Dragon Sleeping (The Dragon Circle Trilogy Book 1) (46 page)

A second later, the Anno began their silent attack. “Oh, God,” one of the women said behind him.

“They’re small,” Mrs. Blake said by his side. “Aim low.”

The creature with the poison stick ran straight for the Oomgosh. He guessed the Anno thought the tree man wouldn’t make a very good meal.

But the creatures were not closing their circle evenly. The one with the spear was having trouble maneuvering with the long piece of wood before him. The Anno to either side would reach the neighbors’ circle first.

The Oomgosh stepped forward and grabbed the nearest Anno with his one hand. He twisted the creature about, flipping it over so it couldn’t use its knife, and threw the thing back on its fellow with the spear. Both Anno fell to the ground.

Mrs. Blake screamed at his side. Her knife clanged against the Anno’s, metal on metal. The Oomgosh reached for the Anno, who glanced up in fright. Mrs. Blake cut the thing across the chest. It collapsed, dragging itself back through the dirt.

Charlie leapt out of the group to take one of the Anno by the throat, shaking it until it ceased to struggle.

The Oomgosh turned to help the others.

“No!” Mrs. Jackson screamed. “Never again!” She swung the long knife before her like a broadsword. Two more of the Anno went down before her attack. The Oomgosh grabbed another that wanted to sneak back behind her, using his large hand to break the creature’s neck.

“Jesus!” Jason called nearby. The Oomgosh turned and saw the boy look up in horror as an Anno staggered away, the hatchet buried in its forehead.

Mrs. Dafoe was holding another of the creatures off, her knifepoint almost touching that of the creature. The Oomgosh reached forward and dispatched the Anno.

“Hey!” Bobby cried, moving forward with quick jabs of his knife. “Hey!” One Anno already lay dead behind him. Mrs. Jackson yelled again as her knife sliced into another of the creatures.

The Oomgosh saw movement in one corner of his eye. He turned and saw one of the last Anno rushing toward Margaret Furlong, left unprotected when the others had met the attack.

She looked up from the dirt as the thing scrambled forward. “Leo?” she asked.

The Oomgosh rushed toward the woman, his footfalls shaking the ground beneath him. He reached forward and grabbed the back of the Anno before it could plunge its knife into Mrs. Furlong’s throat.

There was a scream behind him. The Oomgosh knew the voice. It was Jason.

He turned around to see that the Anno with the spear had risen and was pushing Jason toward a large tree at one edge of the clearing. Jason’s hatchet was still lodged in the skull of the fallen Anno, and he had completely forgotten about the knife stuck behind his belt.

The Oomgosh felt a pricking sensation at his wrist. He glanced over to see the Anno he’d forgotten trying to stab him with its knife. He tossed the creature to the ground and crushed it with his foot.

The other neighbors were looking to him. It appeared that they had killed the rest of the attackers.

“Stay away from the poison!” the Oomgosh commanded as he quickly ran to Jason’s aid.

The Anno looked like it was smiling as it poked at Jason. The boy’s back was almost to a tree. There was nowhere he could run.

“Beware, my Oomgosh!” a call came from the sky. It was Raven.

But the tree man had no more time to be wary.

He reached forward toward the Anno, watching carefully to see if it would swing the spear.

“The trees, Oomgosh!” Raven called as he swooped closer. “Up in the trees.”

The Oomgosh glanced up as two Anno fell from above, their knives drawn. The tree man batted one aside with his hand, but the other grabbed onto the thick branches of the tree man’s hair and stabbed at his neck and cheek, reaching for the Oomgosh’s eye.

“Noooo!” Jason moaned. The Oomgosh grabbed the creature from his shoulder and threw it against the tree trunk. It hit with a sharp crack.

He turned to Jason. If they had done something to the boy—

But Jason looked unhurt, except for the fear in his eyes. He pointed back at the tree man.

The Oomgosh looked down. The poison stick was jutting from his chest. He felt the fire then, sudden and terrible, as he fell to his knees.

Jason pulled the spear from his chest as a new group of Anno dropped from the surrounding trees.

“Raven!” the tree man called to his oldest friend. “Protect them!” Then the pain became too great.

T
he Oomgosh couldn’t die.

Jason jabbed with the spear at the Anno falling around him. “You can’t kill him!” he cried. “I won’t let you!”

Bobby was rushing toward him, screaming at the top of his lungs.

Mrs. Blake and Mrs. Jackson weren’t far behind.

Charlie leapt out from the side of the tree, snapping at the Anno. He grabbed one by the leg and pulled it to the ground. Bobby was there now, too, his knife slashing at the three-foot- high creatures. But there were more of them dropping from the trees, dozens of them, as if the whole village had decided to join in the fight.

A black shape rocketed down from the sky. “No, you will not!” it squawked at the Anno. “Raven forbids it!”

Half a dozen of the Anno ran into the forest, as if the great bird’s claws were too much for them. The bird flapped his dark wings to pursue them. But it seemed that twice as many of the creatures dropped to take their place.

“Jason!” another voice called. “Step back from the trees.”

Jason looked around to see the magician Obar standing next to Mrs.

Smith.

“Now,” Obar said solemnly, “we will show you what happens when you attack humans.” He tossed a ball of fire at a cluster of the creatures. They shrieked as the magic flame consumed them.

The other Anno on the ground retreated, their shrieks echoing up in the trees. But even that high, eerie noise grew fainter, as if the Anno in the trees were retreating as well.

Another Anno fell to earth, ten feet away from them. Was Jason wrong? Would these crazed creatures turn around and attack again?

He noticed this latest invader wasn’t moving. Jason walked forward warily and prodded the small thing with his spear. The Anno flipped over. There was an arrow, a full-length, human arrow, in its back.

“Hello, the camp!” came the call.

“Hello, yourself!” Obar called back up. “Please join us. We’ve got to take care of the wounded.”

Jason realized he meant the Oomgosh. The tree man hadn’t moved since he had fallen after taking that spear—that poison stick. Jason was afraid he was dead. He hoped the wizard knew better.

Others dropped from the trees as Obar rushed toward the Oomgosh. This time the newcomers were human—the four Volunteers and Mark and Todd. None of them looked hurt in the least. Why couldn’t something have happened to one of them, rather than the tree man?

No, Jason, thought, he didn’t want to wish injury or death on anybody. The Oomgosh was just so big, so strong, and so cheerful. How could this happen to someone like him?

The wizard knelt over the fallen tree man. He placed his two hands a few inches away from the wound. Was it the poison that made it look that green, or was that the color of the Oomgosh’s blood? When Jason had had to hack off the tree man’s withered arm, there had been hardly any blood at all.

The wizard’s hands glowed green, a brighter color than the damp chest below. Vapors seemed to rise from the tree man’s chest cavity, flowing into Obar’s fingers.

The wizard groaned and shuddered.

“Is he going to be all right?” Jason asked as Obar stood.

“I got to the poison quickly,” Obar replied, swaying slightly on his feet. At this moment, he looked none too healthy himself. “It’s good, too, that you removed the spear. He will need a great deal of rest to recover completely. But, with luck, he should do just that.”

“Oh, really, wizard?” Nick called. He looked different now, the way he leaned with the sword at his belt. “That’s what you said about Charlie!” The dog frisked around Nick’s feet, tail wagging and eyes glowing.

“Oh, he has recovered,” Obar said simply. “It is just that he’s a different dog than he was before. This world does that sort of thing to people sometimes. One of the dragon’s little jokes.”

“They blame it on the dragon,” Stanley said. “Wizards, hey?” A harsh cawing erupted overhead, as if Raven was laughing.

The great black bird descended from the sky, this time landing on Nick’s shoulder. Nick didn’t even move. It was like he was expecting it.

“So the Oomgosh will recover?” the bird said as he cocked his head. “The Oomgosh is like Raven. We are here forever.”

Jason liked that kind of talk. He wanted the Oomgosh to be better than some stupid poison stick. He still felt like crying.

“He’ll do fine,” Jason said instead.

The bird nodded his agreement. “Raven has chased the Anno.

Now Raven needs to bring something else.”

He took off again from Nick’s shoulder and flew up to one of the lower branches of a nearby tree. Leaves rustled for an instant as Raven’s claws grabbed at something out of sight.

An instant later, the black bird swooped back down, straight toward Mrs. Smith. He flew close above her head, dropping something from his claws.

Mrs. Smith caught the dragon’s eye as Raven settled back on Nick’s shoulder.

“People should be careful with precious stones,” the black bird announced. “One never knows who’s going to end up with them.”

Mrs. Smith stared at the stone in her hand.

“Thank you,” she began. “I don’t—” She stopped abruptly, just looking from the dragon’s eye to Raven and back to the eye. Before this, Jason had never seen Mrs. Smith when she didn’t know exactly what to say.

“The dragon wanted you to have it,” Raven answered curtly. “Sometimes even Raven defers to others.”

“Wait a moment.” Jason’s mother stepped forward. “What’s happened to Mary Lou?”

Mary Lou hadn’t come back with the others. Jason had been so worried about the Oomgosh, he had forgotten all about his sister!

“She’s gone,” Obar replied.

“Gone?” Jason’s mother demanded. “What do you mean’ gone?”

“Oh, I’m quite sure she’s still alive,” Obar added hastily. “I’m just not precisely sure—where.”

“Isn’t there some way we could find her?” Mrs. Smith interrupted before Jason’s mom could object again.

“With two eyes?” Obar asked back. “We could certainly try.” The air just beyond Obar shifted and took an almost solid form.

“You have more than two eyes to work with.” It was Mary Lou’s prince.

“Wait a minute!” Jason protested. “Weren’t you supposed to protect my sister?”

The prince shook his head. “I have to admit that things didn’t go exactly as I expected.” He looked to Obar. “You need me to come along. I have great knowledge of those other places Mary Lou might be.”

“You didn’t want us taking her before,” Mrs. Smith pointed out. “You didn’t want her to leave the Anno.”

The prince looked away from her for a second. “My mistake. I didn’t want to lose her.” He looked back up at Obar and Mrs. Smith. “Mary Lou and I are very close.”

“If he knows something,” Mary Lou’s mother insisted, “you have to take him with you!”

“Do we?” Obar answered drily. “Garo and I have some unfinished business.”

“And it should stay unfinished,” the prince replied, “until we have found Mary Lou. We can hold off on old feuds until we’re ready for the dragon.”

“Well,” Obar replied, “if you feel that way about it—” He looked to Mrs. Smith. “What do you think?”

“I think we should find Mary Lou before something else happens.”

“Let us do it, then,” Obar agreed. He seemed very relieved someone else had taken the responsibility.

“If you will allow me to show you the way?” the prince said with a smile.

All three of them popped out of the clearing as Jason stared at that smile. He didn’t like that smile at all.

What the heck did his sister see in this prince, anyway?

T
he King of the Wolves growled.

The wizard had lied. He said he would give the King great power. He never said he would trap the King in a place with great stone walls, a place where the King couldn’t move and stalk and kill.

But the wizard had used such words, filled with such promise of power. The pack would follow a king forever who had power like that. A king like that could kill anything at any time, even those foolish humans who turned him away, made him the laughingstock of the pack.

A king had to have power like that.

But what had the wizard done? He had taken the King away from his pack, into this strange dark place. And he had given the King nothing but his glowing green touch, a touch that had taken all the wolf’s energy and made it feel both hot and cold, as if winter and summer were happening all at once. And then that wizard had left the King here, without another word.

The King stopped pacing. He felt another one of those pains, deep inside. That was something else the wizard hadn’t told him about.

Something was growing, deep inside the King of the Wolves.

“W
here are we?” Constance Smith asked. This place was full of colors, shimmering one after another, as if they had stepped into the middle of a rainbow.

“One of the other places,” the man called Garo said. In this place, he looked quite solid. “The dragon exists in many different dimensions and times. Some say the creature might exist everywhere. In the place where we just came from—the real world, I suppose—the dragon only reveals itself when it is about to destroy. But the dragon always exists somewhere. In one of these places, the dragon rests and waits.”

“Is that what we just left?” Mrs. Smith asked. “The real world?” Until a couple of days ago, she would have thought that island the strangest place she had ever seen. Now she was in a whole other world of colors rolling across a great plain, yet a world still dotted with fields and rivers and trees like the countryside at home.

“The more you know about the dragon,” Obar murmured, “the less you will use that word—real.”

“And this is where we’ll find Mary Lou?”