Hydra (16 page)

We’ve concluded, based on that information and what Ed and I observed while fighting and fleeing from the yagi, that Eudora’s created a new kind of enemy to fight us, and is breeding them or growing them or whatever, in that lake. And since we’ve encountered them now in the Black Sea
and
the Caspian Sea, she must be making lots of them and filling all the lakes where she thinks dragons might want to float.

But that’s the end of our conclusion. Beyond that are only theories and plans and wishful thinking. We don’t like the water yagi. They’re crazy dangerous, bred to kill us, likely more dangerous than the original yagi. We want them gone.

Ed’s been mostly silent through the conversation, except for when he’s been directly asked a question. But now, with the basic facts established, he clears his throat. Perhaps it’s because he’s our honored guest, or maybe it’s because he hasn’t spoken much, so everyone knows he wouldn’t try to say anything unless it was important, but my family actually quiets down and looks at him instead of talking over him like they talk over one another.

“If I understand correctly,” Ed begins, “these yagi are bred with science and dark magic. They don’t breed themselves. Eudora’s got some kind of water yagi factory set up at that lake. That’s where all these devils are coming from.”

My family members nod, but remarkably, remain silent as Ed continues.

“I can only see one solution.” Here he pauses and looks around at all of us, maybe sizing us up to gauge whether we’re ready to hear his plan. We must not have looked quite ready yet, because he prefaces his words. “If we let her go on churnin’ out these assassins, they’ll overrun the waters and nowhere will be safe. We’ve got to put a stop to her so she canna make any more. I say we fly up there and destroy the operation.”

There’s silence for maybe ten full seconds after Ed finishes his speech. Everyone’s either digesting his words or waiting for him to say more.

But he doesn’t say more.

Finally, my mom says the one thing I’ve been thinking, which I’m pretty sure has filled everyone else’s thoughts, as well. “That would be suicide.”

Ed tips his head as if to admit she may be right. “The sooner we act, the fewer water yagi in the world. If we wait for them to fill the earth, nowhere will be safe. I can use me cameras to observe them. We can learn a great deal about them before we fight them. But we’ve got to do somethin’.”

Everybody falls silent again. If their thoughts are anything like mine, they’re trying desperately to find an alternative, a way out that wouldn’t require an enormous risk of dragon life. And if they’re like me, they can’t think of anything.

“If we’re going to even consider attempting this,” my brother Ram presents his thoughts with measured caution, his voice extra deep, much like my dad’s, “we need to know what these creatures are capable of. We don’t want to get up there, practically in Eudora’s clutches, and realize we’ve gotten in over our heads. We need to come prepared.”

Felix, ever impatient, jumps on the tails of his brother’s words. “How are water yagi different from regular yagi, besides living in the sea?”

Everyone looks at me and Ed. Technically, I’ve rarely fought regular, land-dwelling yagi, and then mostly in the dark of night. But I
have
been told about them my whole life, and trained to defend myself against their various defenses. Which means I know a far sight more about them than Ed does, considering he didn’t even know such an enemy existed until I told him about them.

So I prop up a couple of bread rolls. (I don’t know why my mom makes them, other than old English tradition—I mean, we mostly just eat meat and the odd token veggie. Occasionally we’ll stuff meat into the rolls like a sandwich, but only for variety’s sake. Mostly they just sit there in baskets on the table, waiting to be used as stand-ins for yagi as the need arises.) I wiggle one roll like a hand puppet as I explain, “Water yagi have hands—six sets of hands. They’re part octopus, or squid, or something. They can grab you and pull you down underwater.”

My mother, who’s sitting on my other side, the side closest to the bread roll representing the land yagi, taps the roll and offers, “Land yagi have insectoid claws, with talons that slice and tear flesh. They’re not made to grip. Further up their arms and legs, they have spines like a cockroach. But unlike a cockroach’s spines, which are just there to make them look scary, these spines contain a poisonous venom that kills slowly over the course of several days. That’s how we lost our first Azi.”

For a few seconds, everyone at the table observes a moment of silence for the fallen dog, who saved my mother many times over. We still have Azi’s great-grand pups, including a couple of dogs currently lounging by the fireplace that spans one full wall of the dining room. One of the dogs lifts his head and gives a mournful howl, as if he understands.

The howl seems to jog my mother’s memory. “Land yagi also emit a wailing sound that can have a paralyzing effect on anyone who hears it. Do the water yagi have that?”

“I can’t say as I heard as much underwater.” Ed makes a face that says he’s trying to remember. “Sound doesna travel underwater the same way as through the air. But they might have that skill, and I just havena been in a position to hear it.”

Rilla asks. “Do water yagi have venom?”

I exchange looks with Ed. “Not that I know of,” I admit cautiously, “but we mostly fought them in dragon form, with armored scales, so they couldn’t have hurt us even if they did.”

“They’re armored, too?” My father clarifies.

I nod. “The water yagi armor deflected Ed’s broadsword. I can’t say for sure it’s bullet-proof like land yagi, but I would guess so.”

Ed picks up the water yagi roll. “They can swim near-on as fast as I can. Their arms are like fins or paddles. Might have a bit of a barb on the underside, now’s I think on it. And they’ve got teeth—rows and rows of sharp teeth, like a shark.”

“Maybe that’s another species they’re bred from,” my grandfather suggests.

“Maybe.” Ed agrees. “Whatever it is, it didna pierce me scales, but if ye met up with one while ye were swimmin’ in human form, that would be a far different story.”

“But they don’t attack normal humans, right? Just dragons, in dragon or human form?” Zilpha clarifies. “Land yagi can smell if a person’s a dragon. They don’t bother normal people. In fact, they hide from them.”

“The same must be true of water yagi,” I agree. “Considering how many there were in the Black Sea, if they attacked people instead of hiding from them, we’d have heard news reports about them by now.”

“Do they have antennae horns like land yagi?” my mother asks.

“Not that I’ve seen,” Ed answers.

“How often do they come up for air?” my brother Ram asks.

Ed looks at him, a long silent look that makes my hair prickle. I know the water yagi can stay underwater far longer than I can, but surely they have to breathe at some point.

Don’t they?

“I canna say as they ever seemed to need air,” Ed recalls. “But I was too busy fightin’ them off to think on their habits overmuch.” He turns to me. “Did ye ever see them come up for air?”

I close my eyes, picturing the roiling water and especially the long stretch when Ed and even the yagi disappeared from my sight. “Never. It’s almost as though they have gills.”

Rilla gestures despairingly, her hands in the air. “Eudora’s done it this time, hasn’t she? Her yagi weren’t good enough because we could smell them coming. With our swords, we can decapitate them before they get close enough to inflict us with their venom or stab us through with their horns. And when we’re dragons, they can’t touch us at all—we’re armored and we can fly. They may be able to hunt us down, but they’re not likely to defeat us. But
these
creatures,” she laughs helplessly and shakes her head.

Zilpha picks up Rilla’s speech. “The water yagi can sneak up on us when we least expect it. They can pull us underwater and hold us down until we drown. Our fire’s no good under water, and our swords are difficult to use in the water. And who knows if they have venom?”

“We’ll study them with the cameras first,” I remind her.

“And then what?” She asks. “At some point, if we’re going to disable the operation, someone’s going to have to get past them, right? They’re being made in a lake, right? Somebody’s going to have to swim through their water.”

I shudder at the thought. Fighting the water yagi hasn’t helped my fears.

Ed holds out the bread roll and tears it in half. “I’m the one best equipped to fight them. I can stay underwater a mighty long time.”

“How long?” my grandfather asks.

Ed shrugs. “Never been tested.”

“At least six minutes,” I offer, recalling the time I timed him, though I know from our adventures on the Black Sea he can handle being submerged for longer.

Ed offers me a tiny smile. “I’ll do whatever I need to—swim into that lake and learn how she’s makin’ them, destroy the operation, kill as many as I can, but I canna fly myself there and I donna know where it is. If ye can get me there, I’ll fight them.”

The dogs by the fireplace lumber to their feet. They seem to have caught the note of challenge in Ed’s voice, the call to action that makes my heart hammer with a mixture of awe at Ed’s bravery (he of all people knows the danger of the foes he’ll be facing) and fear for his safety.

Ed tosses the halves of the bread roll to the dogs, and they catch them from the air, swallowing them down.

My mother has been mostly silent through this discussion. Now she sighs. “We fought Eudora off long ago. Since then, I’ve only been focused on keeping my children safe. We’ve holed up in this fortress, even fled to the states, all in an effort to keep them out of her reach. But she’s not content to stay away, is she? We can’t hide away forever. It’s time we stand and fight.”

For the next hour at least, as we munch the meat cookies my mother made for dessert (meat cookies are like hamburgers, mostly, but without buns or pickles or other distractions, though we sometimes top them with cheese like you might frost a cookie, or mix in chopped mushroom or onion like real cookies have chocolate chips) we discuss logistics. My father pulls out maps, and supplies us with images his spies have sent him—pictures and even video footage, most of it grainy and distant, of whatever Eudora is up to at the lake.

We don’t have a great deal of intel on what’s going on up in Siberia. True, my father has spies up there, but he doesn’t get phone calls or e-mails from them any more than he does from my mother, and for the same reason. It would be too easy for Eudora to hack into the transmission and find out everything he knows, along with the identities of his spies. We can’t risk that.

So the spies mostly keep watch and occasionally visit us with information. They exist mostly to keep us safe, and in the case of my grandmother, they alerted my grandfather to the fact that there was another dragon on the earth.

And it’s not just Eudora they’re spying on.

There’s another dragon in Siberia, living near Eudora, who in some ways is even more dangerous than Eudora, because he’s still a dragon. His name is Ion and my father absolutely hates him, on account of the last time they fought, Ion very nearly killed him by tearing open his softer underbelly with his horns (remember, our scales are armored to resist nearly anything—bullets, swords, fire—but our slightly-softer underbellies can be pierced by another dragon’s horns or talons or even tail spikes).

Ion lives in a castle near Eudora and has been known to work with her. My dad’s spies keep watch over both of them, but the spies have reported that they sometimes suspect Ion knows what they’re up to, spying on him. We’re not sure if this is pure paranoia on their part or if there really is something to it. Ion did live among us, for a time, long ago, though he was most likely acting as a double agent, spying on behalf of Eudora while trying to make my grandfather and father believe he was on their side.

And by the same token, it’s entirely possible that Ion and Eudora have spies among us—villagers they befriended while Ion lived here, who still feel enough sympathy or allegiance to him that they’d keep him informed of what we’re up to.

For that reason, we’ve got to keep all our plans quiet, and make our moves with stealth. Even though everyone’s eager to be part of Ed’s raiding party, we can’t leave the village undefended. Some of us have got to stay behind and help cover for those who’ve gone.

My brothers both want to go, on account of neither of them have met the enemy and they both think they need the experience. My parents want to go, too, since they’ve fought the regular yagi the most, and even faced Eudora, so they know a bit more about what they’re doing. Also, though they don’t say it in as many words, I’m pretty sure they want to come along to look after their kids and make sure none of us gets hurt.

“You three girls need to stay home,” my mother insists. “It’s going to be dangerous, and there’s no need for you to come.”

Her words send a spark of anger shooting through me so strong and fast I’m tempted to stand up or stomp away in fury. “It’s not too dangerous for Ram and Felix.” Somehow I keep my voice level, although I want to scream.

“Wren.” My mom pats my hand. “We need you to stay safe. The dragon world needs you.”

“They need my womb, you mean.” Okay, maybe now I am shouting just a teeny tiny bit. “
This
, mother, this is precisely why I don’t want to marry. You used to be a butcher. You used to fight yagi and do brave things, but then you had dragon babies and you all but retreated back into the womb with them. I am a dragon. I have wings. I’m meant to fly, not cower in fear while someone else fights my battle for me. The water yagi attacked
me
. I have more experience with them than anyone. I need to go.”

No one says a word, not even my mother.

Then my grandfather clears his throat and volunteers to stay behind. “I’ve fought Eudora enough times. I don’t care to see her face ever again, thank you. Not that I’m afraid of her, mind you—but if everyone else wants to go, I don’t mind staying home.”

“Thank you, Father,” Mom says without looking at me. “But we have two villages to protect, so we’ll need more than one dragon to stay behind. Is it too much to assume that my other daughters care enough about the continuation of the species to tend the hearth while we’re gone?”

Rilla raises her hands in a gesture of innocence. “I’m cool. I’ll stay. Siberia holds no allure for me.”

But beside her, across the table from me, Zilpha’s neck is flaming red like she sometimes gets when she’s nervous or embarrassed, and she’s making a tortured face.

“Zilpha?” My mom only says her name, but there’s so much in that word. It’s more than just a question, asking if she’s okay, asking if she isn’t going to stay home like her obedient sister. There’s an undercurrent of
et tu, Brute
, almost as though she fears Zilpha will turn on her just as I did. And the implication that Zilpha, of all people,
Zilpha
, who’s always only ever wanted to marry and make dragon babies, surely Zilpha knows it’s her place to stay home.