“All right,” Kevin said. He followed Daniel out of the room and pulled the door shut behind them, his nerves jangling. Was he in trouble here? Even Mr. Regis’s words of warning hadn’t prepared Kevin for this. No matter what Daniel said about it just being a lark, it was really obvious that he wanted to believe this was going to work, that they could mutter a spell or a charm or whatever over a nearly solid piece of rock and it would come to life. That was bad enough, but how was he going to react when nothing happened? Would he freak out, or just accept it and laugh about the whole thing? Well, they would both soon find out.
“We’ll use the anthropology lab,” Daniel said. “ Follow me.”
Kevin did as he was instructed, wishing he could think about anything but this ridiculous mission. There suddenly seemed to be so much to appreciate in this small museum—mummies, a pre-Columbian culture section, and he’d caught a glimpse of a marvelous-looking insect “zoo” on the other side of one of the rotundas. But even as he saw it on the way, his gaze slipped over everything and barely registered it. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be . . . this wasn’t even remotely normal.
“Here we are,” Daniel said. “Our grand experiment is about to begin.” The older guy was keeping his tone light, no doubt because he could see how uncomfortable Kevin was. Maybe, Kevin thought suddenly, the whole thing was a test, one of those mess-with-yourmind things that prospective employers occasionally pulled to see how well you followed directions, or whether you were creative and could problem-solve on your own. He wasn’t quite sure what arena reading incantations over dinosaur eggs would fall under, but that would explain quite a bit. The question was, of course, just what was the right answer?
The room Daniel led him into was a lot bigger and more brightly lit than Daniel’s mini “office.” Long, stainless steel lab tables lined the walls beneath shelves holding books, supplies, computers and the dozens of software manuals that were interspersed among the clutter. At least in here there was room to breathe and a person could turn around without smacking his nose on the wall. Daniel led him to one of the larger tables in the center of the room and found a cleared space on one end. The young paleontologist set the egg on its surface and for a moment the two of them just stood there, staring first at it, then at the journal Kevin still held.
After a second Kevin placed it next to the egg. “What, uh, do you think we need besides this?” he asked Daniel.
Daniel shrugged. “Well . . . a cage, maybe, to hold the baby Timimus when it hatches. Sometimes they do the monkey thing here so they’ve got a few tucked away. Hold on a sec—I’ll get one.”
Kevin nodded and watched as Daniel strode to one of the larger cabinets and dug around in it until he found something suitable. He couldn’t help but notice that Daniel had said not if it hatches, but when —no sir, no lack of confidence there.
“Here we go.” As Daniel came back with a small, wire cage, Kevin thought he sounded absurdly cheerful, more like he was announcing the date for the next paleontology dig than preparing for something like this. What a mess. He’d wanted so badly to be here, and now all Kevin could think about was getting the heck out of here and going home.
After a moment’s contemplation, Daniel carefully picked up the Timimus egg and placed it inside the cage, then snapped the door shut. “Okay,” he said. “I guess I’ll read the words now.” Daniel laughed suddenly, but Kevin thought he could hear nervousness and something else that he couldn’t identify in the sound. Hope, no doubt. It looked to him like Daniel was trying really hard to seem normal, as though on the surface this were all a hoax and any minute now he’d admit that it was some sort of rite of passage that each newbie at the museum had to endure. But Kevin just wasn’t buying it, and seeing the way Daniel’s hand shook as he picked up Professor Nuriel’s journal and opened it to the right page just hammered that home.
Around them, the museum was quiet, nearly empty. If there were security guards, it was still early enough for them not to bother with making rounds, so not a sound slipped through the duct work or was carried up on the drafts flowing along the wide staircases. Holding his breath despite himself, Kevin found he was leaning forward and mentally following along with the words in the journal as Daniel carefully read them out loud.
“Hear this call, spirits of Ladonithia,” Daniel intoned. His voice was raspy, a real giveaway that he had a serious case of the jitters. “Awaken and return from your abyss to this frozen host, first of four, to then combine, and grant to he who resurrects you, a single wish fulfilled.”
Kevin hadn’t caught the contents of the incantation earlier, and even as the final words came out of Daniel’s mouth, his eyebrows raised. “First of four, to then combine”—what did that mean? And a wish fulfilled—was that what this was all about? Greed, or something like it?
He turned his head toward Daniel’s, but before he could say what was on his mind, a small, sharp sound rippled through the otherwise silent room.
The sound of an egg cracking.
Kevin’s face whipped back toward the cage, and he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The Timimus egg was suffused in a hot, lavender-colored glow, the sort of unnatural hue that blared off the neon signs of cheap bars after midnight and hurt your eyes in the darkness. Running horizontally around it was a jagged crack, widening with every second that they gaped at it. “No way,” Kevin whispered as they bent closer. “No way!”
“Oh,” Daniel said happily. “I think it’s definitely way.” Without planning to, they both circled the cage, trying to see the glowing egg from all angles. The light was slowly receding, pulling away like embers fading as they cool. In its wake there was nothing but the egg, and now it was definitely a lot more than a prehistoric fossil.
The new shell was a soft, yellowish color veined with darker lines of gold that reminded Kevin of butter melting in a too-hot skillet, just before it starts to turn brown. The egg was about the size of a child’s football, one of those undersize toys that parents bought their toddler to try out in daycare, and where the shell was splitting, the edges were a brighter white and oozing with clear fluid like a wound that had broken open. Each successive crack that the shell made was like thunder in Kevin’s ears, and when it was joined by something else—a low chittering —he nearly hyperventilated. A final harsh snap, and the Timimus egg broke completely in two.
He and Daniel automatically back-stepped, then both of them immediately returned to where they’d just been standing. Something was coming out of the splintered shell, tiny claws scrabbling and slipping at the edges of the sticky, slightly bloody embryonic fluid that coated the crumbling pieces and pulsed out between the cracks. The claws were followed by toes, the toes by the beginnings of young, fragile limbs in a golden skin flecked with brown that glistened with the birth moisture.
“This can’t be happening,” Kevin said hoarsely. “I can’t—”
“I told you,” Daniel said in a reverent voice. “ Sometimes strange things happen in Sunnydale.
“Things like this.”
* * *
I thought he’d never leave. To Daniel’s annoyance, Kevin had hung around for nearly four more hours last night, and it was only the impending doom of parental disapproval that had finally pushed the younger kid out the door. Daniel had been done with him long before that, pretty much right after the Timimus egg had reconstituted itself and hatched. He’d gotten the critical thing he’d needed from him—the egg—so what use was Kevin Sanderson to him now?
This morning Daniel had come in early and let himself in through the employee entrance at the back. He wouldn’t have left at all except he was afraid someone would notice his clothes and the shadow of a beard quickly building up. Now he made a beeline for his locked office, needing to know that the Timimus was still safe and sound in the small cage hidden under his desk. He’d wanted to take it home with him but hadn’t been able to figure out how. Only the senior staff got to carry stuff in and out without getting stopped by the security
guards, so he’d been forced to leave the baby Timimus here. Thank God it was all right.
He stared at the infant dinosaur now, and while he’d wanted passionately for Kevin to get out of his hair late last night, it was easy to understand the high schooler’s fascination and reluctance to go. The small creature in the cage was a living, breathing specimen of something extinct for more time than most human minds could comprehend. End to end it was maybe fifteen inches long, and Daniel thought it was easy to see in real life the connection to modern-day birds—the birdlike beak as opposed to teeth, the rounded body and long limbs and neck that echoed the textbook speculation of its resemblance to an ostrich. Technically the paleontologists had been right on the mark.
Daniel checked his watch and tried to plan his day as he opened the small canvas bag he’d brought in with him. There was a pet shop a couple of blocks from Sunnydale Mall, a small place that held its own against the bigger chains by opening early, boarding cats and dogs, and selling, in addition to the usual boring array of mice, guinea pigs, puppies and kittens, some rather “colorful” creatures. From time to time they’d had things like cobras and poisonous South American dart frogs in there, and once they’d even boasted a Komodo dragon. Daniel didn’t know how they got away with the weirder stuff, and he didn’t care; right now, he was just thankful that they’d been able to sell him a cheap handful of white mice. The thing in the cage was going to need more than water, and he was hoping this would be sufficient.
It took only a moment to toss the two mice inside and shut the door—
—and less for the Timimus to tear into both of them. Daniel gasped and instinctively stepped backward as blood splashed the mesh of the cage and splattered the paper-littered surface of his desk. The infant dinosaur ripped into its meal with a ferociousness that the young paleontologist had never expected; this was a modestlysized species that supposedly fed on insects and small mammals. Was it supposed to be so aggressive, especially as a baby? He stared at it as it feasted, nauseated by the sight but still captivated by the way it cleaned itself after the meal, like a bird would preen its feathers. Was he imagining things, or did the Timimus already seem bigger? Clearly the meal had given it strength, but in a bizarre way, Daniel could have sworn it had already physically grown—
Daniel.
He spun and nearly knocked a pile of papers and fossils off his desk. There was no one there, of course; it would have been impossible for anyone to slip into this cubbyhole he worked in without him knowing it, and anyway, he’d made sure to lock the door. Who—
A single wish fulfilled . . .
“What?” Daniel whispered. He scrunched his eyes shut and rubbed his forehead. Those words—he knew them from somewhere. When he opened his eyes again, the first thing he saw was the Timimus, squatting quietly in its cage; the second was Nuriel’s dig journal lying next to it. That was the source—“A single wish fulfilled” was the final line of the incantation that had reconstituted the dinosaur egg. But he’d done that. Was this voice, this sort of . . . presence inside his mind telling him he was now going to be rewarded?
“Famous,” he blurted without thinking. “I want to be famous so that everyone in the museum knows about me.” Not so eloquently as he might have worded it given more time, but in his excitement over the live dinosaur birth, the wish part had momentarily slipped his mind. Maybe he should rephrase it. “What I mean is—”
You have not completed your part.
Daniel stopped, confused. “But I . . . I brought you back to life,” he said to the infant dinosaur. In a way he felt stupid, like he was talking to the air, or maybe a dumb animal. On the other hand . . . well, proof of the extraordinary was right in front of his eyes, wasn’t it? “What else do you want?”
First of four, to then combine . . .
“What?” he asked for the second time. “I don’t understand.”
Set me free, murmured the voice in his head, and Daniel saw the eyes of the small Timimus blaze with sudden fierce light.
Set me free and birth three others—
“Three others?” Daniel repeated. Of course; the Timimus was one, but he needed to resurrect three more.
But why?”
Whatever this entity swirling inside his head was, Daniel thought he actually felt it smile.
Do you not desire me to fulfill your wish, Daniel Addison? Do you not wish to be . . . famous?
Daniel sat back on his chair and closed his eyes, and just for a while, let the enticing words linger inside his mind.
Chapter 6
SHE LOVED HER MOTHER, BUT RIGHT NOW BUFFY WAS thinking that a triple wisdom tooth extraction— perhaps performed by Principal Snyder using a pair of iron pliers—might be more pleasant than Friday night dinner. The food was good, of course. Joyce Summers was an excellent cook, and Buffy knew that her mom always put extra effort into the meal if she got wind that Buffy wasn’t planning to buzz out the door with her friends or to patrol before the plates even hit the table. While that ought to have been a sociable thing to do, since Joyce had found out that Buffy was the Slayer and what that entailed—lions and tigers and vampires, oh my!—it had the skin-crawling side effect of making Buffy feel that her mom was fixing her the Summers family version of the Last Supper at every opportunity. In cahoots with that was the constant talk of college and, in complete self-imposed blindness to Buffy’s real-world situation, would her daughter please go away to a school at any other location on the face of this Earth?
“Here you go,” Joyce said brightly, and set a bowl of dark-chocolate mousse topped with whipped cream in front of Buffy. Fancy, fancy.
“This is really good,” Buffy said honestly after taking a spoonful. “I—”
“How about the University of Arizona?” Joyce asked suddenly. She stirred her own bowl of dessert with a little too much enthusiasm for Buffy to be comfortable. “Tucson is only six or seven hours away from L.A., you know. They have a really varied curriculum. Did you know that in 1998 their agricultural college had an Onion Weed Control Field Day?”
Buffy had been about to gripe at the way this seemed to be the conversation that wouldn’t die, but this bit of trivia completely derailed her. “What?”
“I’m not saying this is a valid career path for you, just pointing out that they offer a lot of choices,” Joyce said hastily. She took another swipe at the now demolished chocolate mass in her bowl. “There’s also the Arizona State University near Phoenix, which is only four hours—”
“Can we close the book on college curriculums for a while?” Buffy interrupted. “Please? My brain is going into high-fry mode like that commercial about drugs, except this time it’s This is Buffy’s brain on college.”
Her mom looked like she wanted to say more, then she pressed her lips together and stared down at what was left of her mousse instead. Buffy swirled her own chocolate goo around, feeling guilty but knowing there was no way out of it. She was what she was—the Slayer—and yet how could she not understand her mother’s desperation to somehow remove her from that? Didn’t she herself always try to make sure Joyce was somewhere safe when the weird hit the fan in this town?
“So,” Joyce said after a few awkward moments of silence, “the news reports have been saying there’s a wild animal loose in town.”
Ah ha—something interesting at last. “What kind of animal?” Buffy asked, her senses immediately tuning up a notch.
Her mother shrugged. “Some people claim it’s an alligator like in the movies, someone’s pet flushed down the toilet and all grown-up now, moved out of the sewers and onto the street. Others swear it looks like a Komodo dragon, but the truth is no one’s gotten a really good view of it. The police, of course, maintain that it’s just a stray dog.”
Buffy stared at her, already back-focusing on the words. “A dragon?”
Joyce smiled slightly. “Nothing that breathes fire or flies, I promise. And having an Indonesian Komodo dragon running around Sunnydale is pretty unlikely. Not only are they
nearly extinct, they’re only indigenous to one part of the world.” Her smile faded into a troubled frown. “Of course, they’re large and they do move very fast. I understand they bite something, then follow it around and wait for it to die.” Joyce looked a little sick, then she shook her head. “But we don’t have any of those in Sunnydale, not even in the zoo.”
“If it’s not a dragon or a dog, then these are like what?” Buffy asked, her eyes narrowing. “Hysterical visions?”
Joyce tilted her head. “Well, a few people have actually had their pets killed in their yards overnight, then found what was left—not much—the next morning.”
Buffy sat up straight, the rich dessert forgotten despite her normal addiction to chocolate. “This thing is attacking and eating the dog next door?”
Joyce nodded. “Not in our neighborhood, but not far away, either.”
Buffy scowled down at her bowl as she considered this. She supposed it could be one of those dragonthingies, but real-world endangered wasn’t Hellmouth style. It was much more likely to be a goblin with lots of teeth, or maybe one of the faeries that she and the Slayerettes had faced a while back when they’d tangled with the Erl King and his Wild Hunt. And hadn’t they been so fun, like mini-monsters with razor blade-lined jaws—ugh. Still, they didn’t come solo, so maybe it really was—
Somewhere down the block, a man started screaming.
Buffy was up and out of her seat instantly, registering then leaving behind her mother’s cry of surprise as she sped to the front door, yanked it open, then ran to the sidewalk. It took only a second to place the stillscreaming voice—two houses up, the new guy who’d moved in only a couple of weeks ago. Buffy couldn’t recall his name but she did remember that he had a neat dog, a friendly if hyperactive Weimaraner named, rather aptly, Mutzoid. “Rhymes with nutzoid,” he’d told her amiably when she’d stopped to pet it one evening.
And now, as if on cue with her recollection of it, the dog started howling.
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