Jennifer Scales and the Ancient Furnace (7 page)

The house was silent. Curious, she ambled on all fours through the rooms until she came to the barn.

The minivan was gone.

With a brief gulp of panic, Jennifer clawed her way quickly across the barn. She pushed the large doors open and peered outside. No one was there.

“Mom? Dad?” She tried not to sound alarmed as she scurried awkwardly around the northeast corner and scrambled up onto the patio. There was a reason why they had left, she told herself. Only Mom could drive the car, so she must have run an errand.

Then she thought of last night. Of course, she had gone to get Phoebe. Jennifer had demanded it. She would be back soon with the dog.

That left her father …

“Heads up!”

Jennifer looked up just in time to duck away from the huge, furry ball leveled like a bomb at her skull. She briefly thought of the giant spiders from her dream, but when the missile landed she calmed down, if only a little.

It was a sheep, one of Grandpa Crawford’s. Its matted wool was streaked with blood, and its hind legs were broken. It was bleating in terror.

“
Dad
!” This didn’t strike Jennifer as funny at all.

He landed on the porch next to the sheep and balanced a hind claw on the sheep’s throat. “Sorry, I didn’t see you come out until I had let go of it.”

“What are you doing mauling sheep anyway?” She was pretty sure she could guess the answer and she began to feel sick. “Grandpa’s going to get really mad at you.”

“I think you know as well as I do that he won’t. Why do you think he goes through more sheep than he can breed every year? He can’t live on honey alone, and he likes his horses too much to eat them.”

Jennifer was relieved she wouldn’t have to watch her father eat an Arabian stallion. Then she was disgusted all over again. “Ugh. That’s not just for you, is it?”

“Of course not. I’ve already eaten. I brought this one back so I could show you how to skin and cook them. After that, we’ll see to the horses, and then I’ll give you your first flying lesson.”

The word “cook” settled Jennifer’s stomach a bit. The word “flying” pricked her imagination.

Then Jonathan Scales twisted the hind claw that clenched the sheep’s throat, and the crack and gurgle that followed had her sick to her stomach again. “Aw,
Dad
…” “It’s a sheep, ace, not a kindergartner. You eat this sort of thing all the time.”

That brought another question to Jennifer’s mind. “Um, Dad, we don’t ever eat…
people
… do we?”

Jonathan looked at his daughter with silver-eyed patience. “No matter how much you try to tell yourself otherwise, Jennifer, you are not a monster. You are not a freak. You still eat the same things you did before yesterday, and you’ll still like doing the things you did before yesterday. We’re going to cook and eat our meals in as civilized a way as we can manage. We’ll have trout tonight for dinner, just like we always do here at Grandpa’s. I’ll make risotto to go with it—your triple-chambered stomach will find your mother’s cooking as horrific as your single-chambered stomach did.”

She choked back a giggle.

“You can use the same charcoal and paper Grandpa has lying around to do sketches. Your wing claw can manage it. There’s even a soccer ball in the garage, once you get your balance back. You are still Jennifer Scales, and you’re all the things that make you a terrific daughter.

“I’m not saying there won’t be new things to learn. But if you see them as additions, and not subtractions, you’ll have an easier time with this. Understand?”

Jennifer nodded slowly.

“Great. Now let’s gut this sheep and roast it!”

It wasn’t as gruesome as she thought it would be. Her father showed her how to use her claws to skin the animal, slice open the belly, separate the edibles from the nonedibles, and slice the meat into manageable chunks. She had an uncle on her mother’s side who used to treat venison for hunters, so she had seen this sort of thing before. It wasn’t completely enjoyable, but it seemed more like butcher’s work than a beast’s.

With ten neat cuts of meat lying on the porch, she looked up at her father with something approaching pride.

“Excellent. Now we cook ‘em.”

Grandpa Crawford had an enormous grill on one end of the porch—it was three times the size of most grills. Jonathan poked a wing claw under the grate, arranged the coals beneath, and then shot a bullet of flame out of his nostrils. The coals began burning immediately.

“All right. Put those cuts on there, and put the cover down. From here on in, it’s just like barbecue.”

“Neat.” Jennifer couldn’t hide a smile. “I don’t suppose there’s any ketchup in the fridge?”

As Jennifer finished—surprising herself by downing all ten pieces in ten ketchup-tinted gulps—the minivan drove up onto the north lawn. A familiar shape was poised in the passenger seat with its head out of the window.

“Phoebe!”

She wasn’t sure how the collie-shepherd would react to a seven-foot-long reptile with a family member’s voice, but to Jennifer’s unending delight, there was never a question in the dog’s mind. Phoebe leapt out of the open window and raced up the porch steps to lick her pack sister’s scaly face. Then, in a black dash, she was off around the house and through the forest.

Jonathan grinned. “Off to find sheep of her own. She never could resist herding them.”

“How’s it going?” called out Elizabeth. She was getting something out of the car.

“We’ve had breakfast. I’d like to do a few more things, maybe get in a bit of flying before lunch.”

“Well, I got what you asked. You sure this is safe?”

Of all the things her mother could have pulled out of the minivan, Jennifer never imagined she would see a trampoline. She looked at her father with startled eyes.

“It’s safe,” he assured both of them. “But before we get to that, we need to cover fire-breathing. Could you check on the horses for me, Liz?” He turned to Jennifer. “I started the fire that cooked your breakfast, but you’ll need to learn how to do your own fire-breathing if you want to have anything but raw meat for yourself.”

“Okay,” Jennifer agreed. With a full stomach, a good night’s sleep, and a growing acceptance that her transformation wasn’t immediately fatal, she was ready to learn a few things. Plus, the thought of her crawling on her belly and eating uncooked food for five-day stretches did not sit well.

Elizabeth set the trampoline against the porch, and then went off to check on the horses, Phoebe, and the sheep.

“Come on.” Her father gestured. “Let’s practice into the lake, with the wind at our backs.”

Fire-breathing, as it turned out, involved just about every vocal action short of actually speaking. A cough, a snort, a growl, even a sneeze—each of these, her father explained, opened a small valve at the back of the throat that released the fire element. Then, as with speech, the placement of the lips, tongue, and teeth did the rest.

While sneezes generated short but impressive fireworks from the nostrils, a rough clearing of the throat issued a volcanic flow that cascaded over the grass and into the lake. Most spectacular of all, a shrill whistle let loose a volley of flame rings that grew as large as hula hoops.

“Check this out,” he told her, calling Phoebe at the top of his lungs. “Once in a while, like when you’re off at summer camp, your mother and I bring the dog up here during crescent moons and teach her tricks.”

Phoebe came racing like a dark dart around the opposite end of the house from where she had disappeared. The moment she saw Jonathan rear up on his hind legs, she stopped about twenty yards away and crouched low in anticipation.

“Phoebe—
circus
!”

The dog stood up. Jonathan let out a short whistle, and a ring of fire ripped out of his mouth. With no steps at all, the dog leapt through the blazing hoop as it roared over her position, did a half-twist in the air, and then landed brilliantly on all fours.

Jennifer burst out laughing. Phoebe raced to a point about twenty yards from her and crouched down as before, obviously expecting Jennifer to do the same.

The three of them played like this for a while. The longer the whistle, the greater the number of hoops Phoebe had to jump through. She could manage up to three, but singed her tail if asked to do more than that.

After an hour or so, Jennifer felt in good enough spirits that she nodded when her father suggested they begin flying lessons.

“This isn’t going to be like fire-breathing,” he warned her. “That comes as naturally to a dragon as, well, breathing. But flying won’t come any easier than walking did when you were a toddler. You fell down. A lot. Now you’ll be higher up.”

“Great.” Jennifer sighed.

“Don’t worry too much. A dragon’s bones and sinews are incredibly resilient. You won’t break or twist a thing. Just your ego, once or twice. Plus, we have this!”

He grabbed a bar of the trampoline with a hind claw and shoved off the ground with the other. “Meet me out by the wildflower fields. Trees and water make for a poor first flight.” Weaving his way through the elms and pines, he disappeared.

Jennifer trudged her way on all four claws back down the gravel driveway. It was at least a half mile to the wild-flower fields. By the time she got there, her throat was dusty and her belly sore from all the scratching and pulling. She was more than ready to learn how to get her carcass off the ground.

Jonathan was bouncing on the trampoline, humming a jaunty tune with smoke smoldering from his nostrils. “A beautiful day to spend out in the sunshine!” he called out. “And a good day to get up in the air, too. Come over here, ace. I’ll give you a hand up…”

He stepped off as she sought her balance in the rubbery center. If walking on four legs was difficult, navigating a bouncy, slippery material was even worse. Up and down Jennifer jarred, a jumble of wings and horns. It was impossible to stop. She decided to wait out the embarrassment on her butt, lolling up and down miserably. Her previous enthusiasm drained away.

“Perk up, camper! You’re learning something amazing.”

“What, hopping on my ass?”

Her father snorted with laughter, letting a cloud of steam out from between his teeth. Jennifer almost smiled back, though a part of her was determined to stay grumpy. “All right, what do I do?”

“We’ll start off with simple bouncing, straight up and down. Just like everyone does. Sitting down is fine, the idea is to get the feel for liftoff.”

This was easy enough, since the trampoline hadn’t really stopped jouncing her yet. She pushed off a bit harder to get up in the air, and before long she established a slow, steady rhythm.

“Good. Now, spread your wings on each up, and fold them on each down…”

This was harder, because her wings caught the south wind when unfolded, which moved her slightly out of position each trip into the air. Jennifer found herself adjusting her wings each time, to try and catch the wind different ways.

“Great! You’re figuring out how the wind and your wings interact. There are four forces at work—gravity, lift, thrust, and drag. Your wings represent an incredible evolutionary leap that minimizes drag while allowing…”

“Dad.”

“Yes?”

“If you want to minimize drag, you could talk less.”

Jennifer let her hind legs down so that she was standing and jumping each time. Wings out, wings in, wings out, wings in… Suddenly, Jennifer kicked hard off the trampoline and waved her wings frantically. On the third beat, her wings caught wind, and she sailed at least thirty feet into the air.

“Nice!” she heard her father call. “Oh, keep flapping, or you’ll come back down too fast.”

She got the message right away as her bulk began to drop. Beating her wings again, she found another gust of air to support her weight, and she tilted her wings to take advantage of it. Now she was more than fifty feet up off the ground. The air was cooler up here. With wild eyes she took in the entirety of Grandpa Crawford’s farm. There were the hives to the south, and the wall beyond, and if she turned a bit she could see the sheep scattering at the sight of her silhouette in the sky, and beyond them the trees, and the house, and the lake…

“KEEP FLAPPING OR YOU’LL LOSE LIFT!” Her father’s voice right next to her startled her, and she flinched into an awkward shape. She immediately dropped ten feet.

“Cripes, Dad!” She regained composure and glared up at his hovering form. Unsolicited lectures on the ground were merely boring. At this altitude, they were dangerous!

After a few minutes of flapping, she began to get me hang of gaining and losing altitude. Her wings were getting tired, though, and she looked down at the ground with both longing and fear.

He seemed to read her mind. “As any pilot will tell you,” he called out, “landing is easy. Landing
well
is hard. Aim for the trampoline again, and try to lose altitude a few feet at a time.”

As she began her descent, she found relaxing and re-stretching her wings even harder than flapping them continually. It was like dropping bit by bit in a shaky helicopter, and her stomach turned once or twice after particularly steep pitches.

Looking down, she could see the trampoline far below, almost between her hind claws. She adjusted a bit to the left and headed for the center.

The heavy whistling in the trees to the north should have warned her what was coming, but neither Jennifer nor her father noticed the sudden crosswind until too late. She felt it like a shove in the back. In a split second she lost her shape and balance, and found herself diving feet first at a sharp angle to the ground. The wildflowers rushed up to greet her.

“
Tilt your wings
!” she heard her father cry.

She leaned forward in a panic and drew even with the ground, belly skimming the tips of the taller sunflowers and reedy grasses. It was like her first experience with a bicycle as a child—she was moving fast, her muscles were frozen, and she had no idea how to stop.

She passed out of the wildflower fields and into the bee fields, closer and closer to the ground. Dropping a leg to try to slow herself down was unthinkable; Jennifer had visions of tripping at thirty miles per hour and breaking her neck in the subsequent tumble. The best she could hope for was a glider landing on her belly. The grass looked soft…