Jennifer Scales and the Ancient Furnace Read online

  Later that evening, with her father still chuckling, her mother giggling, risotto simmering, and the rest of the fish roasting, Jennifer still believed that her catch looked the best of the lot of them.

  CHAPTER 6

  Regression

  The next few days passed agreeably enough. Jennifer continued to work on her flying and hunting, and found time for the occasional game of circus with Phoebe. During the evenings, she would try sketching with the large chunk of charcoal and newsprint that Grandpa Crawford used. It seemed a lost cause at first, but she eventually got the hang of moving her wing claw back and forth as fluidly as she would move a human hand, so that the charcoal made gentle, accurate strokes. Before long, she was sketching trees, water, and other shapes.

  Despite her father’s encouragement, however, she did not get the soccer ball out. Even with her successes this week, looking at the ball made it too easy to think about her friends, and how they would react if they ever found out how different and dangerous she was.

  What would Eddie say? What would his parents say? And Susan? What would happen to her, and her family, if the town found out? Would they have to move? Would the truth follow them? Would she ever get to feel, or even act, normal again?

  So the soccer ball stayed in the garage, and Jennifer stayed out of the garage.

  The dreams, she was glad to see, settled down a bit. In fact, sleeping in her favorite vacation house, in her room, and even the (admittedly reassuring) presence of her parents was all almost pleasant.

  The fourth morning at the cabin, she lay sprawled out on the grass, shooting smoke rings softly around Phoebe’s long muzzle while the dog licked her nose horn. The cries of the nearby family of golden eagles punctuated the still air. Elizabeth was finishing some cold cereal on the porch, and her father had flown off somewhere before Jennifer had even woken up.

  “Flying today should be good,” she told her mother. They hadn’t talked much all week; Jennifer figured they both had been trying to stay out of each other’s way.

  Elizabeth didn’t answer right away. Jennifer lifted her head. “Mom?”

  “I heard you. But I’m not sure your father will want you to fly today.”

  Jennifer raised her snout into the air. Her Dad had taught her how to tell if the weather was changing. “Temperature’s crisp, not too bad. I don’t smell much change on the wind. Am I wrong?”

  Elizabeth gave a genuine smile. “I wouldn’t know, dear. But whatever the weather, I think your father wants you to take it easy today. It is, after all, day five.”

  Day five. The words hit Jennifer like bricks. The crescent moon was ending. Of course it wouldn’t do to be soaring through the air at two hundred feet if her body picked that time to change back into human form!

  She wondered how much it would hurt. Getting larger and scalier had definitely not tickled. Would shrinking and growing hair feel any better? It seemed it might be less traumatic, but she couldn’t be sure and didn’t know if her father would give her an honest answer.

  “So what’re we going to do today? And where’s Dad?”

  “No plans, just do what you like. On the ground, that is. Your dad went to see your grandfather.”

  “Where has Grandpa been all this time, anyway? The note he left said ‘Crescent Valley’ but we never saw him around.”

  Her mother paused again.

  “Never mind! I can tell I won’t get a straight answer.”

  Elizabeth downed the milk left in her bowl in a single gulp. “You always were a perceptive girl.”

  Jonathan did not return until midday. Jennifer was sketching fish in the sitting room when her mother called her to the patio door and pointed. Two large shapes were pelting the surface of the lake with their wings.

  They looked nearly identical—the colors on their backs and bellies, the three horns at the backs of their skulls, and even their toothy smiles. Jennifer supposed her grandfather was the slightly smaller one, since her father was taller than her grandfather as a human.

  She examined the electric blue and silver skin across her wings, back, and double-pronged tail. Her nose horn and wider bulk had already made her feel different from her father, but now she saw just how different she was.

  With a glare at her gene-pool-wrecking mother, Jennifer went out on the porch and watched her father and Grandpa Crawford reach the shore. Phoebe had been trying to herd some dry leaves blowing in the wind, but broke off and sped toward the dragons as they landed.

  “Hey, Phoebe!” Grandpa Crawford’s voice was tighter and higher than her father’s, but it had the same congenial tilt to it. “Get the worm! Get the worm!” The smaller dragon held one wing up and wriggled one talon of the wing claw a few feet above the dog’s head. Phoebe obliged, jumping up and poking the talon with her nose. Then she bolted away from Grandpa Crawford and up the porch steps, where she tried to share her enthusiasm with Jennifer.

  “Down, Phoebe, down! Hey, Grandpa!”

  “Niffer! You’re glorious!”

  Part of her knew that grandfathers always said things like that, and part of her guessed that her father was smart enough to coach his dad on her state of mind, but most of her could tell Grandpa Crawford really meant it. She beamed.

  “Goodness, Jon, will you look at her!” Crawford leapt over the porch railing, eschewing the steps, and landed right next to Jennifer. “She’s a perfect blend! Hasn’t been anything like her for centuries, I’ll bet. Dash, trample, creep—it’s all there!”

  He was poking at her with a wing claw now. A bit flattered, and a little taken aback at the prodding, she grinned and waved his wing away with her own. “Did you just call me a creep?”

  “Wait until you start your lessons!” he went on. “There’s so much for you to learn, and to do! And we’ve got to get you to Crescent Valley!”

  “Slow down, Dad,” Jonathan interrupted with something like alarm. “She’s nowhere near ready for Crescent Valley yet. There’s a long road ahead for her. And if I recall correctly, you didn’t let me enter Crescent Valley until I was sixteen years old.”

  “You were an idiot.” Crawford winked.

  “I’ve already learned a ton, Grandpa—how to fly, how to breathe fire, how to catch sheep, even how to fish!” Her own excitement sounded strange to her, as if she were a five-year-old who had just finished reading her first book all by herself.

  “Wonderful!” he laughed. “I’m sorry I missed it.”

  It didn’t matter to her that she had never seen him in this shape before—his voice, his manner, everything about him was exactly as she remembered. She almost wanted to ask him to read her a story, so she could curl up in his lap.

  “I’ve made spaghetti sauce,” Elizabeth offered from just inside the patio doors. “Don’t worry, Dad, it’s your family’s recipe.”

  “That’s no guarantee,” Crawford muttered to Jennifer. “All right then,” he said more loudly. “Bring it on out, and we’ll have at it!”

  Jennifer had to admit that one of the better things about being a dragon was the absolute discard of all conventional manners. Her mother brought out three large pots and simply set them on the porch. Each dragon then settled down next to a pot, and stuck his or her head in. Their slurps and gurgles were almost comic, but Jennifer was too caught up in the aroma of the sauce to care.

  “This isn’t bad at all, Lizzard!” Crawford belched. The nickname made Jennifer snort. She hadn’t heard that one before. “You sure my son didn’t help?”

  Elizabeth settled down with her own neat bowl of pasta and sauce onto the only chair on the porch. Her smile betrayed both amusement and irritation. “I can follow a recipe just fine. I can also do many other things, all of which are a bit more important than cooking pitch-perfect meals for your son on a regular basis.”

  Crawford raised his sauce-covered jaws from his pot. To Jennifer, he looked a bit like a dinosaur peering up from a fresh kill to look over a challenger. “Now, now, Doctor, there’s no need to get testy. I didn’
t mean anything by it.”

  There was silence for a while. Jonathan raised his head from his own pot and gave them both warning looks. Confused, Jennifer stopped chewing and let some noodles hang out of her mouth. She had never noticed this sort of tension between her mother and her grandfather before.

  Her mother finally shrugged her shoulders. “Whatever. Your son cooks well enough for both of us, so it’s not an issue. We won’t starve anytime soon.”

  This seemed to break the tension. Everyone began eating again, so Jennifer followed suit. She was just licking the last bits of sauce out of the still-hot pot when the tremors began.

  “Dad . . .” She couldn’t control her claws, her wings, her entire body. Shaking from snout to tail, she took a few steps back as she felt her insides swirl. It was a slightly different feeling from the first change, but similar enough that Jennifer became scared. She knew what was coming—her spine, her skin, her teeth, everything would start to hurt again.

  But five days ago, she had been alone. This time, her family was present and ready.

  “It’s okay, Jennifer.” Her mother’s voice soothed her. “It won’t hurt so much this time. I put something in your sauce to relieve the pain.”

  “Something in her sauce?” Jennifer heard her grandfather ask. His voice sounded disapproving, but that could have just been the echoes inside her head. Her vision began to blur.

  She heard her father, far away. “We didn’t exactly talk about this, Liz . . .”

  “Doctor’s orders,” her mother replied, farther off.

  The voices continued, but Jennifer couldn’t make out what they were saying anymore. Her insides were still sliding about and rubbing against each other. She could feel the same disturbing changes in her backbone and skull, only this time in reverse—and with nearly no pain at all, just mild discomfort.

  “Whad did hoo pud in he sawce, Mom?” Her voice seemed tinny and miles away to her own ears. “Morfeeeene?”

  She felt her body slump over as the morphine, or whatever it was, took full effect. Through the blurs before her eyes, she saw the shapes of her father and grandfather, but couldn’t read their expressions.

  “Grea ressipee, Mom,” she said with a grin, falling asleep.

  The dream was very short.

  She was looking in a mirror. Her body was too thin. Visible bones slid beneath her skin as her dragon jaws and wings finished receding. There was suddenly a lump in her throat, and then a bulge in her mouth. She spit it out into her hand.

  It was her second heart, the one she had felt when she had been looking at Grayheart’s Anatomy a few days ago. The slimy, red mess was still beating in her hand . . . da-da-thump, da-da-thump, da-da-thump . . .

  When she woke up, she was in bed. The softness of the mattress surprised her. Too used to rugs on floors, she chided herself. She sat up and looked around.

  It was one of the guest rooms upstairs in Grandpa Crawford’s cabin. The windows were ajar—the cold autumn air cut into her fragile skin—and the door to the hallway was wide open. She could just make out her family’s low-key voices, probably downstairs.

  There was a glass of ginger ale and a slice of lightly buttered toast on the nightstand next to her. That was a clear signal in the Scales family. She stayed in bed, reached out with her pinkish human hands, and grabbed the “sick person food.” The dishes were heavier than she expected, and she almost dropped the glass. As she ate, more questions swirled through her mind.

  How long had the transformation taken? Would it always hurt? Would her mother always be at her side, ready with painkilling drugs? And where the hell was her tail?

  That last question was ridiculous, of course: She didn’t have a tail anymore. From the moment she had woken up, she had known she was a girl again. But at the same time, she missed the tail. She hadn’t thought about it much while she was a dragon, but making the tail swish behind her had been a source of comfort to her.

  Relax, she told herself. You don’t need a tail. You’re normal again.

  Of course, another part of her mind held firmly to the idea that she wasn’t normal at all, and wouldn’t be ever again.

  The voices downstairs got a bit closer—definitely her mother and father. Jennifer could hear multiple footsteps up the stairs. They were talking about the ride home, and whether Phoebe had eaten yet, and what supplies they needed to keep here for next time.

  For next time. Half of Jennifer looked forward to it. Half dreaded it.

  She put the empty ginger ale glass back on the nightstand and settled back down into bed. An urge to close her eyes and pretend to be asleep washed over her, but that made no sense. So when her parents entered the doorway, she was staring at the ceiling.

  “How do you feel?” her father asked. He wasn’t a dragon anymore, either. Two legs, no wings, no horns, thinning hair. Just like any other dad. Had it all been a stupid dream? Had they been on vacation as a human family, and the dragon parts were all one long nightmare?

  “My feet are a bit numb,” she replied. “My stomach’s rolling a bit. And my nose itches like crazy,” she realized suddenly, reaching up to scratch it.

  “The numbness is from the return metamorphosis,” he explained. “The other stuff is from the morphine.”

  “Having a six-inch horn on my snout probably didn’t help, either,” she complained, still scratching.

  “Any difficulty breathing?”

  Jennifer took a deep breath and let it out. “Nope.”

  “Good. Your mother and I think we should all be ready to go in about an hour. The moon’s waxing, so it’ll be a few weeks before our next morph. You’ve got school tomorrow, and your mother’s got surgeries scheduled. I’ll be glad to swing by the office for a day or two, myself.”

  Jonathan Scales was an architect. He did just about all of his work from home when he wasn’t on a “business trip.” Since he could pick and choose clients, he could make his work fit an unconventional schedule. His job made complete sense to Jennifer now—as did the phone in the downstairs kitchen with the oversized push-buttons and speakerphone feature.

  “I think I could be ready to go in an hour,” Jennifer ventured without a smile.

  “The clothes you were wearing last Thursday are in the wash,” her mother explained. “I brought some other stuff up for you to wear. You’ll find it in the dresser.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “Next time, you may want to set your clothes aside before you morph,” her father suggested. “It doesn’t hurt what you wear, but getting the smell of smoke, fish, and blood out afterward is a bit of a chore.”

  “Right. Sorry, didn’t know that.”

  There was an awkward silence. Then her parents smiled nervously and closed the door so she could be alone.

  Getting up and getting dressed was much harder than Jennifer expected. For one, the early October breeze slipping into the room chilled her fragile skin. So she tried to get over to the window to close it, and then found out that walking on legs again was like stepping on stilts.

  The dresser was closer than the window, so she decided to get dressed instead. The top drawer wouldn’t respond to her feeble tugs at first, but she finally managed to get it open and reach in with fumbling fingers. She wasn’t sure how the jeans and sweatshirt her mother had carefully folded into the drawer would fit her. Every limb felt too long and lanky. The dragon shape had been muscular and powerful. This shape felt like one of those overly thin, pasty aliens with warped hands and feet, big bulging head and eyes.

  And no tail. Tail had helped with balance.

  She stumbled forward onto the bed and decided to dress lying down.

  By the time she got everything on (it all fit fine), she figured she had regained enough coordination to stand up again. She slowly rose and stepped over to the mirror on the far wall to look at herself for the first time.

  A sad, tired teenager stared back. Her shoulders were slumped, her weight was on one foot, and her fingers were anxiously twisting her
stringy hair. There were more silver streaks in her hair than before, but it wasn’t shiny like it sometimes was.

  “I should have taken a shower,” her reflection said aloud. Jennifer couldn’t have agreed more.

  The ride home was quiet and uneventful. Phoebe snuggled up next to Jennifer on the backseat of the minivan for most of the way, occasionally licking her ear. Once in a while, one parent or the other would ask her a question about how she felt, or whether she had enjoyed seeing Grandpa again (she had, though seeing his human form that morning had reminded her how old he truly was), or if she still had homework to do.

  Jennifer answered all of these with the fewest words possible. Noncommittal grunts were her favorite. She knew these drove her mom and dad nuts, but she didn’t care. Who has a normal conversation after something like this past week, she asked herself. Nobody came to mind. The next dream took Jennifer a bit by surprise, since it didn’t happen at night, but rather on the school bus the following morning. Eddie wasn’t at the bus stop like he usually was in the morning, so she was riding alone.

  As she stared out the bus window, she began to see the strangest farm animals.

  Skinny horses, with joints almost protruding from their hides, walking down the street and driving cars. Plump pigs, with legs practically disappearing under folds of tender flesh, clustered together at bus stops. Stringy chickens, most with only a few feathers, crossing the road in jumps and starts.

  Then she felt a poke on her shoulder. She turned and pulled back in surprise. Two tall and thin sheep stood in the aisle. Each had impossibly long legs, with strange joints that shook with the vibrations of the accelerating bus. One rested a fragile, spindly hoof on the seat by her neck. It leaned forward and stared at her with two bulging black eyes.

  “This seat taken?” It said in a familiar voice.

  Jennifer shook her head and rubbed her eyes. When she looked back up, the sheep were gone, as well as all the other farm animals on the bus. Skip stood in front of her instead, with his sly grin.