by Finley Aaron
“I suppose they’re both dragons.” The words hit me in the same airless spot that felt so empty when I fell and got the wind knocked out of me. It takes me a second or two to get my breath back.
We’re dragons.
This is real. Not a dream.
Dragons.
“I want to meet her.” Judy whispers so quietly, I almost can’t make out the words. Like she’s not saying them to me as much as to herself.
“You heard what Master Sparks said. She hid us. She took risks to get us out of there and keep us safe.”
“But where is ‘there’? Why did she go back?”
“Uhh,” I’m trying to recall what Mike told us. It’s kind of a blur now, since I was still trying to digest everything else he said, and trying to decide whether I ought to believe it. “To protect us? There’s something evil, or something? I got the sense maybe she was helping to contain it.”
“Something evil,” Judy repeats. “And we’ve got to train to fight it. Isn’t that what Master Sparks said?”
An uneasy fear trickles through me. Judy twisted Mike’s words. That’s not quite what he said. “He said we haven’t trained nearly enough to face it. Someday maybe we’d be ready, but I didn’t get the impression he was suggesting we go looking for a fight, no matter how long we train.”
“But we’ve got to.” Judy’s whisper is little more than a sigh.
“It doesn’t sound safe.”
“Safe or not, if there’s an evil out there—something so bad our Mom gave us away to keep us safe from it—then we have no choice, do we? We’ve got to fight it.”
“We’ve got to hide,” I repeat Mike’s instructions.
“And train.”
“And train,” I concede. “And sleep, because it’s going to be morning soon, and I imagine we’ve got a big day ahead of us.”
“Yeah.” Judy’s voice has a smile behind it. “We have a lot of things to learn about this place.”
“Mom said we’re going home tomorrow,” I remind my sister.
Judy exhales something between derision and laughter. “We’re not going home.”
*
“We’re not going home.” Dad’s standing by the front window, coffee mug in hand, looking out at the deep snow. Hazy daylight streams past him, reflected off the white blanket of snow that covers everything outside the window. “Not today, not unless most of this melts or gets plowed or something.”
I can’t see much from where I’m lying on the futon, but I saw enough last night to know the snow is deep. Nobody’s going to plow us out—the guy at the post office said it’s been fifteen years since there’s been any sign of life up this long private drive. They might plow the road at the end of the driveway, but there’s a lot of snow between here and there.
“How is it going to melt?” Mom asks. “We’re in the mountains. It probably won’t melt until spring.”
“Wait for a mild day when the sun’s out, and I can get you to the road.” Mike’s voice echoes from the kitchen. “In the meantime, the kids wanted to hear about their birth mother. Are they awake yet?”
“I’m awake.” Judy pops halfway out of her sleeping bag. “What’s for breakfast?”
“Cookies…or grilled antelope.” Mom’s voice sours on the second option.
“Antelope?” So maybe I did correctly identify the animal from last night. I sit up, too.
“I want antelope.” Judy pulls herself the rest of the way free of her sleeping bag.
“You do?” Mom frowns.
“Me too,” I realize aloud. I’ve always been fond of meat, even game meat. My parents tried to become vegetarians when we were younger, but Judy and I begged them for meat so often, they eventually gave it up rather than try to convert us or always fix two different meals. I never thought about my food choices as unusual—plenty of my friends have picky eating habits—but maybe it’s a hidden clue to who I am.
Dragons eat meat, don’t they?
They’re certainly not vegetarians.
“Antelope steaks, coming right up,” Mike declares. He grabs a couple of empty plates, throws his coat on over the sweatpants and t-shirt he’s wearing (which look suspiciously like my dad’s sweatpants and t-shirt), and steps outside.
He’s gone a couple of minutes. I expect him to return with raw steaks (I can only assume he’s using the cold outside as a freezer), and then cook them over the fire, but when he returns, two cooked steaks are steaming on the plates.
“These are medium rare. If you want them cooked longer I can—”
“Rare’s my favorite,” Judy interrupts, bounding forward to take a plate to the table. Dad hands her a knife and fork, and she tears into the meat with relish.
I can’t recall ever eating antelope before, but I join her at the table and try my first bite.
Heaven.
No, seriously, this is what I was born to eat, isn’t it?
As I’m eating my steak, I’m sitting at the table in the chair that faces the wall with the hidden door—the one that leads to the tunnel to nowhere. I gesture to the wall with my steak knife. “What’s at the end of the tunnel?”
Master Sparks looks surprised, yet pleased. “You found the hidden tunnel?”
“Rudy pulled the rope.” Judy gestures to the cord dangling above. “We followed the tunnel as far as the wall, but the footprints lead farther than we could go.”
“But it is possible to go on, isn’t it?” I ask when Mike only frowns silently. “We tried to find another latch, some way to open up the passageway…”
“It is possible,” Mike confirms. “But only for dragons.”
Dad chuckles uneasily. “What, do you have to fly in through the top of the cone?”
“There is an entrance higher up the mountain,” Mike confirms. “That one would actually work for humans, though I’ve got it blocked off currently. I don’t want anyone happening upon it.”
“How do you get in?” Judy presses.
Mike frowns. “There are a number of things,” he begins slowly, “complicated things, that I have yet to explain about dragons and what they can do.”
I can’t stand waiting for him to break the news to us gently. Besides, I’m fairly certain I already know the answer.
“We can teleport, can’t we?”
Chapter Twelve
“Can you?” Master Sparks again looks surprised and pleased.
“You can?” Mom looks appalled.
“I can,” I clarify. “Judy probably can, but she won’t try.”
“I did try.” Judy flashes me a look. “Anyway, I can do something you can’t.” She holds up her fork with a particularly undercooked bite of antelope steak on the tines, and blows a tendril of fire at it. It sizzles for a second before she pops it into her mouth.
Since I’ve seen her breathe fire before, it’s not such a surprise to me. I glance at my parents for their reaction. I’d half expected Mom to be whimpering and freaked out again, but instead she’s giving Dad a look that’s so clear I can read it even though she’s not a dragon.
I told you so.
And Dad’s giving her that sheepish look back, the one that begrudgingly admits that maybe, against all reason, he should have believed his wife.
“You’ve seen her blow fire before?” I ask, feeling stunned and maybe a tiny bit betrayed that they’ve never told us.
“Not as much as that,” Mom clarifies. “But you know my rule about not letting the two of you drink soda pop? Do you know why that is?”
“Because the sugar makes us hyper?” Judy recites the explanation we’ve always been given before.
“Well, that too,” Mom admits. “But there were a couple of times—one was at a birthday party when you were ten, the other was at the back-to-school picnic two years ago—you drank soda and then…”
“Belched fire?” I ask, since Mom seems reluctant to say the words out loud.
“Hardly more than a tendril of smoke,” Mom assures us. “Certainly not open flames like t
hat. But it was enough to make me wonder.”
“What else is weird about us?” I ask. “What other things have you seen and never told us about?”
Mom bites her lower lip and shrugs.
Dad offers, “Your obsession with flying. When you were a kid, you’d jump off of anything. Tree limbs. The back deck. The roof of the garage. You’d get on the swings at the playground and swing as high as you could go, then jump off.”
I grin, remembering.
“You frightened your kindergarten teacher half to death. She called us the very first week of school. She was certain you’d broken every bone in your body, jumping off the swings and sailing thirty feet through the air.”
My grin fades. “You made me promise not to do it after that.”
“You could have hurt yourself,” Mom says.
“Or maybe,” Dad realizes out loud, “you couldn’t have.”
“Dragons are built of tougher stuff than most,” Mike clarifies. “He probably would have been fine, but you were right to ask him not to do it. Best not to give the other children ideas. They would have hurt themselves.”
Judy polishes off her last bite of steak. “What else can we do?”
“Your hearing and sense of smell have always been quite keen,” Dad notes. “Though it’s your ability to see things that always surprised us most.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Judy asks.
Dad shrugs. “Why alarm you? What difference would it have made? We didn’t know where you came from, if your biological parents had amazing eyesight—”
“There was no reason to tell you,” Mom states their position apologetically. “We didn’t want you to feel different. We wanted you to feel like you belonged.”
“Anything else you haven’t been telling us? Any other weird things?” Judy presses.
When our parents just shrug, I swallow my last bite of steak. “Enough talk. Let’s check out what’s down that tunnel.”
“I’m afraid your sister is going to need to learn the basics of teleporting first,” Master Sparks informs me. “And I need to assess where your skills are. But most importantly, as a general rule, you can only teleport to something you’re familiar with. Since you’ve never been inside the mountain, you can’t jump inside the mountain.”
Dad frowns. “That’s a Catch-22.”
“Yes. Well.” Mike frowns, too. “When I feel they’re ready, I can unblock the opening uphill and take them inside that way.”
“Why do they need to go inside the mountain anyway?” Mom asks.
“I have a training facility set up inside. You’ve heard me say, time and again at our martial arts school in Hastings, that at my previous facility—”
“The ceilings were higher, the room bigger,” I fill in the laments I’ve heard him voice at various times over the years.
“The equipment better, bags firmer, track longer.” Judy frowns, “And something about a climbing wall?”
“Yes.” Mike grins. “Rock climbing. Excellent full body exercise.”
“It sounds dangerous,” Mom murmurs.
But Dad leans her way and notes, “Not for them.”
Judy’s been done eating for several minutes now. She’s pulled the necklace out from under her pajamas, and she’s studying the half-eye pendant. “The training room sounds fun enough, but I want to hear about my mother.” She stops looking at the pendant long enough to meet Mike’s eyes. “You were going to tell us about her last night, but then you were hungry and we were tired. Now everyone’s rested and we’ve all eaten. Can you tell us now?”
“I can.”
Mike’s ready to tell us the story at any moment, but Mom insists we brush our teeth and get dressed and tidy up the cabin and bring in more wood for the fire. I think she may be nervously putting off hearing the story about our birth mother. It’s almost like she feels some sort of competition from her, like she knows that if it came down to a battle between the two of them, Mom would lose. And not just because Monica, our mother, is a dragon, but because Monica is our biological mother.
But while that biological connection might have made us who we are, it doesn’t change the fact that Mom is the only mother we’ve ever known.
Not that there’s really a way to tell her that as I’m brushing my teeth.
Within several minutes we’ve got our dishes washed and sleeping bags rolled tight and the futon back in sofa shape, so there’s nothing Mom can do any longer to put off hearing the story.
Mike begins simply, “I met your mother in Hastings. Well, east of Hastings, actually.”
“During World War Two?” Judy quotes from the story he started the night before.
Mike nods.
“Were you at the ammunition bunkers?” I ask the question in a gasping voice. I’ve always been fascinated by the bunkers—even been there on a few different field trips in school and boy scouts.
“Yes. You’re familiar with them?”
“A bit,” I tell him what I know. “The US Navy built them there because it’s in the center of the US. Neither Japan nor Germany had bomber planes that could fly that far without refueling. Plus, by building munitions there, they could ship them to either coast equally quickly—the railroads were already in place.”
Judy chimes in. “Thousands of people moved to Hastings to work there. But wasn’t the work force largely female, because the men were off to war?”
“Indeed, but there were plenty of men working there, too—especially munitions experts, such as myself.”
“You were a munitions expert?” Dad sounds a tad skeptical, perhaps because Master Sparks has always stressed to his students that martial arts are only to be used to defend oneself, and never to attack anyone. He’s basically a pacifist.
So it does seem a bit strange.
But Mike only smiles. “The Chinese invented gunpowder over a thousand years ago. From there, it traveled to India, so that by the time I was born, it was a significant export from the entire region. The people knew how dangerous it could be, and many merchants were unwilling to deal with it. For dragons of course, the risk is lower. We have defenses…”
“Defenses?” I repeat, intrigued to understand just what he means.
“For example—your mother. I was working at the munitions facility when she arrived. She was an inspector. We were working on a new torpedo, and I’d just discovered a production flaw and was trying to correct it when I heard a woman’s voice behind me say, ‘You’re doing it wrong.’”
“That was our mother?” Judy’s grinning.
“Yes. And she was right—it was wrong, but I was already trying to fix it. She was a perfectionist.” Mike’s emerald green eyes glow wistfully. “Brilliant, a keen observer, highly critical of any flaw—and for good reason. Munitions flaws could be fatal. A major production flaw could mean the difference between winning or losing a battle, even the war.”
“There were flaws occasionally though, right?” I know enough of the local lore to have heard that much history. “Explosions at the bunkers? People died?”
“People died.” Mike nods. “Indeed, it was dangerous work we were involved in, and no degree of brilliance or perfectionism could prevent all of them. In fact, that was how I learned of your mother’s true nature. We both happened to be present when one of those explosions occurred. I mentioned defenses. In human form, we’re just a bit hardier than regular folks. The explosion would have killed us both. But in dragon form, we’re fire-proof, bullet-proof—”
“Blast proof?” I ask.
Mike nods. “I had a split-second warning—an instantaneous realization that the accident before my eyes would probably kill every person present. Your mother was across the room from me, or I might have tried to reach her. As it was, I acted on pure instinct. I changed into dragon form. When the smoke began to clear, I saw that every person in the room was flat on the ground, either dead or gravely injured, but your mother…”
“She turned into a dragon, too?” Judy asks with a h
int of awe and maybe even pride in her voice.
“Yes. I caught only a glimpse of her before she returned to human form. For the next minute or two it was chaos, as help poured in and the two of us assessed the injuries of those around us. She always wore tinted glasses with side shields to disguise her eyes, as I did, actually. I had managed to turn my head and get an arm up in time to shield mine from damage, but I saw her glasses had been broken irreparably in the blast. She let her hair hang over her face and kept her head down, but I realized that at any moment, someone might get a good look at her eyes, so I insisted on helping her to the infirmary myself.
“Of course, we didn’t go to the infirmary at all. We headed back to her room. Any time someone stopped us to ask if we were okay—our clothes were in tatters from a combination of the explosion and our quick conversion to dragon form, thankfully we were wearing enough layers we had enough to keep us covered. Anyway, when anyone stopped us, I told them she was shaken up but otherwise uninjured, and urged them to go help those worse off. She kept her face turned against my shoulder, hidden by her hair, and in that way we were able to make it back to her room, where she kept spare glasses.
“I left her there to change and compose herself, while I went back to my room and dressed. We both reported back to the site of the explosion then. It was a long day and we didn’t get a time to talk privately, but I knew from the way she glanced at me now and then, that she knew what I was, and she knew I knew what she was.”
Mike looks down and takes a long breath. I glance at Judy. Her eyes are wide.
“I must confess to you,” Mike begins again with marked hesitance. “I felt a special connection to her. Even from the moment she first walked in behind me and told me, ‘You’re doing it wrong,’ I wanted to please her more than anyone else. I told myself it was because she had high standards, because I wanted to prove my worth, but I realized, once I knew what she was, it was because,” he shakes his head.
My entire family leans in just a bit, hanging on his words.
“I loved her. I should not be ashamed to admit that. Once I realized she was my own kind, the only dragon I’d met in fifty years, I felt certain we must be together. But when the two of us finally had a chance to speak together in private, she confessed to me that she was secretly married.”