Dragon (26 page)

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Thank you so much for reading Dragon! I hope you’ll find and enjoy the rest of the books in the Dragon Eye series.

And now, as promised, the first five chapters of Hydra:

Chapter One

“Turn the wipers up faster!” Rilla shouts over the pounding rain.

“They can’t go any bloody faster!” My mom is hunched over the steering wheel, cruising along at about 30 miles per hour, which normally wouldn’t seem very fast, except we can’t see anything through the deluge on the windscreen.

“We can’t go on like this.” Rilla, my sister who’s older than me by about fourteen hours, takes her role as the eldest triplet very seriously, by which I mean she tends to boss everyone around. “We can’t see where we’re going. We might drive into the North Sea.”

“We shouldn’t be that close to the North Sea.” Zilpha, my sister who hatched twenty hours after I did, is studying the big paper map unfolded on her lap. “Not unless we’re even more lost than I thought.”

“We’ve got to be getting close to the castle,” Mom insists, which might be reassuring if she hadn’t already been saying that for the last two hours, during which time we’ve zigzagged through most of the Scottish Highlands. “Look for Broadbottom Road.”

“I haven’t seen a street sign in miles.” Rilla’s in the front passenger seat, directly in front of me, her nose inches from the window as she tries to locate a sign.

“You won’t find Broadbottom until we get on Invertinny Lane.” Zilpha’s beside me with the map, though she’s mostly staring out the front in fear of oncoming vehicles—a justified concern, considering the road is essentially one lane wide, with occasional wider passing sections. This road was built for chaos on a good day. Considering it’s raining, almost night, and we don’t know how to get were we’re going, I’m surprised we’re still alive.

“Aren’t we on Invertinny Lane?” Mom asks.

“No, that was Invernonny Hole.” Rilla’s aghast. “You didn’t take that, did you?”

“Mom, please tell me you didn’t take that.” Zilpha’s studying the map again. “That would take us in the opposite direction of the castle.”

“I don’t bloody well know which road I took. Why don’t you tell me?” Mom’s accent has been getting thicker the deeper we travel into the Scottish Highlands. It wasn’t bad when we landed in Glasgow last night, but I wouldn’t be able to understand her at all anymore if she wasn’t saying the same things over and over—mostly cursing at the rain, the roads, and the other drivers. She comes by the accent both by blood (through her Scottish mother) and by upbringing (she spent ten years at a boarding school in northern England, just south of the Scottish border).

While my mom and sisters are arguing, I pull out my tablet computer with the maps I loaded in preparation for this trip, which I haven’t been using because the battery is almost dead, and I don’t have a charger adapter that works with anything in this foreign car. I’m trying to save it until we really need it, but if it means not spending the night on Invernonny Hole in the rental car with my mother and my two sisters, well, it’s worth risking running out the battery.

Assuming we don’t need it more, later.

I’ve already had to use it several times, ever since the GPS sent us around the complete wrong side of Loch Ness, which we didn’t realize until we got to Drumnadrochit. When she saw the sign for the town, my mom screamed “Drumnadrochit!” over and over, making it sound like a bunch of curse words, and then swore off using the GPS altogether.

My tablet saved us that time and twice since. I’m starting to feel like a bit of a superhero, except that my powers are wearing down and my mission is far from fulfilled.

“Headlights!” Zilpha screams.

Twin beams have appeared out of nowhere in front of us. The oncoming car can’t be more than thirty feet away, and there’s nowhere for us to go because the road is only one lane wide, with bushes and puddles who-knows-how-deep on either side.

“Bloody, bloody, bloody,” Mom mutters as she slams the brakes and squeezes over to the left side of the road, which is the side the Scottish drive on when they have more than a single lane, which right now we don’t. The tires beneath me lurch as they leave the pavement, splashing into muddy holes.

I’m in the backseat of our tiny rental car, on the passenger side, which is on the left, directly above the holes. I stare past my sister Zilpha as the passing car zips by us on the right, hardly slowing down in spite of the tight quarters. If our vehicles hadn’t been different heights, we’d have knocked mirrors.

Our car is no longer moving. Not forward, anyway. It rocks as my mom presses the gas, and the tires make an anxious spinning sound.

Futile.

“Are we stuck?” Rilla asks.

No, no, no. I do not want to be stuck on a narrow road in the Scottish Highlands, in the rain, in the dark.

The wheels splatter puddle mud as high as the windows, but the car isn’t going anywhere.

“Wren, poke your head out and see what the trouble is.” Mom says.

I’ve got a pretty good idea what the trouble is, and while I don’t know what help it will be, I’d rather try to fix the problem now than wait until it gets completely dark outside. I open my door and find a couple of puddle-less spots to plant my feet. Then I study the tires.

Deep in mud. “Straighten your wheels out,” I advise Mom through the open door, while I kick a bunch of loose gravel in front of the tires to create rudimentary ramps out of the holes. Then I climb back in the car. “Okay, drive straight out, slowly pick up speed, and then turn your wheel to get back on the road.”

Mom mutters some incomprehensible Scottish words under her breath, but she follows my instructions. The tires stutter as they get hold on the loose gravel.

“Slowly!” I caution.

Mom doesn’t panic or spin out. With a lurch, we’re up, out of the holes. Another lurch brings us back onto the pavement.

To be honest, I’m surprised that worked. Car things are not my specialty.

That crisis averted, I return my attention to my tablet, where a reassuring blue triangle blinks at me from the screen. I try to ignore the cold wet seeping through my shoes. “We’re on Willowick Road. Invertinny Lane is just up ahead. Keep going.”

“How far?” Mom asks.

“I don’t know. Look for a sign. It should be on the left.” I switch the device off to conserve power. We’ve still got three more turns before we get to the castle. We might well need it again.

“A sign, a sign,” Rilla mutters.

I join her peering through the glass. After a long bleary stretch our headlights reflect off a whitish slab. “What’s that?”

Mom taps the brakes. “What’s what?”

“There. Invertinny Lane—with an arrow.”

“Is that sign on the ground?” Rilla studies it as Mom takes the turn. “Don’t they have sign posts in Scotland?”

“This far out, you’re lucky to get a sign at all,” Mom admits. “Or pavement.”

That last bit was under her breath, and I barely caught it, but the car’s sudden rocking illustrates what she meant. I don’t know if this road has ever been paved. Certainly not recently.

“Okay, look for Broadbottom Road.” Zilpha traces the line on the map, the one Mom drew in based on the sketch the castle curators e-mailed us along with a line drawing of a turreted castle that makes it seem like the place we’re staying for the summer was designed by an eight-year-old with a ball-point-pen.

In fact, Nattertinny Castle dates to something like the thirteenth century, which for some reason makes Mom think it’s the perfect spot for us to spend our summer vacation. I am less convinced. To me, staying near one of the deepest lakes in Scotland (Loch Ness is 744.6 feet deep, a full 740 feet deeper than anything I want to swim in) is a supremely bad idea, and it’s getting worse every minute.

It’s also getting darker every minute. The sun hasn’t quite gone down yet, I don’t think, but with the heavy clouds and rain, it might as well have.

“Is that a sign?” Rilla asks.

“I saw nothing.” I’ve been staring out my window, the same direction as Rilla, hardly blinking, ever since we got on this road.

“No, no, it was. Back up!” Rilla insists.

My mother, showing all the judgment of a woman who’d fly her three daughters to Scotland for the summer to celebrate their twentieth birthdays, throws the rental car into reverse and starts backing, never mind that she has no idea what’s back there.

I strain to peer past the heaping luggage in the back window, but I can’t see anything more than bulging canvas.

“There-there-there-there!” Rilla squeals, tapping on the window with her finger.

I look. There’s a field running alongside the road, with barbed wire fencing and a big metal gate. In the middle of the gate there’s a white sign with big black letters that says:

DANGER! No trespassing—live cattle!

And under that, in much smaller letters:

Broadbottom Road

And beneath that, in letters so small it would appear someone added them in by hand with a marker:

To Nattertinny Castle

“Hmm. Didn’t the confirmation e-mail say something about a gate?” Mom asks.

“That’s a closed gate.” I’m staring at the locking mechanism, wondering if we can even open it without a key, and who’s going to go out there in the rain to try, anyway?

“I was visualizing more of a wide-open gateway,” Zilpha agrees.

“It says ‘To Nattertinny Castle,’” Rilla insists.

Zilpha leans across me to see better. “Maybe they mean on down the road. Maybe there used to be an arrow pointing forward, and it got washed away, or something. Surely they don’t intend for us to get out of the car and open the gate manually.”

I’ve got my tablet back on, studying the map. Our little blue triangle is blinking at the junction of Invertinny and Broadbottom. “This is it,” I admit, wishing it wasn’t true. “This is the road. We have to go through that gate.”

“Go open the gate,” Mom orders.

“I can’t. I’m holding the map,” Zilpha waves the wide paper to validate her excuse, like she couldn’t just put it down (although, in her defense, it is tricky to fold up again).

“I found the sign,” Rilla points out, as though that somehow exempts her from any further responsibility.

“Wren!” Mom turns to me. “Go open the gate.”

“Fine.” I’m already wet, anyway, and I’ve turned off my tablet and stashed it back in my bag. I check for oncoming cars, then open the door and dart toward the gate.

The rain has let up slightly, so it’s not quite so drenching, but still bothersome. The gate latch is this big slippery metal rod and clasp on the backside of the gate, so I have to reach around over the gate and get my sleeve soaking wet. The gate should swing wide open, but instead it thumps into a puddle, so I have to drag it back through the mud and rocks, and I’m trying to hurry but my legs knock against the metal gate with every step, and I’m soaking wet by the time my mom pulls the car through.

Then I close the gate behind us, even though it would be easier to leave it open and just get back in the car. But I’m pretty sure it was closed for a reason, and it did say danger, even if the danger is only cows.

Speaking of, the cows are standing about the field, getting rained on and watching me. These cows don’t look dangerous at all, let alone enough to justify a warning sign with an exclamation point.

I dive back into the car.

“Ew, you’re dripping wet!” Rilla pulls the paper map away from me as Mom drives over the lumpy road with a speed that’s not nearly prudent, but will hopefully get us to the castle before it’s completely dark out.

I ignore my sister and instead watch out the window, wondering what could be so dangerous about cows, anyway. Female cows and even steers aren’t vicious creatures.

No, it’s the bulls that are pure terrifying, though I don’t see any of them around. A bull can weigh twice as much as a cow, all of it pure muscle run through with testosterone-fueled fury, armed with hooves and horns. A bull could trample this little car flat.

We’re rumbling along the lane at a good clip when Zilpha starts screaming.

“Bull! Bullhorns! Turn around!” My sister’s screams seem to pull their text straight from my fears. Or maybe my subconscious smelled it coming, I don’t know. We dragons have an unusually keen sense of smell, though usually not so much when we’re in human form.

Mom screams back, “There’s nowhere to go!” as she throws the car into reverse and starts backing up.

A bull is charging us, our headlights glinting off his horns. It’s this huge muscled thing, bigger than our rental car probably, with sharp horns that look like they could rip right through the doors and gore us.

Indeed, my mother is right. There’s nowhere to go—the road is so deeply rutted it’s a big jump to get up into the field. I don’t know if a four-wheel-drive vehicle could make it, but this car certainly can’t. The only passable direction is backward, and the gate isn’t far behind us.

“Wren! The gate!” Mom screams.

“It’s not my turn!” I point out, because there’s no way I’m going back out in the rain, not with a bull charging us. Now the word danger seems insufficient. At the very least, they should have put more exclamation points on the sign.

“You’re the only one who knows how to work the latch!” Rilla shoves me toward the door, which might seem sort of cruel except for the fact I’m not completely defenseless, and everybody in the car knows it. I mean, I may be a girl, but I’m strong—I’m about five and a half feet tall, of medium to larger build (even in human form, I’m muscular), and while I’m not wearing any swords right now, I’m still trained, as are my sisters, in not just swordsmanship but various martial arts.

Far more than that, though, I’m a dragon.

But then, so are my mom and sisters.

The bull is still maybe twenty feet in front of us when I open the door to run for the gate. But it’s muddy here (a slippery, slimy mud) and I’m trying too hard to move quickly, besides which Mom hasn’t completely stopped the car, so it’s moving, too. As I attempt to shut the car door (I have to shut it or the car won’t fit through the gate), the momentum of my arm’s motion mixes in an unsettling way with the direction my feet are pointed, and I go down splat on my hands and knees.