by Kate Hall
They come up to another door, this one heavy reinforced steel.
“I’m going to hand you off to your aunt. You’ll be in the best hands, but I’m sure you knew that already.” Sarah expects a keypad to appear for him to type top-secret codes into, but he simply turns the doorknob and lets them in.
This room is much like the first, all concrete, except there’s a line of chain-link fences along the left side going up to the top of the twenty-foot ceilings. Elizabeth is leaning on a gate at the end of the hall, somehow managing to look like a cover model in her khaki and green zoo uniform and black rubber boots.
“Who’s a good dragon? Is it you? Are you a good dragon?” she says, her tone babyish as she speaks to something Sarah can’t see on the other side of the fence.
“Miss Halacourt,” Victor calls, and she straightens up and rushes to them.
“So sorry, Victor,” she says, her voice hard. “I’m working on training exercises.” When her gaze moves to Sarah and Gabby, she beams. “I’m so glad to have you here. I’ve been trying to convince Victor for weeks to bring you into the training area.” While she’s talking, Victor waves and goes back through the door, leaving them all alone.
Sarah is unsettled by this entrance. She had expected to walk Gabby through the aviary, and perhaps get a glimpse at Hawthorne again so that she could explain that he somehow knows about the egg. She’d been thinking that, maybe, if she gets close enough, she can find out more about him. She had not expected to be greeted at the door and taken to see the training area.
Elizabeth swivels around and walks away, leaving through one of the chain-link gates without another word.
Gabby and Sarah look at each other and then look back to her.
“Come on, girls. Can’t leave gates open for long when you’ve got dragons about.”
They rush over, following her out the gate and through a thin aluminum door, and they’re suddenly in the aviary. The transition is jarring; they’d gone from a long concrete room and into what seems like an open field in a mountainous valley.
“Holy crap,” Gabby whispers, craning her neck to look at the infinite sky that stretches above them. Sarah smiles at her amazement.
They’re standing in a patch of thin grass outside, and if they squint, they can see the guest pathway in the distance.
“This place is magical,” Sarah says.
“It has to be,” Elizabeth replies. “We have over two hundred dragons in one building, and a good deal of them are not small.”
Gabby’s eyes widen. “Two hundred?”
Elizabeth tilts her head. “Two hundred thirty-six, actually.”
She strides off through the field, her pace brisk, probably due to her mile-long legs.
“Hawthorne!” she calls, cupping her hand over her mouth. She elongates the first syllable before sharply cutting the second upward.
A red and black mountain dragon lands in front of her, heaving his glowing, lava-like chest plates. Its amber eyes blink curiously, its pupils adjusting to take in the three puny humans. Sarah shrinks back. She hadn’t considered that they were within the magical boundary that protects zoo patrons from the dragons.
“Not you, Smaug,” Elizabeth chides, waving a hand at him. Sarah is delighted by his geeky literary name, although she doesn’t move closer. “Shoo! Go harass Keida.” She makes a “tch” sound as she flaps a hand toward him. He tosses his head, snorts black ash into her face, and then takes off. This motion doesn’t phase her—she just wipes the ash away from her eyes and calls again, “Hawthorne!” This is the first time Sarah has seen Elizabeth look anything less than perfect, and it warms her just a bit.
A juvenile prairie dragon crawls up the galaxy leggings Gabby is borrowing, and it burrows itself under her shirt. It’s long, furry tail hangs out the bottom, the puff of brown fur at the end wiggling with excitement. She squeals, jumping backward and holding her arms out to her sides.
Elizabeth rushes over to assist her, unabashedly reaching under the hem of the shirt to retrieve the creature. By the time she has a grip on it, faerie dragons are nesting in Gabby’s piles of hair.
While this chaos is happening, Hawthorne lands in the field, tilting his head at the scene.
Sarah walks away slowly, Gabby and Elizabeth tangled in a futile dance of removing assorted dragons from her person.
Hawthorne sniffs the air as she approaches, his expression going from quizzical to excited. He dances in place, his huge feet pawing the grass underneath him flat. A previously hidden crown of red and black feathers flares up behind his horns, and she hesitates. The red reminds her of the blood on the murdered female dragon. She’d been terrified when meeting the female dragon a month ago, but now, she doesn’t have adrenaline to push her along. She lifts a shaky hand up, trying to appear confident.
He leans his head forward and sniffs, then suddenly presses his forehead against her entire torso, his nose brushing the ground. Sarah almost falls, but she buries her hands in his feathers and tightens her fingers to steady herself. A laugh leaps out of her before she can help herself.
“You’re a good boy, aren’t you, Hawthorne?” she says, her voice a gentle croon like she used with Keida weeks before. She strokes his shining golden horns, which are surprisingly rough against her fingertips. He smells like fresh-cut grass and morning dew.
“What’s going on?” Elizabeth calls, her voice suddenly tight. Sarah turns her head enough to look, and she and Gabby are standing far back and watching.
“I’m fine,” Sarah replies, resting her head back against his forehead. When she rubs her hand through his baby-soft facial feathers, the smell of leaves getting ready to abandon branches for the winter springs up. Quietly, just to Hawthorne, she says, “I hope I’m doing the right thing with this egg.”
He doesn’t move, but a feeling of warmth and affection spreads lazily through her. She lets out a sigh as she realizes that everything will be alright. It’s a familiar intrusion in her mind, the same energy as the female dragon’s telepathic messages, but an utterly different tone.
“What do I do about Helen, though?” She pauses. “You’re a dragon. Of course you don’t know anything about that.” When she’s about to pull away from him, he nudges her, his green eye focused and serious. She puts a hand back on him to steady herself, and another vision hits, this one like a load of bricks.
SHE CAN FEEL A PAIN IN HER WINGS—NO, IT’S NOT her. This is Hawthorne. He’s crouched to the ground, hiding as far in the underbrush as he can, restraining from calling to his mate. If she doesn’t come to him, she may be safe. The egg may be safe. A human that looks like fire at the top and darkness all over pulls out a light box and puts it to her mouth, and a sound keens out. The sound of another forest dragon. Deceit.
He tries to tell his mate not to come to it, to go back to their den and hide. It’s no use, though. She’s drawn to the call, and she becomes hopelessly entangled in the wires that had sliced Hawthorne’s wing open. He tries to get to her, but the human is already stealing something, anything, from her. Scales. Teeth. Blood. It isn’t until the human disappears in a cloud of black smoke that his mate is able to escape, not even looking his way. He tries to follow, but he can’t get off the ground with his wing destroyed.
THE VISION GOES SPOTTY, AND SARAH HAS TO blink a few times to see where she is. Right. The aviary at the zoo. Except now, she’s lying on the ground. Hawthorne is staring down at her. When she opens her mouth to speak, though, he flies off, his now repaired wing carrying him through the air.
Elizabeth runs up and crouches over Sarah. “Oh my god, are you alright? Did he hurt you? Forest dragons, even wild ones, are usually very docile. I don’t know why he would do anything.”
Sarah keeps staring into the distance, where Hawthorne is no more than a green and gold speck. “Where exactly did you guys get Hawthorne?”
Chapter Sixteen
Alex
IT’S BEEN LESS THAN TWO WEEKS SINCE CYNTHIA was murdered and strung on t
he front gate, yet nobody is talking about it anymore. Alex can’t get the image out of his head.
It had taken five minutes for a first-responder to arrive. In his life, five minutes had never been long. Practically the snap of fingers.
When you have to pull a dead girl off a fence and hold her so she isn’t alone, five minutes is a lifetime.
Cynthia and Alex weren’t friends, but he’d had a few classes with her, and she’d always been kind. Freshman year, when another student was diagnosed with cancer and lost all her hair, Cynthia shaved her own head in solidarity. A bunch of others followed suit, of course, but she was the first, and, he thinks, the only one who really meant it. If she hadn’t, she probably wouldn’t have shaved her eyebrows to match the victim. Nobody else did.
His nights have been sleepless, and he finds himself wandering campus. Sometimes he falls asleep in the grass while gazing at the stars, or curled on a bench by the clocktower. The rest only lasts a short time, as he’s always startled awake by the ten o’clock dorm curfew that pulses through him when he isn’t in his room. He can’t bring himself to sleep in his dorm, though. David doesn’t bring it up.
After the funeral on Saturday night, he drove until he ran out of gas. Then, he filled up the tank and drove until the stars were hidden by an early morning sky. He wasn’t searching for a party this time, and he didn’t find one.
Every time he closes his eyes, he pictures Cynthia, her frail body chained to the front gate of the school. When he can finally get rid of her face, it’s replaced by Hannah screaming that it’s his fault, that Cynthia would be alive if he’d tried to save her.
He wants to tell her that he tried. He wanted to apologize for not getting there in time. But he couldn’t get the words out. He just let Hannah be angry at him.
It’s easier that way.
He hasn’t been able to concentrate in his classes, and he fails the Spiritual Magic exam on Tuesday. The rest of his classes are easier to keep up with, but he has a hard time with Spiritual Magic on the best of days.
When class ends on Wednesday afternoon, he doesn’t get up to leave. He can’t bring himself to move. His body feels entirely too heavy, and he has no motivation to get to his next class until the absolute last minute. He isn’t sure if it’s from exhaustion or from the image of Cynthia being reduced to a black bag, but he just stays in his seat, staring at his blank notebook. He now has five days of blank notes.
Sarah is the last one to go; he vaguely notices that she’s putting her bag together slowly, but he doesn’t actually focus on her until she stands next to him, waiting for something, or perhaps deciding if she should say something. He doesn’t know if he could take another person asking how Cynthia died, and he definitely can’t deal with talking about the kiss he and Sarah had shared a lifetime ago.
After a moment of silence, he hears the sound of paper being torn out of a notebook, and the small stack of paper brushes against his arm as she sets it on his desk.
He doesn’t look at it until she’s gone. He considers just crumpling it up, disinterested in a love letter that demands he speak about the kiss when the only things he can focus on right now are guilt and anger.
It’s not a letter, though. There are five sheets, each with meticulously color-coded Spiritual Magic notes in neat, bubbly letters. He closes his own notebook, but not before realizing that there are teardrops on the empty page. He hadn’t even noticed that he was crying again.
AFTER CLASSES LET OUT FOR THE DAY, HE changes into his only set of fireproof clothes and goes to the gym.
St. Merlins’ gym is an entire building—besides the regulation basketball court, there’s a weight room, a gymnastics room, a pool, and a magical sparring room. The sparring room is where he goes—it’s been a while since he’s used his fire, and he finally feels its power flowing back into his fingertips after a week of emptiness. Something awakened in him when he saw the tear stains on his blank notes, so he’s taking advantage of this sudden burst of motivation to get some practice in.
He rolls out a rubber mat, smaller than the one Phillip uses in Pyromancy class. Alex has been skipping Pyromancy all week, sitting in the counselor’s office so that it would be excused, although he never says much. He’s been afraid that his fire was gone for good, and he didn’t want to have to tell Phillip that. If he weren’t a Pyromancer anymore, his scholarship would be redacted at the end of the semester, and he’d be forced to go back to Kansas.
He starts with basic stances to warm up. These motions are slow, practiced. By the end of the first set, he can feel sweat beading on his forehead.
Some of the more prominent religions believe that fire is the first gift given to humans by God. That, when God granted humanity with fire, they were cleansing us. People believe that those born with the gift of fire are pure, the only humans able to cleanse their soul in the same way that a wildfire will cleanse land to make space for new life. He isn’t so sure about that.
He likes to believe that there’s something special to make him the first pyromancer in his family, but he mostly just feels like everyone expects for him to be greater than he is. In public, he’s a stoic firestarter, only allowing precise motions and flawless execution. In private, though, when there are no expectations placed on his shoulders, he’s restless and sloppy, desperate to discover what makes him special.
After repeating his warm-up a few times, he creates slow, broad strokes of flame, painting the air around him gold and red before the fire disappears in a crackle. He is a phoenix, painting the air with his cleansing fire. Each movement is meticulous, practiced.
A few of the younger students in the gym stop their sparring to watch him when he quickens his pace, the flames going from red to gold to the hottest of blues as he twists and pulls at the energy flowing through his body.
He works through his magic the same way he might work a tight muscle—if he goes too fast or moves wrong, it could tense up, flaring back to hurt him. His longest bout without using fire was the three weeks after Brittany broke up with him, and it became such a furious turmoil inside him that, when he lost his temper working on a fence, it exploded out of him, destroying half a field worth of corn. Thankfully, nobody was injured, but he did have to pay for the damage to his neighbor’s crops.
He sees a girl out of the corner of his eye, her blonde hair pulled back in a loose bun, and he almost thinks that it’s Cynthia. He turns to look and stumble, but he doesn’t stop the flames. He curses at himself under his breath. Of course it isn’t her—it’s just another freshman coming over to watch his performance. The fire senses his trepidation, licking outward and testing the boundary that protects the onlookers.
Every year, St. Merlin’s holds an end of year expo. It’s mainly for students to show their parents what they’ve learned, but a lot of important people show up, too. Alex was asked by the dean to show off his skill with fire, a routine that he’d worked all year to build up. When he got up on the stage, he gave a mediocre performance due to his nerves, but he was still approached by four college scouts and three military recruiters when they found out he was also a telepath.
He sucks in a shaky breath and drops his torso, lifting his leg in a circle kick and creating even more fire. He’s supposed to spin back around to pull the flames back into his hands, but he overshoots and fall to the ground, the fire dissipating at once. This time, he’s able to make it look purposeful—he uses the momentum to roll and land in a crouch, but he knows that he screwed up.
A few of the students clap halfheartedly, but the small audience he’s gathered disperses before he’s on his feet. He didn’t do as well as he should have, but he still feels immensely better now that he’s gone through the motions.
Phillip is standing at the back of the room, watching Alex with an eyebrow cocked.
“I expect to see you in class from now on, Mr. Locklear,” he says after approaching Alex. He pats Alex on the back, exiting the room while Alex’s shirt sticks to his skin with sweat.
He puts away the mat before rushing after Phillip. He also texts David, and they all three have dinner in Phillips apartment, a tradition they haven’t picked up since last year.
EVEN AFTER THE DINNER, HE CAN’T SLEEP.
He roams campus some more, telling himself that he just needs the fresh air. St. Merlin’s campus is dotted with strategically placed trees and flowers, and they’re in different stages of autumn. Some of the more delicate trees are bright red, leaves floating to the ground in the wind. The piles look like pools of blood dotting the grass and pavement, so much so that Alex wants to pick one up to make sure it’s dry, but he keeps his hands in his pockets.
He wanders aimlessly around campus, telling himself that he can’t go to the front gate. Last time he was there, a silver chain was still woven through the bars, Cynthia’s dark blood dripping off it. It glimmered in the light of the police cars, gleefully strangling the vines that wind their way through the gate.
Still, he ends up at the gate, trembling at the sight of it.
He considers, for a moment, climbing up the stone wall, sitting on the elk whose head is thrown back in a deathly cry; a lot of his classmates have done it. Their Instagram accounts have photos, the tag “RideTheElk” accompanying them. It’s sort of a rite of passage for the richest of the rich, teenagers who don’t have anything better to do than conquer an eighteenth century statue. He wonders if Cynthia had thrown her head out in pain, unconsciously mimicking the elk in her last moments, or if she’d hung her head and accepted her fate. By the time he arrived, she’d been facing the ground.