The Dragon at the North Pole (3 page)

“Why, thank you!” said Emmy.

“I’ll get you my bottle of green ink and maybe you can use a big feather for a quill,” Daisy suggested.

“I won’t need ink,” Emmy said. “I have dragon ichor and talons.” Dragon ichor was the green stuff Emmy secreted from her talons.

“And here’s a little something from Miss Alodie’s new store,” said Jesse. He handed her a square box Miss Alodie had wrapped in purple tissue and tied with a green bow.

Emmy took the box and held it in the palm of her hand. “Pretty!” she said, viewing it from all angles.

Daisy cleared her throat. “Em? There’s actually something
inside
.”

“Oh!” Emmy unwrapped the box and picked out the green stone. In her large palm, it looked no bigger than a pea.

“Just what I always wanted!” she exclaimed. Then she said blankly, “What is it?”

“It’s a raw emerald,” Jesse said, and went on to tell her about the stone’s ability to reveal treachery.

Emmy wasn’t listening. Her snout hung low and her tail swept the dusty planks of the barn floor.

“What’s wrong?” Daisy asked softly.

“I don’t have any gifts to give you,” Emmy said sorrowfully. “I was hoping Santa would come to town and give me a hand. But if you say it never snows here … Maybe that’s what the song coming from the northern lights is saying, that Santa Claus
isn’t
coming to town.” She looked up, her big green eyes brimming with tears.

“Don’t be sad, Emmy,” said Daisy. “We don’t need presents from you.”

“Daisy’s right,” said Jesse. “Just having you in our lives is the best present we could have.”

Slowly, Emmy began to brighten. “Really?”

“Really,” said Jesse and Daisy.

Emmy held out her arms to them. “Holiday hug?”

After the hug, Jesse clapped his hands and said, “Okay, Emmy! Time to brush your fangs.”

Emmy scowled. “Oh, pooh!” she said.

The cousins followed her outside to the water trough, where she kept the push broom she used for a toothbrush. As she ran the bristles over her fangs, she said, “Why I hafoo oo is?”

“So you won’t lose any more fangs,” Daisy said. Just after Thanksgiving, Emmy had gotten a terrible fang ache and had lost the fang not long afterward.

Emmy lowered the brush and growled. “Yeah, well, the Fang Fairy ripped me off.”

“We’ve told you, there’s no such thing as the Fang Fairy,” Jesse said patiently. “Any more than there is such a thing as Santa Claus.”

“Then how come she took my fang and didn’t leave me a quarter?” Emmy said. She dipped her nose into the trough, slurped up water, tossed back her head, and gargled loudly before spitting the water out.

Jesse and Daisy didn’t have a good answer for Emmy. When Emmy had lost her fang, she hadn’t told them about it. Instead, she had put the fang under her pillow of socks for the Fang Fairy to find. The next day the fang was missing! But nothing had been left in return.

“The next time you lose a fang, you need to tell
us,” Daisy said. “That way we can play at being the Fang Fairy and leave you a quarter.”

“I want the
real
Fang Fairy,” Emmy said sulkily, “not a play one.”

Just like she wanted the real Santa Claus. Jesse sighed. Sometimes being a Dragon Keeper was just impossible.

They walked back to the barn and tucked Emmy into the old corncrib, which was filled with rolled-up socks. She wouldn’t let them leave until Jesse had read
A Visit from St. Nicholas
. Then Jesse and Daisy headed back to the house. After a light supper, they went upstairs carrying steaming cups of hot chocolate. A bathroom separated their bedrooms.

“If you wake up first,” Daisy said, “come next door to wake me. We’re allowed to open our stockings before we eat breakfast.”

“Excellent!” said Jesse.

Christmas morning, Jesse woke up to Daisy’s finger drilling a hole in his shoulder.

“What?” he muttered groggily. He felt a sudden cold draft on the side of his face.

“Look, Jess!” Daisy said, pointing out the window next to his bed.

Jesse turned and gaped in astonishment.

It was as if someone had come along during the night and smothered the world in whipped cream. Freshly fallen snow covered the ground and the rooftops, weighing down the bushes and tree branches. More snow fell from the sky, which was a soft, pale gray, unlike any sky Jesse had ever seen before.

He sat up and let out a loud whoop of delight.

“Just a dusting, eh?” he said with a chuckle. He pressed his nose to the frigid windowpane. Then he turned to Daisy and said, “Let’s go outside!”

Daisy flapped her hands. “I can’t wait to see how Emmy likes her first snow!”

They met in the hallway, dressed in long underwear and jeans and sweatshirts and socks. Daisy put her finger to her lips as she led Jesse tiptoeing past the master bedroom. They crept down the stairs and peered into the living room. The tree was brightly lit, and their stockings were stuffed with gifts. More presents were piled beneath the tree.

As much as Jesse would have liked to sit down and unpack his stocking, the snow was calling to him. From the look on Daisy’s face, the snow was calling to her, too.

Ten minutes later, in boots and scarves and mittens and winter coats, Jesse and Daisy stepped outside.

“Race you to the Dell!” Daisy said. She leapt off the porch and immediately fell face-first into the snow. She sat up, spitting out snow and laughing. There was no going very fast in this stuff. Jesse dived in after her. He wanted to wallow in it, to pack it into balls, to lie down in it and make snow angels, to touch his tongue to it, to do all the wonderful things he’d never had a chance to do in the tropical places he’d lived. And if
he
was this excited, what would Emmy be doing?

Jesse and Daisy picked up their feet and giant-stepped through the thigh-high drifts. They had to stop every few steps to rest. When they got to the laurel bushes, they slid through the tunnel on their bottoms and struggled to their feet on the other side.

The Dell lay before them, a vast white china bowl with a fine black crack in it where the brook cut through the snow. To the west, Old Mother Mountain rose up like a huge white ghost, mini avalanches tumbling down her steep shoulders. Every branch of every tree in the Deep Woods was coated with snow.

In contrast to all the whiteness, the old dairy barn stood out as if a fresh coat of red paint had been applied to it overnight. The snow banked up against the sides of the barn, pure and undisturbed.
Strangely, Emmy hadn’t set foot in it yet.

Jesse and Daisy went slipping and sliding down the hill. When they came to the front of the barn, they stopped short.

“Maybe she was up late,” said Daisy.

“Maybe she doesn’t even know it snowed,” Jesse said.

“Wait till she sees!” said Daisy

But the moment they slid the barn door open, they knew something was wrong. The warmth of Emmy’s body normally kept the barn toasty, but this morning the barn was cold. They ran to the corncrib. It was empty. They climbed up to the loft. Also empty.

Their dragon, Emerald of Leandra, was gone.

When they got back down the ladder, they saw one of the sheets of paper they’d given Emmy the night before spread out on the planks of the Museum of Magic. It was anchored in place by the raw emerald. On her brand-new personal stationery, Emmy had written in her large loopy hand: “Dear J and D, Gone to help Santa. E of L.” She had added her two-fanged smiley face.

“ ‘Gone to help Santa’?” Daisy said. “What could that possibly mean?”

“I don’t know,” Jesse said, bewildered. “But wherever she went, she didn’t take her emerald
with her.” He slipped the gemstone into his coat pocket.

Daisy looked around the barn, her brow furrowed. “What about the other two pieces of stationery?” she asked. “Where are they?”

Jesse shrugged. “Maybe the professor has some ideas. Come on.”

They headed back. The trip home wasn’t anywhere near as much fun as the trip out. Now the snow was just a cold white obstacle to their urgent need to contact the professor, their adviser on dragon matters.

When they got into the mudroom, they peeled off their layers, then made their way up to Jesse’s room. Jesse threw himself into his desk chair and switched on his computer. He sat back and stared at the still-black screen. Behind him, Daisy stood drumming her fingers on the back of his chair.

For Christmas, Jesse had asked his parents for a new computer to replace his old, slow one, but instead they had given him a handheld gizmo called a Blueberry. Jesse called it Blueberry Sal, after a character in one of his favorite picture books, but he still hadn’t mastered using the tiny keyboard.

The Blueberry was downstairs in Jesse’s backpack. Just as he was beginning to think that he ought to run and get it, the computer came to life
with a reluctant
blurp
. After Jesse had typed in
www.foundadragon.org
, the professor’s familiar white-bearded face materialized on the screen. There was a sprig of holly stuck in the lapel of his black coat, and he was holding a cup.

“Happy winter solstice!” Professor Lukas B. Andersson said, raising his cup to toast them.

“You’re a little late,” Jesse said. “Winter solstice was the twenty-first.”

“Actually, it was the twenty-second this year,” the professor said. “But why quibble? It is not possible to detect the actual instant of the solstice. In order to pinpoint the day, we must be able to observe a change in azimuth, or elevation, of less than or equal to about one hundred sixty degrees of the angular diameter of the sun.”

“What are you two talking about?” Daisy said.

“The winter solstice,” Jesse said. “It’s the shortest day of the year, when the earth’s axis is tipped farthest away from the sun. That’s why the sun is so low in the sky and why it’s dark in the morning and the late afternoon.”

“Yeah, well,” said Daisy. “Whatever you want to call it, Emmy took off.”

The professor’s snowy white brows lowered over his eyes. “Took off
what
?” he asked. “Don’t tell me she’s taken to wearing habiliments.”

“Habiliments?” Daisy said.

“Clothes, I think,” said Jesse. Then he said to the professor, “What Daisy means is that Emmy is gone.”

“She left us a note saying that she had gone to help Santa,” Daisy added. “Do you have any idea what she might mean?”

“Gone to help Santa!”
the professor bellowed, setting his cup down hard on his desk. “What do you mean? WHAT SORT OF NONSENSE IS THIS?”

Jesse ducked as if the professor had hurled a snowball at him. “That’s all she wrote,” Jesse said in a meek whisper.

“We don’t know any more than that,” Daisy added. “Those are the bare facts.”

“Well, the
bare facts
, young lady,” said the professor, “are that you, her Keepers, whose job it is to look after her, left her out in the cold on Christmas Eve, and now you’ve got to find her and bring her back. I don’t mind telling you that I have a
very bad
feeling about this. The base of operations for Santa Claus—aka Kris Kringle, aka St. Nicholas, aka Father Christmas—is the North Pole. But the North Pole has also been a veritable magnet for far less savory characters. You two had better get cracking if you—”

But before the professor could finish what he was saying, the screen of Jesse’s old computer was swallowed up by a blizzard of static.

Jesse smacked the side of the monitor. It didn’t help. Then he turned to Daisy. “Do you think Emmy might have decided to look for Santa by actually going to the North Pole?” he asked.

Daisy shook her head. “I don’t know. And the only way we could get there to check would be by flying on Emmy’s back.”

They were just pondering this when the doorbell rang. Daisy dashed downstairs, Jesse at her heels.

They opened the door a crack and peered out. Miss Alodie was wearing a pair of fuzzy green earmuffs with a lumpy green scarf wrapped around her lower face and a long, fuzzy orange coat. She looked like a human carrot.

“Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good morning!” she cried out, her blue eyes dancing.

“Shh!” Jesse and Daisy said, pointing behind them up the stairs.

Miss Alodie nodded and whispered, “Oh! I see! The parents still nestled all snug in their beds, eh? Well, they’re missing out, aren’t they? Who could have imagined it? Yesterday it was fifty-five degrees and warm enough to make my crocuses consider
poking their silly heads out of the dirt. Today we’re walking in a winter wonderland!”

The twinkle in her blue eyes dimmed as they traveled shrewdly from Jesse to Daisy. “Why so glum on a snowy Christmas morn, kids?”

“Emmy’s gone,” said Jesse.

“Gone?” Miss Alodie echoed. “Gone where?”

“She said she went to help Santa,” said Daisy. “We think she might have gotten it into her head to look for him at the North Pole, but we have no way to get there to find out.”

“Well, in that case, my Christmas gifts to you are just the ticket,” said Miss Alodie.

“The ticket?” Jesse asked.

“Your ticket to the North Pole!” she crowed. She turned and picked up two packages wrapped in purple tissue paper that had been sitting in the snow behind her. She handed them to Jesse and Daisy.

“Well,” said Miss Alodie, “what are you waiting for? Unwrap them!”

Miss Alodie came inside and scraped the snow off her boots on the mat, then followed Daisy and Jesse into the living room. Unwrapping their gifts, Jesse and Daisy both made polite noises, but neither of them had the slightest idea what Miss Alodie had given them. Each of them held a pair of what
looked like crude, short-handled badminton rackets made out of interwoven twigs and moss and lashed together with vines.

“They’re
snowshoes
!” Miss Alodie said, slapping her thighs with elfin glee. “Made them myself from willow branches.”

“Thanks a lot, Miss Alodie,” Jesse said, but he was thinking that Miss Alodie’s snowshoes didn’t look as if they’d get them across the street, much less to the North Pole.

“Don’t thank me,” Miss Alodie said. “Just find your dragon and bring her back home safe and sound. I’ll stick around here long enough to see you off and give your parents the most valuable gift any grown-up could ever wish for.”