Broken Dragon (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 3) (36 page)

A single band of light passed over Mara, drawing her back to the demontoid. It continued to float and spin in the air above their heads. A wave of exhaustion passed through her. She took a deep breath and tried to gather herself, as she looked down at Ping.

His eyes radiated so brightly they bathed his face in crimson, like someone standing in a photographer’s darkroom. Lines at the corners of his eyes deepened; muscles rippled along his jaw. A guttural sound of exertion or anger rose up from his throat. Something burbled below the skin of his forehead, as his brows pinched downward. His chin lowered, and his lips pulled back, revealing his teeth in a grimace as he strained.

Mara jumped up, holding her hands in front of her and willing him to stop moving. Her fingers flickered. She pulled them back to her chest and looked downward. Her torso was flashing like a bad video feed as well. Groaning aloud, she yelled up to the ceiling, “No, not now!”

Rolling his shoulders in slow motion, Ping twisted his head sideways, looking away from Mara, as if casting off invisible shackles. His head snapped back, making her jump. His skin was gone. The fiery red eyes glared at her from gray-green features of bony ridges, plates and spines. The muscles in his neck stood out, and he growled like a cat on the verge of pouncing. His body jerked forward, as if something snapped, and he was free.

In one smooth move he jumped to his feet, his body coiled and tense, about to lunge.

Mara staggered backward, slipped on her floor mat and fell onto her backside. Now facing upward toward the still-spinning crystal, she reached up to it with both hands, hands that continued to flicker and fade. Through gritted teeth she screamed, “Come on!”

A cone of brilliant green light burst from the spinning demontoid and enveloped Ping. He roared and threw himself at Mara but collided with the edge of the light, as if it were a solid wall.

Mara climbed onto her knees and focused on the light, envisioned the night it had surrounded her mother and had dragged out the consciousness of her mother’s counterpart. Glancing downward, she watched Ping twist and contort, fighting against the light, as it divided into two beams and separated. Ping’s body came apart, not in a cloudburst of dust, but melted like a sand castle on the beach as a tide came in. Under the emerald light, he disintegrated into a shapeless pile of black grit sprinkled with greenish sparks of mica.

Mara gasped. Her transparent hands trembled, and she turned back to the spinning crystal, narrowing her eyes with determination.

The pile of dust shifted and moved with the spinning green light. Flowing like wet cement into a tall column, it swayed and undulated. Bits of it landed on Mara’s cheeks, where it skittered across her skin. She jutted her head sideways, slinging it off, but forgot about it when the pile of grit in front of her molded itself into the head of the dragon, an animated bust that howled into the light and exploded, peppering Mara with a wave of stinging granules.

Holding her arms over her head, she ducked to the ground, making herself smaller. The grit clung to her back and neck, accumulated, and crawled down her legs and around her torso. She toppled onto her side, feeling like she had been dipped in plaster. It grew so thick, she could not move.

Then it was gone.

Rolling onto her back on the cold concrete floor, Mara looked toward the ceiling. Something clattered next to her head. From the corner of her eye, she saw, a few inches away, the demontoid, unmoving, unshining, under the sterile lights of the warehouse. Then everything got dark. Mara scrambled to her feet and spun around, kicking the crystal in the process.

Looming over her was the dragon, its head rearing back, ready to strike. Its neck swung in a wide circle and its wings lifted, sucking the air up toward the ceiling. Mara resisted being pulled forward by the wind and held her hands before her, cringing for the flood of fire that she knew was coming. When nothing happened, she lowered her hands and gazed after the dragon, just as it flung itself into the air. A blast of air knocked Mara again to the floor as the dragon’s wings swept back, propelling the creature through the ceiling with the resounding screech of rending metal.

Mara looked up in time to see a large section of ductwork peeling away from the ceiling and swinging directly at her. Rolling on her side, she moved just as the large pipe broke free and crashed down onto the concrete floor where she had been.

Flat on her back, she stared up at the remains of the ceiling to see if anything else would try to flatten her. Not seeing anything impending, she stared out at the starry night and wondered where the dragon was going this time.

Her phone rang. She slid it from her pocket, sat up on the floor and tapped the phone’s screen.

“Hey, Mom. I was just about to call you,” Mara said.

“You sound out of breath. Is there something strange going on I should know about?” Diana said.

Mara swallowed and tried to measure her breathing. “Why do you ask?”

“Hannah’s sitting here in the kitchen with me, while I’m cooking, and all of a sudden she begins to giggle. When I turned around from the counter to see what she’s up to, she was sort of green, like someone was flashing a green-colored light on her. She said she thought you were doing it, but, when I asked her to explain, she couldn’t.”

Mara tensed. “Is she okay?”

“She seems fine, but it was a little odd. Do you have any idea what is going on?”

“Not completely, but I want you two to stay in the house until I get home. I have to stop and pick up Sam at the bakery, but we should be there in less than an hour.”

“Why stay in the house?” Diana asked.

“I don’t want you to freak out, and I have no reason to think it’s on its way over there, but the dragon is loose again,” she said.

There were no parking spaces in front of the bakery when Mara pulled up, so she illegally swung her Outback alongside a bus stop at the end of the block. Two old women, sitting on the bench in the Plexiglas shelter, glared at her as she bent forward to see if her brother waited down the street. Sam had said he would be there when she arrived, but light was still streaming from the front windows of the bakery, so he had yet to close up. Groaning in frustration, she was about to shift the car into gear and cruise around the block, when the bakery when dark. However, the inside of her car suddenly filled with light. A bus pulled up behind her, and the driver honked his horn. Mara pulled away from the curb.

She inched forward, looking for Sam on the sidewalk, while watching the flow of traffic on the street. Just as she approached, he darted out the bakery door and turned to lock it. Hitting her brakes, she tooted her own horn three times. The bus pulled up behind her again and honked. Slamming her palm against the steering wheel, she pressed the gas, just as she heard a knock on the passenger side door. Sam jogged alongside the car in the middle of the street. She braked again, and he jumped in.

“You said you would be waiting when I got here,” Mara said.

He threw his book bag into the backseat and slipped on his seat belt. “This crazy woman nabbed me, when I came out the first time, and insisted that I let her buy a pumpkin pie. Ping must be putting something addictive in them. They’re good but not that good.” Settled in, he looked at his sister and said, “What’s the big rush? When I talked to Mom earlier, she said dinner wouldn’t be ready until late.”

“The dragon’s loose again,” Mara said. “We need to get home in case it shows up at the house, in case it’s still stalking Mom.”

“Tell me that you didn’t try to do something stupid to Ping,” he said. “You did, didn’t you?”

Mara pretended she was busy navigating, took a turn south and then said, “It never got that far. I never activated the Chronicle.”

“Yeah, but you did something, because you’ve got that stubborn-but-guilty look on your face that you get after you’ve done something you thought was right but went all wrong.”

“Look, before we went over to the warehouse, I spent all afternoon working with Ping, and I’m telling you that he has completely lost himself to that dragon. Even when he doesn’t physically look like the dragon, it influences everything he says and does. I had to do something to get rid of it.”

Sam shook his head. “I’ve worked with him a lot more than you, and I never saw any of that.”

Mara’s voice grew louder. “His eyes turned red, and he was about to pounce on one of his customers this afternoon. Later at the warehouse, after I repaired the roof, he seemed amazed at my ability, like he had never seen it before. He called it
magic
.”

Sam eyed her doubtfully.

“He actually said the
M
word, and it wasn’t
metaphysics
. After that he gave me another round of the ole red eye. I had had enough.”

“So what did you do, if you didn’t use the Chronicle?”

“I’ve always thought it was more complicated than that. I had to get the dragon out of him, before I could send it back to its own realm—at least that seemed like the logical approach. Remember the crystal I used to separate this realm’s mom from your realm’s mom on the bridge that night?”

“I’m not sure that would work in Ping’s case,” Sam said.

“Why not, hotshot?”

“Mom’s body was taken over by a consciousness from another realm, so it makes sense metaphysically that you could pull it back out again somehow. If I understand correctly from Ping’s explanations, his body—the one he occupies now—is an amalgamation of his and the dragon’s bodies. It’s not just a simple matter of yanking a consciousness out of where it doesn’t belong. They both belong there, metaphysically speaking.”

“Boy, you really have been hanging around him too much. You’re beginning to sound like him.” She paused and glanced over her shoulder, as they accelerated down the ramp onto Interstate 205 heading south. “Anyway it didn’t work.”

“What happened?”

“Mostly I just confused myself and pissed off the dragon. At least that’s how it looked, before it busted another hole in the warehouse roof on its way out.”

“And you think it’s going after Mom again?”

“I don’t have any particular reason to think it’s going after Mom, but, if there’s even a remote chance, we need to be home, until we know what’s going on.” They drove in silence for a few minutes, then Mara said, “Your Mara, the one from your realm, used the Chronicle to visit other realms to collect reptiles and things for your mother’s cult. Am I remembering that right?”

“Yes, why?”

“Was the dragon one of those creatures she brought back to your realm from somewhere else?”

“Well, yeah. It’s not like I come from a realm where there are dragons flying around all over the place.”

“Did your Mara ever tell you where this dragon came from or why she brought it back?” Mara asked.

Sam shook his head. “We never talked about it. I mean, it only made sense that they would get all excited about having a dragon to do their bidding, since they worshipped reptiles. Having a dragon for them would be like a car collector having a Maserati, don’t you think?”

“You say they were excited?”

“Oh, man, it was insane. There were celebrations and rituals and public events to make sure people knew that Diana had a dragon that would do her bidding.”

“Really? How so?”

“How so, what?”

“How did they get the dragon to do their bidding? How did they control it? Did Mara use her abilities to control it somehow?”

“Mara didn’t really have much to do with it after she brought it back, and the dragon always seemed to do whatever Diana wanted. I don’t think she had to force it or train it. It just wanted to please her, I guess, like a pet or something. Why so many questions about the dragon?”

“No reason. Just figuring out if there’s a piece to this puzzle I’m missing somehow,” she said, as they turned into their driveway.

Sam found himself getting drowsy, reading the last page of the colorful children’s book he held on his lap, while sitting on the edge of his mother’s bed. He had tucked Hannah in more than fifteen minutes earlier. Finishing, he closed the back cover softly, preparing to make a quiet exit. Her eyes were closed, and her lips were turned up in a relaxed smile. It still amazed him that this was his daughter and that he could feel so deeply about someone he’d met less than two weeks earlier. When he had crossed over from his own realm and had met the version of Mara and Diana who lived here, he had mixed feelings to sort out. He had to separate his past relationships with them from his hopes of what they might be here. With Hannah, he was smitten from the moment they met, or at least shortly after he’d gotten over the shock of her arrival.

He reached to turn off the lamp on the nightstand, and Hannah’s eyes snapped open. Backing away from the light, he gave her a look of mock disapproval and said, “Are you trying to fake me out? Why aren’t you asleep?”

“I wasn’t pretending to sleep. I was letting you look at me, like you always do when you think I’m asleep,” she said.

“I like to make faces at you when your eyes are closed,” he said. “In the future, when I’m older, do I make faces at you when you are sleeping?”

She pushed his arm. “No, silly. You watch over me, like you did just now.”

“I see.” He pulled up her blanket a little. “So you’re saying I watch like that when I’m a grown-up dad too?”

“You’re the same dad, silly, just older,” she said. “You know, I am going back soon.”

Sam cocked his head. “You mean, back to sleep?”

She swatted at him playfully and said, “No, back home with you and Mom and our new brother that’s coming.”

His heart raced at the thought of a whole family. “Nana told me that you said you wouldn’t be here for Christmas, that you would be gone before then.” He paused for a minute to swallow and make sure his voice didn’t crack. “I’m going to be really sad when you leave.”

“You don’t need to be sad. I will see you when I get back.”

“I know, but it will be years before I see you again.”