by L. J. Smith
“Or it could be that they know I’m not the one,” Iliana chimed in sweetly. “And they’re off kidnapping the real Wild Power while you guys are wasting your time here.” She blew her nose.
Keller gritted her teeth and felt a pain in her jaw that was getting familiar. “Or it could be that we just don’t understand dragons,” she said, possibly with more force than was necessary.
She and Iliana locked stares.
“You guys, you guys,” Winnie said nervously. “Um, maybe it’s time we opened this.” She touched the box Circle Daybreak had sent.
Iliana’s eyes shifted to it with something like involuntary interest. Keller could see why. The box had the mysterious allure of a Christmas present.
“Go ahead,” she told Winnie.
It took a while. Winnie did witchy things with a bag of herbs and some talismans, while everyone watched intently and Iliana mopped her nose and sniffled.
At last, very carefully, Winnie lifted the top of the box off.
Everyone leaned forward.
Piled inside were dozens and dozens of pieces of parchment. Not entire scrolls but scraps of them, each encased in its own plastic sleeve. Keller recognized the writing—it was the old language of the shapeshifters. She’d learned it as a child, because Circle Daybreak wanted her to keep in touch with her heritage. But it had been a long time since she’d had to translate it.
Iliana sneezed and said almost reluctantly, “Cool pictures.”
There were cool pictures. Most of the scraps had three or four tiny illustrations, and some of them had only pictures and no writing. The inks were red and purple and deep royal blue, with details in gold leaf.
Keller spread some of the plastic sleeves across the table.
“Okay, people. The idea is to find something that will show us how to fight the dragon, or at least something to tell us how he might attack. The truth is that we don’t even know what he can do, except for the black energy he used on me.”
“Um, I can’t read this, you know,” Iliana pointed out with excessive politeness.
“So look at the pictures,” Keller said sweetly. “Try to find something where a dragon is fighting a person—or, even better, getting killed by one.”
“How do I know which one’s the dragon?” It was an amazingly good question. Keller blinked and looked at Galen.
“Well, actually, I don’t know. I don’t know if anybody knows how to tell a dragon from another Night Person.”
“The one in the mall—Azhdeha—had opaque black eyes,” Keller said. “You could tell when you looked into them. But I don’t suppose that’s going to show up on a parchment like this. Why don’t you just look for something with dark energy around it?”
Iliana made a tiny noise that in someone less delicate would have been called a snort. But she took a pile of the scraps and began poring over them.
“Okay,” Keller said. “Now, the rest of us—”
But she never got to finish. The phone on the kitchen wall shrilled. Everyone glanced up toward it, and Iliana started to stand, but there was no second ring. After a long moment of silence, it rang again—once.
“Circle Daybreak,” Keller said. “Nissa, call them back.”
Keller tried not to fidget as Nissa obeyed. It wasn’t just that she was hoping against hope that there was useful information about the car. For some reason she couldn’t define, that very first ring of the phone had made her feel unsettled.
The early warning system of the shapeshifters. It had saved her life before, by giving her a hint of danger. But for what was about to happen now, it was entirely useless.
“Nissa Johnson here. Code word: Angel Rescue,” Nissa said, and Keller saw Iliana’s eyebrows go up. “Yes, I’m listening. What?” Suddenly, her face changed. “What do you mean, am I sitting down?” Pause. “Look, Paulie, just tell me whatever—”
And then her face changed again, and she did something Keller had never seen Nissa do. She gasped and brought a quick hand up to her mouth.
“Oh, Goddess, no!”
Keller’s heart was pounding, and there was a boulder of ice in her stomach. She found herself on her feet without any memory of standing.
Nissa’s light brown eyes were distant, almost blank. Her other hand clutched the receiver. “How?” Then she shut her eyes. “Oh, no.” And finally, very softly, “Goddess help us.”
CHAPTER 12
They were all on their feet by now. Keller’s early warning system was screaming hysterically.
“I can’t stand it anymore,” Iliana hissed. “What’s going on?”
Just then, Nissa said in a quenched voice, “All right, we will. Yes. ’Bye.” She carefully replaced the handset.
Then she turned very slowly to face the others.
Or not to face them exactly. She was looking down at the floor in an unfocused way that scared Keller to death.
“Well, what is it?” Keller growled.
Nissa opened her mouth and raised her eyes to look at Winnie. Then she looked down again.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Winnie, I don’t know how to say this.” She swallowed and then straightened, speaking formally. “The Crone of all the Witches is dead.”
Winnie’s eyes went huge, and her hands flew to her throat. “Grandma Harman!”
“Yes.”
“But how?”
Nissa spoke carefully. “It happened yesterday in Las Vegas. She was outside her shop, right there on a city street, in broad daylight. She was attacked…by three shapeshifters.”
Keller stood and listened to her pounding heart.
Winnie breathed, “No. That’s not possible.”
“A couple of wolves and a tiger. A real tiger, Keller, not any smaller cat. There were human witnesses who saw it. It’s being reported as some bizarre escape from a private zoo.”
Keller stood rigid. Control, control, she thought. We don’t have time for grieving; we’ve got to figure out what this means.
But she couldn’t help thinking about Grandma Harman’s good old face. Not a beautiful face, not a young face, but a good one, with intelligence and humor in the keen gray eyes. A face with a thousand wrinkles—and a story to go with each one.
How would Circle Daybreak ever get along without her? The oldest witch in the world, the oldest Hearth-Woman.
Winnie put both hands to her face and began to cry.
The others stood silently. Keller didn’t know what to do. She was so bad at these emotional things, but nobody else was stepping forward. Nissa was even less good at dealing with emotion, and right now her cool face was sympathetic and sad but distant. Iliana looked on the verge of tears herself, but uncertain, Galen was staring emptily across the room with something like despair.
Keller awkwardly put an arm around Winnie, “Come on, sit down. Do you want some tea? She wouldn’t like you to cry.”
All pretty stupid things to say. But Winnie buried her strawberry-blond head against Keller’s chest, sobbing.
“Why? Why did they kill her? It isn’t right.”
Nissa shifted uneasily. “Paulie said something about that, too. He said we should turn on CNN.”
Keller set her teeth. “Where’s the remote?” she said, trying not to sound rough.
Iliana picked it up and punched in a channel.
An anchorwoman was speaking, but for a second Keller couldn’t take in what she was saying. All she could see were the words on the screen: “CNN SPECIAL REPORT: ANIMAL PANIC.”
And the footage, rough video from somebody’s camcorder. It showed an unbelievable scene. An ordinary city street, with skyscrapers in the background—and in the foreground ordinary-looking people all mixed up with…shapes.
Tawny shapes. About the same size she was in panther form, and sinuous. They were on top of people. Four of them…no, five.
Mountain lions.
They were killing the humans.
A woman was screaming, flailing at an animal that had her arm in its mouth to the elbow.
A man was trying to pull another lion off a little boy.
Then something with a white-tipped muzzle ran directly at the camera. It jumped. There was a gasping scream and for an instant a glimpse of a wide-open mouth filled with two-inch teeth. Then the video turned to static.
“—that was the scene at the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles today. We now go to Ron Hennessy, live outside the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce…”
Keller stood frozen, her fists clenched in helpless fury.
“It’s happening everywhere,” Nissa said quietly from behind her. “That’s what Paulie said. Every major city in the U.S. is being attacked. A white rhino killed two people in Miami. In Chicago, a pack of timber wolves killed an armed police officer.”
“Shapeshifters,” Keller whispered.
“Yes. Killing humans openly. They may even be transforming openly. Paulie said that some people claimed to see those Chicago wolves change. She took a deep breath and spoke slowly. “Keller, the time of chaos at the end of the millennium…it’s happening now. They can’t cover this up with a “private zoo” story. This is it—the beginning of the time when humans find out about the Night World.”
Iliana looked bewildered. “But why would shapeshifters start attacking humans? And why would they kill Grandma Harman?”
Keller shook her head. She was rapidly approaching numbness. She glanced at Galen and saw that he felt exactly the same.
Then there was a choked sound beside her.
“That’s the question—why,” Winnie said in a thick voice. Usually, with her elfin features and mop of curls, she looked younger than her age. But right now, the skin on her face was drawn tight, and her birdlike bones made her look almost like an old woman.
She turned on Keller and Galen, and her eyes were burning.
“Not just why they’re doing it, why they’re being allowed to do it. Where’s the First House while all this is going on? Why aren’t they monitoring their own people? Is it because they agree with what’s happening?”
The last words were snapped out with a viciousness that Keller had never heard in Winfrith before.
Galen opened his mouth, then he shook his head. “Winnie, I don’t think—”
“You don’t think! You don’t know? What are your parents doing? Are you saying you don’t know that?”
“Winnie—”
“They killed our oldest leader. Our wise woman. You know, some people would take that as a declaration of war.”
Keller felt stricken and at the same time furious at her own helplessness. She was in charge here; she should be heading Winnie off.
But she was a shapeshifter like Galen. And along with the ability to transform and the exquisitely tuned senses, they both shared something unique to their race.
The guilt of the shapeshifters.
The terrible guilt that went back to the ancient days and was part of the very fabric of Keller’s mind. No shapeshifter could forget it or escape it, and nobody who wasn’t a shapeshifter could ever understand.
The guilt was what held Galen standing there while Winnie yelled at him, and held Keller unable to interrupt.
Winnie was right in front of Galen now, her eyes blazing, her body crackling with latent energy like a small but fiery orange comet.
“Who woke that dragon up, anyway?” she demanded. “How do we know the shapeshifters aren’t up to their old tricks? Maybe this time they’re going to wipe the witches out completely—”
“Stop it!”
It was Iliana.
She planted herself in front of Winnie, small but earnest, a little ice maiden to combat the witch’s fire. Her nose was pink and swollen, and she was still wearing those teddy bear slippers, but to Keller she somehow looked valiant and magnificent.
“Stop hurting each other,” she said. “I don’t understand any of this, but I know that you’re not going to get anywhere if you fight. And I know you don’t want to fight.” All at once, she flung her arms around Winnie. “I know how you feel—it’s so awful. I felt the same way when Grandma Mary died, my mom’s mother. All I could think of was that it was just so unfair.”
Winfrith hesitated, standing stiffly in Iliana’s embrace. Then, slowly, she lifted her own arms to hold Iliana back.
“We need her,” she whispered.
“I know. And you feel mad at the people who killed her. But it’s not Galen’s fault. Galen would never hurt anybody.”
It was said with absolute conviction. Iliana wasn’t even looking at Galen. She was stating a fact that she felt was common knowledge. But at the same time, now that she was off her guard, her expression was tender and almost shining.
Yes, that’s love, all right, Keller thought. And it’s good.
Very slowly, Winnie said, “I know Galen wouldn’t. But the shapeshifters—”
“Maybe,” Galen said, “we should talk about that.” If Winnie’s face was pinched, his was set in steel. His eyes were so dark that Keller couldn’t distinguish the color.
“Maybe we should talk about the shapeshifters,” he said. He nodded toward the kitchen table, which was still strewn with the parchments. “About their history and about the dragons.” He looked at Iliana. “If there’s any chance of—of a promise ceremony between us, it’s stuff you ought to know.”
Iliana looked startled.
“He’s right,” Nissa said in her calm voice. “After all, that’s what we were doing to start with. It’s all tied together.”
Keller’s whole body was tight. This was something that she very much didn’t want to talk about. But she refused to give in to her own weakness. With a tremendous effort, she managed to say steadily, “All right. The whole story.”
“It started back in the days humans were still living in caves,” Galen said when they were all sitting down at the kitchen table again. His voice was so bleak and controlled that it didn’t even sound like Galen.
“The shapeshifters ruled then, and they were brutal. In some places, they were just the totem spirits who demanded human sacrifice, but in others…” He searched through the parchments, selected one. “This is a picture of a breeding pen, with humans in it. They treated humans exactly the way humans treat cattle, breeding them for their hearts and livers. And the more human flesh they ate, the stronger they got.”
Iliana looked down at the parchment scrap, and her hand abruptly clenched on a tissue. Winnie listened silently, her pointed face stern.
“They were stronger than anyone,” Galen said. “Humans were like flies to them. The witches were more trouble, but the dragons could beat them.”
Iliana looked up. “What about the vampires?”
“There weren’t any yet,” Galen said quietly. “The first one was Maya Hearth-Woman, the sister of Hellewise Hearth-Woman. She made herself into a vampire when she was looking for immortality. But the dragons were naturally immortal, and they were the undisputed rulers of the planet. And they had about as much pity for others as a T. rex has.”
“But all the shapeshifters weren’t like that, were they?” Iliana asked. “There were other kinds besides the dragons, right?”
“They were all bad,” Keller said simply. “My ancestors—the big felines—were pretty awful. But the bears and the wolves did their share.”
“But you’re right, the dragons were the worst,” Galen said to Iliana. “And that’s who my family is descended from. My last name, Drache, means ‘dragon.’ Of course, it was the weakest of the dragons that was my ancestor. The one the witches left awake because she was so young.” He turned to Winnie. “Maybe you’d better tell that part. The witches know their own history best.”
Still looking severe, Winnie thumbed through the parchment scraps until she found one. “Here,” she said. “It’s a picture of the gathering of the witches. Hecate Witch-Queen organized it. She was Hellewise’s mother. She got all the witches together, and they went after the shapeshifters. There was a big fight. A really big fight.”
Winnie selected another piece
of scroll and pushed it toward Iliana.
Iliana gasped.
The parchment piece she was looking down at was almost solid red.
“It’s fire,” she said. “It looks like—it looks like the whole world’s on fire.”
Galen’s voice was flat. “That’s what the dragons did. Geological records show that volcanoes all over the world erupted around then. The dragons did that. I don’t know how; the magic’s lost. But they figured that if they couldn’t have the world, nobody else would, either.”
“They tried to destroy the world,” Keller said. “And the rest of the shapeshifters helped.”
“It almost worked, too,” Winnie said. “But the gathering of witches managed to win, and they buried all the dragons alive. I mean, they put them to sleep first, but then they buried them in the deepest places of the earth.” She bit her lip and looked at Galen. “Which probably wasn’t very nice, either.”
“What else could they do?” Galen said quietly. “They left the dragon princess alive—she was only three or four years old. They let her grow up, under their guidance. But the world was a scorched and barren place for a long time. And the shapeshifters have always been…the lowest of all the Night People.”
“That’s true,” Nissa put in, her voice neither approving nor disapproving, simply making an observation. “Most Night People consider shapeshifters second-class citizens. They try to keep them down. I think, underneath, that they’re still afraid of them.”
“And there’s never been an alliance between the shapeshifters and the witches,” Keller said. She looked directly at Iliana. “That’s why the promise ceremony is so important. If the shapeshifters don’t side with the witches, they’re going to go with the vampires—”
She stopped abruptly and looked at Galen.
He nodded. “I was thinking the same thing.”
“Those animal attacks,” Keller said slowly. “It sounds as if the shapeshifters are already making their decision. They’re helping to bring about the time of chaos at the end of the millennium. They’re letting the whole world know that they’re siding with the vampires.”
There was a shocked silence.
“But how can they decide?” Winnie began.