The Silver Moon Elm (33 page)

The results were spectacular. She didn’t see them because she was deep in a crater of her own making, but she figured from the screams and fireworks that she had caused a bit of commotion. Before she even got up (with sore hindquarters, but no other injury), she whistled through her teeth for her bodyguard.

The horde had already been waiting for her signal, and it rushed in from the northern skies with the roar of a thousand buzz saws. Elise and Jennifer had found not just one nest of hornets in the woods near her cabin, but ten. Perhaps they were a strange mixed breed or descendants from the beehives Crawford Thomas Scales had once faithfully maintained. Or perhaps they were a rival species that flourished once the competition had gone. Either way, they obeyed Jennifer fervently. A swarm the length of a pterodactyl’s wingspan came crashing down next to Jennifer’s crater.

Before the werachnids could regroup, their third and greatest surprise came: The early dawn bore down as if the sun were riding a locomotive into town. With a quick shift to human form, Jennifer watched the warriors advance upon the observatory from the forest’s edge. Elise led them, riding her newolf Phoebe, screaming louder through her sword than any of them. Her daughter felt no small pride, and a twinge of remorse at the thought that in a different Pinegrove, years ago, a similar group of beaststalkers must have adopted the same tactic against her own ancestors. She wondered if Glorianna Seabright had found her own motives so blameless.

No time for philosophy
! She readied her daggers and took up a position near the hornets. The swarm had not suffered at all during the barrage of beaststalker shouting. Every arachnid around them, however, was in incredible pain. Scorpions and spiders curled up and shrieked under the glare of pure light. Many of the smarter ones thought to shift back to human form.

And that was when Evangelina descended upon them.

RUN
!

She shouted to the terrified guards around her, sending a new shock wave rolling over them. And run they did.

Jennifer had given her sister strict orders. No killing, unless there was no other way. While she knew she couldn’t change Elise and the warriors who followed her, Evangelina was special to her: The two of them were the last dragons. They would follow Xavier’s values and the values of their ancestors and show the world what dragons could truly be.

Despite the growing hunger she had sensed, her sibling appeared to enter the fray with a smidgeon of restraint. The lingering light and noise from the beaststalkers did nothing to faze her. She could be, as Jennifer had learned before their own fight, blind or deaf at will.

The hornet dragon stung and chased away those few that withstood Evangelina’s thought weapon, driving them south toward the school.

“Look to the air!” Elise called out from Phoebe’s back. She had ended the newolf ’s charge some distance from the observatory and now swung back to ensure a secure flank to the north. A dozen of her warriors kept up with her, pushing back their bewildered enemies and hacking at those hairy limbs that dared get in the way.

Jennifer followed Elise’s voice and saw a sight that made her swallow hard: A dozen bulbous shapes flew through the air toward them, aiming for the center of Jennifer’s small force.

Only ten landed alive. Eddie’s quiver was now low two arrows, but he quickly pulled another from behind his back and readied a third shot.

Nakia got to his target before he could fire, plunging her claw into the head of a deep blue jumper with white markings. Jennifer felt a bitter pang as she watched the friend she knew as a gentle lover of newolves and fun cars disembowel a fourth spider that tried to leap on top of her.

“Bitch,” she heard the troubled scorpion spit. Then, “Die. Die, already!”

She hadn’t wanted it this bloody or this personal. Wasn’t there another way to get past these spiders?

She changed into dragon form and blew fire in a circle around her, which caused several of the new jumpers to back off. Evangelina held off another surge, a few dozen regathering from the south, by coating one of their number in acid. Not exactly following the spirit of our agreement, Jennifer told herself, but it did scatter the rest of them without hurting more.

With most of the field won, they pushed hard at the observatory.

Here they met the stiffest resistance. A ten-foot-tall horned baboon spider with a clipped front leg and three fat-tailed scorpions of only slightly smaller size pulled back to a small door near the base of the spherical observatory. Inspired by their courage, another dozen or so humans shifted back into their spider forms and tried to make a last stand.

Jennifer kissed her blades and gave them a burst of light and sound. They shuddered but held their ground.

Evangelina pounded on them with her mind. They flinched, but held their ground.

Then Elise flew off her steed straight into the middle of them all, swinging her sword, and they began to falter.

Elizabeth George-Scales, as Jennifer anxiously tried to recall while watching the scene before her, was a caring soul full of optimism and grace who healed the sick and wounded. Elise Georges had a grace of a different kind—the grace of inevitable death as it clears a battlefield, and the grace of a killing blow as it slides past even the tightest defenses.

There was a moment when that grace was nearly not enough. A brown funnel spider lunged forward upon Elise’s blade, impaling itself deeply enough to land a bite on her shoulder before dying. Pulling back in pain, she did not see the horned baboon spider rush forward and lift up its orange and black maw for a killing blow.

“Mother!”

Eddie Blacktooth’s arrow was true, flying straight between the giant spider’s mandibles and emerging from the back of its many-eyed head. The arachnid crashed to the ground in a cloud of snow and dust.

Success! Jennifer congratulated herself on the fact that only Elise appeared to be hurt, with a minimum of werachnid casualties. And Jennifer herself had killed no one. Xavier would have been proud. They had made it to the entrance of the observatory, Eddie’s warriors were scattering the last of the guards, and Jennifer had just located Nakia and Andi on the field about halfway between the observatory and the high school. Suddenly she heard Evangelina’s voice. For the first time, her sister radiated worry.

Sister
!
Something is here
!
It is strong
!

This is it, then. The Quadrivium. Edmund
?
Tavia
?
One of the other two
?

The observatory door opened, and out came a father and his son.

Jennifer had hoped it would not be true after all this time, but she had to believe what she saw. “Oh, Skip…”

But it was not Skip who stepped forward first. Otto Saltin, werachnid and sorcerer, was alive. His chocolate hair was slicked back with sweat, and his eyes bore none of the friendliness he had faked with Jennifer the time they had first met.

This is not over, he had told Jennifer a few months later, with a blade through his belly. She had had no idea how much he meant it.

He saw Elise, peeled his lips back into a sneer, and said a single word.

“Numb.”

Unlike her first experience with Otto’s sorcery, Jennifer actually saw the magic this time. A icy bluish streak leapt from Otto’s lips and slammed into its target. Elise gave a wail and fell to the ground, sword clattering to her side. Otto stepped forward onto her back, pressed her down with his winter boot, and opened his mouth to say another word.

Before it came out of his throat, it was cut by a long dagger—one with a beautifully ornamented hilt carved in the shape of a tiny dragon—that had flown through the air with deadly accuracy.

Andi and Nakia rushed forward to help guard Elise’s paralyzed body. Jennifer stepped up to the dead man who lay next to her and bent down.

“If I had to kill someone,” she told him, yanking her blade out of his ruined throat, “I’m glad it was you.”

She straightened and looked into the eyes of the man’s son, who looked like he wanted a dagger of his own. She knew there was nothing she could say or do that would salvage Skip. And she didn’t want him back anyway.

Expecting him to shift into any one of a number of spider shapes, she raised her knives.

He hesitated, started to say something, and then took a step forward.

Something whistled by Jennifer’s elbow, and then there was a black shaft sticking out of Skip’s right shoulder. He bellowed in pain.

Eddie had another arrow cocked and his bow aimed before Jennifer could even turn around to identify him as the source of the shot. With tense limbs, Evangelina drew up next to the archer.

Andi pulled Elise back away from the entrance, and Nakia covered the retreat in scorpion shape. The beaststalkers beyond Eddie and Elise took up positions in a tight circle near the entrance, facing outward and preparing for a counterattack.

Skip staggered back several steps, until his back was to the observatory entrance. His beautiful blue-green eyes glanced at Eddie and the next black arrow pointed at his heart, and then turned to Jennifer. He let a cocky grin crawl over his bleeding mouth.

“Can you believe it, Jenny? Eddie fucking Blacktooth.”

He pulled a black object out of his jacket and pointed it at Eddie. Jennifer looked at it for a few seconds before she realized it was a gun. He fired it three times.

Evangelina had already thrown her dark aura out to cover Eddie. The boy cried out, but Jennifer couldn’t tell how many of the bullets hit him, or where. Not satisfied with this knowledge, Skip aimed blindly into the shadow and fired five more times.

There were a few tense moments when Jennifer and the others were not sure what had happened. But then a quiet laugh from the darkness settled the matter.

Brother. Are you through
?

He emptied the clip.

A low purr of annoyance spread like the darkness itself. Evangelina advanced, and Skip gave a small whimper. The gun went sailing into the gloom, useless.

Why isn’t he changing
? Jennifer wondered.

Before she could determine why, Evangelina’s tail plunged through Skip’s abdomen, lifted him up, and threw him. He crashed through the doors and skidded into the darkness beyond.

“Evangelina!” Jennifer rushed forward to check on the boy, but stopped short of entering the observatory. “You didn’t have to do that!”

Selfish. Arrogant. Hurtful. Unrepentant
.

Evangelina withdrew her aura with an air of indifference.

You thought these things of him, even before he betrayed you
.

“But that doesn’t mean—” Jennifer stopped short when she turned and saw Eddie. He was sitting on the ground holding his left elbow. Blood trickled down his forearm and over his hand. A grim nod told her he was hurt, but okay.

A cold shriek distracted them all. The bulbous form of Tavia Saltin filled the entryway. She took in the sight of her dead brother and nephew, then Jennifer, and foam formed on the tips of her mandibles.

“You little bitch! I knew we should never have let Skip save you! He should have left you behind with the rest of your pathetic kind! I’ll rip you apart! I’ll—”

Tavia
.

Jennifer turned to Evangelina, but knew even before she saw her sister’s stunned expression that she was not the source.

Let them in, Tavia
.

Edmund Slider? Jennifer wondered. But the voice in their heads didn’t sound like him. Tavia certainly didn’t respond the way one would expect her to treat her boyfriend.

“Let them in?!” the spider screamed at the unseen source. “They deserve to die and we could kill them all, right now, if you had the guts!”

Tavia. Please. Let them in
.

Evangelina’s expression evolved from shock to utter bewilderment. Before Jennifer could stop her, her sister was a helpless young brunette pushing past the giant spider-Tavia and walking into the observatory.

A few quiet seconds passed. Jennifer felt a wave of recognition come from within the observatory, then fear, then…

Mother
?

CHAPTER 18
Quadrivium

«
^
»

Jennifer wasn’t sure she wanted to step into the observatory. But curiosity and her own desire to have this battle end, one way or another, won out.

The inside of the observatory was not what she would have expected from photographs in science textbooks and magazine articles. There were no computers tallying astronomical distances or painting interstellar photographs, no swivel chairs with old astronomers sitting in them while peering through a telescope. Indeed, not even a telescope in sight.

Instead, the inside of the observatory was smooth obsidian, and the ceiling and walls took the same spherical shape as the exterior. There were small pinpricks of light all over the interior surface, and Jennifer realized right away that she was looking at the nighttime sky. Enough illumination pooled at the bottom of the room to see the occupants.

The floor ahead was smooth and sloped slightly upward. About halfway up the slope was a striking blond spider with red and white facial markings. Seven of the eight eyes were scarred shut—
Edmund Slider, I presume
!—and he stood still as Tavia rushed to his side. Evangelina was already past them, barely caring who they were.

It was the third figure in the room, a brunette woman of striking height, who caught Jennifer’s full attention. Jet-black hair cascaded down her pale, freckled shoulders and back. Jade accents matched her simple gown. Tiny freckles peppered her gentle nose, broad cheeks, and the pale forehead above her carefully shaped eyebrows. And beneath those eyebrows were the most mesmerizing points of color Jennifer had ever seen.