The Dragon in the Sea
Read The Dragon in the Sea Online
Authors: Kate Klimo
BOOK 1
THE DRAGON IN THE SOCK DRAWER
BOOK 2
THE DRAGON IN THE DRIVEWAY
BOOK 3
THE DRAGON IN THE LIBRARY
BOOK 4
THE DRAGON IN THE VOLCANO
BOOK 5
THE DRAGON IN THE SEA
This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2012 by Kate Klimo
Jacket and interior illustrations copyright © 2012 by John Shroades
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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For more Dragon Keepers fun, go to
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Klimo, Kate.
The dragon in the sea / by Kate Klimo. — 1st ed.
p. cm. — (Dragon keepers; #5)
Summary: Jesse and Daisy and their dragon friend, Emmy, try to recover a Thunder Egg from merpeople who stole it from Daisy near the Inn of the Barking Seal, where the cousins are visiting their grandmother Polly.
eISBN: 978-0-307-97437-2
[1. Dragons—Fiction. 2. Eggs—Fiction. 3. Mermaids—Fiction. 4. Mermen—Fiction. 5. Magic—Fiction. 6. Cousins—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.K67896Dqs 2012 [Fic]—dc23 2011030768
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v3.1
For Justine
,
in memory of magical Sea Cliff summers
Dear Reader
,
I hope you enjoy reading about Jesse and Daisy’s latest magical adventure with their dragon, Emmy. As you read this book, you will come across something new that looks like this:
.
This is a dragon footprint, otherwise known as a dragon footnote. The dragon footnote lets you know that you will find out more about the word or words it marks when you visit my wonderful new website,
thedragonkeepers.com
. It has maps and pictures and glossaries of characters, places, and terms.… In short, it’s a complete guide to the wonderful, magical world of the Dragon Keepers. Please visit soon!
Yours truly
,
Kate Klimo
CHAPTER
O
NE
ZOMBIE FOG
Dear Mom and Dad, Even though our driver got lost twice, we still made it to the Inn of the Barking Seal in time for lunch—and guess what? Those seals are still barking! There were two last-minute cancellations,
so it looks like Daisy and I are going to be the only guests. What with a 26-pound turkey, we’d better make room for lots of turkey and sausage-stuffing sandwiches. Aunt Maggie and Uncle Joe are on their way to Boston to help out with the twins. This is Daisy’s first time away from her parents for Thanksgiving, just like it’s my first time away from you, so I guess, for once, we’re both in the same boat. She is going to email them later on tonight if this computer holds out. It’s practically an antique! Just in case, Mom, if you’re online with Aunt Maggie, tell her Daisy misses her a boatload. And, oh, by the way, I miss you guys, too.
What Jesse
didn’t
say was that he and Daisy missed Emmy right now, even more than they missed their parents. Emmy was their six-month-old dragon, who was now as big as two elephants combined. Emmy had been invited by her friends in the Fiery Realm to attend a royal runehing as the guest of honor of the Grand Beacons. She was so excited, her Keepers didn’t have the heart to say no.
As Jesse was thinking about this, the computer started making a crackling noise. He pressed SEND and turned the computer off before it exploded.
Then he went looking for his cousin. Finding someone in his grandmother’s bed-and-breakfast was no mean feat.
A big, gray-shingled house on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, it had been built by a whaling captain in the 1860s and had since been added on to by each of its owners. It sprawled along the cliff like a train that had toppled off the track. The locomotive was the Salon, where the computer sat on a captain’s desk near a sandstone fireplace. Next came the kitchen and the dining room, or the Galley and the Mess Hall, respectively, if their grandmother was giving the tour. Then, one after another, came the seven staterooms with three parlors—Red, Yellow, and Blue—tucked in here and there. Jesse came across his grandmother in the Red Parlor.
The same grandmother who regularly sent them socks in the mail, this was Aunt Maggie and Jesse’s mother’s mom. Jesse and Daisy weren’t allowed to call her Grandma or Granny or Nana or any of the other names most kids called their grandmothers. It was “just plain Polly, thank you very much.”
Daisy wanted to be just like Polly when she grew up. Polly was tall and lean, and her long gray hair was always in a braid that hung down her back like a mooring rope. She wore red wooden clogs, men’s plaid shirts, and corduroy trousers. She had a
way of nailing you with her sharp black eyes that made you believe she was expecting great things from you and you had better deliver. She never said typical grandmotherly things like, “My, how big you’ve grown,” or “Give us a kiss,” or “When I was a girl …” In fact, you never knew
what
she was going to say.
“Hey, Polly,” Jesse said. “You might need to break down and buy a new computer.”
Polly looked up from her crossword puzzle and grunted. “What for? I need a new computer like a flounder needs a unicycle.”
Jesse laughed. “Have you seen Daisy?” he asked.
“Nope, but when you track her down, why don’t you two hike to the beach and say ahoy there to the new neighbors?”
“Neighbors?” As far as Jesse knew, Polly’s was the only house within miles.
“The Driftwoods,” Polly said. “Bill and Mitzi. They’ve built a shack about six feet above the high-tide line, due south down the beach a spell. They’ve got kids, too, a boy and a girl about your age. Coral and Reef.”
“Coral and Reef?” Jesse repeated. “They sound like hippies.”
“Hippie beach bums, the best kind,” said Polly, returning to her puzzle. “Only kind that could survive on
that
beach. Your cousin’s probably in the Fishbowl with her nose in a book.”
The Fishbowl, the caboose of the house, was where the kids slept. It had four bunk beds and overlooked the garden on the edge of the cliff. The hallway to the Fishbowl veered this way and that, went up two steps and down three, up five and down two. It listed, sometimes to the port, sometimes to the starboard. As he lurched along, Jesse passed old prints with captions like “Thar she blows!” and “Perils asea” and “Rounding the Horn of Africa.”
Jesse thought Polly could open a nautical museum if she wanted to. Their grandfather, Zeke, had been “sewn into his hammock” before the cousins were born, but both Jesse and Daisy felt they knew him from his house and his stuff. A merchant seaman, Zeke had brought back treasures from his voyages around the world: Maori war clubs made from sawfish blades, Aleut harpoons, antique scrimshaw carved from the teeth of blue whales, and lots of bright work, shiny brass fittings like compasses and portholes and hinges and plaques salvaged from old vessels. There were model ships
everywhere: ships in bottles, ships hanging from the overhead beams, and ships on every mantelpiece.
