by Lori Bond
Pendragon’s Heir
Pendragon Cycle #1
Copyright © 2019 by Madeline Smoot
Book Cover Design : www.KimG-Design.com
Stock images : Bigstock.com
Individual Image Credits:
Coin: mirzamlk/Bigstock.com
Dragon: dean zangirolami/Bigstock.com
Frame: valex113/Bigstock.com
Effect 1: sakkmesterke/Bigstock.com
Effect 2: art_of_sun/Bigstock.com
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CBAY Books
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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-944821-60-9
ebook ISBN: 978-1-944821-61-6
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For Tricia and Jessica, who always believed in this book.
1
WHERE I’M PLAGUED BY VISIONS OF A GLORIOUS PAST
THE FIRST IMAGE POPPED INTO MY HEAD IN THE MIDDLE OF SECOND PERIOD trig. One minute I was staring at the sine wave I’d just graphed on my tablet, and the next minute I was staring at a coat of arms painted onto the breastplate of a medieval knight.
I blinked twice, but the image stayed in my mind’s eye, superimposed over my graph. It was like trying to focus on two things at once. Ms. Terrie droned on about the various trig functions and the graphs they produce in relation to a unit circle. At the same time, I just as clearly saw an intricate green shield topped with a gold crown and emblazoned with three gold dragons. The two dragons at the top faced each other as if about to fight while the third dragon on the bottom wrapped around a tower. It wasn’t like any coat of arms I’d ever seen before, but then again, I wasn’t exactly an expert on heraldry.
I took a deep breath. This wasn’t the first time a picture had popped into my head and refused to go away. For three years now—ever since I was thirteen—random images would appear, rattling around in my mind, sometimes for days. Before now, the image had always sort of grown in clarity over time, but today, the image appeared complete and vibrant, overlaying the everyday world.
I reached down and snuck out my sketchbook and a pencil. For the rest of class, I alternated between graphing the various functions on my tablet and sketching out the knight and his coat of arms. My drawings didn’t make the picture in my head go away, but it made the knight seem less urgent, less immediate. I tried to be discrete, but I sat in the second row. It wasn’t a huge shock I got caught. It also might have had something to do with the colored pencils I pulled out ten minutes before class ended.
“Miss Taylor, a word,” said Ms. Terrie at the end of class.
I didn’t sigh because I had learned last month when Ms. Terrie had caught me texting that sighing only made things much, much worse. Instead, I colored in the last golden dragon then paused for a moment to compose myself. I grabbed my tablet, notebook, and backpack and headed for the front of the room. A couple of girls sent me sympathetic grins, but none of them were close enough friends to wait for me.
The next few minutes passed with me taking an impromptu, verbal quiz on the lesson for the day. Ms. Terrie’s next class meandered in, taking their seats, but no one interrupted my little trigonometric moment of doom. When the bell buzzed for third period, Ms. Terrie finally stopped.
“Well, you appear to have learned the material despite your distraction.” She waved a hand at my sketchbook still open to my completed drawing. “Next time though, promise me you’ll save your little artistic endeavors for a more suitable time and place.”
I nodded, but I didn’t promise. If I’d learned anything in the past three years, it was that pictures would grow in my mind whether or not I wanted them.
I took the late pass Ms. Terrie handed me and scurried out of the room to my next class. At least in junior AP English, I sat in the back. My teacher barely nodded as I slunk into the room holding up the late pass. Last week we had finished reading Pygmalion, and now we were watching My Fair Lady in honor of the original play.
I crammed my sketchbook and colored pencils in my bag, glad to be done with today’s intrusive image. Already it had started to fade from my mind’s eye. I never got more than one image a month, and I figured if I was lucky I might even go six weeks or more before the next. I slid down in my seat, trying to find a comfortable position to watch Eliza and the Professor sing about the rain in Spain. Then another image slammed into my head blocking out the entire classroom.
I shot up in my seat, kicking the chair in front of me. This picture was even more vibrant than the last one. After a second, my vision cleared enough that I noticed the kids on either side of me were giving me weird looks.
“Elaine, you okay?” asked Jared. He half turned and glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. Then he turned all the way around and stared.
“Yeah,” I muttered, reaching down to pull my sketchbook back out. I’d never seen an image so well-defined before. It wasn’t just like I was looking at a still from a movie. Instead, it was almost like I was standing in a frozen scene.
“Seriously, if you’re about to projectile vomit or something, I don’t want it to be on me.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m fine.”
“You don’t look it. What’s with your eyes?”
I didn’t know what he meant, but I didn’t get to ask.
“Ms. Taylor, Mr. Alexandrov, do you have something you would like to share?” called the teacher from the front of the room. Apparently, he’d stopped staring at his phone long enough to notice we weren’t fully engaged in the movie.
I shook my head and ducked down over my notebook. Jared turned back to the front. Once our teacher had gone back to his phone, I started drawing the latest image. I drew the same medieval knight; only this time, he stood in a more majestic pose with his arms straight out in front of him as if he planned on holding back an entire army with the strength of his arms alone. There was something odd about his armor now that I was paying proper attention to more than just the coat of arms on his chest. There were little ridges up and down his arms that I was sure weren’t part of a normal suit of armor. It was like little things were sticking up out of the suit.
It wasn’t just the bumps that were a little odd. His silver armor almost sparkled in the sun in places instead of being a dullish gray. The cut was also almost modern somehow, like someone had decided to wear medieval armor but make it out of high-tech material instead of iron or steel. However, just as I was no expert on coats of arms, I was also no expert on suits of armor. The guy’s helmet looked properly medieval with its little slits on the face and feather plumes on the top. I also couldn’t picture a modern knight wearing a big purple cape that streamed in the wind behind him. In fact, there was only one modern knight I even knew of, the eccentric gazillionaire superhero Pendragon in New York. That guy had built a half dozen robot knights or something and ran around saving people from rogue robots and stopping train derailments. I wasn’t drawing Pendragon though. In the video that trended all over the Internet last year when he fought the Horned Menace, Pendragon’s armor looked nothing like my picture. His armor was gold and bulkier with a clunky crown perched atop the helmet.
Behind the first knight, I drew two more knights. Their armor was made from the same material as the first knight, but they didn’t have the coat of arms or the silly cape. The two other knights had drawn the strangest looking longswords. Even though the static image in my head was silent, I could almost hear the energy sizzli
ng off the swords’ sharp edges. The swords glowed too as if made from a cross between a piece of metal and some kind of energy weapon. My imagination was so weird. I did a rough sketch, and just as suddenly as it had appeared, the image faded from my mind.
Class ended, and I grabbed my stuff. I’d almost made it to the door, when the classroom flat out disappeared. One minute I was walking past desks and students, and the next I was about to slam into the knight with the stupid cape and the outstretched arms. Behind him three knights guarded some kind of tower with a girl standing behind a crenellation at the top. I froze, shocked at how real all of it looked, like I had stepped into a photograph. For the first time I understood how Alice felt when she fell down the rabbit hole. I tried to back away from the knight, but I only managed to trip on my own feet. I stumbled into someone behind me.
“God, Elaine,” Jared muttered behind my back. He grabbed my elbow, saving me from falling flat on my butt. “What is with you today?”
Maybe it was the fall or Jared catching me, but I sort of snapped back into the classroom. I still saw the knights, and the tower, and the medieval damsel in distress, but I could also see Jared peering at my eyes.
“Thanks,” I said. It sounded more like a squeak than my actual voice. Normally, I wasn’t this awkward, but not being able to see the real world was messing with more than my mind.
Jared shook his head, but he let me go when he realized I wasn’t going to drop to the floor in front of him. “You should think about going to the nurse,” he said, passing me to get to the door. He glanced at me one last time. “At least have someone look at your eyes.”
I didn’t bother to answer since I was losing the classroom again to the image in my mind. I tried to go to my locker, but I slammed into someone else on the way.
“Watch it,” the person said, but I couldn’t tell who was speaking. I saw a kid with a knight’s helm instead of a face.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. I ducked out a side door and made my way, almost by touch, to my car.
As soon as I’d gotten in the front seat, the picture faded down to a more manageable level. The knights, tower, and girl still beckoned to be drawn, but I also saw the parking lot through my windshield. I waited a few more minutes, but the image didn’t flare up again. It seemed to have settled down into an annoying, but more familiar, level of strange.
I fished my phone back out of my bag and called home.
My mom picked up her phone after the first ring. “Hi, kiddo. What’s going on?”
“I’m skipping chemistry lab,” I said, not bothering to mess with polite conversation.
“Sorry?” said Mom in that no-nonsense voice that meant she wasn’t going to like the next thing I had to say.
“I’m not going to my next class,” I said again. I shuddered just imagining the chaos that might happen if I lost the real world while mixing chemicals during an experiment. Although I was pretty sure they didn’t let us work with combustibles, I’d seen too many movies where kids blew up their schools on accident because of a stupid mistake
“I think of myself as a tolerant parent,” said Mom.
“I think I’m tolerant too,” said Dad in the background. Clearly, I was on speakerphone.
“But there had better be an excellent reason your butt isn’t in class.”
“You know how I get those pictures in my head?”
“Ah, yes, your artistic inspiration?”
I snorted.
“Did the muse strike?” Dad asked.
“Like a tractor-trailer.” I rubbed my forehead as if the movement would erase the picture from my head. It didn’t work. “Only this was more than just an idea for a drawing or even like those normal times where a picture kind of resolves in my head. One minute I was in class, and then, bam, the whole place disappears, and I’m in a photograph. I couldn’t see school at all.”
“That does sound weird,” Mom said. “Do you need one of us to come pick you up? Only we’re both in the middle of important projects.” Mom’s voice trailed off.
I stared out at the parked cars in front of me as if one of them understood my mother’s obsession with scrapbooking. Her photo albums were works of art, but it was never-ending annoying when they took precedence over everything else, including me. “Yes, well, it would be a tragedy if you had to leave while the glue was still wet.”
“The glue,” Mom said as if she was already half-distracted by whatever project she was working on. “Can’t let the glue dry.”
“The audit I’m working on is fascinating,” Dad called from his side of the room. Dad was an accountant who worked from home. Our house wasn’t big enough for my parents to have separate spaces, so my Mom had set up her elaborate scrapbooking station on the other side of his office. “You can help me with this audit if you’re up to it when you get home,” Dad added. “I can come pick you up, and then we can tabulate the debits.”
“I will never be up to helping with an audit.” Math was just fine, but I did not see the beauty of a balance sheet the way my dad did.
“Do you think you’ll be able to draw it out?” Mom asked.
I nodded, glad one of my parents had remembered why I called. Then I realized she couldn’t see me over the phone. “I’ll try.”
“It can’t hurt.” Mom was a firm believer in using art to expunge the images. It had been her idea three years ago for me to start art classes. “I’ll see if your father has any ideas about this,” she added.
I waited for Dad to say something, seeing as he was sitting right there and all, but the silence stretched out until it became uncomfortable. I realized this would be one of those talk-about-Elaine-and-tell-her-later-what-we-discussed kind of conversations.
“Okay, then,” I said. “I’ll sketch this picture out and see what happens.”
“You know you can call us anytime if you need us,” Dad said.
“I know.”
“If you’re lucky,” Mom added, “you’ll be able to get back into school by your next class.”
I tried not to snort. Today was feeling anything but lucky.
2
WHERE I FIND MYSELF ILL PREPARED FOR REAL LIFE
“ELAINE? ELAINE TAYLOR?”
I turned around, wondering who would yell out my name in the school parking lot in the middle of the day. A cute guy a couple of years older than me dressed in an impeccable gray suit walked toward me across the parking lot. Even though the guy looked like someone had brought to life a Renaissance masterpiece of some pagan deity, “stranger danger” ran through my head. How did this guy know my name? I kind of wished I was still sitting in my car where I’d have a nice steel door and some shatter resistant glass between us, but the car had gotten hotter than the latest designer after having a new look trot down the red carpet. I had abandoned it a half hour ago to sit on a curb a couple of spots down.
This guy looked okay—well, better than okay—like an underwear model had stepped off a billboard and into real life. Still, I’d seen enough reruns of every police TV show every network ever made for me to know that a sociopath could have the face of an angel.
The guy saw me, and he was headed my way. “You’re Elaine Taylor, right?” he asked.
I stood up, but I didn’t answer. I hadn’t decided if I would talk to him or run for the school or what, when he screamed, “Get down!” He pulled out a gun.
I froze. I’d never in my entire life had a gun pointed at me. Other than my dad’s hunting rifle, I wasn’t even sure I’d ever seen a gun in real life before.
“Elaine, get down,” the guy yelled again.
I realized the guy wasn’t pointing the gun at me, but something behind me. I started to turn my head to look, but before my head turned even a quarter, something slammed into my back, knocking me face first into the ground. For a second, I thought I’d been shot, but it didn’t hurt the way I had always imagined a gunshot would. In fact, it felt like something big, and maybe metallic, had shoved me from behind. I gasped until I caught my
breath, and then I rolled over. I instantly wished I had stayed on my face.
My initial instinct was that I must have hit my head, and hit it hard, when I fell to the ground. There was no way the chaos around me was anything other than a massive hallucination. My boring innocuous school’s parking lot had erupted into a war zone. Huge metal knights in actual shining armor fought with some sort of advanced tactical SWAT team. These weren’t medieval knights though. These were technological robotic marvels shooting lasers from tiny guns in their arms and using rockets and bullets along with their swords.
I smiled at my amazing imagination when one of the robot hallucinations landed in front of me, blocking a SWAT guy headed my way. This had to be a dream because the knight wore a purple cape very similar to the one I had been drawing on my knight all morning. The cape looked silly in my drawing, but it looked ridiculous in real life. When I woke up from this weird concussion-induced dream, I’d have to ditch the cape from my drawing.
A robot hand slammed into the window of the car to my right, raining glass all over the ground and me. It was that weird safety glass, so I didn’t get hurt, but the glass falling on my face acted like a jump start for the dead battery that was my brain. For the first time since I’d fallen, my shock-addled mind finally decided to process the battle raging around me. I realized that this wasn’t a dream, a hallucination, or some other trick of my overactive imagination. There were actual bullets flying and real rockets exploding all around me. That robot knight being forced back by the advancing SWAT guys would step on me and crush me any minute now if I didn’t move.
I hurled myself back onto my stomach and scrambled under the nearest car. It was a tall off-road pickup with oversized tires. I crouched behind the nearest tire and hoped the rubber would shield me from the bullets being sprayed all over the entire area by the SWAT team.
Curling into a little ball with my eyes tightly closed, I kind of half-hoped everything would go away, but of course it didn’t. I needed to formulate a plan, one that hopefully ended up with me unhurt. Something heavy slammed into the truck, rocking it back and forth. I shrieked and shut my eyes even tighter. Unhurt seemed unrealistic; I settled on alive. I needed to figure out how to get out of this alive.