Immediately, Elizabeth went totally still. Her face lost all color. With her ringlet curls and white dress, she looked like a porcelain doll come to life. “A—a what?”
“A dragon,” Cordelia said matter-of-factly. “A member of the northern ridged species, and a baby. Probably two or three months old.”
Elizabeth was trembling like a brittle leaf in the wind. Her eyes settled on Icky and Cabal. “What are—what are those?”
“That’s a filch.” Cordelia pointed. “He’s all right, just a little temperamental. And he snores, especially when his allergies kick up. And that”—she pointed to Cabal—“is a zuppy.”
“A zombie puppy,” Gregory said, with a certain degree of pride. “That means he’s not exactly alive. And he has to eat blood.”
“Blood,” Elizabeth repeated dully. The dragon was happily chewing on the ends of her curls.
“Only for the first few weeks,” Cordelia said. “Zuppies have very sensitive stomachs when they’re newly turned.”
Elizabeth was still motionless. It was as though she had been frozen in place. Only her eyes moved, rolling back and forth with a kind of suppressed panic. Taking pity on her, Cordelia moved forward and detached the dragon from her shoulder. Elizabeth gasped, as though she’d been released from underwater, and backed up as far as she could go without hurling herself into the air.
“Tell me,” she said, still panting. “Tell me everything.”
There was no point in trying to conceal the truth. “There are more of them,” Cordelia said. “Not just dragons and filches and zuppies, but hufflebottoms and squelches, slints and cockatrices. My father cares for injured monsters. That’s what he does.” When Elizabeth’s lips curled into a sneer, she added defensively, “Someone has to help them.”
“But now all the monsters are gone,” Gregory finished. “Someone stole them, and dad-napped Cordelia’s father.”
Elizabeth looked to Cordelia as if for confirmation. Cordelia swallowed down the sudden pressure of grief and reached into her pocket for the note she’d retrieved from her father’s closet.
“I found this in his room,” she said.
Elizabeth accepted the note wordlessly, and seemed to take a very long time to get to the end of the fragment. As she read, she seemed to go very green. In fact, she turned the exact shade of a particularly pickled pickle.
But finally, she looked up.
“Let me get this straight,” Elizabeth said, speaking very slowly, as if each word had a physical shape she had to work her way around. “You’re telling me that all those horrible creatures—the slints, the hufflesquelches . . .”
“Hufflebottoms,” Gregory corrected her.
Elizabeth ignored him. “You’re telling me they’re all . . . lost? You’re telling me they might be anywhere?”
“They’re not horrible,” Cordelia snapped. “And they’re not lost. They were taken by a man—”
“Or a woman,” Gregory interjected.
“Or a woman,” Cordelia agreed. “With the initials of HP. It says so right in the note.”
“And it’s our job to find ’em,” Gregory said cheerfully.
Elizabeth’s eyes took on a cloudy look that Cordelia couldn’t decipher. Then she tossed her hair over her shoulder and gave an exaggerated sigh. “It’s lucky for you I’ve no imminent plans,” she said. “Now you’re really going to need me.”
“Need you?” Cordelia repeated. “We don’t need you. We don’t even want you.”
Elizabeth smiled thinly, the way a cat smiles at the mouse between its paws. “Well, then, I suppose you don’t want to know what HP stands for.”
Chapter 19
“You know HP?” Gregory blurted out.
“She’s bluffing, Gregory,” Cordelia said. “She only wants us to think she knows something we don’t.”
“I wouldn’t need to bluff for that,” Elizabeth snapped. “Since what you know isn’t enough to fill a thimble. You don’t even have the right initials.”
Cordelia stared. Elizabeth rolled her eyes so hard, Cordelia was surprised they didn’t turn backward.
“Look again,” she said, returning the note to Cordelia. “That isn’t an H. It’s an N. See? It’s obvious if you compare it to the H in ‘Hello.’ They look completely different.”
She was right: the difference was obvious.
“It’s an N,” Elizabeth went on. “And see here? This bit of ink before it?”
“The comma?” Cordelia asked, when Elizabeth pointed.
“It isn’t a comma.” Even though Elizabeth didn’t add an obviously, Cordelia read it in her facial expression. “Who signs initials directly after a ‘Sincerely’ or ‘Best Wishes for a Successful Abduction’ or ‘In Anticipation of Revenge’? Initials go below the closing salutation.”
“I know how to write a letter, thanks,” Cordelia said, before Eizabeth could start explaining how to count to ten.
“Just not how to read one,” Elizabeth fired back. “That squiggle? It’s the lower half of an S. S-N-P. See? You had the wrong initials all this time.”
“S-N-P,” Gregory repeated slowly, puckering his mouth around each new letter.
“Okay, fine.” Cordelia stuffed the note back in her jacket pocket. “We had the wrong initials, and now we have the right ones. But right or wrong, initials don’t get us very far.”
Gregory still had a funny look on his face, like he was chewing on something he didn’t quite like the flavor of. “Why do I know those initials?”
Elizabeth looked at him pityingly. “Probably because you’ve seen them on about a thousand signs around Boston,” she said. And then, turning back to Cordelia, “SNP stands for the Society for National Protection. They’re the ones,” she added, when Cordelia only stared, “who chased the goblin out from our cellar and tried to kill it.”
Cordelia felt a yank of nausea that had nothing to do with the motion of the basket—although the basket didn’t help. “To . . . kill it?”
“Well, what did you think they would do? Ask it for a Bundt cake?” Elizabeth snapped. “After you found that—thing—living under our garden, we had the SNP camped outside our house for days.”
“That’s right.” Gregory’s expression cleared up. “They had signs all over the stations, too, and wormy volunteers rooting out the strays and vagrants and don’t-belongers.”
“They even accused us of breeding her,” Elizabeth said, with an exaggerated shudder. “As if we’d grown her like a potato plant. The neighbors threatened to burn the house down. Why do you think we had to move from the old house?”
“I’m sorry,” Cordelia said. “I never knew—”
“You never asked,” Elizabeth fired back.
“Maybe because you stopped speaking to me.”
“Oh, sorry. Maybe it was because I was dealing with the goblin living under my house—”
“You could have asked for help—”
“You could have offered it—”
“How about both of you pin it,” Gregory interjected, before Cordelia could respond. “We’ve got bigger fish to fry.” Then, turning to Elizabeth, “You said you know where to find these SNP lugs?”
“Their headquarters is in Worcester,” Elizabeth said, with a little sniff of distaste.
“Worcester, as in Massachusetts?” Cordelia burst out. That was only an hour outside of Boston. “You mean we came all the way to New York for nothing?”
“At least we know who HP is now,” Gregory said, and then he frowned. “Who SNP is, I mean. Seriously Nasty People.”
It was as good a theory as any—and the only one they had. Still, Cordelia hated to admit it. “Bring us down,” she said exasperatedly. “We can talk about it once we’re on the ground.”
That wiped the smirk from Elizabeth’s face. “Yeah . . . um, about that . . .”
Cordelia stared at her. “You do know how to bring us down, right, Captain?”
Elizabeth at least had the grace to look guilty. “Not exactly.”
“You said you knew how to drive this thing!” Cordelia cried.
“I didn’t say I knew how to land.”
“We’ve got another problem,” Gregory said. He was peering over the edge of the basket. “There’s no more land to land on.”
Elizabeth and Cordelia rushed to join him. Cordelia’s heart sank.
Gregory was right. While they’d been arguing, the basket had left the city behind. Beneath them was a smooth stretch of black water.
They were heading directly into open ocean.
There was nothing to do but wait until morning and hope they had not gone too far astray.
And hope, too, it didn’t begin to storm.
Cordelia hadn’t anticipated how cold it would be this high up. She, Gregory, Icky, and Cabal huddled together in the center of the basket, while Elizabeth sat several feet away, staring distastefully at both monsters and swatting at the dragon whenever he happened to swoop near her. The wind rocked the basket gently back and forth and caused the flame beneath the swollen balloon to sputter and spit. Cordelia didn’t want to think about what would happen if the flame went out. They’d go plummeting to earth and splatter, like grapes hurled from the air by a giant.
They shared a dinner of hard seed bread and jerky, which Cordelia had thankfully transferred from her rucksack into her jacket pockets on the train. The jerky was as knotty as a tree branch and just as difficult to chew. Elizabeth managed only a few bites.
“That’s disgusting,” she said.
“Go hungry, then,” Cordelia said.
After that, Elizabeth ate without complaining. And although she made a face when the dragon—who had inexplicably taken a liking to her—curled up next to her feet, she didn’t pull away.
“He won’t light me on fire in his sleep, will he?” Elizabeth asked. When the dragon snored, small bits of steam issued from his nose.
“That depends,” Cordelia said. “Are you flammable?”
Gregory nudged her and whispered, “Be nice.”
“Impossible,” she whispered back.
Gregory lay down. Cordelia was sure she would never sleep, suspended in the air with no idea where they were going or how they would get down. She couldn’t stop thinking about what Elizabeth had said about the Society for National Protection. Had they really intended to kill the old goblin? What possible danger could it have been to them? Goblins and people had coexisted peacefully for millennia, and for many centuries had even intermarried without a problem. And the goblin they’d found beneath Elizabeth’s garden was so old, she was missing her teeth. All three sets of them.
But she curled up beside Gregory anyway. They had no blanket, but once the filch had settled down at their feet and Cabal had folded himself next to their heads, Cordelia began to warm up.
Elizabeth was lying on the other side of the basket, shivering so much her teeth chattered together.
“She’ll freeze,” Gregory whispered.
“So much the better,” Cordelia whispered back.
“Cordelia,” he scolded her. “You don’t mean it.”
Cordelia swallowed a sigh.
“Lie next to us, Elizabeth,” she said, attempting to be pleasant and succeeding only in sounding gruff. “We’ll keep each other warm.”
“I’m fine,” Elizabeth said.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Cordelia said. “It’s colder than Cabal outside.”
“I said I’m fine.”
But after another minute, Elizabeth inched closer to Cordelia. Another minute passed, and she came closer again. Another minute, another inch—until by the time Cordelia drifted off to sleep, Elizabeth was lying directly beside her, and Cordelia was breathing in the smell of her hair.
Chapter 20
Cordelia woke just after 7:30, when the sky was like a dark gray smudge of charcoal, and the sun rising looked like a fire burning over the horizon. Elizabeth looked out over the edge of the basket, the wind lifting her hair behind her and the dragon perched on her left shoulder. In that moment, she looked so much like the girl Cordelia remembered—like her old best friend, the girl who jumped in puddles and hunted the streams for salamanders—that Cordelia was almost afraid to move and disturb the picture.
Then Gregory stirred and muttered something in his sleep, Elizabeth turned around, and the dragon lifted off from her shoulder and began circling through the air.
“Come look,” Elizabeth said. There was a strange expression on her face—as if she had accidentally swallowed a fly.
“Good morning to you too,” Cordelia grumbled, wiping sleep from her eyes with a fist. But she stood up, stamping the cold from her feet, and joined Elizabeth at the side of the basket.
“What is—?” she started to ask, and then she saw, and the words dried up in her throat.
They were skimming over a dark stretch of sea, approaching a coast studded with rocks, where whitecaps were breaking on the shore. Tall ships rose and fell on the swells. Dark pines were interspersed with stubbly beaches, all of them dusted with snow. Beyond them, Cordelia could see crowded spires, touched with gold in the morning light, glittering like enormous icicles pointing in the wrong direction.
They’d made it back to land.
“It’s beautiful,” she breathed. Elizabeth only nodded.
For a while, they stood in silence.
“I’m sorry,” Cordelia said. “About the goblin. I wish I’d never found that stupid tunnel.”
Elizabeth knitted her hands together. “It’s all right,” she said finally. “It wasn’t your fault.” But Cordelia wondered whether she really believed that.
They drew closer to the shoreline, descending through a veil of mist, passing so low over the water that Cordelia could see individual waves breaking around the wharves. So low that Cordelia could see longshoremen gaping at them from the docks.
Too low.
Cordelia turned and saw that the flame keeping the balloon aloft was barely sputtering.
No sooner had she taken a step toward the flame than the balloon dropped. Cordelia screamed. Elizabeth toppled backward, landing on Cabal’s tail. The bottom of the basket hit the water with a splat and a whoosh, and Cordelia thought for one panicked second that they would be thrown over into the hungry waves.
Then, just as quickly, the balloon rose again, and the basket rolled back in the other direction. Cabal landed on top of Cordelia, and she pried him off her chest.
She staggered to her feet as the flame once again sputtered and the balloon dropped, rocketing her stomach into her throat. She lurched toward the flame and grabbed the small canister of gas below it.
Empty.
“Cordelia!” Gregory yelled. The balloon skipped over the waves, skimming the surface of the ocean, careening straight for an outcropping of toothy rocks biting up from the shoreline. “Hold on to the—”
Before he could finish his sentence, the balloon plummeted again and he went sprawling to the bottom, on top of the filch. Water sloshed over the sides of the basket, drenching them all. Up and down they went, like a gigantic yo-yo, hurtling toward the shore.
Elizabeth clung to a support rope, her face green, her eyes wide and terrified. The dragon circled overhead, shrieking in distress.
The dragon.
The idea came to Cordelia vividly, all at once: dragons made flames.
She jumped and just missed the dragon’s leathery wing tips. Down she went, crashing to her knees as the basket once again touched the surface of the ocean, releasing a fine spray of freezing water. She tried again, and this time managed to grab hold of the dragon. He wriggled in her hands, shrieking, batting his wings against her wrists.
“Come on,” she said. She held the dragon to the dying flame and gave him a little shake, as if the dragon were a bottle and the fire was stuck at the very bottom of him. The dragon coughed and two small lines of steam uncoiled from his nostrils. “Come on!” she said again. This time, the dragon did nothing but blink at her.
“Hold on, Cordeli
a!” Gregory shouted. “We’re gonna crash!”
She risked a glance over her shoulder and saw that they were speeding toward a gigantic rock face; any second, they would hit. She was filled with a white-hot panic.
“Please,” she whispered to the dragon, “make fire for us.”
“Now, Cordelia!” Gregory screamed.
Her mind was spitting up random bits of information, churning out memories: how chupacabras have blunt teeth and strong jaws and how specters can glow in the dark and how dragons loved to be tickled on their chins. . . .
And she remembered the time their old dragon, Digbert, had nearly burned down the living room after a particularly lengthy tickle session.
That was it.
As they bumped out of the water and hopscotched toward the giant elbow of rock, Cordelia eased one finger under the dragon’s chin and begin to tickle. The dragon shivered. The dragon snorted.
And then the dragon opened his mouth and released a long, vibrant stream of fire.
The balloon soared upward. They were so close to the rock that Cordelia could have stretched out a hand to touch it; she saw their shadow skate across its pitted surface. Then they were above it. They passed safely inland, skimming over trees threaded with mist. Elizabeth and Gregory whooped for joy. Cordelia kept tickling, and the dragon kept exhaling long, satisfied streams of flame.
But they weren’t yet out of danger. Cordelia knew they would need a place to land safely, and soon. Dragons couldn’t make flames forever, especially not baby dragons—and already she could tell that her dragon was tiring.
As they came over the ridge of trees, a dazzling vista of stone buildings, white-carpeted lawns, churches, and snowy streets unfolded beneath them. Cordelia could see students in university robes huffing through the cold, tracking footprints in the covering of new snow. At one corner of a great quadrangle was a large bell tower, which was just chiming the hour. Eight o’clock.
“We have to find a way to land!” Cordelia called out over the steady roar of the wind.
“I don’t think we have much choice,” Gregory said.
The Magnificent Monsters of Cedar Street Page 15