Well, Jim, we ran over this frail old lady who attacked me and disappeared into another dimension.
Yep. That was going to fly.
She wished she were still asleep in the van with Zee warm and steady beside her. That there had been no dragon killing today, no old woman who was not what she seemed. That all of this was some horrible dream from which she could wake up. But there would be no waking up from this, not now, not ever. There was no going back to this morning, no do-overs.
Her hand reached for the pendant at her breast.
It was gone, the chain broken. Frantic, she crawled around the site on hands and knees, groping blindly in the shadows, searching. But she knew in her soul that the old woman had taken it, and that whatever it was wanted for was surely nothing good.
Four
Morgan Weathersby slapped at his neck, silencing the whine of a mosquito just a few seconds too late. His hand came away smeared with blood, and a dozen other spots on his body itched already. Damned bloodsuckers. More of them than there ought to be this late in the fall, but it would be cold enough tonight to knock them down a peg. He tossed another chunk of wood on the campfire. A knot of pitch flared and popped, sending sparks up into the dark night, illuminating the faces across from him.
Time had carved its mark on the man he knew as Carpenter. Unlike Morgan, who looked the same now as he had twenty years ago, the old man had aged visibly since they’d last met. His hair remained thick but was nearly white. The line of his jaw was both leaner and softer, and he moved with a slight hesitation, as though not entirely certain the ground would be there when his feet came down. Not surprising, that. It had been damn near twenty years since their last trip.
Carpenter had brought his youngest son that time. The trip was a family ritual by then—a rite of passage, and even though this third son of his had been less than enthusiastic about hunting in general and scornful about this expedition in particular, Morgan had never been one to turn down the solid reality of bills in his wallet.
It was understandable, bringing your sons out to take a beast as a ceremony to mark the transition from boy to man. He admired it. But this trip was different, and he had protested until Carpenter won him over with extra cash. Women had their own rites to mark entrance into adulthood, and they damn well shouldn’t have anything to do with guns and killing.
This was no place for a girl, especially a girl with night-dark hair and eyes of a brown so deep you could barely see the pupils, a girl self-contained and light-footed and too goddamned capable for her thirteen years. She’d kept up easily on the hike yesterday, had carried her own pack, never made a single sound of complaint.
Morgan scowled at her, sitting motionless on an upended chunk of a log, gazing into the fire as though she saw secrets there. Grace had been like that, always looking into the depths of things and keeping what she learned locked behind an impassive face and unreadable eyes.
Grace was not safe to think about.
“We start at first dawn,” he said, needing to get the girl out of his sight. “You might want to turn in.”
Carpenter sniffed the air. “Temperature’s dropping—frost by morning.”
“Good hunting weather,” Jenn said. Her voice was deep for a girl, slow rolling, like a shallow river over stones. She turned to her grandfather. “Which rifle will I carry?”
“The Winchester.”
“I like the AK.”
“The tradition is the Winchester, Jenn. That’s what your dad used.”
“You just want to use the AK yourself.” She smiled at him, a slow smile that made her eyes even darker.
“Your dad got his bear with the Winchester.”
“Lucky shot,” Morgan grunted. “Boy couldn’t aim and was shaking like a junkie.”
Carpenter’s white teeth gleamed in the firelight. “The girl’s a crack shot, Morgan. Takes after her grandpa, not her old man. Wait and see.”
Morgan snorted. “In my experience, the apple don’t fall far from the tree.” It was an insult to Carpenter, but he couldn’t abide the way Jenn occupied her own skin, eyes measuring him up with an expression that bordered on disdain.
Not often he thought about his appearance, but those eyes made him remember that it had been a few years since he’d cut his hair, that his beard was untrimmed and bushy, that the flannel shirt he wore was overdue for a wash. Not that he cared what she thought about anything, her or any human creature.
A sound startled all three of them into stillness, a sharp retort, almost like a gunshot.
Only one thing made that sound in the forest: a tree, breaking under stress, branches cracking and rustling as gravity pulled it down to the earth. But trees didn’t fall randomly on quiet nights. They broke in high winds. Or when something big enough pushed them over.
Morgan picked up his shotgun, chambered a shell. Carpenter was a few seconds behind him, the girl even quicker.
It took a pretty big critter to break a tree. A grizzly might do it, if the trunk was rotten or not too big around. And there were strange creatures out here in this forest, not registered in any Hunting the Northwest guidebook.
Twenty beats of his heart, and then a sudden onrush of wind that brought down leaves and set the trees to keening. A shadow blotted out the stars overhead, a sinuous, long-necked shape. And then, as suddenly as it began, the wind was gone, the sky was clear, the normal forest sounds returned.
“What the hell was that?” Carpenter’s useless gun was still trained on the empty sky; might just as well try shooting at the stars.
“Freak burst of wind, I reckon,” Morgan lied. “One of those dust devils. You get some strange weather up here.”
With all of the rules he’d broken over the years, a few things had managed to sneak past him from Dreamworld into Wakeworld. But he was damned sure he would have noticed a dragon. And if there was a dragon here, then something had gone very wrong with the worlds, and this part of the forest was a particularly dangerous place to be.
At least the creature had flown over, had kept on going. Still, a dragon could cover a lot of territory with speed; it might be back. He sat back down by the fire, covering his unease with a casual tone. “Cold tonight. Hope it don’t turn to snow or some such. Get the girl to bed, Carpenter. She’ll be good for nothing in the morning.”
Jenn smiled, that smile that hid what she was really feeling. “Come on, Grandfather. Old men need their sleep.” Carpenter grunted, allowing her to grab his hand and tow him toward the tent.
“Get some sleep yourself, Morgan,” he said. “Good dreams.”
Good dreams. Now there were words to choke on. Morgan would be a happy man if he never needed to dream again; there was no peace for him there. And there would be no sleep for him this night. All through the long hours of the dark, at the mercy of memories that refused to stay contained no matter how many years came between, he listened for the thunder of dragon wings with the loaded shotgun across his lap.
Just before dawn, when the sky began to be visible above the trees, he banked the fire. After lowering his pack from where he’d hung it away from bears, he slapped bacon into the cast-iron pan and put the kettle on for coffee. The girl emerged from the tent first, looking young and vulnerable with her hair tangled and the Dreamworld still fading from her eyes.
“Smells good,” she said, breathing deep, and he couldn’t help approving the fact that she seemed to be referring as much to the scent of frost and evergreen as to the bacon.
She vanished into the trees, off to relieve herself. Despite his fatigue, Morgan remained on high alert. He didn’t like the girl out of sight. His eyes kept scanning the sky, ears straining for any sound out of place. The quiet of the night had done nothing to allay his unease, had intensified it if anything.