by S. W. Clarke
Chapter 19
“Percy isn’t weak,” I growled, fingers curling.
Yaroz snorted. “Do you not realize, human, that I can hear the blood rushing through your veins? That small heart beating like a bird in your chest? I can sense your desire to reach for that piece of leather you have strapped to your body, little good it will do you.”
She was right: I was spoiling for a fight. I was prepared to throw down with a full-grown dragon, right here in the middle of the swamp in Louisiana.
That was how important Percy was to me.
“Good,” I said, one hand sliding toward my belt. “Then you can’t claim I surprised you after you get whipped by the little human.”
“Human,” she said, “do you ever think this dragon will imprint on you?”
“It doesn’t matter.” My hand found the grip of my whip. “Percy deserves better. Has he imprinted on you yet?”
“Not yet.” Her eyes narrowed. “But he will. As soon as he understands that I am the one who can truly protect him in this GoneGod World, he will.”
Blistering heat emanated from Yaroz’s nostrils, still only a few feet away from me. A rumbling in her chest clued me in to the fire she was brewing there, and I knew she had few compunctions about ashing me to the ground.
And yes, I said “ashing.” When you’re a dragon rider, you’ve got about fifty made-up words in your lexicon to do with fire and burning.
I tensed, eyes fixed on her mouth in the moonlight. That was what you had to watch on a dragon preparing to burn you—the parting of those jaws.
A cry sliced through the night, followed by a second, this one higher pitched. Followed by what sounded like scrabbling in the sky.
Yaroz responded immediately. Her head rose high, and she let out a shriek so resounding my hands clapped straight to my ears. A second later she pushed herself off the ground, wings extending past the width of the road and out into the bushes. When she took off, I had to grab onto the moped to keep from being pushed over.
“Hey!” I yelled, my voice blown back at me. “We’re not done here.”
Her black form rose, struck across the refuge, carrying her deeper. In the direction of the screeching and scrabbling.
Ohh no, she wasn’t getting out of this so easily.
I climbed onto the moped, kicked up the stand. I turned the ignition, revved down the road, following Yaroz at a perpendicular. When I got to the first left, I took it.
Even though I’d lost sight of her, it wasn’t hard to follow the sound of what struck me as something like an oversized cat fight.
I drove hard down the road toward the noises, until with the same suddenness they’d started, Yaroz’s yell cut them off entirely. Only silence followed—well, beneath the ringing in my ears.
When I got to about the place where I’d heard it, I slowed the moped, squinting into the darkness. I caught golden scales glittering some forty feet off the road. Then green scales scuffling across the ground.
I left the moped with the headlight on, picked my way to the edge of the road and the embankment. I’d reached water, but when I tested it, I found it only about two feet deep.
Still, this was going to ruin my best pair of boots. Hell, my only pair of boots.
“Yaroz!” I yelled, making my way through the marsh. Every step sank into the muck. “No ditching the parent-teacher conference early. Especially when you’re the teacher.”
A small chirping sounded on the island ahead, a curious sound. A second later, Yaroz’s deeper voice responded with its own set of noises that didn’t make words.
And I realized with a start exactly what I was hearing. Percy had read about this in a book, and told me about wanting to learn it.
This was dragon speech. Communication I couldn’t understand a word of.
Percy had never communicated this way. He’d never learned how. The only language he knew was English.
I kept pressing through the muck, even as a thread of guilt wound its way through me.
Come on, Tara. This isn’t the right time to feel guilty about not teaching Percy one of the thousand things he’s begged to learn.
But the truth was, I couldn’t have taught him dragon speech. I didn’t know any other dragons.
And then the unwanted thought came:
Maybe he needs her after all.
Maybe Percy needs his birth mother.
I pushed all that aside, too. Right now, there was only room for putting Yaroz in her place, giving her a piece of my mind about how she’d battered him.
When I finally reached the island, I staggered onto the bank and stopped, mouth open.
Before me, small, bipedal creatures milled around on this island. They seemed to be picking objects up, moving them. Some sat and hammered away at metal. They looked not much bigger than gnomes, but it was hard to make them out in the darkness.
And amongst these creatures were six dragons, none of whom were paying any attention to me. Two younglings, maybe Percy’s age, their wings to their bodies as they rested in what looked like an enormous bird’s nest. Another two, maybe slightly older, stalked across the grass at a distance from one another, giving off angry hisses and shrieks. All had bruises, missing scales. They looked even more beat-up than Percy had.
And at the center of them all stood Yaroz, staring between the two angry younglings. Reprimanding them, it seemed. She flicked a talon toward one when he strayed too close to the other, sent him rolling with a scream.
She was brutish. She was like a mother cat.
I was wholly out of my depth here. This dragon was utterly beyond me, and if I wasn’t careful, I wouldn’t walk away from this island.
But I couldn’t let her know that.
I came a few steps closer. “Yaroz, we need to talk about the way you’ve treated Percy.”
The dragon’s head half-turned on her neck, one eye glancing back at me. “Treated?”
One of the creatures tottered over toward Yaroz, stopping between her and me and clearing his throat. He had the slenderness of a human, but the shortness of a dwarf. “Excuse me, Mistress. Where would you like the younglings’ shinguards to be worn—high up, or at mid-ankle?”
Well, it seemed Yaroz had found replacements for her gnomish stablehands in the GoneGod World.
“Yes.” Yaroz’s eyes hadn’t left me.
“Ah,” the creature said. “So, you’d like them high up?”
Yaroz’s tail swept across the ground, and in one motion she flung the creature aside, who went yelling through the air and landed in a pile of metal.
Ouch.
“Repeat what you said to me, small human,” Yaroz growled.
“Yeah.” I swallowed. “So, we need to talk about how you’ve treated Percy. You’re hurting him, and all these other younglings. It isn’t right.”
But I wasn’t so sure anymore. This was, after all, the way of things amongst many species on Earth. Brutish reprimands were common.
Yaroz turned fully around to face me. When she hissed, I felt it like acid up my veins. Felt it crawling over my skin.
Yeah, maybe I should have opted for more tact.
↔
Yaroz surged forward, striking out with one clawed foot—to grab me or crush me, I wasn’t sure.
And I wasn’t about to find out.
I threw myself out of the way, rolling across the island as the younglings burst into the sky, swooping and shrieking above us.
“The dragon race will rise,” Yaroz boomed, and another of her feet obscured the moonlight above me, the only tell I had that I was about to be minced.
I rolled again, but the edge of her talon caught my jacket, ripped it.
“We will no longer kowtow to humans or other mythical creatures,” she boomed again, fully monologuing now as she went about trying to squash me. “Not since the devastation of Pompeii have we been poised to reap such glory.”
I tugged at my jacket, but she’d snagged it good. I unzipped it, slid my arms out of the sleev
es and scrabbled for momentum, my muddy boots sliding over the wet grass.
Something grabbed my shirt at the nape, and razors pierced into my back with such agonizing force my vision whited out even as I was pulled to my feet. It was one of the younglings; I recognized the general size of those talons in my skin.
My hand went automatically to Thelma, and the second I had her grip in my fingers, I lashed her over my back.
A youngling’s shriek sounded directly behind me, and whichever one of them was gripping me let go.
I launched myself into a forward roll, spun back toward the dragons in a crouch.
But all I could see was Yaroz’s face.
It hovered directly in front of me, and her jaws had parted. Fire burned in the back of her throat.
“If you kill me,” I blurted, “Percy will never follow you.”
She paused, the fire still flickering in her throat. Considering my words. And then, “He will, in time. Do you know why, human? Because he won’t have anyone else to follow.”
In the next moment, her mouth opened. She’d made up her mind. Fire roared up out of her throat, pouring toward me in a plume. And there was nothing I could do to change the fate staring back at me.
At least I would die with my eyes open.
But it never did hit me. Something enormous wrapped around me as the fire left Yaroz’s mouth, rippling and cracking and heating up the air until I thought my skin might melt off anyway.
Amidst the roar, I recognized the scent enveloping me. I recognized the heartbeat not far from my ear, and the glinting blue of the scales as they deflected the flames.
Percy had come. He’d come to protect me.
Yaroz’s flames died away, but Percy remained curled around me, every part of me wrapped in dragon scale.
“How could you?” he spat at Yaroz. “You promised me you wouldn’t hurt her.”
Yaroz huffed. Then a low chuckle emanated from her great chest. “I made that promise under other circumstances. She came to confront a dragon, and she received a dragon’s ire.”
“Uh, Perce,” I said. “I’m kinda suffocating in here.”
Percy didn’t move. “Swear you’ll let her leave.”
“I will not swear anything of the kind,” Yaroz said, her voice smooth and unconcerned again. “She’s fresh meat, and one of my children has already set his claws in her. She bleeds.”
The younglings went on flapping through the air, even more animated by the commotion and the promise of a meal. Except for one, who shrieked at me from the ground. That must have been the one I’d gotten with my whip. The only vulnerable place on them was the eye; it had been a GoneGodDamned lucky shot.
“Tara is right. If you kill her, I’ll never follow you,” Percy hissed. “Never.”
Pride filled me. Even if Percy hadn’t imprinted on me, he was acting with principle. Character. Those were qualities I wished I could claim I’d cultivated in him, and always wanted him to have, but I wasn’t sure they existed in him because of me.
He was principled because of who he was.
And as scared as he might feel, I knew he wouldn’t run from Yaroz. If there was one thing I’d taught him to do, it was to stay his ground. To be brave.
When my family was killed, I ran to live. I spent too long running, safeguarding my own life.
I was done with all that. My family would always come first.
I could practically feel Yaroz rolling her eyes. “We will make it quick, if you like.”
“No.” Percy tightened around me. “
Yaroz’s deep breathing emanated around the island as the tinkering creatures went on beating the metal—clink, clink, clink—in the distance. “Very well,” she said after a time, a strange delight entering her voice. She has a trick up her sleeve. “We will refrain from eating the human—on one condition.”
“And what’s that?” Percy asked, surprising me with his wherewithal, his bravery. I’d never seen him like this before, negotiating with absolute shrewdness.
“You must join me,” Yaroz said. “And do not equivocate—I can smell my children’s wants and lies. I know this is what you wish.”
Percy didn’t answer. With my face pressed up against his belly, I could hear his heart whooshing in his chest. It was beating faster than I’d ever heard it.
“If you join me,” Yaroz went on, “and become a true dragon, I will spare this woman’s life.”
He paused, his heart still hammering. “And if I don’t?”
“Then,” Yaroz said, “I will kill you both now.”
Every part of Percy’s body tensed.
“No!” I yelled, trying to get out of Percy’s hold.
He uncovered his wing from my face, allowing me at least to see Yaroz and her brood. “Tara?” he whispered, that childlike nature back in his voice.
He was afraid. Uncertain.
“Just let us leave,” I said, words leaving my mouth almost as fast as they entered my head. “Let us leave, and we’ll never bother you—”
“Silence,” Yaroz said. “This is my child’s decision, and no one else’s. Do not interfere.”
I turned to meet Percy’s eyes, but he was staring straight up at Yaroz.
She was right: he wanted to join her.
He wanted to be a true dragon.
He’d always wanted to be a real dragon, and this was maybe his one and only chance. And, GoneGods, he was the equivalent of a twelve-year-old boy who’d been offered the opportunity to enter a world in which he would be truly powerful. He would be almighty.
Who could resist that?
The words hurt before they left my mouth, like trying to speak around barbed wire. “Go with her,” I said, hoarse. “It’s all right.”
Percy’s eyes darted to mine, even as his wing unraveled from around me. “No.”
“We have no other choice.”
He knew I was right, but he went on staring at me with those big golden eyes, now full of pain. It was maybe the longest moment of my adult life, but the shortest, too.
Because a second later, he whispered, “OK, Tara.”
But he still didn’t move.
Yaroz gave a great sigh. With a swoop of her wing, she sent me flying onto the ground and rolling toward the bank. I stopped half in the water. And amidst the pain that followed, I heard the matriarch growl, “You are each other’s weakness.”
Chapter 20
My boots squelched as I climbed onto the moped, its headlight still shining over the road. Everything hurt, not least that beating organ at the center of my chest. As I started the ignition, the dragons spoke to each other in the night.
I could hear them as I U-turned, made my way back toward the refuge’s entrance. I wondered if Percy’s voice was among them.
He was learning a language I didn’t understand. One I could never learn how to speak.
I drove in silence down the highway, the shreds of my jacket flapping in the wind, caked mud drying over every part of my body. I drove away from Percy. And for the second time in two days, I didn’t know when I would see him again.
If I would see him again.
For the duration of that drive, I let myself feel wretched.
It wasn’t often feelings like that overtook me. Most of the time I pushed them away. Most of the time I had Percy there to brighten my day.
But tonight, everything had changed.
I didn’t just want to be his guardian. Didn’t just want to be his protector.
I wanted to be his mother. I wanted him to be my son.
And now I couldn’t. His real, biological mother had arrived, and he wanted to be with her. She had given him an ultimatum, but I suspected it was what Percy had truly wanted, anyway.
Besides, I hadn’t ever really been mom material. I was always dragging him after me on my vendetta to take down the Scarred, never giving him the real indulgences a mom should. Well, a human mom, at least.
And now he was gone.
I had nowhere else to go but t
he barn. When I returned, I gingerly pulled off my muddy, shredded clothes, evaluating the damage. No broken bones, by some miracle. I had some nasty cuts on my back from those dragon talons, though.
I did my best to clean myself up using the trough and spigot outside. Changed into a new set of clothes. And, finally, sat down surrounded by all my things and not a living creature in sight.
On my wrist, my watch started buzzing. I glanced down; Ferris was calling.
I leaned over, retrieved my phone from my pile of dirty clothes. “He’s gone,” I said as soon as I picked up. “I lost Percy. I think for good, this time.”
Ferris, who’d been about to say something, pivoted almost at once into a long sigh. “I suspected it would come to that. That matriarch isn’t one for sharing her progeny.”
“I went out there to talk to her, and you can imagine how that went.” I scuffed my muddy boot over the ground. “I was spitting mad. She got madder. And GoneGods, that woman can rant and rave about stuff I just don’t get. I know I go off on tangents, but she was going on about Pompeii this and glory that. What’s with that?”
He paused. “Did you say Pompeii?”
“Yeah. I don’t know what she was talking about. What does Pompeii have to do with the glory of dragons?”
Ferris’s voice had changed when he spoke again. I heard an emotion I hadn’t yet sensed in him: fear. “You don’t understand. Pompeii wasn’t what you think it was, Tara.”
“I believe the archaeologists have pretty much got that one solved, Ferris …”
“They haven’t,” he snapped back, but his voice carried a strange and faraway hollowness. “Until five years ago, the archaeologists didn’t know dragons existed.”
“What are you saying?”
He paused. Then, “It was a flight of dragons that rained lava on the island, Tara.”
An awful feeling slid over me. “Not a volcano?”
“Not a volcano. It was a great battle between the citizens of Pompeii and a flight of dragons. Mount Vesuvius was meant to be the dragons’ Mount Olympus, but dragons are fiercely territorial.”
“As I’ve gathered,” I murmured. “So did the dragons win?”