by S. W. Clarke
Ahead, a sign blazed with luminous intensity in the night, beckoning me.
“Your tracker’s on the move,” I said when Aubert picked up. “Though I don’t know how long it’ll be until he reaches into his back pocket. Best catch him while you have the chance.”
“We’re tracking him now,” she breathed. “I can’t believe you did it.”
The scent of pancakes wafted through the air as I limped on. “Really? What did you think would happen?”
“Well, you know …”
“You thought I’d get my ass kicked.”
“Something like that.”
“I did. But I also completed your mission.”
She paused. “Are you all right?”
“All right enough to talk and walk toward food. By the way, do I get a per diem for this?”
“Well—” She sighed. “Sure. If you come by the station, I’ll give you twenty bucks.”
“I’m holding you to that, Aubert. And please, catch that ogre for me.” When I hung up, I’d reached the double doors. My whole body felt lighter as I stared inside.
“Welcome to IHOP,” the hostess said, her voice not even catching at the sight of me. They probably saw worse than me on a regular basis. “How many in your party?”
“One.” Then I raised a finger. “Nix that. Seven. The other six are gnomes.”
Ten minutes later, I was seated in a booth with a carafe of coffee in front of me and both my hands wrapped around a steaming mug.
GoneGodDamn did it feel good to sit down.
When Ferris and the other five gnomes filtered in, all dressed in regular children’s clothes (because what else do you wear in the GoneGod World when you’re a gnome?), I scooted over to allow two of them to sit beside me, the other four on the opposite side.
Ferris stared at me from across the table as the hostess set down menus for everyone. One of the gnomes flagged her. “I’d like a children’s menu, please.”
After the hostess had left, Ferris shook his head. Picked up his menu. “You look terrible.”
I tapped my mug. “Nothing coffee and pancakes can’t correct.”
He eyed his menu with supreme disdain. “You should have let Dordri help you with the ogre.”
Dordri was the ninja who was presently tracking Grunt toward the Garden District. He’d lain in wait outside the community center for over an hour.
“Pfft.” I waved a hand. “I had it under control.”
“Of all the places in this city, you picked this one?” another of the ninjas said as he perused his menu.
“It was within walking distance,” I said. “That is, walking distance when you’re missing a shoe. Much smaller radius.”
“I like pancakes,” another of the ninjas said. “I once ate three platters of endless pancakes. It was glorious and then awful.”
It was impolite to get down to business before we’d eaten, but I had to know. “Any updates from Dordri?” I asked Ferris.
“Drink your coffee,” Ferris said without looking up. “Dordri is the best tracker of us all.”
“And where’s Grunt headed?” I pressed, leaning closer.
Ferris lifted his eyes to glare at me overtop his menu. “Listen, do you trust us, or not?”
“Sure I do, but you have to understand—I’ve been hunting Scarred for years …”
Ferris groaned. “She’ll never let up until she gets her answer, mundane as it may be,” he muttered to himself, pulling a phone out of his breast pocket. He hit a few buttons, murmured into it as the waitress came to take our order.
“You would like five orders of endless pancakes, one blueberry pancakes, and one breakfast hash,” she said at the end. Her eyes lifted to survey us. “All of you would like pancakes except for the human, correct?”
I shrugged, handed over my menu. “The gnomes have spoken.”
After she’d left, Ferris hung up.
“Well?” I said to him.
“Did she get my order?” he said. “Blueberry pancakes.”
I exhaled long and low through my nose as I shot him my most monstrous stare.
“Your ogre is walking north through the city.” Ferris clasped his hands on the table for effect. “Dordri reports an awkward walk. He said you kicked him in a particularly sensitive spot.”
Grim satisfaction flooded through me. Then, “He’s just … walking?”
“He’s just walking.”
“And Dordri is on his tail?”
Ferris’s head tilted. “You have issues letting go of control, don’t you, Tara?”
I jerked the coffee carafe toward me as one of the other ninjas reached for it, pouring myself a second cup. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The other ninjas began speaking in a language I didn’t understand—Gnomish, I guessed—and all six of them broke into laughter.
They were definitely shit-talking me.
Our meals arrived, steaming and fragrant, all seven plates being passed down the length of the table. So many pancakes.
I picked up my fork, dug in. “What’s so funny?” I asked the ninjas after I’d taken a bite of hashbrowns.
Ferris gestured to me with his knife. “Zanfiz said you look like you’ve fallen from the heavens on the day the gods left.”
I glanced down at myself. Ripped cardigan and skirt, hair a mess. Streaks of dirt on my hands, probably elsewhere, too. One shoe missing. Bruises all over.
Zanfiz was right.
I one-shoulder shrugged, dug into my meal, this one respite in the midst of a lot of trouble. “Well, at least I fell from the heavens and not the hells.”
Chapter 18
Ferris gave me a lift back to the barn outside the city. As I rode in the Mystery Mobile, I assessed my wounds. Nothing broken, but I’d definitely have some purple bruises and some icing to do.
When he dropped me off and I pushed open the enormous barn door, something shifted in the darkness. I froze at the doorway, squinting into the square of moonlight and the blackness beyond until I heard, “Tara?”
I sucked in air. “Perce?”
When I turned on the lights, Percy lay in the hay, staring back at me with enormous pupils and what looked like a big mark on his face. He raised a wing over his eyes. “It’s too bright.”
“Sorry about that.” I turned most of the lights off, came over to him and dropped my bag. When I knelt next to him, I could pick out other marks on his scales. It looked like he’d been attacked, clawed by something. “What’s happened to you?”
“Nothing,” he mumbled from under his wing.
I leaned around to meet his eyes. I suspected I knew who had done this, but I wanted to step carefully. “Did you go hunting?”
“No.”
I set a hand on his wing, and he flinched. He’d never done that. “Are you in pain?”
He sighed. “I’m fine.”
He wasn’t telling me the truth. The flinching had been obvious enough.
I settled into the hay next to him. “Want me to tuck you in?”
A pause. Then, “I’m too old for that.”
“You weren’t a week ago.”
“Well, all right then.”
I sidled up next to him, worry still lancing me like a hot iron. I pushed it aside to focus on the dragon in front of me. I began to stroke his face the way he liked, singing my mother’s song; he was usually asleep after thirty seconds of that. And he was, mostly, but he murmured in a half-asleep way, “They hurt me, Tara, to make me tougher. But I want to go back. Can I go back?”
“Back to whom, Perce?” I whispered, heat rising up my neck.
“The flight,” he said. “The flight of dragons.”
The flight of dragons had hurt him.
They’d hurt Percy.
She had hurt Percy.
I didn’t answer him, but it didn’t matter; he had fallen into that familiar snoring.
As I stroked a hand over his wing, I contemplated with blind fury all the ways in which I coul
d kill the matriarch. And there weren’t many, really—she was, after all, a fully grown dragon. But that didn’t stop me from fantasizing.
This was the first time Percy had truly left my side, and the moment he’d done so, someone had hurt him. To toughen him up. To make him like her.
I’d met the matriarch. I didn’t want Percy to become like her.
For all I knew, she had a heart of coal in that fiery chest. For all I knew, she had no love at all to give.
What did it mean to confront a matriarch? I had no idea, but I was going to find out.
When I stepped outside the barn and dialed Ferris, I stared up into the night sky, waiting for him to answer.
He did, on the third ring. “Tara,” he groaned. “It’s midnight. Do you know what time a gnome goes to sleep?”
“I just have one question for you, Ferris, and then you can sleep.”
“Get on with it.”
“Tell me where the matriarch is.”
He sighed. “She could be anywhere. She’s a dragon.”
“She must sleep somewhere.”
“Why do you want to know that?”
My fingers curled into a fist at my side. “Percy came back tonight. He’s beaten up. Badly.”
“Now Tara,” he began with a certain wariness, “steel-tipped kitten heels aren’t going to help you with a matriarch. I’m not sure you want to …”
“I want to, Ferris. Will you tell me?”
I could hear him rubbing a hand over his face as he sighed. “She’s in a wildlife preserve, a swamp of sorts with an island at the center. Sauvage. It’ll be a drive from New Orleans.”
“I’ve got a moped.”
“Eh, that’ll be a slow ride.”
“Can I get there and back by morning?”
“If you leave now. And provided she doesn’t reduce you to ashes for confronting her.”
I turned back toward the barn. “That’s a risk I’m willing to take, Ferris. Have a good night.”
“Tara—”
But I’d already hung up. Ferris wouldn’t talk me out of this; I’d made up my mind from the moment I’d seen Percy from the doorway.
I was his protector. I had always been his protector, and I had failed to keep him from harm.
It was time to pay a visit to the one who harmed him.
Inside, I rooted through my bags and pulled out my regular clothes. Got changed into my jacket and jeans, clipped my whips to my belt, slid my throwing knives into their sheaths in my boots. Braided my hair so tight it hurt my scalp.
Last of all, I scribbled out a note and set it beside Percy, who slept on.
I set a kiss on his head. Stood in the darkness and turned toward the night.
A wild white heat filled my chest. It ached with something like pain and something like vicious fury. It wouldn’t subside until I did what I needed to do.
↔
It’s hard to have a bitch fight when you show up on a moped.
I rode east through the night with my single headlamp, pushing the engine to do fifty. That strained the moped to a squeal, but I didn’t care; Aubert could charge me for any damages.
The highway outside New Orleans was dull and dark, the bushes grown high along the edges, obscuring my view of the Bayou Sauvage Wildlife Refuge where Ferris had told me Yaroz and her brood slept.
I wondered in a pique of anger if she had followed us here. Why else would she be in New Orleans? Not the kind of place a dragon would naturally choose to live—no, not one like her. She’d choose a mountain or at least a cave. Not a swamp.
And if she had followed us here, maybe she had been tailing us for some time. At that show in Tallahassee, I could have sworn I heard a dragon’s wings, even when Percy was on the ground.
Maybe she’d had her sights on Percy for a long time.
When I arrived at the wildlife refuge, the gatehouse was closed, the entry inaccessible—to cars, that is.
My moped, on the other hand, could squeak through.
I scooted past the security bar and drove down the ink-black road toward the depths of the refuge. Apparently alligators were plentiful here. Well, when you’re going to face a full-grown dragon, alligators certainly don’t rate so high on your creatures-I-wouldn’t-want-to-fight-to-the-death list.
Top of that list? Probably dragons.
I’d spent five years taking care of a dragon. I knew how lethal they were, how hot their fire burned even before maturity, how sharp those talons could be.
How GoneGodDamned smart they were.
As I drove deeper into the refuge, I realized that Ferris had done me a real disservice: he hadn’t told me where in this enormous place to look for Percy’s mama. And when I tried to dial him up, I didn’t have any signal.
So I did what my mother would have done.
I stopped the moped, climbed off and swung the kickstand down in the middle of the road. I set one hand to the horn and started beeping.
Birds tore into the sky, feathers rustling for what must have been a mile all around. Other things splashed into the water nearby. Somewhere far off, I could have sworn a coyote howled.
“Yaroz!” I yelled between beeps. “I need to talk to you. It’s me, Tara Drake.”
That went on for two or three minutes. My ears were starting to ring when I heard it: a crack like a whip in the sky above.
My eyes lifted, and a shadow passed across the fat moon.
I lowered my hand, stood in the road, waiting.
It didn’t take long; with another crack, the ground beneath me rumbled, a sudden wind blowing into my face.
The queen herself had landed, scales glittering under the moonlight, eyes glowing in the night. She stood with her neck arched so high, I had to stare almost straight up.
Her regal head obscured the moon.
Neither of us spoke; I’d once again been rendered speechless, all the fighting words I’d prepared swept out of my head.
“You,” she said, her voice caramel and silk and death. “You dare awaken my children from their sacred slumber.”
As if in response, a dragon shrieked somewhere within the refuge. I heard the tiny drumbeat of flapping wings. Elsewhere, another dragon returned the call.
“Afraid it was important,” I managed to say without compromising the cool timber of my voice. “We need to have a parent-teacher conference.”
A moment later, Yaroz’s face lowered so close to me I felt half-certain she would close her jaws over the top half of my body like that T-Rex in Jurassic Park. I didn’t even have time to run, to prepare a defense. She moved that fast.
So I was grateful when her nostrils stopped a foot from my head.
“Remove that pitiful armor,” she whispered.
“Oh, this.” I unsnapped the helmet and set it atop the moped. Tried to keep my hands steady as I did. “Helps prevent my head from cracking like—”
My voice was drowned out by a great insuck of air. My braid flew toward her nostrils as she inhaled.
“Hm,” she said. “My son’s scent is all over you.”
My head jerked back. “Ew. I would never. First of all, that would be a massive dereliction of my responsibility as his guardian. Second of all…”
“Cease speaking.” Her voice had shifted more toward death than caramel and silk. You’d better believe I ceased speaking. “Stupid humans, always with minds in the muck. I don’t mean in a sexual way—he has spent all of his short life around you. And this is why he’s weak.”
She hadn’t used the word imprinted. Ferris had told me it was impossible for Percy to imprint on me, anyway.
For five years, I’d never dared to think he would see me as anything other than his protector, or at best his older sister. Maybe I hadn’t wanted to be anything other than that.
But in the past six months, something had changed. And I knew exactly which moment it had occurred. It was the day he’d scarred my wrist, which would never have total feeling again after he’d turned his dragonfire on me.
/> He had been so angry that day. We were practicing for hours, and I wouldn’t let him stop. I should have; he was tired, hungry, not at his best. Neither was I.
And yet we’d needed the show to go perfectly. We needed those tips.
And so we’d persisted, us both getting angrier and angrier. Until I snapped, and he snapped, and he’d opened his mouth and that cauldron of flames had appeared at the back of his throat.
My hand went up to preserve my face. He was already holding back, but he couldn’t stop the plume that had already escaped.
It was a half-second of excruciating, mind-melting pain, all the skin on my wrist burning away. And in the moment I collapsed to the ground and Percy rushed to my side, I already understood.
If I could endure this and still love him, I could endure anything. And I did; I still loved him. I would have loved him even if he hadn’t done what he did.
He was already in paroxysms of guilt. Hot tears splattered onto my face. “I’m so sorry, Tara!”
I couldn’t speak; the pain was too much. I only groaned.
“I’ll fix it,” he said. “I’ll fix it right now.”
I knew what he meant to do. I tried to tell him not to, but my rational brain couldn’t fight its way past the pain to form words.
That day, he gave up an hour of his mortal life to heal my wound. Apparently OnceImmortal creatures can do that in this GoneGodWorld—burn time off the end of their lives to use magic as they had before the gods left—but I’d never seen it before. I wasn’t even sure it was real.
Not until Percy made the sacrifice for me.
When I sat up, rubbing my newly healed wrist, I’d pressed my eyes shut with a shaking head. “You shouldn’t have done that, Perce. You’ve lost time you’ll never get back.”
“I don’t regret it—”
My eyes flicked open to stare him down. “Never again. It’s me who sacrifices for you—not you for me.”
He’d nodded, mollified, tears still in his eyes. He wanted a hug, I could tell. So I gave him one.
And that day, I realized now, he’d become my son. At least in my eyes.
In this parent-teacher conference, I didn’t want to be the teacher. I wanted to be the parent.