Blazing the Trail: The Dragon Diaries

by Deborah Cooke

  “Theoretically, if we sing them all together, that would make the harmony that might vibrate apart the NightBlade,” I said, and Meagan nodded with enthusiasm. “But only two of you can sing.” I had an idea then, and recorded Jessica’s singing into four different music files on my messenger. It wouldn’t play all four concurrently, so we shared the files and queued up our messengers to play them all at the same time.

  I turned to watch the spell light as the harmony began, thinking I’d see something in the motion of the spell if this resonance was powerful to the ShadowEaters lurking in the spell light.

  It made no difference at all.

  I was disappointed, and so was Meagan. “That can’t be it.”

  She frowned and scribbled that she’d look for alternatives.

  Was she wrong? Or were we just missing a critical piece of the puzzle?

  “What’s next?” Derek asked, and I understood that he was saying that he was still following the dragon. I smiled at him with relief and saw a wary gratitude dawn in his eyes.

  “I need to reinforce the dragonsmoke at our loft. I promised my dad.” I shrugged. “Maybe I can find something in my dad’s hoard or in that book to solve the riddle.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Derek said immediately, and got to his feet.

  He looked purposeful, which didn’t bode well for any discussion we might have on the way.

  It said something about my day so far that I was glad to have his company, even so.

  Chapter 12

  It was forty-seven kinds of bizarre to enter the loft where I lived with my parents, knowing they weren’t home yet bringing a guy with me.

  On the one hand, Derek was adamant that he had to defend me.

  On the other hand, this was breaking every household rule I knew.

  Plus it gave me a funny feeling.

  Not only was he in my home, not only was he crossing the dragonsmoke barrier with me, but he was going to see me breathe smoke. I felt incredibly self-conscious about that.

  My dad’s dragonsmoke barrier had begun to erode, just as anticipated. It touched my skin like quicksilver, the chill of it making all the little hairs on my body stand up in unison. I shut the door behind us and locked it. The loft was still and echoed with its emptiness. There were no fetid smells coming from the kitchen, which was a good thing.

  I gestured to the room. “You might as well come in and sit down. I don’t think there’s anything much to eat.”

  “It’s okay,” Derek said, and perched on the end of one of the black leather couches in the living room. “Kind of stark.” The room was austere, almost monastic in its strict simplicity, which was precisely how my dad liked it. The ceilings were high in the space and the rooms uncluttered—which left lots of room for dragons to gather.

  “My dad does black and white in a big way.”

  Derek smiled. “I like him already.”

  I sat down opposite him, not really settling back into the couch’s squishy comfort, either. “Look. About yesterday…”

  “There’s nothing to say. I saw how you feel about Jared.” He looked away from me and his throat worked a bit. “And now that you’ve told us the whole story, I think maybe I was wrong about him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Derek looked back at me, his pale eyes seeming unnaturally bright. “He let them take him this morning so that you could get away.”

  I nodded, sadness welling inside me again because I hadn’t been able to save him.

  Derek cleared his throat softly. “As much as I’d like to hate his guts, I respect what he did for you.”

  I looked up, astonished by this.

  Derek didn’t blink as he watched me. “Wyvern, lead us.”

  I had to walk through this with him to make sure I understood. “But you were the one who wanted to ensure the alliance, who wanted commitment from me in order to follow me.”

  Derek grimaced. “Didn’t I tell you that I understood about having to do your duty instead of doing what you wanted?”

  “But I thought you liked me.”

  “I do like you.” Derek swallowed. “I’m not sure it’s enough, though.”

  I stared at him.

  “I know I don’t like you as much as you like Jared. I understood that yesterday.”

  “But you left like you were mad.…”

  “I was mad. I was trying to do what I was told to do, and you were messing it up.” He swallowed visibly. “And when I saw the way you looked at him, I knew that you could only ever give me a fraction of that.” He heaved a sigh and looked away. “If you can’t look at me the way you look at him, I don’t want half measures.”

  “Black or white,” I murmured.

  “All or nothing,” he agreed. He almost smiled. “I said I’d follow the Wyvern, and that means that the Wyvern’s agenda is my agenda.”

  I was glad I was sitting down. Relief would have buckled my knees. All of the wolves were in, despite my choices.

  I still needed a plan. I settled onto the floor, kicked off my boots, and cracked my knuckles.

  “Anything I can do?” Derek asked.

  “Just be quiet. It’s kind of a meditative thing.”

  He watched, his eyes glittering as I summoned the shimmer and let my body shift shape. The surge of power ripped through me with explosive force, compelling my body to take its alternate form. I loved the sensation of it.

  In a heartbeat, I was a massive white dragon, my tail unfurled across the floor and my wings resting against my back. I opened my eyes to find that Derek had braced his elbows on his knees and was leaning forward to watch.

  That did just about nothing for my self-consciousness. But I knew what I had to do. I let quiet slide through me, although the exercise was a little more difficult than usual. I breathed slowly and deeply, letting my eyes drift closed, persuading my heartbeat to slow to a fraction of its usual pace.

  And I breathed smoke, a long glittering tendril of gossamer dragonsmoke. It wound from my lungs through my nostrils and into the air of the loft like a vein of silver. I directed it toward the exterior, letting it slide beneath the front door, weaving it back and forth across the doorway, entwining it with the thinning remnants of my dad’s dragonsmoke barrier.

  Once the interweaving began, I slipped into a familiar rhythm, focusing on the dragonsmoke and the protective barrier it made. I forgot about everything except breathing smoke in a long steady tendril.

  Breathing smoke can’t be fascinating to watch, especially to someone who can’t see the smoke. I noticed that Derek got up and looked out the window of the loft after a while. I kept breathing, intent on my task, but a bit curious as to what he’d do.

  A few moments later, he bent down and unzipped my backpack, then removed a book. His book. Herodotus. He waved it at me to show me what he’d taken, turned on the reading lamp at the end of the couch where he’d been sitting, and settled in to read a few travel tips about the ancient world.

  To each his own.

  I breathed smoke.

  SOME TIME LATER, I HEARD a guy walking around my dragon form.

  Derek and I had been alone; then suddenly there was someone else in the loft. No doors or windows had opened.

  My eyes were watchful slits. Dragons never truly sleep, you know. We doze. We slumber. We might look comatose. But on some level we are always vigilant. Maybe our interior alarm systems are preset to a more sensitive level.

  I heard the guy in the loft, even though his footfalls were silent.

  Derek was still reading on the couch opposite me. He looked pretty engrossed and utterly unaware of the intruder.

  That was odd.

  The loft had fallen into the shadows of early evening.

  The intruder walked around my tail. I felt him looking at it, as if he’d never seen the like. He wasn’t afraid—his pulse was too slow for that. He was more curious. But wary. He walked slowly around my back as I remained motionless, feigning sleep. I could practically feel the weigh
t of his gaze as he studied my folded wings. I felt the air move as he lifted a hand, then dropped it again, deciding against an exploratory touch.

  He smelled like wood smoke and the outdoors. Was he a vagrant or a street person? How had he gotten into the loft without setting off the alarm system that deterred human invaders? He could have passed through the dragonsmoke barrier easily—it didn’t trouble humans—but there was no door or window open.

  He took another step, coming around my left shoulder. I tingled with the awareness that he was checking me out and braced myself for whatever he might do. I was prepared to roar to life, to pivot and fry him to cinders, no questions asked. He had invaded my parents’ home and my father’s lair.

  We dragons have no sense of humor about uninvited visitors.

  My dad’s hoard was here and I was in charge, left to defend our earthly possessions and personal security.

  I was ready.

  He took another step, and I saw his silhouette in my peripheral vision.

  I smelled blood. Old blood. Dried blood. It awakened something primal within me. Who knew what this guy had done? Who knew what he planned to do next? I was ready to defend everything I cared about.

  I held my breath, waiting on that next step that would bring him more clearly into my range. One more step. One leap and breath of dragonfire. There was no explanation he could give to justify his presence, nothing he could say to save himself.

  He took that step, he crouched down to look into my eyes, and he whispered the one thing that evidently could stop me cold. “Unktehila, we need your help.”

  There was only one person who called me by that name, by the name the Thunderbirds had given to the dragon shifters. Kohana called me that, but Kohana was dead.

  I raised my head and looked at him. It was the Wakiya elder from my dream, the one who had dropped his cigarette on the rug. His dark eyes glinted as he watched me, and I guessed that he had known all along that I wasn’t really asleep.

  And I should have known that this was another Wyvern vision of the possibilities. Both real and not real. Okay.

  “I told you to hurry,” he said. “And Kohana gave you the clue you need.”

  “It doesn’t help if I don’t understand it.”

  Derek kept reading as if I hadn’t spoken.

  The elder reached into the pocket of his jeans. With one hand, he withdrew a stone.

  It was a piece of red rock, rounded and small enough to hold in one hand. I knew it had a rune scratched on one side and a circle etched on the other.

  How had he gotten it?

  How long had he been creeping around the loft?

  “Hey, that’s my rune stone!”

  “And it holds the answer.” He lifted it up so that the circle was facing me and gave me a hard look. Then he sang the same note Kohana had sung. He tugged his other hand out of his pocket and tossed a handful of what looked like snow into the air. It glistened and glittered—maybe it was a handful of starlight—and then aligned briefly into a musical staff.

  I was reminded of what Meagan had drawn at lunch.

  The circle on the stone looked like a note.

  I still didn’t get it. Meagan had already theorized that Kohana had given us the first note in a harmonic sequence, but the harmony she’d come up with hadn’t made any difference to anything. “We tried that already,” I said, but the elder smiled.

  He tossed the rune stone in the air and caught it again. By the time I followed the trajectory of the stone and looked back at him, we were standing on the red rock that I’d visited before, snow swirling all around us.

  “Here the earth speaks her secrets. Here the truth of the riddle is revealed.” He bent and brushed the snow away from a section of the rock that was covered in carvings. He touched one of a bird, a figure that repeated over and over on the rock face.

  “Wakiya,” I said, remembering that this red rock was a place sacred to the Thunderbirds. Wakiya was the name they used for themselves and this was a drawing of one.

  The elder nodded, then tipped back his head to sing. He sang that note, letting it ululate in the back of his throat. Other men stepped out of the flying snow, forming a circle around him and creating a chorus. They were ghostly, there but not there, their voices the most material sign of their presence.

  It was potent, that singing. It made my body tense and my pulse quicken. It was summoning a kind of energy.

  The dead elder who had brought me here stopped singing, letting his fellows carry the note as he turned to me. “Four kinds left,” he said. “Four notes.”

  “Each one is characteristic!” I said with excitement. “Each of us has to provide our note to destroy the NightBlade.”

  He smiled and stood, extending his hand to me. “Let us defeat the threat together.”

  I shifted shape and stepped forward in human form to shake his hand. His skin was papery, just like Sigmund’s. Was it progress to be shaking hands with more dead people as well as talking to them? I really didn’t have time to think about it.

  “You have to help,” I said to him. “I can’t do this alone.”

  “I have just offered my assistance.”

  I knew instinctively that this wasn’t enough. “No, you have to come with me. We have to defeat them all together. You have to sing the note, live and in person, to do the Wakiya part, since Kohana can’t.”

  “I am not alive, though.”

  “You can still sing.”

  He frowned and shook his head, looking back at his ghostly fellows. “My time in your world is done. I have done what I can, but I cannot go back there again. The portal is secured against me.”

  “Then I’ll just take you with me,” I said with a confidence I didn’t quite feel. “I’ll make a portal.” He looked surprised, but I gripped his hand and smiled. “Here we go.”

  Worst case: he’d be right and it wouldn’t work.

  Best case: I’d have the fourth surviving kind of shifter present and accounted for.

  You know which option I was hoping for.

  I took one last look at the red rock in the snow, not at all sure I’d ever see it again. It was tranquil and powerful, a wonderful place but not one necessarily for me. It had been an intersection for our kinds to negotiate our differences, but I had a feeling that now that was achieved, the Wakiya would secure it for themselves.

  Which meant I had to make this work.

  I closed my eyes, holding fast to the elder’s hand. Spontaneously manifesting out of a dream—instead of just waking up—felt like the right answer, but I wasn’t at all sure it could be done. I couldn’t think of another way to take the elder with me, though, and I was going to trust my gut.

  I wished with all my heart and soul to be back in my parents’ loft, back opposite Derek, and hoped I’d be in dragon form. I felt the tingle that always accompanied my attempts to spontaneously manifest elsewhere, felt my body begin to make the transformation, and tightened my grip on his hand.

  Holy hoard. It worked.

  WHEN I MANIFESTED IN THE loft, I gave a hoot of joy. I was in my dragon form, exactly the way I wanted to be. And—bonus—the elder was still with me, clutching my talon. I had time to see that he was as impressed as I was; then Derek shouted in surprise.

  He sat up, his eyes wide. “Zoë, what are you doing?”

  “Solving the riddle!” I cried, triumphant, and shifted to my human form in a glorious tide of shimmering blue light. The elder nodded approval. “And bringing help.”

  Derek looked pointedly around the loft. “What help?”

  “Him.” I gestured to the elder, who seemed mightily amused.

  “Uh, there’s no one else here, Zoë.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Trust me.” I hauled out my messenger and checked the time. It was eight thirty already. “We’ve got to get to the dance.”

  Derek was looking at me like I’d completely lost it. “I thought you didn’t want to go anymore.”

  “We have to go. The Shado
wEaters will be there. They’ll have the NightBlade and will try to take out at least one wildcard. We’re all supposed to be there, and the school is already filled with spell light.” I was hauling on my boots as I talked, grabbing my keys and my backpack. Excellent—I still had Skuld’s shears. “If Jessica’s there, she’s in trouble already. Let’s go!”

  I bolted out the door, and Derek came after me. I ran down the stairs to the parking garage, trusting the ghostly elder to keep up. Meanwhile, I messaged Meagan, my fingers flying. She’d gone to Isabelle’s place with Jessica, so I told them all to come to the school together and meet us there.

  I was through the door to the parking garage when she called. I quickly explained the issue, then remarked, “You said there were four parts to the harmony.”

  “Soprano, alto, tenor, and bass,” she agreed.

  “Which one was that note of Kohana’s?”

  “Tenor.”

  I got into my car, scrolling through the recorded notes stored on my messenger. Derek got in the passenger’s seat, looking a bit shaken. Like he’d been startled awake to find the world shifting hard. I smiled at him and delegated a task. “I need a sound, characteristic of the Neuroi, that matches one of these notes. A powerful sound for you, or a ceremonial sound.”

  Derek’s eyes shone with purpose as he took my messenger, scrolling through the audio files as I turned the key in the ignition. The car sputtered but didn’t start. I tried again as he worked through the three remaining notes.

  Nada. The engine was dead.

  No, the battery was dead. It should have had enough juice for the week, but I’d taken that extra trip downtown to Jared’s hostel and run it dry. Stupidly, I hadn’t thought to plug it in when I got home. There was no time to charge it up because we had to get to the school before the others were hurt.

  I could have shifted shape and flown there in dragon form, carrying Derek. But I was afraid that I would need every crumb of my dragon powers for the fight ahead. Plus I might end up needing to beguile a whole bunch of innocent bystanders who saw me in dragon form (don’t we love the Covenant?) and I just didn’t have time.