Xavier closed the loop for her. “Jennifer, when I met you just a few days ago, you weren’t just the first dragon I’d seen in more than twenty years. You were a dragon…who was still a dragon. Don’t let her”—he jerked his head back—“change that. Don’t let her change you. Once you set the world straight, it will need you the way you are.”
The air left her wings. Once I set the world straight? “As if we can possibly succeed now.”
“I know it looks bad,” he told her, “but I’ve seen worse. The three of us will just need to regroup, is all. Come up with a new plan.”
“We’re running out of time. Seraphina can’t keep holding off whatever’s attacking her. Crescent Valley probably emptied everything it had on her.”
“We’ll make it,” he promised her. “Together, we’ll finish what we started.” And with that, he split off from her and began his descent toward the cabin.
Had it not been for the tiny whistling sound, Jennifer wouldn’t have already been looking down at Xavier when he grunted. She would have missed his wing spasm, the way his body suddenly jerked and his quick and uncontrolled spiral toward the ground.
CHAPTER 16
Sunday
Evangelina and Jennifer dropped immediately to follow Xavier’s body. They lost him for a moment through the treetops, but within a minute they found him again.
He was on his back in the brush, splayed out like a giant black and gold butterfly on top of a cluster of raspberry bushes. The cold, snowless wind pushed the vegetation and the body on top of it back and forth. Had there not been a thin, black, carbon-aluminum arrow sticking out of his heart, Jennifer would have thought he was relaxing. As they got closer, Jennifer heard him muttering.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid…” He spoke between shallow breaths, and his glazed eyes tried to focus on her. “I flew too low, too early, even for this side of the lake. I should never have relaxed my guard.”
“Maybe we can do something,” she offered frantically. She looked over at Evangelina. “What if we pull the arrow out?”
“Jennifer Scales.” Xavier smiled. “I’m glad we found each other. Even if you were a bit difficult, and foolish…”
“What if we pull the arrow out!” She shouted the question at Evangelina.
Her sister shrugged.
Then he’ll die faster. It might show mercy.
“That’s not helping!” She tried to lift Xavier’s body off the brush, but he was too large, and she didn’t know what good it would do anyway, so she stopped. “Xavier, tell me what to do!”
“Watch over him,” he answered in a whisper. His wing claw opened, and two things poured onto Jennifer’s trembling wing claw: the moon elm leaf, and the red and green curl of Goodwin, still alive. “Until you and I meet again…”
“You can’t die!” Jennifer felt the panic rising in her throat. “I need you here!”
The Elder’s yellow smile remained, but he said nothing.
“Xavier!”
He’s gone. I can’t sense him anymore.
Jennifer fell to her knees. “No! Not him!” Her mind raced back to that moment on the stone plateau, when this ornery dasher had rushed in from nowhere to save her. All of the thrill she had felt at that moment, and all of the hope she had accumulated since then, crumbled away. “He can’t be gone! I need him! He was the last!”
Not the last.
Evangelina reminded her gently.
“But now there are only two of us! We can’t take on the entire town of Pinegrove!”
Have faith, sister. We are not finished yet.
“Faith,” she snorted through her tears. “That’s almost funny, coming from you.”
She felt Evangelina’s attention turn elsewhere.
They are coming, the ones who did this.
“Who, werachnids? They’ve followed us from Pinegrove?” Or from Crescent Valley? Or perhaps it was not even from that far. Jennifer remembered the sounds she had heard during the night she spent at the cabin.
Not werachnids. Something else.
Her sister turned to look at her.
Something familiar.
Even though Evangelina told Jennifer there were several of them hiding nearby, only one was brave enough to emerge out of the brush and confront them. It was a young man dressed in grim brown clothing and archer’s gear. His quiver held dozens of thick, black arrows that looked exactly like the one sticking out of Xavier’s corpse. He stepped up and inspected the fallen dragon. He might have let out a small gasp at what he saw, but Jennifer couldn’t hear too well past the throbbing blood in her temples.
“He’s mine,” she growled, pushing her sister aside. She spread her wings and cleared her throat, ready to incinerate the soldier…until she saw him raise both hands and his face to her. Sorrow and reverence clouded his sparrowlike nose and soulful eyes.
“Spirit! Forgive me!”
She squelched the fire building within, choking in shock. “Eddie?!”
He stiffened in fear. “You know me, Spirit?”
“Eddie Blacktooth!” Had it not been for the dead dragon not ten feet away from them, Jennifer would have hugged him. As it was, she was shocked at his appearance.
While lean from hunger, this Eddie Blacktooth was clearly a warrior. He held his composite bow in muscular hands, and multiple scars curved over the ripples on his arms, neck, shoulders, and chest. He wore mostly camouflage gear, with patches of animal skin sewn in places where the fabric had worn thin. Three hunters’ knives of varying sizes hung off his utility belt.
But above all, he held his sparrowlike face high, not dug into his chest like it always seemed to be back home. Jennifer could not reconcile this young man with the pathetic boy who had cowered before Winona Brandfire last week.
“But how did…Skip told me…” She trailed off, realizing she had answered her own question. Why would Skip tell me the truth about anything? And who’s to say Skip had any idea?
He looked at her, confused. “I didn’t know what flew overhead. In my fear and haste, I assumed it was one of…” He cleared his throat and spat. “One of them. Jumping high.”
She looked over at Xavier. “Oh, Eddie…”
“Take my life in payment,” he declared abruptly, standing up and offering her a small knife with both calloused hands.
“What?!” Jennifer panicked as she watched several other young men and women come out of the woods, similarly dressed, each with head bowed and hands holding out some convenient implement of death.
“I’ve wronged you,” Eddie told her again. “You and your spirit brethren came to help me, as omens of good fortune. I repaid your divine gift through murder. My life is forfeit.”
Jennifer gasped, and then steamed silently as she heard her sister’s mocking laughter inside her head.
They think we’re gods. Splendid.
“Eddie, haven’t you ever seen a dragon before?” Of course, she knew the answer before he gave it with reverent brown eyes.
“Dragons have been dead for longer than we’ve been alive,” he explained. “Only Mother remembers seeing one alive, as a child. All that are left are spirits like you…” His features turned desperate. “I cannot curse my family. I owe them everything. Please, divine Spirit—”
“Stop calling me that!” Jennifer shifted out of dragon shape and motioned to her sister to do the same. Evangelina reluctantly followed suit. “I’m not a spirit, and you don’t owe me your life. But Eddie, you killed a friend…”
His jaw dropped open. “Spirit in human shape!” he cried. Then he shielded his face. “I cannot look. Only the most blessed of mortals may—Aaarrr!”
Twisting the ear she held, she pulled him closer. “Eddie, shut up and listen! My name’s Jennifer. I can’t explain why I’m here. Not now, anyway.” Her mind was working again now, and she took in the dozen or so warriors that gathered. They looked at her with alarm, but also enough respect for her to continue.
“We need a ceremony. For my friend. I can’t t
ake him back where he belongs—” She had a brief but grim memory of the great stone plateau in Crescent Valley, and the creatures that guarded it. “But I think he’d be okay if we laid him to rest near here. Someplace safe. Maybe near the cabin. You know the one just northeast of here?”
“Yes,” he answered, keeping his head still.
“Great. Can you help us move him?”
He put his hand to his ear as she let go, and then he nodded. “Yes, we can move him. It will be an honor to bury him. What was his name?”
Jennifer sighed at Xavier’s fallen body and thought back to his last words carved in stone. “He just wanted to be known as a loyal friend,” she told them. Then she turned to Eddie. “And it’s him you owe a debt to, not me. You want to repay your debt?”
“More than anything,” he told her, bowing once more.
“Then take his place and help me.”
He didn’t hesitate. “Absolutely. I will stand at your side.”
It was well after midnight on Sunday morning by the time they had buried Xavier. Jennifer had him put where Grandpa Crawford’s grave would have been, and then decided she should doze while she could. Evangelina offered to stand guard, needing little in the way of sleep. Meanwhile, Eddie and a few others stayed at the cabin, while the rest of his patrol made for their headquarters, which they told her was a campground a few hours’ march away.
By the time dawn broke, Jennifer had a fresh set of tears ready. She lay in the downstairs bedroom for a while, listening to the heartbeat of her vigilant sister outside the door, wondering which of the two of them would be the next to die.
Or would it be Eddie? Of course, it had occurred to her the moment she had seen him that he and his fellow beaststalkers could be the new source of strength she needed. But would they come along? And did she want them?
She got up, and she and Evangelina joined the small troop of beaststalkers who had been camping outside. (They had refused her offer to sleep indoors, out of courtesy to the dragon-spirit in mourning, and she had been too tired and exasperated to force the issue.) From their tents and packs they supplied her with proper clothes, and it was a relief to take off the nightgown that she had first found at the cabin several days ago. Then Eddie and the other young warriors—none of them knew what a beaststalker was—shared a few key facts.
First, the entire “family”—the entire loose group of warriors who lived on the run and in a variety of makeshift homes throughout this part of Minnesota—numbered about thirty individuals. For years, there had been intermittent contact with other, similar groups. However, it had been months since they had last heard from anyone else.
Second, while some parts of their clothing were primitive, these people had technological savvy. The bow Eddie had was top-of-the-line, obtained through a series of trades with trusted contacts and supply chains. A few of them had legitimate jobs and simply wove themselves into the fabric of society, just as weredragons and werachnids so often did in the real world.
Third, they lived a bloody existence.
“How are you not dead?” she asked them plainly, after hearing a few of their recent adventures.
Eddie bowed his head. “Many of us have died, Jennifer-spirit.” Jennifer-spirit was the compromise they had reached on her possibly divine identity. “And most of us die before our time. But those who remain are strong. I myself have slain over thirty spider-beasts with this bow. No one else in our family, not even Mother, has done this before turning sixteen.” His face changed from pride to sorrow as he remembered his last kill. “The spirits have blessed me…until now.”
“So you believe in dragon spirits, do you?” Evangelina’s throaty voice was a bit playful with Eddie. “And you worship them.”
Eddie nodded. “Native American tales of the spirit world are strong. While Mother says it is mythology, many of us grew up with relatives or friends who insisted some spirits do exist—such as dragon-spirits. Dragon-spirits were a strong, divine force that once kept the spider-beasts at bay. We have heard of the times when dragons were plentiful and lived peacefully alongside all others.”
Jennifer narrowed her eyes at Evangelina’s snort. “Legends can exaggerate. But I remember a little of the times you’re talking about.”
“Then you must be older than you look!” He looked at her with new respect.
“Hey,” she protested, “I’m not that old…”
“Will we see your mother?” Evangelina asked Eddie with some anxiety. Jennifer figured the memory of her sister’s fight with Wendy Blacktooth had awakened some small measure of guilt.
“She’s dead,” Eddie explained with no visible regret. “She and my father fell in battle when I was four years old. The last I saw of them, they were back to back, fighting off hordes of enemies. Piles of dead, eight-legged monsters lay at their feet. The others in the family raised me from that point. Now I am an elder, and I help raise others.”
“So wait. You’ve been talking about a mother, but you just said she died. Who’s Mother, then?”
They were interrupted by a clamor in the nearby forest—the howl of something that sounded like a cross between wolf and wildcat. Jennifer leapt to her feet with the others, but there was something recognizable about the sound. She recalled the hunts of Crescent Valley…
A huge, furry shape crashed through the underbrush and came at Eddie. Rather than pull out a weapon, he laughed and held his arms out. The newolf—that is, after all, what it was—crashed into him and began licking his face.
Jennifer nearly fainted in shock at the sight of the animal. She could not tell for sure if this was the exact creature she had once met on the side of the road last spring, but it shared an auburn coat and a thoughtful set of animal eyes. “How many of these are still around?”
“Just Phoebe, as far as we know,” he chuckled while giving the deadly animal a noogie. “Down, girl, down! She has a terrific sixth sense. Mother keeps her at her side, at all times.”
Phoebe. Mother. Jennifer barely had time to put it all together before what looked like the rest of Eddie’s clan stepped into the clearing. At the front of this grim band, none of whom were smiling, stood the most forbidding figure of all: six feet tall, honey blonde hair, and sharp emerald eyes.
Jennifer rushed forward for a hug, but her target was too fast. With a quick dodge to the right, the woman brought down the butt of a sword on the back of Jennifer’s head.
Jennifer woke up to darkness and the anxious outrage of Evangelina clouding her mind. Through her sister’s thoughts, she gathered the beaststalkers had surrounded them both, and Evangelina was about ready to kill them all. Only an argument between Eddie and the woman who was certainly Elizabeth Georges-Scales—She’s alive!—was delaying the slaughter.
You’re awake. Are you all right?
I’m fine. What’s happening?
The idiot boy is challenging the bitch who resembles
your mother.
Resembles? Jennifer’s spirit, which had risen upon the memory of seeing her mother alive again, sank a bit. She stretched a hand out into the darkness. “Help me up, please.”
Evangelina’s claw grabbed her wrist and pulled her up into the morning light. The move startled the crowd of beaststalkers around them, but Jennifer could plainly see they were all too terrified to attack. The only one who urged them on was the woman, whose face was contorted in rage and disgust.
“I can’t believe how stupid you are!” she was screaming at Eddie. “You shoot one down, and then rather than finish the other two off, you lead them to a comfy lakeside cabin and stand guard! Did you also cook them breakfast?”
Eddie took a step forward. “Mother, will you listen to me?!”
“I will not. You disappoint me, Eddie. If any of us die here today—”
“Nobody’s going to die!” Jennifer interrupted. “Mom—Mother. Eddie. My sister and I are not going to hurt any of you. In fact, we need your help. If you could—”
“Quiet, beast. Your pretty fa
çade doesn’t fool me. My scouts told me the true shape you took as you came down from the heavens to mourn your friend. You’ve got a forked tongue, and I’ll cut it out if you say another word.”
Jennifer took a step back. “But I’m your daughter…”
“Enough.” The blonde woman raised her sword and came at them.
A quick left from a spindly front claw sent her staggering back.
“You’re cute,” Evangelina croaked. “Let’s play again.”
“Take it easy on her, that’s my mom!”
“Stop,” the woman said while regaining her feet, “calling me ‘Mom.’”
“Mom mom mom mom mom this universe sucks and I’ll call you what I want mom mom mom mom mom!”
“Phoebe, attack!”
The newolf, crouched between the woman and Eddie, snarled at Jennifer and Evangelina…but stayed put.
“Mother, she’s not going to attack them. Don’t you remember the legends of wolves who once hunted alongside dragons?”
Phoebe got a swat across the snout for her insubordination. “Those are tall tales, campfire stories! Dammit, dog, if you’re not going to behave—”
“Look.” Jennifer raised her palms and took a cautious step forward. “You’ve given me plenty of reason to fight you. You’ve coldcocked me, tried to get your friends to kill me and my sister, and sicced your wolf on me. But I’m still not going to do it. I’m not going to fight my own mother. Can we just—”
“Stop calling me that.”
“Dammit, look at my face! Can’t you see it? Are you that damn stubborn?! I’m your daughter!”
The woman lowered her sword. “Am I to take it that none of you are going to help me fight this creature and her grotesque friend?”
Nobody moved.
“Fine.” She sheathed the weapon and walked away. “Disobey me, if you want to play with the funny-looking woodland creatures. But keep them away from me, Edward, or I’ll kill you.”
The Silver Moon Elm Page 24