The Dragon in the Volcano

DRAGON KEEPERS

BOOK
1
THE DRAGON IN THE SOCK DRAWER

BOOK
2
THE DRAGON IN THE DRIVEWAY

BOOK
3
THE DRAGON IN THE LIBRARY

BOOK
4
THE DRAGON IN THE VOLCANO

Jesse didn’t tell his parents that Emmy, his and Daisy’s dragon who masqueraded as a sheepdog, was
so
bored that she had taken to sneaking out of the garage and running loose around the neighborhood. Sometimes, she even followed them to
school. Other times, she disappeared for hours and wouldn’t say where she had been. Daisy was afraid that Emmy was off hunting squirrels and bunnies and other defenseless woodland creatures. When Emmy had started flying, she had switched from eating foods like cheese and cabbage to eating meat. The more meat she ate, the bigger she got. She was almost too big for the garage now, which was a major worry. Where were the Dragon Keepers going to keep their dragon when she didn’t fit in the garage?

Jesse was just signing off when a loud buzzing noise brought him to his feet. He looked around. All the other kids were standing up in their places and looking just as startled as he was. The next moment, Ms. Lasky came into the room and clapped her hands. “Fire drill, kids! Line up along the front wall for a head count.”

Jesse found a place next to Daisy against the blackboard.

“I think it might be a real fire,” Daisy said, her blue eyes shiny with excitement.

When Ms. Lasky had finished counting, she said, “Okay, kids, follow me. We’re going to
walk
—okay?—not run, down the hall, out the fire exit, and line up on the sidewalk in front of the school. You all know the drill.”

“Why do you think it’s a real fire?” Jesse whispered as they walked swiftly down the hall. Kids from other classes were pouring out of their rooms in orderly lines.

Daisy tugged on one of her pale-blond braids. Her ears were bright pink and a little pointy. Her nose was pink, too, and right now, it was twitching like a rabbit’s. “Because I smell something burning—don’t you?”

Jesse sniffed and shrugged. To him, that was the way October smelled in America, like burning leaves. He had lived in hot countries his whole life before moving in with his cousin Daisy’s family last spring. He liked the autumn almost as much as the spring. He liked the way the trees, with their leaves of bright yellow and red and orange, seemed to be lit up from within, like giant lanterns. He even liked the way it got dark early and the lights in the houses along their street winked on as Jesse and Daisy walked home after school.

Uncle Joe had started to make fires in the living room fireplace at night. Jesse loved sitting on the hearth and staring into the dancing flames. He and Daisy would sit before the fire and sing one of the rounds they had learned in chorus, first Jesse, then Daisy joining in:

By now, all of the kids from kindergarten through fifth grade were lined up on the sidewalk outside the school. The kids who had been at recess had their coats on. The kids who had been in gym class were shivering in their gym uniforms, and the kids who had been in art class were wearing their smocks. They all stood quietly in their groups and stared at the school building as if they expected it to burst into flames at any second.

Suddenly, the public address speakers crackled as the voice of Ms. Goodman, the principal, announced, “This has been a fire drill. Please wait to return to your classrooms until the buzzer sounds again.”

Daisy’s shoulders slumped in disappointment.

The next moment, they heard an eruption of laughter coming from the third graders standing on the corner.

“What’s going on now?” Daisy wondered.

Suddenly, their dragon, Emmy, in sheepdog form, came trotting around the corner of the
building with a nozzle clenched in her mouth. She proudly dragged behind her the green garden hose belonging to Mr. Fine, the school janitor. Then Uncle Joe came barreling into view, his long, graying ponytail flying behind him as he frantically waved Emmy’s leash in the air.

“Emmy, put that hose down this instant!” he called to her.

Now everyone was laughing, even Ms. Goodman, who had come outside to see what all the commotion was about.

Emmy stopped running and gave Uncle Joe a chance to catch up with her. Then she began running circles around him, and it wasn’t long before Daisy’s father was wrapped like a mummy up to his knees. When Emmy ran out of hose, she dropped the nozzle on the ground and sat in front of Uncle Joe. Her stub of a tail wagged eagerly, her long, pink, forked tongue lolling out of her mouth.

The only person who wasn’t laughing, other than Uncle Joe and Jesse and Daisy, was their classmate Dewey Forbes. “Your dog is an ill-mannered upstart,” he said. “My Loretta would never do anything like this. That’s because poodles have manners. I’ve made a study of it, and I have concluded that Emmy must not really be a purebred sheepdog. She must have something else mixed in
there … like
Devil Dog
!” Now Dewey snickered and snorted.

Daisy leveled a dead-eyed stare at Dewey.

Jesse shook his head sadly. What could he say? Emmy’s behavior was nothing to brag about. The fact was that Emmy was an excellent dragon but, lately at least, a very bad dog.

“She’s just bored,” said Daisy, “because we’re in school all day.”

“Maybe you should try crating her,” said Dewey. “As a training method, crating has a high degree of proven success.”

Jesse shuddered at the thought of cooping Emmy up like that. They had nailed together two wooden packing crates to make a nest for her, filled with their rolled-up socks. But only yesterday, she had cracked her nest because she was so big.

Mr. Fine and Ms. Goodman were untangling Uncle Joe from the hose. When they were done, Uncle Joe snapped the leash onto Emmy’s purple collar and walked her back around the corner of the building to take her home. The all-clear buzzer sounded. One by one, the classes began to file back into the building.

As Ms. Lasky’s class began to move, Jesse caught sight of Uncle Joe’s beat-up old truck heading down the road in the direction of home. Emmy
was sitting in the front seat, peering forlornly out the back window. Just then, Jesse caught a glimpse of High Peak, looming over the tops of the trees. It was the extinct volcano where he had found the thunder egg from which Emmy had hatched. A cloud was snagged on the mountain’s snowcapped summit, looking remarkably like a wisp of smoke. Or was it a
real
wisp of smoke?

They didn’t have any after-school activities, so Jesse and Daisy headed home when the last lesson was over. Emmy was waiting for them in the garage. They had run out of animals to compare her with for size. She was bigger than any land mammal, and while some whales were bigger than she was, they had the entire ocean to swim around in. Emmy had to bend her head to fit in the garage, as she read a magazine that looked, in her long green talons, no bigger than a matchbook. She looked up at them, her emerald-green eyes moist with sorrow.

“Chad and Amanda are splitsville!” she said in a tragic tone.