The Silver Moon Elm (9 page)

She spoke through the corner of her mouth, trying not to move her nose. “Erkay. Nerwhat?”

“Now you talk to her, just like any’un else. Ya give yer orders.”

“Huh.” Jennifer tentatively worked her mouth open, but the queen showed no sign of aggression. “Um. Hi there. Thanks for coming. You’ve, er. Done well. I like what you did there, with the dragon shape. Nice…er, wings and all.”

The queen hopped up and down a bit, humming enthusiastically.

“Yeah. Um, well, you can go now. We’ve got everything under control. Really, though. Couldn’t’ve done it without you.”

Immediately, the queen leapt off her horn and rushed back to the others. Three seconds later, the massive dragon shape had dissipated, and the strumming of the fire hornets was fading back into the forest.

Jonathan exhaled. “Good job, Jennifer. Thanks, Ned.”

“Anytime, Elder Scales. Just give me a call, ’n’—”

Elizabeth stepped between the two of them and glared at her husband. “We’re going home. Now.”

They went back through the lake, waited for Elizabeth to dry off in the farmhouse, packed the minivan, and took off for Winoka in complete silence. Between her mother fuming in the driver’s seat and her father steaming alongside the minivan, Jennifer certainly didn’t want to be the first one to talk.

But she couldn’t help herself—one question burned in her mind. She opened the passenger window, letting a blast of cold air in.

“Dad,” she called out. “What did Ember mean by hobbling dragons?”

“Now is not the time,” Elizabeth growled.

“She wasn’t asking you, Liz,” Jonathan snapped with a quick turn of his reptilian head. He looked at Jennifer as he kept up his cruising speed. “Hobbling is a vicious practice among beaststalkers. Instead of killing the weredragon, they cripple the person’s spine. Done properly, it prevents the body from changing.”

Jennifer digested that in silent horror for a moment. “So they can’t change when the crescent moon comes?”

“No. But their bodies don’t realize it, and try to change every time. The pain, I hear, is unbearable.”

“Very few beaststalkers do that anymore,” Elizabeth interrupted.

“Have you ever done it, Mom?”

Elizabeth glared at her. “That’s a disgusting question.”

“Which you didn’t answer.”

“Jennifer.” Her father tried to get her attention back, but she was resolute.

“Would asking about the three dragons you murdered be disgusting, too?”

The minivan screeched to a halt, swerving into the breakdown lane with a stomach-turning twist. “Young lady, do you want to get out and walk home?”

“I can fly,” Jennifer pointed out. “And don’t act like we shouldn’t talk about this. You’re always hush-hush about the past when it suits you. But I deserve answers.”

“She’s right, Liz.” Jonathan had come to a more gentle stop next to them, and he poked his head through the passenger window. “We ought to share—”

“Shut up!” Elizabeth reached out with lightning speed and slapped his scaly cheek, right in front of Jennifer. “Don’t you dare talk about sharing! I’ve done my penance for what I did. And for years, you and your…your friends have kept that one act dangling over my head. Even though you know it was a horrible mistake.” A thumb jerked at Jennifer. “And even now, with her old enough to understand, you have the balls to whisk her away to your secret hideouts and say awful things about us, and lie about us, as if every beaststalker is alike, and I can never visit, and even when I do I practically get immolated—”

She burst into tears. It was worse, so much worse, than her anger. Jennifer could count on one hand—mostly occurrences in the past few months—how many times she’d seen her mother cry. It was frightening and pitiful at the same time.

“Liz, don’t—”

The minivan lurched forward as Elizabeth jammed down the accelerator. Jennifer heard an exclamation of pain as Jonathan yanked his head out of the window a half-second too late.

“Mom!” She tried to look back in the ditch behind them. “I think you really hurt him.”

“Good!” The woman was sobbing, and the minivan uneasily straddled the breakdown lane and the righthand lane of the highway. “I hope he forms an embolism.”

Jennifer reached out and patted her mother’s coat. She wasn’t quite sure what to say. Then she caught an image in the sideview mirror. “Huh. He’s up.” In the faint cherry glow of their taillights, she could make out the sleek, winged shadow of her father as it bolted toward them. “Wow, he looks kinda angry. Maybe you should—”

“How fast can you go when you fly?”

“What? Um, I’ve never really—”

“I’ll bet he can’t do ninety.”

Like a spaceship launching, the minivan jerked forward with sudden purpose. Jennifer felt herself thrown back against the seat. All she could do was bend her head a bit and watch her father shrink rapidly in the sideview mirror.

“Mom, this is a bit fast.”

Her mother didn’t answer, and as the minivan’s whine raised in pitch to a terrifying scream, Jennifer whitened her knuckles upon her armrests.

“Um, Mom, think of your daughter’s safety. Every year at school, they gather us into the auditorium and show us all another video of some car that’s been crumpled into a small, decorative box as a result of reckless driving…”

The engine’s scream raised to a roar. The painted dashes on the highway flew past like deathly pale bullets.

“Um, also, as any child psychology book will tell you, I depend on you and Dad to model a mature, loving, adult relationship so I can form—”

“Oh, shove it! You’re on my list, too.”

Thoughts of the minivan’s unsafe speed flew out of Jennifer’s head. “What! What did I do?”

“Don’t use that whiny, put-upon teenager voice with me. I know how much you love taking off with your father and leaving me in the dust. Being a dragon—how exciting for you! You get to fly around together and laugh away, feeling superior to all the poor people down below who can’t disembowel sheep with their own teeth.”

“That’s not—”

“And when someone who disagrees with your point of view comes along, why, you can just incinerate her, or explain her away by calling her a murderer.” Now her voice dripped with venom. “After all, no dragon would ever kill anybody! No indeed. Not unless, you know, they deserved it! What a comfortable lifestyle you get to lead.”

Jennifer had not the faintest idea what to say, and no opportunity to say it anyway. Something large landed on top of the van at the same time a scaled triangle descended over the top of the windshield—Dad’s wing, she realized in a mixture of panic and admiration. Cripes, he can go ninety!

Elizabeth swore. The van swerved with the added weight and lost aerodynamics. Jennifer’s heart stopped as she felt the vehicle veer dangerously toward its right side, and she began to change shape instinctively—a dragon shape would better protect her and her mother from a crash…

But the van righted itself in time, and came to an abrupt stop with its hind third still sticking a bit into the highway. She heard her father yell as his momentum threw him off the roof and onto the pavement. As he rolled around in pain, the headlights washed out most of his vivid indigo and blue colors.

“Dad!”

“Don’t worry about him.” Elizabeth’s tone had not changed. She looked over at Jennifer, and for the briefest of moments there was something there—revulsion?—that had never been there before.

Looking down, Jennifer realized she had only morphed halfway. Her flesh was bulging, her hands were covered in a mixture of blue scales and pink skin, and who knew what her face looked like?

“Sorry,” she said, at once feeling resentful that she had to apologize to her own mother.

Elizabeth didn’t say anything else. Instead, she threw off her seat belt, launched the door open, and ran out in front of the van where her husband lay. Then, to Jennifer’s dismay, she began kicking him with a furry Land’s End boot.

“What is the matter with you?” she was screaming, punctuating each important word with another kick to his midsection. “A car with your wife and daughter is going upwards of ninety miles an hour, and you decide to land on it? We could have been killed! You could have been killed!”

“Give it a moment,” he gasped from the frost-bitten, blood-soaked gravel.

She kicked him again with clenched teeth. “Oh, stop the theatrics. You’re fine and you know it. Superior bone structure and all. It takes a lot more than a roll on the side of the road to kill one of you.”

His silver eyes lost their humor and narrowed. “Well, dear, you would know.”

“Don’t you say that!” She threw herself at him and began to throttle him—or at least did the best she could, with her small hands up against a huge, scaled throat. “Don’t you dare say that! I’m not a killer! I’m a doctor! I’ve saved hundreds of them! DON’T YOU DARE CALL ME A KILLER AFTER WHAT YOU’VE DONE!”

She stopped trying to choke him and started slapping him, uselessly, around the muzzle and crest. His face softened a bit as he weathered the blows.

“Is that why you tried to throw your life away back in Crescent Valley?” he asked her. “Because you think you’re a killer?”

Sobbing, Elizabeth stopped hitting him and covered her face. Jennifer stared at them both as an eighteen-wheeler rumbled by, angrily blowing its horn at the poorly parked minivan. Elizabeth Georges-Scales, a professional doctor, calm and collected, even sometimes cold as stone, was melting down. Jennifer had never seen it this bad. She devoutly hoped she would never see it again.

Jonathan Scales reached up and wrapped his wings around his wife.

“No!” Elizabeth was startled into anger again. She launched herself up and stomped back to the minivan. “You don’t get to comfort me! You’re a killer, too, Jonathan! Don’t forget those two thugs! Don’t forget them!”

While Jennifer expected him to protest, Jonathan did not move. He just watched his wife get into the minivan, without argument.

A killer? Him? Somehow, it was even harder to see him in that role than her mother. And what thugs?

The sound of the minivan starting up refocused her on what was happening. “Mom, no! Wait.”

“We’re going now.”

“No, we’re not!”

Her mother turned to her with a poisonous expression. “Don’t you talk back to me…”

“You can’t just leave Dad here!” He was slowly getting up, but his wings were streaked with blood.

“Jennifer, your father’s fine. And this discussion is over. We’re leaving.”

“No, we’re not.” Jennifer flung open her door, ducked out of her seat belt, and was out of the van before her mother could react. “He’s hurt.”

Elizabeth growled in exasperation and slammed the steering wheel. “Jennifer, get in the car!”

“Mom, look at yourself! Who the hell are you? What are you doing?”

“I’m your mother and I’m telling you to move your ass!”

She tried to stand tall and silent against her mother’s withering glare. Finally, she broke and said, “Not until you work this out with Dad.”

A delicate balance of a snarl and a sigh escaped. “You don’t know what you’re talking about! It’s been years between your father and me! Years of trust and sacrifice and compromise! I don’t need your relationship advice. You have no idea what goes into a relationship, Jennifer. You have no clue!”

“Mom, get out of the car.”

“Jennifer, get in the car.”

“Get out!”

“GET IN!”

Jennifer stepped back and shut the car door. “I’m not leaving him.”

“Ask him about the tramplers,” Elizabeth growled. “You may change your mind.”

With that, she gunned the engine and the minivan’s tires squealed with the effort to reenter the highway.

“Mom!”

But all that was left was a cloud of gravel, and a pair of vanishing taillights in the dark.

“I can’t—she just—did you see—she left us!”

“That she did,” Jonathan agreed.

“Where the hell are you? I can barely see.”

“Over here. You should change—you’ll see better, and we’re obviously flying home.”

“But you can’t fly in the shape you’re in!” She shifted shape—she was warmer this way, if nothing else. Her father was sitting on his haunches, rubbing the base of his righthand horn.

“Just give me a sec. Your mother was right—I’ll be fine.”

Jennifer sat down next to him. “What was that she was saying about the tramplers, and about you being a killer?”

He sighed. “I don’t suppose there’s any way you would accept the truth at a later date…”

“No.” She felt herself getting angry—not just because she imagined it must be a horrible thing in order to get her mother so upset, but also because it was yet another secret from the past that they had kept from her.

She glued her gaze to the highway while she waited for her father to begin. As a dragon, she could plainly make out the shape of a silver and black Mitsubishi Eclipse as it flitted past them in the far lane. “I’m waiting.”

“You’re familiar with the beaststalker rite of passage.”

“Yeah, from Eddie. I gather it’s pretty important to do better than he did.”

“Your mother’s rite involved Xavier Longtail’s brother. Ember’s father. She did better than Eddie—in fact, she succeeded brilliantly.”

“Right, I got that part. So Mom killed a weredragon, and she’s spent a lifetime saving them and other people to make up for it. Where do you come in?”

“Let me start a bit before then—to when we first met. It’s important you hear this.”

Jennifer nodded. She had never really heard this story in detail—just that they met in graduate school, and had worked out the fact that she was a beaststalker and he was a weredragon. She assumed a lot of hot, steamy, parental love figured into the picture somewhere, so she had never pressed for details.

“I met your mother years after her own rite of passage,” he explained. “I was a graduate student in architecture at the same university where she was a medical student. She was still wracked with guilt, though of course her beaststalker friends considered her a hero. It did not take long to learn what she was—just a few dates. But by then it was too late. I was already in love.”

His voice caught for a moment, and Jennifer waited patiently. The woman he still loved was probably ten miles away by now, and accelerating.