The Dragon Guard (21 page)

“I propose this to you: The best time to hit an enemy is when they are most vulnerable.”

“That would seem obvious.”

“Obvious, but not always possible.” Brennard steepled his fingers and looked over them at Jon. “But if it can be done, we can break them, and once broken, the children will scatter. Once scattered, they will realize they are alone in a dark and hostile world and they will need aid. They might even be willing to accept it from us openly or by guile. Do you not agree?”

It seemed Brennard had been doing a lot of thinking in the past few hours. Openly? Never. But offered in disguise? Maybe. “I do,” answered Jon cautiously.

“Good. Because it will tax you, and I want you to be prepared.” Brennard then told him how and when and where he intended to strike.

“That soon?”

“If we are tired, they will be exhausted. There isn't a better time, for the moment.”

Jon listened solemnly, bowed in understanding, and then left his father's presence for much needed rest, his thoughts tumbling in eagerness, even as he fought for the calm he needed to sleep.

 

Stef woke curled up around his battered sneakers, their overripe scent filling his nose. “Yuck.” He groaned and rolled away. The room stank of bear cub and he knew he'd spent at least half the night in the furry hide of his other self. He sighed. They'd catch him one of these days, and what would he do then? Rich had told him just to say it was a big old dog, a stray, he took in sometimes and which followed him around, but jeez. How blind did his parents have to be to mistake a bear cub, half grown, for a dog? Not to mention the stench. Or the noise, if his cub self decided to start bawling for food. He had a sweet tooth in either form. Impossible, Stef thought, and sighed. They'd never think it was a dog.

Especially since neither animal had permission to be living at their house.

Stef rolled to his knees and then his feet. The smell of hotcakes and coffee filtered into his bedroom, the standard Sunday morning breakfast. His stomach rumbled loudly, in a familiar bearish way, and he decided he was starving. He pulled on pants and shirt, ran a comb through his hair and lumbered to the kitchen, ready to devour as big a stack as his mother could pile on a plate.

“Stefan! Sleepyhead! Ready to eat?”

“Smells great, Mom.” He poured himself a glass of milk as his dad winked at him, and tugged a chair away from the kitchen table with his foot so that Stef could sit down.

“All American breakfast, eh? Bacon and pancakes.”

He forked himself a few crisp pieces while she took a plate warmed on the stove and heaped it up. She set it down in front of him, saying, “Have you been using that foot powder I bought for you?”

He ladled syrup over the pile and watched the caramel stickiness drip everywhere. “Yes, ma'am.”

“It stinks in there, Stefan.”

“I'll clean it up tonight, Mom, after Jason's game, okay? I've got laundry to do and stuff. And . . . and . . . I'll get one of those stick-up things, okay? It's just the football gear, it gets sweat in it, you know. I know it smells. I try to keep it clean.”

She ruffled his hair. “You're a good son, Stefan. Don't worry. Someday you will be big football star and we can retire to Florida and watch your games on the TV.” Her accent came out a little as she said that, wiping her hands on her apron, as she returned to the stove and poured a new batch of hotcakes onto the griddle.

“College first, Mom.”

“Of course. Always the school. You must grow a little more, too. Eat up!” She gave the order with a wave of her pancake turner.

“If he grows any more, Mama, we'll have to buy more shoes,” his father said, grinning as he stuffed a forkful of light, fluffy pancakes into his mouth. His eyes twinkled at Stef as he said that, and Stef just grunted at his father's teasing.

His mother let out a little huff, and said, reluctantly, “If he needs them. Only if he needs them!”

Now that she mentioned it . . . “I will soon, Mom,” Stef said. He snapped a piece of bacon in two and devoured both halves at once.

“Fine, fine. It goes in the budget. Two weeks your father gives up beer and has liverwurst for lunch sandwiches, and you have new shoes.”

His father opened his mouth to protest that, and stopped in mid-word as she turned and waggled the pancake turner menacingly again. “Made of money we are not,” she scolded. “But we are your parents and will sacrifice for you. Those two weeks, I will skip bingo at the church, too. Everyone must give up something.”

Whatever it was his father had intended to say, it had been stomped flat by the second flood of words from his mom. Instead, his father mopped his face with a napkin and said, “Not the bingo, Mama. I'll make do, but you go to bingo. Who knows? You could win the shoe money!”

Besides which, bingo nights were the only nights of peace at home for his father. Stef hid his grin by polishing off the last of the pancakes on his plate and asking for more. His mother's face flushed with pleasure. “You like my cooking?”

“It's the best, Mom.” And it was, nearly.

“Good, good. You say there is a soccer game today?”

“Yup. Jason's team is in it. We're gonna go watch, if that's okay.”

“As long as everything is cleaned later.” She nodded, and fussed with the bow on her apron before pouring out yet another round of pancakes. “And as long as it is okay with your father.”

“It's a big game, Stef?”

“Yup. Part of the championship.”

“We should all go. Spring is outside, and we should go.” His father stole a pancake off Stef's plate, winking again, his good humor recovering a bit.

“Oh, that might be fun.” His mother wiped her hands on her apron. “I'd better start on some sandwiches for lunch!” Humming tunelessly but quite happily, she began to plan her assault on world hunger at lunchtime.

It wasn't quite what Stef had planned, but what could the harm be? Rich's parents never went anywhere with him, his mother worried endlessly about germs and public exposure, so it wouldn't be too crowded.

Stef reached over and plucked a piece of bacon from his dad's plate, grinning, and winked at him. “Sounds like fun.”

 

The early morning flight to San Francisco Bay landed in light fog, bathing the whole area in soft gray mist draped everywhere she could see from the plane window. The gloom held a beauty of its own, but Ting also found it saddening. She had had plans for the day, but they didn't matter, really. Jason would play super with or without her in the stands, and Bailey would cheer loud enough for both of them. It's just that she didn't think . . . she didn't believe . . . that her being with her grandmother would help. Magick couldn't fight cancer, as far as she knew. Being there seemed to be all she could do, and she would. It's just that she felt as if they were all fighting a losing battle. She didn't want to face that.

Ting touched the airplane window as if she could trace a pattern through the mist, to see things better. Jiao Chuu hugged her shoulders gently. “It'll be all right,” she said softly, as if reading Ting's mind.

“I hope so.” Ting felt the brush of her mother's kiss across the top of her head.

“We don't know if everything will turn out the way we want it to. But I do know that anything done in love will turn out all right.”

Ting put her hand out and held her mother's, tightly. Her mother was thinking the same thing, then. They might lose Grandmother, even after all they'd been through, and all they were going to try. She sighed, as the plane lurched downward and bumped on the landing strip and began to brake hard and fast, and her ears popped faintly. Sometimes you had to do things for the past and the present, and not think about the future, she guessed.

 

Bailey slept soundly all night despite the worry, and she only woke when she heard her mother making an early morning, hushed-voice phone call. She only caught a word here and there which sounded more like she was leaving a message than talking to anyone. Bailey punched her pillow back up and drifted off to sleep again for a little longer until a tiny fuss from the pack rat's cage woke her for the last time.

Lacey appeared to have eaten every tiny morsel of food in existence in the pack rat world. She lay in her empty food cup, her tail tucked around her body, with the tuft under her chin, and looked up with the saddest eyes imaginable.

“Like I would let you starve,” Bailey scoffed at her. The fluffy rodent managed a faint chirp.

“Oh, really.” Bailey rolled her eyes as she shuffled to the corner of her tiny bedroom where she kept the various packages of seeds and grains and pellets. Lacey got to her haunches at the familiar rattle of food packs. The black tufted tail twitched in eagerness. She barely waited for Bailey to lower the refilled cup into the cage before diving in nose first.

“You must be a stress eater,” Bailey observed. Lacey did not make a noise other than rattling through the food till she found what she wanted, stuffed her little cheeks full and then went into her sleep ball filled with freshly shredded tissue and chips. Then came the noise of sunflower seeds being noisily cracked open. Bailey grinned.

Bailey was dressed and halfway through her own breakfast when her mom called out, “What's the agenda for the day?”

“Jason's game, homework, laundry.”

“Fun stuff.” Rebecca yawned as she sat down opposite Bailey.

“Speak for yourself. I find homework and laundry kinda groadie, myself.”

Her mother laughed. “That's why I'm the mom and you're not.” She pulled over the teapot that Bailey had made up and poured herself a cup of tea. The teapot looked like the character teapot from Disney's
Beauty and the Beast,
but it reminded Bailey more of Aunt Freyah than anything. If Aunt Freyah ever became a teapot, which of course, she didn't, to Bailey's knowledge.

“Bailey?”

“Hmmm?” She looked back to her mother.

“I called Legal Aid this morning, but they were closed, of course, it being Sunday. So, I won't have any idea what we can do until tomorrow or even Tuesday.”

“Okay.” It wasn't really quite okay, and they both knew it, but it was all that could be done. From here on out, it was a “wait and see” deal. See what damage her father tried to do, and see if they could counter it somehow. She put a spoon in her teacup and stirred it around, a lot, before adding, “I don't want to live with him.”

“He might be able to offer you things I can't.”

“If he'd changed, maybe, but from what I can see, he hasn't changed at all. He's gotten worse.” Bailey waggled her spoon at her mother. “Some people just shouldn't be parents. There ought to be a license or something where you apply before they let you, like driving school. And I don't want him to be a parent of
me
.”

“You're sure?”

“He may walk like a duck and talk like a duck but that doesn't make him a good father.”

“Mmmm,” said her mother, the comer of her mouth twitching. “Right.” She stood up. “I guess I'd better get going, then. Big day ahead of us.”

Bailey finished her breakfast, got up, and loaded the small apartment dishwasher quickly while her mother ate, standing up, as she often did. Trent liked to tease her, “Mrs. Landau! All that food will go to your ankles!” whenever he and Jason came over and joined them. That would be the bright spot in her day, seeing Trent and Jason. She could tell them what had happened and they would tell her they'd help however she needed it. Things would be okay.

“Oh,” said her mother, as if she'd remembered something she'd almost forgotten. “About that . . . other thing. Maybe you could . . . not do it? Just for a while, till this problem with your dad is resolved.”

“Not do Magick, you mean?”

Rebecca nodded.

“I can try. I mean, most of the time, you have to really concentrate on it to do anything, you know? It's like hard mental work. Sometimes, though, it just . . . pops out at you.”

“No one's going to believe you're a witch, but I don't want anyone to be able to prove you do unusual things either.”

“Understood.” Bailey nodded vigorously, her ponytail bobbing.

“Although . . . if you could manage the laundry?” her mother added hopefully.

“Sorry. Magickers don't do laundry. We just summon up new clothes.” Bailey fled the kitchen, followed by her mother's laughing disappointment.

In her room, as she sorted through her hamper and laid out various piles of clothes for the wash, she thought about that. She wondered if Gavan or Aunt Freyah were ever tempted to use their power for everyday things. Freyah did, in a way, in her little cottage, but Bailey thought she did what she did to make people feel at ease and taken care of. They all knew picnic hampers didn't really have personalities or dancing food trays really have names, even if they did in Freyah's corner of the world. Did they? Or did Freyah have so much power in her, and so much experience under her hat, that such things were second nature?

Wow. She might
not
have laundry in her future! Wait till she told Jason and Trent that.

 

Trent steered his father by the elbow the moment they neared the soccer bleachers, and he could see Jason's stepfather getting ready to be seated. “Mr. McIntire!”

The big man turned and smiled, laugh lines going deep around his heavily sun-tanned face. “Trent.”

“You remember my dad, Frank Callahan?”

“Once in a rare while.” McIntire smiled affably and put his hand out. Trent's father looked rather like a string bean next to him as they shook hands.