The Story of Owen (16 page)

Owen looked at him, a polite expression on his face. “When you say ‘we,'” he said, “you mean people on the Internet, don't you?”

“Of course I do,” Mr. Carmichael said. “Who else would I talk to about dragons? Everyone in this town is convinced it's the mine, and people spend all their time squabbling over whether the economic gains outweigh the risks.”

“Mr. Carmichael,” Owen said at his most diplomatic, “while I am sure you and your colleagues have given your best efforts to your theories—”

“Please don't patronize me,” Mr. Carmichael said. “I haven't patronized you.”

“He has a point,” I said quietly to Owen. “It might be worth talking about with your dad and your aunts.”

“That's all I ask,” Mr. Carmichael said. “I know what it sounds like, but I promise you that even though we are amateurs, we're at least smart enough to obsess about dragons from the safety of our basements and computer rooms instead of chasing after them in the field.”

“Mr. Carmichael, that might be the smartest thing you've said all evening,” Owen said, a genuine smile on his face.

“Please, call me Archie,” Mr. Carmichael said. It made sense that his daughter played the flute. He was all scales, up and down again and never standing still. “And I'll leave you to your dinner. You can just let Emily know if you want to talk to me again.”

“Thanks for dinner,” I said as he stood up.

“Until next time,” he said, and walked out the door.

Owen shifted into the chair across from me so we could face each other.

“Well?” I said.

“He may have a point,” Owen said slowly. “Not much of a point, but a small one.”

“Lottie is going to laugh at you when you tell her.”

“I was going to let you do it,” he said, grinning. He finished his hamburger and reached for his fries.

“Thanks,” I said. I looked around the seating area. We were the center of attention, and now that Archie wasn't talking anymore, I could hear the hushed whispers again. I sighed.

“What?” Owen said.

“On Monday, there's probably going to be a rumor that we were on a date.”

So far, the Trondheim SS rumor mill had mostly left us alone. Owen was forthright about his academic shortcomings, and it was easily accepted that I was tutoring him.

“Would that be so bad?” Owen asked. He was staring at the nutritional information on his tray liner as though it contained the secrets of the universe.

I had only just settled into my new, slightly more public life, my bizarre new friendship with Sadie and my added responsibilities. The melody finally made sense. I had no desire to move everything around again.

“Yes,” I said.

“You're probably right,” Owen said. He didn't look disappointed, and I let out a breath I didn't realize I'd been holding. He risked a look over his shoulder and the whispering intensified.

“At least they didn't see us sitting alone in my car in a dark parking lot overlooking Lake Huron from the scenic outcropping by the lighthouse,” I said, grinning.

“If they had, I could have drawn a knife on them,” Owen pointed out.

“I'm not sure that would do anything to lessen the rumors,” I said.

“If it had been a journalist or something, we would have been in trouble,” Owen said. “Aunt Lottie would kill me.”

“And here I thought all you had to worry about was high school girls,” I said. “Though, as a group, they are pretty determined.”

“I've noticed,” Owen said.

It wasn't until I'd dropped him off and got all the way home that I thought to wonder if it was actually Sadie he'd been talking about.

For two weeks, Lottie ignored us every time we tried to mention Archie Carmichael or his theories that there was a new dragon hatching ground close to Saltrock that no one knew about. I didn't really blame her. The government kept a fairly close watch on things like that, for obvious reasons, and there hadn't been any reports, official or not, from any of Lottie's old contacts, about that sort of migration. Hannah let us get all the way through it once, and then offered a few suggestions about what to do when some random person knocks on your car window in the dark, none of which involved McDonald's. I didn't see Aodhan, but Owen assured me he'd done his best to talk to his dad whenever he was at home.

At the end of the second week, Lottie changed her mind. It wasn't because Owen or I had had a sudden breakthrough of unassailable logic, and it wasn't because Lottie randomly decided to trust us. It was because in those two weeks, Aodhan fought dragons almost every day, and no fewer than four
dragons attacked Hannah's smithy, drawn in by the same plume of smoke that had attracted the first one. I spent three of the battles in the shelter with Hannah, bouncing on the couch and making up songs about waiting. Owen was burned, seriously enough to warrant an examination from my mother, by the second one, and we both got out of our algebra midterm because of it, though he didn't have to spend the night in the hospital. The fourth one I witnessed with my own eyes.

I'll never forget what they looked like, Lottie and Owen, standing side by side with the slayed dragon all around them. Owen had landed the final blow this time. We'd been practicing again, and the dragon had been on us so quickly that Owen didn't have time to go for his real sword. The sword he used for training was longer than the one Lottie used to spar, and so it made sense for him to do it. It was the first time I saw Owen slay a dragon. It was the first time I had ever seen
anyone
slay a dragon, and the whole thing had happened right in front of me.

One moment, I'd been doing exercises under Lottie's supervision, and the next Hannah had been dragging me back toward the house. We were cut off from the shelter, so we just stood together under the eaves and watched while Owen and Lottie battled the dragon in the yard. Hannah held her hand tightly over my mouth, and I didn't even try to fight her. I had a chorus of screams in my throat and no wish to share them with the dragon. The exposed nature of the fight meant that Owen couldn't be the bait this time. He had to be moving, and he circled Lottie until the dragon went for her, headfirst and raining fire from the sky. I don't know how he stayed so calm, so patient. He waited until the dragon was so close to Lottie she could have tapped it on the nose with her sword, and then
he slipped in next to it and drove his long practice sword into its chest.

The dragon reared up, flames shooting toward the sky before they went out suddenly, like water had been poured on a campfire. The tail slashed through the air, spines whistling a shrill counterpoint to the deep bass of the dragon's legs beating on the ground. It was a symphony of the dying, a moment of lasts. And then it was over, and Owen and Lottie stood in the wreckage, and for just a fraction of a second, the whole world seemed to still.

“Fine, then!” And the moment was broken. Lottie climbed laboriously over the dragon's tail, spitting out her words as she moved. The dragon had curled in on itself around Owen's sword, almost like it was hugging it, and they had to crawl over its tail or legs to get clear. Lottie had to maneuver her injured leg out first and then support her weight by leaning on the spines on the dragon's tale and using them to pull herself over. “Tell me again what this Archie Carmichael said about a new hatching ground.”

“Inside,” Hannah said. I think I might have been in shock, because I just stood there, staring at Owen with trumpets blaring in my head and not much else in the way of rational thought. “And congratulations, Owen,” she added. “It was an excellent job.”

He straightened and smiled, and then vaulted over the dragon's tail to stand beside his other aunt. Lottie turned to him as if seeing him for the first time in a while, as if she was surprised to see that he was as tall as she was. He was bleeding where the spines had caught his left shoulder. I don't think he'd noticed yet. More scars.

“It's been such a crazy week, I forgot!” she said. She hugged him, very nearly lifting him off the ground in spite of her leg. “Congratulations, Owen,” she said. “We'll get the camera and take a picture.”

Hannah still had me by the shoulders and was steering me toward the door. Lottie and Owen caught up with us, and by the time I was sitting at the kitchen table, they had the kettle boiling and Lottie was assembling the ingredients for crème brûlée.

“Have you been keeping that handy just in case?” Owen said. He was spooning powdered hot chocolate into mugs, as Hannah had declared that celebration was called for and tea was not appropriate.

“Of course,” Lottie said. “Cakes take too long.”

“Plus she can't burn them,” Hannah pointed out. She looked at me, and I could tell she was sorry about having to restrain me earlier. I honestly didn't mind. “Siobhan, are you all right?”

The kettle whistled, and a few moments later, Owen pressed a warm cup into my hands. It made me feel slightly less weird.

“The first one is always the hardest,” Hannah said. “Sitting through a hundred slayings in the shelter doesn't really prepare you for it.”

“It was just so …” I paused, looking for a word. “Noisy.”

“You get used to it,” Owen said. He sat down beside me and we watched Lottie mixing things together at the counter. “Did it scare you?”

“It was a dragon!” I said. “Of course it scared me.”

“That's not a bad thing,” Hannah said encouragingly. She
took a sip of her hot chocolate and then decided it was too hot, so she set it back on the table. “Fear is a healthy thing when you're dealing with dragons. It keeps you from getting eaten or set on fire.”

“I'll keep that in mind,” I said.

“Seriously, though,” Owen said. “You're okay?”

“Yes,” I said. “I'm fine. I just hadn't expected to be that close so soon. It was just—I don't know. I don't know what I was expecting.”

“Every dragon is different,” Lottie said. She was cracking eggs against the counter and didn't look up. “It's important not to get complacent.”

“No fear of that!” I said. I watched as Hannah set Lottie's hot chocolate down at her elbow and kissed her on the cheek.

“Do you think it will make a good song?” Hannah asked. My hands had been pressed against her side when she held me, so she must have felt them tapping out the beat.

“It's not that easy, exactly,” I told her. “I mean, hearing it in snippets is one thing. Turning it into something that makes sense is another kettle of fish entirely.”

“But you'll do it?” Owen asked.

This was it, I realized. This was what I had to make other people feel, even if they didn't get to see it like I had. I could already hear the first whispers, the line of brass and then the faltering drums of the dragon's dying hearts. This was something I could do.

“It's not going to be an opera or anything long and involved, but yeah. I can make it a song.” I said. “If you want, I can sign up to play it for the Christmas assembly.”

“I'm not sure a song commemorating my first dragon
slaying is thematically appropriate,” Owen said. “Don't we have a pep rally or something you can use instead?”

Our school mascot was some senior dressed up in a very unrealistic-looking St. George caricature costume, a red dragon on a white surcoat and a foam lance in his hand as he stood at the front of the gym. I had a sudden vision of Owen standing up there too, the real dragon slayer and the simulacrum while the entire population of Trondheim Secondary yelled “GO, LANCERS!” at the top of their voices. It wasn't particularly inspiring.

“What's Christmas without a few dragons?” I said, and realized that maybe I hadn't kept my hysteria quite as at bay as I thought I had. “Give me some time, and I'll arrange for you to save some reindeer too.”

“It may have been a mistake introducing you to my aunts,” Owen said, but he closed his own hand over mine, to stop the shaking.

“Oh, don't be such a baby,” Lottie said, obliviously spooning crème brûlée into the tiny white ramekins it cooked in. “You just slayed a dragon more or less on your own. I'm sure you can handle some musical accompaniment.”

“Don't we have an English test tomorrow?” Owen said. He must have been desperate.

“Nope,” I said. “We're in the clear until next week.”

He looked at me like I had betrayed him, and Hannah, who had been watching me closely, laughed. Lottie put the ramekins in the oven and came over to sit at the table.

“You don't want to leave anyway,” she said. “You're going to tell me about your Internet theorist friend before I change my mind.”

I drank my hot chocolate while Owen outlined Archie's theory about a new hatching ground that we didn't know the location of. I was surprised that Lottie decided to pay attention to the idea at all. It was fairly farfetched. It wasn't like dragons were difficult to notice. And they couldn't have displaced a human population, or it would have made the news. There were very few places that a horde of dragons could just move into without attracting attention. When Owen finished, Lottie and Hannah looked at each other for a long moment.

“It would explain the increased number of attacks,” Hannah said slowly. “And it's not just Saltrock. We shouldn't get four dragons in a month here at the house.”

“Dad has been really busy lately, too,” Owen added. “They used to have one sighting a week here, and maybe only two attacks in a month. Now there are sightings practically every day, and if there's a whole week without two attacks, it's a light week.”

I should have known it was so bad. I'd been here for those dragon attacks. I'd brushed the death that landed on Nathan Stark. Whatever distractions I faced, at school or otherwise, I should have known. Trondheim was at the southern end of the region Aodhan patrolled, and if Owen was right, it meant that there were more dragons to the north of us than there had ever been before. We had to find where they were coming from. I thought about Michigan, what had been lost there when the dragon incursions couldn't be stopped.