“Thanks.” Colin quickly turned to Gideon, as if he was embarrassed now to meet Lucinda’s eye. “My mother saw you heading over here and she wanted me to remind you that Sarah’s worked all day making us all a hot meal but it won’t stay hot for long.”
“Saw us? She must have been watching through my binoculars!” Gideon turned to Tyler and Lucinda. “Meaning we had best hurry up, I suppose.” He sounded as pleased as a small boy to be bending the rules. “Before Patience loses her patience!”
Even Lucinda on her best behavior couldn’t pretend that was a great joke, but she chuckled as best she could. “Come with me, Colin,” she said. “I’m just going in to see the dragons. Come along! I’ll be quick.”
Colin, who was beginning to get off his bike, suddenly stopped. “Ummm… no, thanks. You go ahead in. I’ll wait here.”
“Don’t be silly! You can tell me what you’ve been doing since last summer.” Lucinda almost took his arm, but thought better of it. She wanted to be nicer to the tall, awkward boy this year, but she didn’t want to give him any ideas. “Come on!”
Colin reluctantly- very reluctantly-joined the small group as Mr. Walkwell pushed open the heavy door.
The air was at least as hot inside the massive barn as it was outside, but it was also full of the musky smell of wild beasts. Lucinda did her best to not to let the stink bother her-after all, this was what she had been wanting for months, the way a little kid wanted a special doll for Christmas.
Meseret the adult dragon lay stretched in her enclosure with her wings folded against her body, big as a city bus, beautiful and awful. Lucinda could not hold in an excited squeak at seeing her. Meseret was like something out of a children’s storybook, all thick, leathery scales and knobs and whorls of bone, something that should not exist in the real world… but there she was. The eyes with their slit pupils watched them all and gave away nothing.
Can you hear me, Meseret? Lucinda did her best to speak with her thoughts. Do you remember me? We flew together! Although to be perfectly fair, an observer on that night last summer might have thought Lucinda had been dangling helplessly from Meseret’s harness. Do you remember me? I’m Lucinda! She had tried to convince herself not to expect too much at first, but Meseret’s gigantic, uncaring silence pained her anyway. Remember? I helped save your egg!
“Man, look at this! The little one’s here too!” called Tyler, and Lucinda reluctantly turned away from the big dragon.
“You wrote in your Christmas letter that you named her Desta,” she said to Gideon.
Her great-uncle nodded. “It’s Ethiopian for ‘Happiness’. My wife Grace once had a puppy with that name that was very dear to her… ”
Desta didn’t look much like a puppy, or in fact like a baby of any kind, at least compared to the tiny thing that had hatched in the farmhouse kitchen last summer. The young dragon was now as big as a small horse. In most ways she was a smaller, slenderer version of her mother, but her overall color was a sandy brown instead of her mother’s drab gray-green, with rosettes of brick red a frill of pale olive spines down her back. Desta’s scales, some as big as Lucinda’s hand, others as small as a sliver of her pinkie nail, glinted and shone as the muscles moved beneath the skin.
The young dragon was watching Lucinda and Tyler, too, but she mostly looked like she wanted to go back to sleep. “ So cool,” whispered Tyler.
“Is anything wrong with her?” Lucinda asked, staring at the straps around Desta’s middle. A chain connected the arrangement to a large ring set into the concrete floor of the pen, close to the pile of straw she was using for bedding. “What’s that thing she’s wearing?”
“Harness,” said Gideon. “Have to keep it on her right now. She’ll learn to fly soon, you see. Don’t want her leaving the property by surprise.”
“She must hate it.”
“Don’t sentimentalize the animals,” her great-uncle said. “That’s a mistake.” Meseret suddenly growled, and although the mother dragon was some distance away from her Lucinda could feel the slow, rumbling sound through her feet.
“Why’d she do that?” Lucinda asked. “Is she all right?”
“Perfectly all right,” said Gideon. “She’s probably just hungry
… ”
Meseret raised her vast head and swiveled it from side to side, nostrils flaring, as if she smelled something.
“Gideon… ” said Colin, “maybe we should… maybe we ought to… ” Lucinda couldn’t help noticing that the older boy sounded genuinely frightened. “I’ll just… ”
A strange, loud noise made Lucinda jump, a wet pop like a starter’s pistol held underwater. Colin Needle jumped, shrieking in surprise and pain. “Owwww! Oh, help, it’s hot! It’s burning me!”
Lucinda spun to see Colin jumping and thrashing wildly. Something thick and sticky was running down his jacket-something that smoked. An instant later, Colin’s jacket burst into flame.
Luckily Mr. Walkwell was only a few yards away. The wiry old Greek moved with such incredible speed that Lucinda had just opened her mouth to shout for help when he wrestled off Colin’s burning jacket and threw it aside. He shoved the pale, whimpering boy onto the floor, then rolled him back and forth to make sure he was no longer on fire. For long moments after the flames were out he kept Colin down on the ground. The black-haired boy lay trembling violently, his breath hitching.
“Is he all right?” Lucinda asked. “Colin, are you okay?”
“It is not bad,” said Mr. Walkwell. “His mother will give him something for the burns.” He didn’t sound too worried.
As Mr. Walkwell and Gideon helped the tall, pale boy out of the Sick Barn, Tyler crept up next to Lucinda and quietly said, “Well, I guess dragons don’t forget that easily, huh? Desta’s mom hasn’t forgotten who stole her egg.”
“Don’t be mean, Tyler!” What he had said finally sunk in. “Wait a minute-you mean Meseret? Was that her? What did she do?”
“I guess she still remembers Colin from last summer. She spit at him from twenty feet away! Hawked a big one.” He rubbed his mouth to hide his grin. “A flaming loogie.” Thunder rumbled softly in the distance. The storm seemed to be moving away.
Lucinda was not amused. In fact, she felt a bit sick inside-all this from trying to be friendly…! “Poor Colin. He didn’t want to go near the dragons but I made him do it… ”
“He’s fine, Luce. Anyway, he deserved it-just ask Mama Dragon!”
But this was most definitely not the way Lucinda had wanted to start the summer.
Chapter 3
The side trip to the Reptile Barn had led them a different route than they usually took back from town. Tyler found it interestingly strange to approach through the center of the farm, past outbuildings and barns, instead of seeing it across a distance from the road in the hills. From the hillside the buildings came into view below like a fleet of strange painted wooden spaceships, all red and yellow and tan and white, but their approach this time made the house and its connected structures rise up before them like a vast sea of saw-toothed roofs and towers-an entire toy city made by drunken Christmas elves and plunked down in the middle of a dusty California valley.
“Look, Luce!”
His sister looked up. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “We’re definitely back.” She had been trying to comfort Colin Needle, who was huddled near them in the back of the wagon, eyes red and jaw clenched. Tyler didn’t think the older boy’s injuries were as bad as he was making them out to be-only a few small spots on his coat had actually caught fire.
Lucinda gave him a warning look as the cart horse pulled them past the old grain silo. The tall, gray structure looked like a haunted house out of a scary movie, but was actually only an empty wooden building that covered the farm’s greatest secret-the Fault Line, a gateway to other times and places that Octavio Tinker had discovered. Tyler didn’t know what Lucinda’s look meant and didn’t much care: she had her dragons and he had the Fault Line. In fact, as far as Tyler knew, he was the only person in the world who could walk into it and out again safely without the help of any machine or device. Did she really think he was going to ignore it all summer?