“I’m the enemy?”
“You’re part dragon. The way Wendy and I were raised, you’ve been our enemy for centuries. But instead of acting like an enemy when Wendy died, you mourned her, mingling death with an enemy’s tears. Now . . .”
They both looked up at the seraph. It surveyed the bridge and then strode eastward with purpose, leaving a wake of pure steam and footsteps of azure fire. It passed through the barrier as though neither wall nor wanderer existed. Xavier Longtail scrambled out of its way.
“It’s heading for—”
“Eddie,” her mother finished. “It’s going to protect Eddie. Maybe there’s a little Wendy left in it, after all.”
The winged force knelt by the unconscious boy’s side and covered him with its wings. Eddie stirred, but did not wake.
“Great.” Despite her cynical tone, Jennifer actually did feel better for Eddie’s safety. “Who’s going to protect us? More specifically, Dad.” She pointed in the opposite direction.
Jonathan Scales was not far away and drawing closer, due mainly to the fact that the beaststalker onslaught was beating him back. He blinked in and out of camouflage. A beaststalker shout ripped the air, causing him to cover his ears and roll away. He responded upon recovering with a short burst of flame. It was not effective: His enemies had deduced he was not in this fight to kill, and they had no such conscience.
Elizabeth surged toward the melee, without a single weapon.
“Mom! How’re you going to—”
It was no use. Her mother was already ten steps ahead of her. Head still swimming from everything that had happened tonight, Jennifer followed. She’s right. We can’t let Dad die, on top of all the other horrible things we’ve seen tonight.
Unfortunately, she could not make it in time to stop the next attack. A dozen arrows came shrieking at Jonathan. Elizabeth pushed him down just as the barbs arrived. All dozen darts hit her in the torso, and Jennifer screamed.
Then she gasped, along with everyone else.
“Stand down,” Elizabeth snarled, picking splinters out of the holes in her jacket.
A few of the warriors hesitated, but two young men did not listen. One called, “Traitor!” and came at her, sword high. The other ran up behind Elizabeth and swung with his own blade.
Jennifer did not even need to react. Elizabeth delivered a roundhouse kick to the first man’s jaw, sending him sprawling. She turned just in time for her left arm to come up in reflex and block the second man’s attack. The blade cut through her sleeve before shattering. She brought her right fist across and knocked the assailant to the ground. Neither man got up.
“Stand down!”
The remaining beaststalkers took two steps back and lowered their weapons. The dragons they fought pulled up and began to circle, taking in this new development.
“Sweetheart!” Jonathan gasped, getting back up on his hindclaws. “You’re not hurt!”
“Apparently not.”
“You never told me you couldn’t be hurt by beaststalker weapons!”
“That’s because I had no idea I couldn’t.”
Now the dragon scowled. “You mean you pushed me out of the way with the intention of taking twelve arrows in the heart?”
“We could discuss this later, darling.”
“Fair enough.”
Elizabeth raised her voice. “Glory Seabright is dead. Her time is done. So is this battle.”
“You’re not in charge here.” Jennifer didn’t recognize the pregnant woman who spoke out. “You’re an insult to the mayor, and to all of us.”
Elizabeth drew herself up so straight and so high, Jennifer could have sworn her mother grew a foot taller. “I am Glory’s heir. She raised me, she loved me, and I loved her. I will not tolerate any bickering near her corpse. She is not a carcass you can just leave on the battlefield, while you pursue your selfish games! She is my mother, and you will do what I tell you, or I will throw you off this bridge!”
The beaststalkers stood in silence. The dragons traced a quiet holding pattern.
“You. And you.” Elizabeth pointed to two of the largest warriors. “Sheathe your swords, haul your ass over there, and pick up my mother. Carry her to city hall and guard her. You two.” She pointed to two more. “Pick up Wendy Williamson. Glory was her mother, too. We’ll bury them together.”
No one moved, until a woman Jennifer recognized from Winoka’s city council spoke up.
“What are you guys waiting for? Move it!”
“Thank you, Sarah.”
“You’re welcome. What else do you need?”
“We need to make sure no one provokes any of the—
“Look out!”
This time, Jennifer caught sight of the elegant, deadly shape of Ember Longtail even before her mother did. Not again, she steamed as she flipped her two daggers out and leapt at the returning attacker. You don’t get her, like you got Wendy.
As Ember’s double-pronged tail came around at an angle sure to pierce her mother’s throat, Jennifer’s daggers moved in two neat circles. Swick and swack they went . . . and two long cuts of dragon meat splattered onto the road.
Ember roared and pulled up, the stump of her tail spurting blood upon the asphalt. Stumbling back, she unleashed a torrent of fire at Jennifer and Elizabeth. Jennifer flashed into dragon form and held her mother inside her wings. When she looked back up, she saw Ember’s attention had shifted slightly, to something behind her. She turned and caught sight of two familiar figures, not far from the crowd.
Susan? Gautierre? What are you doing here? What are you doing together? And, Susan, why do you have a video camera? There was no time to ask these questions. Ember snarled and stepped toward Susan, ready to unleash fire again. Jennifer went cold with a thought: She thinks Susan is a beaststalker, like everyone else here!
The next stream of fire was even bigger, and Jennifer was too far away to help.
Gautierre, however, was in perfect position. By the time he interposed himself between his mother and Susan, he was in dragon form. The flames bounced harmlessly off his scales.
“Fool!” hissed Ember, but Gautierre did not hear her. He was already turning to check and make sure Susan was okay. Jennifer couldn’t restrain a grin. Ah. That’s why he’s here. Now all I have to do is figure out Susan. And the camera.
With a stomp of her foot, Ember was back in the air. Jennifer gave chase. Behind her, she heard her father urging the rest of the Blaze to hold steady. The angry roars of the dragons in response convinced her: She would have to give up this chase, turn back, and help him.
“Come after my mother or friends again, and I’ll cut more pieces off you!” she screamed at Ember’s shrinking shadow, before she circled around to rejoin those on the bridge.
As it turned out, they were not so angry at her father, as at herself. “Jennifer Scales must pay!” came the cry, and in a flash she had hundreds of elders screaming through the air at her. “Revenge for attacking our own! Revenge for our lost Eldest!”
Jennifer did not have time to try to explain or make peace. The scaled cloud of rage blacked out the stars and moon, and she saw it was intent on chasing her down and killing her.
I can use that, Jennifer realized. She shifted her scales to indigo long enough to get past them and over the bridge. Then, she turned herself bright yellow and kept going, letting her scales shimmer like a beacon. Not too quickly, she reminded herself as the cloud gave chase. We don’t want the tramplers to give up! Mom will need more time to clear the bridge.
She lowered altitude and kept close to the riverbank. Soon, she was going so slowly that the more aggressive dashers were almost passing her. That made her pick up speed again.
When some of those dashers climbed high into the air and hurdled down and smashed into the earth in grand explosions around her, she began to think she may have made this too easy for them. Flaming shingles and smoking branches whipped by her face, and the persistent growl of the Blaze strummed louder in her ear
s. She picked up speed, until she was doing fifty, sixty, seventy miles an hour. Still they chased her. Eighty, ninety miles an hour she reached . . . and the fastest among them began to close in on her periphery.
The chase grew hotter, and now there were other things in the air—dragonlike shapes full of hornets, and missiles of electricity, and other magic she had never seen before. Something sharp stuck her in the left wing, making her cry out and lose altitude. Worst of all, she saw they were in the uninhabited wetlands south of town, and the shimmering barrier loomed large in front of her. There was nowhere else to run.
“All right, enough!” she shouted, landing and screeching to a halt. “Enough, enough!”
She whistled and stomped her feet, and within seconds she was surrounded by clouds of hornets and dragonflies in the air, and a tapestry of snakes on the ground. The dragons pursuing her balked, giving her time to address them.
“If you want to tear me apart, I’ll give you the chance!” she promised. “All I want is for you to listen, for one minute.”
Several spouts of flame ignited the air, sending waves of immolated insects to the frost-bitten ground. Jennifer heard the stomping of dozens of feet, as the tramplers among them summoned their own allies—crocodiles and Komodo dragons and serpents of all sizes. The black mambas she had called kept a courageous perimeter, but she knew they could not last. She retreated until she felt the tingling of her hair entering the barrier. The horde pressed closer.
“Give me a chance to explain!”
“Kill her!” they cried, stomping out the last of her snakes.
Jennifer felt something strange within her. She had a vision of the gigantic silver moon elm, when she had first seen it on the volcanic island in another universe, and the way it shuddered when its serpentlike guardian, Seraphina, uncoiled from its trunk and branches. Right now, whatever was inside her was unwinding and flexing. The murderous faces of the Blaze drew closer, and she felt her internal organs ignite. Her skin sizzled painlessly, and her hair began to smolder. She didn’t know what was happening to her, or if what was happening would protect her against the Blaze . . . or destroy them all.
“How dare you attack the Ancient Furnace!”
The sudden declaration startled Jennifer, because it came not from any of the dragons assembled in front of her . . . but from behind.
She turned and almost cried with relief, letting her body relax and douse whatever had been growing inside. Xavier Longtail, black as the night with glittering golden eyes, deadly three-pronged tail twitching in outrage, was drawn up to his full height. The bright green and red markings of Geddy the gecko flitted over his wingspan. Her relief turned to dismay as she realized what lay between them. Xavier was on the wrong side of the barrier!
“Ancient Furnace? She is not worthy of the name!” a trampler cried out. “She fought against the Eldest of the Blaze, and played a hand in her death!”
“She attacked your own niece, Elder Longtail!” added a small dasher, whose scales shimmered between scarlet and violet.
“She did that on my behalf,” Xavier announced. That made all of them pause, including Jennifer. He explained. “Ember Longtail was acting against my wishes. I have come to terms with the woman who killed my brother. When Ember attacked this woman, she disobeyed my will . . . the will of her own clan’s elder! In defending the woman, Jennifer Scales did what I would have done myself, were I not behind this wall.”
“She was not doing your will,” the small dasher sneered. “She was protecting the murderer, who happens to be her own mother!”
“Once again, Elder Longtail, you find yourself on the wrong side—literally and figuratively.” This creeper who spoke now was nearly Xavier’s size. “That barrier you stand behind makes you irrelevant. So does your sudden, naïve hope for peace. You would have left a better legacy if you had joined us this evening.”
“My legacy?” Xavier asked in a curious tone. “What will you have to say about my legacy, Elder Turner? Our legacy is written on the stone plateau in Crescent Valley. When do you suppose you’ll make your next visit?”
The Blaze looked up and around at the shimmering blue dome.
“If anyone has made themselves irrelevant,” Xavier continued, “it is the lot of you, for rushing off to destroy a town that in seventy years hasn’t come close to finding or threatening Crescent Valley. Its mayor is now dead, its future uncertain. One of its most likely leaders has a dragon for a daughter—that would be the Elder Scales you’re trying to kill here. This young elder is the obvious choice both to keep her mother safe, and to ensure the safety of dragons trapped in that town. You want to attack her? You want to have beaststalkers choose a leader that despises us? You want to try to live there, inside that cozy dome of yours, with no friends? How many of you do you think will be left two days from now? Two weeks? Two years?”
“The barrier won’t last that long,” the creeper insisted, as his comrades shifted uncomfortably. “The arachnid who created it is dead!”
“Yet it persists. I have to admit, I’m no expert on this sort of sorcery. Maybe you’re right, Elder Turner. Maybe you can kill Jennifer Scales.”
“Try to kill Jennifer Scales,” Jennifer Scales corrected him softly.
He ignored her. “Frankly, I can’t think of a worse move you could make tonight. And I’ll be sure to carve that in the stone plateau, after you’re all dead. So much for legacy.”
Jennifer began to relax when she saw a few of the dragons in back begin to turn to walk away. Several reptiles that had been summoned, feeling their masters lose interest, began rooting about the frozen turf. After a minute, only a few dozen dragons remained.
“So what do we do?” a dazzling emerald trampler asked. “We sit and wait for this thing to disappear? We return cheering, with the Ancient Furnace propped on our shoulders? What?”
Xavier began to answer, but Jennifer stepped in front of him. “I promise I’ll find shelter and safety for all of you, for as long as it takes. First, please, I need to help a friend. One of our own. Can I trust all of you to go back with me to the bridge?”
By the time Jennifer and the Blaze had returned to the bridge, the bodies of Glory Seabright and Wendy Blacktooth had disappeared. Hank Blacktooth was also gone. Elizabeth had ordered him removed from the scene. Only a few beaststalkers stood sentry.
The corpse of Winona Brandfire was still there, but she had been covered with a tarp. Jonathan, Elizabeth, and her beaststalker companions had their full attention on the trembling form of her granddaughter, Catherine, whose blood still seeped from the wound at the top of her spine. Jennifer shifted out of her scales and sheathed her daggers as she approached.
“How is she?”
“She’s not in immediate danger,” Elizabeth said. “We should get her to the hospital to stop the bleeding. Even after extensive surgery, she is going to have difficulty walking.”
“And being a dragon again . . . ?”
“Jennifer, I’m sorry. I wouldn’t know how to begin undoing what Glory has done.”
“Dad?”
“I’ve never heard of it happening, ace.” He looked at the members of the Blaze, who had perched themselves along the southern bridge railing. “I don’t think any of us have.”
“But all Glory did was wound her! You’re a surgeon, Mom! If you can fix a wound, why wouldn’t that fix the hobble?”
“What’s hurt is not visible to a surgeon, or anyone else in this world.” Elizabeth rolled back off her knees with a sigh of despair. “There’s nothing to fix, no medical precedent, nothing we can offer someone in Catherine’s condition! Until tonight, when I saw Edmund Slider stand up, I didn’t think it was possible to recover at all. How he did it . . .” Together, they looked through the barrier at the arachnid form that lay in the wheelchair. Not far beyond, Eddie was still asleep in the embrace of the seraph.
“Hey!” Jennifer called out, struck by an idea. “HEY!”
“Honey, what are you doing?”
> “You said nothing in this world can do anything about this. Maybe something from another world can. Hey, you!”
The seraph lifted its head.
“Yeah, you! You’re here to help, right?”
It did not move.
“I mean, you’re not just here to sit in the middle of the road and keep my boyfriend’s ass warm, am I right? You’re here, you’re helping. My friend Catherine needs help.”
“Ace, perhaps a bit more decorum toward the huge hunk of immortality . . .”
“It doesn’t scare me, Dad. It’s like you used to say about me all the time growing up: ‘I brought her into this world; I can take her out.’ Yeah, that’s it! Get up, walk on over here . . .”
The scent of burning lavender reached them even before it had breached the barrier again. In a few steps, it reached Catherine. Everyone except Jennifer backed up to give it room. As it knelt, the pavement beneath it crackled.
“What’s wrong with her?” Jennifer asked it. “What can’t we see that needs to be fixed?”
The seraph’s face drew close to Catherine. Its fire did not burn her, but a fever glistened on her broken skin. One of the silver sleeves fell back and a hand filled with light emerged. As the hand plunged slowly into her wound, Catherine cried out.
“Catherine.” Jennifer tried to sound comforting, even though she had no idea what the seraph would—or could—do. “Try to hold still. We’re going to help you.”
Her friend’s eyes searched, but saw nothing. “Jennifer, are you with me?”
“Always.”
“It hurts so much.”
“Hang in there.”
The bulge in Catherine’s back extended as the seraph probed deeper. Her friend sucked in a breath, reached out with a weak hand, and grabbed Jennifer’s wrist.
“How much longer?” she asked the seraph hotly, knowing she would receive no reply.
Instead, the seraph withdrew its hand, plucking out something dark and twisted. As soon as it was out, Catherine fainted.
Seraph of Sorrow Page 44
