by Bryan Davis
He grabbed the spine with both hands, and Karen wrapped her arms around him. For the moment, except for the whistling wind and slow flapping of dragon wings, all was silent, allowing Ashley to concentrate on the map. When the blinking dot glided across the border of the blue expanse and into a green region, she raised her hand. “Okay, Mother, we should be right over it. Time to make your dive.”
A low growl rumbled from the dragon’s throat. “Ashley?”
She winced and leaned forward. “Please make your dive?”
Thigocia began folding in her wings. “Hang on!” As she angled downward, her scarlet laser eyes pierced the clouds below.
Ashley hugged the spine and lowered her head. Suddenly, it seemed that the whole world fell out from under her. Her body floated upward. Her stomach squeezed the breath out of her lungs. With streams of cloudy vapor whipping by, she tightened her grasp, forced in a chest full of air, and shouted into the gale. “You two okay back there?”
“Yeah!” Walter choked out. “Except I lost my cap, and Karen’s strangling me!”
Ashley ducked lower. “Just hold tight!”
When they broke through the clouds, Thigocia pulled up and banked to one side. “I sense a hint of danger,” she said as she coasted into a circular descent.
“Where?” Ashley yelled through the swirling breeze. “How far?”
“It is difficult to measure. The intensity is low, and the location seems vague.”
Ashley peered at the mountainous terrain below wooded peaks, plunging slopes, and two river valleys nestled between high, uneven ridges. Autumn had stripped many trees to a few stubborn brown leaves, while bushy firs and ponderosa pines infused the mountain with lush greenery. “Should we land?”
“Yes. We must fulfill our reason for coming, and if a battle ensues, I cannot fight with three untrained riders. Besides, our warrior needs firm footing if we expect him to use his weapon.”
Ashley glanced back at Walter. His expression had hardened. His eyes flashing, he reached over his shoulder and grabbed Excalibur’s hilt. He slid it out partway, as if checking its readiness, then returned his grip to the dragon’s spine.
As Thigocia approached a mountaintop, her eyebeams sliced into the shadowy, forested slopes. The blanket of clouds hovered low as she drew up her wings to angle sharply toward a small grass-covered clearing at the very top of the rounded peak.
Holding her breath, Ashley leaned into the dragon’s dive, trying to duck under the torrent of fog-soaked air. Seconds later, Thigocia thumped against the ground, making a loud squishing noise as she skidded through a carpet of wet grass.
Walter slid down her damp scales, avoiding her beating wings, and landed feetfirst. He whipped Excalibur from his back scabbard and pivoted slowly, firmly gripping the hilt of the sword with both hands. Although no sunlight penetrated the low cloud bank, the blade shimmered, emanating an aura that coated the silvery metal.
Thigocia lowered her head to the ground, making her neck into a stairway. Ashley grabbed a duffel bag strap from her mother’s spine and clambered down the scaly ladder, followed closely by Karen. They rushed to Walter’s side, turning with him as he scanned the encircling line of denuded trees and tall conifers that lay only a stone’s throw away in every direction. Although a hint of wood smoke tinged the air, no sign of fire arose from the thousands of acres of forest that spread across the distant hills.
“I don’t see anyone,” he said, twisting back toward the dragon. “Do you still sense danger?”
Thigocia’s ears rotated, like satellite receivers searching for a signal. “Something sinister … not close at hand … perhaps among the trees, but I saw nothing in the forest as we descended.”
“Something invisible?” Karen asked. “Maybe a demon of some kind?”
“We destroyed the Watchers.” Thigocia snorted twin plumes of smoke into the air. “I doubt that any other demons would be foolish enough to seek a confrontation.”
“As long as the danger stays on the sidelines,” Walter said, lowering Excalibur’s point to the ground, “let’s get started on what we came here to do.”
“But first …” Thigocia blew a hot dry breeze toward the three humans.
Walter spread out his arms, letting the desert-like wind flap his wet sleeves. “Ahhh! The Sahara treatment!”
Ashley and Karen stripped off their coats and basked in the drying flow.
“Can’t beat this with a stick,” Karen said, squeezing her eyes closed. “Ashley, I’m glad your mom is so full of hot air.”
“Good one.” Walter pointed at Karen and winked. “And it’s a good thing she doesn’t need a breath mint.”
As Walter and Karen continued trading jokes about hot air and halitosis, Ashley rotated her body slowly and basked in the luxurious breeze. She winced now and then at the heat and the inane jokes as she watched Walter playfully jabbing Karen. Would he ever grow out of his childish ways? He was a valiant warrior, but at times he seemed like such a kid. Still, it would be fun to join in, kind of let loose and laugh with them. She closed her eyes and shook her head. No. Someone had to be serious around here, so it might as well be her.
After a few minutes, the girls put their coats back on, now warm and dry. Walter patted Thigocia on her side. “You’re better than a thousand hair dryers, and we didn’t have to worry about popping a circuit!”
“Time to get to work!” Picking up her bag, Ashley strode through lush, calf-high grass until she reached a thinner section with only a short carpet of greenery. Something underneath had obviously stunted the growth. She scuffed her shoe across the soil, exposing a solid foundation. “There’s a slab here,” she said, looking back at her mother. “Was this our home site?”
“It has to be.” Thigocia flicked her tail toward a tall oak. “That tree was next to your grandfather’s bedroom window.”
Ashley walked under the oak’s dripping branches and ran her hand along the trunk’s rough bark. Her fingers traced a deep furrow until they came across the outline of a heart. Stooping, she gazed at the initials carved in the center but could only make out the first letter of each pairT and H.
“Timothy and Hannah,” she whispered.
A trickle of memories seeped into her mind, a lanky man lifting her into the tree’s lowest bough. As his brown eyes gleamed, a smile radiated from his noble face, but as thin veils darkened the scene, he backed away, his body fading as he withdrew. With her little bare toes wiggling in front of her, she reached out a pair of chubby hands, and a childlike voice squeaked out.
“Daddy!” Ashley said softly, tears welling as she dug a fingernail into the bark. “Daddy, come back!”
Her mind’s eye still watching from the tree, a window came into view, white drapes drawn closed on the inside. Her thoughts drew her into the bedroom, and, against the adjacent wall, she found a single bed covered with a blue downy comforter. Another man, an older man this time, sat on the edge and gestured for her to come to his lap.
Ashley whispered the nickname she gave to the man after her father died. “Daddy!” He had become a replacement daddy, a kind but sickly old man who assuaged the pain in a little girl’s heart. After a few seconds, the image of her departed grandfather also faded away in darkening shadows.
New memories flowed. As a two-year-old girl, she leaped into her grandfather’s outstretched arms, a book tightly clutched to her frilly nightgown. He took the huge volume and opened to the first page, squinting at the opening lines. “Are you sure you want to read this? It’s really dark and scary.”
She ran her finger across a sketch of a solitary man walking in the midst of a gloomy forest. The black-and-white drawing seemed so real, she could almost hear his feet shuffling through the path’s tangled weeds. “I already read it to myself, but I didn’t understand all of it.”
Her grandfather slid his hand over the drawing. “So you want me to explain it?”
Little Ashley nodded. “Especially the scary
parts. They gave me goosey bumps.”
Withdrawing a pair of reading glasses from his pocket, he sighed. “Okay, let’s see what this says …”
Midway in the journey of our life,
I came to myself in a dark wood,
For the straight way was lost.
Ah, how hard it is to tell
The nature of that wood, savage, dense and harsh.
The very thought of it renews my fear!
It is so bitter death is hardly more so.
But to set forth the good I found
I will recount the other things I saw.
How I came there I cannot really tell,
I was so full of sleep
When I forsook the one true way.
Ashley nodded slowly, recognizing the words being replayed in her mind. “Dante’s Inferno,” she said out loud. That story had haunted her dreams for years, a plunge into the depths of hell where she witnessed the torments of the damned—souls who would suffer for eternity. With every succeeding circle of punishment, she pictured herself in the place of the tortured, stripped naked and pummeled by demons century after century without hope of rescue. Even her cries for mercy would be echoed by the mocking curses of Satan’s henchmen—prayers answered by obscenities.
She shook the thoughts away, and her flow of memories jumped to another scene—the same bedroom, but this time her grandfather was rushing her across the room, carrying her in the crook of his arm. With his free hand, he thrust open the window and threw a duffle bag outside. Then, after lifting her over the sill, he whispered, “Wait at the tree!”
Toddling in pink slippers, she hurried to the oak and peeked out from behind the trunk. Her grandfather scrambled through the window, snatched up the duffle bag, and caught her into his arm as he passed by, barely slowing down at all. Seconds later, they were standing at the edge of the forest. As little Ashley watched the house, puffs of white coloring her excited breaths, her grandfather pulled a cap, two boots, and a pair of mittens from the bag. “It could be a long hike,” he said, “but we have to get to a phone to warn your parents.”
He pushed one of the mittens over her stiff, frigid hand, and nodded toward a path in the woods where a matrix of spindly shadows crisscrossed a leaf-strewn trail. Her grandfather’s breathing grew labored as he stretched the ski cap over her ears, his own breaths puffing streams of white. “We’ll follow it … until we get … to the creek bed … but we have to throw them off the trail … by walking through the water.”
Ashley laid a hand on his chest. “Is your heart hurting again, Dada?”
He took a deep breath and covered her hand with his own. “It was, but it’s getting better now.”
As her grandfather replaced her slippers with boots, Ashley looked back at the house. One of the men came out and pulled a gasoline can from a car, then went back inside. “If those men catch us,” she said, gazing at her grandfather again, “would they kill us?”
Raising a finger to his lips, he whispered, “I think they would. That’s why we’re hiding.”
“If they find us, and kill us …” Her lips puckered, and a tear rolled down her cheek. “Would I go to Heaven?”
He moved the clasped hands from his chest to hers. “I told you about how to get to Heaven. I’ve sung you to sleep with ‘Amazing Grace’ a hundred times, but you wouldn’t believe me.”
She wiped the tear, and her voice pitched higher. “I’ll believe whatever you say. I just don’t want to go to Hell.”
“Of course you don’t, and you won’t.” He brushed away another tear with his thumb. “Just listen for God’s voice and always follow the light, and he will lead you to Heaven.” He kissed her forehead tenderly. “Can you do that?”
Sniffing, she gave him a slow, uneasy nod. “I think so.”
He patted her on the head and inhaled deeply. “I think my heart is strong enough now.” Picking up the bag, he took her hand, and the two hustled down the leafy slope. The forest darkened with every step—downward, always downward. Fear gripped her heart as visions of Dante’s demons haunted every shadow along the way.
Ashley’s memories jumped again, this time resurrecting a dense forest, a dark starless sky, and the sound of her grandfather sloshing through a shallow brook. With her cheek on his shoulder, her gaze stayed locked on the bouncing trees behind them, each one seeming to draw a sword, just as those two intruders had drawn theirs, the two men who had invaded her home and chased her and her grandfather away.
Suddenly, a loud explosion rumbled through the woods. She jerked her head toward the sound just in time to see a huge fireball billow into the sky and then disperse in a million orange and yellow sparks. Glowing cinders flew in all directions and twinkled like copper-colored stars.
Her grandfather covered her eyes with one of his big, soft hands. “It’s going to be okay,” he whispered. “It’s going to be okay.” But the despair in his voice said otherwise. It wasn’t going to be okay, and even at her young age, she knew her life was going to change forever.
“Earth to Ashley!”
Ashley blinked.
“Come in, Ashley!” Walter waved his hand in front of her eyes. “Are you okay?”
Ashley gave him a brief nod. Walter’s voice sounded like her grandfather’s, an echo of love traveling across thousands of lonely nights, bringing comfort, yet drawing tears. Are you okay? the voice repeated, tugging at her heart as the memories streamed away from her mind. She firmed her chin. It was a terrible time to cry. She had to stay strong.
“You zoned out,” Walter continued. “What’s rattling up there in that souped-up brain of yours?”
She brushed away a tear. “I finally remember the night when the slayers killed my parents.”
“Really? Any clues that’ll help us find your father?”
She shook her head. “Not yet. Maybe searching around will trigger another memory.”
“There’s not much here to search through,” Walter said, kicking a brick fragment. “Someone really cleaned this place up—no broken drywall, no plumbing, not even the kitchen sink, but your mother found where the fireplace used to be. She says that’s important.”
With Karen standing at her side, Thigocia pawed the dirt at a raised portion of earth on the opposite side of the foundation. “We hid the keepsake box under the hearth. If it is still here, it should be under one of the bricks.”
Ashley pulled the bag strap higher on her shoulder and hustled with Walter to the site. While Walter traced the edges of the brick layer with a pocket knife, Ashley stroked her mother’s neck. “Seeing this place brought back a lot of memories, including what happened the night you died.” She pulled out her tissue and dabbed her nose. “I was in the woods when our house exploded.”
Thigocia’s ears twitched, and her eyes darted between the foundation and the forest. “When we finish here, I will tell you more about that night, but I dare not lose my concentration while I am monitoring the danger. It seems to be slowly increasing.”
“I got it!” Walter called. He pried up the edge of a loose brick and began tossing fragments to the side. When the opening was about six inches square, he plunged his hand into a hole and withdrew a black metal case about the size of a music box, bent on the top and rusted along every edge. Rising to his feet, he handed it to Ashley. “I guess you should do the honors.”
Ashley glanced at her mother and slowly opened the box. Inside, there were four compartments. One held a folded piece of paper; the second, a gold ring with a mounted red gem; and the third, three coins—a dime and two pennies. The fourth compartment was empty.
“Is that a rubellite?” Karen asked, pointing at the gem.
“That was my ring.” Thigocia lifted her clawed hand. “I stopped wearing it when I realized that Devin was still alive and stalking me.”
A breeze lifted the folded paper, but Karen pinched the edge and kept it in place.
Thigoci
a touched Ashley’s back with her wing. “The paper is the telegram Gabriel sent to congratulate us on your birth.”
Walter pushed the lid farther open, and it broke free from its rusty hinges. “Ooops! Sorry!” He set the lid carefully on the ground. “I was trying to get a better look at the coins. Why were you saving them?”
“When we left the hospital after Ashley was born, Timothy bought a newspaper and coffee from an elderly street vendor. When the man gave Timothy those coins in change, he closed Timothy’s fingers around them, and I will never forget what he said. ‘The dime represents the ten spies who quaked at the sight of giants in the Promised Land. They are chaff in the wind, a dime a dozen. But the pennies represent the two faithful witnesses who believed God would conquer the Nephilim. They are the widow’s mites—copper coins, yet rare gems—a gift that Jesus declared far more valuable than the treasure of kings. Keep these coins and never forget God’s promises.’”
Ashley plucked the dime from the box. “What should we do with them? We can’t bury them now.”
“Put them in your pocket,” Thigocia said. “The box is worthless, so there is no sense taking it along. We can store the telegram and the ring in your bag’s waterproof pouch.”
After sliding the coins into her jeans pocket, Ashley handed the box to Walter, withdrew the telegram, and unfolded it. Holding the worn edges carefully, she read out loud. “Congratulations on the birth of your daughter. May she live in peace and learn the secret behind the Oracles of Fire. Signed, Gabriel.”
As she scanned the logo and address at the top of the page, she tapped her jaw. “Larry, I need you to contact the Western Union office on Stephens Avenue in Missoula. Find out the data source of the request for the telegram Gabriel sent to my birth hospital on the day I was born. It says it came from Glasgow, but I have my doubts. If they won’t give the source to you, go ahead and snoop in their database if you can. It could be a matter of life or death.”
“Consider it done.”
“What? No witty reply?”
“On a scale of one to ten, your tone of voice registers a nine point six on the ‘I’m-totally-stressed-out’ meter. It is not safe for man or machine to test your limits at this time.”