Rise of the Poison Moon (14 page)

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Authors: MaryJanice Davidson

Tags: #Magic, #Fantasy fiction, #Dragons, #General, #Fiction, #Fantasy, #Spiders, #Shapeshifting, #Epic, #Good and evil

BOOK: Rise of the Poison Moon
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Not anything she could measure, in any case.
CHAPTER 21
Jennifer
Jennifer was coming off shift on the roof when Susan and Gautierre came back from their full-town patrol. She gracefully slipped off his back as he hit the pavement.
“Jenn, the police station! It’s under attack!”
“Skip?”
Susan nodded.
“Are they evacuating?”
Her friend could only shrug. The terror on her face was all Jennifer needed.
In a split second she was in the air on blue wings, Gautierre close behind her. They were barely over the treetops when they saw the explosion.
“Cripes!” This blast was fiercer and louder than the one at city hall.
He’s getting better at this. The bugs are getting nastier.
Chunks of the building a full mile away landed on the houses below their wings, and they could sense the stench of the green plume that rose from the crater.
“Look for survivors!” she ordered Gautierre.
They found thirteen wounded over the next half hour, with several clearly dead and many dozens more missing. The two of them began turning over rubble and finding more. At first they were the only two who could withstand the poisonous fumes. Then a fire truck arrived and washed most of the reek away, and others could join in.
The ambulances—some real, some makeshift—came quickly and whisked the wounded away to the hospital. Gautierre and she kept at it, still in dragon form, with medics and police officers and townspeople at their side. They found another wounded person, then another.
“Keep digging!” Jennifer ordered them. And they obeyed.
Heavy equipment arrived—there was only one backhoe within the dome, but there were several jackhammers and quite a few trucks to carry the rubble away. In their stronger dragon shapes, Gautierre and she helped them move it all. They unearthed fewer survivors, and more corpses.
Scanning the ruined site after an hour, it occurred to her they might come across Hank Blacktooth. No one had seen him since the explosion.
Did she want him dead, or alive?
Does it matter? He’ll die soon enough, the day Skip wants to send a swarm for him and only him. Like he sent one for Dad. What can I do to stop it? Nothing. Xavier can search all he likes—within a month, we could all be dead.
She fought back tears of despair as her wing claws dug furiously. They cut open on sharp edges of rock and steel, and she kept digging through the pain. Voices called out to her, and she kept digging.
Finally, Gautierre put a wing on her and turned her around. “Jennifer! The police are getting a radio call—it’s your mother.”
Scrambling out of her pit, she flipped to human and grabbed the radio from a nearby officer. With a double take, she realized it was Chief Whittle—
Carrot Helmet?
—who had a look of concern on her face. She pressed the radio button. “Mom?”
“Honey. Our spotters think another one’s coming.”
“Where?”
“The hospital.”
Jennifer’s blood froze. “Mom. Get the fuck out of there.”
“We’re evacuating. Can you get here? I might need to get in the air, if . . .”
“Sixty seconds.” She handed the radio back to the young chief. “I’m going to leave my friend here to help you. You’re going to protect him.”
“No one’s going to touch him, Ms. Scales. You have my word. He’s found eighteen trapped survivors and digs faster than the backhoe. Thirty different people have come up to me asking his name, so they can thank him personally.”
“Gautierre Longtail.”
“I’ll pass that along.”
“Thanks.”
She scrambled into the sky, pressing her wings hard, coming quickly within sight of the hospital and the rolling fields beyond. Her mother was waiting in the parking lot, with several staff bunched around her.
Useless,
Jennifer thought tenderly.
They can’t protect her. All they can do is get ash blown on them.
She landed next to them and looked where they were pointing.
“Smaller,” Jennifer muttered.
“Big enough,” Elizabeth guessed. It was the size of a large dragon—in fact, it held a shape very much like one, trailing wisps as it floated over the vegetation, as if a dragon were melting overhead.
“Turning!” the spotter called out from the roof. “Coming right for us!”
A beaststalker whom Jennifer recognized from the city council—Sarah Sera—tugged at Elizabeth’s sleeve. “You or your daughter will be the target. You have to get out of here. You have to get out of here at least five minutes ago.”
Elizabeth exhaled. “I don’t want to leave—”
“MOM.” Jennifer was already spreading her wings. “Get on board.”
“Another one!” called out a different spotter, pointing a bit farther to the west. “Coming faster!”
Elizabeth turned to Sarah. “Evacuate the hospital.”
“Mom!”
“Use a spread pattern, so it can’t hurt too many at once. If—”
“Get on me
now
!”
“If the building is destroyed, take everyone to Smart Bean Foods. Jennifer and I will try to meet you—ack!”
Snarling, Jennifer had grabbed her mother’s coat with her teeth and dragged her into the air.
The moment her hind claws left the parking lot, the first shadow changed course to intercept. It was only a few seconds before Jennifer spotted the second one—this one in the shape of a spider, and different from the first in color as well. In fact, Jennifer wasn’t sure she could really even call it a shadow . . .
“Honey. I’m slipping out of my jacket. If you could—gah!”
Jennifer snapped her head around quickly enough to deposit her mother on her back. She felt the woman’s fingernails embed themselves in her scales.
“That wasn’t funny, kid.”
“Get on board when I ask, next time. What do you think of these two swarms? They look different from what Skip has sent before.”
Elizabeth peered downward. “They’re both after us, each in a different shape. The dragon is probably meant for me, the spider for you.”
“Aw, that’s sweet. I’d hate to have to share. I suppose we should be glad he’s not going after the hospital. At least they won’t have to evacuate.”
“It’s a matter of time. Once you and I are gone, Skip’s job gets considerably easier.”
“Cheery thought. Perhaps we could try to stay alive? For funsies?”
“Head west.”
“Over them?”
“We’ve never seen a swarm jump. I’d rather get out to the farmland on the edge of town. There are fewer people there, so they’ll do less damage.”
“This doesn’t exactly strike me as a survival strategy.”
“How long can you stay in the air?”
Jennifer’s mind went back to a seemingly endless flight over the seas of Crescent Valley. It was stressful and kind of awful at the time, but now it seemed like a vacation. “At least eight hours. Haven’t really ever tried to push it beyond that.”
“We have eight hours to come up with a plan, then.”
“No problem,” Jennifer lied through sharp teeth.
They did not need eight hours. As they crossed over the first shadow, it rose to meet them, and Jennifer at once felt alarm, relief, and irritation.
“Evangelina!”
The shape did not respond aloud, but coalesced into a three-dimensional winged form that cruised by their left flank, momentarily blotting out the sun before it circled back to hover over its companion shape.
Sister. Sister-mother.
“Do you think she and Skip—”
“Friends? Unlikely, given what I saw from her the last time she ran into him.”
“Good news, then. And the second one must be Dianna Wilson.”
“Pretty odd time to show up.”
“Not odd at all. Your father was married to Dianna once, and Evangelina is their daughter.”
“So they’re here because he’s dead? What, they want to bring a pot roast to the after-funeral party?”
“I doubt that.”
Jennifer looked suspiciously at the newcomer’s tattered black wings, six spindly legs, viciously spiked tail, and shrouded facial features. “Okay, so? He’s dead, they’re here? How does that make sense?”
“Calm down, honey. We can ask them. If they were going to attack, they would have done it by now. Right?”
“HEY.” Jennifer made a beeline for her half-sister. “MY MOTHER AND I WANT TO KNOW WHAT THE HELL YOU’RE DOING HERE.”
No time, sister. Another swarm is coming.
“What, are you—is this draw-a-scribble-on-our-home-town day, or some shit?”
How can Skip draw this quickly? It doesn’t matter.
“Where is it?”
Mother feels it coming from the bridge. Heading this way.
“Coming for the hospital.”
“Evacuate!” Elizabeth called out to the people below. “Get clear of the building!”
Not necessary. Mother and I will handle this.
 
Evangelina darted off toward the bridge, descending farther and farther until Jennifer was sure she was going to crash. They followed her, as did the spider shadow they now knew to be Dianna Wilson.
Instead of crashing, Evangelina’s dragon shape soaked into the surfaces of the trees and structures, becoming a shadow again without losing any speed.
Jennifer saw the oncoming swarm now, a jumbled mess of the same sorts of creatures that had taken away her father, destroyed city hall, and buried townspeople at the police station.
“It’s huge—at least triple what he’s sent before.”
“That can only be for the hospital,” her mother deduced.
“How does he do it—how does he make so many, so quickly?”
“The better question is, how are Evangelina and Dianna going to—oh, my.”
The hunger never ends it never ends it never ends
Evangelina accelerated toward a swarm that looked ready to consume her—until her shadow swiftly expanded, covering an area ten times that of the swarm. Like a predator fish that had teased its prey with a deceptively small lure, Evangelina opened its maw and consumed the entire swarm whole, seeming to swallow a gulp of the Mississippi River as she did so.
CHAPTER 22
Andi
Andi watched in shock as the shadow of Evangelina Scales—she recognized her right away—dominated the Mississippi River and swept their sorcery out of existence. It was terrifying and beautiful, like the way Skip would sometimes grab her jaw and squeeze while loving her. She felt horribly exposed all of a sudden.
The feeling increased tenfold when she saw the spidery shape of Dianna Wilson flank her daughter. This shadow glowed jade, with each bright eye a different color. All eight were looking right up the cliffs at them, as if they had always known the two of them would be there.
“Mom!” Skip cried out. “MOM?!?!”
Andi grabbed his shoulder. “Skip. Time to go. We can’t win this fight.”
“Fight? I don’t get it. Why is my mom fighting me?”
“Um, maybe because you killed the first love of her life.”
“
She
left
him
.”
“Yes, she left him. Alive.”
“Oh, this is . . . unbelievable. Unbelievable! MOM!?!?” He called down to the river, where the two new shapes hovered in two-dimensional space. “STAY OUT OF THIS! YOU LEFT, REMEMBER? YOU LEFT! LEAVE AGAIN!”
“Skip, we—”
“Yes, I know!” He slapped her hand away. “Heaven forbid anyone stop the great Dianna Wilson from doing whatever the fuck she wants. Fine, let’s go.”
Incredibly, while Dianna and Evangelina did not pursue them, things actually got worse for Andi and Skip upon their return to the Cliffside.
Six arachnids were waiting for them in the dining area.
“Dear nephew,” said one of them, a baboon spider. “You have been failing. The time has come to accept the guidance of your betters.”
“Fucking Aunt Tavia,” Skip muttered, throwing up his hands. “I hope she died painfully.”
CHAPTER 23
Jennifer
They were in the parking lot—everyone from the hospital Jennifer realized, except for a skeleton crew that was taking evacuated patients back inside—when Evangelina and Dianna returned.

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