Jennifer Scales and the Ancient Furnace Read online

  Phoebe came racing like a dark dart around the opposite end of the house from where she had disappeared. The moment she saw Jonathan rear up on his hind legs, she stopped about twenty yards away and crouched low in anticipation.

  “Phoebe—circus!”

  The dog stood up. Jonathan let out a short whistle, and a ring of fire ripped out of his mouth. With no steps at all, the dog leapt through the blazing hoop as it roared over her position, did a half-twist in the air, and then landed brilliantly on all fours.

  Jennifer burst out laughing. Phoebe raced to a point about twenty yards from her and crouched down as before, obviously expecting Jennifer to do the same.

  The three of them played like this for a while. The longer the whistle, the greater the number of hoops Phoebe had to jump through. She could manage up to three, but singed her tail if asked to do more than that.

  After an hour or so, Jennifer felt in good enough spirits that she nodded when her father suggested they begin flying lessons.

  “This isn’t going to be like fire-breathing,” he warned her. “That comes as naturally to a dragon as, well, breathing. But flying won’t come any easier than walking did when you were a toddler. You fell down. A lot. Now you’ll be higher up.”

  “Great.” Jennifer sighed.

  “Don’t worry too much. A dragon’s bones and sinews are incredibly resilient. You won’t break or twist a thing. Just your ego, once or twice. Plus, we have this!”

  He grabbed a bar of the trampoline with a hind claw and shoved off the ground with the other. “Meet me out by the wildflower fields. Trees and water make for a poor first flight.” Weaving his way through the elms and pines, he disappeared.

  Jennifer trudged her way on all four claws back down the gravel driveway. It was at least a half mile to the wildflower fields. By the time she got there, her throat was dusty and her belly sore from all the scratching and pulling. She was more than ready to learn how to get her carcass off the ground.

  Jonathan was bouncing on the trampoline, humming a jaunty tune with smoke smoldering from his nostrils. “A beautiful day to spend out in the sunshine!” he called out. “And a good day to get up in the air, too. Come over here, ace. I’ll give you a hand up . . .”

  He stepped off as she sought her balance in the rubbery center. If walking on four legs was difficult, navigating a bouncy, slippery material was even worse. Up and down Jennifer jarred, a jumble of wings and horns. It was impossible to stop. She decided to wait out the embarrassment on her butt, lolling up and down miserably. Her previous enthusiasm drained away.

  “Perk up, camper! You’re learning something amazing.”

  “What, hopping on my ass?”

  Her father snorted with laughter, letting a cloud of steam out from between his teeth. Jennifer almost smiled back, though a part of her was determined to stay grumpy. “All right, what do I do?”

  “We’ll start off with simple bouncing, straight up and down. Just like everyone does. Sitting down is fine, the idea is to get the feel for liftoff.”

  This was easy enough, since the trampoline hadn’t really stopped jouncing her yet. She pushed off a bit harder to get up in the air, and before long she established a slow, steady rhythm.

  “Good. Now, spread your wings on each up, and fold them on each down . . .”

  This was harder, because her wings caught the south wind when unfolded, which moved her slightly out of position each trip into the air. Jennifer found herself adjusting her wings each time, to try and catch the wind different ways.

  “Great! You’re figuring out how the wind and your wings interact. There are four forces at work—gravity, lift, thrust, and drag. Your wings represent an incredible evolutionary leap that minimizes drag while allowing . . .”

  “Dad.”

  “Yes?”

  “If you want to minimize drag, you could talk less.”

  Jennifer let her hind legs down so that she was standing and jumping each time. Wings out, wings in, wings out, wings in . . . Suddenly, Jennifer kicked hard off the trampoline and waved her wings frantically. On the third beat, her wings caught wind, and she sailed at least thirty feet into the air.

  “Nice!” she heard her father call. “Oh, keep flapping, or you’ll come back down too fast.”

  She got the message right away as her bulk began to drop. Beating her wings again, she found another gust of air to support her weight, and she tilted her wings to take advantage of it. Now she was more than fifty feet up off the ground. The air was cooler up here. With wild eyes she took in the entirety of Grandpa Crawford’s farm. There were the hives to the south, and the wall beyond, and if she turned a bit she could see the sheep scattering at the sight of her silhouette in the sky, and beyond them the trees, and the house, and the lake . . .

  “KEEP FLAPPING OR YOU’LL LOSE LIFT!” Her father’s voice right next to her startled her, and she flinched into an awkward shape. She immediately dropped ten feet.

  “Cripes, Dad!” She regained composure and glared up at his hovering form. Unsolicited lectures on the ground were merely boring. At this altitude, they were dangerous!

  After a few minutes of flapping, she began to get the hang of gaining and losing altitude. Her wings were getting tired, though, and she looked down at the ground with both longing and fear.

  He seemed to read her mind. “As any pilot will tell you,” he called out, “landing is easy. Landing well is hard. Aim for the trampoline again, and try to lose altitude a few feet at a time.”

  As she began her descent, she found relaxing and restretching her wings even harder than flapping them continually. It was like dropping bit by bit in a shaky helicopter, and her stomach turned once or twice after particularly steep pitches.

  Looking down, she could see the trampoline far below, almost between her hind claws. She adjusted a bit to the left and headed for the center.

  The heavy whistling in the trees to the north should have warned her what was coming, but neither Jennifer nor her father noticed the sudden crosswind until too late. She felt it like a shove in the back. In a split second she lost her shape and balance, and found herself diving feet first at a sharp angle to the ground. The wildflowers rushed up to greet her.

  “Tilt your wings!” she heard her father cry.

  She leaned forward in a panic and drew even with the ground, belly skimming the tips of the taller sunflowers and reedy grasses. It was like her first experience with a bicycle as a child—she was moving fast, her muscles were frozen, and she had no idea how to stop.

  She passed out of the wildflower fields and into the bee fields, closer and closer to the ground. Dropping a leg to try to slow herself down was unthinkable; Jennifer had visions of tripping at thirty miles per hour and breaking her neck in the subsequent tumble. The best she could hope for was a glider landing on her belly. The grass looked soft . . .

  A short hillock was all it took for Jennifer’s right wing to catch the earth. The impact jarred her entire body, throwing her out of symmetry and sending her into exactly the kind of rolling tumble she had been trying to avoid—only this time, she was sent askew by the hit to her right side. Jennifer lost herself in a furious swirl of earth and sky.

  At last, she crashed into something that felt like rotted wood. Her head spun and buzzed, and a sickly sweet smell filled her nostrils.

  “Are you okay, Jennifer?” She heard her father’s voice above her.

  “Yeah . . .”

  “Good. Now get out of there!”

  A slow liquid oozed onto her belly. Thinking it was blood, she lifted her head up . . . and saw honey. Then she realized the buzzing wasn’t in her head at all.

  “Ah, sugar . . .”

  “Out! Out!” her father called. She could have sworn he was chuckling. Hundreds of black dots converged on her position. With another curse, she kicked her way out of the pile of broken honeycomb that her landing had destroyed. Of course, she had no way to run. It was crawl or fly, and Jennifer didn’t even stop to th
ink. She just unfolded her wings, took two or three panicked steps with her hind legs, and then pushed herself up.

  Miraculously—or so it seemed to her—it worked. Ten feet up, then twenty, then she was over the wildflowers again, leaving the angry swarm of bees far behind.

  “Nice takeoff!” her father beamed as he swooped into position next to her. “I shouldn’t have bothered with the trampoline. All we had to do is plop you on top of a beehive, and you perfected your technique just fine.”

  “Hilarious, Dad. How the heck do I get down?”

  “Let’s try a bit farther north, by the sheep pastures. They don’t sting as hard.”

  “This isn’t funny . . .”

  “You didn’t see it from my angle.”

  “I could have maimed myself!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Like I said, it will take more than a beginner’s crash to hurt you. And no bug you’ve ever seen has a stinger long enough to pierce your hide. You could wear those bees as a winter coat. Now come on, we’ve got a landing to finish.”

  She followed him to the sheep pastures, but the words “no bug you’ve ever seen” stuck in her mind. Her mind went back to the butterfly in Ms. Graf’s classroom, and the menacing cloud of dragonflies.

  What bug might she see someday that she did have to worry about?

  For the rest of the day, they worked on flying and landing. The only interruption was lunch. Elizabeth produced two vatfuls of slightly overcooked macaroni and cheese, and then stayed with them for the afternoon to watch her daughter’s progress.

  By the time the sun was low in the sky, Jennifer felt mildly comfortable taking off and landing in an open field. She ventured as high as a hundred feet once, but lost her nerve as she realized she was coasting over prickly pine trees. Two unusually large golden eagles swooped by her ear and convinced her to seek firm ground. It was enough—she decided as she landed without stumbling for the first time to applause from her mother and praise from her father—to get this far.

  “Excellent!” her father cheered. “You’ve got a real gift for this, ace. Your grandfather had to work with me for at least three days. He finally lost his patience, took me up to the roof of the cabin, and shoved me off toward the lake. Speaking of which—”

  He spread his wings and kicked off the ground, soaring into the air. Jennifer noticed his perfect, effortless form with a small twinge of jealousy. She struggled to follow him up, while her mother began a jog back to the cabin.

  “I need to catch dinner,” Jonathan explained. “You should just watch for this part, I think. No sense in you drowning just yet.”

  They turned north and let their wings stretch as they coasted over the lake. Jennifer tried not to think about the fact that landing here would be impossible, and that the tree-lined shore was hardly better terrain. Instead, she focused on following her father as he climbed in broad circles. Eighty, ninety, a hundred feet—Jennifer caught a small crosswind but shifted her wings quickly to compensate—two hundred feet, three hundred, and still Jonathan climbed.

  Jennifer kept her head up. She knew the distant view of water and trees below would terrify her. They were going far higher than she ever had outside of an airplane.

  When they reached five hundred feet, her father turned his head. “The first thing you have to do is follow the shadows. Clear your mind and keep your eyes on the water.”

  He looked down, and Jennifer reluctantly did the same. The setting sun cast an uneven light over the surface of the lake, and at first she couldn’t make much out. But by letting her eyes relax, she found that she could both ignore the altitude and see small shapes underwater.

  “You hover and wait until they come near the surface,” she heard her father continue. “Then you dive. Okay, remember, just watch for now.”

  An instant later, her father plunged with his feet forward and down and wings stretched back behind him. He looked to Jennifer like a massive, indigo hawk.

  Seconds later, just before he dove into the lake itself, he broke his own fall with a furious beating of wings, jabbed into the water with both hind legs, and plucked out two silvery shapes. He lifted off again, circled over the lake to the shore, and dropped the fish into a large plastic crate his wife had pulled out into the yard. Then he circled up to meet Jennifer again.

  “Dad, I’ll never be able to do that. That was crazy!”

  “You’ll be doing it by the end of the week. Tomorrow, if we have time.”

  Without waiting for an argument, he dove again, this time face first and with wings held close around his trunk and tail. Jennifer almost screamed when she saw his head slam right into the water, followed by his body with a surprisingly small splash. She hovered uneasily. Was that his shadow she saw? Yes, of course: it let out a stream of bubbles as it sliced through the water. He was much faster underwater than she would have expected.

  A few seconds later, he emerged from the lake, this time with a larger shimmering shape in his mouth. Jennifer knew her fish well; she could tell even from this far that it was a walleye. It followed the trout into the plastic bin.

  “I’ll need to get about a dozen more like that,” he panted upon rejoining her. “Should take only a few minutes. But you might want to get a bit lower, if that’ll make you more comfortable. I’ll go as fast as I can.”

  And he was off again. As he fished, the pair of eagles Jennifer had seen before flew a tight circle on the opposite end of the lake, occasionally sparing a sharp glance at this larger predator. She watched her father with something approaching regret—he was doing all the work, while she just tagged along. She had never liked that feeling, not even as a small child. They had always fished together when they came to Grandpa Crawford’s lake. She would have her own pole, tackle, and bait; Grandpa even kept a special tackle box for her in his garage. Catching her own fish always felt special, and she hadn’t needed help tying her line or setting the hook for years.

  This, on the other hand, felt too much like her father wrapping his arms around her to guide the fishing pole, while one hand stayed on hers over the reel to make sure she didn’t reel too fast or too slow. It chafed her.

  Doesn’t look that hard, she convinced herself as her father came up with his sixth and seventh fish. And if I do it wrong, what happens? I get a little wet. Big deal.

  Jennifer fixed her eyes on the lake’s surface, a bit away from where her father had just disturbed the water. Before long, she found them: three slender shadows, wriggling just under the surface of the lake. She let her feet down, pulled her wings up . . .

  ... and began to scream.

  Like most insane water rides, the dive was more terrifying in the experience than the watching. At first, Jennifer was certain she was doing something wrong. Then a voice in the back of her mind spoke up.

  Keep your head down. Eyes on the fish.

  She saw the three shapes scatter at the sense of her shadow above them—drat, she had come in on them from the west, like an idiot. No stopping now. While two of the shapes bolted in opposite directions, one just shot straight ahead. She chose that one, and tilted her wings so that her diving path became less steep.

  Claws out . . .

  She saw her hind claws flex as they reached out in front of her. Her approach to the surface was perfect, the fish was right below her, she tilted back, back . . .

  Wings! Flap wings, dork! Slow down! You overshot!

  She lost sight of the fish as it disappeared below her nearly prone body. A desperate flap of wings broke her form, and she struggled to avoid plunging into the water. It worked, sort of—she slowed a bit, the fish tried to scoot past, and she flicked her hind leg into the water without thinking. Her claws pierced slime and scales, and she felt a brief thrill of victory.

  Unfortunately, she was still moving, and she realized she had no idea how to pull up. On her back, with wings spread out like enormous air brakes, Jennifer did the only thing she could think of—she turned her wings forward to start flapping.

 
Had she been faster, or even a few feet above the water, this might have worked. But instead, the new shape sent her into a roll, and she skidded across the surface of the lake like a skipping stone. A few splashes ended with one large sploosh, and then she was floating on the surface on her back, a bit dazed . . .

  ... and with the fish still squirming, impaled on the back toe of her hind claw.

  She raised her head and found her father, who was cruising toward her. “I GOT THE FISH!” she hollered. “I GOT THE FISH!”

  With a vigorous flop, the fish loosened itself from her claw and dropped into the water with a light splash.

  “Aaaaargh!” She immediately folded her wings up against her body, rolled over in the water, and dove.

  Get back here, you slimy, stupid, hole-in-your-gut, useless excuse for a fish! It was hard for Jennifer not to take the rascal’s escape personally. Two seconds ago, she had looked like a fool who had managed to catch a fish. Now, unless she caught that fish again, she just looked like a fool.

  There it was—a wavering, glimmering shape ahead, trickles of blood escaping the puncture wound from both sides. She knew it would be easy enough to pluck off the surface when it died shortly, but that wasn’t the point.

  She heard a massive splash nearby, and saw her father’s shape enter the water. Oh, no, you don’t, Dad. No help on this one. This fish is mine!

  With that last thought, she let out a furious hiss. To her great surprise, a cascade of flame escaped from her jaws and surged toward her prey, boiling the water as it passed. The tempest coursed over the fish and Jennifer lost sight of it for an instant.

  Then, after the flames died and the water cooled, she saw the fish gently float to the surface, quite dead.

  She followed it up. When her head broke into the chill autumn air, she heard something large thrashing in the water close by . . . and laughing?

  The dead fish floated gently by her nose horn. It was charred, punctured, and half of it was missing. It was pathetic. It was beautiful.