Jennifer Scales and the Ancient Furnace Page 11

  “They are brutal,” he answered sadly. “But I’m afraid even your potent imagination does not do them justice, Jennifer. While the werachnids act out of animal instinct, the beaststalkers—so we call them—act out of religious fervor. Barbara is their patron saint, and they seek us out in an effort to smite evil.

  “Beaststalkers often have swords as you suggest, but they do not need them. They are masters of the duel, walking weapons that use light and sound to subdue even the most powerful of Allucina’s other children. Their very voice can paralyze their foe. Some even—”

  Suddenly Crawford stopped, as if something had occurred to him. He sighed and smiled apologetically. “I don’t mean to scare all of you. Other than in dreams”—he looked meaningfully at Jennifer—“no weredragon has reported seeing a beaststalker for years. Be glad of that.”

  This did not completely reassure her. She looked into the lingering darkness under the sunlit trees nearby, half-expecting to see huge, bulbous eyes or the glint of a curved sword. But there was only the empty eagle nest.

  “My grandmother says dragonflies are bringing strange news to her,” Catherine offered. “She says we may see beaststalkers again, soon!”

  Now Crawford actually chuckled. “Young Catherine, your grandmother is among the most revered of the elders. But I think Winona Brandfire’s dragonflies may be a bit too anxious. We have not heard a whisper of any enemy since Eveningstar, and I doubt we will for some time.”

  Jennifer did not know much about weredragons. She knew next to nothing about their enemies, or how reliable dragonflies were as scouts. But she knew a thing about her grandfather. One of the things she knew was that when he wasn’t being straight with her, he could never look her in the eye.

  Right now, his silver eyes strayed across the lake.

  “So, you wanna go turf-whomping?”

  “Pardon?”

  Catherine’s eyes were full of mischief. “Turf-whomping! My grandma taught it to me. Tramplers do it a lot, since we can’t fly for long distances.”

  Jennifer shrugged. “Sure, I guess.”

  “Follow me.”

  They left the cabin and went out to the southern pastures. There were still hundreds of sheep grazing—Jennifer supposed her grandfather bought herds and herds of them to support the refuge. While the fluffy white shapes scattered at their approach, Catherine paid no attention to them, but instead began running out onto the grass, parallel to the tree line.

  “Just watch!” she called back over her wing.

  Her bulky olive form rolled over the gentle, grassy slope. Flapping her tiny wings, she barely got off the ground. Instead of soaring higher, as Jennifer had learned to do, she let herself glide back down to the ground. Then, with a magnificent kick, she heaved into the air again. Another kick—whomp—and another—whomp. They were huge, slow-motion steps by the clumsiest lizard Jennifer had ever seen.

  She chuckled to herself. It looked like bad flying, but it also looked like a ton of fun. Before she knew it she was off after her new friend, letting her wings cut through the autumn air and kicking at the pale grass with trembling legs.

  “The dashers laugh at us when they see us do this, but frankly, I like being this close to the ground!” Catherine called out as Jennifer pulled up, so that they were whomping side by side. “It makes for easier acceleration, like a sprinter using quicker steps. Check this out.”

  She slammed her heels down harder and shortened her stride. And just like that she was leaping ahead of Jennifer. Then she suddenly veered sharply to the left, into the forest.

  “You don’t have to use the ground every time!” she called out behind her. “I tried this last time and crashed, ’cause I’m still new at this, but let me see . . .”

  Jennifer turned to follow, her stomach fluttering—the trunks of the trees were fairly close together, and some of them had very low branches with heavy knots. She tilted her wings enough to slow down to a gentle glide with each whomp, so that she could watch.

  But Catherine didn’t get far. After maneuvering fairly gracefully through a cluster of oaks and kicking off a thick trunk so that she could accelerate, she found herself faced with some heavy, fragrant pines that were just too fat to avoid and too bushy to find purchase for another kick. She slammed into two pines at once, and with a squawk tumbled through the lower branches into a flurry of dead leaves.

  “Catherine! You okay?” Jennifer couldn’t stop giggling—it didn’t look serious, by any definition. “I’m not sure that’s how you’re supposed to do it.”

  “Maybe I should watch my grandma a few more times,” Catherine muttered, shaking the leaves and twigs from her wingtips. “Of course, she spends most of her time in Crescent Valley, and I don’t get to go there yet.”

  “Do you think what the dragonflies told her is true?” Jennifer picked a string of moss off of her friend’s scaly back. “I mean about enemies coming? Grandpa seemed skeptical.”

  “With all due respect to your grandfather, the Brand-fires’s scouts don’t make mistakes. It’s our specialty, you might say. If they tell us something, it’s happening. Something is on the way.”

  “But what’s on the way? Beaststalkers?”

  Catherine shrugged. “Or worse.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Training

  “Weredragons,” Crawford announced, “do not exist.”

  There were five of them on the porch—Jennifer, her grandfather, Catherine Brandfire, Patrick Rosespan, and a creeper Jennifer hadn’t seen before, with lavender scales and a shield of spikes protecting the back of his neck. They were the newest weredragons, and they were getting a short lesson from their host.

  Patrick looked them all up and down after Crawford’s remark. He grinned.

  “No disrespect, sir, but I feel pretty real!”

  Crawford took the snickers from the students in stride. “Thank you, Mr. Rosespan. You’re as literal as your older brother, I see. I suppose I should be more exact. We are real, physically. And we have spiritual strengths that I will help you access in the weeks and months to come. But to the rest of the world, we do not exist. Or haven’t you noticed?”

  Patrick shifted uncomfortably. “I always kinda wondered why I never saw Eveningstar on the news after my family escaped.”

  “My first morph was right alongside the highway two months ago,” offered Catherine. She frowned. “Sure, it was nighttime, but nobody stopped to check on me. Not even the state patrol.”

  “We hide here, but we probably don’t even have to,” Jennifer suddenly realized. “Nobody ever sees us flying, or hunting, or anything, do they?”

  “They do not have to,” Crawford answered. “A beast flying through the air like you, a beast suffering in a ditch like Catherine, a whole town of beasts burning to death like Eveningstar—these are all things that can be ignored by the larger world. Eveningstar, after all, was populated nearly entirely by weredragons. It was a rare refuge in a world that would rather not notice us. Simply put, we are not mundane enough.”

  “We’re freaks,” offered Catherine. The term startled Jennifer. “But I always thought that would mean more people notice me, not less.”

  “It depends, doesn’t it? People typically react one of two ways to something different. They ignore it if they can, and they try to stop it if they can’t. They only seek a third way, to accept and adapt, if they have no choice. And we’re not so different ourselves when we’re human, are we? Before your first change, some of you may have missed a thing or two you ought to have seen or heard.”

  As he spoke, the elder dragon’s eyes settled on Jennifer. The meaning was clear—she felt a sudden pang of guilt about her father and her remark yesterday about not trusting him. Sure, he could have told her earlier about weredragons. But couldn’t she also have made more of an effort to find out? How many times might he have tried to tell her, only to have her snap at him, or ignore him? Heck, she tuned out so many of his lectures, he could have given a slide presentation on weredrag
on anatomy in the kitchen and she probably would have missed it.

  Crawford saw his message hit home and continued. “Our position is precarious. We’re too strange to merit notice. Were we to force the issue, we’re too few to defend against the inevitable backlash. The consequences would be horrible. Our refuges—this farm, others like it around the world, even Crescent Valley—are hidden, but they are not impregnable.”

  “This is depressing stuff,” the creeper complained. “Why are you telling us this—to make us feel worse?”

  “Not at all! But you need to know the truth. Many young dragons come to this change with a lot of anger, or resentment, or despair. They try to change what they are to get the world to accept them—or else, they try to change the world too fast, to make it again like it once was when people revered and respected us.

  “Change comes to us all, and it will come to the world—slowly and steadily, like a tide that the moon pulls across an enormous beach. You cannot push the waves faster, and no one can build walls of sand thick enough to stop it. It comes when it comes.”

  “So we just sit here and wait for things to happen to us?” Jennifer asked. “That doesn’t sound very productive.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to sit and wait for anything,” Crawford said with a smile. “You will each have your role to explore in our community. You can see this in the way each clan supports the others. Tramplers are built for strength and ferocity, dashers for speed and grace, creepers for stealth and strategy. In our customs, our battles, even our hunts, each clan has a role to play. And within those clans, each individual finds his or her passion.”

  Jennifer thought about that. What did that mean for her? She didn’t look or feel like she belonged to any of the three. Did she have a role in this community, or would she be cast out once everyone realized how different she was, and how badly she fit?

  “Each of you will spend time this week with a more experienced dragon who can help you learn the skills specific to your type,” Crawford continued. “Joseph will learn camouflage, Patrick will learn tail strikes, and Catherine will learn lizard-calling.”

  At this, Jennifer slouched, seething with resentment. “And what am I going to do? Learn nostril-picking with a wing claw?”

  “You,” he answered with narrowed eyes, “are going to learn all three.”

  “I’ll bet my father put you up to that.”

  “Actually, Niffer, it was my idea.” He closed in and bent over so that only she could hear him. “This isn’t going to be a vacation, my dear. If you think your father was bad, wait until you hear my lectures!”

  It wasn’t so bad, she reflected as the week went on. Crawford gave lectures each morning and evening—stories and history about weredragons and their culture. During these times, she learned little infuriating factoids, such as the edict that she, like every weredragon, would have to go through fifty morphs—more than two years!—before they could even learn where Crescent Valley was, much less go there. Some sort of obnoxious test of maturity, she gathered from the rambling.

  After several doses of this sort of thing, Jennifer decided learning new skills from the other tutors—doing stuff—was a bit more appealing.

  She and Joseph needed to pick up the finer points of camouflage from none other than Mullery, the creeper who had emerged from the brush the day Jennifer had watched the hunt. He was a bit surly, and never let on if “Mullery” was his first or last name. Jennifer often had the impression he would rather be somewhere else.

  The first lesson went passably well, given the dark cloud hanging over their tutor. When Joseph tried a tree-bark pattern, he was able to get appropriately rough-hewn lines. But Mullery ruled that the color was two shades too light, and the texture too spacious.

  Jennifer herself could manage a lay-low camouflage that mimicked fallen leaves, but not much else. An attempt at tree bark ended up in a sort of rudimentary plaid, and her try at a rock, in Mullery’s curt words, required “more mineral, less vegetable.”

  Tail-striking with Patrick, under the tutelage of his older brother, Alex, was a better spirit-raiser. Alex liked to speak in military shorthand (just like Eddie, Jennifer thought wistfully). According to the older Rosespan brother, dashers had strange oils throughout their bodies, allowing their nervous systems to act as generators. The prongs at the end of Jennifer’s tail were longer than most dashers’—and of course, she was larger to begin with—so right away, results were spectacular.

  “Wow!” exclaimed Alex, as a cascade of sparks blew apart an empty hornets’ nest they were using for target practice. “Nice work! You acquired that target like an old pro. You’ll be on dasher duty if we ever get you on a Crescent Valley hunt, and that’s an order!”

  That sounded agreeable enough, albeit vague, Jennifer decided later that week while lolling through woodlands with Catherine and Ned Brownfoot. It certainly seemed more exciting than Ned’s first lizard-calling lesson.

  Jennifer still wasn’t sure what lizard-calling was, exactly, but to hear Ned tell it, it required near-perfect weather and ground moisture conditions. After putting off their first lesson for two days because “the moon war’nt right,” Ned—who was at least as old as Grandpa Crawford—spent at least an hour looking for the right patch of ground to work on.

  His kind, elderly, southern Missouri drawl made Jennifer impatient and tired all at once. “Young ’uns,” he said as he paced, “never get th’ hang . . . of summonin’ crap . . . without th’ proper beddin’.”

  “Here now . . . this otta work,” he finally called out, right before Jennifer and Catherine gave up for the day. He was at the entrance to a low cave that was at least a quarter of the way around the lake, in a part of her grandfather’s forest Jennifer had never been before. The leaves were scarce and the dirt less spongy. It reeked of dried dung left by indeterminate animals. “Now, girls, come on in . . . ’n’ watch yer heads . . . It’s my job . . . to find th’ right spot . . . but it’ll be yer job . . .”

  “To die of the stench?” whispered Catherine.

  “. . . ta duck.”

  “Ow!” Catherine rubbed the back of her pale olive head where it had just scraped against a dip in the cavern’s ceiling.

  “Hey, Catherine,” Jennifer asked when they had a moment alone. (This happened fairly quickly, as Ned felt—immediately upon their arrival at the cavern—that an even more choice spot of ground must lie deeper within, and so went exploring.) “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure,” Catherine said, grinning through vermilion eyes.

  “You ever see, um, weird things when you’re human?” Catherine shrugged. “I daydream now and again. In Mr. Soule’s history classes, I often drift and imagine myself flying or floating.”

  “Hmmm.” Jennifer wasn’t sure their experiences quite matched up. “Nothing about beaststalkers? Raining spiders? Sheep people? Vomiting up hearts?”

  “Ugh. No.” Catherine’s reptilian face showed concern. “Have you talked to your grandfather about that?”

  “Not yet. It’s hard for me to separate what’s normal for a dragon from what’s not. I’m trying not to bother him with stuff that may not be important.”

  “Listen, Jennifer. If it’s important to you, it’s important. And you need to talk, believe me. I’m not that much older than you. Sometimes, fourteen years old seems like yesterday.” Catherine sounded surprisingly sad. Jennifer was confused. Weren’t the last couple of years in high school supposed to be the time of your life?

  “I wish I had connected with my family more back then. I didn’t realize until my first morph how much I really depend on them. When I was alone out by the highway, I was running away from home. They had told me about the whole weredragon deal, and I was freaking out. I didn’t know whether to believe them or not. Either way, I was furious with them.”

  “Huh.” Jennifer didn’t know what to say. This sounded too familiar.

  “Girls!” Ned’s aged voice came trembling from deep down in the cave. �
�Gimme a wing claw here . . . I think . . . I’m stuck . . .”

  After freeing Ned’s right hind claw from between two rocks, where it had slipped after contact with a patch of not-so-dry dung, the two of them convinced the elder dragon to get on with the lesson nearer to the cave entrance.

  The trick to lizard-calling, according to Ned, was in the smoke you used to prep the ground.

  “You gotta pepper th’ dirt . . . like an omelet that ain’t quite right . . . watch now . . .”

  He snorted vapor from his nostrils and watched it float over the rocky floor of the cavern. Then, with a roar far louder than Jennifer thought this old man could manage, he punched the ground with a clenched claw.

  An instant later, an enormous Gila monster came crawling out of the receding smoke. It twisted its massive head about, flicking its tongue, seeking its master. Once it found him, it curled up at his feet and stared at the astonished younger dragons.

  “He’s waitin’ . . . for orders,” Ned explained. The careful Missouri accent didn’t sound so slow and dumb to Jennifer all of a sudden. “He’ll stick ’round . . . up to ’n hour. Then you gotta . . . call new ’uns.”

  “We’re going to do that?” Jennifer stared at the Gila monster. It looked large enough to swallow Phoebe with minimal effort.

  “What did you think lizard-calling would be like?” snickered Catherine.

  “Well, I dunno, but I didn’t think we’d be . . . calling lizards. Cripes, that thing is huge!”

  “You won’t get ’un . . . like Trixie here. Not right away. More likel’a mud turtle . . . or garden snake. Give a try, Cat.”

  With furrowed brow bent low, Catherine puffed smoke onto a patch of dung-lined pebbles. Jennifer peered in closer to get a good look at whatever came out.