Treasurekeeper

by Ripley Harper

  But no matter how deep you look, he never wants the dragon.

  Never, ever, ever.

  When he finally stops speaking, summarize his long story. “So a mysterious woman came out of nowhere, became the Green Lady and saved my mom from the Order’s clutches.”

  “Basically, yes.”

  I look at Ingrid. “But you still don’t like her?”

  “More than that, I don’t trust her,” she says, her voice now completely even again. “The woman is an extremist, a fanatical eco-warrior type who seems to believe that civilization itself was one big mistake and that we’d all be better off running barefoot over the African savannah, hunting antelope and fighting tigers with home-made spears.”

  “There aren’t any tigers in Africa.”

  She sends me a withering look. “I’ve never understood her motives for coming forward and campaigning for your mother’s freedom, nor can I fathom the need for all the secrecy surrounding her home and her people. She doesn’t even have a surname, for pity’s sake. She’s simply ‘Clara’, like Cher or Madonna. The sheer pretension of—”

  At the unexpected sound of a door opening, Ingrid stops speaking and we all swing around. Behind us, a smiling, grey-haired woman appears through a servant entrance discreetly hidden away behind two enormous ferny house plants.

  “Mr. Pendragon requests your presence in the—”

  She doesn’t finish her sentence because Gunn jumps up, leaps over the table and sprints towards her.

  “Get her out of here!” Ingrid shrieks.

  “Paula!” Sofia cries. “Close your eyes! Do it now.”

  I frown, bewildered. I know this woman: she’s the Pendragons’ day housekeeper and she’s really nice. A few weeks ago she found me crying in my room one night when she came to turn down the bed, and to make me feel better she brought me a cup of hot chocolate and showed me pictures of her grandchildren.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  But then she falls to her knees and I know. Oh no.

  Oh shit.

  She lifts her hands into the air in a strange gesture somewhere between prayer and surrender, staring at me with a horribly vacant, worshipful look in her eyes. “My Queen!” she cries, her eyes shining with tears even as her mouth stretches into an ecstatic smile. “Have mercy on me!”

  “No, Paula. Stop. Come on. Get up.” I watch in horror as Gunn tries to get her to leave, gently at first and then more forcefully.

  But it’s clearly too late because she fights him tooth and nail. “My Queen! I beg you! Don’t let him send me away from you!”

  Gunn scoops her up to carry her away. But despite his size and strength he seems to be really struggling; the poor woman is kicking and screaming, literally foaming at the mouth. “Let me serve you, oh merciful, glorious Queen! Please! Don’t let him—”

  When the door slams shut behind them, one of the big house plants fall over with a huge crash.

  “Why didn’t you tell me I was still shining?”

  Ingrid makes an impatient sound. “You’re shining most of the time now,” she says. “The real question is why that door wasn’t guarded. For God’s sake, how difficult can it be to follow a few simple instructions?” She stomps out of the room, clearly on the warpath.

  In the sudden quiet, I can clearly hear Sofia’s dispirited sigh.

  “Will I ever be able to be around normal people again?”

  “I’m not sure.” Her voice is uncharacteristically subdued. “It certainly seems as if even the residual after-effect of your magic is becoming increasingly dangerous.”

  “So what must I do?”

  “You need to learn how to control your power as soon as possible,” she says, not unkindly. “Or else a lot of people are going to get very, very hurt.”

  Chapter 3

  I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl of Cumae hanging in a jar.

  And when the boys said, ‘Sibyl, what do you want?’

  She replied, ‘I want to die’.

  From The Satyricon (1st century CE), by Gaius Petronius

  It’s two in the morning. Everyone is asleep. I’ve been in my resting state for about twenty minutes and have just woken up.

  The human body cannot handle large amounts of magic, which means that every time I light up with the shine, my body has to rest and re-build itself afterward. The more magic I use, the longer I have to rest, so the fact that I wasn’t out for long is a good sign. Maybe it wasn’t that bad. Maybe Daniel and Paula will still be okay.

  The thought doesn’t really make me feel any better. Nothing makes me feel better. Lately it’s as if there’s a heavy weight on my chest almost constantly, a suffocating pressure that deadens all feelings except dread and anxiety and horror. If only I could switch off my brain for a while. If only I could stop thinking, incessantly and uncontrollably, of all the mistakes I made and of all the people I hurt.

  If only I could forget what I am.

  Last year I killed a boy with my bare hands—a brutal, vicious, disgusting act which the entire world has now witnessed on social media. At the time I thought I was doing the right thing because he was going to kill me and then blow up the school, but in the past few months the internet has weighed my actions that night and found me wanting.

  I shouldn’t have used violence; I should have negotiated calmly. I shouldn’t have told Miss Anderson to cut me loose; I should have told her to run and get some help. I shouldn’t have wasted so much time trying to break the lock or dragging my friends to safety; I should have used Jeffrey’s gun to shoot it open and gotten a group of kids to help me carry out the others. I shouldn’t have tried to do it all myself; I should have phoned the police and the fire station from the landline in the office.

  Obviously.

  Miss Anderson’s death is my fault. Henry’s missing eye is my fault. Jeffrey’s death is my fault, and not only because I killed him but also because I never did anything to help him, or even noticed his pain. Maybe I’m not even that different from him. Maybe I also wanted to blow up that school.

  This is what everyone on social media thinks. This is what my old school friends are telling anyone who wants to listen.

  This is what I also think sometimes, late at night, lying awake like this.

  I killed two other people too, a man and a woman flying a plane over the desert. And indirectly I also caused the death of a girl, Alania, and a man, Jean-Marc, who died to protect me. Not to mention all the Skykeeper assassins who’ve died, trying to stop me from becoming what I have no choice but to become one of these days.

  A dragon.

  Some people believe that my grandmother changed into a dragon before she died: an enormous fire-spewing scaled and clawed monster with leathery wings and long fangs. My mother never changed into a dragon (at least not on this plane of existence, whatever that might mean) but her choice meant that she died a death so horrible I still have nightmares about it. My great-grandmother, like most of the great-great-grandmothers before her, also never changed into a dragon, but this was because the magic inside her had been so weakened by years of constant, systematic torture during childhood that she didn’t have the strength to. They called this torture ‘drilling’ us into our magic, and although it stopped girls like me from changing into dragons, it also meant they usually ended up crippled or blind or crazy or sick or dead.

  But hey.

  I wasn’t tortured as a little girl, which means that the magic inside me has grown too strong; my human body won’t be able to channel it for much longer. Soon, I will have to become a dragon, or die in agony.

  Those are my choices.

  I pull a cushion over my head, trying to make the bad thoughts stop, but they just keep coming until I’m literally moaning out loud.

  One of these days I’m going to change into a dragon. Iryna and Dasha and Michael must hate me now. I should’ve noticed there was something seriously wrong with Jeffrey. I never really even knew Alania, and she died for me. I almost made Jack Pendragon wa
lk into his own fireplace. People on the internet think I’m a satanic racist terrorist freemason psychopath feminist murderer. A Skykeeper prisoner killed himself rather than face me. My mother never loved me, how could she, she lied to me all my life. I should’ve told Miss Anderson to run that night, they’re right, I should have. I was so stupid all those years to hope that Gunn might fall in love with me someday. My mom thought the power inside me was evil. None of my friends at school have said a word to defend me. Not even Maggie. Not even Ty. Paula’s oldest grandchild is called Lee, and he’s brilliant at tennis. What if Daniel becomes so shine-struck he can’t get better? I killed those two people on the plane and I felt nothing. Henry used to be my friend and now he’s the poster boy for my female stupidity. I can’t even talk to normal people anymore, I’m this poisonous thing who’ll change them into zombies without even—

  “Stop it! You’ll wake the whole house.”

  I lift the cushion from my head to find Zig next to my bed, glaring at me. As far as I’ve been able to determine, Zig never sleeps. No matter what time of night or day it may be, he’s always there whenever I turn around, scowling and mumbling and wishing me dead.

  “Sorry.”

  “Why did you make that sound? Are you sick?”

  “No. I’m fine. I didn’t realize I was making a noise, sorry.”

  “Liar.” His strange silver eyes burn with hatred. “You sounded like a howling wolf.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

  “I will never believe your lies, monster.”

  Until about a month ago, I could laugh about Zig’s insults. It just became amusing after a while, the way he’d keep hating me so much no matter how nice I tried to be. But now that I know the truth, the joke isn’t all that funny anymore. Because he’s right. I am a monster. And no matter how nice I try to be, that’s never going to change.

  Dragons aren’t nice, unfortunately.

  “I’ll be quiet,” I tell him as I pull the pillow over my head again. But I don’t hear him leave, so after a while I sneak a look to find him still standing in the exact same spot. “What?”

  “Your self-pity makes me sick!” His scarred upper lip curls into a sneer of disgust.

  “I know. It makes me sick too.”

  “You are nothing but a weakling and a coward.”

  “I know.”

  For a moment something flickers in his icy silver eyes. He starts to say something then stops himself.

  A short silence.

  “The least you can do is learn to control your magic. You might not care about the other people you’ve enslaved, but if you keep exposing Rodriguez to the shine, he won’t recover either.”

  I sit up, hugging my knees to my chest. Zig is obviously not leaving, and I feel too vulnerable lying in bed with him snarling at me like a rabid dog.

  “Since when do you care what happens to Daniel?”

  “I don’t have to justify myself to you.”

  “I know.”

  Zig is a dragonslayer, descendant from a long line of men trained since birth to kill girls like me when we become too much for our keepers to handle. He hates me as the “Horror” foretold by his beloved “Old Words”, and lives for the day when I’ll finally change into a dragon and he can end my life with his sword: a misshapen weapon of bone and hair and skin that haunts my nightmares. When he first became my bodyguard (yeah, I know, the irony), I found it upsetting to be around someone who hates me so much the whole time, but now I find it strangely restful, perhaps because his contempt for me mirrors my own feelings so exactly.

  Zig is the only person in my life who has never lied to me. He told me what I am the first moment we met, and although I didn’t believe him at the time, I do now.

  I guess these days he’s just about the only person I believe.

  “Zig?” I ask quietly, looking down at my knees. “What exactly is going to happen to Paula?”

  “The housekeeper? Why do you want to know?”

  “I just do.”

  He’s silent for so long that in the end I look up to see him scowling at me, his tattooed face bleak and forbidding.

  “Please, Zig.”

  His scowl deepens, but weirdly enough he looks more confused than angry, as if he’s trying to figure out some puzzle. “It is too soon to say what Paula’s fate will be,” he says after a while, grudgingly. “But Jacob is still alive.”

  “What do you mean?” My heart lurches painfully. “Why wouldn’t he be alive?”

  “They haven’t told you?”

  “Told me what?”

  “When the uninitiated become as badly shine-struck as those two, they cannot survive for long.” His pale silver eyes betray no emotion. “They stop eating and drinking and waste away slowly. It’s a long-drawn-out and terrible death.”

  Oh God. Of course it is.

  I hug my knees tighter as that familiar rush of self-hatred slices through me. “Why didn’t anybody tell me?”

  Another sneer. “Your keepers are very careful to protect you from the truth of what you are.”

  Yes. Yes. Of course they are.

  “Can I save them?”

  “If you make them your slaves, their lives will be spared.”

  My mouth pulls into a grimace when I realize what he’s telling me. “You’re talking about pledging, aren’t you?”

  “That ritual has many names.”

  “Yeah, okay. But what you’re saying is that if they pledge themselves to me, like Michael and Dashy and Iryna did, they will be cured?”

  “Nothing can cure them, but they will survive. They will serve you for as long as they live and never think of anyone or anything except your needs again.”

  “That’s it? That’s the only way to save them?”

  His icy eyes grow even colder. “Only a monster will call that saving anyone.”

  Of course. Yes.

  Only a monster.

  I put my head down on my knees. Think about this for a while.

  “Will this happen to everyone who sees my shine?”

  “To everyone who has no magic of their own to protect them.”

  I look up into his cruel, scarred and tattooed face. Zig might hate me, but he always tells the truth. “So how did it work in the old days?” I ask slowly, trying to figure it out. “I mean, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, when girls like me still became dragons all the time. Surely everyone who saw them couldn’t have become shine-struck? Or did they, like, enslave whole cities?”

  “I don’t have to answer your questions.”

  I sigh. “I know, Zig, okay? I know you don’t have to. But I’m asking you anyway. Nobody else ever tells me the truth.”

  I notice that same odd flicker of confusion in his eyes again before he makes a sign with his left thumb over his heart, as if he’s warding off the evil eye.

  “I do not tell the truth to please you.”

  “I know.”

  I’ve almost given up on an answer when he finally speaks, his voice resentful, as if he’s lost some inner battle and now blames me for it.

  “You’re right. In the distant past there have been dragons powerful enough to enslave entire communities. But a shine as bright as yours is exceedingly rare. To my knowledge, only a couple of dragons have been that powerful since the fall of the Roman Empire. My people slayed one of them; the St Georges slayed the other.”

  Of course.

  Of course they were slayed.

  “What happened to all the shine-struck people once the dragons were killed?”

  “There are conflicting accounts. But most believe that the people were saved, recovering fully from their affliction.”

  “They got better?” Suddenly I feel all the hairs on my body stand on end.

  “Yes.”

  His simple, toneless answer hits me like a fist. I put my head on my knees again, hugging myself tight as a slowly creeping fear begins to burn inside me.

  No. It’s not fear.

  It’s ho
pe.

  Oh God.

  Perhaps I’ve finally found it. A way out. A way to stop this once and for all. The thought is terrifying, shocking, nauseating, exhilarating.

  What if all this can simply stop?

  I clench my hands into fists, unable to believe that the solution to this whole mess has been right in front of my eyes the whole time. So simple. So clean.

  So unthinkable.

  “Zig?” I try to swallow my fear, force myself to look him straight in the eye. “Are you a real dragonslayer?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  I wave a hand in the air, not knowing the right words for what I want to say. “I mean are you, um… fully qualified in slaying? Or are you still in training? Like an intern or, I don’t know, an apprentice or something?”

  “I am no apprentice.” His silver eyes now as hard as steel.

  “Okay. That’s great.” I swallow my fear. Push it down. “So. Like. You could basically walk out right now and slay a dragon with that sword of yours?”

  “Yes. I can.”

  “Only, I’m asking because the last time—” My mouth runs dry as I remember that nightmarish scene in the Pendragon library. “Amber survived.”

  He flinches slightly at the name, but I only notice because of the slight movement of the dying skydragon tattooed across his face. “She survived that night because my goal was not to slay her. I meant only to stop her from killing her father.”

  Of course. Yes.

  Mustn’t forget that she was trying to kill her father.

  It’s the type of thing that dragons do, apparently.

  “And if I use my dragonvoice? That night with the fireplace—” I focus on the bedsheets, too embarrassed to look at him. To this day, I can’t think of the shameless way I kissed him without turning beet red. “When I, um… You seemed just as helpless as everyone else.”

  “You caught me unawares that night,” he says evenly. “With my sword by my side, your dragonvoice will not be able to stay my hand.”

  Of course.

  The sword. That terrible sword.