She shrugs. “Maybe some water. I won’t stay long.”

  Alright then.

  Now, Chloe and I have been in the same homeroom class since the first day of high school, and in all that time we’ve maybe spoken to each other twice. Not because I never tried, you understand, but because Chloe is the kind of person who will look you up and down when you shyly greet her on your first day of school and tell you: “Shut up and never talk to me again, new girl.” True story.

  Anyway, you know the type. If Netflix is anything to go by, there are girls like her in every school in this country: cheerleading types who prance around in a glittering flash of long hair and white teeth and sleek limbs and expensive make-up, and whose so-called “popularity” entirely depends on Stalin-like intimidation techniques and games of social exclusion.

  Yup. One of those.

  When we get to the kitchen, I put a glass of water down in front of her, barely concealing my impatience. Normally I’d be intrigued by a visit from “the Princess” (because of course that’s her nickname), but I have too much on my mind to be interested in mean-girl politics right now.

  She takes a slow, careful sip, as if she’s afraid of being poisoned.

  “So,” I try to hurry her up, “you wanted to talk to me?”

  She twirls a strand of impossibly glossy hair between her fingers. “I heard you got suspended again and I’d like to know what happened.”

  “Like you don’t already know?”

  Jonathan Pendragon and Chloe have had an on-again, off-again thing for years, and as one half of our school’s “golden couple” (no really, that’s what they’re called) there’s no way she won’t already have heard every humiliating little detail about what Ty did to me.

  “I’d just like to hear your side of the story.” She tilts her head to the side, her entire body radiating sympathy.

  “Why do you care?” I ask, not falling for her act for one second. When she doesn’t answer, I wave an impatient hand. “Why are you really here, Chloe? What do you want?”

  “Who said I wanted anything?”

  “Oh, please. You pointedly ignore me for three whole years and now you suddenly want to know what’s going on in my life?”

  Her perfect eyebrows shoot up in surprise. “I never knew you cared either way.”

  “Cared about what?”

  “About me ignoring you.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then why are you being such a bitch?”

  It’s my turn to raise my eyebrows. “That’s r
ich coming from you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you’re the biggest bitch I’ve ever met in my life.”

  “What did you just say?”

  “You heard me.”

  For a few seconds we glare at each other. And then she cracks up laughing, a real laugh, rich and bubbly. “Well,” she says when she finally sobers, “it takes one to know one, I guess.” She gives me a sly little smile. “At least I don’t have green hair.”

  “I don’t have green hair,” I say, irritated. “It’s a reaction to the chemicals in the town pool. Why is that so difficult for people to understand?”

  “Whatever.” She fakes a yawn. “So, are you going to tell me what happened or not?”

  “Not before you tell me what you’re doing here.”

  “I’m here because we have a problem.”

  “We have a problem?”

  “I know, right?” she says, smiling faintly. “What is the world coming to?” Then she opens her bag, takes out her phone. “Here—have a look at this.” She taps the screen a few times and hands it to me.

  I take it reluctantly, not sure I like where this is going. When I glance down and see that it’s porn, I immediately hand back the phone.

  “Nope. Not interested.”

  “Just look at it.” Something in her voice makes me look at the phone again. Only to do a double take when I see another picture of myself in a sexually suggestive pose.

  “What the hell?” This time the photo is professionally done: my head is so seamlessly pasted onto the body of a naked model that even I could believe that it’s real. “I’m going to kill Ty!”

  “Calm down. Ty had nothing to do with this.”

  “I know it’s Ty! He did it before when Jonathan …” I suddenly realize that I’m talking to half of our school’s golden couple. I give her a suspicious look. “Did Jonathan send you?”

  “Oh, please. Even you must know we broke up after Cayden’s party.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  She leans over, swipes the screen a few times. “I’m here because of this.”

  This time the picture is of Chloe. Her photo is a lot less sexually explicit than mine: you can see her naked breasts, but her limbs are arranged in such a way that you can’t see much else. “There are pictures of Amanda too. And Taylor Wilson, and Maggie.”