The Last Dragon Chronicles #4: The Fire Eternal (17 page)

O
kay, what the heck just happened?” said Tam. He stepped warily onto the first row of cobbles, his astonished gaze switching between Gwendolen (who was still on the fence post), a stunned-looking Zanna, and a single green dandelion leaf, which was falling to the ground like an alien snowflake.

“It was a shift,” Zanna muttered, her coattails flaring as she spun around looking
for reference points. “This has got to be some sort of time corridor.”

“Oh, right, so as well as keeping dragons, you timetravel as well?”

Hrrr,
replied Gwendolen, raising her wings in distress.

Zanna sent her a calming call. “Lucy’s dragon thinks it might have been a trap.”

Tam’s grin fell apart. “She was
abducted
? Who by?”

“I don’t know,” Zanna said, fury burning through the dampness in
her eyes. “And I don’t have time to discuss it with
you.
Why don’t you just leave us alone, Tam? Go back to your fancy apartment and write your exposé of David if you must. One of the people I’m closest to has just disappeared, and I don’t think I really care about you
or
your magazine anymore.”

“I want to help,” he said. His eyes softened. A wisp of snowflakes patterned his shoulders. “Seriously.”

Zanna flipped her phone open and quickly keyed in a speed-dial number. “You’ve done enough damage.”

“I brought her here, Zanna.”

“Exactly. Just
go.”

He sighed, ran a hand through his unwashed hair, and looked at length down the alleyway again. Gwendolen was hovering at ground level now, on the
exact spot where the rift had opened. She seemed to be trying to take some kind of reading, but her
movements were impossible for the human eye to follow. She just kept popping up here and there like random pixels on a computer screen. After a few seconds, Tam gave up watching her and said, “Tell me what you’re going to do.”

Zanna’s eyes met his in a gesture of impatience. “Take advice — from an expert. Hi, Liz, it’s — Oh, Lexie, this is Mommy. No, sweetie. No. I’ll be … very late tonight.
Did you? Oh, that’s nice. Well, I’m sure if Daddy could have seen your picture of Bronson he’d have liked it. Yes. Give the phone to Aunty Liz now, will you …? She’s where? Mr. Bacon’s? Oh. All right, is Unky Arthur at home? Good. Take the phone upstairs to him, please. Yes, then you can have an ice pop if you like. They’re in the bottom drawer of the freezer. Be careful, it’s cold. Ask Gwillan to
help you. What? No, Lucy’s not here. She’s gone to visit a friend. She might be away for a little while. Just go to Arthur now,
darling, OK?” She clamped her hand across the phone.

Tam said, “Who’s Bronson?”

“Her toy mammoth,” Zanna said. “This is a private call —
if
you don’t mind.”

“She draws stuff for David?”

“No, Tam, she just draws. Now — Arthur? Hi, it’s me. Yeah, I’m still in Blackburn.
No, there’s been an incident — Lucy’s disappeared.”

She proceeded to tell him what she’d seen.

Arthur asked at length about the squirrel.

“It was just a squirrel,” she said, sounding mildly irritated. “She chased it, and
poof.
You know what she’s like about Ringtails and Birchwoods.”

“That rodent wasn’t right,” said Tam.

Zanna twisted on her heel. “Arthur, wait a second.” She put the phone
on mute. “Are you still here?”

“Some kind of light came out of her cell. It made a squirrel from the falling snow. If it
was
a trap, that squirrel was the bait.” He added as she frowned, “It’s
the truth, Zanna.” He nodded at the phone. “See what your ‘expert’ makes of that.”

Her fingers tightened into her palm. She relayed the information back to Arthur.

After a short pause Arthur said, “Does
Lucy have images of squirrels on her phone?”

“Dozens,” said Zanna. “She’s always taking snaps of them — in the library gardens, mostly.”

She heard him take a long breath through his nose. Usually a pronouncement of wisdom would follow. This time, it was fear. “Zanna, you must leave there. You are in great danger.”

“But Lucy’s gone,” she repeated. “I can’t pretend it didn’t
happen.
I can’t leave
her, Arthur. She’s a pain in the backside, but she’s still … Lucy.”

“There is nothing to be done,” he said. “Come back to the Crescent.”

Her fingers, china-blue with cold, squeezed tightly around the phone. “No. What is this place? Why did David use it as his home address? There is no home here. It doesn’t exist.”

“I’ve told you before, existence is merely …”

“Don’t get cryptic with me,” Zanna
cut in, biting down on a wave of anger. “You wrote about this. Did you bring it into being?”

“When I wrote about David at the folly,” he said, “I was guided by the auma of Gawain, through his claw. There are forces at work here that are almost impossible to comprehend. I believe we’re caught up in something far greater than our own domestic troubles. Come back to the Crescent. We need to talk
this through.”

“There’s no time,” she said, pulling a braid from her hair. “Lucy’s been taken and I intend to go after her.”

“What?”
exclaimed Tam.

Shut up,
she mouthed at him. “Arthur, tell me how to open this rift.”

“I can’t do that.”

“I think you can. Gwilanna always knew how to move through time. I’m a sibyl; you’re a physicist. There are forces in the universe that work for us as
well.
While we’re wasting time chatting, Lucy’s life could be at stake. Now, tell me what to do.”

There was another short pause. Then, in a voice close to freezing, Arthur said, “What became of the isoscele, Zanna?”

In the shadows of her mind, a well of fear sprang up. The isoscele? Why would he ask about that? “I’ve told you before. It was lost in the Arctic. What’s this got to do with rescuing Lucy?”

“What you’re planning is ill-advised,” he said. “Even if the rift could be opened from this side, there is no guarantee of a linear transfer. You might end up in a dimension of the universe you can’t get back from —”

“Ask him which dimension David came from,” whispered Tam, leaning in close enough to overhear — and be elbowed firmly in the ribs for his trouble.

“If we had that piece of Gawain,”
said Arthur, “it might be possible to draw Lucy back merely by committing the dragon’s blood to paper …”

A snowflake landed on Zanna’s cheek. The dash of cold was the catalyst that made her shudder. She looked
briefly at Tam. His eyes were still raising the question that was falling off her lips in silent words …
Which dimension did David come from?
Was he nothing more than … an entity, then?
A being, a life force drawn through time?

She felt faint. Tam put out a hand and steadied her. He heard Arthur say, “Where is the isoscele hidden?”

She pushed Tam away and snapped back at Arthur, “Tell me how to open this rift or I swear I’ll take Alexa out of the Crescent and none of you will ever see her again.”

“Alexa may be the key,” he said. “I’ve meditated on this at great length, Zanna
— about how Gawain’s claw came to be in the folly. I don’t think it was mere serendipity that I found it. I think your daughter was involved.”

“I’m not
interested,”
she snapped. “Five seconds or I end this call. I’m not joking, Arthur. I want that information.” She glanced at Tam again, who nodded supportively.

“Very well,” Arthur said, straining at the edges of despair and reluctance. “Did
Gwendolen go through the time slip with Lucy?”

“No. She’s here. Worried, like me.”

“Then give her Lucy’s phone. Ask her to try to commingle with it.”

Zanna’s blood ran cold. “Are you saying that Lucy was taken by the
Fain?”

“What you’ve described has all the elements of their methods, though why they have targeted Lucy’s phone is a mystery.”

“Why are they even back?” Zanna said. “I thought
David …” But her throat swelled and she couldn’t go on with that. She gathered herself again and said, “What then, if Gwendolen makes the link?”

“She will need to trace the precise coordinates of the rift. The points will be etheric, not numerical. Gwendolen will have to feel them in her mind, then dream them consistently and purely to project them. If she succeeds, you will see a shimmer at
the place where Lucy disappeared. But to open the rift for long enough to allow
you through, you will need to find a power source that Gwendolen can use to magnify her thoughts. A car battery might be enough.”

“I’m on it,” said Zanna.

“Wait,” Arthur said. “Please think about this. If you go, you might never see Alexa again.”

A tear ran freely down Zanna’s cheek. “Bye,” she said, and cut the
call. She clicked her fingers. In an instant, Gwendolen was on her shoulder. “You got jumper cables?” she asked a startled Tam.

“Um, yeah. In the trunk.”

“Get them, and Lucy’s phone. Oh, and pop your hood.”

“What? Why?”

“Just do it,” Zanna snapped. “Unhook the terminals on your battery.”

Knowing better than to argue, Tam did as instructed. In the meantime, Zanna told Gwendolen what she needed
to do. Gwendolen tested the battery terminals, flicking them with her tail until showers of sparks were leaping off them under the hood. Then she plugged
herself into the phone. Closing her eyes, she concentrated hard. A few seconds passed, then she reached for the crocodile clips that were attached to each of the battery terminals and gripped them hard to complete the loop. Every scale on her
body immediately stood on end. A pulse of violet light came out of the phone and went shooting down the ringlets of wire to the battery. There was a low humming noise and a slight smell of burning. A smoke ring emerged from Gwendolen’s nose. And in the gap between the houses on Thoushall Road, a shimmering vertical line appeared.

“Zanna, wait,” Tam called as she moved toward it. She was now just
yards away from the rift, which was deepening and folding as it detected her presence.

She paused, ready for her final steps, when, of all things, her phone rang. Irritated, yet glad of the excuse to hesitate, she answered it.

It was Elizabeth Pennykettle. “Zanna?” She was breathless, practically frantic.

“Liz, I’m kind of busy.”

“I talked to Arthur. Don’t you dare go near that rift!”

“Sorry.
Almost there. Doing this for Lucy.”

“No, Zanna! No! Think about Alexa.”

Zanna’s lower lip trembled. “Take care of her for me.”

“Wait a second. Listen.”

There was a fumbling noise, then Alexa said, “Mommy?”

“Baby?” Zanna’s voice was like a cracking egg.

“Mommy, where are you going?”

“I don’t know,” Zanna said. Tears streamed down her cheeks.

“I saw Daddy,” said Alexa.

“Daddy? What?”

“Through Bronson’s eye. I saw him, very small.”

Zanna reached out her hand. The time rift rippled. “That can’t happen, baby. Daddy’s …”

“He was being a polar bear.”

“What?” Zanna said in a small, hurt voice.

The next voice was Liz’s. “Sweetheart, come home.
Something odd is going on here. I can’t afford to lose you. Step away from that rift. It’s not — Zanna!” she shouted, as a squeal came
down the line. “Zanna, can you hear me? Are you OK?”

There was a rustling sound and then Zanna said, “Yes.” She sounded furious.

“Where are you?”

“Sitting on my backside in a clump of wet dandelions.”

“It didn’t work? The rift rejected you?”

“Oh, it worked all right,” Zanna said, breathing fast. “I’m gonna kill that —”

“Zanna? Slow down. Tell me what happened.”

“He pushed me aside! He’s
gone in my place. The stupid arrogant son-of-a —”

“Who pushed you aside? Tam, you mean?”

“Yes!” Zanna railed, sounding as though she was doing a war dance. “Tam’s gone after Lucy.”

T
he snow began to fall in flakes as big as plums. But it could do little to soften Zanna’s anger or accumulated pain. For another ten minutes she spoke freely to Liz, pouring out feelings that went way beyond what had just happened with Tam. She was bordering on hysterical as she revisited her fears about David, her life with him, and who he really was. Question after question.
All of them rhetorical. All underscored with bewildered despair.

For Liz, it was like gathering in a sheet on a windy day — first just a question of catching on and holding, then the careful process of drawing in safely. Using all her skills of motherhood, she listened patiently,
answered sympathetically, and finally brought stability, simplicity, and calm. “The truth is here, standing beside
me, Zanna, getting messy with an ice pop. Come home, where you belong. Alexa needs you. So do I.”

It was enough. Zanna said, “OK, but the sky here is filling up with snow again. The last thing I need right now is to be wrapped in a blanket on some freezing highway. I passed a small hotel just down the road. Think I’ll stay there overnight. What will you tell Lexie?”

“Exactly that,” Liz said.
“Mommy’s stuck in a storm.” She heard the breathy shudders coming down the line again. “We’ll sort it out, Zanna. One way or another. Drive safely tomorrow. Take your time.”

Zanna said good-bye, then snapped her phone shut and went to Gwendolen. The dragon, exhausted from her recent exertions, was asleep on Tam Farrell’s engine, curled up like a shiny green kitten. Her paws were slightly blackened
and she’d dropped a scale or two, but otherwise she seemed unscathed. Zanna picked her up, took the keys from the ignition of Tam’s car, and
locked it. Then she went back to her own and drove to the hotel.

In the meantime, in the Crescent, Liz was struggling to keep her composure. Despite Arthur’s advice to Gollygosh, the
hrrr
had quickly gone around the dragons that David’s special “threesome”
had felt some kind of “auma wave.” This, combined with Gretel’s report that Alexa had apparently “seen” her daddy, had set up a minor earthquake of whispers. No dragon dared to act on these rumors, of course, for Liz was running off red-hot sparks and had enough to think about with Lucy going missing. Alexa
seemed
unaffected, though. She was going about her usual routines, playing with her toys,
drawing her pictures, and talking to the fairies spinning around her mobile as though nothing on this Earth could ever really faze her. Gretel, in particular, found this infuriating. Many a smoke ring had been blown by her that day.

The general buzz wasn’t lost on Arthur. In the kitchen the following morning, while Alexa was out in the
garden (planting apple seeds in yogurt containers, in spectacularly
unpredictable sunshine), he reiterated his feelings about the girl to a disenchanted Liz (and a very alert listening dragon). “Ever since she learned about the dragon G’lant, significant things have been happening,” he said. “The lifelike drawings. Her awareness of David. The reanimation of the dragons —”

“They’re barely active,” Liz cut in, almost ticking him off. “G’reth was asleep when I looked
at him this morning and Gadzooks had dropped his pencil down behind Zanna’s desk. Golly hasn’t fixed a thing for weeks. They’re hardly making mischief, are they? It will take a bit more than a few guttering
hrrrs
to prove to me that David is reconnecting with them, Arthur.”

Bonnington came in then, mewing for food. Arthur reached out for his tail but missed. At the same time, the kitchen door
opened and Alexa popped her head just inside and said, “Aunty, can I put the apple pots by the rockery, so that the fairies can water the seeds?”

“Yes,” said Liz. “But don’t plant the apple seeds in the rockery, will you? We don’t want any big trees growing there.”

“No,” said the girl. The door closed again.

Fairies. The rockery. Arthur thought about the light that Bonnington had witnessed
from the fairy door. Could that be connected with Alexa, he wondered? It was too much to expect that the rockery might lie on another time rift, but was it possible Alexa had somehow created one? That her desire to see fairies was so intense that she had fleetingly opened something more spectacular than an ornamental doorway made of wood? “We should talk to her about G’lant,” he said.

“No,” said
Liz. “I absolutely forbid it. She’s a child, Arthur. I won’t have her interrogated. The name is nothing more than a trigger for her imagination.”

“I agree,” he said, crossing his thighs in what Lucy always called his “academic” way.

Lucy. Liz turned the agony aside.

“It’s a wonderful name: noble, creatively potent, and highly suggestive of dragon lore. It makes sense to me now why David sent
it. I don’t think it was entirely romantic.”

He recognized a tight-lipped breath. “I wouldn’t tell that to Zanna,” said Liz.

“Zanna has closed herself off,” he came back. “Even in her meditative state she has given up believing in David’s survival to protect herself from the pain of having lost him — or rather, the man he
used
to be.”

He heard her run the tap. Fast, splashing water. A clink
of cups. Dropped items of cutlery. She was becoming flustered. “Arthur, we’ve been over this time and time again.”

He smacked his lips slightly before replying, a sign that he was leading up to some kind of premeditated diagnostic response. “I want to share something with you,” he said. “Something that may help you accept that David could come back.”

On the fridge top, the listener widened its
ears.

“When I was attacked by the Fain,” Arthur said, “my memory was torn apart and left in scraps. As it returned, certain pieces did not fit. They seemed inappropriate to my life as I knew it. After a while I began to realize that those pieces were fragments of the history of the Fain, in particular their spiritual creed.”

“Why haven’t you mentioned this before?”

“There was never any need
to — before,” he replied. “In the past few months these extraneous memories have crystallized into a meaningful ‘record.’ I now understand the relationship between the Fain and dragons.”

He felt the pressure of air as she turned.

“When I was at the abbey, I had a dream. I saw the universe created from the outgoing breath of a dragon called Godith. Everything was born from the fire of that dragon.
A white fire. Auma in its purest sense. You and I, this physical world we inhabit, came into being when the fire cooled down to a low enough vibration to produce ingenious combinations of atoms and molecules. But in certain parts of the universe the fire
remained at a higher vibration and filled the spaces between the atoms. From this aspect of the fire the Fain evolved.”

“And what’s this got
to do with David?”

Arthur nodded slightly and pointed his toe. “There is an element of spiritual tension that binds the universe together. Humans, in their quietest moments, reach out to the etheric world of the Fain, seeking what they call enlightenment. But it is not a one-way process. The Fain, likewise, have a mystical aspiration to make a cyclical journey back to Godith, back to dragonkind.
They can only become truly enlightened when they commingle, unconditionally, with a living dragon’s fire. They call it
‘illumination.’”

Liz turned to the dishes again. “This is intense stuff for a Wednesday morning, Arthur. An alien religion lesson? I still don’t understand how David fits in.”

“What I’m about to tell you now came to me in a meditation a few days ago. A single moment of clarity.
A revelation, perhaps. We always talk about David dying, but the nature of his passing, the ice through the
heart, has always seemed significant to me. You use icefire to animate your dragons. What if the ice that took his mortal body had that same capability?”

“Arthur …” Her hands splashed into the water.

“Please, just consider it,” he said. “Ever since my mind was scrambled by the Fain, I’ve
been reaching out for a truth like this. And now it has come. I think David has been transformed. I think he’s on the pathway to illumination and his chosen name is G’lant.”

Liz stood away, shaking her head. “I’m sorry, no. I just can’t deal with this. David will always be a boy to me, Arthur. A lovable young man who got carried away saving animals and the Arctic ice cap. And I’m responsible
for that,
and
for what happened to him. I was the one who introduced him to dragons. If I’d kept my mouth shut, if I hadn’t let him get into conflict with Gwilanna, he might still be … oh, I don’t know.”

“You do,” Arthur said evenly. “You know that David came here for a purpose. Alexa, too.”

“She —”

“There is movement,” Arthur continued to press.
“A great atmosphere of change. For a while it
was confined to hopeful speculation and tiresome reminiscence. Our hearts were in the Arctic, but not our eyes. Now we have ruptures in the world’s weather patterns, the inexplicable migration of polar bears north, the seizure of your daughter through a known time rift, and what I believe to be an accurate report of David’s reappearance. The universe is turning and this planet is its focus. Something
major
is about to occur. David is at its core and I’m sure Alexa senses it. The truth is shown to us every day through her, but we’re relabeling it as childish babble.”

“Then why isn’t he here, being more of a father?” A rare burst of anger powered through Liz’s voice. “Why doesn’t he come back and show himself, instead of torturing his partner with signs and speculation?”

“Perhaps he can’t,”
Arthur said. “Or is not allowed to. Or he is trying to divert attention away from this house. From what Zanna told me of Lucy’s disappearance, it’s clear she was taken by the Fain. Why they want her is impossible to say. But they may not stop
at a daughter of Guinevere. We must be prepared to act — while we can.”

Liz glanced through the window. Alexa was carrying a watering can to the rockery.
“And do what, exactly?”

“Find the isoscele of Gawain. I don’t believe Zanna lost it. Something as precious as that doesn’t slip idly through the fingers. I believe she put it away to dissociate herself from the pain of losing David. We should retrieve it and test Alexa.”

“She’s not a lab rat, Arthur.”

His marble eyes rolled. Even now, their fixed expression still unnerved Liz a little. “She
saw David through the medium of her drawings. If she was aided by the auma of Gawain, she could be capable of boundless creation. Dark matter might be to her what clay is to you.”

That brought forth an agitated laugh. “Whatever happened to good old string theory and …”

“Quantum mechanics?” He raised an eyebrow, just as Bonnington leaped onto his lap. Vision, at last. He
saw that Liz had her
hands to her face. Crying? Exasperated? It was difficult to tell. “It might be a means of bringing Lucy back — and Tam Farrell, of course.” More pain. He could see the film of moisture in her troubled eyes now. But this was crucial. He needed to push. “I tried to explain to Zanna that when I wrote about David years ago at the Abbey, my hand was guided to that time corridor in Blackburn. It was no
accident. Neither was my finding one of Gawain’s claws on the floor of the folly. Some force intended it should happen.”

Liz gestured at the ceiling with rubber-gloved hands.

“I believe Alexa made the claw materialize.”

“What? What are you talking about? Alexa wasn’t born when —”

Now it was Arthur’s turn to cut in. “I believe Alexa came to this planet, in this fashion, for a reason. I believe
she chose her own parents. One from this dimension, one from —”

“No,” Liz interrupted him, spreading her hands. “That’s enough. I don’t want to hear any more about this. I love you, Arthur. You’re a genius and a good, kind man. But sometimes I think you spend so long in your own head that you forget there’s a very real and stressful world outside of it.”

“You are a descendant of a dragon princess,”
he reminded her. “You have the power to animate clay and speak in a language few humans could master. Don’t forget
that
world, Elizabeth. It’s what you really are.”

He watched her knot her fingers, saw the ripple of movement in her neck when the dragon, Gwillan, leaned forward to speak to her. He knew then that she had not given up believing in what she was, but was merely frustrated by her inability
to take action.

The cordless telephone rang. It was close enough at hand for Arthur to pretend to fumble for it. He pressed
RECEIVE
. But as he began to raise it to his ear, Bonnington let out a furious hiss, morphed into a tiger, and struck the phone out of Arthur’s hand.

Liz gave a yelp of fright. On the fridge top, the listening dragon took a pace back.

The phone crashed to the floor and
the shell broke open. Bonnington was over it in a moment, arching, spitting, baring his fangs. The handset clicked and gave a pregnant
brrr.
The green light on the arch of its shoulder faded.

Bonnington relaxed and morphed back into a tabby.

“What was all that about?” Liz said fearfully.

Arthur brought his hands together under his nose. “They have found us,” he said.

That was all Liz needed.
She yanked the door open and shouted up the garden, “Lexie, come in now. Come and have a drink of juice….”

On the rockery, Alexa stood up as if she’d magically grown out of a space between the stones. She smiled underneath her sun hat, wiped some loose soil off her hands, and jumped down onto the path.

She was running down the lawn when she stopped abruptly and turned to stare at the fence that
separated number 42 from Mr. Bacon’s garden.

There was a large black raven hunched on a post.

“You’re
her
, aren’t you?” Alexa said.

The raven cast her a crabby-eyed glare.

So Alexa repeated the question — in dragontongue.

“Oh, very impressive,” the raven caarked sourly.