The Last Dragon Chronicles #4: The Fire Eternal

by Chris D'Lacey

  “What? Why?”

  “Just do it,” Zanna snapped. “Unhook the terminals on your battery.”

  Knowing better than to argue, Tam did as instructed. In the meantime, Zanna told Gwendolen what she needed to do. Gwendolen tested the battery terminals, flicking them with her tail until showers of sparks were leaping off them under the hood. Then she plugged herself into the phone. Closing her eyes, she concentrated hard. A few seconds passed, then she reached for the crocodile clips that were attached to each of the battery terminals and gripped them hard to complete the loop. Every scale on her body immediately stood on end. A pulse of violet light came out of the phone and went shooting down the ringlets of wire to the battery. There was a low humming noise and a slight smell of burning. A smoke ring emerged from Gwendolen’s nose. And in the gap between the houses on Thoushall Road, a shimmering vertical line appeared.

  “Zanna, wait,” Tam called as she moved toward it. She was now just yards away from the rift, which was deepening and folding as it detected her presence.

  She paused, ready for her final steps, when, of all things, her phone rang. Irritated, yet glad of the excuse to hesitate, she answered it.

  It was Elizabeth Pennykettle. “Zanna?” She was breathless, practically frantic.

  “Liz, I’m kind of busy.”

  “I talked to Arthur. Don’t you dare go near that rift!”

  “Sorry. Almost there. Doing this for Lucy.”

  “No, Zanna! No! Think about Alexa.”

  Zanna’s lower lip trembled. “Take care of her for me.”

  “Wait a second. Listen.”

  There was a fumbling noise, then Alexa said, “Mommy?”

  “Baby?” Zanna’s voice was like a cracking egg.

  “Mommy, where are you going?”

  “I don’t know,” Zanna said. Tears streamed down her cheeks.

  “I saw Daddy,” said Alexa.

  “Daddy? What?”

  “Through Bronson’s eye. I saw him, very small.”

  Zanna reached out her hand. The time rift rippled. “That can’t happen, baby. Daddy’s …”

  “He was being a polar bear.”

  “What?” Zanna said in a small, hurt voice.

  The next voice was Liz’s. “Sweetheart, come home. Something odd is going on here. I can’t afford to lose you. Step away from that rift. It’s not — Zanna!” she shouted, as a squeal came down the line. “Zanna, can you hear me? Are you OK?”

  There was a rustling sound and then Zanna said, “Yes.” She sounded furious.

  “Where are you?”

  “Sitting on my backside in a clump of wet dandelions.”

  “It didn’t work? The rift rejected you?”

  “Oh, it worked all right,” Zanna said, breathing fast. “I’m gonna kill that —”

  “Zanna? Slow down. Tell me what happened.”

  “He pushed me aside! He’s gone in my place. The stupid arrogant son-of-a —”

  “Who pushed you aside? Tam, you mean?”

  “Yes!” Zanna railed, sounding as though she was doing a war dance. “Tam’s gone after Lucy.”

  26

  NO PLACE LIKE HOME

  The snow began to fall in flakes as big as plums. But it could do little to soften Zanna’s anger or accumulated pain. For another ten minutes she spoke freely to Liz, pouring out feelings that went way beyond what had just happened with Tam. She was bordering on hysterical as she revisited her fears about David, her life with him, and who he really was. Question after question. All of them rhetorical. All underscored with bewildered despair.

  For Liz, it was like gathering in a sheet on a windy day — first just a question of catching on and holding, then the careful process of drawing in safely. Using all her skills of motherhood, she listened patiently, answered sympathetically, and finally brought stability, simplicity, and calm. “The truth is here, standing beside me, Zanna, getting messy with an ice pop. Come home, where you belong. Alexa needs you. So do I.”

  It was enough. Zanna said, “OK, but the sky here is filling up with snow again. The last thing I need right now is to be wrapped in a blanket on some freezing highway. I passed a small hotel just down the road. Think I’ll stay there overnight. What will you tell Lexie?”

  “Exactly that,” Liz said. “Mommy’s stuck in a storm.” She heard the breathy shudders coming down the line again. “We’ll sort it out, Zanna. One way or another. Drive safely tomorrow. Take your time.”

  Zanna said good-bye, then snapped her phone shut and went to Gwendolen. The dragon, exhausted from her recent exertions, was asleep on Tam Farrell’s engine, curled up like a shiny green kitten. Her paws were slightly blackened and she’d dropped a scale or two, but otherwise she seemed unscathed. Zanna picked her up, took the keys from the ignition of Tam’s car, and locked it. Then she went back to her own and drove to the hotel.

  In the meantime, in the Crescent, Liz was struggling to keep her composure. Despite Arthur’s advice to Gollygosh, the hrrr had quickly gone around the dragons that David’s special “threesome” had felt some kind of “auma wave.” This, combined with Gretel’s report that Alexa had apparently “seen” her daddy, had set up a minor earthquake of whispers. No dragon dared to act on these rumors, of course, for Liz was running off red-hot sparks and had enough to think about with Lucy going missing. Alexa seemed unaffected, though. She was going about her usual routines, playing with her toys, drawing her pictures, and talking to the fairies spinning around her mobile as though nothing on this Earth could ever really faze her. Gretel, in particular, found this infuriating. Many a smoke ring had been blown by her that day.

  The general buzz wasn’t lost on Arthur. In the kitchen the following morning, while Alexa was out in the garden (planting apple seeds in yogurt containers, in spectacularly unpredictable sunshine), he reiterated his feelings about the girl to a disenchanted Liz (and a very alert listening dragon). “Ever since she learned about the dragon G’lant, significant things have been happening,” he said. “The lifelike drawings. Her awareness of David. The reanimation of the dragons —”

  “They’re barely active,” Liz cut in, almost ticking him off. “G’reth was asleep when I looked at him this morning and Gadzooks had dropped his pencil down behind Zanna’s desk. Golly hasn’t fixed a thing for weeks. They’re hardly making mischief, are they? It will take a bit more than a few guttering hrrrs to prove to me that David is reconnecting with them, Arthur.”

  Bonnington came in then, mewing for food. Arthur reached out for his tail but missed. At the same time, the kitchen door opened and Alexa popped her head just inside and said, “Aunty, can I put the apple pots by the rockery, so that the fairies can water the seeds?”

  “Yes,” said Liz. “But don’t plant the apple seeds in the rockery, will you? We don’t want any big trees growing there.”

  “No,” said the girl. The door closed again.

  Fairies. The rockery. Arthur thought about the light that Bonnington had witnessed from the fairy door. Could that be connected with Alexa, he wondered? It was too much to expect that the rockery might lie on another time rift, but was it possible Alexa had somehow created one? That her desire to see fairies was so intense that she had fleetingly opened something more spectacular than an ornamental doorway made of wood? “We should talk to her about G’lant,” he said.

  “No,” said Liz. “I absolutely forbid it. She’s a child, Arthur. I won’t have her interrogated. The name is nothing more than a trigger for her imagination.”

  “I agree,” he said, crossing his thighs in what Lucy always called his “academic” way.

  Lucy. Liz turned the agony aside.

  “It’s a wonderful name: noble, creatively potent, and highly suggestive of dragon lore. It makes sense to me now why David sent it. I don’t think it was entirely romantic.”

  He recognized a tight-lipped breath. “I wouldn’t tell that to Zanna,” said Liz.

  “Zanna has closed herself off,” he came back. �
�Even in her meditative state she has given up believing in David’s survival to protect herself from the pain of having lost him — or rather, the man he used to be.”

  He heard her run the tap. Fast, splashing water. A clink of cups. Dropped items of cutlery. She was becoming flustered. “Arthur, we’ve been over this time and time again.”

  He smacked his lips slightly before replying, a sign that he was leading up to some kind of premeditated diagnostic response. “I want to share something with you,” he said. “Something that may help you accept that David could come back.”

  On the fridge top, the listener widened its ears.

  “When I was attacked by the Fain,” Arthur said, “my memory was torn apart and left in scraps. As it returned, certain pieces did not fit. They seemed inappropriate to my life as I knew it. After a while I began to realize that those pieces were fragments of the history of the Fain, in particular their spiritual creed.”

  “Why haven’t you mentioned this before?”

  “There was never any need to — before,” he replied. “In the past few months these extraneous memories have crystallized into a meaningful ‘record.’ I now understand the relationship between the Fain and dragons.”

  He felt the pressure of air as she turned.

  “When I was at the abbey, I had a dream. I saw the universe created from the outgoing breath of a dragon called Godith. Everything was born from the fire of that dragon. A white fire. Auma in its purest sense. You and I, this physical world we inhabit, came into being when the fire cooled down to a low enough vibration to produce ingenious combinations of atoms and molecules. But in certain parts of the universe the fire remained at a higher vibration and filled the spaces between the atoms. From this aspect of the fire the Fain evolved.”

  “And what’s this got to do with David?”

  Arthur nodded slightly and pointed his toe. “There is an element of spiritual tension that binds the universe together. Humans, in their quietest moments, reach out to the etheric world of the Fain, seeking what they call enlightenment. But it is not a one-way process. The Fain, likewise, have a mystical aspiration to make a cyclical journey back to Godith, back to dragonkind. They can only become truly enlightened when they commingle, unconditionally, with a living dragon’s fire. They call it ‘illumination.’”

  Liz turned to the dishes again. “This is intense stuff for a Wednesday morning, Arthur. An alien religion lesson? I still don’t understand how David fits in.”

  “What I’m about to tell you now came to me in a meditation a few days ago. A single moment of clarity. A revelation, perhaps. We always talk about David dying, but the nature of his passing, the ice through the heart, has always seemed significant to me. You use icefire to animate your dragons. What if the ice that took his mortal body had that same capability?”

  “Arthur …” Her hands splashed into the water.

  “Please, just consider it,” he said. “Ever since my mind was scrambled by the Fain, I’ve been reaching out for a truth like this. And now it has come. I think David has been transformed. I think he’s on the pathway to illumination and his chosen name is G’lant.”

  Liz stood away, shaking her head. “I’m sorry, no. I just can’t deal with this. David will always be a boy to me, Arthur. A lovable young man who got carried away saving animals and the Arctic ice cap. And I’m responsible for that, and for what happened to him. I was the one who introduced him to dragons. If I’d kept my mouth shut, if I hadn’t let him get into conflict with Gwilanna, he might still be … oh, I don’t know.”

  “You do,” Arthur said evenly. “You know that David came here for a purpose. Alexa, too.”

  “She —”

  “There is movement,” Arthur continued to press. “A great atmosphere of change. For a while it was confined to hopeful speculation and tiresome reminiscence. Our hearts were in the Arctic, but not our eyes. Now we have ruptures in the world’s weather patterns, the inexplicable migration of polar bears north, the seizure of your daughter through a known time rift, and what I believe to be an accurate report of David’s reappearance. The universe is turning and this planet is its focus. Something major is about to occur. David is at its core and I’m sure Alexa senses it. The truth is shown to us every day through her, but we’re relabeling it as childish babble.”

  “Then why isn’t he here, being more of a father?” A rare burst of anger powered through Liz’s voice. “Why doesn’t he come back and show himself, instead of torturing his partner with signs and speculation?”

  “Perhaps he can’t,” Arthur said. “Or is not allowed to. Or he is trying to divert attention away from this house. From what Zanna told me of Lucy’s disappearance, it’s clear she was taken by the Fain. Why they want her is impossible to say. But they may not stop at a daughter of Guinevere. We must be prepared to act — while we can.”

  Liz glanced through the window. Alexa was carrying a watering can to the rockery. “And do what, exactly?”

  “Find the isoscele of Gawain. I don’t believe Zanna lost it. Something as precious as that doesn’t slip idly through the fingers. I believe she put it away to dissociate herself from the pain of losing David. We should retrieve it and test Alexa.”

  “She’s not a lab rat, Arthur.”

  His marble eyes rolled. Even now, their fixed expression still unnerved Liz a little. “She saw David through the medium of her drawings. If she was aided by the auma of Gawain, she could be capable of boundless creation. Dark matter might be to her what clay is to you.”

  That brought forth an agitated laugh. “Whatever happened to good old string theory and …”

  “Quantum mechanics?” He raised an eyebrow, just as Bonnington leaped onto his lap. Vision, at last. He saw that Liz had her hands to her face. Crying? Exasperated? It was difficult to tell. “It might be a means of bringing Lucy back — and Tam Farrell, of course.” More pain. He could see the film of moisture in her troubled eyes now. But this was crucial. He needed to push. “I tried to explain to Zanna that when I wrote about David years ago at the Abbey, my hand was guided to that time corridor in Blackburn. It was no accident. Neither was my finding one of Gawain’s claws on the floor of the folly. Some force intended it should happen.”

  Liz gestured at the ceiling with rubber-gloved hands.

  “I believe Alexa made the claw materialize.”

  “What? What are you talking about? Alexa wasn’t born when —”

  Now it was Arthur’s turn to cut in. “I believe Alexa came to this planet, in this fashion, for a reason. I believe she chose her own parents. One from this dimension, one from —”

  “No,” Liz interrupted him, spreading her hands. “That’s enough. I don’t want to hear any more about this. I love you, Arthur. You’re a genius and a good, kind man. But sometimes I think you spend so long in your own head that you forget there’s a very real and stressful world outside of it.”

  “You are a descendant of a dragon princess,” he reminded her. “You have the power to animate clay and speak in a language few humans could master. Don’t forget that world, Elizabeth. It’s what you really are.”

  He watched her knot her fingers, saw the ripple of movement in her neck when the dragon, Gwillan, leaned forward to speak to her. He knew then that she had not given up believing in what she was, but was merely frustrated by her inability to take action.

  The cordless telephone rang. It was close enough at hand for Arthur to pretend to fumble for it. He pressed RECEIVE. But as he began to raise it to his ear, Bonnington let out a furious hiss, morphed into a tiger, and struck the phone out of Arthur’s hand.

  Liz gave a yelp of fright. On the fridge top, the listening dragon took a pace back.

  The phone crashed to the floor and the shell broke open. Bonnington was over it in a moment, arching, spitting, baring his fangs. The handset clicked and gave a pregnant brrr. The green light on the arch of its shoulder faded.

  Bonnington relaxed and morphed back into a tabby.

/>   “What was all that about?” Liz said fearfully.

  Arthur brought his hands together under his nose. “They have found us,” he said.

  That was all Liz needed. She yanked the door open and shouted up the garden, “Lexie, come in now. Come and have a drink of juice….”

  On the rockery, Alexa stood up as if she’d magically grown out of a space between the stones. She smiled underneath her sun hat, wiped some loose soil off her hands, and jumped down onto the path.

  She was running down the lawn when she stopped abruptly and turned to stare at the fence that separated number 42 from Mr. Bacon’s garden.

  There was a large black raven hunched on a post.

  “You’re her, aren’t you?” Alexa said.

  The raven cast her a crabby-eyed glare.

  So Alexa repeated the question — in dragontongue.

  “Oh, very impressive,” the raven caarked sourly.

  Alexa jumped up, clapping her hands in glee. “Are you a fairy?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, child. There are no such things as fairies. They’re intervital forces, sentimentally misrepresented as idealistic corporeal entities.”

  Alexa hooked her lip. “I’ve got a door for them,” she said, pointing proudly at the rockery. “They’ll come when the bonglers play the right tune.”

  The wind chimes gave a slight tinkle.

  “Ridiculous,” the raven chuntered. Unwisely, a fly landed by its feet. In an instant the raven’s beak daggered down and the fly was devoured in a single gulp.

  Alexa gasped. “Does it wiggle and wriggle and tickle inside you?”

  “What?” squawked the bird.

  “You’re the old lady who swallowed the fly! I don’t know why. Perhaps you’ll —”

  “Because I’m hungry, that’s why,” the “old lady” cut in. “And tired of this pathetic hollow-boned form.” She ruffled her windbeaten feathers in annoyance, making Alexa giggle.

  “I suppose you think this is funny, don’t you, child? I was supposed to be Premen again. That was the deal. Your father cheated and left me coated in feathers.”