Seraph of Sorrow (46 page)

After they had each completed their rite of passage and moved to the University of Minnesota campus, Wendy waited for the feelings to subside and to fall in love with someone else. But “someone else” never happened, and she let her friend Hank Blacktooth browbeat her into accepting something less than true love. Watching Lizzy fall for Jonathan Scales was pure torture, particularly the first night she met him, when she could taste Lizzy’s favorite lipstick on his lips in the fraternity basement.

An unhappy sort of existence followed, though it got a little better when Eddie was born, and when Lizzy and her family moved back to Winoka. Knowing what she knew about Jonathan and Jennifer, reestablishing a friendship with Lizzy had to wait. It was good enough to know that they were next door, and that the day might come when they could be friends again.

She always thought Jonathan or Hank would have to die first. It didn’t matter much to her which. As it turned out, she didn’t have to wait, thanks to Eddie and Jennifer.

Feeling the spiked prong of Ember Longtail’s tail drive through her body, Wendy thought of them both—fifteen years old, in love, with so much more to look forward to than Wendy ever had. She said a silent prayer on Jennifer’s behalf, as she saw the girl give an outraged scream and drive off her assailant. She said a prayer for her son, whose voice she heard carrying from the far end of the bridge.

Then she looked up at Lizzy Georges-Scales, who had rushed to her side to try to stop the bleeding, and tried to tell her after all these years how much she loved her. For once, it wasn’t fear that held her back—her throat was filled with blood, and the words could not get through.

The absence of fear was enough for Wendy Blacktooth. She smiled, then relaxed.

When Eddie Blacktooth was fifteen, it took him only a few weeks to become an excellent archer. The hands that were so awkward on the hilt of a blade played beautiful music on a bowstring. So it was not much trouble to convince his mother to let him go with her and the Scaleses to Winoka Bridge. It was harder to convince them to let him take up his own position on the east end of the bridge—quite a distance from them—but when he told his mother with proud eyes that he could handle it, she relented. After all, it was possible he would pass a rite of passage today, and do so saving a life, instead of taking one.

Then Edmund Slider had created his barrier, and Eddie’s blood chilled. He saw right away that he was separated from his family, and from Jennifer. Skip Wilson was now the closest thing to a friend he had out here, which was to say he had no friends at all. He had kept an arrow cocked after that, ready to shoot any one of the four werachnids prowling below. It was almost a relief when Edmund Slider died, since that preoccupied Skip’s aunt. Skip looked distracted as well, which gave Eddie time to consider Andi.

Of all the people on the bridge that night, only Eddie saw this girl’s complete transformation. It started the moment Glorianna Seabright crippled Catherine Brandfire. While the mayor, Jennifer, and Catherine’s grandmother battled it out on the bridge, Eddie watched a battle of a different sort take place within a single body. Andi spent most of the time on one knee, where Skip Wilson had rudely pushed her before going to check on his teacher. Nothing
looked
different right away, but a dull sort of throb pounded the air nearby. Skip, distracted by other goings-on, didn’t notice. Nor did he notice the steam and stench that began to rise from her body. It was as if something was pouring over her, sticking to and seeping through her skin.

She’s in pain.
Eddie briefly considered climbing down from his perch to help her, but of course he didn’t. With no knowledge of how to stop this trauma, and no assurance that she would look favorably upon a young beaststalker approaching her, there was no point.

New arms emerged from her body, and then disappeared, and then reappeared. Back and forth they went, like strange antennae exploring a new environment, and Eddie decided to raise his bow so the tip of his arrow was pointing at the center of her back. He kept the string slack, though, and prayed for something friendly to emerge.
Jennifer said Andi was an ally, in that alternate universe . . . didn’t she?
The arms receded one last time, and the girl stood up looking almost the same as when she began. Eddie knew better. He was not at all surprised when she leapt twenty feet into the air, came down upon the mayor, and did in seconds what no enemy had managed in over seventy years—ended the reign and life of Glorianna Seabright.

After that, he noticed his mother and Dr. Georges-Scales tending to the mayor.

And after that, he saw the black dasher come for the doctor, and take his mother instead.

“Mom!”

Throwing his bow and arrow down, he leapt from his hiding place and rolled onto the asphalt, briefly surprised at how little pain there was in the landing. He rushed past a startled Skip and a mournful Andi, toward his mother, crying out and not caring who saw or heard—

—until he was suddenly facing the wrong way, back at Skip and Andi.

He looked over his shoulder. There was his mother again, choking on her own fluids. The doctor was ripping pieces of cloth from her sleeves to staunch the bleeding.

“Mom!” he cried out again. He turned and rushed toward her—

—and again, he found himself running the wrong way.

“Mom!”
What the hell is going on?

He tried and failed again. His mother’s limbs were calmer now. Finally, it occurred to him.
The barrier.
Of course. He had seen Glory do the same thing when Edmund first put it up.

Thoughts racing, he whirled and faced Andi. “Lower that wall! I need to get through!”

Andi brought her hands down from her face. Her cheeks were still wet, her magenta hair in confused tangles. “What?”

“My mom’s in there! I need to get to her. Bring the wall down!”

Her eyes betrayed confusion. “I—”

“We can’t.” Skip put a protective hand on her.

Eddie looked at his mother again. The pool of blood around her was seeping outward; Jennifer’s mom was kneeling in it, crying as snow settled upon the back of her ripped jacket; his father was unconscious a little farther away. “What do you mean, you can’t? She just went through it twice herself! Help me do it, before she dies!
Mom!
” He tried to race toward her again, hoping he could maybe surprise the barrier. It was no use.

“We can’t” was all Skip would say.

“Can’t? Or won’t?”

Skip said nothing. Eddie looked past him. “Andi, whatever Skip’s told you about me, that’s my mother in there and she’s dying and
you have to let me through
! I don’t care if you don’t let me back out! I know you can do it!
Let me through! MOM!
”

He put a fist into the barrier. It sunk several feet in, before its reflection threatened his own face. Pushing back, he marched toward his enemies, face reddening and spittle spraying. “Damn you, Skip! You think you’re getting back at me for Jennifer or whatever the fuck motivates you, but you don’t get it.
This is my mom! This is forever!
”

“I get it fine.” Skip’s features were dark and calm. “I get ‘Mom.’ I get ‘forever.’ ”

He turned and dragged Andi away by the wrist.

Most of what happened next, Eddie could only remember through tears. He knew he tackled Skip to the asphalt and pounded on him with bony fists. He knew his tears were still falling, that somewhere behind him Jennifer kept shouting at him to stop, and that he continued to pound Skip and call for his mother. Finally, he knew he was more relieved than anything else, when Andi put a gentle palm on the back of his head and covered him in a blanket of sleep.

When Xavier Longtail was fi fteen, he liked to watch Pinegrove sleep from a distance.

His brother, Charles, told him this was dangerous and that the beaststalkers who lived there now would kill him if they spotted him, but Xavier couldn’t help himself. What other memories did he have of his mother and father, beyond those in Pinegrove? Where else could he possibly be safe, if not in the last stronghold of his kind?

“No,” Charles corrected him as they looked down the twilit hill at the twinkling lights of what was now called Winoka. “This is not ours anymore, Xavier. Nor is it the last stronghold. Let me show you.”

Xavier had discovered Crescent Valley that night, and like many dragons before and after him, he fell in love with it. Drawn in by the eternal crescent moon, he forsook the old world and returned only rarely, to visit the farm of his friend Crawford Scales.

So the night Winona Brandfire died was the first time in almost fifty years that Xavier saw Winoka. He wasn’t going to go at first. He felt Winona, Ember, and most of the Blaze were indulging in a selfish, destructive impulse. He couldn’t blame them, but he wouldn’t join them.

It was only after he discovered his great-nephew Gautierre was missing that he felt compelled to follow the Blaze. Since he and his lizard, Geddy (riding on his nose), trailed them by miles, they did not arrive at Winoka until it was already encased in a shimmering blue dome.

You really can’t go home again,
he mused while skirting the curved outline. It took him less than a minute of flying over the town, observing growing panic in the streets, to assure himself that this was not some mysterious beaststalker defense. What would happen if he flew into it? He had no desire to find out. He scouted the perimeter, until he heard roars from the southeast and spotted tongues of flame by the bridge.

The scene upon his arrival was ugly. Winona, their Eldest, was dead. Her granddaughter, Catherine, looked nearly so. Beaststalkers and dragons, including Jonathan Scales, battled to the west, well beyond where Xavier could help or stop anything. Gautierre was nowhere in sight.

Worst of all, his niece, Ember, was extracting one of her tail spikes from the throat of Jonathan’s friend Wendy.

Helpless, he could only watch as Jennifer Scales chased Ember away before any more damage was done. Ember, sensibly, flew away—despite the woman’s bluster and training, she had little experience with actual combat, whereas the legend of the Ancient Furnace was growing daily. Watching the two of them disappear in the distance, he couldn’t decide for whom to root. Ember was dear to him, but she had lost all perspective. Xavier had come to know this Wendy Blacktooth a little during their time together on the Scales farm. She was a good person. Had Ember been there with them, wouldn’t she have seen that?

It didn’t matter. He saw a boy below running into the barrier, trying to reach Wendy.

“Her son, Eddie,” he mused aloud to Geddy. It did not take long before this child turned to violence as well, attacking another boy, for reasons Xavier didn’t understand at this distance. The girl with the other boy mercifully subdued Eddie—
Werachnid,
Xavier guessed—and then those two left Eddie’s body behind and disappeared into the brush by the bridge’s eastern end.

Gently descending to where Eddie lay, he checked the boy’s condition (still alive) and then looked back through the barrier. Jonathan’s wife, Elizabeth, the woman who had killed his brother so many years ago, was still at her friend’s side, frantically trying to save her life.

“Dr. Scales.”

She didn’t answer.

“Dr. Scales,” he repeated more loudly.

“Xavier,” she answered without turning from her patient, “unless you have a crash cart and a way of getting through that wall, I’d appreciate it if you’d let me do my job.”

“She’s gone, Doctor.”

“Stow it.” Another bloody rag got tossed to the street, replaced by a fresh one.

“You need to get up. Your family and friends will need you. The fight continues.”

“And I’ll bet you’re just
thrilled
about that.”

The venom in the words unsettled Xavier. “Doctor?”

“I’ll ask again: Do you have a crash cart and a way to get through that wall?”

“She was a good person. A good friend. I learned that about her, in a short time.”

The doctor began to press on the patient’s chest, alternating sets with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Occasionally, she would mutter instructions to Jennifer to check a pulse, press on some bleeding somewhere, or conduct some other exercise in futility. Xavier stopped trying to talk to them and instead focused on what was happening beyond. There were still a few dozen of the Blaze aloft, but the sirens blared on, and the beaststalkers would soon have an advantage in numbers. Already, he could make out a thickening crowd under the distant streetlights.

Of all the dragons, Jonathan was closest. He was fighting efficiently and well, Xavier noticed, but the creeper’s job was complicated by the fact that he was trying
not
to kill anybody. No one in the Blaze was helping him; they were picking fights with random beaststalkers farther away. The beaststalkers, meanwhile, were working together better . . . and had no issues with lethal force.

Geddy scrambled down his nose far enough to get his attention. Looking at where the gecko’s head was pointed, he spotted a familiar figure on the western edge of the bridge. He was surprised to see this person there, and even more surprised when he saw his great-nephew Gautierre next to her . . .

When he saw Ember reappear in the sky, his surprise turned to deep concern for the girl’s life, and those near her.

“I hope my great-nephew knows what he’s doing,” he whispered to Geddy, who flicked his tail in agreement. “I hope he and I chose the right path, after all.”

Gautierre Longtail was still fourteen tonight. When he turned fifteen months later, he looked back on this fateful night as the point where he truly fell in love. Unfortunately, it was also the night he disobeyed both his mother and his great-uncle, albeit in different ways.

From his exposure to the world beyond Crescent Valley, he’d come to the conclusion that Ember Longtail was obsessed about the wrong things. Why could she talk of nothing except his late grandpa Charles and the woman who killed him? Wasn’t there anything else to care about? Wasn’t there any
one
else? He had found someone, and it did not take long for him to fall for her. She was beautiful, funny, interesting, brave, and kind. She was, in a word, special.