“No, Jennifer…don’t go…” Jonathan reached out weakly with a wing claw as his daughter callously abandoned him on the crisp lawn. He was torn between pain and laughter. “Oh, you ungrateful wretch…it’s the beaststalker in you! That’s it—you’re grounded!”
“Don’t stomp your foot, dear. This isn’t like pulling a rattlesnake out of the ground.”
“I know, Mom.”
“You’ve ‘known’ for months. But that hasn’t helped. Perhaps another trip to your little dragon theme park would help? Or perhaps not…”
“Get off my back!”
“Okay, sure. I’ll get off your back. And you can fight your battles with a swarm of hapless pygmy owls for the rest of your days.”
“Oh, for crying out—”
“It will be stuff of legends. The Ancient Furnace and her trusty band of miniraptors. All field mice will know and fear your name—”
“Okay, Mom, I get it.”
Jennifer glared at her mother with fierce gray eyes. Elizabeth returned an even, emerald gaze. Neither of them moved for several moments.
Jonathan, back in human form now with the end of the crescent moon, watched from the safety of the deck chair on the backyard porch. He cradled Geddy, Jennifer’s pet gecko, in his left palm while stroking the lizard’s green and red markings with his right thumb. Phoebe, the family’s black collie-shepherd mix, lolled by his feet. Like both animals, he kept his mouth shut.
Jennifer finally adjusted her tanned leather jerkin, raised a rusty, secondhand sword from her mom’s college days, and attempted a deep breath.
“Tighter grip.”
Jennifer gritted her teeth, but the point of her sword came up a bit.
“Deeper breath.”
The resulting hiss was a bit heavier than necessary.
“Begin.”
Jennifer spun around and made a circle high in the air with the point of her sword. It began to glow dimly. In a single, practiced move, she flipped the sword point-down and jammed the tip into the earth right in front of her.
Out of the dirt popped a black-and-gray spotted pygmy owl. It gave a hoot, fluttered over to the backyard porch, and settled down on the railing—at the end of a long line of tiny owls just like it, except all snowy white.
“Well,” sighed Elizabeth, “at least you got a different color.”
“I hate this!” Jennifer plunged her sword hilt-deep into the cool turf.
“Don’t do that, it’s bad for the bl—”
“Why don’t we just go inside already? I’ll never get it right.”
“Honey, birdcalling is not an easy—”
“That bird sucks! The other birds suck! This sword sucks! I suck!”
“Jennifer, that’s simply not true.”
“Which one?”
Elizabeth paused. “Well, you certainly do not suck. The rest is up for debate.”
Her daughter seized the opportunity. “It’s this sword!” She kicked the hilt where it stuck out of the ground. “This thing’s a disaster! What did you do, leave it in the rain the whole time you attended medical school?”
“The sword is fine for training purposes.”
Even Elizabeth herself didn’t seem entirely convinced by that, but Jennifer was ignoring her anyway. “And why do I have to learn all this stuff, anyway? I can fight like a dragon when I need to fight! See?”
In less than a second, she was back in her dragon shape, a shimmering blue-winged lizard with silver accents, a severe nose horn, and a long spike at the end of her double-pronged tail. She continued her rant.
“This stuff, I’m good at! I can breathe fire! I can disappear with camouflage! I can tear stuff with my claws! I can shock things with my tail!” She pounded the ground with her tail, sending bits of turf sailing. “But best of all—” She finished by punctuating her words with stomps of a heavy hind claw. “—I can summon any…lizard…I…want!”
A trio of large, exotic lizards emerged from the earth she had pounded—a black Yangtze Alligator with yellow crossbands, a Galapagos tortoise with moss hanging off of its dark olive shell, and an enormous black mamba that swept the ground under her wings and coiled gently around her left hind leg. Phoebe, up on the porch, whined through her muzzle but relaxed as Jonathan reached down to pet her.
“You promised, Jennifer,” he murmured loud enough for all to hear. Jennifer breathed deeply and willed herself back into human form.
Elizabeth looked over the animals and her daughter with an inscrutable nod. “Perhaps you’re right. You need to ditch that sword.”
“Huh?” Jennifer was startled. “Really? I don’t have to use this anymore? Can I have yours?”
“No.” Her mother’s voice was very stern, and Jennifer recalled last spring, when the two of them had killed Otto Saltin together. Werachnids like Otto were sworn enemies to weredragons, and Jennifer found their spider shapes terrifying. The werachnid champion had not completely died until she had taken her mother’s sword and chopped the sorcerous spider’s eight-eyed head off. Instead of congratulating her on a fine slicing technique, however, Elizabeth had snatched the sword away and yelled at her.
There must be something about a beaststalker’s blade, Jennifer guessed, that’s quite special. Either that, or Mom has sharing issues dating back to childhood.
“There’s something about a beaststalker’s blade that’s quite special,” Elizabeth said, walking to the porch.
Ah-ha! “Really?” Jennifer asked casually.
Jonathan reached under his lawn chair with his right hand (Geddy was now sleeping in his left), pulled out a long shoebox wrapped in foil paper with a glistening bow, and handed it to his wife.
“Each weapon is unique to its owner,” her mother explained. “Over time, beaststalker and blade become almost like brother and sister. As an only child, you may not understand that analogy. Fortunately, I do have a brother. You remember your uncle Mike, who owns that butcher shop in Virginia? Bladesmithing’s a bit of a hobby for him. I contracted his services for this. He sends it with his compliments. Happy fifteenth birthday, dear.”
Jennifer flushed and looked down as she kicked at the lawn. The mamba slid off her leg and sought a dark, cozy spot in the weeds by the porch, where its green-gray skin blended nicely. “Wow. I’m really sorry I wasn’t here earlier, Mom—”
“Forget it. As you pointed out, it’s early yet, and you couldn’t have known. As for your father, he has paid his penance by baking an emergency birthday cake. Your grandfather’s inside now, putting on the candles. We’ll have it in a moment, but you should open this first.”
Jennifer took the shiny gift and gave it a soft shake. It didn’t rattle much. With a single tear, the paper and bow were off the box and on the grass. Left in her hands was a slender but sturdy box of polished mahogany. The locking clasps were brass, and they made satisfying clacks as she popped them open and lifted the lid.
Inside, nestled in black velvet-lined molds, were two long daggers. Their broad blades curved gently from precise steel tips, for well over a foot, to exquisite hilts gilded in bronze. One hilt was in the shape of an angelic woman in flowing robes whose arms hugged the base of the blade; the other was in the shape of a dragon with jaws open, as if devouring the rest of the weapon.
She couldn’t say a word. Setting the box on the ground gently, she knelt, reached into the box with both hands, and pulled the weapons out. The hilts seemed to melt into her hands. Flashing the blades back and forth, Jennifer noted they were each longer than her arm from elbow to fingertip.
“Mike made me my first sword as an apprentice when I was in college—this rusty nail you’ve been using all summer,” Elizabeth explained. Her daughter barely heard her. “When I told him last year it wouldn’t do for you, he offered to replace it for free. He worked on these for some time.”
Jennifer still couldn’t think of anything to say.
“As you can see, my brother’s technique has improved. I don’t think those will rust anytime soon. Now, let’s put them to the test.”
Without any warning, she drew her own sword and brought it down at her daughter’s head.
Jennifer was used to this—all summer long, her mother had tried to find ways to test her reflexes.
But it was hard to surprise the child of a beaststalker and a weredragon. In a flash, the two knives were crossed in an X above their owner’s head, and the mother’s blow stopped cold at their junction.
The knives twisted as Jennifer stood up and turned, and like that Elizabeth’s sword flew out of her hand.
“Well, what do you know,” Jonathan said with a grin from the porch. “First time for everything.”
On an adrenaline high, Jennifer smoothly swirled around with the knives’ points facing up. They blurred and traced a glowing silver halo over her head before she flipped them down and jammed them into the earth together.
In a burst of black feathers, a modest but sturdy eagle with white and red markings arched out of the earth and made straight for the porch railing. The row of owls that had been perched there dissolved into a flurry of hoots and white feathers, and before long the larger raptor stood alone on the railing, cocking its bright crimson face at the serpentine shape that coiled just beneath it.
“Bateleur eagle,” Elizabeth identified with an impressed look. “Member of the snake eagle family. Native to the African savannah. Incredibly large specimen, especially for a male of the species—that must be almost a seven-foot wingspan. Nicely done.”
“Snake eagle?” Jennifer looked in alarm at her black mamba, which had felt the shadow of the bird on its back and was reared up in a warning hiss. The eagle flexed its claws and squawked menacingly. “Um, they wouldn’t happen to call them snake eagles because they’re really good friends with snakes, would they?”
They had just finished separating the combatants when Grandpa Crawford came outside. His gray eyes were bright, but his smile was restrained as he observed the blades in Jennifer’s hands. “Hey, Niffer! Cake’s almost ready. You get your present?”
She flipped up the knives with a grin. “Check it out, Grandpa!”
“They’re nice,” she heard Crawford mutter to her mother. “Of course, it’s just one more thing to keep her from focusing on her dragon heritage.”
“I’m terribly sorry my relationship with my own daughter has crowded your ego. Perhaps we should all leave?” Elizabeth’s voice was less dark than her look.
Before Jennifer could react to the sudden tension, Jonathan cleared his throat. “How about that cake, Dad?”
A few moments later, a birthday cake was on the patio table, with fifteen long and thin candles all poking out of a frosted dragon’s mouth. Jennifer looked around the table, spotted her mother and grandfather still eyeing each other, and made a silent wish: I wish they would get along better.
Of course, she mused as she wiped out all fifteen tiny flames in one breath, they got along a lot better than most beaststalkers and weredragons. Dr. Georges-Scales was the only beaststalker anyone knew who had befriended, much less married, a weredragon. And according to her, Crawford Thomas Scales had softened considerably over the years. Maybe Jennifer had something to do with that.
Crawford was smiling at his granddaughter now. “Good job on the candles, Niffer. Reminds me of your grandmother, before she passed on. I’m sure I’ve told you about the Barn Fire of ’52…?”
Jennifer shook her head, a little warily. As a child she had loved Grandpa’s stories, but as a teenager she had grown a bit impatient with the way he could go on about family history and dragon legend.
“This would be back in Eveningstar,” he started. “Before the werachnids came, of course. Grandma and I had a place on the edge of town. We used it a bit like we use this farm, as a gathering place for weredragons with nowhere else to go during the crescent moon.”
“Like Joseph?” Joseph Skinner was a weredragon without any family in the area; Crawford had let him stay at the farm often last year and help out with the horses, bees, and sheep. Like all new weredragons, he was a couple of years older than Jennifer; but he had been kind to her and helped her with homework.
“That’s right. Anyway, we used woodstoves back then, and we stored a bunch of wood in the basement and barn…”
“Would you like a slice of cake, Crawford?”
The old man shot an irritated look at his daughter-in-law, but Elizabeth kept a tiny smile at the corner of her mouth as she held out a paper plate with cake on it. Jennifer realized her mother knew full well how much Crawford hated interruptions, once he started a story.
“No thanks, Lizzard. As I was saying, we had a wood-stove, and plenty of fuel all over the place. All it took was an oil lamp and a nervous horse by the name of—”
“Jennifer, sweetheart, will you want a small piece or a large one? I’ve got a large one here.”
Crawford hissed audibly and stared—not at the grinning woman holding out the piece of birthday cake, but at Jennifer herself. It was as if he was daring her to make a choice. Beaststalker cake or dragon story?
Diplomacy was crucial. Slowly and gently, and without breaking eye contact with her grandfather, Jennifer reached out, took the cake from her mother, tried a bite, hummed appreciatively, and motioned for him to continue.
He nodded and went on. “So the place is all ablaze, and your grandmother, who was always quite the talker—”
“I always found her rather quiet,” observed Elizabeth.
“Well, Doctor, maybe when you were around she couldn’t get a word in edgewise,” Crawford snapped. He eyed the woman’s leather training armor, as if seeking a vulnerable spot.
“I think it’s because she didn’t care for me much.” The taunting smile never left the woman’s face. Surely, Jennifer thought, here stands a brave woman.
Grandpa Crawford stood up and turned. “I can’t imagine why. Jennifer, perhaps we should continue this story inside—aw, hell, Jonathan!” This last remark was directed at his own son, who had appeared in the doorway at the least convenient time possible.
Jennifer immediately saw something was wrong in her father’s expression. He was holding a phone and listening intently to whoever was on the other end.
“What’s wrong?” Elizabeth stood up and opened the screen door for her husband.
He stepped onto the porch and gave her a hug with his free arm. “Okay, Cheryl…yes, Cheryl…of course. We’ll be there tomorrow. I’m so sorry.”