“Buried! Buried!”
What happened next stunned Winona. The earth in the clearing rose up in three walls, each at least eight feet high, facing each other in a triangle. Ripples carried through the ground, bumped Winona, and rattled the tree above her. Before the creeper could take wing, the walls converged and smothered him. A slow struggle ensued—first there was a great swelling in the earth as the captive beneath tried to escape, then a series of tremors, and then nothing.
“Motega!”
She scrambled out from under the tree and ran to the spot where the dragon had once been. It was incredible, how quickly fortunes had reversed in this fight. One moment, her boyfriend had been there—the next, he was gone.
She heard Danny’s voice coming from the trees, calling to the others.
“Pull him out of the woods! Watch the flames!”
Yes, pull him out of the woods, she found herself seething as she spread her palms over the unforgiving rock. Pull him out here, so I can kill him for what he’s done. All she could feel was the boiling rage inside. Her vision clouded, and she began to feel her spine unravel. The crescent moon was pulling her shape.
“Okay, the fire’s out,” she heard Danny say. “Roll him over—no, hold him! He’s beginning to spasm. Winona, come here and help!”
Her innards roiling and her mind reeling, Winona stumbled toward the voices. Red-haired Danny and black-haired Katherine were there, holding down a few limbs of the struggling arachnid. It was helpless on its back, its legs wriggling furiously in pain, parts of its flesh visibly burning. Jodie, Rick, and Pete were coming out of the woods. They were all still in human shape. Not for long, Winona told herself. Soon we’ll have ourselves an old-fashioned barbeque, and this sick, grotesque thing will be our guest of honor.
“Kat, did you bring the ointment and bandages?”
“Yeah, I’ve got them right here.” The girl slung off her backpack and began pulling out supplies. “I wish we had changed earlier. We could have helped.”
Winona spat. “Ointment and bandages?! What the hell good do they do us now?”
Katherine bit her pretty lip. “Sorry, Win. Just trying to—Hey, are you feeling okay? Are you about to change? Danny, I don’t think she can help right now.”
“Fine.” Danny’s teeth clenched. Everyone else was staring at the smoking, eight-legged form before them. “You guys, don’t stand there. We gotta hold him down!”
Winona tumbled onto her side and began to cry. Motega, she whispered into the soiled grass where the dragon had been. I’m so sorry I couldn’t help you. Her body kept convulsing.
“Let me up!” came a raspy voice. “Dammit, Danny, Kat, let me up! I’m okay. It looks worse than it is. Winona! Winona, I’m okay. I’m . . .”
Winona’s head snapped up. At first she looked at the ground to see if the dragon had emerged from its grave. Then she realized the voice was coming from the werachnid.
“Motega!?”
Released from his friends’ grasp, the enormous spider flipped upright. He faced her, speechless. Winona scrambled to her feet and pushed off the ground with her wings.
My wings. I’ve changed.
Like Motega.
But not like him at all.
They all stood there, Winona the dragon and Motega the spider, Danny and Katherine, Jodie and Rick and Pete, all stunned at what the others were seeing.
Suddenly Katherine collapsed, her long hair spilling in front of her face. She let out a grunt as four more limbs burst from her spine, and several bulges appeared at the top of her skull.
Winona looked in a panic at her, and Motega, and all the others, and Motega again.
Then she screamed and blasted into the sky.
The rest of that night was a blur to Winona Brandfire. She never returned to the college. Instead she flew northeast, on frail trampler’s wings, toward the crescent moon for hours.
By the time her wings finally gave out, she was over a large, shimmering body of water. She let herself tumble, plunging into the cold depths and letting all the air out of her lungs. What is the point? she told herself as she sank like a stone. If we’re not killing, we’re dying. I don’t want any part of it anymore.
There was a dim splash from above. She sank and sank, waiting for the bottom. But the bottom never came, and as she rolled over her own tail, she began to suspect she was rising again. Her lungs cried out for air, and she tried to open her mouth to drown herself, but her throat closed in a reflexive bid for survival. Right when she was about to force her lungs open to the water, a crimson shape darted past, and a claw took her own and pulled her to the surface.
By the time she burst out of the water and gasped her first breath of air in the ancient refuge her kind called Crescent Valley, Tasa was gone again.
Crescent Valley was kind to Winona Brandfire. Here, there were no enemies or fights, beyond the odd territorial dispute between a trampler in a mountain cave and a dasher in a stone aerie farther up the slope. These were settled by the Blaze, a wise group of older dragons representing every known dragon family. They used words and logic, respected tragic history, and found peaceful ways to resolve conflict. Winona came to watch when they gathered, and she sought out elders to ask all sorts of questions. They completed her education, and marveled at how bright and passionate this young dragon was. Despite her age, they knew she was the last of the Brandfires, and so they called her “Little Elder” and let her come and go as she pleased.
Once she shared her story of her last night in the arboretum, she learned that the dragon who had died was named Gerald Scales. He had attended the college in his youth and liked to return from time to time to enjoy the place where he used to change under a crescent moon. His run-in with the young and powerful Motega had been nothing more than bad luck.
That bad luck had not stopped with Gerald. After months of mourning, a sinewy widowed dasher named Christina Scales kissed their young son, Crawford, on the top of the head, told him she’d be back soon, and then flew from their Pinegrove home. She returned with the scorched, fanged head of Motega Brave-eyes impaled on the back of her tail. Not every dragon in Crescent Valley, Winona realized then, resolved conflicts peacefully.
Winona heard from dragons attending Carleton—there were, as she and Tasa had suspected, others of their kind—that before he died, Motega had gotten one of the girls at that school pregnant, a certain Katherine Wilson, who disappeared after having a daughter named Dianna. Whether this child was the only one Motega fathered, or if there were more, no one could say.
These were the sorts of stories from “the other world” that made Winona glad to stay in Crescent Valley for years. She listened sadly to the tales of those few who survived the massacre of Pinegrove, attended the stone plateau funerals of dragon after dragon who returned after flying off with vengeance in his or her heart, and greeted new arrivals to Crescent Valley. In this way, she welcomed and tutored many younger dragons, including Ned Brownfoot, Charles Longtail and his younger brother, Xavier, and Crawford Scales.
Shortly after Pinegrove, a refugee from that town named Smokey Coils arrived in Crescent Valley for the first time. His parents were among the many elder creepers who died in Glory’s massacre, and he did not talk much about the experience. She mistook his stoicism for bravery, and his physical similarities to Gerald Scales—they were both creepers—released deep feelings in her that she mistook for love. They had a child named Jada, right in Crescent Valley, which got others talking in low tones about the wisdom of raising a child here.
Such talk got her to gather her courage and emerge again through the lake, where Crawford Scales was building a refuge for dragons. She and Jada spent time there and in the nearby town of Northwater. Sometimes Smokey came with them, but when she began to talk of moving to Northwater permanently he made excuses, choosing to live in the dragon stronghold of Eveningstar, and they parted ways.
Tasa showed up a couple of times soon afterward—once at the Scales farm when the thoug
ht of raising a child alone overwhelmed her and she sought solitude in the barn, and once during her first night in the Northwater apartment with a wailing baby. Winona depended more often upon the advice and help of Charles Longtail, descended from the Longuequeues of France. They became fast friends, and he was in many ways a father to little Jada.
“When were you going to tell me about this?”
From behind she could see the enormous, elegant form of Charles Longtail, all coiled power and cobalt streaks, sag with a sigh. “Xavier told you.”
“Of course Xavier told me! He’s worried sick! He says you’re off to meet with Glory Seabright, you won’t say where, you won’t let him go along . . . This is madness!”
“This is our best chance for peace,” he replied, facing her. “All of the work I’ve been doing for years—it must come to this someday.”
“Come to what? Suicide?”
“It’s not suicide if she wants to talk peace.”
“She doesn’t talk peace!” Winona felt rage and tears well up. “She can’t!”
“Winona, none of us know for sure what Glory Seabright is capable—”
Her hind leg came down so hard, a rift opened and an anaconda squirmed out. “I know what she’s capable of!”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to dredge up memories of your mother.”
“It’s not Ma I’m worried about anymore, Charles. Not for a long time. It’s you!”
He sighed again, and the two of them examined each other. Winona found herself wondering what it would be like, after years of knowing this man, to fall in love with him. Why had they never fallen in love? Tasa didn’t seem to care much for this dasher, though in his whispering sessions to Winona, he never explained his discomfort. Certainly Charles, a widower with a charming young daughter named Ember, was available. He was a few years younger than Winona, but not so much that they couldn’t make it work. Maybe—
“You should come with me,” he finally said.
She felt her scales relax. “I’d like to.”
“You’ll need to hide, some distance away. I promised I would come alone.”
“Xavier thinks that’s dumb.”
“Xavier will learn better, in time.”
“Charles. If she tries to kill you . . .”
“I can handle Glory Seabright. But it won’t come to that. She’s not going to fight me.”
He’s right. Glory isn’t here to fight him. The grim, ironic thought saddened Winona as she watched a young beaststalker with golden hair set arrow to string. This other woman is.
She watched the duel unfold, frozen between doing nothing because Charles had told her to stay hidden, and doing nothing because she was too scared to do anything else.
“What are you waiting for?”
She jumped at the voice, which was whispered loudly and closely enough by Tasa to have sounded like he was seething inside her skull.
“Dammit, Tasa, what are you doing here? Charles didn’t want anyone else to come!”
“Then he shouldn’t have invited you. But he did, and he needs help!” His gnarled, red wing claw pointed at the unfolding scene. “We’ve got to break cover and save him!”
She wanted to go, but her clawed feet would not move. “I can’t, Tasa. You go. You help him. I’ll go get help, in case there are more . . .”
“You’re such a chickenshit!” He rammed into her, pushing her on top of her wings and rattling the back of her skull against the base of a thick spruce tree. “I’m tired of watching you screw up every chance to be a real dragon! You want to stay hidden in the bushes—fine!”
He disappeared, and Winona squeezed her eyes shut to hold the tears. It didn’t work, and in any case she couldn’t close her ears against the clamor by the river. The sound of Charles Longtail’s death throes made her gasp and sob. She lay there, paralyzed by despair. After a while, she heard voices—one of them was the young woman, and one could only be . . .
Driven finally by the need to be sure, she lifted herself off the ground and emerged slowly from behind her spruce tree. Right away, she saw the body of Charles Longtail on the silent riverbank. His head lolled to one side, forked tongue stuck between two long teeth. A sword jutted from a smoking wound in his throat. About thirty yards distant, two beaststalkers were arguing—one with honey blonde hair, and another with graying black hair. The older one would be Glory Seabright. Though decades had passed, Winona could never forget the face.
She turned back to the corpse. What could have been? she thought. Love for me. A father to little Jada. Peace for dragons. It was all in ruins . . . because she hadn’t acted in time . . .
I wonder where Tasa is now.
She stepped forward carelessly, and snapped a branch under a wing claw.
That got Glory’s attention. “Elizabeth!”
But this “Elizabeth,” whoever she was, was already walking away. “I know there’s a second one,” she called out. “I saw it before I saw the first. I don’t care. Kill it yourself.”
Winona knew then she was not in danger—Glory would follow her disciple. Glory was nothing without her disciples. She returned her attention to Charles and thought of his younger brother, Xavier, and Charles’s own eight-year-old Ember, and what she had to tell them now.
“I don’t know what to tell you.”
“You’ve told me enough, Xavier.” Winona settled on her haunches, beyond despair. It was too much like that moment long ago, when she had the unfortunate task of informing this very dragon that he had lost his brother, Charles. Now, years later, the tables were turned. Except this news was even worse.
“Even without any bodies or any other evidence, we have to assume they’re—”
“Dead, I know.” She looked into the fire she had made in her cave, and thought of her little Jada—a toddler giggling at her mother’s crazy faces with delight, a grade-schooler coming home from Northwater Elementary with perfect marks but teachers’ cautions against aggressive behavior, an impetuous teenager falling in love with a silly (vegetarian!) dragon, a married mother who chafed at sticking around the house . . . and, finally, another casualty of Glory Seabright’s army, dead before the age of forty. “As I said, Xavier—you’ve told me enough.”
“Have I, Elder Brandfire? I wonder.”
“Xavier, I’d like to mourn my daughter, and her husband. This is hardly the time—”
“Regretfully, I beg to differ,” he interrupted with no regret in his tone at all. “I would suggest that this is the perfect time to ask you: Do you still cling to your ridiculous notions of peace? Do you still think we should stride into Winoka, wings outstretched, smiling and waving white flags from our tails? You’ve talked a good game since Charles died almost a decade ago.”
“Charles was not just your brother. He was my friend.”
“Such a good friend, that in all this time you’ve never discovered and caught his killer.”
“Whoever it is, is long gone.” She believed this. Sure, at times she would pass by a tall, lithe blonde in some random town and wonder if she was brushing shoulders with Charles’s killer. This was Minnesota—and there were thousands of tall blondes. Plenty of them, she was sure, were named Elizabeth. She couldn’t mount a hunt based on such skimpy information.
Not so for some in the Blaze, like Xavier. Not so for her own daughter, who became obsessed with the tale of her mother’s friend, and who convinced her husband to join her on a quest for revenge. No matter how much Winona protested, no matter what she told them of dead Grammie Patricia and their dead uncle Forrester, they wouldn’t listen . . .
“Long gone,” he repeated her words with distaste. “I doubt it. In fact, whoever killed Charles probably killed your daughter and your son-in-law. Yet in your heart, the quest for peace goes on. No doubt you see yourself as some sort of successor to his—”
“Xavier, not now!” She stomped her foot twice, and two six-feet long Gila monsters scrambled out of the crumbling rock beneath her. Without looking at her s
ervants, she pointed them in the right direction. “Elder Longtail is leaving. Please see him out of this cave.”
A quick flick of his three-pronged tail kept the lizards at bay. “I’m curious to know, Elder Brandfire, since so many on the Blaze speak of you so well. They see your ineptitude, your fawning hopes for peace, and your spinelessness as strengths that qualify you to be our next Eldest. Assuming your hermit of an ex-husband doesn’t want the job.”
“Actually,” she snarled over the crackling flames, “I think they want me to be the next Eldest because they see my greatest strength of all—my ability to see through your hate and bile. You act like you deserve the job yourself, but we both know you don’t have what it takes to lead the Blaze. The last Longtail who was up to the job died years ago.” It was a harsh barb, and it felt good to say. Fight fire with fire, she told herself. Hurt with hurt.
His lips curled enough for her to spot spittle on his yellowed teeth. “It would not have to be me, Elder Brandfire. Just someone who knows who the hell he or she is. Someone who doesn’t pretend to be a dragon, all the while hating dragons. Someone who doesn’t walk among us, a coward in dragon’s clothing. Someone whose own daughter didn’t respect her enough—”
“GET OUT!” She let loose with a jet of flame, making him close his eyes and turn his head, but no more. When he faced her again, he was actually smiling.
“Someday,” he promised her, “you will understand. I don’t know what it will take to get you there, but I hope I am there that day. Eldest.”
He left before she could spit in his face again.
Later in the day, long after she had calmed down from Xavier’s visit and was simply wracked with sadness, she got another visitor. She figured he would come, and she knew why he was here. Spotting the light shift at the entrance to her cave, she smiled ruefully.
“Come to say good-bye, Smokey?”
Seraph of Sorrow Page 28
