Voices of Dragons

by Carrie Vaughn

  “I may be out all night,” he said, not sounding concerned or annoyed. He sounded like it was just part of the job. “There’s got to be a thousand reporters in town, and they’re getting unruly. We’ve called everyone in to keep an eye on things.”

  “Can you come home for dinner?”

  “I’ll probably grab something on the go. I may meet Mom if she isn’t swamped. We’ll call to check in later.”

  “Dad—” She didn’t like the way her voice whined, making her sound like a little kid. “What’s going to happen? I’ve been watching the news. Everyone says it’s bad. How bad is it?”

  “I don’t know. All this press is making it worse, making people panic. I’m hoping it’ll blow over. If we don’t panic, it’ll blow over. How does that sound?”

  “Okay, I guess.” But he hadn’t sounded confident. He was just saying it to make her feel better.

  “Kay, I have to get going. Be good, all right?”

  Not “be careful.” That was something. It had to mean things weren’t so bad.

  Then Mom called. “I just talked to Dad,” Kay said.

  “Me too.” She sounded better, as if as long as they were all still in contact, all was well with the world. “We’re going to grab dinner at the Alpine before he goes back to work. Will you be okay? Can you find something to eat?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  Jon stopped by for a hug and kiss and asked for news.

  “My parents are doing okay. If they don’t sound worried, things are okay, right?”

  “Yeah. Probably.” Then his phone rang. It was his mom, wanting to know where he was. “I guess I need to get going. Call me if anything happens, okay?”

  “Assuming I can get my mom off the phone.” They smiled, and even Kay started feeling better. They kissed again, and she almost asked Jon to stay. He lingered, as if he were going to ask if he could. But he squeezed her hand and left, to go home and reassure his mother, and it was too late for Kay to change her mind.

  She wanted to ease into a relationship, not plunge in like Tam wanted her to. They should be together because they wanted to, not because they thought they were supposed to. But did she and Jon want two different things? If they did, then what?

  Kay watched the news all evening, trying to do homework and failing. It was hard to keep her mind on algebra when an endless parade of politicians and commentators on TV went back and forth between predicting disaster and reassuring that everything was fine. That was stupid, because nothing was fine. She could feel the balance of the world changing around her. Maybe because she was part of it. The person who rode the dragon. She kept expecting to see pictures of her and Artegal flashing on the screen. So far, that hadn’t been made public.

  But she and Artegal were safe for now, and as long as nothing else happened, they’d stay safe.

  Around ten, her mother called her and told her to get to bed. Or at least think about going to bed and getting some sleep. Kay was long past the age of being told to go to bed. But since things were quiet for the moment, she agreed. The morning would come more quickly if she slept through it all. Assuming she could get to sleep.

  Sirens woke Kay. Lots of them: fire engines, police cars, ambulances. It sounded like every emergency vehicle in the county was on the road and speeding toward a disaster.

  The air-raid sirens were also howling.

  She sat up in bed enough to push aside the curtain over the window. She didn’t see anything, except a passing blue-and-red flashing light, quickly vanishing down the road. Her window faced away from downtown Silver River, where the police car was headed. She couldn’t see anything else.

  She padded into the living room and turned on the TV. Two in the morning, and the Great Falls, Montana news was broadcasting. Letters in the corner announced LIVE.

  A pretty but flustered woman reporter was glaring at the camera and delivering her line: “…fire department primarily concerned with containing the blaze so it doesn’t spread to other buildings…”

  The camera shifted to a taped segment. She recognized the fire chief, his middle-aged face red with exertion, shining with sweat and smudged with soot. He was wearing a helmet and his big coat. Fire trucks made up the backdrop of the scene. Except for flashing emergency lights, the street was dark and nothing else was visible. Nothing gave a clue as to his location.

  Where are they? Kay’s heart pounded. What was in the process of burning to the ground?

  The fire chief said, “We’re just lucky we don’t have strong winds tonight. We could have lost the whole town in minutes. Right now we have a good chance of containing the fire by morning.”

  Back to the reporter: “Chief Perez would not give details, but he said there have been several serious injuries, and people have been transported to area hospitals. Once again, I’m in downtown Silver River, where several government administration offices are burning…”

  Her heart nearly gave out. At least it was night. The buildings would have been empty. Her parents wouldn’t have been working—except, because of the trouble on the border, they hadn’t stopped working.

  She retrieved her cell phone from her bedroom and dialed her mother. The call rolled to voice mail.

  “Crap,” she muttered. Everyone in town who had any vaguely official position was probably either at the scene or on the phone. She’d have to keep watching the news and get the one-sided filtered version of what was happening. Or not.

  She changed quickly, pulling on jeans, a sweatshirt, and her hiking boots. She called her mother again, then her father. Neither was picking up, which shouldn’t have surprised her. No doubt they were way too busy to talk to her. And she knew better than to head down there and get in the way.

  But she wouldn’t get close enough to get in the way. Just close enough to flag down someone who could tell her what was going on. May as well—she certainly wasn’t going to get any more sleep tonight, and she didn’t want to wait until morning to get more news. Mom and Dad may yell at her for leaving the house, but that was all they could do. She’d take it as a fair trade for finding out what was happening. She got in her Jeep and set off.

  An orange glow sat over the entire town, flames reflected into the night sky, billowing and flickering. Kay had seen wildfires in the distance that looked and sounded like this, a constant crackling of wood. The air smelled of heavy soot and ash. But this wasn’t a distant wildfire; this was right in the middle of Silver River. She had to squint into the light.

  Six blocks away, the streets were barricaded, police cars blocking access. The flashing blue-and-red lights hurt her eyes. She felt only half awake, muzzy-headed, as if maybe she were still in bed dreaming. Kay pulled over and left the car, moving closer to the disaster on foot. She wasn’t the only one. A crowd had gathered outside the police barricade, people huddled together, murmuring questions: What was going on?

  “Kay! Hold up!” someone called out to stop her. She recognized the voice—one of her father’s deputies, at the open door of his car across the street. It shook her awake. Someone to answer questions, that was all she wanted. Deputy Kalbach could answer her questions.

  “What’s going on? What’s burning? I can’t get ahold of my folks. Have you seen them? Are they around anywhere? Where’s my dad?” She hadn’t thought she’d have sounded so panicked. This must have been what it felt like to be in an earthquake, when all the phone lines went down and you didn’t know if anyone was alive or dead.

  When he crossed over to her and took hold of her arm, she saw it as a bad sign. There was too much tension in the grip. She didn’t think her stomach could drop any farther.

  He touched the radio at his shoulder. “Yeah, I got Kay Wyatt here. What should I do?” She couldn’t make out the reply that scratched back at him, but he didn’t look happy about it. “Okay, got it.” He turned off the receiver and pulled her toward the car. “Come on.”

  She dug in her heels. “Wait a minute, where are we going? What’s happening?”

 
“Your folks are at the hospital. I’m taking you there now.”

  At that, her mind stopped working. She let the deputy push her into the passenger seat of his patrol car. They drove, lights flashing and siren blaring. People got out of the way instantly. It was eerie.

  “What happened?” she finally managed to ask, when her mouth started working again. “Are they hurt?”

  “It’s your dad,” he said, his face a grim mask. “He got to the scene first. The night dispatcher was on duty, and he went in to make sure she got out. It was pretty bad.”

  Kay leaned her head on her hand and tried not to imagine what “pretty bad” meant. Wait ’til you see before you start crying.

  “Alice—your mom—rode in the ambulance with them.”

  “Why didn’t anyone call me?” Her voice was hoarse and unreliable.

  “This happened twenty minutes ago! We’ve barely been able to think!” His expression twisted, and Kay realized with a shock that he was holding back tears, too. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I don’t mean to yell. It’s just we’re all shaken.”

  Her father’s deputies were honorary uncles and aunts to her. They looked after her. They were anchors. Seeing Deputy Kalbach like this—face twisted, shoulders slouching—Kay almost burst into tears right there.

  Instead, she hugged herself and stared ahead, trying to be numb.

  The hospital wasn’t in town, but a few miles out on the highway. It wasn’t big, just an emergency room and a few clinics to serve the outlying areas. For anything serious, people went to Great Falls.

  She tried to reassure herself that if this were serious, they’d have airlifted him to Great Falls. So he had to be okay.

  With the police siren heralding them, Kalbach brought them right to the emergency room doors. Kay rushed inside before the deputy had climbed out of the car.

  The place was crowded. There’d obviously been more people injured than her father. A couple of men wearing blackened firefighter’s coats lay on beds sucking oxygen through masks. Walking wounded were being led to backrooms by orderlies. A reporter with a cameraman was being herded out none too politely. Panicked, Kay looked around for a familiar figure on a bed, for her mother standing watch, and couldn’t find them.

  The deputy pushed past her and tapped a white-jacketed nurse on the shoulder. “Sheriff Wyatt, where is he?”

  The woman pointed to a corridor. Kay rushed past them both.

  Two steps into the hallway, she stopped, froze. Her mother sat in a plastic chair, part of a row of them lining the wall. Her elbows rested on her knees; her hands covered her face.

  A doctor, a woman in a white coat, closed the door of a room a few paces down. She kneeled by Kay’s mother, touched her shoulder, and said a few words. Mom didn’t respond. When the doctor stood to return to the emergency room, she spotted Kay, and her lips pressed in a line.

  Kay wanted the world to stop right there, she wanted to run away, and she wanted not to have to live the next five minutes of her life. The universe could end and she wouldn’t care, as long as it prevented the next five minutes.

  The doctor approached her. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m Kay Wyatt. My dad—”

  The doctor looked back at Mom, seemed to debate with herself. Then she lowered her head. Her smile was probably meant to be comforting, sympathetic. But it was just sad.

  “I’m very sorry. We did everything we could.”

  Just make everything stop, Kay begged. She was still asleep. Her brain couldn’t hear the words.

  The doctor touched her arm, then walked away. Kay managed to sit next to her mother, though her limbs tingled when she moved. Like her body wasn’t hers, or she was leaving it. Still, her mother didn’t react.

  Kay eyed the door that the doctor had closed. A door to a room where a body lay on a bed. She said, “Can I see him?”

  Her mother looked up at that. Her face was red; her eyes were red, swollen. Her hair was mussed. A streak of black soot smudged her cheek, and she smelled like smoke. She didn’t look at all like Mom. She only stared at Kay, expressionless.

  Kay started again, pointing at the door. “Can I—”

  “Oh, baby, you don’t want to see him, not like that, you don’t—” She broke down, folding against Kay like her bones had disappeared, pressing her face to her shoulder. Numb, startled, Kay held her while she cried wrenching sobs.

  If Kay had been about to cry herself, she was now shocked to stillness.

  After a long while, her mother stilled, but Kay suspected it was exhaustion and lack of oxygen rather than spent grief that made her stop crying. She remained curled up in Kay’s arms like a child, sniffing and clinging desperately to Kay’s shirt. Don’t go, the gesture said.

  At one point, she noticed Deputy Kalbach looking at them. Then he bowed his head and walked away.

  Kay didn’t know how long the two of them stayed frozen in that tableau. She was aware of Kalbach blocking the end of the corridor and of a reporter shouting at him. Then the doctor, the same who had told her about Dad, sat by her and whispered close to her ear—so her mother wouldn’t hear.

  “Kay, I know this is very difficult. But can you take her home? We’re going to have to move him soon.” She nodded to Mom. Translation: Get her out of here before they pull the body out of the room.

  Kay almost shook her head. No, of course she couldn’t take Mom home. Mom was the grown-up, Kay was the kid—she wasn’t expected to do anything. But Mom wasn’t doing anything right now. Her eyes weren’t even seeing.

  So Kay nodded, taking her mother’s arm. “Mom, we have to go. Come on.”

  Mom had aged years in moments. She walked hunched and wouldn’t let go of Kay, who kept her own mind numb and focused on the task at hand.

  With one arm around Mom’s shoulder, she approached Deputy Kalbach and touched his shoulder. “Can you take us home?”

  The young deputy nodded quickly.

  Then came the gauntlet.

  More reporters had arrived. More injured had been brought in, and their families and colleagues filled the emergency room. Word spread. It couldn’t help but spread in a town like this when something terrible happened. People would have to take only one look at them, Kay with her face a rock and Mom huddled in her arms, to guess what had happened. She recognized faces, heard her mother’s name called out, but she didn’t react, didn’t respond. A flash went off, someone taking a picture. Deputy Kalbach was their shield. Kay felt his arm across her back, pulling them both into the sphere of his protection. His other arm stretched out before them, cutting across her vision. It deflected all comers. Reporters shouted at her. She didn’t hear a word of what they said. Only Kalbach’s voice saying, “Move aside. Please, get out of the way. Clear the way.”

  The journey to the door outside was chaos. A blur. Kay kept her gaze forward and absorbed none of it.

  She sat with her mother in the back of the patrol car. Mom still leaned on her, still seeming unable to hold herself up.

  Kalbach kept looking at them in the rearview mirror. He started, “Kay, I—”

  “Don’t say anything,” she said, closing her eyes. If he said anything, she’d break, and she couldn’t break. She had to take Mom home.

  The air still smelled like smoke, and the sky over Silver River still glowed orange, fires still burning. She remembered the news report: The fire could have swallowed the town in seconds.

  She asked the deputy, “Do they know how the fire started?”

  Her mother stirred in her arms, straightening, turning her tear-and-soot-streaked face to the window.

  “It was them,” Mom said, nodding in the direction of the border.

  15

  The dragons circled. The next morning, three of them flew just over the river, banking sharply when it looked like they might pass into human territory. The sight of them made people cringe, as if they wanted nothing more than to run and hide. Lock themselves behind castle walls. Like mice in view of soaring hawks.
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  Kay watched the news on TV. Several people, mostly firefighters, had been injured in the blaze that destroyed two of the four buildings in the administration complex. Only one was killed. Sheriff Jack Wyatt’s face appeared in newspapers and on TV screens all over the world, and the eulogies poured forth from people who never even knew him. It was because he was a cop. They could use words like hero without knowing anything about him.

  The president went on TV to declare the attack an act of aggression. Several of the more shrill pundits called it war. These were the same ones who questioned why humanity had ever agreed to the Silver River Treaty in the first place, and argued that an international coalition should launch an assault to reclaim the vast territories so blithely handed over all those years ago. We could have wiped the dragons out then, they said, and we can do it now. The time of the dragons is over, was over millennia ago. This is the age of humans.

  Kay watched the dragons from the living room window. She felt like her brain hadn’t turned back on yet. She couldn’t think of Artegal at all. She kept wondering what happened next, and her mind kept going blank.

  Mom had taken sleeping pills. She was still asleep, curled up on her bed in her clothes. Kay had taken her shoes off, put a quilt over her. She didn’t know what else to do. The phone had been ringing all morning. She finally turned it off. And her cell phone and her mother’s.

  A trio of news vans were parked on the street outside, and a crowd of reporters milled around them, everyone wanting interviews with the family of the first person killed by dragons since the treaty. Sixty years of tension stretched to the breaking point.

  She scrolled through the missed calls on her cell phone and on the house phone, wondering who she should talk to and what she would say. She didn’t know how long her mother was going to be out of it, and she didn’t want to be in charge. She wanted to talk to her dad. Her parents may have been workaholics, both of them, always out doing their jobs. But they always answered their phones when she called. Her father had always taken her calls. She almost called him now, just to see. Maybe it had all been a mistake.