Seraph of Sorrow

by MaryJanice Davidson

  “Ri!” She spun around toward the voice. Andrea was in a nightgown and bathrobe, holding an ash-laced poker in her hands. The girl’s honey-blonde hair and bright green eyes were wild with fear and excitement. At least she was smart enough to bring slippers, Glorianna thought as she shifted her weight on the cold pavement.

  “Where are the police?” she asked Andrea.

  As if in answer, a patrol car careened through the intersection. It was impossible to tell who was driving it, because the interior was full of the same fire that seeped out from under the hood, and which burst from the liquor store windows, and which was consuming several other buildings and parked vehicles. The police car veered, nearly hit the small crowd of scattering townspeople, and smashed into the corner hardware store.

  The beasts above roared with sadistic laughter, and one of them let loose with a new jet of flame. It was too high to do much more than wash the rooftops of the buildings on the northeast corner, but already some of the townspeople were running away. A few of them fired handguns into the gloom. Glorianna could not tell in the chaos if the bullets missed completely, or glanced off thick hides.

  “Stay fast.” Richard Evan Seabright used a voice his daughter had never heard before—not a dull farmer’s baritone at all, but something sharper and clearer. It stopped the crowd in their tracks and compelled them to face him as he jumped onto the flatbed and lifted his sword high. The blade glistened crimson from the surrounding firelight.

  “You can’t run from these things! They’ll follow you to the next house you live in, the next town we build together. The only way to stop them is fighting. Right here. Tonight!”

  “We’ll die!” Glorianna could not see the man who said this.

  Her father gave a small smile. “Let the test come. Death is on our side tonight.”

  With that, he climbed onto the cab of his truck, turned to the twilit sky, and raised his sword at the swooping shapes. “Ready yourselves, or ready your souls!”

  A hollow shriek answered. Something swooped down toward him from behind.

  “Dad!”

  Before she could finish screaming, he had leapt from the truck, spun in midair, and flung his blade with a yell. As Richard Seabright landed, a bright blue dragon with violet markings under its wings gave a gurgle of surprise and pain, lost control of its predatory trajectory, and crashed into the burning street.

  Glorianna cheered with everyone else as her father walked back past his truck, approached the reptilian carcass, and yanked his weapon out of the monster’s throat. The corpse lifted with the pull, and then collapsed again.

  “Death is on our side tonight!” he repeated, bloody sword pointing at the crescent moon.

  A larger dragon descended—with black scales and a spiked crest—right over the thickest part of the crowd, breathing heat. The cheers reverted to screams, and Glorianna saw the woman who owned the bakery down the street crumple into a writhing twist of fire. The man next to her staggered backward with his entire upper body aflame, and his pistol exploded in his hand. The shrapnel flew into the faces of a pair of teenaged boys who had been picking up rocks to throw.

  As the dragon passed low over the street, someone leapt from a second-story rooftop onto the dragon’s back. It buckled with the added weight and roared in indignation.

  “Mom!”

  Glorianna held her alarmed friend back from following the woman and her unwilling steed, nearly dropping her pitchfork. “No, Andrea! She knows what she’s doing!” She knows what she’s doing. A thrill went through her at the thought. Andrea’s mom. My dad. How many are there? How good are they? Can we win this?

  “Let me go, Ri!” Andrea shook free and ran into the intersection. “Mom!” Both Glorianna and her father gave chase.

  The dragon was too fast for those on the ground—but the woman riding it hung on, drew a butcher’s knife from inside her coat, and drove it between the wing blades of the beast she rode.

  The fiend thrashed as it rolled onto the pavement, spilling the warrior onto the sidewalk. She somersaulted several times and finally came to rest, facedown and motionless.

  “Mom! Mom, get up!” Andrea wailed as she sped through the intersection. “Get up!” She was heedless to everything around her—the small explosions coming out of the liquor store close by, the outraged bellows of the dragons above, or the Seabrights as they tried to keep up.

  They were all so focused on Andrea’s mother and the squirming thing that kept trying to remove the weapon from its heaving back, they did not see what was coming from their right.

  This specimen was even larger than the black-crested one—nearly twice the size of a grown man—with deep green scales and burning eyes. Its wings did not appear strong, but its limbs were heavily muscled, and its jaws were like an open truck hood.

  It threw aside a Volkswagen sedan with a massive nose horn, smashing a telephone pole and darkening the surrounding streetlights. Then it made the most horrifying sound through its clenched teeth—a whistle from hell’s train.

  The flame came out as a ruinous blanket that unfurled over the entire intersection. Richard Seabright had no time to do anything before the cascade overtook him.

  Glorianna did not shout after him. She couldn’t. All she could do was stand and let a hot wind whip past her as she watched her father die. Her own father, who had cared for her in her mother’s absence and swore nothing would happen to them, who had taught her how to hold a sword in a simple barn with pride in his eyes, whom she had begun to cook for and take care of as she grew stronger and he grew ever slightly more frail—what could she possibly say to him, if she could make a sound?

  He faced her and burned. And about that time, she realized something. It was not a hot wind that surrounded her. It was the dragon’s fire.

  She could not see the beast anymore, only the blast it generated. It washed over her feet and legs, passed over her hips and shoulders, and coursed through her billowing hair. The heat was uncomfortable—but there was no pain.

  Why was there no pain?

  The burning body of Richard Evan Seabright stood tall within the sheath of fire and watched her. She looked down. Her clothes had disintegrated; her flesh was untouched.

  Finally, the dragon’s breath was exhausted. It snarled through steaming nostrils and surveyed the damage. Richard’s body was charred. Glorianna’s soft brown eyes watered as she watched him struggle to keep upright. His lips and tongue were flayed, but they formed one last word she could hear over the chaos above.

  Tested.

  Then his limbs lost the last of their muscle, and he collapsed with his sword beneath him. Something forced itself up Glorianna’s throat, and she spat bile onto cracked pavement.

  With a satisfied roar, the dragon thundered into the intersection. The warrior was dead. It did not notice this crumpled mess of a teenager. It turned its back on them both and faced down Andrea’s mother, who had recovered from her fall and staggered to her feet. The woman did nothing to defend herself. Why isn’t she looking up? Glorianna wondered. Doesn’t she see it?

  She was about to call out, but then she followed the woman’s lost gaze to another point of the intersection. There was a second shriveling carcass out here, only a few feet away from Richard Seabright’s.

  There were only two clues to its identity—her friend’s pale brown slippers and the poker glowing on the pavement. Everything else was burning or had been reduced to crusted ash.

  Andrea’s mother abruptly turned to Glorianna, completely lost. She can’t help herself, the thought came. None of these people can help themselves. They are not so strong, after all. Their leader is gone. Dad is gone.

  But I am tested.

  She willed herself to stand. One set of knuckles tightened around the handle of her pitchfork, and the other wiped away a useless tear.

  Death is on our side.

  The awkward tool she held took a smooth and graceful course, blazing a trail for its owner. Glorianna followed the triple-pronged
end as it rushed toward the horned beast, danced up the spiked back, and thrust itself into the base of the scaly neck. Since the dragon had reared up when it sensed the first footstep on its hindquarters, the tines forced themselves nearly straight down the spine. She held on to the fork’s handle as she began to slip, and twisted the shaft.

  The dragon bawled with an unearthly sound. Wings flailed around her; scales heaved beneath her. She braced herself as best she could against her enemy’s back, pulled the pitchfork out, and jumped clear. Ignoring the bitter stench of the blood spattered on her bare skin, she readied another blow.

  It was not necessary. The dragon collapsed and rocked back and forth on the pavement. Glorianna watched with a mixture of hot satisfaction and cool fascination as the thing moved less and less. Then, amazingly, it changed shape.

  It lost its wings first, then its sharp teeth and nose horn, then its tail, then its bulk, then its color and texture. Soon, all that was left on the ground was a naked woman, lying on her stomach, gasping in pain. She was a bit overweight, yet smaller than what had been terrorizing the town. The woman’s dark features betrayed shock at her wounds and her change. Her back arched and caved; trickles of blood coursed down her shoulder blades.

  The sounds around them—the people’s screams, the dragons’ roars, the smashing of windows, and the chatter of gunfire—died down, until all that was left was the crackling of burning timber in the surrounding shops. Glorianna was mildly aware that all of her neighbors had gathered near, and that at least three or four dragons had perched themselves on rooftops above. Everyone was staring at her, and at the miserable victim at her feet.

  Who was still alive. She prodded the woman’s leg with the fork, drawing blood again. The pierced leg did not budge. After a full minute, Glorianna began to realize what everyone else here was surely thinking: The wound was a crippling blow, but not fatal.

  “Gn . . . ng . . .” The woman tried to pull herself up. Neither legs nor arms would cooperate.

  Glorianna’s cheeks flushed with the certainty of what she had done. Carefully stepping forward, she stooped to one knee by the woman’s head and whispered in her ear.

  “I turned you back.”

  Her enemy bent her head up. Glorianna followed her gaze.

  “The crescent moon is up. In fact, it’s only one day old. My father told me your change lasts for several days at a time. You know what I think?”

  “Gnnnggg . . .”

  “I don’t think you’re ever going to be a dragon again.”

  The woman’s lips drooled blood and spittle.

  “I’ll bet it hurts.” Glorianna placed the shaft of the pitchfork across the back of her victim’s neck, and pressed down. The woman’s head smacked onto the pavement. “I’ll bet it hurts real bad. I’ll bet for the rest of your miserable life, you’ll feel this pitchfork like it’s living in your spinal cord. My father’s pitchfork. Mr. Richard Evan Seabright. Remember the name.”

  She stood up and kicked the woman’s face. Then she walked over to the pile of dust that used to be her father.

  The sword of the house of Seabright, all lethal silver and sharp edges. Her family’s sword, a weapon older than this town, or this country, or even several of the kingdoms it had visited. There was history to it, Glorianna knew, ages of rich history. She had never listened too carefully to her father when he’d talked about it all. She picked up the weapon and noticed a smudge on the blade. It was ash in fingerprint oil. It was all she had left of him.

  As something deep inside her unwound, she kissed the small mark and released her rage in a choking sob, which accelerated into a violent scream.

  What happened shocked her. Her voice caught the blade’s steel and increased tenfold. At the same time, her lips shattered the spring gloom. The blinding light washed away the stars and crescent moon. She could clearly see the demons perched above clasp their scaled skulls with batlike wings and grimace in pain. Most of them collapsed backward onto the buildings’ roofs, but two of them lost their balance badly enough to plummet to the street a few steps away.

  Glorianna was instantly upon them. Richard Evan Seabright’s sword plunged into each spine, drawing a shriek each time. The one with lilac scales shifted back to a gray-haired slip of an elderly woman, and the one with navy blue scales reverted to one of the boys Glorianna knew from school—one of the football team’s offensive line. I almost asked him for a date, she chastised herself in disgust. He took classes with me! He sat behind me in history!

  The spectacular light and sound faded from the intersection, and the deep shadow of night fell over them all again. All were quiet, watching her.

  “Who else?” she screamed at the rooftops. Freckles of blood dotted her young face and arms. “Who else?”

  None of them moved. Glorianna’s cold gaze settled farther down the street, at two more dark shapes. They were a couple of blocks away, far enough from the fires that she could not make out their features. One of them had wings, she was pretty sure. Perhaps it also had a nose horn that could overturn Volkswagens. She didn’t care.

  “Take them,” she called out. “If I see any of you again, you’ll end up just like them.”

  She walked back to the truck, every step feeling heavier than the last. More sirens emerged from the distance—ambulances, she guessed, or more fire trucks. How will they clean Dad and Andrea up? she wondered. Will they try to shovel the remains into a body bag, or will fire hoses wash everything in the intersection down the sewer first?

  A hand caught her elbow. “Glorianna. Ri.”

  It was Andrea’s mother. Her honey-framed face was streaked with tears and sweat. Cement scrapes marred her right cheek, arm, and hip.

  “Mrs. Georges.” Glorianna stumbled. She gestured vaguely to where her best friend had been. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t get to her in—”

  The hand on her elbow squeezed tighter. “It’s all right, Ri. I’m sorry, too. For your father. But I’m glad you’re okay.”

  They watched the dragon-people writhe in pain. Nobody else around them moved.

  “How did you survive that thing’s fire?”

  Glorianna shrugged. I’ve been tested, she decided. And I passed, like no one else can.

  Mrs. Georges motioned to the crippled woman. “Do you know how you did that?”

  Glorianna examined her father’s sword. “I’m not sure. But I’m going to do it again soon.”

  There was another pause, and then the older woman sighed. “You should come with me. For a day or so, at least. Your father wouldn’t want you to be alone tonight.”

  “I’ll take the truck and meet you at your place.” Glorianna broke away with the most agreeable smile she could manage. She had no intention of going anywhere but home. Home was where her father would want her to be. His house, his legacy—it was hers now. She would sleep and eat there, for as long as it took her to sort things out.

  And then she would begin to fight again.

  Her footfalls became uneven, and her shoulders began to slump. She thought she would surely break. I won’t, she ordered herself. These people—and those dragons—need to see strength. Don’t think of them; don’t look at the piles of ashes; don’t say another word.

  Still naked, she walked over to her father’s truck, threw the weapons in the bed, and found her father’s keys in the ignition. She cranked them and crushed the accelerator, leaving behind the dozen or so townspeople who watched her with awe, and the seeds of devotion.

  The air split with another shout. Glorianna squinted through the bright light with satisfaction as a straw target with multiple weapon punctures actually trembled and collapsed. The dozen or so students nearby began to cheer.

  Since that awful night three months ago, she had never been alone. There were always people around the Seabright farm: cooking, cleaning, tending, training. Some had lost their homes in the attack. Others sought her out after the stories they heard. These people, numbering thirty or so, with one or two more coming each day, wan
ted to learn.

  Victoria Georges was a frequent visitor, and Glorianna was glad of it. Beyond their kinship through being neighbors and losing family that fateful night, Glorianna found this woman to be one of the few who wasn’t awestruck or uncomfortable around her.

  “Times like now,” Victoria observed, watching the training from Glorianna’s front porch, “I wish there were more children.”

  “No need. One per family will do.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “My father told me.” Glorianna had spent the last few months thinking about all the things her father had tried to teach her. Many of them she had ignored at the time. But the more she worked with these warriors who followed her, the more she realized he had been right about a great many things. “Children in our families are single children, or siblings spaced many years apart. I was an only child. So was Andrea.” Though the name made the older woman wince, Glorianna found she had no trouble saying it anymore. Why flinch? Andrea had been a hero.

  Victoria gestured to the others, whose swords clunked together in practice swings and mock duels. “Everyone here is like you and her?”

  “There are exceptions, but the most promising recruits don’t have any brothers or sisters within ten years of their own birthdates. My father said he and Mom were thinking of a second child after I turned ten.” She forced herself to finish. “Then she died.”

  Victoria whispered as she rubbed her own stomach. “Alex and I always planned a second child to keep Andrea company, but the years passed so quickly.”

  “I’m not criticizing,” Glorianna hastened to add. “Quality over quantity. Compare to these dragons who have plagued us for centuries—from what we know, they seem to spawn at least once every few years. And if the rumors of giant spiders are true, they probably lay many eggs at a time, like their smaller cousins. We can’t hope to keep pace. Victory must come through skill, not numbers. If we’re going to succeed, each warrior must receive the full attention of his or her parents, during the critical years of development.”