Broken Dragon (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 3) (4 page)

“After that black cloud left his body, he recovered from the shedding fairly quickly. Last night he asked if I could run him home, so I dropped him off.”

“Is he okay?”

“He seemed fairly upbeat. Looks like he has a bad case of eczema, but that is fading quickly. I invited him for Thanksgiving dinner, but he said he had plans. I got the impression that is why he wanted to go home.”

Mara nodded. “He helps out at one of the shelters near his apartment, serving dinner to homeless people. It’s a big deal for him, something he and his dad used to do each year.”

Diana reached back and stuck the needle into a little red tomato-shaped pin cushion on the counter behind her. She pointed to the side of her chair and said to Hannah, “Come stand right here, and hold up your arms.”

Hannah hopped down and stood next to Diana, who slid the cloth over her arms and head. It was a bright green hoodie that matched the sweatpants Hannah wore.

“Okay, turn around, and pull up the hoodie,” Diana instructed.

Hannah reached behind her and slipped the hood over her head, revealing a row of increasingly large felt triangles that had been sewn onto the scalp and down the center of the back, forming a scaly-looking spine that stopped at her waist.

Mara smiled and said, “Look, you’re a dinosaur!”

Hannah shook her head. “Nuh-uh, that’s wrong.”

Diana patted her shoulder. “Lift up your arms, honey.”

She raised her arms, showing that material had been stitched between the arms and body of the hoodie, forming wings that hung down to her shins. “I’m a dragon, just like Ping!” She ran in a circle in front of the kitchen counter, flapping her wings.

“That is so cool,” Mara said. “You are such a good nana, Nana.”

Diana reached down and grabbed a bag on the floor next to her chair. Out of it, she pulled another piece of green material and a plastic bag stuffed with white cottony batting. She placed them on the table in front of Mara’s coffee cup.

“What’s that?” Mara asked.

“Penance for your bad timing and infractions. You get to make the tail, Auntie Mara,” Diana said.

Hannah ran up to the table, still flapping her wings and turned her back. Wiggling her rear end, she chanted, “Make my tail! Make my tail!”

Squinting was the only way Mara could see out the large window of the living room. It was one of those rare chilly fall days when no clouds filtered the sun or insulated the ground, bright and cold at the same time. Sam pedaled up the driveway and turned onto the short path leading to the front porch. Grabbing a jacket from the wall peg to the right of the front door, Mara stepped out onto the front porch. Her brother toed the kickstand on the bike, removed his helmet and placed it on the bicycle seat. Turning to face the house, he shrugged a book bag off his shoulders.

“Hey, sis. I see you finally got up,” he said.

“What’ve you got in the bag?” Mara asked.

“I ran over to the convenience store on Seventh and picked up a few things for Mom. And I got some treats for Hannah.”

“To make up for missing Halloween.”

“Yeah, but don’t tell her. I stopped by a few of the neighbors’ houses and asked that they give them to her when we go trick-or-treating later. Good thing it’s Thanksgiving or no one would be home in the middle of the day, and it would be impossible to pull this off. Mrs. Gunderson on the corner is putting out her plastic jack-o’-lantern just for Hannah.”

“You ran around the neighborhood distributing candy, so your daughter can go trick-or-treating?” Mara asked.

“Yeah, is that stupid?”

“No, it’s very sweet.”

“You’re not embarrassed?”

“I think my threshold for embarrassment is a lot higher than it used to be.” Mara stepped off the porch and looked over her shoulder to make sure no one in the house was watching or listening. “You done with the bike? I need to run over to Abby’s house and talk to her father. He must be going crazy that she hasn’t been home for two days.”

He nodded and handed her the helmet. “What are you going to tell him?”

“I don’t know.” She looked up at the clear sky and told herself the water in her eyes was from the cool air. “Maybe I’ll just stop by and make sure he’s okay, offer some support or something. I mean, what am I supposed to say?
I allowed a darkling wraith to turn your daughter into a metaphysical monster bent on ending existence as we know it?
That she disappeared into a big bubble?”

“You’re just making yourself crazy,” Sam said. “If you can’t tell him the truth, why tell him anything at all? There’s nothing you can say that will make him feel better about his daughter’s disappearance. What’s the point in going over there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Has he called looking for her?”

“No.” Mara paused. Furrowing her eyebrows, she said, “No, he hasn’t, and that’s kind of odd. I’d be the first person he would call, if she went missing.”

“Could he be out of town?”

“Maybe.” She strapped on the helmet, took the handlebars and steered the bicycle toward the driveway. “I’m going to run over there. If Mom asks, tell her that I just went for a ride around the block.”

“All right, but I wouldn’t be gone very long, if I were you. Mom seems to be running out of patience with your disappearing acts.”

“She won’t think much of it, as long as she doesn’t see me pulling out of the driveway in my car. Anyway she’s got her hands full in the kitchen.” She mounted the bike and was about to push off but stopped. “Oh, one other thing …”

“Yeah?”

“Sit down with that daughter of yours and find out why I sent her back here.”

Sam shrugged. “I’ve tried to ask her a few questions. All she wants to do is rub my face and talk about trick-or-treating and dragons. Maybe she’ll be more cooperative after she’s gotten that out of her system.”

* * *

Abby lived a couple miles away with her father in a ranch house northwest of the Lantern home. Her mother had died when she was a toddler, and it had always just been the two of them, which made Mara feel that much worse, as she pedaled through the neighborhood. Of course there was no way to explain what happened on the roof of Mason Fix-It two nights ago; Mara wasn’t even sure herself.

Having been possessed by the darkling wraith for a few minutes, Mara understood that it desired to consume her—or more precisely to
become
her. It wanted to slip on her soul like that serial killer in
The Silence of the Lambs
wanted to slip on the skins of his victims. She had allowed that to happen to her friend. She allowed it to pull apart all that was Abby, yank her from every realm, take all the many things that she could become and harness it to that vaporous black skeleton, turning her into an incomprehensible horror.
How could anyone explain that to a father?

A horn yanked her back from her reverie. A driver to her left waved a fist through his windshield as Mara glided across the four-way-stop intersection without pausing. Mara raised an arm to wave and shrug at the same time. She mouthed
I’m sorry
as she cleared the intersection.

The pavement on the far side of the intersection sloped upward, and Mara stood on her pedals to build up some momentum. Two blocks later, she took a left onto a tree-shrouded block. During spring and summer, thick foliage kept the neighborhood in cool shadows, but now bare branches reached into the clear blue sky, allowing the bright sun to stream through. The entire character of the block looked different.

Mara’s heart pounded as she made the last right turn onto Abby’s block, although not because of exertion from pedaling up the inclined roads. The house was just half a block ahead, and she still didn’t know what to say to Abby’s father. But she did know she couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t at least show some concern.

Looking ahead, Mara eyed the olive green mailbox with big black numbers, 2-5-7, crookedly displayed on its side. She and Abby had painted it in third grade. It sat next to the short driveway in front of the house. As Mara approached, an old blue-and-white Ford pickup backed out and into the street, its tailgate turning away, so the front of the truck faced Mara.

There, behind the wheel, was Mr. Gibson, Abby’s father. His eyes widened with recognition when saw Mara. Smiling, he waved, honked his horn and drove away. He didn’t look like he had a care in the world.

Odd.

Mara stared after the truck, until it turned at the end of the block. Once it was out of sight, she looked up at the house. The edge of a curtain hanging in the wide window next to the front door swayed for a second. But there was no light coming out. Of course it was a bright sunny day, so why would there be? She told herself Mr. Gibson probably caused the curtain’s motion when he closed the front door, even though she knew he most likely went out the side door, the one that led from the kitchen to the garage.

Standing over the bicycle at the curb, she stared at the curtain for several seconds. It did not move again. Sitting back down, she pushed off the curb and pedaled up the driveway. Leaving the bike on its kickstand in front of the garage doors, Mara walked up the concrete walkway to the front door. Pausing for a second to listen, she heard nothing inside and jabbed a finger into the lit doorbell. She heard the familiar two-toned bell inside but didn’t sense any movement.

Still, she had the feeling someone was there.

Only two people live here.

She knocked on the door. “Abby? Are you in there?”

Nothing.

Sitting at the desk in her bedroom, Mara stared into the screen of her laptop. After checking her email and finding none—no surprise since normal people were celebrating Thanksgiving, not worrying about their gadget repairs—she found herself randomly entering words into a search engine and not getting any meaningful results. She entered
aphotis
and saw nothing relevant, and so typed in
darkling wraith
and
metaphysics
and
realms
. All returned something, but nothing relevant to her current concerns. Soon she realized she wasn’t reading the screen, just entering random words and hitting Return.

Sitting back, she tapped the Power button and folded the monitor over the keyboard. Behind the laptop, she spotted the small leather book her niece had brought from the future. She picked it up, again amazed at the heft of it. Running her hands over the grain of the leather cover, she turned it over and looked at the back. Just more grain. Opening the front cover, she stared at her own handwriting:
The Chronicle of Continuity
. The paper looked old and worn, dry and brittle, brown at the edges. It had tiny lumps and fibers running through it; imperfections you didn’t see in modern stationery. Oddly the words appeared to be written with a ballpoint pen. Modern words written on ancient papyrus, almost an affront to the title, a visual discontinuity.

Why would I have a five-year-old bring a blank book to me from the future?

Book in hand, she stood and walked out of the room.

Downstairs she found Hannah, flapping her dragon wings, pacing in a circle in front of the fireplace, tracing the outline of the circular throw rug on the floor.

“Hey, dragon girl, you look like you’ve plumped up since the last time I saw you,” Mara said, taking a seat on the couch.

“I don’t turn into a dragon until I pull on my hoodie.” She pointed to the hood bunched up on the back of her neck, partially hidden by her hair. Patting her chest, she added, “Nana made me put more sweats on under my costume, so I can go outside and terrorize the neighborhood.”

“When’s that going to happen?”

“When my dad gets down here. I might blow fire on some houses and burn them down.”

“I see. Well, before you do that, can I ask you some questions?”

“Okay.”

“Why did you bring me this book?” She held up the leather volume.

“Because you told me to.”

“When I told you to bring it to me, did I tell you what I needed it for?”

“You need to write in it.”

“What am I supposed to write?”

She shrugged. “Do you want to write in it now?”

Sam walked into the living room, putting on his jacket, and smiled at Hannah. “You ready to set the neighborhood on fire?”

Mara raised her hand toward her brother. “Wait a minute.” To Hanna, she asked, “How am I supposed to know what to write?”

Hannah rolled her eyes, walked up to the side of the couch and said, “Gimme.”

Mara handed the book to her.

She batted away the book. “Not the book. Gimme your face.” She held her arms outstretched toward Mara’s head, but her cloth wings limited her reach.

“My face?” Mara raised an eyebrow but leaned forward.

Hannah put her hands to her aunt’s cheeks and said, “Write.”

Electricity nipped at Mara’s cheeks, and her eyes glazed over. Without turning her head, she reached over the arm of the couch to the tiny drawer in the end table and opened it. After retrieving a blue ballpoint pen, she didn’t bother to close the drawer. Opening the leather-bound book that sat on her lap, she flipped past the title page and scribbled a few words on the left-hand page, then a few on the right. She flipped the page and repeated the process—flipped the page and continued.

Sam walked around the end of the couch and looked down at her. “Mara?” He bent down in front of her and waved a hand between Mara’s face and the pages of the book. She didn’t flinch or react at all. She continued writing.

Turning to Hannah, he said, “What did you do to her?”

“She wanted to know what to write. That was the magic clue,” Hannah said.

“Magic clue? What magic clue?”

“When Mar-ree gives me the magic clue, I’m s’posed to prompt her to write in the book. It’s a new game she showed me.”

“When she showed you this game, was it in the future?”

Hannah gave him a confused expression.

“You know, when Mara and I are older.”

“Yes, before she sent me through the bright light.”

Sam crouched and tried to look into Mara’s eyes, but they looked through him. He doubted he could prompt her, while she continued in that state. Mara flipped a couple more pages, while he tried to figure out what to do.