Seraph of Sorrow (37 page)

And a lizard that cared for its young cared if the young died.

“Mom will be home soon,” he muttered to the small lizard as he opened the cage and spooned some pureed sweet potatoes into the feeding dish, waking up the creature. “We’ll see when she gets here whether this is your last meal.”

The discovery that dragons used lizards as furtive scouts came as an early and welcome surprise to Hank. He had a simple-minded local trampler by the name of Ned teach him their language, which involved mainly head shakes and tongue protrusions, and then arranged for his own scout. The terms of her servitude were straightforward: She told no one else what he was using her for, and she came back with the names and addresses of every elder in the town. In return, her daughter
(“Is THAT your excuse for trying to hurt me?”)

(“I’m not trying to—”)

(“Hank! Thank goodness you’re here. Your father just hurt me. I don’t know if he—”)
would live.

In the weeks since, she had come back with a few names each day, which Hank recorded on a town map he kept hidden inside the sixth volume of his journals. From his discussions with Smokey Coils and others, he figured he had two-thirds of their “Blaze” mapped out.

Another week or two of this,
he promised himself,
and I can blow this zoo and go home.
It would feel good to be in Winoka again, where he wouldn’t have to look over his shoulder every day . . . and where he would finally get his due from Mayor Seabright and her two protégées.

Less than a half-hour passed before the mother skink returned through a hole in the floorboards. Her pale green head drooped with fatigue. Skinks were generally nocturnal creatures, but Hank had decided a day schedule was more convenient for him. He took out the journal, being careful not to disturb the sword that lay across the top of the bookcase, and flipped open the cover to pull out the Eveningstar map.

“Get over here,” he told the skink as he spread out the map in front of the bookcase. It ambled over with a morose gait, and began to relay its findings of the day.

“Ned . . . Brownfoot. Trampler. Yeah, I know him. Where does he live?”

The skink surveyed the map, crawled over to the southwest corner, and tried to lick a spot where a local road met the state highway. The tongue lapped over too broad an area. “Be more precise.” He pulled a quarter from his pocket and put it in front of her. She moved the quarter with her nose until it was clearly in the southeast corner of that intersection.

“All right.” He uncapped a green marker—green was for tramplers, blue for dashers, black for creepers—and moved the quarter aside to make a small X at that location. “Who else? Atheen . . . Whisperwind. Dasher. Where’s she? No, don’t waste time looking up at your kid. She’s fine. She’s eating sweet potatoes. Focus on the map, you little shit.”

They went on like this for a few minutes. The skink had five more names, and Hank marked them all carefully. Then he recapped the markers and stood up, flipping his servant and the quarter off the map and folding up the document. He was about to stick it back inside the journal when he saw something shift.

The movement was to the left of the door, next to the un-decorated window. The window was ajar and he could feel a breeze.
Why is it brushing my face, when the opening is waist-high?

He took a step forward and noticed something else weird—the glass of the window was uneven. It was an almost imperceptible difference, but it was there—the bottom third of the window looked about two feet closer than the top two-thirds. Which could only mean . . .

His blood chilled as the dragon dropped his camouflage, revealing a dark rainbow of scales. Hank expected to die.
You fool. You knew he could do this. You knew
all
creepers could. You should have swept the apartment after he closed the door. A single mistake, and

(“Your father just hurt me. I don’t know if he—”)

(“Dawn, calm down! Hank, it’s nothing; don’t let the blood fool you; your mother and I were just practicing, and—”) now you die.

But the old creeper didn’t attack. He seemed confused. “Sam, I don’t get it. Why treat that skink so badly? Why terrorize it? If you have questions, you could ask me. I’d tell you. Animal cruelty . . . that’s just not right, Sam. That’s not for dragons. I agreed to take you, Sam, when you had no one . . . I felt I owed you. I owed my daughter, little Jada, whose mother I left on her own. But I can’t watch this. I can’t let you stay here, Sam . . . no, not anymore . . .”

During this speech, Hank wasn’t listening. He was trying to calm his racing mind into devising a strategy for escape.
He doesn’t get it. All he saw was you, and the skink, and the map. He hasn’t figured out what you are, or what you’re doing here. Move. Move! MOVE!

He grabbed the sword off the bookcase to his right and stepped forward with his left foot, turning to bring the sword in a slashing motion across the body of Smokey Coils. The dragon reared back, taking only the tip of the sword across the belly.

What happened next was never entirely clear to Hank, and his memory became more clouded with time. At that moment, however, he saw a fierce glow surround the creeper. Around them both, the entire room pitched to the left. The walls burst and bristled with millions of legs—
millipedes,
he guessed. Worst of all, his sword bent and sprouted scales, until the blade was a hissing viper.

It’s not real,
he told himself with a certainty he did not feel.
It can’t be real.

He had no evidence to back this theory up. It all
seemed
real. He had never heard of a dragon creating any sort of illusion like this.
It is the dragon, isn’t it?
The skink he had left on the floor tripled in size and began to drip with orange slime. Its secretions burned the floorboards, and the stench of

(“Don’t let the blood fool you; your mother and I were just practicing, and—”)

(“We weren’t practicing; he came after me with that sword of his! He’s not himself—please, Hank, protect me!”)
sulfur and burning wood invaded his nostrils.

One thing prevented Hank from succumbing to the chimeras around him. It was the image of Glorianna Seabright attending his funeral, presiding over his coffin with that condescending sneer on her face, pretending to honor this young man’s sacrifice for her cause . . . and afterward, gripping his tearful mother by the shoulders and whispering in her ear,
My condolences, Dawn. I can’t help but feel partly responsible . . . I shouldn’t have asked little Henry to go. Plainly, he wasn’t as good as we could have hoped.

He lifted the viper, snapped it straight, and drove it into the left eye of Smokey Coils. The old creeper screamed and washed the floor of the apartment with flame. By then, Hank had vaulted himself onto the dragon’s back. As the dragon thrashed, it was all Hank could do

(“Please, Hank, protect me!”)

(“Dawn, what the hell are you saying!?”)

(“Dad, Mom’s hurt! Put down the sword—”)

(“I don’t put down this sword for anyone, not in my own house!”)
not to fall off.

Neither the scream nor the fire lasted much longer. The millipedes and the slime and the stench and the viper gave way to reality. Smokey’s body heaved and fell, sending Hank rolling.

It took a few seconds for him to get up and survey the room. It appeared normal again, if you discounted the roasted skink, glowing-hot quarter, and dragon sprawled on the floor. A few of the papers on Hank’s desk were on fire, but that was easy enough to stamp out. Once he had done so, he kicked the quarter at Smokey’s chin. “This month’s rent,” he sneered.

He pulled out a backpack from under his bed, went over to the bookcase, and crammed all of his journals inside, including the one with the map. After tossing in a few clothes, he zipped it up and slung it over his shoulder. Then he stared at the terrarium for a few seconds, weighing his options. He finally opened the cover, reached in, grabbed the baby skink as it licked up the last of the sweet potato puree, and snapped its neck between his thick fingers.

After dropping the tiny corpse, he walked up to the dragon and pulled his sword out of its eye socket with his right hand. Smokey screamed again, startling Hank into kicking the beast in the jaw. That sent the geezer back into unconsciousness. In a panic, Hank ran out of the room, down the stairs into the garage, and into Smokey’s pickup truck. He threw the backpack and bloody sword into the passenger seat, pulled the key out from where it was wedged between visor and roof, and got the engine roaring.

Five minutes later, two newolves watched from a distance as the familiar truck of Smokey Coils left Eveningstar, proceeding north. They said and did nothing. Smokey left town regularly, to spend time with nature. He was quite the recluse.

Hank’s return to Winoka was all he could have hoped for. The town burst into celebration, his mother showered him with affection, and even Glorianna Seabright raised an eyebrow when she saw the bloodstained sword and stack of journals Hank dumped out of his backpack. Everyone accepted his story that he had killed Smokey Coils, but had no time to hew off the beast’s head before it became necessary to leave town.

Glory declared him a young man, having passed his rite of passage. His mother threw him an enormous party. Best of all, Wendy Williamson showed up.

“There’s not much here.”

“Don’t be a fool. There’s plenty.” The mayor’s voice dripped with disdain.

“Names and addresses? Sketches of big wolves? What can I do with this?”

“If you don’t know, you have no business planning an attack on that town.”

Hank leaned in closer to the mayor’s office door, and heard someone inside shuffling about paper—perhaps unfolding a map.

“How do we know your agent listed them all?” This was the first voice, a man whose smooth tone carried an undercurrent of ill temper.

“He didn’t. We agreed to conduct espionage, not generate a complete directory. That map pinpoints more than half of their elders and identifies their types. The journals document their defensive patterns and tactics. The rest we leave to you. Surely you have some method of skulking about in the dark, which will suit that purpose.”

“It will take time,” the man said. “Perhaps years, to do it properly.”

“Good heavens.” The mayor sighed.

“It’s not just the rest of the list! An attack of this magnitude, against a town this fortified, requires assembling an army. Our kind hasn’t gathered in numbers for centuries. And I have research to do, if we’re going to be able to display enough power to fight dragons.”

She laughed mirthlessly. “I should have known. Well, whatever. Take a year, or ten, or a hundred if you like. Plan and plot with your fellow bugs. You seem like a young, spry fellow, so maybe you think you have forever. Just remember that people do move, from time to time. The information I’m passing to you today will get steadily less helpful, the longer you wait.”

“It takes as long as it takes.” The man was gathering up papers.

“Careful that I do not lose patience with you and your friends. If it takes you too long to start a fight with them, you may have one with me.”

The man scoffed, and Hank heard footsteps approaching the door. By the time it opened, he was far enough away to appear having newly arrived at city hall. The tall, angry man brushed past so quickly, all Hank caught was his chocolate hair and sharp blue-green eyes.

“Come in, little Henry.”

Distracted by her pet name for him, he turned away from the other man and entered her office. She was leaning against the front of her desk with a faint smile.

“I suppose you heard everything.”

“Yes.”

“You’re wondering why.”

“You gave away everything I learned,” he said.

“I gave them a copy. The information helps them, and costs us nothing to pass on.”

“So they’re going to attack Eveningstar, instead of us getting the chance?”

She clapped her hands together in the prayer position. “Little Henry, try to let the testosterone settle down. Not every battle ends the way you want it to. And not every fight requires a beaststalker’s sword. You and I discussed economy of force, when we first met. Why should I, the mayor of this town, send beaststalkers to fight and die in Eveningstar, when I can find a bloodthirsty arachnid to do it for me? Let the spiders and the dragons kill each other. We will destroy the victor, who will be bloodied and weak at the end.”

“But you said yourself, by the time they attack my information could be useless!”

“Hmmm.” She mocked him, pretending to consider his words. “I suppose you’re right.”

“You sent me out there to do what, nothing?! I risked my life for you!”

“Please, little Henry. You didn’t do anything for me. You did it for

(“I don’t put down this sword for anyone, not in my own house!”)

(“Hank, he’s going to kill me! Stop—”)

your mother.”

“This wasn’t my mother’s idea. You came up with the mission, not

(“Hank, he’s going to kill me! Stop him!”)

(“YOU BITCH! Hank, she’s setting me up! Don’t listen to—”)

her!”

Glorianna blinked, as if remembering. “That’s right. You said you wanted me to teach you . . . What was it? Patience. And I told you I would. So did I succeed, little Henry? Have you learned patience? Will you be content to watch your hard-fought accomplishment waste away, year by year, as the werachnids plot and plot and plot and plot, and the dragons harden their position, and your fearless mayor makes no move toward them because she’s . . . What did you say? Too afraid? Will you have the patience to watch your fame fade, your mother grow disappointed, and your precious Blacktooth Blade go unused? Or will you lose your temper, and make a horrible mistake . . . again?”

Now it was Hank’s turn to blink. What was the mayor

(“YOU BITCH! Hank, she’s setting me up! Don’t listen to—”)