The Dragon Guard (14 page)

Jason shifted his weight. “I just can. Besides, if there was anything really bad prowling out there, she'd still be hidden in your clothes.” He flicked a finger at the pack rat who began to busily groom her whiskers as if she hadn't a care in the world, and hadn't appeared to have been listening.

Bailey stood on tiptoe and peered out the little spy hole in the apartment door. “Someone
was
here. Honestly.”

“I don't doubt that.” Jason nodded at her. “But you're all right?”

“Outside of being nearly spooked out of my ponytail.” Bailey settled back onto her shoe soles. “I think he might have followed me from the bus stop this morning.”

“That's not good.” Trent scowled.

“What'll I do?”

“Well . . .” Jason scratched his head and from the expression on his face, he had begun formulating some sort of plan. His mouth opened as if he'd finished just as the door rattled under a heavy THUMP!

Bailey jumped back with a muffled squeak and Lacey dove nose first back into her pocket. Perhaps it was Lacey who'd squeaked, no one had the time to decide.

Jason grabbed Bailey's hand, then Trent's. “Who-ever it is, we're not waiting around to see if it's trouble!” He grabbed the crystal pendant around his neck and, with a cradle of all their hands, peered intently into it.

No rainbow of color like Bailey's teleportion, just a rush of cold air, and they were elsewhere. Trent stumbled a bit upon the ground as they alit, but he gripped Jason's hand tightly, and then all three were on solid footing, and Bailey let out a soft sigh of relief as she saw where they were. Fresh air, green grass down slopes leading to a green valley and a deep blue pond, framed by the oddly colored and jagged Iron Mountains. Jason was the only one who could bring the younger Magickers into Haven, for the Gate into the valley hadn't stabilized yet, although the Elders could, and had, brought them all there from time to time. Someday, a school would stand down in the valley, with the Iron Mountains as its backdrop.

Trent said, “Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble . . . when will we three be met again?”

Bailey rolled her eyes and laughed at his poor imitation of a witch from Shakespeare's
Macbeth
, but the color returned to her face, and she let go of their hands, though not before they felt her trembling. Trent and Jason traded looks. It was not like Bailey to let anything rock her optimistic view of the world.

She wrinkled her nose. “I really, really, don't like being scared.” A toss of her head, ponytail bouncing, punctuated that.

“I can tell that.” Jason beckoned down the trail to the clear blue pond nestled in the valley. “Let's go sit and talk a bit, then we'll see if the coast is clear.”

The three of them trotted down into the small valley that was all they knew of Haven, and Bailey threw herself on a scoop-shaped rock that lay close to the water, poking out of the fringe of trees that ringed one end. Its bumpy exterior disappeared, moss covered in the darker, cooler grove. As she settled down on the sun warmed rock in a late afternoon that had given the landscape a warm orange glow, Jason looked about.

“Time,” he said, “isn't the same here. Ever notice that?”

Trent nodded. He folded up and sat on a patch of dry grass, facing the lake which formed from a long, thin waterfall tumbling out of the mountain, its spray keeping most of the shore a little damp. “It isn't the same and it doesn't pass the same way. If we study here, I don't know if we'll stay younger or grow older. I've been trying to think of a way to test it.”

Jason sat down too, checking the ties on his hastily put on shoes.

Bailey blinked. “Not get older?”

“Something like that. Or maybe we get older faster, but I don't think so.”

She considered first Jason, then Trent, then shook her head. “I would have noticed that. You'd have sprouted chin hairs or something.”

Jason blushed, but Trent put his head back and laughed. A startled pair of birds took wing and flew off as his voice broke the silence of the small valley. Jason hid his reaction by combing his fingers through his hair. “If time does pass differently here, then chances are your stalker will be discouraged and gone if we go back in a few minutes. The trouble is, how do we keep you safe after that?”

“Depends, doesn't it, on what we're dealing with? Dark Hand, someone following Bailey, or . . .” Trent paused and busied himself with picking strands of grass and braiding them into a grass chain.

“Or what?”

“Or something where we can't begin to know what we're dealing with. Maybe she's imagining something. Maybe someone from school is trailing her 'cause they're too shy to say hello. Or something.” Trent did not look up from the strands he twisted through his nimble ringers.

Jason stared out over the valley, the pocket of land he'd found when he'd opened a magickal Gate. “That's just not good enough.”

“Well, I know
that
.” Trent looked up, grass lanyard dangling from his hand.

Bailey said, “You mean I could be scared over nothing?”

“It's not likely, but yeah, you could. Or something we don't want to deal with.”

She frowned, her freckles seeming to dance over her nose as she did. “Like what?”

“Like someone who wants to know more about Magick and isn't magickal at all.”

Bailey paled.

“I don't even want to think about that,” Jason answered Trent.

“None of us do, but it's bound to happen sooner or later. I have less risk than any of you of being cooped up in some super secret government laboratory while they try to find out what makes me tick, but I'm in this as deep as anyone. So. We have to be careful, and we have to stay hidden and . . . we have to have a safe harbor somewhere.”

“Someone saw me Crystaling. Maybe him. I'm almost sure.” She knotted her forehead. “It may be too late already.”

“You didn't.”

“I was trying to get away!” Bailey looked at Trent in despair.

“What's done is done. We need a haven, and we need it now.” Trent looked at Jason.

“I'm trying!” Jason bolted to his feet. “Don't think I'm not!”

“We all know you are. The point is, none of us is truly safe till that last Gate is opened. Iron Gate, Water Gate, and whatever it takes to stabilize our being here.” Trent put his grass chain in his pocket, Bailey watching. He noticed her stare, and indicated the weaving. “It'll deteriorate at a certain rate. I want to see what it looks like when we get back, and how it dries out, and so forth.”

Bailey grinned. “A walking scientific experiment.”

Trent nodded.

Jason was not so easily distracted. He seemed to be trying to breathe steadily, every once in a while rubbing the back of his left hand. Finally, he let out an exasperated
chuff
, sounding rather like her beloved bulldog friend, Ulysses S. Grunt. “It's not Dark Hand. So, there's no reason why the crystal would have been blocked for calling for elder help, unless you were so scared, you just couldn't Focus.”

“That's a possibility.” Bailey chewed on the corner of her lip.

“But, on the other hand, Trent has a point. There could be others out there, even more dangerous to us, people we haven't even been considering. We've all got to be a lot more careful with our Magick. The vows we took won't keep us from our own stupidity.”

They all nodded in agreement.

“And . . .” Jason took a deep breath. “I need help and I'm going to be asking everyone for it. We have to have some place to go . . . and I don't think I can find it alone.”

A deep rumble filled the air. Bailey started as if the ground jolted under her, her arms flailing wildly. Jason and Trent stared as her body . . . her rock . . . began to lift from the ground. She shrieked and grabbed for a piece of it that jutted up sharply next to her and hung on for dear life to the sun-warmed . . . no, hot! rock.

“My ear!” a thunderous voice complained, and the rock tossed about, and then sent Bailey tumbling head over heels in a somersault to the ground, her mouth wide open in a soundless cry. The scoop-shaped granite wavered a bit, morphing into the triangular shaped head of a lizard. A very large lizard.

“A . . . a . . . dragon!” Bailey got out. She scrambled backward, stopped only by Trent's stunned and frozen body.

Jason stood, one hand still out in gesture, the great lantern eye of the dragon now fixing on him. “Don't move,” he said. “Really. Just . . . don't move.”

The dragon's now sunrise orange-red body revealed itself, looped into the forest, his chin resting on the edge of the watery pool, a serpentine grin opening his toothy jaws. “It would be too late to move, anyway, if I were hungry.” The beast flexed one taloned paw which moments before had looked like a tree's dead roots reaching down into the mud at water's edge. “Which I am, but not that hungry.”

Bailey let out another shriek as if her throat had finally unfrozen. The dragon immediately swung his gaze on her, and hissed, steam boiling up, with the smell of sulfur. “Enough of that.”

She snapped her mouth shut, her eyes getting very big. The dragon stared into her.

Trent managed to say, “Don't look in his eyes! Don't!” but it was too late. Bailey felt herself being drawn into those jewellike saucers, and for an eerie moment, she felt as she did when experiencing what it was like to be Lacey.

Only this was not Lacey. This was an immense, wise, and very old bescaled body lying upon what used to be a very pleasant area to sun oneself.

Bailey gulped down a deep breath. There were more words, like a roaring surf breaking over the beach, but she didn't hear them, she experienced them, and she knew she wouldn't understand any of it till later, when she could be still and remember it. But that she did hear.
Leave now. Leave now and take Trent with you, or there will be disaster.

And there was the picture of her apartment building hallway, and her apartment piercing her mind, and it was safe and clear and empty, and she knew it was all right to go. For now.

She cupped her amethyst. She held her hand out to Trent. “I have to go. We have to go.” She looked into her crystal, wrenching her eyes away from the sight of the great orange-red dragon.

“But—” was all she heard Jason say, and then she whisked Trent and herself away.

Jason watched his friends disappear. He looked to the dragon.

“Hasty friends,” the other said. “Too bad. I was going to invite them to tea.” The beast laughed, forked tongue flickering in and out. “Just a light snack really.”

“I never know,” Jason said, “quite how to take you.”

“Then sit a moment, and talk, for right now I am quite serious. And I cannot talk long, for I
am
indeed getting hungry and might forget myself.”

Jason sat, taking the dragon's advice. He also took Trent's advice not to look the firedrake directly in the eyes. He wondered what dragons used to sweeten their tea with . . . one lump of Magickers, or two?

T
HE dragon put out a talon, stretching it from the scaled toe of its paw, rather like a cat might extend a claw lazily, stretching, yet still reflecting menace with its grace. So much power hidden, and yet a hint of it revealed to him with that movement. Jason caught himself staring at the highly polished surface, thinking that it must be able to cut and slash as if it were diamond. And maybe it was. He had no idea what dragons were made of.

The dragon settled then, putting his chin on that selfsame paw, his eyes on a level with Jason's head, making it even harder not to look directly at him. Jason could feel the heat radiating from the orange-red scales. It was rather like sitting next to the fire-place, when the logs had gone to crimson coals, and were best for marshmallow roasting. He rather hoped he couldn't be considered a marshmallow.

“Now, then,” said the dragon. “Insofar as I can read the expressions of one of your sort, you look a bit troubled to me.”

Of the three of them, he thought he'd probably looked the coolest, what with all Bailey and Trent had been through. Jason sneaked a look at the mirrorlike surface of the pond, saw creases etched deeply across his forehead, and blinked in surprise. He looked . . . well, old. Like McIntire. Or his faint memories of his father. Yes, his father had had a knifelike wrinkle just like that across his forehead. He put his hand up and rubbed, just to check, and to see if he could rub it away. He saw himself do it, and felt his rough fingers, and the wrinkle stayed and obviously belonged to him.

“So it seems,” he agreed, although sharing with a hungry dragon bothered him more than he'd let on, friends or not. Never was there a time when they visited that he was not aware that he sat with a vastly bigger and wiser and mostly unknowable being who tolerated him.

“And you come here looking for . . .” The dragon let his question dissolve into a low rumble, rather like a drawn out purr.

“Haven.”

A muted thunderous chuckle. “I look safe to you?”

“Safe is not a word I'd use.” Jason gazed along the serpentine body which now revealed itself threaded throughout the forest edging the pool, and he wondered how he could not have seen the dragon before. “You are awesome. But this place . . .” He beckoned along the valley's horizon. “I opened the Gate here, and it must have been for some reason. We need a corner of our own, and I think this is it.”