The Silver Moon Elm Read online

  Her mother turned to her with a poisonous expression. “Don’t you talk back to me…”

  “You can’t just leave Dad here!” He was slowly getting up, but his wings were streaked with blood.

  “Jennifer, your father’s fine. And this discussion is over. We’re leaving.”

  “No, we’re not.” Jennifer flung open her door, ducked out of her seat belt, and was out of the van before her mother could react. “He’s hurt.”

  Elizabeth growled in exasperation and slammed the steering wheel. “Jennifer, get in the car!”

  “Mom, look at yourself! Who the hell are you? What are you doing?”

  “I’m your mother and I’m telling you to move your ass!”

  She tried to stand tall and silent against her mother’s withering glare. Finally, she broke and said, “Not until you work this out with Dad.”

  A delicate balance of a snarl and a sigh escaped. “You don’t know what you’re talking about! It’s been years between your father and me! Years of trust and sacrifice and compromise! I don’t need your relationship advice. You have no idea what goes into a relationship, Jennifer. You have no clue!”

  “Mom, get out of the car.”

  “Jennifer, get in the car.”

  “Get out!”

  “GET IN!”

  Jennifer stepped back and shut the car door. “I’m not leaving him.”

  “Ask him about the tramplers,” Elizabeth growled. “You may change your mind.”

  With that, she gunned the engine and the minivan’s tires squealed with the effort to reenter the highway.

  “Mom!”

  But all that was left was a cloud of gravel, and a pair of vanishing taillights in the dark.

  “I can’t—she just—did you see—she left us!”

  “That she did,” Jonathan agreed.

  “Where the hell are you? I can barely see.”

  “Over here. You should change—you’ll see better, and we’re obviously flying home.”

  “But you can’t fly in the shape you’re in!” She shifted shape—she was warmer this way, if nothing else. Her father was sitting on his haunches, rubbing the base of his righthand horn.

  “Just give me a sec. Your mother was right—I’ll be fine.”

  Jennifer sat down next to him. “What was that she was saying about the tramplers, and about you being a killer?”

  He sighed. “I don’t suppose there’s any way you would accept the truth at a later date…”

  “No.” She felt herself getting angry—not just because she imagined it must be a horrible thing in order to get her mother so upset, but also because it was yet another secret from the past that they had kept from her.

  She glued her gaze to the highway while she waited for her father to begin. As a dragon, she could plainly make out the shape of a silver and black Mitsubishi Eclipse as it flitted past them in the far lane. “I’m waiting.”

  “You’re familiar with the beaststalker rite of passage.”

  “Yeah, from Eddie. I gather it’s pretty important to do better than he did.”

  “Your mother’s rite involved Xavier Longtail’s brother. Ember’s father. She did better than Eddie—in fact, she succeeded brilliantly.”

  “Right, I got that part. So Mom killed a weredragon, and she’s spent a lifetime saving them and other people to make up for it. Where do you come in?”

  “Let me start a bit before then—to when we first met. It’s important you hear this.”

  Jennifer nodded. She had never really heard this story in detail—just that they met in graduate school, and had worked out the fact that she was a beaststalker and he was a weredragon. She assumed a lot of hot, steamy, parental love figured into the picture somewhere, so she had never pressed for details.

  “I met your mother years after her own rite of passage,” he explained. “I was a graduate student in architecture at the same university where she was a medical student. She was still wracked with guilt, though of course her beaststalker friends considered her a hero. It did not take long to learn what she was—just a few dates. But by then it was too late. I was already in love.”

  His voice caught for a moment, and Jennifer waited patiently. The woman he still loved was probably ten miles away by now, and accelerating.

  “Of course, I knew it wouldn’t work. After all, my disastrous relationship with Dianna Wilson was still fresh in my mind. Weredragons couldn’t date their enemies, I was sure. It would break my heart, but I had no choice. I was about to call it off with her, when the most extraordinary thing happened.

  “We were on what I thought would be our last date—just an evening stroll by the river not far from St. Paul, with a full moon above us and no one else around. I can still remember your mother eating double-chocolate-chunk ice cream out of a waffle cone she had bought back in town. I think she knew I was going to dump her—she seemed depressed, and she was eating that ice cream awfully fast. Just as I was about to come up with some lame line about wanting to be good friends, she spilled a whole scoop of it on her dress. That started a bit of a fuss, and we were examining whether or not it had made a stain on the hem…when we both caught sight of it.”

  “What?”

  “A moon elm leaf,” he answered.

  “Moon elms? But they don’t grow here in this world! They only grow—”

  “In Crescent Valley, yes. Yet there it was, a moon elm leaf. And when we looked up, we suddenly found we were standing under an entire tree. It was a glorious, huge, shimmering thing. Unlike any moon elm I had ever seen, and certainly unlike anything your mother had experienced.

  “Normally, moon elms have pale leaves that simply reflect the color of the lichen in the forest around them. If you take a leaf out of Crescent Valley and look at it under normal daylight (as I did shortly afterward), it’s a sort of unappetizing, milky white. But this leaf—and all the leaves on the tree—were silver.

  “I picked up the leaf, and then I immediately realized I shouldn’t. I began to change, Jennifer. Change—here, in this world, under a full moon!—the moment I touched that leaf. I dropped it and tried to make my condition look like a headache, convulsions—anything but the truth! I was in a panic; I didn’t want it to end like this.

  “But I couldn’t help it. The change had started, and I was doomed. Moments later, your mother looked upon me for the first time as a dragon. I quickly considered shifting my skin to make myself invisible—then I could just skulk away. But your mother’s reaction kept me there.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She broke down,” he answered with glistening eyes. “It was not unlike what you just saw here tonight—without the kicking. Oh, how she cried.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, she cried because I hadn’t told her the truth right away. She cried because she knew I intended to break things off. And of course, she cried because she was still carrying inside what she had done years ago.

  “And while she was crying, the attack came.”

  Jennifer stiffened. Here was the heart of the matter, she was sure.

  “There were two tramplers, a young man and a young woman. They, too, must have touched the moon elm or its leaves, because they were in dragon form under the same full moon I was. Like lightning, they were upon her.

  “She didn’t carry a sword with her—the rusty one you’ve practiced with was shiny and new back then, but she kept it under her bed in her dorm room, with never an intention of using it again. Of course, she was still a formidable fighter—but against two dragons and without a weapon, I could see she would lose before long.”

  “So you helped her.”

  He nodded. “I helped her.”

  “You killed those two tramplers, because they were trying to kill Mom.”

  “Yes. Because they were trying to kill her—that much was certain. They even used the name of the dasher she killed—This is for Longtail, they said. The Blaze, I learned later, had assigned them to learn the identity of the be
aststalker and assassinate her. It took them years to trace her steps—she didn’t brag or boast about her deed, like most beaststalkers did—and when they found her, it was her dumb luck that I was there to protect her. Yes, Jennifer, I killed them. Ripped out their throats and tore their heads off, like we do when we hunt oreams at Crescent Valley. Two of our own. I killed them and I would do it again, in a heartbeat.”

  His voice was hard now, and he unconsciously bared his sharp teeth. Jennifer could almost see the dead, wingless trampler shapes in the cold ditch before them.

  “I realized at that moment that I would not leave her. And she realized she would not leave me. We swore our love to each other, under that silver moon elm. And we’ve been together ever since. The strange thing is, we’ve gone back to that place quite a few times over the years…but the moon elm was never there again. It was as if it just grew there, for us, that one night.”

  Jennifer stared at a patch of grass in the ditch for a while, waiting for more. It didn’t come right away. “Yes. Well, Dad. I see. You saving Mom’s life and then professing your love under an itinerant tree—that completely explains why she’s so pissed at you right now…”

  “I’m getting there!” His wing claws flexed nervously, and he shifted a bit in the gravel. Two sport-utility vehicles cruised by, the second one swerving a bit at the inexplicable shapes it must have witnessed on the side of the road.

  “Of course, we had to hide the dead bodies,” he said. “So we did, burying them in some caves not far from the river. And then we had to find out what the other dragons knew—would more of them come after her? Would they come after me, too?

  “With the help of my father, who sat on the Blaze, I learned the two tramplers had not taken time to report back any information before attacking. They had, everyone guessed, gone straight from discovering who your mother was to launching their attack. Without the crucial information these two dragons took to their graves, the Blaze was nowhere near connecting the beaststalker they still sought, and the woman I was dating.

  “As a result, when the tramplers went missing, the trail went cold. The Blaze knew a beaststalker had killed Xavier’s brother, and they now assumed that same beaststalker had done away with the pursuit.”

  Jennifer stiffened. “You never corrected them. You let them think Mom had done it. That’s why they blame her not just for the rite of passage, but those two other dragons!”

  “That’s right. Years later, they traced the killing of Charles Longtail to a beaststalker who fit your mother’s physical description. But by then, Dr. Elizabeth Georges-Scales was a doctor who had saved countless dragons’ lives. It made no sense to the Blaze that she would be a beaststalker. Of course, your grandfather had figured it out; but he helped me hide the truth.”

  “I bet Grandpa Crawford was mad at you for making him lie like that,” Jennifer snapped. She recalled the difficult relationship her mother and her father-in-law had, even up to his death less than a month ago. Realizing how he had protected all of them just made her miss him more.

  “It wasn’t until you revealed your beaststalker half in Crescent Valley,” Jonathan reminded her, “that Xavier Longtail and the others still searching for his brother’s killer put it all together. They made the natural assumption at that point that she had killed not only Charles Longtail, but also the two tramplers. I thought the Blaze would go after your mother immediately, but Winona Brandfire showed incredible restraint that night. The fact that you saved Catherine—that might have saved us all. Winona got everyone to calm down and focus elsewhere. Because of that, we were able to discuss sanctuary for your mother later on.”

  “Okay, I know the story from that point. So they assumed Mom did it all. And Mom was okay with you pinning it all on her?”

  He coughed. “Your mother didn’t know, until tonight. For years, she has thought I had owned up to killing those tramplers right away, told the full truth to the Blaze, and received forgiveness.”

  “I wonder where she got that idea,” Jennifer fumed.

  “Jennifer, please understand. I was young, and—”

  “Are you still too young to tell the truth? Were you still too young when I was hauled up in front of the Blaze a few months ago to account for who Mom was?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Cripes, Dad! What would you do if I lied the way you did to the Blaze and to Mom? Would I get a free pass because I’m fifteen years old?”

  His reptilian head hung low. “You don’t need to try to make me feel worse, Jennifer. I know what I did.”

  “So when are you going to make it right?”

  “My thought was to do it during your mother’s visit. Ever since the Blaze granted her sanctuary during our search for Evangelina, I figured the time was coming to set the record straight. The Blaze would not have granted sanctuary to someone they wanted to kill. Everyone has to learn the full truth. We’ll never be able to accomplish what we need to accomplish as long as people misunderstand what happened. I will admit to the killings when I return to Crescent Valley. Tomorrow, I suppose.”

  “Why did you wait so long?” Jennifer asked, exasperated. “It makes no sense! Winona Brandfire defended us against Xavier when I made a mistake. Why wouldn’t she forgive you, too?”

  Jonathan sighed and scribbled a strange pattern in the gravel with a wing claw. Jennifer recognized the broad swirls and shapes—it was the sort of writing dragons carved into molten rock, when burying their dead.

  “Because,” he slowly explained, “she will have to forgive me, a friend she has deeply trusted for years, for murdering her daughter and son-in-law.”

  A complete numbness fell over Jennifer. She was certain she had not heard what she had just heard.

  “I know you have never asked Catherine about her parents,” he continued. “And I also know she’s never offered it. After all, she probably doesn’t even know what they were doing when they went missing, less than a year after she was born. But I would imagine someday very soon, you will need to share what you have learned with her.”

  The words kept coming, and Jennifer kept trying to fend them off—but they were too true, and too hard.

  She stared at him and felt the fire come.

  He winced. “This may complicate your friendship a bit—”

  “You!” She got up and—finding she couldn’t help herself—kicked him. Several times. Had her mother kicked him hard enough? Definitely not. “You! You! You are…you! You are…ruining my life! Ruining my LIFE!”

  He took the kicks with resignation, moving only a little to avoid getting hit in the same painful locations more than once. “Jennifer, don’t be melodramatic…”

  “Melodramatic?! I’m a freak because of you! I had a murderous sister because of you! And now I’m going to lose one of my best friends…because of you!” She turned to rant at the empty cornfield behind them. “Why did I get out of the minivan?!” she asked the dirt expanse. “Why didn’t I listen to my mother? My own mother! She tried to tell me! She told me, ‘Jennifer, get in the van!’ That’s what she said! And I ignored her!”

  “Ace, your mother was driving over—”

  “Why did I ignore her?” she asked, whirling upon him again with a bonus kick. “She always wants what’s best for me! She’s told me so! She saved me when Skip’s dad used you as bait—we could have left you down there in that sewer system, that’s what we should have done—and she taught me that neat little thing with the daggers—you know, where I throw them and they hit nasty things like your other daughter—and after all that I ignored her! Why?”

  “Maybe we should—”

  “Maybe you should shove it, Dad.” She turned away from him and spread her wings. “Shove it deep, shove it hard. I don’t want you in my life. All you ever do is fuck it up.”

  She took off before he could answer her.

  The flight home was cold and dark. Jennifer didn’t need to look behind her to know that her father followed her the entire way, from a respectful
distance. To his credit, she supposed, he didn’t try to stop her or slow her down. The effort to keep up an escort in his condition must have been considerable.

  So she sped up.

  She morphed within a step of landing in front of their house on Pine Street and barged through the front door. Phoebe scrambled to all fours with a startled bark, and then raced forward to lick Jennifer’s hand. Eddie was lounging in the living room, with the stereo on a bit louder than necessary, reading a magazine laced with photos of bikini-clad models. Ugh. Boys.

  “Jennifer!” He jumped up, threw the magazine under a couch cushion, and turned the volume down. “You’re back! I wasn’t expecting—”

  “Did my mom come home?”

  He flipped his brown hair back in confusion. “What? No, she left with you. Isn’t she still with you?”

  “Great.” So her mother had taken off for parts unknown. At ninety miles an hour, she could be anywhere, Jennifer thought grimly. Including the hospital.

  She had called the hospital to verify Dr. Georges-Scales wasn’t there—either on shift or as a patient—by the time her father skulked through the door, wings folded close to his body and tail down.

  Without waiting for him to say anything, she pushed past him and went upstairs. The footsteps behind her were human—Eddie, she guessed, was following her. Trying to help. As if he could.

  “Jennifer, wait up!” She was right. The boy’s voice was concerned. “What’s going on? Why are you back so soon? Is your—”

  “Eddie, I don’t have the time.”

  “But you’re really upset! It must be important. Let me help you.”

  “Help me?” She put a hand on the doorway to her room and faced him, shaking the platinum strands away from her look of disgust. “You? Get real, Eddie. You didn’t help me when I needed you last spring. You didn’t help me when I needed you at the mall with Evangelina. And you didn’t even help me yesterday, when it would have been easy. You’re not a help. You’re deadweight.”

  Her words crushed him—she saw that immediately—but she did not take them back. She was too angry at him, and her father, and her mother to care.