Everyone has to grow up sometime, he mused as he sent the boy on his way. Eddie already seemed to walk taller as he stepped out of the house and faced the world, the way his father told him to. Everyone has to show what they’re made of. I had to myself. Eddie was in the car now, starting the engine. I had to step up when my mother needed me. When she brought me to the mayor, and I got that assignment in Eveningstar. I did what I had to do. I had to find out what our enemy was up to. To do that, I had to stiffen my spine. Eddie was pulling out of the driveway now, waving with his good arm. I had to go the extra mile. I even injured myself, to fool my adversaries. The car was in gear and roaring down the street, heading straight for Winoka Hospital. They took me in, and I got the information I needed, and then I got . . .
. . . right . . .
. . . out again.
Understanding came too late to Hank. All it did now was press on his temples like an ill-fitting crown. He realized that Edward Blacktooth would not be back at 1600 hours. Nor would he have any trouble finding a doctor at that hospital to stitch up that wound.
How did Wendy and Lizzy learn I knew something about the mayor? he asked himself. It didn’t matter. Rumors swirled around this town like January wind. The more pertinent question, he decided, is: Why did I believe my son would ever betray his pet dragon-girl?
It was frigid when he met with his small beaststalker army again in the dark, about half a mile from Winoka Bridge. Their numbers were surprisingly high. The twentysomethings, sporting a full array of blades and bows to go with their camo outfits, had brought more of their buddies along, and they numbered nearly fifty. Hank recognized all present as beaststalkers who had passed their rites, and nobody was stupid enough to bring guns or other explosives; but the sudden surge in numbers made him nervous. What if word had spread too easily, beyond even Eddie and the Scaleses? What if Glory knew?
If she knows, she knows, he finally chastised himself. Let her show up with a hundred soldiers of her own. He knew she wouldn’t: With Glory Seabright, it was all about keeping secrets, and acting solo.
No one knew when the meeting might start (in fact, a few of them were still skeptical anything would happen at all), so they had agreed to meet at nine o’clock that evening, when traffic to and from town generally died down. They were at the pregnant woman’s house—her name was Stephanie, Hank overheard someone say—and most stayed inside. Only three or four of them were outside at any time, monitoring the bridge and city hall with binoculars.
The night dragged on. The mayor did not emerge from city hall. Fewer and fewer cars traveled the roads, but the bridge remained open. Eddie’s betrayal, and Hank’s own gullibility, began to weigh on him. Fool, to think he would ever leave that girl-thing. Fool, to think he could amount to anything. Fool, not to kill him when I had the chance!
Midnight came, and the grumbling began. Hank suspected it started with Jim Sera, who did not serve any of the shifts outside but preferred to pout inside, conspicuously close to the snacks Stephanie had thoughtfully set out on her kitchen table. “Spending an awful lot of time spying on a mayor who’s served this town just fine for sixty years,” the muttering went. “Seems to me if she wants to talk to someone on a bridge, she can do it without our help.”
A few others agreed with Jim, but fortunately most assembled remained drawn to the lure of beaststalking tonight. “I’ll wait all night if that’s what it takes,” one of them interrupted. “Haven’t killed a beast in years. I’d love to do it again, even if I have to push the mayor aside!”
“You be careful with that talk,” Jim replied. Only the reassuring hands of his wife on his shoulders calmed him down.
“We’re all here for Glory,” Sarah assured him.
Finally, the reconnaissance team outside came back with news. “Couple of police have set up barriers down the road from the bridge.”
This is it, Hank told himself as he jumped up from Stephanie’s dilapidated living room couch. “Everyone outside,” he told the room. “Let’s have ten files of five, bowmen in the middle ranks, blades—”
“Hold two seconds. Who put you in charge?”
Hank kept his quivering hands inside his jacket pockets as he turned to face Jim. The important thing is not to shout. “Jim, it doesn’t have to be me at all. Sarah can do it; she serves on the council, too. Sarah, would you like to take the reins until we reach Glory?”
He knew without looking at Sarah that he had tightened his control over the group. “No, Hank. That’s fine. Jim, we’re both still upset about Amanda, but this isn’t helping . . .”
“This isn’t about Amanda!” Jim protested, but by then Hank was already out the door, and everyone else was following him. They waited in the alley behind Stephanie’s house for several minutes—long enough to see Glorianna Seabright emerge from city hall, lock the door behind her, and start toward the bridge. The police who had set up the traffic barriers had disappeared. Glory intended solitude.
Disappointed. Hank recalled the word, and how she had used it the day of his father’s funeral. Glory’s going to be disappointed again. He felt giddy.
It wasn’t until she was nearly halfway across the bridge that he noticed the other figure waiting. He didn’t need binoculars to deduce the man in the wheelchair. “She’s with Slider,” he told the others. “Let’s move. In file, quietly. He’s hobbled, but he may have friends.”
They kept to the left, out of the streetlights and moving low and fast. Given their numbers, they would be easy to spot soon. Closing the distance was critical to Hank, now that the meeting had started. If he could embarrass Glory into admitting she was weak enough to negotiate with the enemy, who knew what might happen—
He stopped short when he saw the tiny figure of Edmund Slider stand. Calling a quiet halt and whipping the binoculars up to his face, he saw Glory try to kill this man who everyone had thought was hobbled. She failed, and seconds later the beaststalkers got the shock of their lives.
“What the hell is that?” wondered Sarah aloud at the blue barrier that shot up into the sky and over their heads. Hank winced at her faltering tone.
“Whatever it is, we’re not going to defeat it by standing here,” he growled, motioning the group forward again. They were still at least ten blocks away from the bridge when Jonathan and Jennifer Scales arrived, landing next to the mayor and demanding her attention. Hank steamed at the sight of them. He had no time to deduce what this interruption could mean, before the town’s air defense sirens began to wail.
“A bit late for that,” he heard one of the twentysomethings mutter. “The arachnid has already pulled his trick, and these dragons are already upon Glory!”
Hank grew uneasy. Glory would not have allowed an alarm to sound for her meeting with Edmund Slider, and the Scaleses were notoriously efficient at evading the eyes of those who kept watch over the town borders. Something else is coming, he told himself.
Sarah saw them first. “To the west! Five hundred feet high!”
They all looked, and then they gasped, and even Hank felt his stomach churn. Hundreds of dragons were flying low over Winoka, roaring boldly, puffing fire freely.
Exclamations including So many! and How dare they! peppered the group. Hank felt the same wonder and outrage as they, but had no time for it. This was an invasion, pure and simple. Glory has no secret plot. She’s been duped! “Double-time!” he called out. “Sarah and Jim, take the rear flanks, fan out and knock on doors. We need every stalker in town at the bridge!”
There was no further argument. A small group split off and ran down the streets, hollering and banging on doors. Hank ran the larger portion of the group forward to the bridge. The dragons were headed there, too, and got there much faster. He seethed as he watched them perch upon the beams of the bridge’s superstructure. They think they can come burn this town. They think they can take their time doing it.
He could no longer tell who was talking to Glory, because the Scaleses and a few other dragons blocked his view.
It didn’t matter—soon the fighting began, and Hank accelerated. Seeing an unfamiliar teenaged girl screaming in pain in the midst of it all, he deduced Glory had hobbled her. Plainly, the hobbling had instigated the violence. So the mayor wants a fight after all. Well, it’s not all for her to win, he promised himself. She will not come out of this as the hero. Not when it’s her fault to begin with.
The race to Glory was the longest of Hank’s life. Every time he caught sight of her parrying a blow from the dragon she was dueling, every time he heard the roar of the assembled monsters above, every time he felt the vibrations caused by the thunderbird above as it beat its wings and rolled through the sky over a red dragon, it felt like another year had passed.
As they came to the western edge of the bridge, Hank finally saw something that slowed him down. In the middle of the bridge, not far from where Glory fought her enemy, stood a glowing golden statue, in the shape of a dragon. Its light frayed the edges of Hank’s perception—not so badly that he couldn’t see, but strongly enough for him to feel a suddenly familiar fear.
Smokey Coils!
Memories once thought dead unearthed themselves—the stuffy garage apartment, and the trick this elder had played, and the way sights and sounds and smells had all gone wrong. None of that was happening to him now—he wasn’t the target—but he knew it was only a matter of time before each and every beaststalker fell prey to this device. Already, he could see those behind him pause and wipe their eyes, as if trying to dismiss a blur.
Fortunately, Hank knew how to fight this weapon of illusion. Take out the source.
“Bows! The statue!” His order steeled the group. The archers among them set arrows to string and aimed at the glowing, golden dragon . . . and then two of them cried out and collapsed, feathered shafts sticking out of their shoulders. The others spun to see where and who this new enemy was, but before they could figure it out two more beaststalkers crashed to the pavement, knocked unconscious by an unseen force.
Camouflage, Hank recognized. Whatever dragon this was had seen them early and was waiting for them. This monster has set a trap for us.
“Hank Blacktooth,” the invisible monster hissed. “I will not let you make this situation worse. Tell your fellow fools to stand down.”
He placed the voice and felt his face twist. “Daddy Scales. I’m unsurprised to find out you’re behind all this.” Two more archers went down with shafts in their shoulders. Now he knew who was firing from the shadows above. “Wendy, you traitorous bitch! You and Lizzy have damned yourselves to exile! And Edward, I know you’re up there, too—I’ll kill you!”
“Charming” came Jonathan’s voice as three more of Hank’s comrades fell, kneecaps smashed. “But Eddie’s on the other end, and I don’t think you can cross that barrier.”
Glancing at the shimmering blue wall, Hank could make out only a few figures beyond it. One of them—a teenaged brunette with coffee-colored skin—was writhing on the ground. Andi, I presume. Had Glory hobbled her, in addition to the girl-thing on this side of the barrier? Hank didn’t see how that was possible. Yet both seemed to be experiencing similar pain . . .
Stephanie, the pregnant beaststalker, kissed her sword and began to shout, but before she could generate any light or noise, something ripped the blade from her grip and tossed it over the railing. “This is no place for an unborn child,” the air hissed next to her. “Go home.”
Hank Blacktooth raised his axe. “I hope you’ll have the guts to show yourself soon, Jon, so I can carve out your heart and force-feed it to that pathetic excuse you call a wife.” Feeling wind near his left shoulder, Hank ducked and avoided an invisible blow. This is a fight I can’t win. And I’ll never make it to the golden dragon with Wendy and Lizzy over my head.
Happily, he found he was not far from a perfectly acceptable target. Bringing his axe over his head, he sprinted the thirty or forty yards that separated him from Glory and the massive trampler she was fighting. Both were disoriented and vulnerable. He wasn’t one hundred percent sure which of them he would swing at, until the axe came down—in the throat of the dragon, who crumpled to the ground and died with the blade still buried in its flesh.
CHAPTER 20
Ruined
“What the hell,” Mayor Glory Seabright spat, “do you think you’re doing?”
“Saving you.” Hank smirked over the bleeding corpse of the trampler.
“This is my battle. My fight. My victory!”
“I can tell from the way you’re losing. And to the very enemies you thought you could negotiate with! You’ve got a lot to answer for—”
They were interrupted by a bellow from above, and a swooping shadow. Hank threw himself to the ground, and Glory pressed herself against the bridge railing. A slim, black dragon with peach markings and a double tail darted past, its rear claws missing Hank’s scalp by inches, and its tail shaking the roadbed with a shower of sparks.
Behind them, several more dragons had dropped to the pavement and were fighting the beaststalkers Hank had led here. The swinging, snarling, and parrying was punctuated with genuinely violent attempts at breathing fire or shouting light—only to have the sources interrupted by new blows from a nearby enemy. Blood was spilling, slick and crimson.
Looking around, Hank was surprised at how few combatants were close. Beyond him and Glory, there was that lump of crippled girl-thing still writhing on the pavement, a dead dragon at his feet with his axe stuck in it, a dead teacher in a wheelchair on the other side of the translucent wall, a woman clinging to the dead teacher, a couple of teenagers beyond the dead teacher . . . and right here, on this side of the wall, was Jennifer Scales. She glared at him from under platinum locks and held out two daggers. As for the golden dragon-shaped statue . . .
Gone! It took him a moment to realize the truth. Jennifer Scales was the golden dragon!
“You’re a menace beyond words,” he told her as he reached down and yanked his axe out of the dead dragon’s throat. “It’s time you died.”
He felt a sting in his back. Twisting his head, he spotted a feathered shaft sticking from the flesh by his right shoulder blade.
“Wendy, is that you and your poor aim?” He turned his whole body and called out to the unseen archers. “Or is it Lizzy and her inability to make a shot that counts?”
The next shot answered his question.
“I guess the first one was Wendy,” Glory mused as Hank howled, grasping at the arrow stuck in his groin. She cast an eye above. “Libby, if you put one through his heart, I’ll have tea tomorrow with the dragon of your choice.”
Before anyone could take the mayor up on her offer, her cobalt bird rushed the western edge of the bridge and screamed. The sound wave hit the bridge’s superstructure, scattering those dragons still perched there and dropping two lithe figures forty feet to the pavement.
“Mom!” Jennifer ran past Hank and toward one of the women who had fallen. There was no need for concern. Both Wendy and Lizzy, Hank saw through the tears in his eyes, had rolled out of their falls and had suffered only scrapes and bruises. Collapsing to the curb, Hank bit his lip and broke the shaft of the arrow. He tossed the long, feathered piece aside. The pain in his groin was still intense. Funny, he thought, how you can get rid of eighty percent of the arrow in your crotch, and still have a major problem.
“I’m glad to see you girls are both okay,” Glory told the women. “Of course, I would have been happier if you hadn’t shown up at all.” She stuck her shoulder out. “Libby, if you’re done complicating things, could you do me the favor of removing the arrow you shot into me?”
“Stow it, Mother. You’ve hurt a girl here tonight. A girl!”
Glory looked down the street at the twisted form. “Well, the little brat interfered. I could have killed it, you know. I thought you’d appreciate the mercy—”
“Her name is Catherine Brandfire!” Jennifer screamed. Hank couldn’t decide what bothered him more—the arrow-point embedded in his scrotum, or th
is brat’s piercing whine.
“Control yourself,” the mayor scolded. “Have your parents taught you nothing? Comrades fall in battle.”
“There didn’t have to be a battle here at all,” Elizabeth argued. “Mother, why did you have Hank come here with those beaststalkers? Bad enough the Blaze is here, but at least we had a chance to limit the damage when it was just you and their Eldest squaring off. Now . . .”
“Now we have a proper fight,” Hank wheezed. Wow. Difficult to talk.
“Having Hank show up was not my idea.” The mayor sounded offended. “Neither was having you show up, or your daughter, or all these demons who just landed on my bridge. That said, I’m glad my people came, since I would have had a heck of a time killing every one of these dragons with your daughter flashing knives in my face and you and Wendy firing missiles at me.” She paused. “Please tell me I don’t have to fight you on top of all this, Libby.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Mother. I’m not going to fight you. With Jennifer’s help, I can make the dragons stop. But you need to stop your own people. You don’t have much time.”
Hank tried to argue further from his spot on the curb, but he couldn’t. Something was wrong. Something besides the blade scraping the insides of his testicles. He felt tired, too. When he saw the mayor take a lurching step, he understood. They’ve drugged the arrowtips. How disgustingly pacifist of them.
“Libby. Did you—” The mayor stumbled again.
“You’ll be fine,” Elizabeth assured her. She kept babbling on about how important it was to get everyone talking instead of fighting, and Hank was sure she would go on to propose gathering around a campfire and singing songs, but he suddenly wasn’t listening.
He caught sight again of the teenagers beyond the barrier, near the east end of the bridge. First he recognized Skip Wilson, the boy who had hurt his son, who regularly threw off the yoke of authority, who’d conspired with that ghastly Scales girl to destroy the Blacktooth Blade. Next to Skip on the pavement was his girlfriend. Unlike the hobbled girl-thing on this side of the barrier, who had slipped into unconsciousness, this one was still rolling on the pavement. Sick? Unlikely. Hurt? It didn’t appear so. Under sorcery? Hmmm.
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