The Moon Coin (The Moon Realm Series)

by Richard Due

  After a full minute, he started making groggy sounds. A little while later, words came.

  “Stop. Leave . . . me . . . alone. Go away.”

  Lily did none of these things.

  Eventually, Jasper opened his eyes to see who was shaking him.

  “Hey. Wha—?”

  “Wake up!” said Lily.

  Jasper’s voice grew louder. “What? What’s going on?”

  “Listen! I’ve figured out where Uncle Ebb has been going.”

  Jasper angled himself up on his elbows and squinted.

  “Lily? Is that you?” he asked.

  “Yes! It’s me, you idiot! Now listen! I’ve figured out where Uncle Ebb has been going.”

  “Do you know where he is now?”

  “No. Not exactly. But we need to find him. We need to go back.”

  “Go back? Go back where?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I know what the necklace is for! The bedtime tales—they’re real! I’ve been to the Moon Realm! Ebb wasn’t making it up. You need to go there, too. You need to see it for yourself!”

  Jasper blinked his eyes as though he thought that might help. It didn’t.

  “Lily, you’ve been dreaming. Go back to bed.” He dropped back into his pillows, pulling one up over his ear.

  Lily yanked the pillow away and tossed it behind her.

  “No!” she said. “You have to listen to me!”

  “Go to bed, Lily,” said Jasper, sounding grumpier. “Let me sleep. We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

  “No. Morning will be too late. You have to go. You have to go back tonight!”

  Jasper flopped onto his stomach.

  “The only place I’m going back to is sleep. Get out!”

  “No!” pleaded Lily. “Just let me explain.”

  Jasper swung his legs out of the bed and stood. He clutched the blanket around his shoulders, and an angry look bloomed on his sleepy face.

  “Go,” he said hoarsely.

  Lily backed away quickly, her eyes widening with alarm. She wasn’t afraid of being removed, or even of being locked out, for she had long ago secured a key to his room, but Jasper had installed a bolt, and if he woke up enough, he just might think about using it. Then she would have no way of getting in.

  “You’re right,” she said, holding up her hands.

  “I am?” said Jasper, looking a bit confused.

  “Yes! You’re right. Now just sit down for a minute and let me think. Then I’ll leave . . . and you can go back to sleep.”

  “Okay,” said Jasper, sitting down and staring at nothing in particular.

  A minute passed. Jasper’s eyelids drooped.

  “Maybe you should lie down,” she offered. “You know, I—I always think better that way.”

  “Right,” said Jasper, slumping onto his side. A minute later he began to snore.

  So much for the direct approach, Lily thought, removing the moon coin from her own neck and carefully slipping it around his. She wrapped his arms around the log of clothes. Then, leaning over him, she unlocked the coin’s fob and spun the inner circle of moons. Dodging the shadows of the swaying tree limbs, Lily struggled to pick out Barreth’s little symbol. But Earth, with its tiny satellite moon, was easy to find, and she remembered the moons were in alphabetical order after it. Barreth would be the very first one. She took a long time fussing with the moon coin before snapping the fob closed and backing away.

  It was done. When the moon coin reached a full charge, her brother would vanish. Lily stepped backward and sank down into the cushioned chair under the window, drawing up her knees and hugging the pillow she’d yanked away.

  The clock on Jasper’s desk read 4:25. She’d been back for a whole hour. Time was running short. She just needed to stay awake so that if it got too late, she could call off the mission and set the coin back to Earth. And if she couldn’t show him the Moon Realm, she’d have to attempt to explain . . . although she knew, deep down, she would have very little chance of convincing him.

  Lily glanced around Jasper’s darkened room. His tastes were changing faster than hers. He was leaving his childhood behind. His once fanciful drawings were morphing into feasible-looking drafts. All of his picture books were gone. But on his bookcase, Uncle Ebb’s figurines still stood tall: a giant Jasper had named Big Thud; at his feet, the three tiny tinkers, Think, Thank, and Thunk; a Dragondain, Major Combat, riding Rinnjinn; a bird of Taw; Dolf, the merman, on the mighty Kress, his seahorse dragon; and towering over them all, his wings spread wide, Morgoroth the Devourer, Keeper of the Magic Flame, greatest dragon in all the Moon Realm.

  A cool draft poured across the windowsill. Lily shivered. She unfolded the blanket draped over the back of the chair and snuggled into it. Maybe if she showed him the things she had brought back. . . . Would he believe her then?

  Lily woke with a start, a sound memory rapidly retreating from her consciousness. What had she heard? Tarzanna?

  The sunlight streaming through the windows was so blinding she dared not open her eyes more than a crack. A sharp rap sounded on the door. That was it! That was the sound!

  “Jasper?” came Linnea’s muffled voice. “Have you seen your sister?”

  “Oh no!” Lily gasped. “Mother.”

  She forced her eye

  s open, her gaze darting around the room before finally settling on the bed’s rumpled sheets . . . empty, rumpled sheets.

  “Jasper!” Lily breathed, barely above a whisper. “What have I done?”

  The End

  TheMoonRealm.com

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  The Dragondain

  Book Two / A Moon Realm Novel

  Available in paperback and ebook on Amazon: Amazon.

  Available as an eBook at: Barnes & Noble, and the iTunes iBookstore.

  THE DRAGONDAIN

  Chapter One

  Return to Barreth

  Jasper understood nightmares. Drowning, being tossed about in darkness, not being able to breathe—or just being afraid to breathe—these were all fair game in the realm of nightmares. The weirdest thing about this dream, though, was that he really thought he was wide awake. Of course, he’d had those before, too: the lucid ones—dreams so real they were just like being awake.

  And he was pretty sure he was having one of them right now.

  Wasn’t Lily in this dream earlier? She was going on about something. . . .

  With a crash of snapping twigs, Jasper came to rest. He had landed flat on his back, woozy and blinded.

  Did I sleepwalk out of my window?

  A grayness crept into his vision. Odd, muffled noises like birds and deeper sounds you might expect to hear at a zoo surrounded him. Something was thumping on his chest. In his head, Jasper heard voices.

  “It’s definitely not she,” said an aristocratic voice.

  “Are you sure? It looked an awful lot like her to me,” came a deeper, rumbling voice.

  And there were other voices, in the background, but also inside his head.

  “Shorter hair, different clothes. And if I’m not mistaken, this one is a male Dain cub.”

  “I find it very hard to tell those Dain cubs apart, especially after they change their coats. And we’ve been in this swamp so long, my nose has become useless.”

  Blurry, swirling lights appeared on the gray background. Jasper turned onto his side and groped around. I’m definitely not in the yard, he thought. He was lying in what felt like a giant bird’s nest. His vision cleared a bit more, and he realized that the blurry lights were actually intensely bright stars. The top edge of the nest flickered with the red glow of
a nearby fire—a big one, from the sound of it. All of a sudden, an enormous bird’s head popped over the rim of the nest and peeked down at him, chattering something . . . birdish.

  “Are you all right?” he heard in English, followed again with the strange thumping—or was it more like a pulsing?—echoing in time upon his chest.

  The huge head pivoted as if to look nearby. “Is it possible it doesn’t understand me?” asked the bird.

  “Nonsense,” said the deep rumbling voice, sounding much closer than it had just a moment before. “Lily understood us just—”

  Something leaned over the nest, blotting out the stars. It was a great head—full of teeth and whiskers—wreathed by a blazing mane of fire. Two luminous, amber eyes the size of dinner plates stared down at him.

  Jasper fell back and screamed, instinctively raising his arms for protection.

  The fiery head retreated quickly, uncloaking the bright stars.

  “Oh, I see your point,” conceded the deep voice.

  . . . to be continued

  .

  Richard Due (pronounced “Dewey”) first imagined the Moon Realm while telling bedtime tales to his children. He makes his home in Southern Maryland, where he and his wife have owned and operated Second Looks Books since 1991. The Moon Coin is the first novel in the Moon Realm series. Visit TheMoonRealm.com for more information on the series.

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  Carolyn Arcabascio hails from Massachusetts, where she lives and works as an illustrator while pursuing her lifelong exploration of words, images, and the magical places where they meet. Visit her website at www.carolynarcabascio.com.