“Uh.” She paused in midcrunch. “What?”
“Trying to remember if we’ve got a dentist anywhere in that hospital.”
“Not that I know of. The one me and my dad use knows Hank Blacktooth pretty well. I think he’s living pretty close to city hall.”
He didn’t respond, but she could sense the question: so what happens if someone needs serious work done? Yet another medical situation we haven’t experienced so far but probably will soon. Wisdom teeth, teeth chipped in accidents, root canals . . . it’s only a matter of time. So what will we do?
The answer came, strangely enough, in the voice of Dr. Georges-Scales: the same thing we do when a pregnant woman has to give birth, or someone gets the flu, or appendicitis. We will make do.
“Dental stuff isn’t supposed to be any big deal,” he finally managed. “Growing up in Crescent Valley, it was easy. Dragon physiology is pretty rigorous.”
She could see him starting to worry about her again. “I have a perfect dental record,” she reminded him. “Teeth like rocks. I’ve been hoarding floss.”
“Hmmm.” He didn’t smile. “What about other routine stuff? Like having an appendix out.”
Ah, that’s where this is coming from. He was thinking about a certain poor Mr. Simmons, late of the United States Post Office, former commander of the local American Legion post, and Susan’s mailman for the last seven years. Mr. Simmons had been the latest person to die under Big Blue. Jenn’s mother couldn’t save him in time; his appendix ruptured, and he died of peritonitis.
Death was always scary. Unlike in movies or television, how Mr. Simmons had died was depressingly mundane. It hadn’t been sexy or cool or scary—was death ever really that way?—and he hadn’t been burned or stabbed; he hadn’t died trying to save children or fight for his life. He’d . . . he’d just gotten sick. Didn’t feel right standing up. Sat down. Maybe lay down, after a while. Told a friend to take him to the hospital.
And died, before he ever got to sit up or stand up or do anything else, ever again.
It was dumb, but that upset Susan more than anything else. Dragons run amok? Huge spiders jumping around? Overzealous, sword-flinging, jackbooted thugs? She could handle these things. Jennifer Scales had trained her well.
But dying of appendicitis? That was supposed to be nothing. That was supposed to be no big deal.
Also, her gums had started bleeding, despite all the flossing, and she was achy and sore almost all the time now. She’d done some research outside her boyfriend’s watchful gaze, and was as equally amused and appalled to recognize the early symptoms of scurvy.
Frigging scurvy!
She’d never taken a vitamin supplement in her life (her late mother had been convinced vitamins were a plot by the drug companies to make money on unnecessary crap, so children’s chewables were verboten), and by the time she checked out the local supermarkets and drugstores, there were none to be had. As for fresh lemons, oranges, and grapefruit? Forget about it. Even cans of juice concentrate were gone.
She had said nothing of this to Gautierre. Some things weredragons were no good for, and curing scurvy was right up there on the list.
“Maybe we’ll go back to the old days,” she mused aloud,
“and the barber will knock out our rotten teeth and sew up our wounds.”
“What?”
“Eh. Pass me more Pez.” She wolfed down the sugar pills and chewed defiantly.
At least they were wearing clean clothes. Her gums might be bleeding excess sugar and Gautierre might have seen every single one of her outfits and she might not remember the last time she had any cheese that wasn’t Velveeta (what the hell was “processed cheese food,” anyway?) and . . . okay, she was giving serious thought to suggesting it was time for the cats and dogs of the town to be turned into lunch. But dammit, she did laundry every week. Religiously. Possibly laundry was her religion now.
“What if we never get out?”
He had been searching the tree line. He looked at her and blinked slowly, like an owl. “We will, though.”
“No, come on. What if we don’t?”
“We will. I know we will.”
“How?” She was genuinely curious; he sounded so certain. “How d’you know?”
“Because I’m not letting the love of my life die under a dome like an ant under a magnifying glass.” His calm certainty touched her and, it must be said, frightened her a little.
He looked like a boy, and he acted like a boy, and he kissed and groped and obsessed about sex like a boy. Yet he was more than that. They weren’t the same: not the same sex, the same religion, the same political party, or the same under a crescent moon. Yet he was cloven to her, and she felt him in her even when he was miles across town.
“You say the sweetest things.”
“Mom.”
She sat up so fast the top of her head rapped against his chin. “Boy, did you just get me out of the mood. It’s Susan, remember? Sooo-zen.”
He’d seized her arms with both hands, stood in one smooth movement (How did he do that? His knees didn’t even creak! Who gets up from a sitting position without at least a crackle of cartilage?), and shoved her behind the enormous willow tree they’d been snacking beneath.
“It’s Mom.”
“I don’t see—”
“Quiet.”
She hushed, more than a little annoyed. The sky was clear, it was a beautiful day, there wasn’t a soul in sight, and there was a can of pie filling right over on the blanket over there with her name on it. The pressure was definitely getting to Gautierre, who was now jumping at shadows and imagining his mother, then manhandling (dragon-handling?) her behind a tree, and—
—and there were a dozen winged shapes on the horizon.
She couldn’t get more precise than that. Whether they were dashers or dusters or smashers or crashers (or whatever the hell the classifications were), mattered less than whether they had sworn their lives to Jennifer Scales . . . or Ember Longtail.
These dozen seemed to dance in the air for a bit, doing reconnaissance circles around each other. Then they rose together about a half mile from where Susan and Gautierre hid, and . . .
“Holy shit!”
Twelve fireballs crashed into the tree line a few hundred yards away. The blaze was immediate and immense.
“They’ve seen us! We’ve got to go!”
Susan followed him without argument, but she wasn’t so sure. Surely they would have gotten closer had they discovered enemies on the ground.
She looked longingly at the abandoned picnic site as he dragged her by the hand into a denser copse. More explosions rocked the earth behind them—some closer, some more distant.
“Gautierre, I don’t think—”
“Sshh. Hang on.”
Biting her lip, she waited for him to figure out what she already had: the destruction was random. That was the good news. The bad news was, they were sitting in the middle of a heap of kindling.
“Gautierre, we can’t stay—”
“I can’t fight them, Susan! There are twelve of them—maybe more. It’s almost her entire gang! We’ve got to hold out and wait—”
“You don’t wait out a forest fire! Gautierre, dammit, get me out of here!”
He blinked, then nodded, then shifted into dragon shape. Climbing onto his back, she shook her head. Dr. Georges-Scales is right. Dragons are dreamy and sexy. But they’re horrible, horrible planners.
CHAPTER 14
Susan
“Ember did what?”
Susan nodded. She and Gautierre were both resting against the wall near the hospital entrance—him from fatigue (though he tried not to show it, bless him), her from anxiety.
“That makes no sense.”
It didn’t matter how incredulous Jennifer and Jonathan Scales were. Off to the south, the first wisps of smoke were rising into visibility.
“There’s nothing of strategic value there,” Jonathan continued. “No buildings. No hid
eouts—in fact, we were all pretty sure that was where Ember herself kept her gang hidden.”
“Defending against an invasion?” Jennifer guessed.
“Possibly. Christopher,” he called out to a pizza delivery boy who had been promoted to emergency team dispatcher. The kid was taking what would have been a cigarette break, back before the last pack was nervously smoked away. “Any word from our scouts on Hank Blacktooth’s people? Are they in the southern woods?”
“Haven’t heard anything as of fifteen minutes. I’ll get back in to check in with the team.”
“Thanks.” Jonathan turned back to Jennifer. “If it’s not Hank, there may be a new threat in town.”
“There’s a new threat regardless,” Susan pointed out. “The forest is on fire!”
“It’s far away from any neighborhoods, and there are wetlands in between. If Ember wanted to attack the town, there are more direct ways. She’s taken them, in fact.” He turned to Jennifer. “Maybe she wants us to waste water fighting it?”
“Mom says water’s the one thing we still have in this town, at least as long as the rain keeps falling and the well pumps keep working.” Jennifer rubbed her chin. Unlike her father, she chose to be in human form this afternoon. “Maybe she’s being a brat. Running drills. Showing her gang who’s boss. Y’know. Stumpy-getting-grumpy kind of stuff.”
“It could be random,” Gautierre suggested, looking at Susan hopefully, since he knew that had been her idea. “She could be trying to get our attention. Distract us.”
Jonathan shrugged. “Why would it distract us? It’s a fire, but it’s far from town. Okay, maybe we’ve got plenty of water: but it would surprise me if Hank risked the personnel and equipment to go out there. With city hall gone, he’s got enough on his hands right now.”
“Excuse me,” Susan piped up. “As the only representative in this conversation of People Who Aren’t Fireproof, I’d like to suggest: Hank Blacktooth will try to put it out. Hank Blacktooth should try to put it out. In fact, if Hank Blacktooth doesn’t try to put it out, I’ll go to the mayor’s new office, wherever that may be, and formally complain as a taxpaying resident of this town, and I prob’ly won’t be the only one. Don’t you guys get it? Don’t you watch my blog updates?”
“Well . . .”
“Um . . .”
“I’m sure they’re very informative . . .”
They all shrugged, embarrassed.
Susan pointed at Jonathan. “Your own wife was on! She talked about this! And threatened you! Biomass! We’re using it for an energy source!”
“And food,” Jennifer added thoughtfully.
“So she’s burning down what’s out there . . . to freeze us?” Jonathan sighed, unconvinced. “She’ll have to burn an awful lot of it. Even confined to what’s under the dome, there are acres and acres and acres—”
“While we’ve been talking, she’s destroyed at least fifty acres of biomass. Say to be conservative, we’ve got six thousand acres outside city limits, but still accessible to us.”
“How do you know—”
Susan, irritated, waved off Jennifer’s question. “Under Big Blue, episode 78, ‘The Resources that Remain.’ Watch the damn blog, ya putz! Anyway, it’s less than one percent . . . but it’s only been an afternoon. The fire’s own momentum will burn down more, before Ember and her cronies even reload. Say this first attack takes out three percent of our biomass. Say they attack every day, and get better at it. Say they hit harder each time, attack the fire equipment when it shows up, and degrade our ability to stop her. By the time January comes . . . are you getting where I’m going with this, or do I haveta break out the hand puppets. Say it with me: by the time January comes . . .”
“We’ll only have what’s left in town,” Jonathan finished for her.
“Hallelujah! He sees the light, Lord.”
“She won’t dare come into town too many times,” Jennifer pointed out. “Look what it cost them, last time. You said yourself, her entire gang is down to a dozen.”
“She must have done the same calculation,” Gautierre said. “My mother’s not stupid. She’ll figure we’ll turn on each other if we have to compete for what remains within the town.”
“That’s a bit nihilistic, even for Ember. There are lots of people in town who are no threat to her. She knows that. She’s misguided. Not evil.” Jonathan looked nervously at Gautierre.
“Okay, Mr. Scales, I don’t know what nihilistic means, but I have met my boyfriend’s mother, right about the moment when she was trying to kill me. Thanks to Gautierre and Jennifer, she missed. But I wouldn’t put anything past her. Evil might be a strong word, but mega-bratty-bitch seems to fit.”
Gautierre cleared his throat. It was almost painful, all the nervous looks he was getting from the other people in the room. “She’s trying to scare us.”
“Scaring us isn’t the plan. Scaring isn’t any fun if you’re a sociopathic shriveled-up misfit—sorry, sweetie, but there it is. So now she’s deliberately burning down trees. So what if it will be this winter or next, that we need them? We need them! And she’s taking them away because it’s easy. Because no one will think much about it. Because maybe you’re right, Mr. Scales: maybe Hank Blacktooth won’t want to risk anything.”
Gautierre grabbed her hand. “I agree. I’m sorry, but my mother is too unpredictable, Mr. Scales. Picking random fights isn’t working. Waiting for the elements to pick us all off isn’t working. Randomly killing off one of Hank’s soldiers or a beaststalker caught alone isn’t working. Even attacking the hospital in a group isn’t working. She’s going to continue to adapt.”
“Like with the sap in the ears.” Now Jennifer was nodding, too.
“So we . . . you guys, I mean . . . you stop her. Right?”
Jonathan gulped. “I don’t know what we can do, Susan. And my wife would be the first to point out: we may have other priorities.”
“Such as?”
As if on cue, Dr. Georges-Scales came out the nearby hospital entrance. “Jonathan, Christopher was telling me we’ve got fires out south. What do we know?”
After they told her, they waited for her to respond.
And waited.
And waited.
“Dr. Georges-Scales?”
“Mom?”
“Liz?”
Dr. Georges-Scales chewed her tongue, looked south, shook her head, and went back inside.
Jonathan and Jennifer, shrugging and scratching their heads, went in after her.
“So?” Gautierre looked at Susan quizzically. “What does that mean? We do nothing?”
Susan couldn’t stop the chill from traveling up her spine. Even though she’d hated playing second fiddle to Jennifer all these years, she had to admit a certain comfort in knowing that she would take action. So would her father, and her mother . . . there were some advantages to being The Loyal Powerless Sidekick, and getting regularly saved was big number one.
To her, she supposed, Jennifer and her family were heroes. Maybe they were even responsible for her own bravery, in places like Hank Blacktooth’s office—because she thought about what they might do in such situations.
What if they didn’t do anything?
What if it all became too much, and they gave up?
What if the heroes . . . just stopped?
CHAPTER 15
Jennifer
It had been a long time, Jennifer realized, since she had last seen Eddie Blacktooth. She didn’t know what was worse—not seeing him or seeing him and being unable to touch him.
Casualty #21 of being in Domeland . . . zero hands-on time with my would-be boyfriend.
He was no more than six feet away, but it might as well have been six million. The blue barrier shimmered between them, casting each of them in an unearthly glow to the other’s eyes.
They were not even alone, she grumbled to herself as she imagined holding and kissing him. Her father was here on her side, and on Eddie’s side was an even rarer sight: the ser
aph that had arisen from the dying body of Wendy Blacktooth, Eddie’s mother. The enormous angel-warrior burned with a silent white fire, had only showed up at erratic intervals over the past few months, and never talked even when it did.
It reminded Jennifer of a huge and annoying conscience, which reminded them of all the death that had led them to this point.
Major mood-killer.
Still, perhaps it could be useful now.
“You have to find Skip,” she was telling Eddie, yet looking hopefully at the seraph.
“I find him all the time,” Eddie snapped. He was in a mood, which only made Jennifer more anxious. They never had more than a few moments together; why he acted this way was inexplicable. Boys: as much a puzzle to the Ancient Furnace as were hieroglyphics.
Well, okay, maybe it was a little bit explicable. He was soaking wet and shivering, probably as a result of fording the Mississippi River to their meeting point on the north end of town without benefit of a bridge. Normally, a boat would have sufficed; but during the crossing a dragon outside the barrier sympathetic to Ember Longtail had taken a potshot at him, and he had been forced to leap into the icy river. The seraph had come to his side shortly afterward to shoo away the intruder, but apparently it didn’t have a clothes dryer handy.
“I’m sorry about that dragon,” she told him again.
He wrung out a sleeve, shivering and drippy and crabby. “I thought Xavier had things under control out here. If he has rogue dragons running around, I don’t know how close I can get to Skip.” He sneezed.
Jennifer put a hand to her mouth and nodded grimly, thinking: don’t smile. Don’t smile.
“I’m sure it’s just the one. Please, Eddie. Won’t you help? If Skip’s done this once, he’ll almost certainly do it again.”
“Especially since he didn’t kill anyone the first time,” Jonathan added.
“We don’t know what he’ll go for next,” Jennifer explained. She could see that Eddie was trying to hide his irritation and fear, and possibly the beginnings of a head cold, and she loved him for it. “It could be the hospital, or someone’s house, or anywhere . . .”
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