The Last Dragon Chronicles: Dark Fire (17 page)

“Harry?”

“Potter. Are you alive today or what?”

Once again, the conversation stalled.

Then, in a voice muted by a note of awe, Melanie asked, “Is she real, Lucy? Is Glade like the one on the telly?”

Lucy glanced at her reflection again. Ared-haired dragon princess. A descendantof Guinevere. Crumpling up in fear, on aduvet, on a bed. “I’ll have to go,” shesaid, hearing the front door opening. “Can I email you?”

Melanie gave an easy to rememberaddress. “Lucy?”

“Um?”

“Please answer my question. I’m looking at Glade now and her ivy’s glowing gold. How does it happen? How does—?”

“She’s just clay and fancy glaze,” Lucy

cut in, hating herself for denying the truth.

“Look after her, won’t you?”

“I    guess,”    said    Melanie, disappointment crumbling her voice into shreds. “You still there?”

“
Lucy?
 
”

“That’s my mum. Gotta go.”

“Wait. Just tell me what you think? I mean, we always  said how great it would be to have proper dragons flying about, didn’t we? It’s creepy, but sort of exciting as well. It’s like, everyone’s looking at the sky for a miracle. We want it to happen, but we’re not quite sure. Do you think they will come?”

There was a two second pause. “Yes,” said Lucy, and put the phone onto its cradle. She noticed as she did so her hand

was trembling.

“
Lu-cy?
 
”

The eleventh commandment rang out

once more: the abbreviated form of
 
thou

wilt come down and speak to thy mother
. Sighing, Lucy glided onto the landing.

She was about to swing onto the flight of stairs proper when she saw her mother going into the front room clucking, “She’s not home. Probably next door with Zanna. Maybe that’s just as well.”

“You can’t keep this from her,” Arthur replied. “Rupert is describing the Hella writings as the most important document in the history of mankind. Now that he has the full translation he’ll publish the transcript of the photographs. When he does, the whole world is going to know. She’ll pick it up off the internet anyway.

Far better that it comes from you.”

Lucy crept down a few steps. Over thetop of the front room door she could see Arthur, sitting down, stroking  Bonnington. Her mother was out of sight.

“I need time to think it through. It has tobe broken to her gently.”

“Do you think so? I think she’s matureenough to understand Gawain’s motives.”

Motives?
 
thought Lucy as her motherwent on, “Arthur, she’s been brought up tobelieve that Gawain was a magnificent,peaceful dragon, completely incapable ofany kind of aggression. How am I going totell her that he was on the verge ofdestroying – what? What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, go on,” Arthur said.

“You jumped.”

“Bonnington dug in a claw.”

“What’s he staring at?” Liz marched to the door and yanked it open.

But by then, Lucy had had the foresight to put in her earphones and come plodding downstairs. “What?” she said as she

reached the bottom. She clicked her iPod

off.

Liz stared at her suspiciously. “I calledyou. Twice.”

Lucy wafted by with a casual shrug. “The god that is Pod called louder. Sorry.” She stepped into the kitchen andopened the fridge. “What’s with you,anyway, you look whiter than this stuff?” She took a swig from a carton of milk.
 
Butthen you would look pale, wouldn’t you, Mother,   because   you’re   keeping

something from me, aren’t you?
 
And it was obvious that Lucy had a right to know. But to ask would have only blown her charade. For now, she was enjoying the buzz of being one up on the old and the ‘wise’, even though she was burning to know the truth. Gawain was ready to destroy what, exactly? She’d find out later. There were ways.

In true parental fashion, Liz avoided the question. “How come you’re alone? Is Zanna next door?”

Lucy offered up a vacuous grin. “Dunno. S’pose we’ll have to get used tonot having her round here from now on,won’t we?”

“And David?”

That was Lucy’s undoing. One twitch

of concern around the mouth was enough to hand the advantage to her mother.

Issuing one of those
 
I can’t leave you alone for five minutes
 
kind of sighs, Liz said, “Has there been trouble while I’ve been out?”

“I don’t know.”

“Stop saying you ‘don’t know’.”

“He’s gone,” snapped Lucy, hurling the milk back into the fridge. The listener, long practised in the art of jumping, did so again as she slammed the door to.

“Again? Where to?”

“Mum?! I’m not his secretary! I don’t
 
know
.” But she did, of course. And if the truth be told it was worrying her, the way he’d left so suddenly. “Oh, all right, he’s gone to Africa,” she muttered.

“
 
Where?!
”

“Africa!” This time, Lucy stamped her foot. Her eyelashes, slightly moist, were gluing together. “He’s gone to see Sophie.”

Liz glanced at the listening dragon.

Hrrr
, it confirmed. That was the implication of David’s last words.

“Does Zanna know?”

“Who cares?” Lucy growled. And she plugged herself loudly into her iPod and stomped away upstairs again.

Africa

Smoke. Spiralling upwards like a weaktornado, dragging west in the breezeacross the outlying flood plain andblotting out the early evening sun. Thewhole site was ablaze: one large building,which David took to be the veterinaryhospital, plus an arc of five or six smallerthatched huts. The spit and crackle ofburning wood was as loud as the voicescalling through the smoke. A barefootedwoman, in T-shirt and shorts, wasscreaming at a male colleague to leave thewater pumps and go to the animals. Frommesh pens just beyond the burning huts,the cries of distressed wildlife added to

the general chaos.

David started after the woman, who bynow had abandoned her colleague andwas staggering towards the veterinarycentre, shielding her smoke-stained facefrom the heat. She was caught by a slender African man who pushed her back andtold her there was nothing,
 
nothing
 
to bedone. As she argued with him, the centralportion of the roof collapsed and glassexploded inside the centre. The Africanclutched the woman to his chest and

together they fell to the hard-baked earth. Orange flames tipped with angry black crests sailed six feet out  of a shattered

window. The woman began to scream and

sob.

“Work, damn you!”

To David’s right, the white man by the

water pumps slapped his hand against the failed machinery, then stood back and kicked one, making it clank. He swept around, eyes as wild as the fire. “Who are you?” he barked, catching sight of David.

“A friend of Sophie Prentice. What happened here? What caused this?”

“What the hell does it matter?” said the

man, in a deeply-shaken South African accent. Sweat was pouring off his broad, bare shoulders. Smoke streaks were

dubbed like war paint on his cheeks. He looked around in an agony of despair. “It’s all gone, man. It’s all
 
gone
.”

“Pieter!   The   tower!”   somebody

shouted.

The man looked urgently towards thepens. An observation tower, wrapped in

high-kicking tendrils of fire, had cracked a wooden  stanchion  and  was  keeling towards an enclosure of terrified impala.

Uttering a string of profanities, Pieter dragged a scorched arm across his forehead and sprinted to the enclosure nearest the tower to grapple with the locked mesh gates. Using a swatch of his vest to protect his hands against the heat from the bolt, he rattled the gates  open and ran inside, clapping the animals out. Three impala   quickly   escaped,   swerving erratically through the smoke. A fourth animal, a half-blind female zebra named Jinnie, had pressed herself into a corner.

“Jinnie, come on, girl,” Pieter shouted. He raced in and slapped her hindquarters hard. The zebra whinnied and flashed its

tail, but planted its juvenile hooves to the earth. All around her in adjoining pens, wild cats and wetland birds voiced their

torment. Other volunteers were racing to their aid. Splints of fizzing timber were all the while falling, sparking where they landed in the grassy enclosures.

“Pieter!” someone shouted. “Get out of

there, man!”

A colleague in the adjacent pen pointed to the platform of fire above them. Pieter looked up at the raging timbers, gradually losing their rigidity and structure. He made an assessment and gritted his teeth. “Not without you,” he said to Jinnie and threw a muscular arm around her neck, hoping he could physically pull her clear. She put out a foot. “That’s it,” he shouted.

“Come on, girl, you can do this!”

The young zebra bayed in fear.

At that moment, a devastating snap of wood forced Pieter to look up over his shoulder. One of the crossedbeam sections

that formed the four walls of the

observation platform had broken free and

was  plummeting  towards   him.   Too committed to dive away from Jinnie, he draped himself over her, protecting her head. The wood hurtled down like a giant branding iron, trailing tails of crackling embers. Pieter filled his lungs with what he knew might be his dying breath. But seconds before impact, something came to save both man and beast – an updraught of air so huge that Pieter felt as if his clothes were being ripped off his skin. The heat

was blistering. The sound deafening. Gravity delivered the beams to their target, but the weight of their impact was strangely negligible. The cellulose and lignin that had given the wood its strength appeared to have been sucked right out of its fibres. The timbers broke across

Jinnie’s back in a cloud of hot, paperyash. The fire consuming them had been put

out.

This time Jinnie bolted, throwing hershaken helper to the ground. Pieter rolledback against the blown mesh fence andlooked once more at the observation

tower. It was standing like a spent and blackened match, still bent but mostly intact, odd fragments being chipped off in the breeze. There was a scream across the

far side of the site. Spitting the taste of charcoal off his tongue, Pieter looked towards the source of the yell and saw something he had only thought possible in dreams or nightmares or  comic books or movies. There was a dragon in the middle of the compound. It had just ingested the last of the fires.

Terror,   incredulity   or   blindastonishment – something hauled Pieter Montgomery to his feet. His hands wentthrough the motions of dusting down hisclothing, but his eyes never left the shapeof the beast. It was incredible, well overtwelve feet high. Bronzed. Powerful. Irresistibly primeval. He glanced at one ofthe animals it had saved and the team had

been unable to free: Kanga, the arthritic

lion. The so-called king of the beasts was standing transfixed at the front of its pen, its muscles so locked that it appeared to have entered the shock of rigor mortis. But Pieter could see the improbable wonder in Kanga’s eyes. And when the dragon spread its wings and took to the sky, scattering shattered debris in its wake, Kanga followed it in slow, slow motion and continued to stare at the yellow horizon long after the creature was out of sight.

Through the cloud of the dragon’s departure, David Rain appeared.

“Who the hell
 
are
 
you?” Pieter hissed.

Before they could make any further exchanges, their attention was drawn by a torrent of deep, heart-wrenching sobs.

Over by the hospital entrance, one of  thewomen was weeping inconsolably into thearms of two of her colleagues. The African man was trying to shepherd asmall gathering away from a body, laidout under a sheet by the steps.

“Oh, no,” said Pieter, checking thefaces, looking at the sheet. “No, no, no!” He ran past David, past the African man,and dropped to his knees beside the body. He pulled the sheet back, exposing theface of a serene young woman. Despite thesuperficial burns to her skin and thewreckage clinging to her close-croppedhair, her grace and beauty were easy to

see.

“No,” moaned Pieter. His shaking

fingers settled on her lips. “No. Oh, no.”

He sank into a deeper, anguished heap as

David came to kneel beside him.

The dead woman was Sophie Prentice,

David Rain’s first girlfriend.

David’s warning

“I couldn’t stop her.”

Just behind David, another young

woman with dark brown hair in a stunted