by Eileen Wilks
The opening yawned ahead, a gaping, shadowed hole in one rocky hill. As they drew near, Lily heard music. She slowed, struggling to catch her breath. Listening.
The brownie mothers and great-mothers were singing to the dragon. Impossibly pure and high, their voices floated out from the cave. They sang in their own language, not English. Gandalf had spoken of songs from the ithnali, songs that had been passed down, generation to generation, for God knew how long. Millennia? How many—two, three, four thousand years? The harmonies were intricate, inhuman, and haunting. They reminded her of dragonsong.
Lily crouched near the entrance and spoke to Charles. “Listen. Listen to me. Whatever the Lady wants of you, it can’t include getting eaten by a pissed-off mother dragon. How would that help? Mika will not tolerate you entering her creche. You know that. Stay up here, okay?”
He thought it over. Finally he nodded.
One thing had gone right, at least. Impulsively Lily hugged him, then gave him a quick rub behind his ears. Then she walked up to the gaping entrance, which wasn’t truly dark. Shadowed, yes, compared to the sun’s light, which was still bright at this hour, though it arrived at a slant now. But there was a dim radiance belowground. Mage lights, she guessed. They provided enough light for her to spot the rope ladder she’d been promised, fastened on this end to iron spikes set securely in stone.
It was a brownie-size rope ladder.
She stared at it in consternation. She could maybe get one foot in at a time . . . kneeling, she pulled it partway up and tried that. Good thing she had narrow feet. She tested its strength as best she could, leaving her foot jammed in between the rungs and pulling with both hands. It seemed sturdy enough to hold her weight, but there was only one way to find out for sure. She shoved it back over the edge, lay on her belly, and lowered herself over the edge.
The singing never faltered as she descended. The worst part was finding an opening to thrust her foot into; her weight pulled the thing down in a way that made the two sides draw together. Several muscle-straining minutes later, she let herself drop the last few feet to land in soft sand.
Five feet away was a red coil of dragon. Mika’s tail, to be precise. On the ledge way above her, brownies stood, singing. Above them rose Mika’s head. The glow from hovering mage lights struck crimson sparks from her scales. Yellow eyes glowed with their own light.
Lily’s mindsense quivered, wanting to reach out. It took only her permission for it to uncoil and touch the mind behind those glowing eyes. “Now what? What am I supposed to do?”
Come close.
That great body shifted slowly, coils sliding, one of them lifting to make an opening. One Lily could slip through if she ducked. Her heart pounded as she approached. The dragon’s body radiated heat like a sidewalk that’s baked in the sun all day. Sam’s body wasn’t this hot. She’d been close to him often enough to know. She ducked down and squeezed herself through that small opening.
It was like stepping into a sauna. There was sand beneath her feet, soft and hot. Mika’s coiled body radiated and trapped heat on this section of sand . . . where five eggs rested.
They were the biggest eggs she’d ever seen. They were beautiful. And pink. The eggs were the softest of pinks, the color of the sky’s first blush at dawn, and each one was beautifully marbled with another color. Blue marbling in that one. Copper and yellow swirls in the one beside it. In another, turquoise; in the fourth, a bright green much like brownie eyes. And in the fifth . . . that one was marbled with crimson, like Mika’s scales. And cracked. As Lily stared, the egg rocked slightly. “Mika?” she whispered.
Touch me.
“I am.”
Touch with flesh and mind.
Lily backed up a couple feet. She slipped the AK-47 off her shoulder and laid it down carefully, then laid her palm on hot, slick scales. Her palm heated from more than physical warmth as she touched dragon magic—heat and chaos, order and power all mingled in an indescribable tactile sensation. And her mindsense sank deeper into Mika’s mind.
Efondi. Mika’s voice was different. Not clearer, exactly. More intimate. The ripples carrying the dragon’s words resonated deep inside Lily. I will explain your duties now. You know I cannot mindspeak at this time.
“Yes. Mika, I—I don’t sense the babies’ minds.”
Their shells protect their minds now. As each one emerges from his shell, he loses that protection. You must touch his mind with yours while linked with me this way.
“I don’t know how to touch two minds at once. Not fully enough to mindspeak them. I don’t think—”
Do not think. Do. Touching with flesh and mind together makes a link. You must touch my babies while you and I are linked and mindspeak each one. Dragon babies must be touched and spoken to this way in the first moments outside the shell, while their minds are fully open. If this does not happen, they will never speak. Never touch another mind. Never develop telepathy or other forms of what you call mind magic. Their minds will be locked in forever.
Lily wanted to be somewhere else. Almost anywhere else. Fighting a demon, maybe. Surely that would be easier than being responsible for keeping baby dragons from growing up trapped in their own minds, unable to communicate. “Forever?”
Yes. You understand I will kill you if you reveal this to anyone except your mate.
“Goes without saying.” And Lily wished she hadn’t said it, though she was surprised Mika had made an exception for Rule.
A second crack appeared on the dawn-and-crimson egg. Panic made her voice almost as high as a brownie’s. “What do I say?”
You name them.
* * *
NSA Headquarters was a huge, dead black building in Maryland next to Fort Meade. Demi had been there twice, but she didn’t go there today. Abel Karonski would go there because it was a public place. Demi wasn’t sure why that meant Mr. Karonski should go there instead of them, but it had something to do with his career not being over the way Ruben’s was.
She had never been to Mr. Smith’s home. She knew it was in Laurel, Maryland, about eleven minutes away from the NSA Headquarters if Mr. Smith took the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. She knew what his house looked like, having looked it up using Street View once. He and his wife lived in a two-story Federal-style home with white siding. It felt beyond weird to drive past that big white house with its flat front and symmetrical windows.
There were a lot of cars parked near Mr. Smith’s house—cars in the driveway and parked along the street, as if Mr. Smith was having a party. Surely he wouldn’t do that when so much was happening, but why so many cars?
Maybe it was his wife’s party and he wasn’t home. Demi had never met Mrs. Smith, but she knew that her first name was Annabelle, that she had very conservative political views, liked cats, and enjoyed cooking. Mrs. Smith was on Facebook.
Another car followed theirs, but that was okay. It held four Wythe lupi and two brownies. Ruben didn’t think Mr. Smith was going to just stand there and let himself be arrested. If he was even there, that is. With or without a bunch of guests. They’d find out soon.
They turned a corner and drove halfway down the block, then Mike pulled over. The car behind them did, too. Ruben, who was in the front seat, turned around to speak to two of the backseat passengers. “You know what to do?”
Twix and Hershey nodded. “Go see who’s there,” Twix said.
“Especially see if the round man’s there,” Hershey added. “Count up how many people and see if they have guns, if we can.”
“And don’t let ourselves be seen,” they chorused, as if they’d practiced it.
“That’s right,” Ruben said. “Don’t be brave. Be careful. Demi, you can let them out now.”
She opened the door and the two brownies climbed over her to get out. Twix and Hershey were confident they could get in Mr. Smith’s house and get out again without being seen. She hoped they were right.
“How are you holding up, Demi?” Ruben asked.
She
realized she’d been rubbing her stomach, which felt very uncertain. “It’s just ordinary fear,” she assured him.
* * *
RULE crouched low in the shrubby undergrowth, watching as three IFVs advanced on the tree line at the boundary of the reservation’s public sector. The rest of the company straggled out behind—a pair of armored personnel carriers and several squads of foot soldiers. Those soldiers had started out in APCs and IFVs which had suffered mysterious calamities on the way here. Brownies were appallingly good at breaking things.
Two of the soldiers in the nearest squad suddenly stumbled for no apparent reason. Another fell flat on his face. Rule didn’t doubt that others, farther back, were also tripping over small, invisible obstacles. Some of them would suddenly be missing some item of their gear. Their squad radios, he hoped. That’s what he’d suggested.
People had largely forgotten why the government created the brownie reservations in the first place. Brownies loved to play tricks on Big People—especially Big People who’d harmed or offended them. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, some of their tricks had become costly. Mills, factories, or foundries had been shut down when their equipment suffered strange mishaps. A few had wanted to get rid of “those little troublemakers” altogether—but most people, then and now, loved brownies. Public outrage had made pariahs of those few who’d advocated for a final solution. They’d been pariahs with both power and money, however. Hence the reservations.
Three dozen brownies came skipping out of the woods, singing at the top of their lungs, some holding hands, some holding flowers. The IFVs—which did look rather like tanks, with their treads and turrets—slowed. And were quickly swarmed by brownies, who climbed up on the vehicles, tossing flowers around like manic flower girls at the world’s oddest wedding. A few brownies hung back, pointedly aiming their phones at the scene. The Internet community would be very interested in those videos.
The brownies were singing “It’s a Small World”—one of the most insidious earworms ever invented.
Rule smiled. On his back, Dilly convulsed in silent laughter.
“We got this,” Codger whispered from beside Rule. “Go.”
Rule nodded and slipped away. The brownies would continue to slow the troops as much as possible. He and his men had another focus: finding Nicky.
FORTY-FIVE
BABY dragons don’t have wings.
That was one of several surprises Lily had experienced as she sat on the hot sand, her hair limp from sweat, mentally midwifing Mika’s babies as they hatched—which, she’d been happy to learn, they did one at a time.
A shiny blue length of dragon stretched out limply across her lap like two feet of reptilian ribbon. He was drowsy, tired from the exertion of breaking through the shell. The warmth of her body probably felt good; he wouldn’t be able to regulate his temperature without help until he was older, according to Mika. A few feet away his older brother tried to run, wobbled, and fell into a crimson heap. He opened his mouth and meeped in surprise.
She smiled. Big dragons roared. Babies, not so much.
Overhead, seventeen brownie mothers and great-mothers sang. They took it in shifts, she’d learned, so that no voices grew overly tired and as many as possible could participate. But the number of singers remained constant at seventeen.
A coil of Mika rested beside Lily so she could keep one hand touching the dragon.
Keeping her mindsense anchored in Mika’s mind was effortless while her hand was pressed against the dragon’s bulk. Touching another mind at the same time was harder, but not as difficult as she’d expected. Mostly it was a matter of attention—rather as if she had to force herself to notice she was already touching that mind.
Directly in front of her was an egg. A small blue-green snout thrust through the crack, bit down on the ragged edge of the shell, and snapped off a large piece. With that, the rest of the shell cracked, came apart. A tumble of turquoise spilled out—along with a burst of strange magic.
The magic prickled over Lily’s skin, wilder or more primitive than Mika’s. She closed her eyes and thought of her mindsense as if it were a diffuse fog already present in the rocky creche, already touching every mind here . . .
“Ohhh.” The new baby’s mind was without texture, pure and clear as water, though there were textures beneath the surface. She couldn’t touch those textures, couldn’t go that deeply, but she sensed them, shiny white patterns sliding around in a crystalline bubble.
Those textures influenced her choice in a way she couldn’t describe. With her mind both linked to Mika’s and touching that water-crystal mind, she spoke: “Bái.” White, she named him. White for those shiny patterns. As she did, Mika sent a pulse of shaped power along Lily’s mindsense—a peculiar sensation.
The naming sank gently into the baby’s mind.
Mika had terrified Lily by telling her that the names she gave the babies would shape them, eventually becoming the first syllable of their true names. For now, the names would be Mika’s entry into their minds, allowing her to speak to her babies, to teach them how to speak back—and when necessary, to control them. But until a baby grew beyond his birth name, it could, potentially, be used by someone other than his mother. Mika assured her that was unlikely. Simply pronouncing a name correctly was not the same as using it, and very few in this world knew how to use a name. But why take a chance? By giving them Chinese names, Lily greatly reduced the number of people who could say them properly. On this side of the world, anyway.
Plus she’d just thought Chinese appropriate. These babies were American dragons. They’d probably have English call-names, but their parents were immigrants. Their roots stretched back to China. And probably to someplace even more remote as well, but none of the dragons had seen fit to confirm or deny that idea when Lily asked. The babies would have to settle for names that reflected their earthly roots.
Bái wobbled up onto his feet for the first time. Lily beamed at him. Good, she told him. Good for you. She even got a reply, though not in words—a sort of delighted hum. Carefully she withdrew her mindsense from him. I’m going to check on Rule, she told Mika. And on the invaders you’re ignoring. I’ll have to break the link.
No response. Mika was lost in the bright fascination of her babies.
Lily sighed. Single-minded, the brownies had called the dragon. She had to agree. She took her hand away from the dragon’s hot body—and swayed as her mindsense snapped back into her and pain stabbed through her head.
She’d expected that. While she was linked with Mika, her head didn’t hurt. The moment she broke the link, it did. But the worst pain would subside if she waited a bit.
She sat without moving. It seemed to take longer this time and hurt worse. Finally, though, the pain ebbed to a dull throbbing.
Carefully she moved the blue baby off her lap—Fe¯ng, she’d named him, Wind—then stood and stretched. The hot sand was littered with brightly colored shell fragments, glossy shards of pale pink streaked with fiery red, deep blue, and now turquoise.
Lily checked on the last two intact eggs. Neither were cracked, but when she crouched to get close, she could hear tapping from the one marbled in copper and yellow.
She settled beside it and closed her eyes. That seemed to help when she wanted to mindspeak someone who wasn’t close by.
Rule was easy to find. Oh, it took effort to push her mindsense out far enough to touch his mind, especially when she was already tired. Even before she nearly fainted after overextending herself, Lily hadn’t liked the way it felt to extend her mindsense very far. It was disorienting, for one thing. It made her feel stretched and precarious and, if she pushed too far, downright tenuous. But with Rule she didn’t have to go looking. The mate sense guided her right to him.
She touched his mind very lightly, not wanted to distract him, and sent the softest “voice” she could. Her lips shaped the words as she sent them. I’m here, if you can talk.
. . . hold . . . a minute.<
br />
Funny how his mental voice sounded exactly like the one she was used to hearing. Did her brain just interpret it that way, or was it an innate property of mindspeech—something his mind did, not hers? She’d have to check that out with people whose voices she didn’t know . . .
Sorry. Had to get some distance from . . . following me.
I missed some of that. Who’s following you? Giving really was better than receiving when it came to mindspeech. For her anyway. She could send quite clearly, according to those she’d practiced with, but she often missed part of the response.
A couple squads. Keeping them . . . while the others look for Nicky. No luck. Brownies . . . half a dozen soldiers in one pit and IFV in another.
His amusement came through clearly, making her grin. Go, brownies. Is it going well, then?
A few problems. No major injuries, but when . . . A frustratingly long break then, followed by, You’re okay?
Sure. There are now three baby dragons. Two more to go.
Baby dragons. It’s hard to picture. Are they cute?
They’re dragons, just very little ones, so mostly they’re stunningly beautiful, but there are moments of cute. They meep.
They what?
Big dragons roar. Baby dragons meep. It’s adorable. I missed what you said earlier about—shit! What was that? What just happened? It had felt as if his mind had been jostled or jolted.
Got to go.
She stayed in touch with his mind, but didn’t try to speak to him. That abrupt departure could only mean something was happening that needed his attention. A fight. Bullets. It might be some more benign event, but the ones that seemed most likely all involved threat, danger, possible injury.
But not death. He hadn’t been killed. At least she knew that much. She drew a shaky breath and, at last, let her mindsense coil back up inside her. Things were not going well, though she wasn’t sure how bad their position was. Rule had been careful not to tell her. A few problems, he’d said. No major injuries. Whatever she’d missed would likely have been more of the same, a way to tell her as little as possible because he didn’t want her to worry.
