There was no spot on the entire surface that was free of carvings. Where she stood—about where her grandfather had been buried, near the center of the plateau—was only the halfway point in a relentless story of death, carved in a language she didn’t need to read to understand.
She walked in every direction, skittered along the perimeter of the formation. It was all the same. Swirl after swirl, whorl after whorl, name after name. Some parts of the plateau were raised with bony ridges—the carbonized remains, she supposed, of a carcass too quickly disposed of. One or more funerals had doubtless suffered interruption.
How many in all?
Jennifer remembered the rough size of her grandfather’s grave markings. They had taken up space roughly equal to a large desktop. By that reckoning, she estimated the small, tenyard radius around her contained several hundred markers. She drifted queasily on her wings, slowly expanding the radius.
Hundreds…thousands…tens of thousands…hundreds of thousands…
Gasping increasingly shorter breaths, Jennifer suddenly realized she had always counted on finding someone: maybe another beaststalker trapped at Pinegrove or Catherine (not Nakia!) Brandfire or some weredragon at the farm or in this world. She had assumed there would be help somewhere.
She had thought she couldn’t possibly be alone.
Finally, on the last patch of flat rock she could find, she landed in front of carvings of a different kind. These were not deep swirls embedded in once molten rock. They were scratches, hastily made in English, by a last author.
There is no one else left, they began. Jennifer couldn’t hold back a whimper, but she read on.
There is no one else left. I am the last. All of the others have died.
Those who just died, at our final stand not far from here, count in the dozens. I will name them. No one will be left to name me. It is enough to have been their loyal friend.
Matthew and Melinda Hotwing.
Grace Ann Coals.
Ned Brownfoot.
Stephen and Atheen Whisperwind.
Crawford and Caroline Scales, and their brave young son Jonathan.
The list went on, but she couldn’t bear to read anymore. Falling to her knees, she collapsed upon her father’s name and began to cry.
She had no idea how long she lay there—a few seconds, several minutes, even hours. What did it matter? Lying on her belly and sobbing, she only wanted to die.
The noises she had heard before—the shrieks from the lakeside—gently entered her consciousness. They had found her. They were closing in, she had no doubt. Maybe a minute left before the end.
There was no place else to go.
Her tear-filled gaze went up to the crescent moon. She cursed it under her breath. So much pain had come into her life since she had discovered its power.
She released herself from dragon form, for what she knew would be the last time. Back in the shape of a fifteen-year-old girl, she felt around with her hands for a sharp fragment of stone. Lifting a small, jagged rock in her hand, she thought wistfully of her beautiful daggers. She had lost them, in that other world. She had lost everything.
Holding the stone firmly in her right hand, she held out her left wrist. She flexed her fingers and watched the blue veins shudder under her starlit skin.
I miss you so much, Mom. You, too, Dad.
The noises in the forest were closer. She could make out movement in a few of the taller trees. They would be upon her in seconds.
She pressed the edge against the skin, saw some blood seep out…and then abruptly stopped. Gritting her teeth, she removed the rock from her wrist and stood up. Not like that, she promised herself. I won’t do it for them.
“Come on!” she screamed out to her predators in the dark. The stone felt fierce in her hand. “Come on!”
She did not see the attack come from behind.
There were three of them that took the first leap together—the bravest of the creatures that faced this intruder.
They were the first to die.
Jennifer felt the shadow ripple over her—she could tell it had wings—and then heard three simultaneous crackles of electricity. She whipped around in time to see the follow-through of an enormous, triple-pronged tail as it sent a trio of burning corpses sailing back into the shadowy forest.
The newcomer descended to the plateau next to Jennifer and looked at her with a mixture of alarm and wonder. She looked back with nothing but an open mouth. Can anything possibly be this shape anymore? she wondered.
“Let’s go!” the dragon shouted at her, offering its back. “Get on!”
Suddenly, the voice registered in her memory. She took in the dark scales, the golden pattern on the underside of the wings…and the triple-pronged tail that had once viciously knocked her unconscious, back in a happier, friendlier Crescent Valley.
It can’t be!
“Girl!” The large dasher’s voice betrayed some familiar impatience as it rose above the gathering buzz of predators. “You need help! It’s available for about another two seconds. Get on or die!”
She got on.
They were up in the air in time to see hundreds of hog-sized spiders land upon the edges of the plateau, each shrieking a bitter siren. The surrounding moon elms shook with the force of larger legs pushing aside trunks, and eight-legged shapes of all sizes were leaping from treetop to closer treetop.
“Hang on hard!” he told her, just before going completely vertical.
She closed her eyes and dug her hands into the joints where wings met spine, as he rocketed straight up and left an angry fountain of darkness leaping and dancing beneath them. In no time, the plateau was a small stone far below, and they were safe in the embrace of the crescent moon.
Or at least one of them was.
“Level out! Level out!” Jennifer gasped, kicking the open air as her fingertips cramped with pain. “I can’t hold on!”
“Right,” he agreed, and in an instant the dragon was horizontal again, soaring among the few wisps of clouds that laced the autumn landscape.
Jennifer blinked a few times, trying to move her mind from the despair and fatalism she had just felt to the shock of what—who, actually—had just rescued her.
“Xavier Longtail!” she managed, which was still nearly enough to surprise him out of the sky.
“How did you know my name, girl?”
“You’re—I—we’ve met.” It was all Jennifer could think to say.
“Hmph. I can’t imagine how. You’re not a spider, are you?”
“No!”
“No, I didn’t think so.” There was a long pause as Xavier plainly thought of how he wanted to ask his next question. “I don’t suppose you would know anything about that roar I heard a while ago, would you? It sounded like it came from about where the old lake portal was. That’s what got me out of hiding and looking around.”
Jennifer bit her lip. She didn’t know why she hesitated. Maybe she wasn’t ready yet to trust again.
“You know about the lake portal, of course. Don’t you?”
She chewed her tongue.
“I could just tip over and let you go, girl, couldn’t I? You wouldn’t mind one bit.”
And just like that, he did.
She slid off his suddenly pitching body, shifted right into dragon shape, and spread her light blue and silver wings. From a few feet above her, she heard the strangest and most wonderful sound.
Xavier Longtail was laughing—not a cruel or cynical laugh, but a genuine laugh of surprise and joy. “I thought so!” he chuckled, and descended just enough to fly alongside her. “It seems I haven’t forgotten what one of us looks like, after all. Though I suppose it’s possible I’m dreaming. Or insane. My noodle”—he pointed to his skull with a crooked wing claw—“is not quite as sharp as it used to be.”
“How can you be here?” she asked.
“I might ask you the same question! But let’s start with your name.”
“I’m Jennifer Sc—
Um…” She realized he probably wouldn’t believe her if she told him her family name right away. How could he possibly accept that? He buried my father at the plateau.
“Jennifer Scum? I suppose I’ve heard worse. Still, you might consider taking your husband’s surname if you ever get married, modern times or no…”
“Just Jennifer will be fine. My family told me a lot about you.”
He shook his head sadly. “I just don’t see how that’s possible. I haven’t seen a dragon since…since…”
“Since you wrote that message down on the plateau.”
His golden eyes wavered. “Yes. Since I wrote that message on the plateau. More than twenty years ago.”
“But how—”
“Give us a moment,” he interrupted her. “We should find a place to land. Then we can talk.”
“Okay. Um, how do we find a place that’s safe?”
“He’ll take care of it.” Xavier’s head motioned to his left shoulder. From under his wing, the most unlikely creature emerged, clinging to his host’s skin with a silly reptilian grin.
The red and green markings on its back were unmistakable.
“Geddy?”
The gecko stared at her from his winged perch, and licked his eyeball with a spoon-shaped tongue.
“I’m afraid I don’t know any Geddy,” Xavier told her without looking at her. “But Goodwin here’s the only friend I’ve had for years. He’ll help us find a good landing spot.”
Geddy—or Goodwin—turned away from Jennifer and skittered up Xavier’s shoulders and skull, until he was right between the dasher’s eyes. From there, he twitched his tail in what looked like random fashion, until Jennifer realized the Elder dragon was using the small lizard’s motion to steer.
“You’re letting the gecko drive?”
Again, the genuineness of Xavier’s laugh surprised her. “It may sound a bit strange,” he admitted. “But Goodwin’s not an ordinary lizard.”
“I’ll bet he’s not.”
“He knows where they aren’t. Has a sixth sense or something about spiders. I wouldn’t have survived all these years without him. Yep, Goodwin, you’re right. That looks like a good patch down there.”
They began a sharp descent, angling for a thin stretch of ground between two lakes Jennifer had never seen before. This part of Crescent Valley was beyond her experience, even before last Sunday. She checked her bearings—which way had they been going? Northeast? It appeared so.
“They’re pretty sparse out here,” he called out as they leveled off a few feet from the spongy ground. There were few moon elms nearby, and the reddish-orange glow of the lichen lit up their claws as they landed. “They don’t care much for large bodies of water. The best hiding places are even closer to the ocean than we are now.”
“The ocean?” Jennifer had heard the lake that held the portal eventually emptied out into the ocean, but she had never seen it. She sniffed, but there was no salt in the air, just the familiar scents of gently churning lake water and moss-covered earth.
“Out over the water is the safest place of all. I tried to get us out there back when…” He trailed off and sighed, absentmindedly scraping the lichen with a hindclaw. “More of us could have survived, I’m sure of it. But tradition held strong for too many of us. Ned and the others weren’t willing to let go of that plateau. It meant too much. It was their end. Our end.”
She didn’t know what to say. Finally, he looked up at her. “Anyway, it was. Until you showed up today. So it’s Jennifer, eh? Great guns. How are you even possible?”
“I…I’m the Ancient Furnace.” It sounded lame to her ears, but it was all she could offer.
His reaction stunned her. “Of course you are,” he said as if she had told him the sky here was sort of dark.
“How did you know?”
“Any regular dragon wouldn’t be able to hold human shape here, would they? And as a dragon, you’re an obvious blend of the types. The prophecies spoke about you.”
His unwavering faith filled Jennifer with unexpected warmth. “You know who I really am.”
“I know what you represent. A second chance. Hope.” His golden eyes glittered. “You are going to set things right again!”
The warmth dissipated, leaving anxiety behind. What did this Elder expect of her? “Uh, yeah. See, I’m not sure how I can—”
“I don’t know either. But you being here is no accident. You and I are going to figure it out together. Oh, Goodwin!” He jumped up, held his gecko out high on a wing claw, and let out a whoop. “We’re not alone after all!”
And neither am I, thought Jennifer.
CHAPTER 11
Thursday Night
Stretching out on the spongy ground, tracing swirls in the yellow, then green, then blue lichen for Goodwin to follow as he scrambled about the ground, Xavier told Jennifer all he knew about the advance of the werachnids over the past few decades. He didn’t ask about her own origins, he just accepted that she was here to help. This made her glad, not just because of his confidence, but because she wasn’t sure how to explain it all anyway.
It had begun around the time he was a child. “I was eight years old,” he told her. “And I’m seventy—no, scratch that, seventy-one—now. It was a good time for dragons. Beaststalkers were in fewer and fewer towns, and they had always been our primary enemy over the centuries. But as a child, I remember not being afraid of them, since no one had seen one in years. They became excellent fodder for campfire ghost stories, and our Elders began to relax their guard, hoping against hope that we had seen the last of such killers. We weren’t great in number, but we were growing.
“That all changed when the werachnids attacked Alexandria, which was where most of our Elders lived when they weren’t in Crescent Valley. The aggressors used a weapon we had never seen before—poison in the air. After smothering the town in it, they attacked. They were led by a champion some of the arachnids called The Crown.”
“The Crown?” Jennifer frowned. “What was he like?”
“None of our number who saw him survived. The few dozen who made it out of Alexandria, including my own family, had lived on the fringes of the city. We didn’t stay long after the poison cloud descended. Of course, there were rumors. Some said he was a mere teenager, but had extraordinary intelligence. On top of that, he clearly had powers unlike any spider or scorpion—the poison gas was evidence enough of that. But his future attacks drove the point home.”
“Eveningstar was next,” Jennifer guessed.
He nodded. “It was twelve years later. A few of us had dared to hope that the werachnids wished no more violence, being content with overrunning Alexandria. But they were merely pausing. They did nothing hastily. Every plan took time, every trap was sprung after careful consideration.
“With Eveningstar, their method was to begin with the river, which curled alongside the town. They dumped something in it that caused the entire body of water to boil, sending up a curtain of poisonous steam. With the north and east cut off, even for flying creatures, the werachnid army came from the south and west. This time, The Crown showed the first evidence of necromancy. With a word, he crippled six Elders at once, dropping them from the sky like wounded flies. With another word, he struck them blind and pulled their wings off. Those he let survive, to carry his message. Just about everyone else in the town perished.”
“How did your family escape?”
“They didn’t. My father, Jacques Longuequeue, was one of the six Elders The Crown mutilated that day. My mother, Martha, he outright killed. As for me and my brother, Charles, and some other young dragons, he thought it amusing to leave us alive, pinned under the piled-up corpses of our fellow townspeople. We weren’t rescued for two days.”
“That’s horrible.” Jennifer didn’t know what else to say.
“It was. And fifteen years later, they came after Pinegrove. This time, the mere specter of their advance caused the town to empty. There was no battle at all. We scattered
like dandelion seeds, some of us going to Crescent Valley, others of us finding refuge in twos and threes in the countryside.
“But even that was not enough for The Crown. Efforts to disperse and settle in small groups around and outside of Minnesota were unsuccessful. The Crown had assembled a small team of prodigy werachnids like himself—there were three or four of them, perhaps. This team had a particular talent for seeking us out and exterminating us. Eventually, we realized dividing ourselves was even worse than sticking together. We gathered again in Crescent Valley, with a small outpost at the farm by the lake portal—the one you came through. Crawford and Caroline Scales, and a few others of us, volunteered to stay out there, and feign a last stand. Our hope was that The Crown would assume we were the very last of our race, wipe us out, and never know the rest of our number were hidden in another place.”
“And that didn’t work.” Jennifer sighed.
“The Crown didn’t even come to do battle. He sent his elite team—three of them, anyway, to the farm to talk. Under a crescent moon, they came under human shape. A girl and two boys—teenagers, mere children like you! And with supreme arrogance, they told us exactly what to do if we wanted to survive. They revealed that they knew where Crescent Valley was. If we surrendered it and the lake portal, they would let us flee to the most remote corners of the world, and die off in peace. Or we could stay, fight, and die more quickly and violently.
“Our choice was obvious: We weren’t going anywhere. Charles got off a good tail shot to the head of one of them, and that was our answer. That cost him his daughter. Ember wasn’t even five years old, and the young woman put her to sleep with a word before she left. The little girl never woke up.”
“What did these three look like? Did they have names?”
He scratched his horns. “My memory’s not good with faces,” he admitted. “And they never used names. But the woman was kind of skinny, with dark hair. Smiled a lot, but you got the feeling she might not mean it.”
Tavia, Jennifer guessed. And young Edmund Slider, then? “Did one of the boys have blond hair, with sharp features and black eyes?”
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