Jennifer Scales and the Messenger of Light (17 page)

“So what?”

“Well, girlish.” Jennifer tried to soften the blow with a small smile.

Susan frowned. “I am a girl. And hey—angels are girlish, too, you know! Look at you, in your girly robes and your pretty platinum hair. Girly, girly, girly!”

Both of them burst out laughing.

Everyone had been more relaxed for some time, Jennifer mused as she admired Susan’s makeup job. It had been three days since the beaststalker trial. Her parents had been conducting some initial research—but insisted Jennifer leave this stage to them, so she could focus on school and enjoy the dance. Even her mother, who still seemed ambivalent about Skip, had let Jennifer borrow some deep red lipstick and dark blue eye shadow.

“I just want to look my best for Gerry,” Susan explained.

“You do.” Jennifer knew how she felt.

“So do you, for Skip. This’ll be great! Is your dad ready to take us there?”

“I don’t think my dad’s ready to take me anywhere,” Jennifer guessed.

She was right. As soon as Jonathan saw his daughter in flowing white robes, full makeup, and teased curls, his face betrayed a quick but horrible fright.

“Oh, come on, Dad. It’s just for a Halloween dance.”

He nodded at Susan as she ducked out of the room for a moment to freshen up. “Well, congratulations. You’ve scared the hell out of me. Honestly, Jennifer. You look beautiful, but I wish you didn’t look so much like…”

“An angel?”

“I was going to say bride. Honestly, I’m not ready for this. Couldn’t you have worn black, or red?”

She cocked an eyebrow. “Red? You want your teenaged daughter to go to a school dance dressed as a devil instead?”

He thought about this for a moment. “Right. Scratch that. In the car.”

Winoka High’s gymnasium was decked out with all sorts of spooky and festive touches—cobwebs in the doorways, strobe lights pulsating in the halls, and ghastly winged shapes hanging from the ceiling. While Susan spotted Gerry right away—he was in a businessman’s suit, which didn’t seem horribly festive to Jennifer—it took a while to find Skip.

After pushing through a few clusters of teenagers, Jennifer finally found him, not far from the punch bowl, and she grinned. He grinned back.

He was dressed as a dragon.

“I couldn’t find electric blue,” he apologized, turning a bit. “But the store had this nice dark red one. I thought you’d like it.” He flapped his cotton-and-wire-stuffed wings, and waved his cloth tail back and forth.

“I love it.” She giggled. “You look great.”

His green-blue eyes shone. “You look great. I mean, really great.”

“Thanks.” She felt her face flush.

He stepped forward and took her hand. “I’m glad we could do this. I mean, I’m glad the past few weeks have been pretty quiet. I mean, with Evangelos, and your father. I mean…”

“I know what you mean.” She nodded.

Fortunately, the disc jockey turned on the stereo at that moment and gave them both a chance to talk about something else. They began with music, and then soccer, and then school teachers and classes.

“Art’s not so bad, because I’ve always been into doing charcoal sketches.”

“Yeah. The stuff you have up all over your room is really great.”

“Thanks. Susan’s not too good at it; her trees come out looking like broccoli. She says she likes sculpture better; we start that next semester.”

“Our art class began with sculpture. It’s pretty cool! You’ll like it. Speaking of Susan, why did she pick such a girly princess outfit?”

“I know…!”

As they talked, it amazed Jennifer how easily the conversation came. They had chatted every day at school for a year, and seen each other on and off during the summer. But it was always easier and easier to talk to Skip.

She felt a brief, wistful air as she remembered this was how she used to talk with Eddie Blacktooth.

Pushing that thought aside, she was just about to ask Skip to dance when she caught his eye straying over her shoulder. She spun around, and her heart sank.

Bob Jarkmand and four or five other boys were standing there, dressed in a variety of soldier and knight costumes. Bob, in full camouflage gear and makeup, was in front of them all. Jennifer was startled to find she only came up to his shoulders, which seemed to grow directly out of his thick neck.

Right behind his enormous left arm was Eddie.

Her lips tightened. “What?”

“Your family’s brought a lot of trouble to this town,” Bob shouted over the relentless, echoing dance music.

Jennifer guessed the other boys here were probably also young beaststalkers in training. She also realized Bob or Eddie could easily spill her beaststalker secret to Skip, right here and now. She needed to change the subject, fast.

“Thanks for the update. How’s your jaw?”

Skip snorted at the memory of Jennifer laying Bob out with a single punch last year. The noise got the group’s attention.

“You got something you wanna say, Francis?” Bob took a step toward Skip. “You know, you’ve got some nerve coming here tonight wearing a costume like that. My great-uncle died fighting a dragon.”

“Yeah? Well, I’m sure I’ve got an ancestor who died after fighting someone with really bad acne, but you don’t see me crying about your mask.”

Jennifer stopped Bob’s punch, grasping his fist in her hand before he even swung. “Don’t.” She swallowed hard and tried not to show it.

“Come on, Bob.” This was Eddie now, who had looked unhappy for the duration of this conversation. “He’s not worth it.”

“That’s a great endorsement of a friend you used to hang out with last year,” Jennifer snapped. She shoved Bob’s fist back into Eddie’s stomach. “Do yourself and the rest of us a favor, Eddie. Stop moping behind stronger people’s shoulders. Stand up for something.”

The slender, brown-haired boy actually crumpled, his face and posture falling in shame and resentment. When he looked back up, Jennifer barely recognized him anymore. Flushed and snarling with anger, he looked startlingly like his father. The words came out in a flood.

“You never appreciated me! My parents told me you were no good! They told me there was something weird about you! They told me you’d be a lousy friend! You and your family deserve what you’re going to get!”

Nobody even saw Skip coming. Later on, Jennifer realized it must have been because he jumped over Bob. Before she could react, his maroon dinosaur shape dropped as if coming down from the rafters, right on top of Eddie. The two of them were a blur of browns and reds as they pounded away at each other.

“Don’t you threaten Jennifer!” She heard Skip’s voice, high and thin as the two boys rolled back and forth. The soft, fluffy plates along the back of Skip’s costume swayed ferociously. “You stay away from her!”

“Get him off!” Bob shouted to the others. They all pressed forward to peel Skip off of Eddie. One of them reached back, and Jennifer saw the glint of a metal blade.

“HEY!”

Before she could even think to control it, the surge of adrenaline had changed her. Even if she hadn’t felt the powerful ripple of muscle through her spine and seen the nose horn emerge in front of her eyes, she would have been able to tell her new shape from the sheer terror in the faces of the boys before her. None of them, it seemed, had actually seen a real, live dragon before. Just stories from their parents, she guessed.

“Put that away,” she hissed with a forked tongue.

The boy who held a dagger in his hand was trembling too hard to do anything. Sweat beaded quickly on his forehead.

Sensing an advantage, Jennifer reared up, spread her wings, let a froth of smoke pour out of her nostrils, and stomped her right leg on the ground hard enough to make the glossy floorboards shake.

The dagger dropped into a slithering bed of black mambas.

“Don’t eat me!” Jennifer couldn’t tell if that plea came from the boy who had held the knife and was now curled up on the gym floor, or from Bob Jarkmand, who was on his hands and knees as if worshipping an angry god.

Eddie and Skip broke up quickly, scrambling to their feet and backing away slowly from Jennifer and each other. Skip regained his composure first—he had seen her in this shape, once before—but Eddie also soon straightened up, taking in Jennifer’s form with a critical eye. It was almost as if he was looking for weaknesses.

Battle training from his parents, she told herself. It occurred to her Eddie looked far braver facing her down as a dragon than he had for months facing her down as the girl he betrayed.

Suddenly, a fire alarm went off and the gym’s automatic sprinkler system activated.

“Oh, the smoke!” she muttered. Morphing quickly back to angel shape, she grabbed Skip’s hand, shooed the snakes away, and headed for the back door. There wasn’t a teacher at this school—not even Mr. Slider, she feared—who would look kindly upon what had happened here tonight.

“Evangelos is ours!” Eddie’s voice pursued them through the drizzling water. He had never sounded more like his father. “That beast will die, just like you, your family, and your boyfriend!”

He’s not my boyfriend, Jennifer thought irritably as she and Skip burst through the fire doors together, and escaped into the dry darkness under a half-moon.

But then again, his hand felt so right in hers.

“I know, I know, I’m in huge trouble!” She said this as she and Skip burst through the front door, startling her parents on the living room couch. Brass quintet music blared from the stereo system, and a gentle fire licked away at the fire-place. “Just let me explain!”

From her parents’ expressions, she could tell two things right away. First, they had been enjoying a quiet evening without their teenaged daughter. Ew! And second, they had no idea what she was talking about.

“Never mind,” she concluded, spinning out of the living room. “Come on, Skip. Let’s go upstairs.”

Later that evening, after Jonathan had driven Skip home and Elizabeth had helped Jennifer wipe off her ruined makeup, she told them what had happened at the dance. Their reaction stunned her.

“Okay,” her mother said.

“Okay,” her father said.

“Okay?!” Jennifer searched the room for a trap, a hidden camera, something.

“Jennifer, revealing yourself tonight may have been a bit reckless,” Jonathan explained. “But most of the dangerous people in this town have already learned what you are. It sounds to us like you were protecting Skip. He’s your boyfriend. You care about him.”

“He’s not—” Jennifer interrupted herself with a sigh. Okay, she did care about Skip. “So you’re not mad at me? I mean, not everyone in that gym was a beaststalker. We were in a pretty dark corner, but I’m sure someone must have seen me when they shouldn’t have.”

Elizabeth shrugged. “It was a Halloween dance with costumes, the gym was dark, there was smoke, sprinklers were going off…who knows what people saw? Ordinary people have seen far clearer evidence of weredragons before and ignored it.”

“I wouldn’t make a habit of it,” Jonathan cautioned. “But there are so many other things happening now, this isn’t the sort of thing we can hammer you on. Your mother and I are actually more disappointed that your time with Skip was ruined. We had hoped the dance would help you relax a bit. Did you have any fun at all?”

“At first. After Susan went off, Skip and I—Oh gosh, Susan! Dad, we gotta go pick her up!”

“Yeah, I saw what happened.” Susan didn’t seem too put off, Jennifer noticed as they sat together in the back of the family minivan. “I figured it would happen one day. I was actually kind of looking forward to it.” She smiled at Jennifer. “You’re amazing.”

“I’m so sorry we had to leave you there!”

“I understand,” Susan said. “They were going to hurt you; you had to go. What else could you do? Besides, I was never in any danger. I’m just a plain, ordinary girl.” Her smile was a bit more rueful now.

“You’re not plain, and you’re not ordinary! You’re my best friend and you’re awesome. So tell me about Gerry! Did the dance calm down enough after we left so you could have a little fun?”

“Yeah, funny thing. After you left, everyone acted as if you and Skip hadn’t even been there. I tried to talk to Eddie about it, but he just shrugged it off and told me to go away. He’s not too wild about me and Gerry, anyway.”

“He’s just sore because he has no real friends now.”

“No doubt. It was hard for me to get back in the mood of the dance, and Gerry seemed pretty preoccupied. He doesn’t talk much. Even when I pressed him about what he likes to do, I barely got an answer. Running, he mumbled, and archery. He spent most of his time moping around the gym floor, searching for any snakes you left behind. He likes snakes, I guess. Thinks they’re cool. This is what I learned.”

“I had the snakes disappear as I left.”

“Yeah. I told him they were the most poisonous snakes known to man anyway, so it was for the best. Anyway, we sort of just hung out until you returned. When I saw your minivan outside the school, I told Gerry I had to go, and he didn’t seem to care. I guess it was a bust.”

“You didn’t even kiss!” Jennifer was dismayed. She had ruined her best friend’s evening!

Susan shrugged. “It’s okay. He didn’t seem too much into me from the start. Never asked me anything about myself. Pretty boys. Too self-involved. I can do better.”

“You bet you can!” Jennifer fumed. “Oooh, wait until I get my hands on him!” She formed her hands into a throttling motion.

“Easy, killer. Don’t dragon out for my sake. Susan Elmsmith can take care of herself. You don’t have to pull up in the driveway, Mr. Scales; right here is good. Thanks for the ride! See you tomorrow, Jennifer.” And just like that, she kissed Jennifer on the cheek and slid out of the minivan.

The next morning at school, Skip was absent. No one acted any differently toward Jennifer than before—Eddie moped, Bob Jarkmand stared, and so on. Better yet, neither Mr. Slider nor any other teacher gave any hint that they were even aware of what had happened at the dance.

At one point later in the afternoon, she snuck out of study hall to get a drink of water. On her way down the hall to the girls’ bathroom, she spotted two unlikely figures ahead talking in low voices: Eddie and Susan.