Dragonhaven (28 page)

I wasn't putting out any kind of fun vibes that morning, which is probably why my attempt to teach her something new was a total disaster. It was a great big drooling object lesson in “I'm not going to do what you say when what you're doing is way big-time something else.” Also to the extent that anything I taught her—or she taught me—
was
based on vibes, it was doomed. Any kind of teaching, you have to keep your mind on business, and maybe she could even pick it up that I was worrying about her safety, and her safety had always and only ever meant one thing to her: me. She wouldn't stay in one place at all but glued herself to my leg and wouldn't listen to anything I was saying and that began to make me angry, except it wasn't her fault.

When Gulp showed up I was lying on the ground with Lois draped over my legs, humming. This time it was one of her own hums. (Very Winnie-the-Pooh-ish. Similar waistlines too, although Lois was built that way. She was also growing too fast to have any slack to get fat.) Lois would have been sitting on my chest while she hummed only I couldn't breathe if she sat on my chest for more than a minute any more, so I'd shoved her farther down.

I had an arm flung over my eyes so I didn't see Gulp land but I felt her. I felt—and smelled—the wind of her coming, and the faint—tinily faint—tremor of her landing. Maybe it was because I was lying down that I felt it this time. And I felt the shadow—and the wash of heat—when she…

My eyes shot open and I moved my arm. She was standing right
over
us. She'd never done that before. An adult dragon is big enough that when you're lying down you might as well be a beetle. My first instinct was to get up and run like hell…but if she'd been going to eat me, she'd've done it weeks ago. I didn't think my lying down was likely to be some kind of irresistible come-on. Dragons aren't carrion eaters if they have a choice.

And then she lay down
beside
us, like she had that first day, when she was apologizing, if that was what she was doing, and seeming to make an even greater effort to make herself as small (yowzah) as she could. She'd never put
all
of herself down next to us before, if you follow me, she'd like tried to leave most of herself at the other end of the meadow. But then we'd never been lying down when she landed either.

She curved her ridiculously long neck in an arc, so that while her body was already really close to us (
really
close), her head was too. (Well, comparatively. There was still fifty-feet-plus of her relative to six-feet-plus of me.) Once she got herself settled, Lois and I were the center of a spiral,
and the spiral was all dragon.
Maybe it was just as well I was preoccupied with Dad's check-in because if I'd panicked and tried to run, there wasn't anywhere to run
to
, except into the dragon. The hump of her body, especially with the spinal ridge plates, pretty well shut out the sun. It had started to get chilly lying on the ground (except where Lois was on my legs), but being that close to her body heat was something else—although adrenaline surges kind of warm you up too. I had noticed her being hot before, of course, but this was another something or other. Degree. Dimension. I noticed Lois' body heat because she was usually pressed up against me. I know, why would dragons waste their fire heating their surroundings? But Gulp was
close
. I could hear her breathing. It sounded like wind in a cave, and one in-and-out breath took several
minutes
.

On a whim—a whim I didn't dare even recognize as a whim—I stretched out an arm. I did it quickly so I wouldn't lose my nerve, which is never a good idea with a wild animal—doing something quickly I mean—but I did it anyway. Besides, what was she going to be afraid of? It would be like having a toothpick attack you. I wasn't quite close enough, so I hitched myself over a little closer to her, trying not to dislodge Lois (still humming). I put my hand on Gulp's jaw. I could touch my baby dragon without gloves (except on her belly), as long as I was careful that only the palm stayed in contact. I assumed I could keep my hand against Gulp's greater heat—and probably her thicker skin helped.

The hot part went okay. The hot part and the Gulp not moving her head with a dragon equivalent of “ugh” part. It was still a sensationally stupid thing to do. Like maybe telepathy works better with a conductor, like those tin-can telephones you maybe made (if you were poor, or lived out in the middle of nowhere, or both) when you were a kid. They don't really work very well, but that they work at all is weirdly exciting (if you're pathetic enough to have made them, then you'll probably find them exciting, okay?). I started
thinking
at her. I guess I started out thinking words, as if I was talking to her, but words aren't really all that good, you know, one picture is worth a thousand, etc., and especially if you don't speak the same language, and while maybe dragons had been keeping up their English since they spent all that time with Old Pete (and he says in his journals he used to talk to his dragons, although his never talked back), there's a limit, I guess, to what an insane whim will stretch to.

And there are so many times when words are nowhere near enough even when you're talking to an ordinary human person who speaks the same language. And
that's
even when you're talking to someone who knows you well and knows almost everything about you, like Dad or Billy or Kit or Katie or Martha knows me. I didn't deliberately shift over to pictures, talking (or whatever) to Gulp, but I did, since I was in my head anyway and could do what I liked and it was all either crazy or imaginary so who cared.

And then it
really
started getting weird. The pictures started like going through my head faster than I was thinking them, like they were getting sucked out of me; but as they went they were getting all distorted. Not like Dad suddenly had six legs or Billy was eight feet tall and green, just…I don't know. But you know how sometimes when two of you who were there start to tell a story to a third person who wasn't, and you keep laughing because it's like you're telling two different stories and one of you is crazy? It was a little like that. And if I
wasn't
imagining it, well, a dragon's point of view and attitude would be a lot different from a human's, wouldn't it?

But what was the dragon perspective doing to my story?

By the time I got to the guys in black with the machine guns and the helicopter—and why I was imagining guys in black with machine guns I don't know, too many TV shows at too young an age I suppose—I had a headache so bad I could hardly bear to keep thinking at all, and the pictures I was making seemed to
rip
at me as they were pulled away—a little like skinning a sunburned arm, only worse—and with every picture the Headache got even worse and worse and
worse
. I suppose that's why I didn't hear the two-way immediately. I might not have heard it at all except that I noticed that Lois had stopped humming. My brain (or my Headache) was thundering in my ears so hard I couldn't hear her either, but my legs had stopped vibrating—and my hip had
started
(vibrating). Even Gulp shifted her head very slightly—not enough to shake my tentative hand though. And there was the hiccupping
brrrr
that was the two-way asking for me to answer it.

I seemed to be paralyzed. My brain was doing or having done to it things it didn't understand, and it didn't have any neurons left over for telling my not-on-Gulp's-nose hand to reach down and flip the switch. There's an emergency override for talking when the other person doesn't pick up, if the two-way is at least turned on. I'd left mine turned on. But you'll never believe the voice that screamed out of it though.

Eric.

“Jake, can you hear me? Your dad's been pretty well taken hostage, and I'm pretty sure they're monitoring unscheduled use of any two-way which means they'll be coming for me in a minute. They're on their way, and they know you're at Westcamp. I don't know when they left, so you may not have much time.
Hell.
I didn't expect them…I've still got to…
Do what you have to do, Jake.
Can you—” And there was a clatter and thump and that was all.

But there was something else too, which I could hear more clearly now that the two-way had gone silent—and after what it had said had sharpened my ears for anything that wasn't wind or dragons. Another sort of buzz or
brrrrrr
. Distant but coming closer. A sort of heavy, rapid
whompwhompwhomp.
Unless I was imagining that.

And I
would
have thought I was imagining it, if it wasn't for Eric. I would have thought I was just being paranoid. I was so used to being paranoid it wasn't even doing its job any more.

No. I wasn't imagining it.

The paralysis splintered like stomped ice and fell away. I shot to my feet, tumbling poor Lois off very roughly. I heard the two-way lose its grip on my belt and
clunk
to the ground. (The second two-way I'd killed in the business of saving Lois.) I stooped down and picked her up—heaved her up—I could only barely lift her any more, let alone hold her. She gave an anxious, protesting little grunt, but she didn't struggle. Gulp was sitting up by then too, her head stretched up at the end of her long neck—she'd rolled up away from us, so she was now like far away by being the distance of the length of her body, although she'd left most of her tail behind—looking as tall as the Devil's Tower, as if the hard blue of the Smokehill sky was something you could touch, and she was touching it. She was looking—or listening—hard.

When she looked down at me again, from twenty or so feet of neck, I took a step forward, and tried to hold Lois out to her, although my arms were shaking—maybe not only with Lois' weight.

Gulp didn't take Lois away from me though. She took us both.

 

This is pretty embarrassing, but the first thing I remember about that journey is throwing up. I guess Gulp didn't want to hang around for explanations—or maybe she'd seen helicopters before. We do have the occasional dramatic air rescue at Smokehill, and dragons live a long time. Or maybe my panic vibes were impressive. She scooped us up in her front claws, spread her wings, and
left
. Dragons are not graceful takers-off—or maybe that was just our weight. And my not being used to flying. Mostly a dragon carrying something as big as us would be carrying a kill, and kills don't care. Also since she didn't have her front feet she kind of bounced along on her hind ones till her wings took over, and her wings took over by going
WHAM, WHAM, WHAM
, which meant the dragon and any passengers were going
JOLT, JOLT, JOLT
, with her entire body doing a massive recoil jerk with every wingbeat. Riding in the backseat of a Smokehill jeep has
nothing
on flying with a dragon. And by the time we were thirty feet in the air I lost it. Breakfast all over the meadow. I wonder what the guys looking for us made of that, if they were doing the on-your-knees forensic-shuffle-for-evidence thing. They were probably looking for blood.

Between my head—which was still throbbing, make that
THROBBING
—and my stomach I was pretty miserable, but I closed my eyes for a while and the cold air began to help. Like her flying style wasn't ghastly enough, Gulp was corkscrewing around
through
the landscape—we, I mean us at the Institute, had always assumed that dragons must fly as low as possible sometimes or we'd have had sightings more often. Or more evidence of them walking. But guesses varied about whether this was about energy expenditure or desire to be as inconspicuous as possible for something that runs thirty to eighty feet long, and at the moment it sure felt like she was trying not to be seen. Also her twisting and jinking felt pretty high octane to me and the bigger the predator usually the more energy-conscious it is. (Bleeeeeaaauugh. It was a good thing I didn't have anything left to throw up after the first time or I'd've been leaving a trail.)

She ducked behind stone pillars and outcroppings and took side-slips down little canyons and valleys (often where her wingspan was I swear
unquestionably
too wide for clearance) even when they weren't going in what seemed to be her direction, like she knew there were bad guys following her. And where did she get that idea? There'd never been bad guys at Smokehill, till the poacher. And he didn't fly, or go
whompwhompwhomp
.

She didn't hold us painfully or anything but I was pretty horribly uncomfortable all the same, and scared that somehow Lois would slip out of either my hands or Gulp's. This didn't seem to be bothering Lois at all. Lois was like a kid having her first roller coaster ride. I kept expecting her to say
Wheeeeee
, although with the wind of Gulp's wings I couldn't've heard her. I hadn't trained her what to say for her first roller coaster ride anyway. Joke.

We stopped once, by a stream at the bottom of one of the little canyons. Gulp came down almost as awkwardly as she'd taken off—holding her, well, her hands stiffly and as if anxiously out in front of her, like someone carrying a birthday cake while walking downstairs in the dark. Phew. I was glad for a drink. We all had a drink. I had a drink and a
wash
.