The Silver Moon Elm (29 page)

Bobbie’s clothes were still smoking. “Make it stop!” she shrieked. “Please! It burns! Please! I’ll do anything. Just make it stop, make it stop!”

Let her burn
.

“What?”

They might escape the storage room. Besides, we ruined the door. Easier to kill them
.

“Jennifer!” Xavier’s reptilian features were full of pain and worry—not for Bobbie or Abigail, she realized, but for her. “Don’t do this! Don’t lose yourself! That’s not our way.”

Evangelina picked up Abigail with a single claw, threw her against the wall, and then reverted back to human form. Her grating voice was full of disdain. “Your way, old man? What exactly is your way?”

“Whatever it is,” Jennifer guessed, “it hasn’t done much good these past fifty or sixty years.” She took a deep breath.
Can I do this
? “Evangelina’s right, Xavier. We have to kill them.”

“Please don’t,” came a new voice. “You said you wouldn’t.”

Andi was standing on the stairs, wearing shorts and a sweatshirt and holding a small gym bag. The small girl was biting her lip and examining Jennifer’s dragon form.

“Are you going to kill anyone?” she had asked.

Jennifer had certainly toyed with murder since she became a dragon. She had finished off an already dying Otto Saltin, and beaten down Evangelina to the point where the spirit of Crawford Scales could carry her away. But had she ever done anything like this before? Ever knocked a wounded girl down as she was running away and let her burn to death?

“I can help them,” Andi offered. She took a step down. “I can heal them. It’s what I do, remember?”

Jennifer surveyed the scene. Bobbie burnt, Anne and Amy unconscious, Abigail in scorpion shape with a claw missing and a hole through her abdomen.

Andi took another step down. “I can keep them alive, for a while. Until help comes. That’s all I want to do. Whatever you came to do, I’m not going to stop you.”

“I don’t trust her,” Evangelina snapped. She grew back into her shadowy form. “I say we kill her, too, and finish the others off.”

But seeing Andi again had awakened something in Jennifer: The memory of another girl in pain, who was almost a friend. Maybe still is.

She gently held her sister back. “Evangelina, please. Let’s stop here, and go.”

“You want me to show mercy.”

“Like you showed my mother. Remember?”

“I remember.” Evangelina looked at Andi. The quiet girl was already pulling bandages and other supplies out of her gym bag to tend to Abigail, who had shifted back into the form of an armless human. When the black beast spoke again, it was with deep anxiety. “I can’t help it, sister. I’m hungry.”

“Pardon?”

“Hungry. Being where I was, where our grandfather still is, I never wanted for anything. I was never hungry like I had been before. I didn’t need to feed on anything, or anyone. But now that I’m back here…”

“I just need you for a little longer, Evangelina. Then you can go back to the crescent moon, and never be hungry again.”

Evangelina slipped away from Jennifer’s grip and took a step toward Anne’s unconscious body. “Why not enjoy ourselves while we’re here?! It’s not like any of these people will know or care what happened, once our job is done. Half of them won’t even exist anymore.”

“You know that’s not the point. Andi deserves the chance to try to save them.”

“How do we know she won’t raise the alarm?”

“Hey.” Andi interrupted them with a look full of pride and anger. “If I had wanted to raise the alarm, I would have done it while you were fighting. Jennifer said she was my friend, and that maybe we could help each other.”

“That’s right, Andi. I said that. And I meant it.”

Sizing Jennifer up much as she had while bandaging her in a locker room days ago, Andi finally reached into her gym bag again and pulled out two shining objects. Jennifer gasped as they came skidding harmlessly across the floor at her.

“Bobbie gave me those, after you left. She said she didn’t want to get caught with them.” She gave Bobbie’s scarred body a bitter glance.

Jennifer shifted back into a girl and picked up the two blades—her two blades, the metal hilts sticking out of their strapped sheaths. How they shone in the faint light from beyond the stairs! She squeezed the handles and felt herself grow a foot taller.
We’re going to win
.

“Do you need any help here?” she asked Andi.

Andi gave her an incredulous look that said it all:
Haven’t you done enough
?

“Right. I’m sorry, Andi. I know they’re your friends. I hope you can help them. We’ll—I’ll—” Never see you again? Not if all goes well. “Take care of yourself.”

They left the school the same way they had entered, Xavier and Evangelina in their larger shapes and Jennifer still feeling the thrill of holding her daggers in human hands. Even in the cold November snow with nothing but a flowered berry nightgown on, she felt invincible.

Staying low, they worked their way around the northwest corner of the school. The observatory was off the northeast corner, which meant they would have to cross at least two hundred yards of open ground, with no cover and the tall school wall to their back, to get to their target.

And just where is the entrance to this thing? Jennifer wondered as they moved. She tried to remember if it had doors anywhere. Yes, she thought she remembered a set of double doors on the west side. Wherever they are, as long as we don’t need to teleport in, we’ll be fine.

As it turned out, there was a lovely pair of doors right where she expected them: in the center of the west side, where anyone could walk in. Of course, they would first have to make it past the six dozen giant, stark spiders ranging from desert tarantulas to silver argiopes who stood guard on the field north of the high school. The silent snowflakes gently fell upon their bloated bodies and stuck to their wiry leg hairs.

One of them—maybe all of them—spotted Xavier’s golden wings the moment they came around the corner, and the alarm went up.

“Too many!” Xavier shouted.

“We can take them,” Evangelina insisted. The cloud around her body extended, and Jennifer felt her sister’s psyche brace for combat.

“Evangelina, are you sure we—”

DOWN
.

The air buckled around them, and a shock wave burst over the field. It melted the snow and scattered a tangle of spindly legs. Spiders tumbled over each other and into the latticework of steel beams surrounding the observatory. Jennifer leapt forward, seeking advantage in this opportunity her sister had given them.

Before she could engage, another shriek went up, and another two dozen spiders came marching around the edges of the observatory.

“We can’t take them all!” Xavier called out.

As the first group of spiders recovered, the trees far off to the northeast began to rustle with movement. More of them, Jennifer guessed.

Jennifer shifted into dragon form, clinging to the precious cooler with a hindclaw. She let a jet of flame escape her mouth to keep the advancing swarm back. But it was half-hearted—the memory of what she almost did to Bobbie haunted her—and before long she saw even more dark legs scrambling to bolster the ranks that faced them.

“We need to get out of here!” Xavier took to the air. Evangelina cursed and followed him.

Jennifer took off after Xavier and Evangelina.
Andi can’t have told them. They were already in position. They knew before we even got here
!

The spiders pursued them for a short while, with some of the jumpers taking a shot at them before the dragons were at too high an altitude to track. The arachnids’ screams followed them even as they punched through the clouds far above the borders of Pinegrove.

Before it had even begun, the assault on the Quadrivium was over.

“I’ve seen horrible things in my lifetime,” Xavier spat as they soared out of Pinegrove and back toward the cabin. “Awful, terrible things. But I’m not sure that didn’t top them all, Jennifer Scales.”

“That’s not fair! We had to retreat. You saw how many—”

“I don’t mean our retreat,” he snapped. “I mean you and your sister’s actions in the school hallway, before that doctor friend of yours put some sense in your brain.”

“What do you—How can that—That was nothing!” Jennifer protested. “You should see what my sister used to do to people.”

He didn’t answer. Jennifer gently chewed her forked tongue between sharp teeth, and her tail twitched as she swerved a bit. “I told Andi I was sorry. I couldn’t help myself, for a while. I was angry.”

“Of course you were. And I’m angry, too—at what they did to all of us, including your father and grandfather. But you won’t ever see me stab one of them in the back, or torture them for fun. It’s beneath me. It’s beneath you, too.”

It’s not beneath me
.

This Evangelina offered from a comfortable distance behind them both.

“No, that appears to be right at your altitude, hot stuff,” Xavier spat. “But maybe you’ll learn better before the end.”

They spent the next hour or so in relative quiet, letting the stars above hold a twinkling conversation. It wasn’t until they were a few miles from the cabin that Xavier spoke up again. He veered in close to her so he didn’t have to shout.

“Jennifer, I regret snapping at you.”

“It’s okay. I accept your apology.” Smiling warmly at him, she wondered if the Xavier Longtail in the other universe ever apologized to anyone.

“I’m offering regrets, Jennifer. Not an apology.”

Her warm feelings vanished. “I can’t wait to hear you split hairs over the difference.”

“Jennifer, I can remember what we were like before the trouble started. Before the rout at Alexandria, before they crushed us at Eveningstar, before they entered Crescent Valley and pushed us to the brink of extinction. We weren’t perfect, but we had pride in who we were. We thought ourselves better than our enemies.

“But as our numbers dwindled, we became more desperate. More and more of us began to lash out, to do things no dragon had ever done before. Some even reveled in embracing the beast within. My brother, Charles, and I argued against them, but the years wore us down. Then he died, of course.”

“How did he die?” Jennifer asked, holding her breath.

“It was when we barely had a foothold in this world anymore. Charles tried to stop a group of young dragons from firebombing a nuclear power plant near a werachnid town. He tried to explain what could happen, not just to werachnids but to everyone. Instead of listening, they turned on him, accused him of conspiring with the enemy, and killed him. Their plot failed, eventually. But neither their failure, nor his murder, taught them anything.

“After we were pushed off this side altogether, we slid into oblivion. The longer we stayed in Crescent Valley, the worse it got. After decades of getting pushed around this world, and another five years confined on the other side, our worst characters came out. We became as primal and thoughtless as those experiments you saw. Yes, the ones werachnids eventually abandoned, because they were uncontrollable.”

Here he nudged himself closer.

“The worst part, Jennifer, is that we still lost. We gave up everything about ourselves that meant anything at all. And in the end, it did nothing to protect us.”

“You mean you would have won if you had acted differently?”

“I don’t know, Jennifer. I suspect we would have inspired ourselves to last longer, since we would have had more pride in who we were. And maybe we would have even inspired unseen allies to join our cause earlier—like Sonakshi and the lurkers. More to the point, we would have forced the werachnids to fight us, rather than the mindless, bloodthirsty shadows we left behind.”

Jennifer sailed along quietly. She was pretty sure how this related to what had just happened at Pinegrove High, but she didn’t want to admit it to herself.

Xavier closed the loop for her. “Jennifer, when I met you just a few days ago, you weren’t just the first dragon I’d seen in more than twenty years. You were a dragon…who was still a dragon. Don’t let her”—he jerked his head back—“change that. Don’t let her change you. Once you set the world straight, it will need you the way you are.”

The air left her wings.
Once I set the world straight
? “As if we can possibly succeed now.”

“I know it looks bad,” he told her, “but I’ve seen worse. The three of us will just need to regroup, is all. Come up with a new plan.”

“We’re running out of time. Seraphina can’t keep holding off whatever’s attacking her. Crescent Valley probably emptied everything it had on her.”

“We’ll make it,” he promised her. “Together, we’ll finish what we started.” And with that, he split off from her and began his descent toward the cabin.

Had it not been for the tiny whistling sound, Jennifer wouldn’t have already been looking down at Xavier when he grunted. She would have missed his wing spasm, the way his body suddenly jerked and his quick and uncontrolled spiral toward the ground.

CHAPTER 16
Sunday

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Evangelina and Jennifer dropped immediately to follow Xavier’s body. They lost him for a moment through the treetops, but within a minute they found him again.

He was on his back in the brush, splayed out like a giant black and gold butterfly on top of a cluster of raspberry bushes. The cold, snowless wind pushed the vegetation and the body on top of it back and forth. Had there not been a thin, black, carbon-aluminum arrow sticking out of his heart, Jennifer would have thought he was relaxing. As they got closer, Jennifer heard him muttering.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid…” He spoke between shallow breaths, and his glazed eyes tried to focus on her. “I flew too low, too early, even for this side of the lake. I should never have relaxed my guard.”

“Maybe we can do something,” she offered frantically. She looked over at Evangelina. “What if we pull the arrow out?”

“Jennifer Scales.” Xavier smiled. “I’m glad we found each other. Even if you were a bit difficult, and foolish…”