“Ember!” Even Xavier seemed alarmed at the attack.
Jennifer did not wait for the Elder’s help. She steeled herself and drove her head into Ember’s neck, snapping the latter’s jaws shut and sending them both tumbling to the ground. The sound of a tail whistling behind her head warned her in time to flinch, and the dasher’s tail spikes missed her narrowly.
“Why you…” She slapped her opponent’s tail down with her own. It was hard to tell in dragon shape how old this woman was—a little slow for a teenager, but not quite slow or powerful enough to be an Elder. Jennifer had never fought an adult dragon before, in any shape. She wasn’t sure if she was in over her head.
After several moments of rolling and wrestling (and making a pretty good showing, she thought), she felt her father’s wing claws on her shoulders and reluctantly scrambled to her hind legs. Xavier pulled up his niece at the same time, whispering harshly in her ear. But Ember broke free of her uncle’s grip and lunged at them both.
This time, it was her mother who intercepted the assault. Armed with nothing but her jeans, suede jacket, and leather gloves, Elizabeth slid between them all with hands held high.
“Okay, stop! You want me? Here I am! Just don’t—just please don’t fight each other anymore!”
“Mom!”
“Liz, get the hell back!”
Ember looked at them all in disgust. “You’re all pathetic,” she hissed with forked tongue. “The murderous beaststalker, the traitor who married her, and the atrocity they spawned together!”
Wind whistled in and out of Jennifer’s clenched teeth, and her hind legs kicked at the thick turf beneath, but her parents held her back. Somewhere in the distance, they could all hear the low, cellolike strumming of fire hornets. Xavier laid a dispassionate wing claw on his niece’s shoulder. “Ember. We should go.”
“No, they should go!” The younger dasher slapped her tail on the ground, sending moss and dirt flying. “They should go back to their own world, slink into the Pinegrove home they wrongly took for themselves, gorge themselves on sweets while sharing stories of the dragons they’ve hobbled or murdered, and then sleep in their stolen beds. That’s the beaststalker way.”
“I’ll be happy to show you the beaststalker way,” Jennifer spat between hisses. She was strongly tempted to shift back to two legs and stab the scaled cow in the jaw. “You want to go again?”
Ember ignored her and stepped closer to Elizabeth, seeped in the fumes of her own hatred. Still hissing breath through her teeth, Jennifer began to raise a protective wing, but her mother stood her ground.
“I hope you die,” Ember growled over the mounting sound of insects gathering, and then her voice rose to a scream. “I hope you all die for what you’ve done!”
Jennifer felt a strange surge ripple down her spine and tail—it was as if her muscles were racing each other. The noise of the fire hornets was louder than ever, and suddenly she saw a sight that almost made her scream.
A massive, shambling shape came crashing through the nearby brush. Twice as tall as any of them, it was the shape of a dragon—in fact, it suggested a nose horn and double-pronged tail similar to Jennifer’s—but it was certainly not a single creature. Rather, it was at least ten thousand fire hornets, each the size of a golf ball. That is, if golf balls were angry, furry, and black with distinctive violet markings.
The swarm moved together with purpose, careening toward the confrontation and spreading its shape to flaunt two furiously buzzing wings—
—and then it stepped right between the Scales and the Longtails, turned to face Ember, and roared at her in a chorus of fierce strums.
The dasher screamed and scrambled back into the wings of her uncle. Xavier’s golden eyes turned to Jennifer in panic.
“You’ve made your point, Ambassador! Call them off!”
Her jaw dropped. “Call them off? I didn’t call them on!”
“Actually, ace,” Jonathan murmured, “I think you did.”
“What?”
The droning cloud wheeled around and flexed its limbs, humming contentedly at its effect on the Longtails. Both dashers were backing away with a total lack of grace, unbecoming of such lithe shapes.
“As the Ancient Furnace, you probably have the powers of many Elders and ancestors,” her father explained as the swarm held position. “This would be one of them—power over certain insects, such as this land’s fire hornets.”
“How did I call them? Scratch that, I don’t care. How do I get rid of them?” She could make out the soft, hairy shapes of individual hornets. Each bug had an oozing nail dangling behind its abdomen. Those can’t possibly be stingers, she promised herself unconvincingly.
“Ummm…”
“You don’t know?”
“I’m not completely sure,” her father admitted. “It’s an Elder trampler skill, and not one I’ve seen performed too often.”
“Cripes, Dad!” In her fear, she could not hide her exasperation. “I can’t get you to stop lecturing when you’ve got some useless piece of dragon trivia to share—and now you don’t know? Now?!”
“Honey, maybe if you use your beaststalker—”
“No, Liz!” Jonathan interrupted harshly. “No one knows what will happen if she lets go of her dragon shape! Those things could swarm her in an instant. Jennifer, try blowing a bit of smoke their way first. They don’t like smoke.”
The black and violet blobs hovered ever larger in Jennifer’s face. “They don’t like smoke? Then why on earth would I use some to piss them off?!”
“Honestly, Jonathan.” Elizabeth snapped. “Talk about blowing smoke…”
“You’re not helping, Liz!”
“Neither are you…”
“Okay, fine. Jennifer, the swarm’s not moving. Just hang tight. I’ll go get Ned Brownfoot.”
Several tense minutes later, during which Jennifer, Elizabeth, Xavier, and Ember all managed to stare at each other and the swarm simultaneously without saying a word, Jonathan returned with an aged trampler in tow.
Ned Brownfoot was the trampler dragon who had taught Jennifer how to summon reptiles by stomping her foot. She smiled desperately at her gentle mentor as he took in the situation. His soft, crooked grin put her at ease.
“Sometimes, knowin’ a little is worse’n knowin’ nothin’ at all, amiright?” he drawled in a warm, southern Missouri accent.
“If you could just help us out, Ned…”
“Sure, Jon. But it’s gotta be Jenny here that does it. Her bugs, after all.”
“What do I do?”
“Call the queen to your nose horn.”
A growl of exasperation escaped. “Which one is the queen, and how the hell do I get her over on my nose horn? And why would I want a bug the size of a nectarine on my face, anyway?!”
Ned did not sound any less amused. “The swarm obeys the queen. The queen obeys you. She responded to your first call…she’ll respond to the same signal.”
“But I didn’t give a signal!”
“You whistled in ’n’ out a few times, when your life was in danger. Didn’tcha?”
“I-I-I have no idea!”
“Well, whistle through your teeth three or four more times, ’n’ see what happens.”
Bracing her forked tongue against her sharp teeth, Jennifer tried to re-create the hissing sound she thought she may have unconsciously made a while ago. It took a few tries, but eventually one of the swarm—easily the largest of the fire hornets—disengaged from the group and landed on her horn. Jennifer crossed her eyes and marveled at its size and the triple violet-stripe pattern lining its body. Cripes, I can see the tongue.
She spoke through the corner of her mouth, trying not to move her nose. “Erkay. Nerwhat?”
“Now you talk to her, just like any’un else. Ya give yer orders.”
“Huh.” Jennifer tentatively worked her mouth open, but the queen showed no sign of aggression. “Um. Hi there. Thanks for coming. You’ve, er. Done well. I like what
you did there, with the dragon shape. Nice…er, wings and all.”
The queen hopped up and down a bit, humming enthusiastically.
“Yeah. Um, well, you can go now. We’ve got everything under control. Really, though. Couldn’t’ve done it without you.”
Immediately, the queen leapt off her horn and rushed back to the others. Three seconds later, the massive dragon shape had dissipated, and the strumming of the fire hornets was fading back into the forest.
Jonathan exhaled. “Good job, Jennifer. Thanks, Ned.”
“Anytime, Elder Scales. Just give me a call, ’n’—”
Elizabeth stepped between the two of them and glared at her husband. “We’re going home. Now.”
They went back through the lake, waited for Elizabeth to dry off in the farmhouse, packed the minivan, and took off for Winoka in complete silence. Between her mother fuming in the driver’s seat and her father steaming alongside the minivan, Jennifer certainly didn’t want to be the first one to talk.
But she couldn’t help herself—one question burned in her mind. She opened the passenger window, letting a blast of cold air in.
“Dad,” she called out. “What did Ember mean by hobbling dragons?”
“Now is not the time,” Elizabeth growled.
“She wasn’t asking you, Liz,” Jonathan snapped with a quick turn of his reptilian head. He looked at Jennifer as he kept up his cruising speed. “Hobbling is a vicious practice among beaststalkers. Instead of killing the weredragon, they cripple the person’s spine. Done properly, it prevents the body from changing.”
Jennifer digested that in silent horror for a moment. “So they can’t change when the crescent moon comes?”
“No. But their bodies don’t realize it, and try to change every time. The pain, I hear, is unbearable.”
“Very few beaststalkers do that anymore,” Elizabeth interrupted.
“Have you ever done it, Mom?”
Elizabeth glared at her. “That’s a disgusting question.”
“Which you didn’t answer.”
“Jennifer.” Her father tried to get her attention back, but she was resolute.
“Would asking about the three dragons you murdered be disgusting, too?”
The minivan screeched to a halt, swerving into the breakdown lane with a stomach-turning twist. “Young lady, do you want to get out and walk home?”
“I can fly,” Jennifer pointed out. “And don’t act like we shouldn’t talk about this. You’re always hush-hush about the past when it suits you. But I deserve answers.”
“She’s right, Liz.” Jonathan had come to a more gentle stop next to them, and he poked his head through the passenger window. “We ought to share—”
“Shut up!” Elizabeth reached out with lightning speed and slapped his scaly cheek, right in front of Jennifer. “Don’t you dare talk about sharing! I’ve done my penance for what I did. And for years, you and your…your friends have kept that one act dangling over my head. Even though you know it was a horrible mistake.” A thumb jerked at Jennifer. “And even now, with her old enough to understand, you have the balls to whisk her away to your secret hideouts and say awful things about us, and lie about us, as if every beaststalker is alike, and I can never visit, and even when I do I practically get immolated—”
She burst into tears. It was worse, so much worse, than her anger. Jennifer could count on one hand—mostly occurrences in the past few months—how many times she’d seen her mother cry. It was frightening and pitiful at the same time.
“Liz, don’t—”
The minivan lurched forward as Elizabeth jammed down the accelerator. Jennifer heard an exclamation of pain as Jonathan yanked his head out of the window a half-second too late.
“Mom!” She tried to look back in the ditch behind them. “I think you really hurt him.”
“Good!” The woman was sobbing, and the minivan uneasily straddled the breakdown lane and the righthand lane of the highway. “I hope he forms an embolism.”
Jennifer reached out and patted her mother’s coat. She wasn’t quite sure what to say. Then she caught an image in the sideview mirror. “Huh. He’s up.” In the faint cherry glow of their taillights, she could make out the sleek, winged shadow of her father as it bolted toward them. “Wow, he looks kinda angry. Maybe you should—”
“How fast can you go when you fly?”
“What? Um, I’ve never really—”
“I’ll bet he can’t do ninety.”
Like a spaceship launching, the minivan jerked forward with sudden purpose. Jennifer felt herself thrown back against the seat. All she could do was bend her head a bit and watch her father shrink rapidly in the sideview mirror.
“Mom, this is a bit fast.”
Her mother didn’t answer, and as the minivan’s whine raised in pitch to a terrifying scream, Jennifer whitened her knuckles upon her armrests.
“Um, Mom, think of your daughter’s safety. Every year at school, they gather us into the auditorium and show us all another video of some car that’s been crumpled into a small, decorative box as a result of reckless driving…”
The engine’s scream raised to a roar. The painted dashes on the highway flew past like deathly pale bullets.
“Um, also, as any child psychology book will tell you, I depend on you and Dad to model a mature, loving, adult relationship so I can form—”
“Oh, shove it! You’re on my list, too.”
Thoughts of the minivan’s unsafe speed flew out of Jennifer’s head. “What! What did I do?”
“Don’t use that whiny, put-upon teenager voice with me. I know how much you love taking off with your father and leaving me in the dust. Being a dragon—how exciting for you! You get to fly around together and laugh away, feeling superior to all the poor people down below who can’t disembowel sheep with their own teeth.”
“That’s not—”
“And when someone who disagrees with your point of view comes along, why, you can just incinerate her, or explain her away by calling her a murderer.” Now her voice dripped with venom. “After all, no dragon would ever kill anybody! No indeed. Not unless, you know, they deserved it! What a comfortable lifestyle you get to lead.”
Jennifer had not the faintest idea what to say, and no opportunity to say it anyway. Something large landed on top of the van at the same time a scaled triangle descended over the top of the windshield—Dad’s wing, she realized in a mixture of panic and admiration. Cripes, he can go ninety!
Elizabeth swore. The van swerved with the added weight and lost aerodynamics. Jennifer’s heart stopped as she felt the vehicle veer dangerously toward its right side, and she began to change shape instinctively—a dragon shape would better protect her and her mother from a crash…
But the van righted itself in time, and came to an abrupt stop with its hind third still sticking a bit into the highway. She heard her father yell as his momentum threw him off the roof and onto the pavement. As he rolled around in pain, the headlights washed out most of his vivid indigo and blue colors.
“Dad!”
“Don’t worry about him.” Elizabeth’s tone had not changed. She looked over at Jennifer, and for the briefest of moments there was something there—revulsion?—that had never been there before.
Looking down, Jennifer realized she had only morphed halfway. Her flesh was bulging, her hands were covered in a mixture of blue scales and pink skin, and who knew what her face looked like?
“Sorry,” she said, at once feeling resentful that she had to apologize to her own mother.
Elizabeth didn’t say anything else. Instead, she threw off her seat belt, launched the door open, and ran out in front of the van where her husband lay. Then, to Jennifer’s dismay, she began kicking him with a furry Land’s End boot.
“What is the matter with you?” she was screaming, punctuating each important word with another kick to his midsection. “A car with your wife and daughter is going upwards of ninety miles an hour, and you dec
ide to land on it? We could have been killed! You could have been killed!”
“Give it a moment,” he gasped from the frost-bitten, blood-soaked gravel.
She kicked him again with clenched teeth. “Oh, stop the theatrics. You’re fine and you know it. Superior bone structure and all. It takes a lot more than a roll on the side of the road to kill one of you.”
His silver eyes lost their humor and narrowed. “Well, dear, you would know.”
“Don’t you say that!” She threw herself at him and began to throttle him—or at least did the best she could, with her small hands up against a huge, scaled throat. “Don’t you dare say that! I’m not a killer! I’m a doctor! I’ve saved hundreds of them! DON’T YOU DARE CALL ME A KILLER AFTER WHAT YOU’VE DONE!”
She stopped trying to choke him and started slapping him, uselessly, around the muzzle and crest. His face softened a bit as he weathered the blows.
“Is that why you tried to throw your life away back in Crescent Valley?” he asked her. “Because you think you’re a killer?”
Sobbing, Elizabeth stopped hitting him and covered her face. Jennifer stared at them both as an eighteen-wheeler rumbled by, angrily blowing its horn at the poorly parked minivan. Elizabeth Georges-Scales, a professional doctor, calm and collected, even sometimes cold as stone, was melting down. Jennifer had never seen it this bad. She devoutly hoped she would never see it again.
Jonathan Scales reached up and wrapped his wings around his wife.
“No!” Elizabeth was startled into anger again. She launched herself up and stomped back to the minivan. “You don’t get to comfort me! You’re a killer, too, Jonathan! Don’t forget those two thugs! Don’t forget them!”
While Jennifer expected him to protest, Jonathan did not move. He just watched his wife get into the minivan, without argument.
A killer? Him? Somehow, it was even harder to see him in that role than her mother. And what thugs?
The sound of the minivan starting up refocused her on what was happening. “Mom, no! Wait.”
“We’re going now.”
“No, we’re not!”
The Silver Moon Elm Page 7