Beastly Bones

by William Ritter

  “For once I must admit Horner has a point,” Lamb said. “I haven’t defended my dig site all this time just to watch it be obliterated by . . . by some wild animal.” The paleontologist still could not bring himself to call the creature a dragon.

  “What about you, Mr. Brisbee?” Jackaby turned to the farmer, who was sitting upright on the sofa but still looked a little wan. “You’ve seen firsthand the reason you should be running.”

  Brisbee nodded solemnly. “None of you would be out here if it weren’t for my stupid pride. I lost my wife worrying about pictures on the front page.” He sniffed. “Then I made it worse, disrespecting the dead. I brought this down on you folks, brought it down on myself, and on this farm. We built that barn with our bare hands, and now it’s torn up like a tin can. Maddie and I didn’t raise our sons to let other folks clean up their messes, and I’ll be damned if I leave anyone to clean up mine. If they aren’t leaving, I’m not leaving.”

  Jackaby sighed. “You are all going to die. Miss Rook, shall we be off?”

  “Wait, please,” I said. “If anyone understands the significance of the site, it’s me. I promise to look after your findings, gentlemen. Mr. Horner, if Professor Lamb survives but you’re killed, do you really believe he will give you even a footnote in his lectures? And you, Professor—do you think Mr. Horner will hesitate a moment before taking full credit for this discovery the instant you’re out of the way?”

  The two men scowled at each other for a moment, and then Horner shrugged. “Well, she’s not wrong,” he admitted.

  Lamb nodded. “If you head back to Gadston, I suppose I could be persuaded to come along—if only to keep an eye on you and ensure you don’t go spreading more slander to the press about this disaster of a dig.”

  “Well, Mr. Brisbee?” I said. “I promise we will look after your farm as well. Your barn can be repaired, and your home can be protected—but your boys have already lost one parent this week. Please.”

  The farmer nodded slowly. “Thank you, Miss Rook. I—I’ll ride back with the scientists. Someone’s got to keep those two from killing each other.”

  “Wonderful,” said Charlie. “Now out! All of you!”

  “Wait a moment,” I said as the crowd filed out the door warily. “Where is Miss Fuller?”

  Charlie frowned. “She wasn’t here when I returned from Hudson’s cabin. I suppose it’s too much to hope that she headed for safety?”

  “I certainly wouldn’t count on it. Let’s hope we can find her before she finds the dragon.”

  The men piled into Brisbee’s wagon and pulled out onto the road. Horner leaned out the side as they picked up speed. “So long, beautiful,” he called. “Steal me a good fossil if you get the chance!” He flashed a last grin and a shameless wink. Lamb cuffed him upside the back of the head, and he sat back down, laughing and rubbing the side of his head. A minute more and they were out of sight.

  “Incorrigible,” I said.

  “Which one?” asked Charlie.

  “That’s a good point. At least they’re on their way, finally.”

  “Are you two very certain you can’t be persuaded to leave as well?” Charlie asked.

  Jackaby shook his head. “No more than you could be persuaded to leave the good citizens of the valley in harm’s way. We have work to do.”

  Charlie nodded. “I really should be going. There are at least half a dozen homes too close to this thing for comfort. I would be remiss, as you say, if I did not warn them. Good luck, Mr. Jackaby.” He turned to me, and for a moment his chocolate-brown eyes locked tight on mine, unconcealed worry playing across his face. “Abigail,” he said quietly, and then paused. “Be careful.”

  It was the first time I had ever heard him address me by my first name. I wanted to live long enough to hear him do it again.

  Charlie climbed atop Maryanne, and the dappled mare raced off along the packed dirt road. I watched until he was out of sight, and all that remained was a settling cloud of dust. It was down to the two of us. Jackaby was at the trapper’s cart, rummaging through the meager assortment of weapons and equipment in the back. He came up with a slightly dull machete, which he strapped to his hip like a broadsword.

  “Well, sir?” I said. “Are you ready to slay a dragon?”

  He pulled the ridiculous knit cap onto his head and smiled in a way he might have thought was reassuring. “No,” he said. “No, I most decidedly am not.”

  Chapter Thirty

  We climbed back up the hill. I had picked out a mountain-climbing axe, and held it to my chest with both hands as I walked. The tool had a sharp, if slightly chipped, edge on one side and a curved pick on the other. At the base of the short wooden handle was another steel point. I did not know what sort of confrontation to expect, or how well I would handle myself when the time came, but I was hoping the sheer number of sharp bits I wielded would increase my chances of success.

  We neared the dig site, and my employer slowed. From the far side of the sagging canvas came the sound of labored breathing. Jackaby’s hand caught me roughly by the shoulder, and I stopped midstride. He pointed downward. I was inches from planting my foot in a bear trap. A glimmer of hope played across Jackaby’s eyes.

  “Hudson?” he called.

  A grunt came from within the site, and we picked our way quickly but cautiously over the barrier.

  Hank Hudson was seated just inside the one remaining wall of the canvas. He was slumped forward, leaning his weight on his rifle for support. I understood why Jackaby had not found any more useful weapons at the trapper’s cabin—the man had brought them all with him. A shotgun with a fat barrel lay beside him, and across his back was slung a bandolier loaded with rifle rounds and buckshot. His belt hung with glistening knives and wicked hooks, and over one shoulder was slung what looked to be a whaler’s harpoon gun. He held his left arm against his chest, buried in the folds of his leathers, and he was pale and slick with sweat as he lifted his head to look at Jackaby.

  “I’m real sorry, ol’ buddy,” he grunted, his deep, booming voice reduced to a gruff whisper. “I’m a damn fool.”

  “Good of you to realize it, old friend.” said Jackaby. “A bit late, though.”

  “Hell of a way to go out, at least.” Hank struggled to smile, and then coughed.

  “If it was your intention to arrange your own funeral, you might have had the decency to avoid arranging ours in the process.”

  The man nodded solemnly and let his head sag. “That’s th’ truth. I do feel right terrible about that, an’ I aim to make it right or die tryin’.”

  “Mr. Hudson,” I said. “You’re injured—what happened?”

  “Oh, hey there, little lady.” He tilted his head toward me. “Yeah, he got me pretty good. I ain’t done yet, though, and he’ll have to come back around here soon enough.”

  I looked across at the scattered bones. “Will one of you please explain to me why you’re so certain the dragon is going to come back for more bones? Isn’t it more likely to pick off cows and horses and things that have”—I swallowed—“meat?”

  “Would you like to tell her, or shall I?” asked Jackaby.

  The trapper grunted. “Shoulda guessed you’d figger it out. Go right ahead.”

  Jackaby took a breath. “I told you I was not prepared to slay a dragon, Miss Rook, and I do not intend to. As I have insisted from the start, dragons have gone the way of the dodo.”

  Jackaby paused, watching my expression and waiting for me to catch up.

  “No,” I said as it sank in. “No, Mr. Hudson, you wouldn’t . . .”

  The trapper nodded, sadly. “’Fraid so.”

  “That beast is as much a dragon as the ‘loathsome birds’ in Darwin’s dossier,” Jackaby continued. “The creature is only a mimic realizing its full potential.”

  “You stole one of the kittens!” I said.

  Hudson shrugged guiltily. “Couldn’t let ’em all be skeeters.”

  “So,” Jackaby went on, “a
fter returning to the valley with his own chameleomorph—an orange tabby, judging by the molted fur in his cabin—Mr. Hudson couldn’t resist trying a little experiment.”

  “In my defense,” the trapper said, “I thought it was gonna be a dinosaur when I started.”

  “Wait,” I interrupted. “You stole the first tooth? But that’s impossible—you didn’t even arrive in the valley until after it was in the newspapers!”

  “I didn’t steal it,” Hudson said. “I wasn’t in the valley when I . . . when I didn’t steal it.”

  “Hudson . . . ,” Jackaby prompted sternly.

  “I did kinda bump into a fella who might have,” he admitted. “I had just left your place up in New Fiddleham. I had the kitten with me and he saw it, only the guy seemed to know it wasn’t no ordinary kitten. He said it was just a shame it wasn’t bigger. He says it just like that, too, all meaningful like. ‘Bigger.’ And then he shows me the tooth.”

  “Did you get a good look at him?” Jackaby asked. “Tell me, did he have a grim, mortiferous aura? Maybe accented by a faint lavender halo?”

  “He was a funny-lookin’ short guy,” said Hudson. “Dark clothes. Real washed-out face. He gave me the creeps at first, but he said he was a friend of Coyote Bill’s, and he thought a guy like me might be able to make use of a real old bone. I figured I already knew why he wanted to get rid of it, now that it was in the papers as stolen. Bill got all nervous when I asked him about the fella later. Downright spooked. Shoulda told y’all then . . . Stupid of me. I just got the idea in my head, and I had to know if it would work . . .”

  The pale man I had seen in New Fiddleham at the train station—he had taken the bone. Jackaby and I exchanged a glance. If he had seen fit to murder Madeleine Brisbee to get the fossil—then why give it to Hudson so easily? None of it made sense. Who was he? Why had he come? Why did those people have to die?

  “You’ve had the fossil since then?” Jackaby said. “The whole time we were looking?”

  The trapper nodded sheepishly.

  “Okay. I take it you reduced it to shavings, then?” Jackaby continued. “You must have laced the creature’s food and kept the food sources varied to ensure only one single ingredient was consistent. Something like that?”

  Hudson nodded again. “Ground it ta powder. He changed a lot quicker than I expected.”

  “ ‘Much of the essence of a living thing is distilled in its teeth,’ ” I recalled.

  Jackaby nodded. “Dragons—even dead ones, are powerful beasts. Dragon bones are potent, and a dragon’s tooth doubly so—why do you think the remains are so rare? I can’t imagine an alchemist or apothecary in all of antiquity who could resist adding some to his stores. Chameleomorphs alone are unpredictable—but you were mixing magics. You compounded the effects.”

  “He grew real fast.” Hudson nodded. “Started sprouting little wings by the second day.”

  “And if you had just stopped then,” said Jackaby, “he would not be growing larger still.”

  “He got all tetchy if I didn’t add the powder,” Hank said. “I was needin’ bigger and bigger animals ta feed him. Like you said, I had to keep changin’ it. He was my responsibility, an’ I couldn’t just let him go hungry, so I took him out a couple times to catch somethin’ a little bigger. Heck of a thing to take a dragon for a walk. I didn’t mean to let him eat Brisbee’s kid, but it was just tied up in the woods, and once the dragon got close, he went nuts.”

  “The goat was tied up in the forest?” I said. Hudson nodded.

  “Not far from Brisbee’s,” mused Jackaby. “I imagine the farmer had been hoping to add some authenticity to his claims about the footprints by kidnapping one of his young goats. I doubt very much he had the stomach to kill the poor little thing, so he probably tried to just keep it safely out of the way instead. Bad luck for the kid.”

  Hudson hung his head. “I could tell it was gettin’ outta hand, so I stopped givin’ him the powder at all, no matter how grumpy he got. He was a good fifteen feet already, and I knew I was gettin’ in over my head. I didn’t give him any yesterday, but by this morning he just went berserk. Broke through his bars and made off into the valley.”

  “The Pendletons?” I asked.

  Hudson nodded. “Got their blood on my hands. I was tracking him when I heard the gunshots. By the time I had gotten there, he had already stuffed himself on the sheep. I managed to drag him back to the cabin, but he snapped his chains and took off before I could get him penned.”

  “And you didn’t stay with him?” Jackaby asked.

  “Oh, I did my very best.” The trapper groaned and straightened a bit, lifting his arm gingerly out of the folds of his leathers. “Stayed a little too much with him, so now there’s a little bit of me left inside of him.” I gasped. The end of his arm was wrapped tightly in bandages that formed a thick bundle, but it was clear that the trapper’s left hand was gone completely. Dark red-brown blood had soaked his clothes from the hide of his jacket down to the dark lining of his boots.

  “You need to get to a doctor!” I said.

  Jackaby grimaced at the injury and surveyed the trapper properly for the first time since we had arrived. “You are in a remarkable amount of pain, aren’t you?” he said, squinting at the trapper. “It’s just rolling off you. In fact—I do believe you’re dying. Hudson, are you dying?”

  The trapper gave a noncommittal shrug.

  “Miss Rook is right. At the very least we need to get you indoors.”

  Hudson gripped the rifle tightly with his remaining hand. “Not until I seen this through. I ain’t so proud I won’t welcome yer help, but I made this monster. One or the other of us is gonna see his end tonight. I set a few traps around the place, but I don’t think they’ll do more’n slow him down. Keep a weathered eye open. He’s fifteen feet tall if he’s an inch.”

  “That was before he got back to the site for more bones,” said Jackaby heavily. “He was at least twenty by the time he went after the cows from Mr. Brisbee’s barn. Let’s just hope he needs another helping of dragon stock before he hits full size.” Jackaby gestured at the fossils that lay before us. The bones had been roughly scattered, but they still described a creature fifty feet tall from head to tail, with a wingspan twice as wide.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The sun was beginning to dip toward the tips of the pine trees that lined the valley, and still there had been no sign of the beast. I risked a run to the farmhouse and back to fetch some water, which the trapper accepted gratefully, although he was having difficulty keeping his head up to drink it. The air was growing crisp and cool, so Jackaby started a small campfire with a few dry logs and the wooden markers that had once surrounded the find.

  “Which way do you think it’ll approach?” I whispered to my employer over the crackle of the wood. He scanned the horizon with a frown.

  “Mimic or not, a chameleomorph becomes a fully realized corporeal incarnation of its quarry, aesthetically, anatomically, and biologically. A dragon of that magnitude must be producing enough incendiary enzymes to exceed containment.”

  “What?”

  “Smoke.” Jackaby’s eyes panned from one end of the valley to the other. “There should be smoke. This valley should be alight with all the wildfires a dragon that size would produce. We should see crackling flames and burning branches. At the very least we should see trails of smoke.”

  I glanced around us. The sky was beginning to redden as the evening grew older, but the only sign of any fire was our own.

  “Do you think it’s left the valley?” I whispered. It was difficult to decide if this was a dreadful notion or wishful thinking. I dared not imagine what destruction that beast’s rampage could wreak on a populated city, but I was none too eager to see it for myself, either. I did not have long to ponder the possibility before my question was answered.

  Jackaby froze, his eyes locked onto the forest across from Brisbee’s field. I followed his gaze. Down the foothills, across the far side
of the pasture, the tall trees shook and the earth trembled. A dark figure crested the treetops for just a moment and then thudded back to the ground. Jackaby drew his rusty machete, and I held tight to my climbing axe. The instrument grew smaller and feebler in my hands as I watched the shadowy form push through the wilderness. The valley fell silent for several impossibly long seconds, and then the dragon leapt into the sky.

  There was no mistaking the figure as it lurched upward. The wings were enormous, leathery like a bat’s and billowing slightly as they caught the wind. The hulking colossus caught the tops of a couple of pine trees roughly against its chest, and the crack of wood echoed across the valley like gunshots as the trees toppled. The blow cost the creature momentum, and it flapped awkwardly into the center of the field, kicking off into a shallow glide for a moment, and then landing again. It had more than doubled in size just since the attack on the barn, and as its feet touched the ground, I could see it was easily four stories tall. It loomed over the rooftop as it passed Brisbee’s farmhouse.

  Jackaby was muttering, mostly to himself. “The raw material from the latest bones seems to have accelerated the growth process. Fascinating, though—its instincts are clearly slower to manifest. See how it moves . . .” With another powerful leap, the dragon was suddenly airborne, the broad expanse of its wings blotting out the setting sun as it coasted directly toward us. Its movements may have been clumsy and imprecise, but it had enough control to direct its glide toward us, and Jackaby and I both leapt to the dirt as it dove, its talons clacking and whipping the air just over our heads.

  The gargantuan beast was too slow to pull up before it hit the uneven terrain of the foothills, stumbling and slamming into the rocky ground. The earth shook, and I clambered to my feet, clutching my little axe as though it might have any effect at all against that mountain of teeth and claws.