Island of Fog (Book 1) (10 page)

“But . . .” Hal struggled over a fallen tree and got his shirt snagged on it. His mind was racing. Surely his parents hadn’t lied to him all his life?

Abigail had found a better place to climb over the fallen tree, and she appeared beside Hal as he pulled at his snagged shirt. “See, if we knew the truth, we’d be angry and would try to escape, maybe even attack them. Imagine what you could do with your fire breath! So they’re keeping a lid on things, trying to find out if we’re changing without coming out and telling us the truth.”

The silence that followed was awkward. Hal set off again through the woods, thinking hard. “And what do you think will happen to us if our parents find out we
are
changing?” he asked.

“The same thing that happened to Thomas,” Abigail said solemnly. “His parents got rid of him.”

“Okay, that’s just stupid,” Hal said, getting annoyed. “Thomas fell off the cliff and that’s all there is to it. You’re so paranoid, Abi. Come on, let’s find that fog-hole—if the monster lets us. I bet it won’t though. I bet it’ll chase us away.” He marched off, stomping through the woods as if he knew exactly where he was going.

Just then came a scream.

They stopped dead, and Abigail gripped Hal’s arm. It was a long scream, filled with terror, coming from deep within the woods. Hal was certain it must be Robbie screaming, but had never heard him scream like that and couldn’t be absolutely sure. It started out high in pitch, then slowly changed, becoming low and mournful, then deep and booming. Another voice joined in the fray, savage and wild, and totally inhuman.

A flurry of other sounds followed: bushes rustling, branches snapping, heavy panting, throaty roars and growls. The noises increased, heading toward where Hal and Abigail stood frozen.

A shadowy shape came into view, darting around in the darkness of the woods. Bushes flew apart and the shadow disappeared for a moment, then reappeared much closer. It was big—bigger than Robbie. It stampeded through tangled clumps of vegetation straight toward Hal and Abigail. They instinctively dove for cover behind a tree and crouched there, trembling with fright.

The huge figure blundered past in a shower of leaves and twigs. Cringing, Hal caught sight of dark brown hair and enormous bulky arms and shoulders bearing down on him, a man-shape at least three times his own height. He cowered, ducked his head, and felt a rush of air as the monster stomped by a mere foot or two away. Then it disappeared from view, and the sounds of its huge stamping feet could be heard for another half-minute before fading into the distance.

After a long silence, Hal let out his breath. “It’s gone,” he said, trying to keep the tremble out of his voice. “Whatever it was, it’s gone.” He slowly disentangled himself from Abigail’s vice-like grip and found himself inches from her white face.

Her bottom lip wobbled as she tried to speak. “Th-th-that was too close.”

“Are you all right?” he asked. His arm had started itching.

Abigail pulled back and got to her feet, looking cross. “Of course I’m all right.”

“Well, good.” Hal glanced in the direction they had been heading—the direction from which the monster had blundered. “I’m confused. That wasn’t the red-faced monster . . . which means it must have been Robbie.”

“
Robbie?
” Abigail looked so startled that Hal would have laughed if the situation wasn’t so serious.

His heart thumped and a prickly sensation crept over his shoulders. “He has these moments of amazing strength,” Hal explained. “That’s his secret. Once, he burst right out of his shirt. I guess something must have frightened him and he changed into . . . into that thing that ran past us.”

“But what frightened him? The red-faced monster?”

Hal and Abigail stood in silence, listening. They heard a rustling sound in the bushes off to one side, the stealthy creeping of a prowler.

“Let’s go,” Hal whispered, planting his hands firmly on Abigail’s shoulders and turning her around. “Robbie’s three times bigger than us but he still ran like a girl. Come on.”

They started to retrace their steps, but their path was blocked.

A large cat-like creature sat there licking its paw. Hal had seen pictures of lions, and this thing was as big and powerful as one, only with red fur and a flowing crimson mane. Its broad face was a cross between a lion and a man, but its eyes were distinctly human, large and blue, filled with a stony malice.

The monster grinned, its black leathery lips stretching to reveal more teeth than Hal had ever seen in his life—razor sharp and needle thin, and arranged in three deadly rows.

But most frightening of all was its tail. When the monster yawned and climbed to its feet, a long scorpion-like appendage rose into view, arcing over the creature’s head and pointing down at them, shiny red and armor-plated. On the end was a quivering ball of long, thin needles, and from the center of these protruded a huge black stinger oozing yellow venom.

The red-furred monster stood before Hal and Abigail with its scorpion tail arced high over its head, pointing down at them and swaying from side to side like a cobra choosing its moment to strike.

The creature’s fur was clean and shiny, but the thing smelled of rotting meat. “Well, well,” it said in a high, fluty voice that contained a hint of scorn. “Look who it is.”

Despite his fear, Hal couldn’t help noticing how the creature’s distinctly inhuman black rubbery lips nevertheless shaped themselves deftly around each spoken word.

“Run,” Abigail was saying in his ear. She’d said it half a dozen times already, but he hadn’t been paying full attention. He took a step backward as she tugged at his shirt from behind.

“If you run,” the monster said, as if reading Hal’s mind, “you won’t get very far. So don’t even try.” It stretched and yawned, again revealing three rows of teeth, then shook its armor-plated tail. The needles on the end bristled and quivered alarmingly.

“It’s a manticore,” Abigail whispered, her fingernails digging into Hal’s arm. “Run before it—”

The creature took three rapid steps forward and stuck its face inches from Hal’s. Now it could easily snap its jaws and bite off his face. Or it could pounce on him, pin him down, and claw him to pieces. Meanwhile its hot, putrid breath made Hal feel sick. That was where the smell of rotting meat came from, as though it had been eating rodents and had bits of flesh stuck in its teeth.

The manticore glanced over Hal’s shoulder. “What’s your name, girl?”

Hal surprised himself by inching sideways and blocking the monster’s view of Abigail. He faced the monster square on, feeling dwarfed by the broad lion-like face and powerful muscular forelegs.

The creature scowled deeply. “Let me see you, girl.”

“Stay there,” Hal told her.

But Abigail tentatively stepped around into view, still clutching his arm. Hal felt a familiar prickly sensation beginning to crawl across his skin.

“That’s better,” the creature grumbled. It stared at her, eyes narrowed. “Abigail, isn’t it?”

It seemed as if time stopped for a second. The mention of Abigail’s name stunned Hal, and he turned to her feeling almost cheated. Did she
know
this thing? But Abigail’s expression indicated that she was as astounded as Hal.

The manticore nodded, looking thoughtful. Its tail slowly sank out of sight. “Yes, I remember you. Dr. Porter’s daughter.” It glanced at Hal. “I don’t remember your name, though. Barry? Harry? Howard?”

“Hal,” he croaked.

“Haaaal, yes. And who was your friend? The one who was here earlier?”

“You mean Robbie?”

The blue eyes widened. “Robbie, yes. I remember now.”

“Who
are
you?” Abigail demanded. “How do you know our names?”

The monster began pacing around them in a tight circle, so tight its muscular bulk nudged against them. Its nose followed close behind the tip of its long scorpion tail, like it was stalking itself. “I lived here once,” it said. “I fell over the cliff outside the woods.”

Hal caught his breath.

“Thomas?” Abigail gasped.

“I
was
Thomas, a long time ago,” the monster said, continuing its pacing. It left large footprints in the dirt, the same cat-like footprints Hal and Robbie had seen by the fog-hole.

The manticore—not an
it
but a
he
, their very own little red-headed Thomas Patten—studied them one at a time. Then Thomas sat and curled his tail around in front. The quills on the end had flattened, and the stinger had vanished from sight. “I don’t remember much. I was chasing a groundhog in the backyard . . . I felt strange, and then I changed, became some kind of animal . . . My mother yelled at me and I ran into the woods.” He paused, a distant look in his eyes. “She came after me, shouting. I kept running, got lost, eventually saw daylight ahead and ran toward it . . . straight out of the woods and off the cliff. I fell into the water.”

“You didn’t hit the rocks!” Hal exclaimed. “Everyone said you hit the rocks and died. But you
missed
.”

“Yes, but then something grabbed my feet and pulled me down,” Thomas said, the corners of his mouth turning down. “I kicked and swallowed water, but down I went, and everything got dark . . . Next thing I remember, I woke up in a forest, lying by the side of a lake. And the fog was all gone.”

A thousand questions were on the tip of Hal’s tongue, but before he could single one out, Thomas sniffed and looked around with a scowl. “And now I’m back here again. I went to sleep one night in my den, and woke up the next morning in these old woods. Took me a while to realize where I was.”

Hal felt a surge of hope. “Thomas Patten,” he said, still hardly able to believe it. “So you changed too! We’re
all
changing . . . but you changed
years
ago!”

“And you’re a manticore,” Abigail said, sounding breathless.

Thomas looked them both up and down. “Yes, I’m a manticore. And I haven’t eaten properly in a week.”

“A manticore,” Hal repeated, nodding. “Well, I’ve never heard of them. But it’s funny, you’ve got red hair, and you
always
had red hair, even when you were—”

“Human?” Thomas finished. He licked his lips. His tail began to unfold, and the quills puffed up so they were standing on end once more.

“Well, yeah,” Hal went on. “Not quite that red, obviously. More ginger-colored than anything . . .” He stopped, realizing he was babbling. He had the distinct, uncomfortable feeling that something in the air had changed. The prickly sensation crawled from his shoulders and down his back.

Abigail squeezed his arm and cleared her throat. “Well, it was nice to see you again, Thomas. We’d better get going now. We’ll bring you some food, lots of it. We’ll go home right now and see what we can find, then come back in an hour or two. Okay?”

Thomas turned his gaze on her and a slow grin spread across his face.

“And then we’ll figure out what to do next,” Hal said. He glanced over his shoulder. “Well, come on, Abi. Let’s—”

“You’re going nowhere,” the manticore said. His tail reared up over his head and the ball of needles quivered. The black, shiny stinger emerged once more. “Look, nothing personal, but I have to eat. I have to eat
properly
—understand? Rodents aren’t enough for me. I’m a manticore now, and have been since I was six. I’ve enjoyed this little trip down memory lane, but all I want right now is to eat a good meal and then get home to my den.” A blue eye winked. “But I promise you won’t feel a thing. I’ll go easy on you, paralyze you first, and then sting you—much less painful that way.”

The ball of quills swelled.

“Thomas, don’t mess around,” Hal said, pushing Abigail behind him and backing away. “I’m not sure if you’re just joking with us or not, but . . . I mean, you wouldn’t, would you?”

The manticore gave a sudden snarl—a deep, throaty snarl overlaid with a thin whining sound, like two separate voices sharing the same space, one angry and savage and the other desperate and helpless. Hal and Abigail stumbled backward in horror. Then the tail flicked and dozens of slender darts shot through the air toward them.

Abigail screamed.

Instinct took over and Hal threw up his arms. Poison-tipped quills thudded into his arms, chest, and legs. He felt a moment of searing pain and then his limbs went numb. He was aware of Abigail spinning and falling beside him.

Hal’s vision blurred and his knees buckled. He dropped onto cold damp soil, rolled onto his back, and watched the treetops spin far above. The bright white sky hurt his eyes.

Then the manticore bent over him with hot, putrid breath and three rows of teeth glistening with saliva. A long red tongue slopped out of the gaping maw and rolled from side to side.

Abigail’s screams had turned to whimpers. Hal tried to focus on her. She lay on her back, her head turned awkwardly toward his. Her eyelids drooped and spit dribbled down her cheek.

A huge foot clamped down on Hal’s shoulder, and claws dug in. He yelled.

Something hovered above the manticore’s head—the ball of quills, from which protruded the shiny black stinger. It stretched, extended, and a glob of thick yellow liquid formed on the end. Paralyzed, Hal watched as the glob hung there for a moment, then wobbled and dropped. He felt a sharp sting on his face.

“This won’t hurt,” Thomas said softly. For a moment, anguish flickered across his blue eyes, as if he were putting down a much-loved pig at a time of great need. Then his stare hardened.

The deadly stinger swooped down.

Hal gave a shout and lashed out with clubbed hands that felt heavy, somehow weighted. He struck something. The manticore yelped and leapt away. Suddenly Hal was free, but his vision blurred again. He rolled onto his stomach, planted his hands in the moist dirt, and tried to get up. His feet slipped out from under him and he collapsed.

He felt strange. His cheek stung, his vision swam in and out of focus, and his hands and arms felt heavy, big, powerful. He paused for half a second, shook his head, and stared.

His hands were enormous, with long clawed fingers. His forearms and biceps were bulging, swelling, and in that moment his shirtsleeves ripped open and hung in rags from his shoulders. Beneath the rags rippled muscles he never knew he had. Skin darkened to a now familiar cucumber green and formed into hard scales. A crested ridge popped out along the length of his forearms and spread up past his elbows toward his shoulders. He felt the strange pulsing, rippling, twitching sensation pour up over his back, heard a tearing sound and felt cool air on his skin as his tattered shirt dropped into the dirt. The rippling moved down his legs and his jeans split apart. His shoes popped open and massive clawed feet expanded outwards.

Panic-stricken and confused, Hal glanced up and found Thomas backing away with blood dripping from a gash across his face. He looked angry.

Then Hal was up and running at the monster with an uncontrollable urge to tear it apart with his bare hands. Thomas turned and fled with a howl. Hal stumbled after him on all fours, tearing through bushes as if they weren’t there, his breath steaming in the air before him.

It was a curious, dream-like moment. Hal felt as though his mind had been transplanted into the body of something else, some large, powerful creature with green scaly skin and enormous clawed feet. It didn’t seem to matter that he was plowing straight through prickly bushes; the manticore darted around them, trying to throw him off, but Hal plunged straight through, intent only on snapping his jaws around the red-furred hindquarters and biting the thing in half.

Hal stopped abruptly, panting. The manticore tore on, glancing back one more time before disappearing for good.

Alone and dazed, Hal twisted his neck, trying to get a look at himself. A twenty-foot-long dark green reptilian body stood there—the body of a dragon, just like those on the covers of countless books he’d read over the years, with tough, scaly, armor-plated skin, and bulky crested ridges protruding from his arms and shoulders. High up on his back, great pointed slabs of bone ran along his spine like a stone wall, all the way down his tail to the heavy club-like arrow tip.

What did his face look like? He squinted down his nose and saw a long, blunt green snout with flared nostrils on the end. Reaching up to touch, he lost his balance and toppled forward, falling flat on his face. Leaves flew up around him.

He lay there a moment, his heart pounding and hot steam puffing from his nostrils. Then he lifted a hand and looked closely. It wasn’t really a hand at all, more like a foot, though he still had a rudimentary thumb. He was a four-legged animal. Panic surged through him. He couldn’t stay like this! He couldn’t go home looking like
this
, a dragon! His parents would have a fit.

As he started to climb to his feet, he felt the weight of three or more people sitting on his back, and was certain his legs would never carry the combined weight. And yet they did, with ease; he felt he could launch six feet in the air if he wanted. He tried it—head high, neck stretched, powerful hind legs flexing—and for a second felt he was twenty or thirty feet in the air. Then he came down with such a thud that his feet sank into the soft soil up to his ankles.

Hal hunkered there, in the middle of the silent woods, and waited for his heart to stop pounding. He felt an itch on his hind leg and idly scratched at it with a foreleg, again losing his balance and almost falling over. Then he realized it wasn’t an itch but a thorn of some kind. He stared closer. It was one of the manticore’s quills, broken off but firmly wedged in his flesh. There were others, too; he could feel them. Had they penetrated his armor? No, the quills had been sticking in his soft, pink human flesh before he had changed, and his new skin had simply formed around them.

He tried to claw them out, but his new dragon toes were too big and clumsy. He tried to pluck at them with his teeth, but found that even harder. He growled, and his vocal chords emitted a deep rumbling sound unlike anything he had ever heard.

Despite the shock of his transformation, Hal felt fine. In fact, he felt great. The poison that had brought him down seemed to have lost its effect, and only the quills themselves were bothering him. They were like tiny, annoying splinters. They’d seemed a lot bigger when the manticore had been waving them around.

But then, Hal had been a small boy at the time. Now he was a twenty-foot dragon. In a comfortable standing position his head hung low, four or five feet off the ground—so not much change there, when compared with his old human body. His crested back stood a few feet higher, maybe seven or eight feet overall, taller than the tallest of men. That made him a pretty formidable size—not the gigantic monsters he’d seen in books, but still bigger than anything he’d ever come across before.

If he stretched out his wings, he could—

Wings!

He whipped his head back and looked again. As though controlled by a separate part of his brain, his wings unfolded from his back, opening and stretching with a curious creaking, leathery sound. Hal gaped. Funny how he hadn’t spotted them before, as if his mind had not been ready to comprehend them. Did they . . . did they work? He wondered how to make them move, and again, as if on cue, they flapped gently, catching the air and causing a strong enough draft to rustle nearby bushes.