Phoenix (20 page)

Girls do that, right?

Yes, I know, it’s a stretch. But as long as there’s any chance at all, I’ve got to make sure. I can’t leave without asking. “Nia?”

“Hmm?” She’s been peering down the mountainside, monitoring the approaching yagi, but she glances back at me.

“Choose.”

“What?”

“Me or Ram. Choose your groom.”

“I—” Nia starts to shake her head, then glances down at the yagi, which are a good two-thirds of the way up the mountain now.

I can see the battle in her eyes. She purposely hasn’t chosen either of us. There’s a reason for that. And she doesn’t want to choose now.

She looks at me, and the struggle on her face is cut through with a request for understanding. “I don’t want to hurt you, Felix. You’re the first dragon I ever met. When I saw you, I saw everything I’d hoped for, everything I’d journeyed to find and given up on ever finding. I thought I saw my future.” She swallows, pain and joy vying for primacy in her eyes. “And then I saw Ram.”

I nod. It’s the slow nod, the one that dips but doesn’t lift up right away, the one that acknowledges deference, submission.

The one that says Ram won.

Which I’ve known in my heart for a long time, but I had to be sure. Now there’s only one thing left to do.

Choose the fire.

I lift my head again. Ram has lowered his sword. He’s had the decency not to celebrate his victory too openly, but I’m not looking at him.

I’m looking at Nia. I need to tell her all she meant to me, and how I feel about her.

Nia gives me this pleading look with her eyes which, for all the very clear facial dragon communication I’ve ever seen, is the clearest and loudest and most obvious. Her eyes are welling up with something that says she knows exactly what I’m about to say, and the set of her lips begs me not to say it, because she can’t return it, and wouldn’t it be easier on everyone involved if we just skipped this part and pretended like I don’t love her and want to marry her, since she has no intention of loving and marrying me?

But I didn’t come to this mountain to walk away without saying what I’ve been wanting to say from the moment I first saw her streak like a falling star through the sky.

I need to tell her I love her.

Nia’s lips tremble slightly, and the warnings in her eyes brim over.

“Nia?”

She shakes her head. She shakes her head no.

I open my mouth. This is the part where I’m supposed to declare my love. This is where the happy-ever-after starts.

But not for me and Nia.

I take a deep breath. “You know.”

Her eyes get a little rounder, a little less of a warning and more of an uncertainty, and without moving my eyes from hers I take two steps toward the lip of the volcano. “You know,” I repeat, with one last look at her. And then I turn to my brother and meet his eyes. “Love her,” I tell him in my sternest voice, which let’s face it, isn’t nearly as stern as Ram’s voice. “Because I’m doing this for you.”

Then I step over the edge and fall.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The lava has been swelling upward, bubbling higher, so I don’t have far to fall before I hit the hot magma. I have just enough time to turn into a dragon before I reach the surface of the molten rock.

But the heat is rising so fiercely here, more than steam and smoke idling gently above a fire, but super-pressurized hot gases spewing upward, so they catch my open wings and I don’t actually hit the lava, just hover above the molten rock, amidst the flames as I spin a slow circle, searching the sides of the volcano, looking for any sign of a dragon in this place.

None.

No hoarded treasure, no bones or shells to mark that meals have been eaten by a creature that requires the kind of sheer volume of calories dragons require.

No sign of life at all.

“Felix!”

I hear my name screamed above me. It sounds so far away, what with the gases spewing past me, pushing back sound. I can’t tell if it’s Ram’s voice or Nia’s or both together.

As I raise my face upward to look, I realize a number of things at once. One is that I started weeping, probably right around the time I tried to tell Nia I’d always love her. Fat tears have been welling up in my eyes ever since, and in spite of the superheated air around me, the tears have pooled on my face and now start to overflow down my cheeks toward my chin.

But at the same time, I watch in horror as Ram and Nia plunge over the side of the volcano.

What are they doing? What were they thinking? I didn’t plunge into a live volcano just so they could jump in after me. The only reason I jumped in at all was to search for signs of a dragon.

I’ve searched.

I’ve found nothing.

There’s no reason for them to join me.

But then I see it—half-obscured by the dragons swooping toward me.

The yagi have reached the top of the volcano. Sunlight glints off their domed heads as they peer down at us, antennae twitching, almost as though they’re transmitting information and receiving orders from Eudora’s command center deep in Siberia. Which might very well be exactly what they’re doing.

Ram and Nia swoop toward me, one from either side. They must have realized, once I jumped in and didn’t die, that’s it’s safer here, inside the volcano, than out there surrounded by yagi.

Their expressions are slightly panicked and maybe a bit upset or startled or something. Ram looks like he wants to scream at me, and, indeed, as he glides past the place where I’m hovering, he throws a blast of fire my way—a fiery burst of chastisement, or anger, or something.

And Nia, as if taking his cue, does the same.

Their heat feels almost cool compared to the heat of the volcano, which is warm even for me. For one disoriented instant I’m just hovering there, floating on the gas waves, getting blasted by cool blue fire. And then the twitching yagi antennae above me go rigid, and the first wave of the mutant creatures rushes off the ledges all around us.

Yagi don’t have wings. In fact, they’re pretty aerodynamic, when you think about it—all smooth with their cockroach exoskeletons. There’s nothing for the intense gases to push against. So unlike the three of us dragons, who are hovering like kites on a steady breeze, the yagi plunge down, down, down.

They hit the lava and sink, submerged completely, which I’m glad for, because they smell so bad under the best of circumstances. This way, at least, they’re encased in molten rock and dissolve below the surface, so their gases don’t escape and poison us.

Even as I look down, watching the yagi hit the lava in a ring all around me, as they plummet straight down from the ledge, one after the other, like a hailstorm of cyborg killers, something else falls.

Something tiny, much closer to me.

It falls slowly, glinting golden in the firelight, and it takes me a moment to realize what it is.

My tears.

They hit the welling lava below me one by one. I watch, entranced. They don’t sink like the yagi plunging through the molten rock in a wide circle all around us.

Rather, they hit the lava with a tiny sizzle, and then bounce back up into the air.

Enchanted, I reach for the first of these as it springs upward toward me. I catch it with the tip of one talon, fully expecting it to shatter into a fine mist, but it only slides evenly down my talon in a slender pierced ball, like a ring.

A gold ring.

Fascinated, I reach for the next of these, and the next. Some puddle in my hands, hot but not searing. Others catch on my talons, pierced like tiny bagels, and then harden there into perfectly smooth, symmetrical rings.

I catch them all—a dozen or more. By that time, my tears have stopped falling. In fact, I no longer feel sad.

Above me, Ram and Nia swoop and scream, shooting fire. I think they’re trying to tell me to fly higher, to get up out of the depths of this volcano.

Not a bad idea, since the yagi continue to fall like rain all around me, sinking into the lava until the level of molten rock begins to rise from the displacement of their sheer numbers. Yagi are about the size of a standard human—not much compared to a volcano whose cone is a hundred feet across. But since there are thousands of them, it’s starting to make a difference.

I give one last, thorough glance around the inside of the volcano. There is still no sign of dragon life other than Ram and Nia flying above me.

And I guess I’m a little relieved. Yes, I’d hoped to find a dragon—wanted nothing more than to find at least one more dragon in this world. But to be honest, I didn’t want to find the kind of dragon who’d fit the description we’d been given—a dragon who would demand human sacrifices, and control his people with threats of death.

Whether any dragon on earth has ever acted that way, I don’t know. We don’t have any proof there wasn’t. But after today’s completed quest, there’s still no evidence there ever was, either.

My work is done here.

I stretch out my wings and rise on the billowing jets of hot air.

Together, the three of us fly up until we’re hovering almost even with the top ledge of the volcano. The yagi continue to fall over the ridge like so many lemmings. I watch them for a few seconds before turning my attention to the solidified tears in my hands.

They’ve turned to gold. Those that were speared by my talons now adorn my fingers like so many plain gold bands. And those I caught in my palm flattened on contact into round disks, forming rudimentary gold coins.

When I glance up again, Nia is flying close, looking at the gold in my hands as I marvel at its sudden appearance.

She tilts her head in question.

I can’t explain. In dragon form, I can’t talk at all. But suddenly I understand. Didn’t Nia say the ancient book about making gold contained the word tears? I’ve shed tears before, even in dragon form, as have the other members of our family. None of those tears ever turned to gold.

Was it the heat of the volcano that did it? Or maybe the nature of the tears themselves, combined with the gases in the air? My tears were particularly heart-wrenched. Does that have anything to do with it? Before I can ponder the question too much, Ram makes a roaring snap and shakes his head in the direction of the falling yagi.

He’s flying higher than I am, higher even than Nia. I beat my wings and join him, high enough above the volcano to see down its sides to the rest of the island.

Of the thousands of yagi that followed us here, well over half, maybe two-thirds to three-quarters, have already plunged into the volcano, including water yagi—they’re slower climbing up the volcano, almost clumsy, but they fall just as surely as their non-aquatic counterparts.

While I might expect them to continue plunging forever, until they’re all gone and Eudora has to make more, those at the lip of the volcano suddenly pause, freezing on the brink instead of throwing themselves over it.

Their antennae twitch as though receiving a message from afar. They’re cyborgs, right? And they transmit information to Eudora. So she must know where they are, and must realize she’s losing contact with them rapidly. If she knows this is an active volcano, then she knows what she’s losing them to, and can logically conclude they’ll continue plunging to their deaths unless she sends them different orders.

Not even Eudora is crazy enough to let them all destroy themselves.

No, she’s cunning and strategic, according to everything I’ve ever heard about her. So maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised when the yagi hesitate for a full minute or two at the lip of the volcano, antennae twitching, and then, with some shuffling that actually knocks a few precariously-perched yagi into the volcano, they turn around and start making their way back down the mountain.

It’s not an elegant process—in the steeper parts, the yagi lose their footing and roll and tumble down in great piles. It’s gratifying, in a way, and I can’t help laughing, partly out of relief, and partly just because it’s funny to see the yagi, with their stern, impassioned faces, falling down and tumbling over one another.

Also because, you know, they’ve been hunting us and trying to kill us for so many days, that to see them bumping about in such an undignified manner makes me feel like justice has somehow been served.

Ram and Nia and I watch until all the yagi have reached the base of the island. Then we make our way back over to the lip of land at the brink of the volcano’s cone, which I plunged from not so many minutes ago. From there, we can see the yagi clearly as they slink away into the ocean, yagi perched on water yagi, and stream away to the north.

Nia is the first to change back into the human. “Is it a trick?” She asks. “Do you think they’re really leaving, or is it a ploy to get us to lower our guard?”

“Did you see their antennae?” I ask. “My guess is, Eudora realized she was losing them, and sent them orders to retreat.”

Ram turns and looks into the volcano. “We finally discovered a way to kill them en masse.”

I turn and look as well. The only sign of the yagi are a few bubbles of yagi stench that rise from the decaying creatures, bursting with flares of molten rock, sending up noxious gases.

“If it was a ploy—if Eudora sends them orders to come after Nia again—now we know what to do. Just find the nearest active volcano, and hover over the opening until they’ve all plunged to their deaths.”

Nia laughs, the sound a mixture of relief and delight. “And if Eudora’s half as smart as I think she is, she’ll know we could easily do that—which means she doesn’t dare set the yagi after me ever again, or she’ll lose even more of them.”

My heart warms. Nia laughed. I made Nia laugh.

She may not be my mate, but it still warms my heart to know I had some part in causing her to make that beautiful, joyous sound.

Nia sighs. “Now what are we going to do?”

For a few seconds, we all look at each other, eyes wide. We’ve been so focused on outrunning the yagi, and reaching the volcano, we haven’t even though about what we’d do afterward—mostly because we never thought we’d ever escape from the yagi.

But we have.

“We could go home,” I realize aloud.