Dragon Sleeping (The Dragon Circle Trilogy Book 1)

by CRAIG SHAW GARDNER

  Something like annoyance crossed over the wizard’s face; it reminded Bobby of his father.

  “Oh, no,” Nunn said, his voice far lighter than his expression. “He was only visiting. Unfortunately, I believe you might have to stay here more permanently.”

  More permanently? Bobby wanted out of here now. He bet there was some way he could do it, too. And Nunn would tell him what it was. Just like with his parents, Bobby had to listen not for what Nunn was saying, but what Nunn really meant. He wondered if Nick had escaped. That could be exactly what Nunn meant by “visiting.” If Nick had done something like that, Bobby could, too.

  “Bobby, wouldn’t you like to see your parents?” Nunn asked suddenly.

  Bobby felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. His parents were here? When he’d run away the day before, he hadn’t even had a chance to say goodbye.

  “They’ve missed you ever so much.” Nunn smiled again. This time the grin seemed to fit much better on his face. “Oh, I know you’ve had some troubles with them in the past. You might say I’m intimately acquainted with them. But you see, they’ve changed.”

  “Changed?” Bobby repeated, his voice barely a whisper. What had Nunn done to them? “Where are they?”

  “Oh, your mother’s just in the other room. And your father’s even closer than that.”

  Nunn waved a hand and one of the room’s walls went away. In its place was another room with three people, all looking upset. Mr. Jackson paced back and forth across the stone floor. Mr. Dafoe wrung his hands, his gaze following Jackson as he paced. And Bobby’s mother sat on the floor in the far corner of the room, her knees tucked up close to her body so that she could rest her chin on top of them. She didn’t seem to be paying any attention to the two men. In fact, she didn’t seem to be looking at anything at all.

  “Don’t you think we should get her to eat something?” Dafoe asked Jackson.

  Jackson stopped his pacing long enough to stare at the other man. “How can we get her to eat when she won’t even recognize that we’re here?”

  Dafoe nervously glanced back at Bobby’s mother. “I don’t want her to die.”

  “Whatever’s happened, she brought it on herself,” Jackson insisted. “Nunn told us, if we worked with him, he’d see we were rewarded. She just didn’t try hard enough.”

  “I don’t know,” Dafoe said. “I don’t know about anything. I wish I’d never seen this place.” He moved over to a table in a corner of the room opposite Bobby’s mother. He looked at the dozen or so objects cluttering the tabletop: an assortment of bowls and cups and a large pitcher. “As long as we’re stuck in this place, I’m going to try and get her to eat something.”

  “Suit yourself.” Jackson glanced one more time at Bobby’s mother, then began to pace again. “I’d like to do something, too. All this waiting reminds me of the army.”

  Dafoe grabbed one of the bowls and carried it over to the woman huddled in the corner. “Margaret? You really should eat.” Bobby’s mother looked up at the sound of the man’s voice, a little startled, as if she only now realized there was someone else in the room.

  Bobby couldn’t stand this anymore. He had never seen his mother look so miserable.

  “Mom?” he called.

  “She can’t hear you,” Nunn announced abruptly. “Why don’t you just sit here and watch, like a good boy?”

  “Come on,” Dafoe urged as he approached her. “This is some more of that stew we had the other day. You remember how good that stew was?” He held out the bowl.

  She ignored it, staring instead at Dafoe’s face. “Leo?” she asked.

  “No, Margaret,” Dafoe said patiently, “Leo isn’t here. You need to eat something.” He offered the stew to her again.

  She pushed the bowl out of the way and struggled to get to her feet. “I need you to stay, Leo.”

  “Now, Margaret—” Nervous, Dafoe took a step away.

  She stood more quickly, clutching at his sleeve. “Leo, please don’t leave me again.”

  Dafoe pulled himself away from Margaret’s grasping hands. She stumbled, staring dumbly at her fingers, as she once again collapsed to her sitting position on the floor.

  “I don’t believe this shit.” Jackson had turned away from the two others in disgust. “You can’t talk to her, Harold. Leave her alone.”

  Dafoe stared down at her. Her eyes were unfocused again, as if she didn’t even want to think. “Why has this happened to her, Carl?”

  “Why?” Jackson made a snorting sound. “That’s one question I can answer. She didn’t listen. She stood up to Nunn.”

  Dafoe turned away from Bobby’s mother. He put the bowl back on the table. “No, no,” he said, more to himself than Jackson, “can’t stand up to Nunn.”

  Bobby looked up at the wizard. “What did you do to her?” Nunn chuckled, as if this was all some merry joke. “She’ll be fine, once she meets your father.” He waved his hand again. “Dad?” Bobby asked as the other room disappeared.

  “He’s right here, you know,” Nunn said softly. Bobby turned away from the now empty wall.

  His father stood behind him, but he was wearing the wizard’s robes. “Bobby?” his father’s mouth said. It was his father’s face, too, but it was on the wrong body. “We need to talk.” Bobby was no longer frightened.

  “Things have changed around here,” his father’s voice said, “but they’ve changed for the better.”

  Bobby looked at the thing before him and knew, in that instant, what he had to do.

  “We just have to talk about things,” his father’s voice droned on. “We never did talk much about things in the past, did we? That’s another thing that’ll change. Soon you’ll understand.” Bobby understood already.

  He had to kill Nunn.

  Thirty-Seven

  Constance Smith did not care for Obar.

  She had known men like him before. Women, too, for that matter. People who said one thing while they meant another, who kept up a line of happy chatter to cover up what they were really looking for. Actually, when she thought of it, there was one particular gossip in her church, a woman close to Mrs. Smith’s age who always wanted to talk “in all confidence.” Unfortunately, that confidence only lasted until the woman found someone else to gossip with.

  There were simply certain people who you couldn’t trust. And Mrs.

  Smith felt that Obar fell firmly within this group.

  “We will talk no more about this stone,” she announced, tired of the man’s constant whining. When she wouldn’t give him this dragon’s eye outright, he had resorted to arguments, cajoling, even all-out pleading.

  And the look on the man’s face when he talked about anything having to do with the stone! It was more than a simple matter of want; more like an obsession. It seemed that everything Obar did or thought had something to do with his dragon’s eye. She was quite sure he would steal the new eye from her if given the chance.

  “The stone was given to me,” she continued. “It is mine. We will have to work together, using our own dragon’s eye, if we are to succeed.”

  “Oh.” The wizard did his best to smile and nod. “Most certainly,” Obar agreed all too heartily. “I would have it no other way. It doesn’t do to argue with the dragon.”

  “And we have more pressing business,” Mrs. Smith added. “We need to put these stones to use. I came with a number of people. Some of them Nunn has killed. Others have stayed with him out of fear. And anyone not with him now he tries to capture.”

  “Capture?” Obar frowned at that. “Bobby Furlong,” he said after a moment.

  So the dragon’s eye told him that, too, if Obar reached for it. Constance had seen Bobby’s kidnapping the moment it had happened. Perhaps it was because she was closer to the other neighbors, especially the children.

  “Someone has to put a stop to Nunn,” she said, not just to Obar, but also to the other neighbors. “He cannot come in and take us like that, with such impunity.”

/>   “Certainly, that’s a worthy feeling,” Obar agreed. “But we must save the rest of us first. We must find the other dragon’s eyes, to get ready for the battle to come.”

  “We are already in a battle,” Mrs. Smith replied abruptly, “and I think we need to fight every battle we can if we are going to win the war. I will not sacrifice a single one of my friends to this Nunn; especially not the children.” She took a deep breath. This was the sort of thing she never admitted out loud; the sort of thing she wouldn’t ever have thought of admitting, before her life changed. “I never had any children of my own. In an odd sort of way, all the people on my little street were my children. They are my family. And I will fight very hard for my family.”

  Joan Blake looked up from where she had been talking to her still upset son. “Thank you, Constance. I think we’re all going to have to pull together if we’re going to get through this.”

  “B-but the stones,” Obar blustered. “We’ll need more of the stones than Nunn! We need more power!”

  “Why?” Constance asked, becoming more exasperated with this man by the minute. “We have just as much power as Nunn now.”

  “But he could destroy either one of us!” Obar insisted.

  “Then we’ll just have to fight him together, won’t we?”

  “Approach Nunn directly?” Obar’s voice cracked at the very thought. He patted his chest, as if to calm himself. “I suppose it could be done, if we did so carefully, and there was something to gain.”

  “We gain Bobby’s freedom, at the very least. And maybe we can convince one or two of the others that have stayed with Nunn that we have a chance to win. Every one of us is important.” She caught Obar’s gaze with her own. “Remember, you said the dragon brought us—all of us—for a purpose.”

  “Well, I did, didn’t I?” Obar hesitated at that. “No one really knows the exact elements necessary for the dragon’s arrival. But people are very important. In fact, in some way, they seem to add power to the dragon’s eyes. Or so I’ve heard.” He shrugged, as if this was all really beyond him.

  This time, Constance thought, Obar appeared genuinely flustered. “This is all new to you, isn’t it?”

  “It’s that obvious?” Obar sighed. “This is new to all of us. The few who survived the last visit of the dragon are now dead. But they did survive, and they had ideas of not only how to survive but how to thrive through control of the dragon.”

  “Ideas?” Mrs. Smith asked. “Do you mean theories?”

  “Well, yes, there was no way for them to prove them,” Obar admitted. “That means they could be wrong, doesn’t it?”

  She pressed her point. “So people could be even more important than the stones?”

  Obar looked frightened at the very thought. “Well, I suppose they could.”

  Mrs. Smith allowed herself to smile. For once in this godforsaken place, a conversation was going her way. “Good,” she said, careful to look at all the neighbors as well as Obar. “Then this is what we’ll do. I’ll be glad to help you locate the other dragon’s eyes. With the two of us working together, we should be able to perform a much more thorough search than Nunn. But first, we must rescue our fellows— brought here by the dragon— before Nunn can use them.”

  Obar looked at her in defeat. “We?” he said weakly. “Together, we equal the power of Nunn. Together, we cannot be defeated.”

  Obar sighed. “Who am I to argue with logic like that?”

  She nodded. “Tell me what you know about Nunn’s fortress and how he protects himself. Then we will get to work.”

  “And attack Nunn,” Obar said softly, as though those were the last three words he wanted to hear.

  “It is the only way we’ll win,” Mrs. Smith insisted.

  Obar shook his head, totally bewildered that it had come to this. “It was much simpler when I was on my own, with the single eye. That way, I was only trying not to lose.”

  But then he told them all that he knew.

  Mrs. Smith smiled to herself. The first skirmish had been won. Now it was time for the real battle to begin.

  At first, he was in darkness, surrounded by silence. Total darkness, total silence. Like he had died and been sent to limbo. Like all his senses had been cut away from his brain. Like there was no way out, and nothing left to do except fall into despair.

  But Nunn had done this sort of thing to him before. Evan Mills wouldn’t let appearances deceive him again. He knew all about the wizard’s tricks. And he knew those tricks could be defeated.

  He remembered how Constance Smith had handled Nunn’s will with a discipline of her own. If he could gather that same mental strength, maybe he could conquer this illusion on his own.

  Last time he thought he was all alone, the rest of the neighborhood had been all around him, suffering from the same illusion. He wouldn’t be surprised if something similar was happening all over again. Perhaps, if he thought about the others, he could find them, too.

  As soon as the notion entered his head, Mills realized he wasn’t alone. He sensed another nearby, some vibration perhaps. But he felt a shape, like in this total darkness there was a space that was darker still.

  Mills found he didn’t want to speak. He felt his voice wouldn’t work.

  What could the doubt be but more of Nunn’s trickery? He spoke, anyway. “Is someone there?”

  “Evan!” he heard, or sensed, in reply. “Thank God. I thought I was going crazy!”

  It was Leo. Mills recognized the other man’s voice. Or his vibration. The darkness was still absolute, the silence a blanket that seemed to forbid any real sound. Whatever spell Nunn had laid upon them this time, it was far more difficult to break.

  “Do you have any idea where we are?” Leo asked a moment later. “Somewhere Nunn has put us,” Mills answered. He remembered then what the wizard had done to Leo, how the man had been transformed into a pulsating ball of energy clasped in Nunn’s hands until the energy, too, disappeared. Mills remembered how angry that had made him.

  He was sure Leo was dead.

  He couldn’t think of much after that, beyond the anger. He remembered charging the wizard. It had something to do with protecting the others. After that, nothing.

  Where were they? What had happened to Leo, and to him? Were there others here, too?

  It seemed that only after he’d thought of something could he realize it was there. There were hundreds of others here, but none of them came from the neighborhood. All of them were strangers. Many of them weren’t even human.

  How could he tell this without sight, without hearing? It was all in his head, Mills thought. Like his mind was brushing against other minds.

  “Evan!” Leo’s voice was full of panic. “It’s happening again.”

  “What?” Evan demanded. “What’s happening?”

  “I’m being taken away,” Leo moaned. “Sometimes, Evan, I change.

  Sometimes I lose myself.”

  Leo’s voice began to fade, as if he was indeed being taken away. “Evan! Help me!”

  What could Mills do but follow?

  Thirty-Eight

  With talking birds and men who looked like trees, this was all too strange for Mary Lou to feel safe. But, for the first time since coming to this bizarre place, Mary Lou felt—well—protected.

  She was light-headed, almost giddy, as she marched with her little group toward a reunion with her neighbors. After her experience with the People, it was wonderful just to be able to communicate with others. And she never realized how happy she could be to see her brother. Her dumb old brother Jason; everyone seemed to accept him here in a way he was never accepted at home. And since they all approved of Jason, they approved of his sister as well.

  Charlie yapped happily, tail wagging, as he walked by her side, just another dog ready to play. Mary Lou tried not to look into his glowing eyes. Not only was his head changing shape, growing a hard, bonelike ridge above the eyes, but also she could swear he was about twenty percent bigger than h
e had been before. From the way he acted, Charlie didn’t seem to realize that anything was happening to him. One advantage of being a dog, she guessed.

  The large man, the one Jason called Oomgosh, led the way. Not that the Oomgosh was entirely human. He had a stump where one of his arms should be, and out of that stump was growing a bright green shoot.

  The Oomgosh was constantly telling stories, tall tales about how he made sure the rain and sun kept their proper places in the sky. Jason laughed at every other sentence out of the tree man’s mouth. Mary Lou couldn’t remember when she had seen her brother this happy.

  Somewhere up above them, Raven flew, swooping down occasionally to tell them all was clear ahead, both on the ground and in the trees. Mary Lou hoped that meant the People had given up on her.

  Of course, the prince was with them, too. Not that she could see him, but, the way he had talked, it sounded as if he felt his destiny and Mary Lou’s were intertwined.

  She heard a cawing sound above. “The goal is near!” Raven called. “Your destination is only a few minutes’ march away.” With a flutter of wings, the large black bird descended to land on the Oomgosh’s shoulder. “I thought I should return so that we might prepare.”

  “Prepare?” Jason asked. “Is something wrong?”

  “Not if we are ready for it,” the bird replied curtly. “Most important, I need to be properly introduced. These people are new to our world. Without the proper arrangement, they may think me no more than a bird.”

  “That will never do,” the Oomgosh said. “I will announce us.” He cupped his one hand to his mouth. “Hello, the camp!” he called in a voice loud enough to carry across half the island.

  The air before them blurred with silver. Two hands appeared in the opening and pulled it wide. Mrs. Smith stepped through. Her wary look turned to a smile.

  “Oh, it is you. Obar said you were almost here.” Her smile grew broader still as she spotted her neighbors. “Mary Lou, Jason! It’s so good to see you again. And this must be?”

  The tree man bowed slightly. “The Oomgosh. Only another humble denizen of these woods.”