The Last Dragon Chronicles #5: Dark Fire

by Chris d'Lacey

  “If the rooms are available we may stay longer,” said Tam. “It rather depends how things pan out. I’m on a working vacation. Lucy’s come along to see the sights and generally explore the area with me. I’m a historical writer, researching a piece about dragons.”

  “Well, you’ve come to the right place,” said Hannah. “There’s an enormous amount of history attached to Glissington. You know about the legend, I assume?”

  “Is the dragon meant to be gray?” Lucy had picked up a leaflet that gave some history of the guesthouse. Despite what had happened to Gwillan and Grace, a gray dragon didn’t seem right to her. Green. Ice blue. Red. Gold. Definitely. But gray? She was prepared to debunk the myth there and then until Hannah said, with brusque authority:

  “The color of wet clay — or so I’m told.” Her closed mouth formed a tight-lipped smile. “We’ve got more leaflets over there on the sideboard. And Clive, my husband, would be happy to fill you in with anything you don’t already know. He’s got every book ever written on Glissington. He’s in the guest lounge watching the television, I think. He ought to be outside harvesting some food — we grow our own organic vegetables here — but there’s been some news about this mist thing in the Arctic and he can’t seem to drag himself away. Clive?” She marched across the hall and pushed open a door. What sounded like a news broadcast filtered out. “Clive, come and meet our new guests.” She beckoned Tam and Lucy over.

  “Welcome to the Old Gray Dragon,” Clive said, wiping his hand across the seat of his jeans before holding it out for Tam to shake. He looked a little organic himself, Lucy thought, with Medusa black hair cascading onto his blousy white shirt. “Been following this?” he asked. His boyish blue eyes were full of wonder. “It’s absolutely astonishing.”

  “What’s happened?” said Lucy. “Has the mist gone?”

  Clive shook his head. “Late last night there were reports of seismic disturbances in the high Arctic. Really got the ships on full alert. Around ten this morning, an enormous island of ice floated out of the mist. Since then, several more have appeared in different geographical locations. The mist has receded, but it’s still covering the central polar region — and they still can’t breach it.”

  “What have they found on the islands?” asked Tam.

  Please, let it be bears, thought Lucy.

  Clive chuckled at the question. “I don’t suppose they’ll let on until the military have been all over them. Hannah’s cousin is on one of the ships. It’s all very hush-hush, isn’t it, Han?”

  She clamped her hands together and spoke to Tam. “Let me show you to your rooms. You can sign in later, once you’re settled. We’re very relaxed about everything here. There’s only one other guest. An elderly lady, Ms. Gee. She’s been here for several weeks. She’s practically a resident.”

  Tam picked up his bag. “With all this talk about dragons I’m surprised you’re not putting people up in sleeping bags in the grounds.”

  “Yes, it’s very quiet,” Hannah said. “Almost ominously so. Do follow me.”

  As they recrossed the hall Lucy thought to ask, “What’s the name of your cat?”

  “Cat? We don’t have a cat,” Hannah replied.

  “Oh, but I saw one in the garden. Smoky-colored fur.”

  The rocketlike spectacles almost fizzed. “Really? Well, it wouldn’t be ours. Clive’s allergic to anything with fur. There’s a private house a little higher up the road. They have animals. It probably strayed down from there.”

  Turning swiftly, Hannah led them up a wide-angled staircase, beautifully carpeted in checkered beige. At the top she offered them a choice of rooms, but in the same breath decided that Lucy should have what she called “the rose.” It was obvious what she meant the moment they entered. The walls were papered a delicate shade of pink, and everything from the towels in the bathroom to the cushions on the chairs and the floral bedspread matched it. “Lovely view from here,” said Hannah, marching to the window and opening the shutters. “Right across the vale.”

  “Can you see the horse?” asked Tam, stopping by a fireplace as tall as his shoulder to examine a fist-sized lump of rock on the mantelpiece. It was the same grayish texture as the boulders they’d seen in the stream.

  “No, you’d have to climb the Tor for that,” said Hannah, stepping aside to let Lucy look out, “but it’s only fifteen minutes to the top from here, right out of our kitchen door.”

  “There!” Lucy suddenly sprang onto her toes. “What?” said Tam.

  She pointed through the window. “That cat I saw. It’s staring at me.”

  He came to her shoulder to see. But just like before, the animal had slunk away before he could catch sight of it.

  “It’s somewhere near that tree,” Lucy tutted, annoyed that she’d lost it again.

  “Well, it’s just a cat,” said Tam. Looking back at Hannah he asked, “Is it dead? The tree, I mean?”

  “Since the seventeenth century,” Hannah replied. “There’s a rather grisly story attached to it. A woman was hanged there.”

  “A woman?” Tam was shocked.

  “Was she a witch?” gulped Lucy.

  Hannah’s face became serious. “That depends on your definition of ‘witch.’ The woman lived by the laws of the natural world. She would certainly have believed in dragons.” She swung her gaze to the window. “People say we ought to have the tree cut down, but it adds a kind of mystique to the place. It hasn’t rotted in all this time. And who am I to uproot history?” She stepped forward, stared at the tree for a moment, then half-closed the shutters.

  Tam returned to the rock on the mantel. “What’s this?”

  “Part of the Glissington cairn,” said Hannah. “Clive will tell you —”

  “Yeah, we know about it,” Lucy cut in, smiling kindly to hide her irritation. She just wanted to be alone now to crash for a while. The countryside was tiring (and scary), she’d decided.

  But Hannah could read Lucy better than she thought. “People say it never existed,” she said, as if she felt the need to defend her private heritage. “But if you find the right stone — and this is one of them — you can feel the ancient vibrations from it. We encourage our guests to put it under their bed at night. It keeps you in touch with the spirit of the dragon.”

  “Cool,” said Lucy.

  Tam raised a warning eyebrow at her. “So, it’s just fifteen minutes from here, then, Hannah?”

  “To the top of the Tor, yes.”

  Tam slid his cell phone open and shut. “Excellent. Nothing like a brisk walk to work up an appetite.”

  “I’m not going up there now,” said Lucy. “Anyway, I need to phone home.”

  “You’ll get a better signal outside,” said Hannah.

  Touché. Lucy’s resistance failed.

  “I’ll go and change my shoes,” said Tam.

  Out of the back door, through a strangely untidy garden (rabbit hutches, ferrets, sacks of potatoes, an incongruous man-made water feature) and they were on Glissington Tor, just as Hannah had said. Nothing above them but a hump of grass. What had looked reasonably smooth from the road turned out to be the worst walk Lucy had ever experienced. It was like climbing a hill of golfer’s divots.

  “Oh, I hate this!” she exclaimed the fifth time she stumbled, narrowly missing yet another cow pie. “Some uncle you are! You’d better carry me, Farrell, if I twist an ankle!”

  He roared with laughter. “That’s actually quite witty.”

  And perhaps it was the auma of the ice bear within him, but as he helped her up he tugged a little too hard and she fell in so close that he had to put an arm around her waist to steady her. For a moment, their eyes met in something other than sparring mode.

  “Do I look windswept?” she said.

  He cleared a few strands of hair off her nose, loosened his hold, and backed away. “It’s safer if you stick to the path.”

  So it was that some ten minutes later they were standing on the summit where Lucy got her
second look at the horse. It was in her line of vision now, ready to gallop across Scuffenbury Hill. It seemed a lot closer than it actually was and made her think that if her step was large enough, she could probably mount it. That made her glance down, wary of what she might be standing on, disappointed that she didn’t really feel anything. No beating heart. No rumbling breath. No auma of dragon at all. The ground here was bare, scorched by bonfires. In those places where the odd rock jutted from the soil, visitors — pilgrims — had carved their names. How many times had people come here trying to raise the spirit of the dragon? She wondered. Maybe her time would be just one more. Perhaps there was no dragon here at all.

  As if he shared her disillusion, Tam checked his watch, grimaced into the wind, and said, “Come on. We’ll come back tomorrow, at dawn.”

  Dawn? she mouthed to his disappearing back. She spread her hands and appealed to the horse. Take me away from here.

  Great “vacation.”

  Thanks to her grumpiness, Lucy had forgotten to take her phone onto the Tor. But back at the guesthouse, she found a weak signal and managed to call home. She spoke for a few crackly minutes to Zanna, feeling for once that they were sharing the crisis like real sisters. There was no change in Liz’s condition. Stable, but sleeping. Everything was calm.

  After she’d showered, Tam took her out for something to eat. They spent the evening in a small country pub. Lucy couldn’t finish her “hunter’s pie” and was ready to go long before Tam was ordering dessert. They drove back to the Old Gray Dragon in silence.

  Before bidding her good night, Tam reminded her exactly where he was.

  “I know,” she said, chewing her lip, stopping him from having to say he’d hear her calls if anything was wrong or she could rap the wall if she needed him. She stepped into her room unable to look at him. She pressed back against the closing door, felt for the key, and turned it.

  She thought about another shower — maybe a bath. There were plenty of rose-scented oils to choose from. She thought about TV. She thought about cocoa. Most of all, she thought about her mom. Before she got into bed, she settled on her knees and tried to pray. She had gotten as far as “deliver us from evil” before she broke down and sobbed, burying her face chin deep into the blanket so that Tam would not hear her; she knew he’d be listening.

  And then, from across the room, came the most comforting sound ever.

  Hrrr.

  Lucy gasped and hurried to her bag. Gwendolen! Poor Gwendolen! Stuck in there all day.

  Fortunately, the little dragon didn’t seem to mind. After investigating every aspect of the room (she liked the cairn rock; it did have a faint dragon auma, she said) she fluttered to the bedside table where she always sat at home and settled down under the pretty lace lampshade.

  Lucy leaned over and kissed her. Now she could sleep in peace.

  In bed, she did as she always did: checked her cell phone for messages. There were none, but it occurred to her she’d forgotten to e-mail Melanie before she left home. No problem. She could send a message through the phone instead.

  MEL, she tapped in. GOOD 2 HEAR FRM U. SOZ 4 DELAY. GOT TIED UP. WON’T BELIEVE WHERE I AM. She paused to think. If she was going to pretend that she’d been “tied up,” she might as well tell the whole white lie. She deleted “I am.” I’VE BEEN, she wrote. B&B ON THE SIDE OF A DRAGON HILL!! HRRR! CAN’T BLAB NOW. WILL TELL ALL SOON. MISS U. STAY COOL. LUV2GLADE. LUCY XXX

  She pressed SEND. Almost immediately a FAILED message came up. One more thing to hate about the countryside: signal-blocking hills. “Can you boost this?” she said to Gwendolen.

  The little IT dragon thought about it. Hrrr-r-rr, she chattered.

  “Plug in and bounce it off the listener at home?”

  Hrrr!

  Lucy shrugged. “If you say so.” She opened up one of the IT ports so that Gwendolen could push her isoscele into it. On a nod from the dragon, Lucy pressed SEND again. There was a flash of blue light and the scales around Gwendolen’s tail began to rattle. Streams of green data poured down the screen, but to Lucy’s satisfaction it came back with a SENT response.

  “Smart,” she exclaimed, and tossed the phone aside. “You’re a genius. Night-night.” She blew Gwendolen a kiss and slipped under the covers. Gwendolen, looking proud of her achievement, rose up and flicked off the light, plunging the room into near darkness.

  Despite the unfamiliar shadows and the sounds of snoring (Tam, she guessed, not the dragon) Lucy dropped off to sleep very quickly. As her waking thoughts passed into fantasy and dreams, she saw herself on Glissington Tor again. Across the vale, the white horse rippled like a sail, but still it did not rise from the hillside. “What do I have to do to wake you?” Lucy asked it. “Tell me what I have to do.”

  As her dream state played with methods of communication, so she imagined the old gray dragon rising from the hill and plugging its isoscele into the earth in the same way that Gwendolen had worked the phone. Swathes of energy fizzed across the vale, lighting the ley lines electric blue. Storm clouds gathered. Rain hammered down over Scuffenbury Hill. The white horse woke up and reared into the storm, neighing at twelve dragons circling overhead. Then, bizarrely, Gwillan appeared, sitting in the branches of the hanging tree like some kind of haunted owl. Lucy felt herself twitch. He looked different. Undead. Like some kind of zombie. He was gray-scaled, hollow-eyed, and struggling to move, as though he were controlled by some outside force. Frightened, she tried to blank him out. But he peered deep inside her, into her dreams. To her horror he pricked his ears like a bat. No, not a bat. Like Grace. Like a listener.

  Her hands clutched the blanket and drew it around her. Suddenly, something landed with a thud on the bed. Its presence was enough to force her eyes open.

  Next to where she’d left her phone, the smoky gray cat was holding something dark and limp in its mouth. It took a pace forward and dropped the kill on her chest.

  A mutant raven — with Gwillan’s face.

  At that point, Lucy screamed.

  26 AN ENCOUNTER WITH MS. GEE

  Lucy!” Tam was outside her door in seconds. The aged oak panels shuddered as he beat them. She saw the handle rattle. He called her name again.

  “What is it? What’s the matter? I thought I heard a scream?” Hannah’s wiry voice joined in.

  “Stand back!” Tam shouted. “I’m going to break it down.”

  “What? No! We have spare keys for all the rooms. Mr. Farrell? N —!”

  At that moment, Lucy opened the door.

  Tam rushed in and gathered her into his arms. “You all right? What happened?” His eyes scanned the room. Nothing. Just the blanket trailing across the floor.

  Clive came up the stairs, tying a bathrobe. “What is it? What’s happened?”

  “It would appear that Lucy’s had a nightmare,” Hannah said, looking rather coldly at Tam. She almost pinched Lucy’s arm. “Is that right?”

  “Um,” Lucy grunted, into Tam’s shoulder.

  Hannah folded her arms. “A little extreme, your reaction, don’t you think?” She drew Tam’s eyeline back toward the door. “I do understand that bad dreams are very frightening, but they’re hardly worth damaging hinges for. And please be aware that we do have another guest in the house. Ms. Gee is in the room right above this.” She pointed to the ceiling. “Drama over, I think. We’ll leave you to comfort Lucy in peace.” She turned and marched out, dragging a meek-looking Clive away with her.

  Tam closed the door, guided Lucy to a chair, and sat her down.

  “I want to call home,” she said.

  He nodded, but didn’t reach for his phone. “What did you see?”

  “It wasn’t a dream.”

  She waited for his gaze to scour the room.

  “The cat came,” she said. “With a dead raven. It was horrible. It dropped it on top of me.”

  “On the bedspread?”

  “Um.”

  He examined it for bloodstains or feathers or cat hairs.

/>   “It was here,” she said, suspecting he would find no trace. “And there’s something wrong with Gwillan. He was in my head, reading me, like a listener. Something’s happened. We’ve got to call David.”

  She stood up and paced around, looking for her phone.

  “Whoa, whoa, wait.” Tam caught her arm. “Speak to him for sure, but he won’t come, Lucy. He won’t leave the house, not after what happened to your mom. Besides, if there was something going down in the Crescent, he’d know about it, wouldn’t he? Why don’t we ask Gwendolen what she saw? If the cat was here, she couldn’t have missed it.”

  Lucy glanced toward the bedside table. Gwendolen, who’d caught the gist of Tam’s words, shrugged apologetically and hurred to say she’d been drowsy and hadn’t seen anything much, just Lucy tossing and turning a bit — the way she did sometimes at home.

  The girl sank miserably onto the bed. “But it was so real,” she insisted, slapping the bedspread. “It must use magicks to cloak itself when it moves about. And why would it bring me a raven?”

  Tam rested two fingers on her shoulder and rocked her back and forth. “Look, why don’t you get back into bed and I’ll sit in the chair and keep watch.”

  “No way,” she said, pulling the robe closed at the neck. “I’m not having you in my room. Me and Gwendolen can look after ourselves.”

  He backed away, raising his hands. “OK. But this time you leave your door unlocked. Is that fair?”

  She gave a reluctant nod.

  “Good.” He stepped sideways and checked the window (closed and locked), the old fireplace (a possible point of entry, but where were the sooty prints?), and the bathroom (barring one small spider, empty). By the time he’d finished Lucy was sitting in bed with her knees drawn up. “Can I get you anything?” he asked.

  “Phone,” she muttered. It had fallen to the floor when she’d dragged the bedspread over her again.

  He lobbed it onto the bed. “Call David,” he said, “if it will make you feel better.”

  She toyed with the phone and put it aside. What could David say that Tam hadn’t? She slid down as if a ghost had tugged her ankles, soaking herself in the warmth and security of compacted polyester and a goose feather pillow. “Turn off the light when you go out — please.”