Night of the Highland Dragon

by Isabel Cooper

  Judith spied her destination ahead: a huge clearing, dark with the shadows of the old trees that circled it, but clear for yards around. She knew the place from many seasons and many years. Her first real hunt had begun there—she and Stephen tagging along behind their father—and many others had followed.

  Now she was alone. The prey was unworthy, inedible, and wrong. But it would be a hunt nonetheless.

  She stepped into the clearing. A squirrel fled at her approach, scurrying for the safety of a pine tree and chittering alarm to any of its fellows who might be listening. Judith thought she heard an extra note of agitation in its call. No animals found her presence pleasant, even without the accompanying rat-things.

  The creatures followed her as she’d hoped. First they lurked at the edge of the clearing. Then, as she moved farther in, they came. They seemed to maintain a fairly consistent distance. Whoever summoned them had probably given them specific orders, since they didn’t look that bright.

  Judith calculated. She wanted them as far out in the open as possible. They were maintaining formation. To get them all out from under the trees, they’d need to be roughly in the middle of the clearing, but no more.

  The farther off from England, the nearer to France.

  She’d been gun captain for a few years out in the Pacific. Now, as she had then, she sighted the spot she wanted. This time, she wouldn’t be depending on half-grown boys with shot and powder. She walked, stood, took a breath—and transformed.

  It was a full-body shiver. It was a moment when she saw double and felt stretched. From the outside, she knew, it took no more than a few seconds, but it always felt longer. Then she was the dragon.

  The rat-things were even smaller now, and they hadn’t moved. Either they were stunned by the transformation or they didn’t have the wit to know they were in danger. Judith rumbled her satisfaction.

  She inhaled and thought control at her gullet, where the force was already warming her chest. Judith and her brothers had inadvertently tested these trees in their youth, and they’d proved very sturdy, but there was no reason to take risks.

  Now the rat-things were shifting, growing wary. It was time.

  Judith swung her head and spat fire in an arc that ran from the last creature on the left to the one in the middle. It was a thin, whiplike stream of flame, which crackled out and caught the rat-things just in the center of their chests. The shrieking hum that emerged from them overwhelmed pride at her precision. It went all through her and made her back teeth hurt. The smell was putrid too. She reared her head back and snarled.

  The other three rat-things bolted. Two headed back the way they’d came, while one broke sideways. Judith grabbed that one with her jaws, careful not to bite—there was no part of this thing that she wanted to eat—shook it sharply, and dropped it unmoving to the earth.

  Meanwhile, the other two had hit the tree line. Quick little buggers; she had to give them that. Judith sprang up, let her wings give her momentum for a second or two, and then dove sharply. The ground shook as she hit it, throwing the rat-things onto their backs. She snaked out a foreleg and ripped through them with her claws. They felt liquid, as if they’d been rotting for a long time already, and they shrieked like their companions. If they hadn’t been dead already, Judith thought darkly, she’d have killed them again for that. Nothing needed to make such a noise.

  She wiped her claws on the soil. With any luck, the things’ blood wouldn’t do much harm, but she’d come out and purify the place later to be sure.

  She turned back to the clearing and the burnt bodies there. None of them were moving. All were dissolving into the air, in fact, and to her relief, they didn’t seem to be doing any more damage to the world with their deaths. A stray patch of pine needles was smoldering, though. She stomped on it with one clawed hind foot, grinding until the smoke went up; then she tossed dirt over everything.

  This was her place. She would take care of it.

  Twenty-one

  One advantage of finding trouble in isolated farming villages was that people actually went to bed. Sunset itself was a touch early, but even by that time most of Loch Arach’s residents were getting dinner on the table, shutting the livestock in for the evening, or otherwise settled in their own homes. Nobody would suddenly go out to catch a show or attend a dance. A good many of the younger generation chafed at these conditions, but for William, they meant there were fewer people to ask inconvenient questions.

  Waiting until full dark, sadly, would make Mrs. Simon or Claire wonder where he was, and William already knew they didn’t keep such speculation to themselves. Late afternoon was the best compromise, he’d decided. If everything went as he planned, he’d be back well before dinner. If he did encounter one of the villagers, he’d just say he was out to look at the sunset. He was sure no local boy could have passed off such an explanation, but he was an outsider and strange.

  Clarke’s silver medallion would be harder to explain. That was why William kept it tucked inside his coat and didn’t take it out until he found a secluded copse of trees halfway between the village proper and the castle. Then he knelt, placed it on the ground, and said the Enochian phrases that Baxter had passed on to him. A low humming, not unpleasant, filled his ears as the medallion attuned itself. He waited, almost holding his breath in the hope that nobody would stumble upon this, the most crucial and most obvious stage of his task.

  Without interruption, the humming ended. William bent and picked up the now-quiescent silver disk. He saw a faint glow in the heart of the multicolored glass beads—maybe refracted sunlight, but then again, maybe not.

  The rest of the disk’s power had little room for debate. His vision snapped from one level of reality to another with the immediacy of putting on spectacles. Rocks and the outlines of houses looked far away and faded. Plants had a faint glow about them, stronger in the pines than the other trees and weakest in the dying grass.

  Off near the main road, six leprous-gray trails ran in thin lines, back to the village and on toward the castle. Of everything in the new landscape, they stood out the brightest.

  He headed out to join them, glimpsing flickers of russet light around his own body as he moved. The whole experience was rather fascinating so far. He wouldn’t have minded lingering, if he hadn’t had his duties to think of—and if he hadn’t been looking at the gray trails. As he got closer, they seemed to squirm beneath his vision. He thought infested and then dissolving, and didn’t know which one was right. He thought of the rat-things he’d seen near Finlay’s and dropped his free hand to touch the butt of his pistol.

  A short distance ahead, another trail joined them. This one was green, of a shade that looked like it had been vivid when it was new, and thicker. Like the gray lines, it went forward toward the castle.

  William’s chest tightened.

  Either the green thing was Judith and the rat-things had attacked her or were stalking her in preparation, or;

  The green thing was Judith, the rat-things were her allies, and she’d met them here for reward, assignment, or punishment, or;

  The green thing was a third party altogether, and whether it was fighting or allied with the rat-things, both of them were headed toward the castle for some reason.

  Every possibility involved Judith and danger. While he was laying the possibilities out in his mind, William was already following the trails, breaking into a light jog that he knew he could sustain for a while and keeping his gaze well ahead to make sure nothing would bring him up short. He almost stumbled anyhow when he saw the smaller path branch up ahead, and that all seven of the trails turned there.

  Not the castle then, but the forest. In some ways, that was a relief; in others, anything but.

  As he jogged onward, the trails got brighter, and William knew he was catching up to the things that had made them. They hadn’t been in a great hurry. From what he’d seen of the rat-
things, they were speedy little devils when they wanted to be. He was glad of their lethargy on this occasion. He was in decent shape, but not as young as he had been, and the trails got harder to see once he entered the forest. There, they competed for his attention with the auras coming off trees and the brighter sparks of birds and small animals. None of those left tracks the way that his quarry did, but immediately at hand, anything living and mobile could easily drown the traces out.

  The ground was also horrible for running. That had been true when William was following an actual—though narrow and bumpy—path through the forest, but far too soon the tracks veered off through the woods themselves. He swore when he saw that—quietly, so as not to alert any of his targets that might be in hearing distance, but intensely profanely.

  Nor did his sentiments change once he got started. Forests were all well and good in poetry, or as places for lovesick men and deposed kings in Shakespeare, but real forest floors held both roots and rocks, cunningly hidden under carpets of pine needles—slippery pine needles, at that. Real forests had plenty of undergrowth to catch at his coat and trousers, briars to whip across his arms like little bloody needles, and birds to screech practically in his ear when he was trying to duck under branches. He hit his head the first time that happened, with a thud that made him wonder why he’d bothered trying to be quiet in the first place.

  He was still keeping up with the tracks as far as he could see. He knew it almost for certain when he heard the sounds up ahead of him. First were a snap and fizz like a struck match; then a shrill buzzing sound that rang in his ears and called to mind horrible hours in the dentist’s chair. When a great beast snarled, drowning out the drill sound, it was almost a relief.

  Almost.

  The wind shifted toward him, and the scent it brought made him struggle not to gag. Smoke mixed with the sweetly rotten scent he remembered from the demon that had attacked him, flooding his nose and throat. His eyes watered. It would make sense for the rat-things to smell like the other demon, he thought. It would make no less sense for the larger creature to smell that way too, if it had come from the same place.

  With sweat icy on his body, and tense from bones to skin in the instinctual response of a naked ape sensing a huge predator, William slowed down. He tucked the medallion under one arm, slipped his silver-loaded gun into the other hand, and moved quietly toward the noises. The trees gave him good cover. Most of them were far larger around than any man, even him, and their leaves let barely any light in. This part of the forest was very old.

  The thought was not comforting. It brought to mind sailors’ tales of krakens and sea serpents, the ancient beasts of the deep, giant bones buried in the American West, and Bible verses that he’d learned in childhood. There were giants in the earth in those days.

  As counterpoint to the verse, a great weight landed on the ground up ahead. The forest floor actually shook beneath William’s feet. With his hands full of objects he didn’t want to let go of, he caught himself on a tree with one shoulder, cursing again at the impact. He kept the profanity silent this time. He was too close for any untoward sound.

  Ducking around another tree and behind a third brought him to the edge of a great clearing, where the last rays of twilight came to earth. He didn’t need that light, not with the medallion, but even without it he would have seen enough to freeze him, openmouthed, in his tracks.

  A dragon stood at the opposite end of the clearing.

  Training and practice let him calculate and observe even while he quietly gibbered. Dragons were sleeker creatures than they’d appeared in the stories of his youth, apparently. The one in front of him had the four limbs that had distinguished the knight-gobbling sort from their counterparts of Chinese legend, and no whiskers. It was a rich, shimmering green, covered with scales the size of his hand, and a sharp-looking ridge ran down from the top of its head to the tip of its lashing tail.

  That was quite a distance. By his shocked estimate, the dragon was at least twenty feet at the shoulder and probably triple that in length, and the furled wings on its back might have covered the clearing. For all of that size, there was a certain grace about the creature, the sort of disconcerting nimbleness he’d seen from tigers.

  It slashed out with one foreleg as he watched, aiming for something in the tree line. The light shone briefly on claws like kukri knives. For an intense, horrifying moment, William wondered whether he should try to help the dragon’s prey, for all of the three or four minutes his life might last doing so. Then he saw the bodies on the ground.

  Three were horribly burned, which explained the smell. The fourth unmoving creature lay in the middle of the clearing. No human being could survive with its body at those broken angles, and apparently some demons couldn’t either. All four of the bodies were rat-things. Their trails were fading, and so were their bodies, slowly dissolving into air and earth. William focused and saw two other trails leading to the tree line, toward the place where the dragon was fighting.

  The dragon’s claws made contact with a splortch like overripe fruit hitting a wall. William got a very brief glimpse of one of the rat-things, mouth open in angry pain, and then that damned buzzing noise, the demons’ death cry, hit him again.

  If he hadn’t had any other reason to object to those creatures being present in his world, the sounds alone would have done it. He leaned against the tree and wished he had a hand with which to clutch his head.

  He heard the dragon exhale and saw it retreat from the tree line, wiping its claws on the soil in a strangely dainty gesture that, on second thought, seemed practical. Who knew what kind of poison lurked in the rat-things’ blood? And if he’d never thought of dragons as particularly forethoughtful, he’d also never thought much about dragons at all, once he’d left the nursery. D Branch didn’t know everything, and it didn’t tell its agents everything it did know.

  The dragon turned. A long, curved horn came up from each side of its head, William saw. Its face was narrow and pointed, and its eyes were comparatively huge, as well as a striking shade of greenish-gold. As he watched, those eyes focused on a patch of ground near where the burnt rat-things were fading—a patch that was sending up a few faint plumes of smoke.

  With a quick, sinuous motion, the dragon slammed one forefoot onto the smoldering earth and twisted it, grinding out stray sparks the way a man might crush a cigarette end. Then it flipped loose dirt on top of all the bodies, even as they faded. It was quick and precise about the whole business, much more agile than William had thought—and far more systematic. He watched with eyes that felt about the size of dinner plates.

  If he survived, he’d deliver a report that would have Watkins buying him dinner at any club in London.

  Cleanup concluded, the dragon stood in the center of the clearing. William waited for it to spread its wings and fly away—Amy Finlay’s “giant eagles” were suddenly much clearer—but instead it coiled around itself, tucking its tail neatly under its chin. Perhaps it was the pose, but now it looked much smaller than sixty feet.

  Then it shimmered like a mirage. There was a moment of color and light that William couldn’t fully translate as the dragon shrank and shifted and became a bipedal figure, a shade less than six feet tall, in a skirt and shirtwaist. Black hair made a neat bun at the back of her neck. Claws became long-fingered hands. The eyes were smaller, but the color was the same.

  Judith MacAlasdair stood in the middle of the clearing, looking around her with the distaste of a woman who’d just completed some unpleasant household chore.

  Suddenly, she frowned. She turned. Those green-gold eyes focused directly on William.

  Twenty-two

  The evening just got better and better.

  Judith still had the faint taste of rat-thing in her mouth, and her head had started to ache, an unsurprising result of hearing the demons’ death cries. Several unpleasant ideas were circling her mind and getting ready
to perch. Most concerned why the little monsters had come, why they’d been following her, and how much of the recent destruction was her fault.

  Now William Arundell was standing at the edge of the clearing. She didn’t know how much he’d seen, but the way he was staring let her know that it had been more than enough. And he had a pistol leveled at her head.

  “I don’t want to,” he said. “But I’ll defend myself if you make me. The bullets are silver.”

  There was no question in his voice, no uncertainty that silver would hurt her or that she knew it. In his other hand, he held more silver: a flat disk that glittered with gems and shone with magic to her sight.

  “What are you?” Judith asked.

  “Human,” said William. “Which makes one of us, doesn’t it?”

  “I’m not not human,” said Judith.

  The silence of a winter’s night filled the clearing. Each of them stood staring at the other. Standoff, Judith thought, remembering American stories. Silver could kill one of her kind. In dragon form, if the shooter missed the head or the heart, it would usually take more than one bullet. From her memory, though, William was an excellent shot, and she’d transformed only a minute ago. She doubted she had the energy to do it again for a while, not after the fight.

  With any luck, he didn’t know that.

  William cleared his throat. Without moving the gun or taking his eyes off her face, he asked, “Did those creatures attack you?”

  “The other way around. They were following me.”

  “And so you struck first.”

  “I’m sorry, were they friends of yours?”

  His mouth twisted in distaste. “Hardly. I’m simply trying to get a sense of what happened.”

  “Why?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “Not if it wasn’t my concern. You haven’t explained how it’s yours.”

  “I want to find out what’s happening here,” he said, “and I want to stop it.”