This morning, in my familiar home, safely nestled in a bustling town, talk of a dragon had been an intellectual exercise, but out here, miles from civilization, alone and unarmed, it was a frightening reality. I’d smelled the dragon’s carrion stench and felt the fear it pushed before it like a psychic bow wave. If I had one functioning brain cell left in my head, I’d turn around and race back the way I’d come.
But that was the way the dragon had gone. I remembered crossing several patches of open land and tried not to think of what would happen if the creature came across me in the open Jeep as I crossed one of those exposed areas.
If retreating wasn’t an option, neither was cowering here until night fell. The thought of sharing the darkness with that thing sent a new spasm of shivers rattling through me. I leaned my forehead against the steering wheel, and waited for the shaking to subside. As crazy as it sounded, continuing on toward the spot Robby had pointed out on the map appeared to be the wisest decision.
As if the word
wisdom
could be applied to any of my recent actions.
I’d embarked on this ill-conceived mission to help Robby and my best chance to find him was to continue. A moment of terror slithered into my mind.
Oh, God—or Bast or whoever watches out for him—let him be safe
.
The sounds of life flowed back across the wetlands. Insects droned and birds warbled. The rabbit dashed for the safety of its den in a rustle of grass. I started the Jeep, jammed it into gear, and bounced along the muddy ruts. From the way nature had crept back into the edges on the trail, it seemed this part wasn’t traveled much. After a few miles, I discovered why. A large pine had fallen, blocking the way, downed by one of the hurricanes that ripped through this area several years ago. If I wanted to continue, I’d have to go the rest of the way on foot.
Camera draped across my chest, I scrambled over the log. Once beyond that obstruction, the path soon deteriorated to a single lane, hardly more than a game trail through an expanse of knee-deep grass. Alert for the sound of returning wings, I pressed on, the exposure spawning an unscratchable itch between my shoulder blades.
The rank stench of a predator’s den guided me to the nest, an odor so oppressive I could taste it in the humid air. Pushing through a line of palmettoes, I stepped into an open vista of sawgrass prairie, a shallow marsh of razor-edged grasses bordered on the north by a large, cattail-ringed pond. Several hundred feet out into the slough, a hammock rose out of the water, providing a dry spot for a few sable palms and cypress trees to put down roots. Something about its hunch-backed shape looked odd. A mound of dirt and twigs easily twice my height stood at the water’s edge, the sawgrass and cypress seedlings around it broken and trampled.
I zoomed in with my camera to get a closer look. The accumulation of reeds, twigs, and mud reminded me of an alligator’s nest, although much, much larger. Like the native reptile, the dragon probably used the heat generated by the decay of vegetation to incubate its eggs.
Through the lens, the pallid fragments strewn across the base of the nest resolved into a scattering of bones. I picked out the long sinuous curve of vertebra and ribs of a large snake, and then the camera swept past a pale, rounded dome. I jerked back to it.
A human skull.
An icy blade of fear pierced my chest. I staggered, almost dropping the camera
.
It couldn’t be him.
Not Robby.
I steeled myself for a second look. Picked clean, and weathered to a dirty ivory, the skull appeared weeks old. I noticed scraps of faded, checkered cloth, like a flannel shirt, and recalled a story of a hiker reported missing north of Alligator Alley.
A hawk’s sharp whistle cut off, and the buzzing gossip of insects vanished. Into that stillness came the faint sound of immense wings, beating and gliding. I scampered back among the palmettoes and crouched, my lungs laboring in quick, shallow breaths. The dark shape soared overhead and I got my first look at a real dragon.
Shakagwa Dun was no friendly, animated beast or the jerky stop-motion monster of a Ray Harryhausen film. It was the spawn of the Loch Ness monster and a vampire bat, a nightmare H. P. Lovecraft might have dreamed up after an all-night bender. Thick, bony ridges covered its back, colored a blotchy green and black for camouflage in a marshland. The sides and belly looked no less impervious, armored in thick gray-green scales. A pair of powerful hind legs, tucked up under the body, clutched a large python in obsidian claws.
At first, I thought the dragon’s front limbs had evolved into wings, like a bird, but as it landed and began to move about the nest, I noticed clawed hands midway down the appendages. The scientist in me analyzed this adaption almost dispassionately. The outside digit had elongated to provide support for the wing, much in the fashion of some of the flying dinosaurs, the pterosaurs.
I wondered if that’s what dragons were—dinosaurs that hadn’t gone extinct. Perhaps Mycon hadn’t been struck by the meteorite that had brought the Cretaceous Era to such a thunderous close in this world. I could be looking at a living dinosaur. I remembered I had a camera, rose, and began snapping pictures.
The dragon shuffled about on all four limbs, its shorter front legs forcing it to move in an odd, hopping gait that parodied a kangaroo. Folded up, its wings rose behind its back in twin spires. It settled on it haunches, tearing the snake into chunks and bolting them down with a quick toss of its head.
Through the lens, I locked gazes with Shakagwa Dun. In my excitement to get a better picture, I’d crept into the open, in full sight of the dragon. The cold yellow eyes studied me and then narrowed in hunger. It crouched, sliding first one foot and then the other forward, stalking me like a cinematic velociraptor, but this was all too real. I staggered, and the movement triggered the dragon’s hunting instinct. It opened its bloody maw to reveal a set of serrated teeth that would look at home in a great white’s mouth. It hissed with the sound of a thousand tea kettles boiling at once, and a cloud of greenish vapor sprayed from its mouth.
The dragon attacked, throwing itself into a graceless charge across the marsh, spraying muck and broken vegetation in geysers behind its powerful hind limbs. I whirled and lurched toward the low palms, more in instinct than any real hope of attaining safety. The Jeep lay too far away to reach before that nightmare overtook me, and nothing in the way of cover lay between me and there. Flight seemed useless, but I still ran.
A hand clamped down on my mouth before I could let out a scream. A strong arm wrapped around my waist, lifted me, and pulled me against a warm, hard body.
“Do not move, milady, and make nary a sound,” Robby whispered, his lips next to my ear.
I wanted to scream his name, but against his restraining hand, it came out as a whimper. He shushed me again and began a mumbled litany that I felt against my skin as much as heard. The singsong words meant nothing at first. I thought he was trying to comfort me, but the air around us began to change, to thicken until it was like breathing pudding. He muttered an incantation. A flash of hope filled me, only to be dashed in the next instant as I realized we were out of time. The dragon would reach us in seconds, long before he could complete his spell.
I rolled my eyes to the side, watching death gallop toward us, but now it seemed to move slowly, as if it, too, was trapped in that viscous fluid. The fountains of mud thrown up in its wake pirouetted in the air and drifted to the ground like falling ashes. Green droplets sprayed from the dragon’s mouth and hung in the sunlight like ichorous crystals.
The cadence of Robby’s words changed, and the atmosphere solidified into a transparent cocoon pressing in on us. The world beyond the invisible barrier flowed and distorted like an image seen from the bottom of a murky pool. My lungs burned, as I tried to drag the gelatinous air past his fingers. Robby’s hand slipped from my mouth and eased down to my shoulder. As he pressed me against his chest, I could feel his hands shaking. Fear, fatigue, or both?
Stretched beyond its breaking point, the temporal flow snapped back to its normal pace with a crack I felt inside my head. The dragon surged toward us, a green and black tsunami. As it reached our side of the pond, the beast slid to a stop, and reared back on its hind legs. It lashed its tail like a wet cat, flattening vegetation and sending up sprays of mud. The long, sinuous neck stretched out, bringing the creature’s snout down to sniff the spot where I had stood mere seconds ago. It huffed out a cloud of greenish vapor. The grasses touched by the venomous mist withered, blackening and turning to ash.
The beast lifted its muzzle, yellow eyes sweeping in puzzlement, searching for its lost prey. The huge head swung closer, and I tensed, certain it would collide with our invisible shield. Closer still it came, until I could see the texture of the skin on its face, a pebbly mosaic of green and black in a tracery of stripes and whorls. Fleshy black barbels writhed on its snout, disturbing the cloud of flies drawn to the gore-encrusted mouth.
Shakagwa Dun lifted its head, searched the area again, and roared its anger and frustration. The sound reached me as a vibration against the walls of our invisible shield. The dragon turned and shambled back through the trail of broken grass, stopping to look rearward between the spires of its folded wings several times before returning to its interrupted meal.
I felt Robby’s breath against my cheek. “Follow my lead, Laura. We are going to ease away from here.” As I took a step, his arms tightened about me. “Slowly—very slowly. The spell is harder to hold while we move. Do not talk, do not even breathe more than necessary.”
A headache pounded behind my eyes, keeping time with my pulse.
We inched away with interminable slowness, freezing each time the dragon lifted its head. Once out of its sight, Robby released me and I felt the spell dissipate in a spangle of light. He staggered, leaned over with his hands on his knees and panted. “That really…takes it…out of you,” he gasped between breaths. When he rose to face me, a storm brewed behind his pale eyes.
“What are you doing here, Laura?”
I turned his question away with one of my own. “Are you okay, Robby? You look…tired.” I wanted to say awful, but opted for diplomacy. His clothes were torn and covered with mud. Twigs and burrs stuck to his hair. The darkness underneath his eyes was not dirt, but exhaustion. He looked like a man who’d put in a rough and sleepless forty-eight hours and saw no hope of respite in the future.
“I saw you from the other side of the lake, but I had to race all the way around to get to you. I ran like all the fire sprites
in Hell were after me, but I feared I would never make it in time. I threw up that temporal distortion spell to slow the bloody great worm down long enough to come up with a concealing glamor that would stand up to it sniffing around. The
Veil of Saint Caraketis
is useful for hiding inanimate things, but not living beings who need to breathe. The Veil is impermeable. No oxygen in, no carbon dioxide out. If we were forced to stay in there much longer, we would have been in danger of passing out.”
He ran his hands over his hair, dislodging a few leaves. “You must have used some kind of vehicle to get out here. Where is it?”
I gestured. “The Jeep’s back that way a bit, in a stand of trees.”
With a hand tight around my upper arm, he propelled me along the trail. “We need to put a little distance between us and that beastie. When we get to your Jeep, you are going to drive out of here as fast as you can and wait for me at your house. I shall have to try and distract it while you flee.”
“You’re mad at me?”
He snorted. “Aye, a bit, but more I was afraid. If I had let something happen to you, after I had only just found you again…” His voice trailed off, and his hand slid down my arm to twine around my fingers.
I squeezed back. “I wanted to thank you. For giving me back the memories of that summer.”
“I never agreed with what he did. I knew you would not tell a soul.”
“Did you get in a lot of trouble?”
“Aye, that I did. For two seasons I had to do all my chores without the use of magic, which meant cleaning out the barn with a pitchfork and sweeping the tower like a scullery maid. My master said it built character. And muscles. He kept me so busy with my studies over the next few years that I could never slip away, but as soon as he began sending me out on the Road on little errands, I would sneak into Vayron and check on you.”
“I never saw you.”
“You were not supposed to. Then one day you were gone, away to college a neighbor said. You were going on with your life, so I decided it was time for me to do the same. I had not been back to Naples since, not until I tracked Shakagwa Dun here. Last night, I was hurt and needed a place to rest and heal. Then I discovered my footsteps had carried me to that Gate behind your house. I promised myself that I would be gone in the morning, but when I saw you…” His words trailed off, and he shook his head. “Perhaps involving you was not the wisest thing I could have done.”
“Don’t think you’ve cornered the market on stupid moves. I can imagine what my dad would have said about me taking off into the glades alone, without letting anyone know where I was going.”
He helped me scramble over the fallen tree and we walked the last few feet to the Jeep in silence. He leaned against the door and scrubbed his hands over his face. The ratty green scrunchie still circled his wrist.
I wanted to reach out, to brush the muddy lock of dark hair from his face, but I twisted my fingers together instead. “You’re exhausted. This is all my fault.”
“No, Laura. Weaving those incantations in this world is like swimming through treacle.” His lips smiled but the pale eyes were dull and lifeless.
“But you wouldn’t have had to work that last spell if you hadn’t needed to protect me. I should have stayed home—like you told me to.”
He pulled me against him, resting his chin on the top of head. “As I recall, you were never good at listening to anything I told you.”