by Kate Hall
Copyright © 2019 Kate Hall
This paperback edition published 2019
Cover Art © 2019 Monica Borg
Published by Lost Window Publishing
Neosho, Missouri
United States
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions contact:
[email protected]
eBook ISBN: 978-1-950291-01-4
Jacket Design by Kate Hall
Jacket Art by Monica Borg
Interior Design by Kate Hall
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication
Content Warning
Quotation
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dedication
For Jacob, who sees the magic in everything, even me.
Content Warning
THERE IS SOME CONTENT IN THIS BOOK THAT MAY be triggering for certain readers. This content includes:
Animal Harm: Chapter 1, 15, 22, 28, 29
Animal Death: Chapter 1
Violence Against Young Women, Including Injuries Similar to Self-Harm Practices: Chapter 11, 16, 28, 33, 38, 40, 41, 42
Depictions of Human Death: Chapter 5, 11, 13, 16, 29
Many of these instances are in italicized portions, but some are not. Throughout the book, the main characters also deal with mental illness such as depression, anxiety, and other trauma. Please use caution if you may be triggered by any of the listed items.
Quotation
“My drops of tears
I’ll turn into sparks of fire.”
William Shakespeare, Henry VIII
Chapter One
Sarah
GROWING UP IN A RURAL TOWN, SARAH HAS SEEN hundreds of videos explaining what to do if she sees or hears a wild dragon. Living in the midwest means you have to be cautious in case of a dragon attack, however rare they may be. The inhuman scream is just like the sound bytes she’s heard in the safety of a classroom—metal twisting and groaning through her head, all the animals in the summer woods burrowing or flying or quivering with fear.
The week after her parents died, she had to watch one of those videos, and the sounds, so close to the sound of a car crash, had her covering her ears, unable to scream as she envisioned the semi plowing into the front of their pickup, the crushed metal echoing the dragon’s call. She was sent out of the room to the counselor’s office for the first of many incidents that year.
Now, alone in the forest, she is completely frozen. The sound is worse than any informational video can describe. This scream is all-encompassing, echoing through the trees and causing any flying animals to take to the sky, and for those who can’t fly to burrow deep into the warm, dark earth. She covers her ears, but the sound isn’t just through the air: it’s in her mind. The creature screams again and again, and she realizes that the cries are not a warning; the dragon is calling for help.
She doesn’t know how she knows. She doesn’t understand why she’s the one the scream is meant for. Something terrible is happening, something so horrific that it’s making a wild dragon, the ultimate predator, call out in pain. She collapses to her knees, the sound digging into her eardrums like knives, and once it’s punctured them, it digs deeper into her soul. Her brain is going to melt out of her skull, her eyesight dotted with spots of white. She collapses to the ground, her knees scraping against the leaves and rocks and needles along the ground.
Then, as suddenly as it begun, the sound is gone. An emptiness flushes into the space, unnaturally quiet for August. Where there should be a breeze rustling through the leaves, there is an all-encompassing silence. Where animals should be scampering through the underbrush, there is a hollowness. She’s only ever heard this kind of quiet in the dead of winter, when everything once living is either frozen, hibernating, or escaped.
Her head throbs, blood pounding through her like a song, and she blinks away the lights. She reaches for her phone to call someone, perhaps the police, for help, but it isn’t in her pocket. Of course, the one day she’s left her phone on her night stand, she needs it. She left it at home this morning because she got sick of waiting for Penny to text her back. Now, she regrets that decision.
The light in the forest is going from a bright white morning to a sickly green, the sky above the trees filling with the dark clouds of a summer storm. She should get back to the house before she gets drenched. The idea of spending yet another day stewing in that house is hard to bear, though. Since her Uncle John ended up in hospice care, Sarah has been living with her mom’s cousin, Elizabeth, on the outskirts of St. Louis. She doesn’t know anything about Elizabeth or her husband, Mark, just that Uncle John didn’t like them being married.
Just as Sarah is turning toward the last ribbon she tied—these woods are faerie woods, and she never risks getting lost—an image flashes into her mind.
Deep in the woods, further than she’s gone on her daily hikes these past two weeks, is a cave. Even if she’s ever seen it, she wouldn’t have noticed—it’s hidden behind the waterfall of a small tributary that empties into the Missouri River. The vision comes with the feeling of desperation, a need that sinks down into her stomach and keeps her from running away.
The woods remain silent—she is the only living thing in the world. The animals stay in their burrows, and the air hangs still in anticipation of the storm. If she listens close enough though, there’s one faint sound. The slow trickling of water.
She flinches at the crunch of her feet against the discarded pine needles as she stands.
She should text Penny, to thank her for being such a good friend all these years, but without her phone, she can only hope that Penny will forgive her for moving. They’ve been friends since right after Sarah’s parents died, no matter what. Except now, something is different. They’ve always had one thing in common—neither of them has had more than the barest of affections. When Sarah sent a message to talk about her new guardians’ overbearing kindness, she’d received a final message from Penny.
Good for you, it said. It’s the last message she’s received from any of her friends back in Sedalia. She’s completely alone.
She might die alone.
She swipes the pine needles off her knees and arms, and her nostrils itch at the sharp smell. When her stance is steady enough to walk, she follows the sound of the river. The waterfall can’t be that far; the dragon’s call was practically right next to her. Surely it couldn’t make that sound loud enough to span miles.
The river is easy to find—she’s surprised she’s never seen it before, but that’s the way of faerie woods. She could walk for miles and miles without seeing or hearing the river, but now that she knows it’s there, it takes her mere minutes to discover it, water clear and fast, the complete opposite of the lazy Missouri River that cuts St. Louis in half. A clap of thunder rumbles, and she startles at the sound, a small scream escaping her. She’s too tense. The anxiety hovers like the storm on the horizon. The dragon’s desperation is needling into her heart, but she can’t help it racing as she walks to her possible death.
She walks upriver, carefully picking her way through the underbrush. The trees are thicker now, tall evergreens that caress each other and cover her in shadow. When she looks up, the gray-green clouds are shrouded by the woods. The persistent sting of pine needles attacks her arms and legs as they try to steer her away from her goal—they hug her torso enough that she has to either shove through or duck beneath them.
When she finally makes her way through the thick copse of trees, the sound of the waterfall slams into her. It rushes down and breaks on the craggy rocks below, blackened by the constant barrage of water.
There is no cave. In the vision, she’d been able to make out a small sliver of it around the edges of the falls. Now, though, there is nothing.
She turns to walk back. This entire hike has been futile, and she’s lost track of the ribbons she usually ties to keep from losing her way in this faerie forest. The woods wanted her to get lost, and now she is.
A low rumble stops her before she makes it past the first branches. It could be thunder, if not for the fact that it reaches deep into her soul and drags a ragged breath from her body. Her heart sinks.
She looks back at the falls, and something moves that didn’t before. A small ripple in the air—not the river pounding down, but a shimmer close enough to touch, the air crackling with static.
When she steps through the film that sticks to her skin like sweat, her eyes widen. There, fifteen feet up, right in the center of the wide waterfall, are the flared golden feathers at the end of a forest dragon’s tail. She’ll have to scale the wall to get to it.
The climb is more than she anticipated. The rock wall is completely vertical, the stones sharp as they cut into the palms of her hands. She boosts herself up, whispering her lessons from a long-ago rock climbing class to herself. It isn’t reassuring, as water splashes along the wall, and she has to be slow and precise to keep from slipping. Yet, her instincts tell her to hurry. Her heart pounds, and her eyes sting with tears.
Halfway up, there’s a shelf etched into the wall, just wide enough for her to stand on so long as she clings to the rocks in front of her. She shuffles her feet along, keeping her eyes pointed toward the tail sticking out of a cave, still too far away. When she tries to rush, though, she slices her hand open on a particularly sharp outcropping. She sucks in a breath and has to desperately cling with the other hand. She begins to tilt, and she can picture herself falling down onto the jagged rocks that are ready to catch her broken body if she falls.
Her hot blood mixes with the cold, slimy liquid coating the cave wall, and now her hand. She should wrap it or clean it or something, but she can’t do anything but bite her bottom lip and ignore the sting of tears welling up. Although nobody is here to see her, a jolt of shame bursts through her, her face flushing. Here she is, her short hair plastered to her face from the sprayback and blood pooling into her cupped palm as she tries to find a deadly dragon, and she’s embarrassed by her tears.
After a moment of collecting herself, she continues on. She stares at her feet, leaning forward so that she doesn’t slip and fall to her death. When the rock wall opens into a huge cave, she almost falls on her face. She rights herself and looks to the long, feathery tail that hangs out the edge and gently splashes through the water.
With the bright white falls to the left, she can’t see anything past the black cave entrance. Her heart slows now that she isn’t hanging precariously onto the side of a cliff, but her sense of security doesn’t last long. There is a dragon attached to that tail, but it’s hidden in the pitch darkness. She takes a few slow steps into the cave. She can’t see, but a sharp metallic smell assaults her, and the air is damp and hot. Something heats her cheeks, like a campfire gently burning her face in waves.
No, not waves.
Breaths.
Nausea rolls through her. The waterfall is drowning out all sound in the cave, but the tiny hairs at the base of her neck raise with a primal fear. Something her ancestors must have developed to keep them from accidentally stumbling into this exact situation, which she has freely strolled into. Her heart races and her stomach clenches.
Another puff of breath against her left cheek pushes her hair into her eyes and open mouth. The stale, fishy taste of the river coats her tongue, and she fights the impulse to bring her hands up to fix her hair. Any move could mean her death.
She turns her head as slowly as she can. Yet another fetid breath wafts over her, the rough, leathery snout of the dragon close enough to touch now that her eyes have finally adjusted. The head itself is as long as her bed, and the rest of the body comes to shape as her eyes trace along in the darkness. She’s half tempted to reach out, to feel the skin on its nose, but her hands remain frozen at her sides.
Again, a sort of desperation runs through her, and tears prick at her eyes. A ragged gasp is dragged out of her, and she stumbles with the weight of this despair that is not her own.
She gathers herself and looks back to the dragon.
Its golden eyes are open, staring directly at her. They shine bright and alive, the morning sun watching her from this creature’s face.
She takes another step toward the dragon. Her feet are icy from the river water, but when she steps forward, warmth seeps in, soaking into her shoes and banishing the cold.
It could be the dragon’s body temperature heating the water. She’s read that when dragons are stressed, their entire body heats up the air around them.
But the water suddenly feels wrong. Heavier. Thicker. She looks down. Scarlet streams along the cave floor. She’d stepped directly from a puddle of clean water and into a pool of whirling blood. A shiver runs through her, her body trying to get her to vomit, as none of its other warnings seem to be working.
She will not throw up. She clenches her jaw and swallows.
Her hands are shaking as she tentatively brings one up to the dragon. Its body is a mountain of gold and brown feathers, the plain colors of a female forest dragon. Its wings, tucked against its body, scrape against the high ceiling. So long as she doesn’t focus on its eyes boring into her, she can do this.
“It’s okay,” she whispers, mostly to herself.
The dragon presses its snout against her hand, its skin surprisingly soft, like a horse’s gentle muzzle. A low moan rumbles out of its throat, along with a swift, palpable relief that makes Sarah’s stomach finally loosen and her heart slow. A huge gash wraps around its neck, the feathers matted and the skin shredded. Her eyes focus on a piece of skin that’s hanging down, stripped right off the muscle. Once gold feathers have been dyed crimson, and she traces the path until she sees a single white feather resting gently in the pool of blood.
She stumbles backward and heaves, the contents of her stomach burning in her throat and tears rushing out of her eyes. She hasn’t thrown up since she was twelve, living with her uncle John and sick with the flu. The time away from illness has made her forget how absolutely horrible it is. She tries to catch her breath, but she chokes as she heaves once again, bile intermingling with blood on the ground.
It takes her a moment to catch
her breath, but the tears don’t stop.
“I don’t know what to do,” she rasps out. “I can’t save you.” She considers begging, but it wouldn’t do much good. Her skin has broken out into a cold sweat. A memory flashes through her mind, but it doesn’t belong to her. The wind on her face, the sharp pain as she flies through steel cables tied between a copse of trees, the desperate clawing to get away, a red-headed woman tearing a single fang from her bleeding gums. Sarah’s mind sticks to the woman for a second too long, but the face is obscured. Something important is tugging at her own memory, but, in this moment, she can only feel what the dragon feels.
Resignation.
The dragon knows it won’t survive. So why did it bring Sarah here today?
Its mouth opens just enough that Sarah can see something shining inside, a twinkling opal that reflects the waterfall behind them. The opal is the size of a watermelon, and it glows dully in the dim cave. The walls glitter with the light emanating from it, dancing with color to displace the darkness of the day.
Sarah has never seen a forest dragon egg before. Some people raise smaller breeds, like fairy dragons that stay the size of a house cat, or even five-foot-tall field dragons that burn farm fields when it’s time to switch out the crops, but forest dragons are extremely rare; only a few live in captivity across the world.
It takes a moment before it clicks.
The dragon is going to die. Nothing Sarah can try will change that. Without a mother, though, the egg will die, too. There isn’t a choice, really. She steps forward again and holds her hands out.
The mother opens its mouth wider. Sarah should be afraid of sticking her hands between those glistening teeth, but a sense of calm envelopes her. This is the right decision. She reaches in, her arm hairs prickling at the hot, labored breaths of the dragon. She carefully wraps her fingers underneath the egg, making sure she has a solid grip before lifting it out. When she’s holding it to her chest, the dragon lays its head on the ground, another breath shuddering out. Its jaw goes slack, and it doesn’t breathe in again. The connection that’s been barraging Sarah’s mind is broken, and she’s suddenly empty.