Seraph of Sorrow (29 page)
He took her trembling hands. “We are. But I meant what I said, Winona. We are in a fight for our lives. Your best hope is to join us. You can only stay alone for so long.”
“I . . . I need time to think.”
Before he could say another word, she was running out of the room.
“Winona!”
The voice she heard as she left Evans Hall was not Motega’s—it was, to her surprise, Tasa’s. The red creeper did not camouflage as he followed her over the moonlit grounds.
“Tasa, what are you doing?! People will see you!”
“Winona, we’ve got to talk!”
She looked up. “How are you in dragon form? The moon’s only a bit less than half—”
“That’s not important. Let’s get into the woods so we can talk!” He grabbed her by the hand and dragged her past the nearest trees.
“All right, now. What’s the big deal?” His brusque manner had irritated her, and her ear ached where she was pulling on it.
“Winona, you’ve got to leave this school. It’s dangerous.”
She gaped, incredulous, at his horned face. “Is that a joke? Tasa, I found friends here. Friends
you
told me to make. Why—”
“I don’t trust them,” he said. His eyes would not meet hers. “I’m sorry. I made a mistake. Please don’t make it worse.”
“What’s wrong with them?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Just pack your things and head home.”
“This
is
home,” she reminded him. “I have nowhere else to go.”
“What about Crescent Valley?”
“Mom mentioned that place, but I don’t know how to get there. Do you?”
He hesitated, which gave her time to think about what she was saying. “Wait a second—I don’t know why I’m considering this! You’re overreacting, Tasa. So am I. I’m going back to my room and going to sleep. And tomorrow night, I’m meeting with Motega and his friends. We’re going to form a community of dragons that doesn’t need to kill people.”
“This isn’t about killing,” Tasa hissed. “It’s about survival.”
“I’m done listening to you, Tasa. I’m going home, and you should go home, too.”
“Winona—”
“Good-bye.”
The next morning, Winona could barely contain herself. She hadn’t slept, not out of fear or worry, but excitement about the coming crescent and what it would mean for her and Motega.
She blundered through her classes, not paying attention to any of the lectures or discussions. Since she lived across campus from Motega and had a different major, she had no plans to see him before evening. They would meet deep in the upper arboretum, near the old faculty picnic grounds. While different people changed at different times at the crescent’s onset, Winona was fairly sure that by the time midnight came, they would all be in dragon form.
It was just before six in the evening when she made her way past Evans Hall and Bell Field and crossed Spring Creek on her way into the forest. She raised the hood of her old sweatshirt, so that her ears would be protected against the autumn wind. The chill was nothing compared to what she felt when she reached the small clearing where they had agreed to meet.
There was indeed a dragon there—Motega, she presumed, from his dark scales and proud bearing. He was larger than Tasa, and the three horns at the back of his head were in a symmetrical formation.
Handsome,
she couldn’t resist telling herself.
Also in the clearing was something Winona had never seen before: a steel-blue wolf spider, its legs sprawled out in an eight-feet span, dark green pools glistening all over its head.
Both creatures turned to face this woman who had burst out of the forest. Terrified of the way the spider fully faced her, with limbs tensed and ready to spring, she darted away to seek shelter back in the trees. Behind her, she heard Motega calling after her.
“Winona, stay with the others in the trees! I will handle this!”
As she lay hidden under the lowest boughs of a thick pine tree, she watched the two creatures fight. The spider leapt over the dragon’s fire, landing on indigo scales and delivering a sharp bite. Winona winced, but fortunately the bite didn’t seem lethal. The dragon’s tail reached up and flicked the intruder off. The giant arachnid went sailing into the trees, and the dragon pursued. Great jaws opened, and a sheet of flame scorched the oaks and maples where the enemy must have been. Despite her hatred for violence, Winona couldn’t help feeling her heart lift.
That will end it! He’s won!
Then an unearthly scream went up, and a strangled voice came:
“Buried! Buried!”
What happened next stunned Winona. The earth in the clearing rose up in three walls, each at least eight feet high, facing each other in a triangle. Ripples carried through the ground, bumped Winona, and rattled the tree above her. Before the creeper could take wing, the walls converged and smothered him. A slow struggle ensued—first there was a great swelling in the earth as the captive beneath tried to escape, then a series of tremors, and then nothing.
“Motega!”
She scrambled out from under the tree and ran to the spot where the dragon had once been. It was incredible, how quickly fortunes had reversed in this fight. One moment, her boyfriend had been there—the next, he was gone.
She heard Danny’s voice coming from the trees, calling to the others.
“Pull him out of the woods! Watch the flames!”
Yes, pull him out of the woods,
she found herself seething as she spread her palms over the unforgiving rock.
Pull him out here, so I can kill him for what he’s done.
All she could feel was the boiling rage inside. Her vision clouded, and she began to feel her spine unravel. The crescent moon was pulling her shape.
“Okay, the fire’s out,” she heard Danny say. “Roll him over—no, hold him! He’s beginning to spasm. Winona, come here and help!”
Her innards roiling and her mind reeling, Winona stumbled toward the voices. Red-haired Danny and black-haired Katherine were there, holding down a few limbs of the struggling arachnid. It was helpless on its back, its legs wriggling furiously in pain, parts of its flesh visibly burning. Jodie, Rick, and Pete were coming out of the woods. They were all still in human shape.
Not for long,
Winona told herself.
Soon we’ll have ourselves an old-fashioned barbeque, and this sick, grotesque thing will be our guest of honor.
“Kat, did you bring the ointment and bandages?”
“Yeah, I’ve got them right here.” The girl slung off her backpack and began pulling out supplies. “I wish we had changed earlier. We could have helped.”
Winona spat. “Ointment and bandages?! What the hell good do they do us now?”
Katherine bit her pretty lip. “Sorry, Win. Just trying to—Hey, are you feeling okay? Are you about to change? Danny, I don’t think she can help right now.”
“Fine.” Danny’s teeth clenched. Everyone else was staring at the smoking, eight-legged form before them. “You guys, don’t stand there. We gotta hold him down!”
Winona tumbled onto her side and began to cry.
Motega,
she whispered into the soiled grass where the dragon had been.
I’m so sorry I couldn’t help you.
Her body kept convulsing.
“Let me up!” came a raspy voice. “Dammit, Danny, Kat, let me up! I’m okay. It looks worse than it is. Winona! Winona, I’m okay. I’m . . .”
Winona’s head snapped up. At first she looked at the ground to see if the dragon had emerged from its grave. Then she realized the voice was coming from the werachnid.
“Motega!?”
Released from his friends’ grasp, the enormous spider flipped upright. He faced her, speechless. Winona scrambled to her feet and pushed off the ground with her wings.
My wings. I’ve changed.
Like Motega.
But not like him at all.
They all stood there, Winona the dragon and Motega the spider, Danny and Katherine, Jodie and Rick and Pete, all stunned at what the others were seeing.
Suddenly Katherine collapsed, her long hair spilling in front of her face. She let out a grunt as four more limbs burst from her spine, and several bulges appeared at the top of her skull.
Winona looked in a panic at her, and Motega, and all the others, and Motega again.
Then she screamed and blasted into the sky.
The rest of that night was a blur to Winona Brandfire. She never returned to the college. Instead she flew northeast, on frail trampler’s wings, toward the crescent moon for hours.
By the time her wings finally gave out, she was over a large, shimmering body of water. She let herself tumble, plunging into the cold depths and letting all the air out of her lungs.
What is the point?
she told herself as she sank like a stone.
If we’re not killing, we’re dying. I don’t want any part of it anymore.
There was a dim splash from above. She sank and sank, waiting for the bottom. But the bottom never came, and as she rolled over her own tail, she began to suspect she was rising again. Her lungs cried out for air, and she tried to open her mouth to drown herself, but her throat closed in a reflexive bid for survival. Right when she was about to force her lungs open to the water, a crimson shape darted past, and a claw took her own and pulled her to the surface.
By the time she burst out of the water and gasped her first breath of air in the ancient refuge her kind called Crescent Valley, Tasa was gone again.
Crescent Valley was kind to Winona Brandfire. Here, there were no enemies or fights, beyond the odd territorial dispute between a trampler in a mountain cave and a dasher in a stone aerie farther up the slope. These were settled by the Blaze, a wise group of older dragons representing every known dragon family. They used words and logic, respected tragic history, and found peaceful ways to resolve conflict. Winona came to watch when they gathered, and she sought out elders to ask all sorts of questions. They completed her education, and marveled at how bright and passionate this young dragon was. Despite her age, they knew she was the last of the Brandfires, and so they called her “Little Elder” and let her come and go as she pleased.
Once she shared her story of her last night in the arboretum, she learned that the dragon who had died was named Gerald Scales. He had attended the college in his youth and liked to return from time to time to enjoy the place where he used to change under a crescent moon. His run-in with the young and powerful Motega had been nothing more than bad luck.
That bad luck had not stopped with Gerald. After months of mourning, a sinewy widowed dasher named Christina Scales kissed their young son, Crawford, on the top of the head, told him she’d be back soon, and then flew from their Pinegrove home. She returned with the scorched, fanged head of Motega Brave-eyes impaled on the back of her tail. Not every dragon in Crescent Valley, Winona realized then, resolved conflicts peacefully.
Winona heard from dragons attending Carleton—there were, as she and Tasa had suspected, others of their kind—that before he died, Motega had gotten one of the girls at that school pregnant, a certain Katherine Wilson, who disappeared after having a daughter named Dianna. Whether this child was the only one Motega fathered, or if there were more, no one could say.
These were the sorts of stories from “the other world” that made Winona glad to stay in Crescent Valley for years. She listened sadly to the tales of those few who survived the massacre of Pinegrove, attended the stone plateau funerals of dragon after dragon who returned after flying off with vengeance in his or her heart, and greeted new arrivals to Crescent Valley. In this way, she welcomed and tutored many younger dragons, including Ned Brownfoot, Charles Longtail and his younger brother, Xavier, and Crawford Scales.
Shortly after Pinegrove, a refugee from that town named Smokey Coils arrived in Crescent Valley for the first time. His parents were among the many elder creepers who died in Glory’s massacre, and he did not talk much about the experience. She mistook his stoicism for bravery, and his physical similarities to Gerald Scales—they were both creepers—released deep feelings in her that she mistook for love. They had a child named Jada, right in Crescent Valley, which got others talking in low tones about the wisdom of raising a child here.
Such talk got her to gather her courage and emerge again through the lake, where Crawford Scales was building a refuge for dragons. She and Jada spent time there and in the nearby town of Northwater. Sometimes Smokey came with them, but when she began to talk of moving to Northwater permanently he made excuses, choosing to live in the dragon stronghold of Eveningstar, and they parted ways.
Tasa showed up a couple of times soon afterward—once at the Scales farm when the thought of raising a child alone overwhelmed her and she sought solitude in the barn, and once during her first night in the Northwater apartment with a wailing baby. Winona depended more often upon the advice and help of Charles Longtail, descended from the Longuequeues of France. They became fast friends, and he was in many ways a father to little Jada.
“When were you going to tell me about this?”
From behind she could see the enormous, elegant form of Charles Longtail, all coiled power and cobalt streaks, sag with a sigh. “Xavier told you.”
“Of course Xavier told me! He’s worried sick! He says you’re off to meet with Glory Seabright, you won’t say where, you won’t let him go along . . . This is madness!”
“This is our best chance for peace,” he replied, facing her. “All of the work I’ve been doing for years—it must come to this someday.”
“Come to what? Suicide?”
“It’s not suicide if she wants to talk peace.”
“She doesn’t talk peace!” Winona felt rage and tears well up. “She can’t!”
“Winona, none of us know for sure what Glory Seabright is capable—”
Her hind leg came down so hard, a rift opened and an anaconda squirmed out. “I
know
what she’s capable of!”