Dark Fire

by Chris D'Lacey

  Tam doubled the beam and saw, to his amazement, a run of what appeared to be overlapping scales. They were dark green, just as Hannah had described, and set in the wall like a row of large tiles. He traced the color sideways and noted there were other contiguous patches standing out here and there from the chamber wall. If this was a dragon’s tail, it was curving, not straight.

  By now, Lucy had seen it as well. Tam caught his breath as he watched her stretch on tiptoe and fix her fingers around one of the scales. The volume of her song increased. He noticed Hannah put her flashlight down so she could press her hands together in prayer. He thought he could hear her asking for forgiveness but the chance to ask her what she meant by that was overtaken by a sudden thump from deep within the hill.

  He aimed his light toward the ceiling. A few grains of earth rained down from a fissure.

  Lucy stopped singing. The thump came again. “That’s a heartbeat,” she said. “It is a dragon. I can feel her auma.”

  Hannah’s hands went up to her mouth. “Then it’s … true,” she gasped. She staggered back and fell against the chamber entrance. “You’ve actually woken her.”

  “Wasn’t that the intention?” said Tam. He moved toward Lucy as more earth fell. “OK. Job done. Time to get out of here.”

  Grabbing the girl’s arm, he dragged her away and pushed her into the tunnels again. He trained his flashlight back onto Hannah, who hadn’t moved. “Hannah, come on. What are you waiting for?” Her eyes were filled with awe, her brow beaded with sweat.

  “She’s alive,” she breathed.

  “Apparently so. Now lead us out.”

  Hannah took a deep breath and looked at him blankly. “My flashlight. I left it on the floor of the chamber.”

  Tam panned his light back in. He couldn’t see it. “All right, go to Lucy. I’ll find it. Hurry.”

  Hannah stepped out into Lucy’s flashlight beam.

  “What’s happening? Where’s Tam?” the girl demanded.

  Hannah merely shook her head.

  At that moment, a wind raced along the tunnel with the same kind of swirling intensity Lucy had experienced when waiting for an underground train to arrive. She whipped around and stared into the darkness. One by one, the bulkhead lights came on. The figure of Ms. Gee appeared between them almost floating along the path.

  “Tam!” Lucy screamed. But by then Ms. Gee had raised her hand and uttered a spell. The Tor rumbled and a great mass of earth crashed down from the chamber roof, plugging it completely.

  Tam. Lucy screamed his name again and ran to the mud face, clawing at it with her cold, bare hands. “What have you done?” she yelled, already thick with tears. “Get him out! Get him out!”

  “Save your breath, child. He’s already dead,” said Ms. Gee.

  “You!” Lucy snarled. “You made him go back into the chamber!” She threw herself at the traitorous Hannah, looking to squeeze her scrawny neck. A bolt of energy from Ms. Gee made her fall away, breathless. As she slumped against the mound of earth burying Tam, something briefly eclipsed one of the low-level bulkhead lights. It was the cat, Bella.

  Now it was Hannah’s turn to question the sibyl. “You’ve killed him,” she panted, traumatized into instant repentance. “That wasn’t the arrangement. You told me he’d only be imprisoned, not murdered!”

  Ms. Gee snorted. “He was a threat. Besides, do you think the dragon would have spared him? In my opinion, I did the fool a favor. And now it is time to be rid of you.”

  The Tor beat again. Hannah felt the ground quake. She stumbled away, her eyes darting at the fine cracks appearing in the ceiling. The wooden support she was clinging to creaked. In places along the rumbling walls, rivulets of water were spurting through the mud and turning to steam. “I pray the queen doesn’t spare you, witch …” She dipped into her pocket and pulled out the skeleton of a tiny hand. She threw it at Ms. Gee, who caught it, gave a repugnant sneer, and crushed it instantly to dust.

  “That belonged to my ancestor, Mary Cauldwell,” Hannah said, stumbling backward away from the sibyl. “Anyone who touches it is cursed. Welcome to a nasty death, Ms. Gee. I hope you get the chance to look into Gawaine’s eyes before she sears the flesh off your bones.”

  “Curses?” scoffed the sibyl, dusting her hands off. “I’d be more concerned about a stone in my shoe.” With that, she lifted her hand again and another bolt of energy took Hannah off her feet and sent her flying down the tunnel.

  Ms. Gee raised her chin, expecting to hear the satisfying crunch of disintegrating ribs as Hannah’s body struck a solid wall of earth. Instead, there was a sickly mulching noise. A death moan escaped from Hannah’s throat. Ms. Gee frowned, looking puzzled. To her surprise, Hannah was pinned to the wall and not in a crumpled heap on the floor. The sibyl, bizarrely, put on her glasses. Her confusion quickly cleared along with her myopia. Hannah’s body was skewered in three neat places, buttoned from her breast to her groin by talons. Her corpse squelched as the talons expanded further into three fully extended claws, pushing her internal organs out. Ms. Gee stepped back. For once in her life she almost vomited as she watched the claws contract into a fist.

  Dry-mouthed, she said, “Girl, get up.”

  There was no response from the tunnel floor.

  “Get up, I said!” Ms. Gee whipped around.

  But Lucy — and the smoky gray Bella — had gone.

  38 TERROR ON THE ROAD

  Mom, where are we going?” Melanie Cartwright said.

  Rachel’s mouth curled into a secretive smile. “On a little detour.”

  Melanie glanced at the GPS screen, which had been “recalculating” their route for the last half hour. “Not more relatives?” She crossed her arms and sighed. How many cheek pinches and hairy-lipped kisses could a girl take?

  “Be patient. It’s not far now,” said her mom. “In fact, we really ought to see it soon.”

  Melanie looked through the window. Fields and trees. “Please tell me we’re not going to another garden center?” She slumped into her seat. What was it with people when they hit their forties? Why did shops that sell plant pots suddenly become so attractive?

  Overwhelmed by her daughter’s mounting apathy, Rachel finally caved in. “All right, I’ll tell you — as we’re slightly lost and I think I’ll have to tap the name into the GPS anyway.” She pulled over and brought up the keyboard screen. “Where would you most like to have been today?”

  “At home, watching TV,” Melanie said drily. “We’re missing all the dragon stuff.”

  Her mother grinned, looking youthful and pretty. “What if we weren’t — missing the ‘dragon stuff,’ I mean?” She turned the screen.

  Melanie gave out a loud gasp. “Scuffenbury?!”

  Rachel hit SEARCH and set the car in motion. “I realized yesterday that your aunt Jane lives only about sixty miles from the site. I thought it would be a treat for you. A sweet way to end our ‘tour.’ You never know, we might bump into Lucy.”

  The voice of the GPS crackled.

  Melanie pointed threateningly at it. “Do NOT break now.”

  Rachel leaned forward and tapped it. “Strange. It’s always been pretty reliable before — apart from that time it led us onto a construction site instead of a parking garage.” She followed the arrow and took a right turn. “You’ll like Scuffenbury. It has a wonderful atmosphere.”

  “Can we climb the Tor?”

  “Oh, I think that’s obligatory.”

  Melanie rustled in a shopping bag by her feet. She resurfaced holding Glade. “Can she come with us?”

  “As long as you don’t drop her. She’ll be in several pieces at the bottom if you do. I — oh, what’s that?”

  The sound of the small car’s engine thickened and it slowed to a quarter of its speed.

  A large black bird was standing in the road ahead.

  Rachel hooted the horn. “Shoo, silly thing.”

  “Just drive at it,” Melanie said. “It’ll fly off when you get too cl
ose. I’ll scare it away with Glade.” She brought the mood dragon up to the window and made one of her customary grrrs.

  Right away, Glade’s ivy turned completely black and she seemed to fly out of Melanie’s hands. Melanie saw a blur of motion and whipped around to face the rear of the car. Her coat, which she’d thrown onto the backseat, appeared to be hiding a trembling bump.

  “Mom, w-what just happened?” she said.

  Rachel was staring at the GPS screen. On it was an image of a snarling raven. She slammed her foot down hard on the gas.

  A split second later something dark impacted with a whump on the windshield. Both females screamed as the glass cracked into a many-pointed star. With a screech of tires the car slid off the road and onto a dirt track between the hedges, where it collided with the post of a gate before coming to a halt, nose down and steaming.

  “Mel?” gasped her mother, fumbling for her seat belt and reaching across to free Melanie from hers. “Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

  Before Melanie could respond, something struck at the windshield again, breaking a hole the size of a tennis ball in it. The head of a bird punched through the gap. It was the ugliest thing Melanie had ever seen. She screamed and drew her hands and feet into her body, ducking as the raven spat. It left a glob of phlegm on the headrest behind her, which quickly began to dissolve away the cloth. With a snort, it whipped its head toward Rachel. It bared a set of miniature fangs, filling the car with the hideous odor of raw, undigested meat. Rachel wasn’t slow to react. Snatching the GPS off the dashboard she struck the bird twice with as much sideways force as she could muster. Its eye was almost punctured on a spike of glass; the same spike skewered its cheek instead. The creature shrieked and thrashed its wings, its hooked claws squealing on the hood of the car. Then, in a movement that must have caused enduring pain, it sawed its head back and forth against the jags, gashing its mouth as it freed itself. A pencil line of black blood ran down the inner surface of the glass and dripped into the air vent at the bottom. And yet, despite its appalling wounds, the bird was able to flog the glass again with even greater force. Suddenly, the entire windshield disintegrated. The bird’s evil eyes glowered at its two adversaries. Wings spread, it was now as wide as the car.

  “Mel, get out!” Rachel yelled, and was grateful to see the passenger door open and her daughter fall onto the grass shoulder beside it. But her own door, wrenched and buckled by the crash, stayed jammed. In an instant the bird had forced its way in. It clamped Rachel Cartwright’s face in its claws and knocked her head against the frame of the car. It would surely have gone on to fracture her skull if a voice hadn’t called out in the tongue of dragons: Stop!

  The raven paused. Rachel’s blood was warm between its claws. In one swift movement it let go of the broken, unconscious human and snatched up the little mood dragon instead, dragging Glade out onto the hood of the car.

  “No-oo.”

  The raven turned its head. The human that had not tried to challenge it was huddled up and crying at the side of the road. For a moment it considered terminating the girl, wondering if the tiny life quaking in its claws could be made to shed its fire tear. But the dragon had been brave to give itself up and was therefore unlikely to demonstrate weakness. And there was no time to waste in idle speculation, not when the rest of the raven flock had been turned to water — or lately to ash — by a dragon many times the size of this.

  And so the last of the ravens that would be a darkling took to the skies with its delicate hostage, spreading its shadow in premature triumph over the image of the horned white horse, before pitching toward the hill from where the dragon auma was steadily rising. There it set down — in the branches of a dead tree beside an old house — and concealed itself in shadow, awaiting developments, unaware that the dragon imprisoned in its grasp was not quite as helpless as it might have seemed. For Glade was doing innately what all Pennykettle dragons were capable of: She was sending out a message to a listening dragon. Her signal of distress was beaming across the Vale of Scuffenbury all the way back to Wayward Crescent, where it was indeed being heard — but not by the listener on top of the fridge or even by Grace, still in semistasis on the workbench in the den. Both of those dragons had now been superseded by one with fast-growing, superior powers. His name, albeit arbitrary, was Gwillan.

  And his time had come.

  39 ESCAPE

  Though her lungs were bursting and tears continued to cloud her vision, Lucy ran and ran down the Glissington tunnels, driven on by fear and the rumbling groans of the shifting Tor. Every few yards a shower of earth fell. The air was now dreadfully choked with heat and soiled with an awful, fetid smell that was beginning to sting the lining of her nostrils, something foul she knew she could have identified if she’d taken the time to try. But time was something she didn’t have. Ms. Gee could not be far behind.

  On the path, lit by the lights at floor level, Bella was leading the escape. While the sibyl and Hannah had been arguing by the chamber, the cat had padded up, pawed Lucy’s hand, and together they had drifted away. So far Bella had guided them faithfully, past two of the kerosene marker lamps, but as they approached the intersection of tunnels she skidded to a halt and disappeared suddenly into the shadows. Confused, and fearing more treachery, Lucy at first prepared to run on. A warning yowl from the cat made her stop and reconsider. It was then she heard what Bella must have heard: Clive’s voice, farther along the tunnel, calling out in search of Hannah. If Clive and Hannah were working together, Lucy needed to hide. Looking back and seeing no sign of Ms. Gee, she followed Bella’s cry and found herself in a backfilled side tunnel, scrabbling up a mound of earth until she was several feet higher than the path and swallowed up in a knot of darkness.

  It wasn’t long before Clive and Ms. Gee came together. Lucy had managed to draw herself up with Bella’s warm body pressed against her shins. Although they could not be readily seen, Lucy’s concern was that they might be heard. The cat was making small gagging noises, her sensitive nose tortured by the putrid odors and the heat. Lucy silently gathered her up, just as Clive swept past with a flashlight. A few yards down the tunnel, he stopped. “Ms. Gee? What the —? Has Hannah brought you here? What’s going on?”

  “Where’s the girl?” said Ms. Gee, with a sandpaper snarl.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lucy heard Clive say, and her heart almost burst. For she realized now that Clive was innocent and therefore in terrible danger. But in those fateful few seconds she spent wrestling with the option of warning him or not, another evil was about to be done.

  “You need to get out of here,” Clive went on. He was coughing deeply and his voice was strained. “Dragons are emerging from hills and mountains all over the world. This is a predestined site. Run, Ms. Gee. These tunnels aren’t safe. Even if the rigs don’t collapse from her movements, you’re going to be poisoned by the stench of her urine.” (Urine. That was the smell. Lucy covered her mouth and quashed a rush of bile.) “After several thousand years of nonrelease, there are certain things a hibernating creature needs to do. Now, is Hannah down here or not? Hannah!”

  “Idiot,” Ms. Gee said coldly.

  “What?”

  At that moment, Lucy decided to give herself up. What else could she do to save Clive’s life? But just as she began to call out, her exclamation was quickly abridged by a loud and lingering gurgling sound emerging from Clive’s throat. It was followed by a cocktail of spurting liquid, tightening muscle, and a strangely hideous popping noise. Lucy sank back in terror. She knew right away that Clive was dead, but could only imagine what horrors the sibyl must have committed. She heard the fatal slump of his body, followed by Ms. Gee’s brief snort of contempt. With it, all hope of escape seemed to fade. To make matters worse, Bella was arching up in her lap, doing her utmost not to sneeze. Lucy quickly turned the cat into her body hoping to soften the sound against her clothes, but the tiny expulsion of air sounded like the crash of a hundred dishes. In
the tunnel, she saw a light beam rise. Ms. Gee had picked up Clive’s flashlight.

  Within seconds, their hiding place was flushed with light. “Out,” the sibyl snarled. “And bring that ungrateful girl with you.”

  The cat hissed. Lucy cradled her tighter. Though she couldn’t be sure which of them Ms. Gee was addressing, she boldly shouted, “Why? Why are you doing this? Why did you turn Bella into a cat?”

  “Because she’s unruly, like you,” the sibyl growled. “I find young girls become more … polite for the experience, especially when they know what will happen to their parents if they should betray me or try to leave. I trust you’re listening, Bella?”

  The cat shivered. Lucy stroked her head. “Why her? Why pick on Bella?”

  There was a triple thump and the Tor shuddered. The stench of urine grew even stronger. Lucy turned her head. The soil beside her was sweating with the stuff. In the space behind Ms. Gee, the air was also beginning to mist, giving the appearance of fine rain.

  Even so, the sibyl kept talking. “She’s a red-headed innocent, born of dragons. I brought her here to calm the creature — and, as luck would have it, the unicorn. But you and she are from the same stock, which makes one of you dispensable — or perhaps you both are.” Lucy didn’t like the sound of that. A smug sibyl was a seriously dangerous one. From Ms. Gee’s lips came more words of magick. Lucy tensed herself, half-expecting she would be padding along like Bonnington from now on. Yet, as the spell ended, nothing much seemed to have happened. Then she saw that Ms. Gee was holding an unstopped vial, into which a few drops of liquid were falling. Lucy touched her cheeks. They were hot and dry. The old witch had stolen her tears.

  “What are you doing?” Lucy gasped.

  “Oh, come, girl. I don’t have time for history. Didn’t the sibyl that delivered you teach you anything? Your tears are the purest form of the dragon essence within you and the safest means of identifying yourself to them.” She stoppered the vial and waggled it in front of her evil face. “If I’m correct — and I usually am — one drop of this thrown into the eye of the Glissington cairn will spread out and form a mirror to reflect moonlight back over Scuffenbury Hill. The light wakes the unicorn, the unicorn frees the dragon. Perfect. You really are quite useful, you girls. All I need now is your beautiful red hair. Oh, and for your insolence, child, I will try to make this as painful as possible — before I kill you, that is.” She twisted a hand.