Dragonhaven (20 page)

So I went to Billy and told him I wanted a project that would take me into the park and let me—us—stay there for a few months. As near to uninterrupted as we could manage. I'd still be under seventeen, but as I put it to Billy (I'd thought this out pretty carefully), the reason we were going to give was that I wanted to be sure that this Ranger thing was what I really wanted to do before I turned seventeen and signed the contract. Between having to stay home and keep Lois company and the rising worry level, I'd gone on acing every test the school guys could throw at me, and they'd been throwing them at me harder
because
of the early-acceptance Ranger thing that I think they suspected was undue influence or something. Which it was, of course, but not from the direction they were looking in. Also because I kept proving I
could
, which seemed really unfair. If the rat can learn to find the food at the end of this maze, let's try a harder maze. Like just for laughs. I think school-equivalency bozos have too much time on their hands.

Why I still wanted to take all these stupid languages I was so bad at if I was going to be a Ranger no one ever asked me (if I'd wanted to make myself useful as a foreign tourist guide I should have been choosing Swahili or Catalan, the Rangers've already got most of the big languages covered)—but then I never let on how much I sweated those tests. And I guess it was a way for me (and maybe Dad) to pretend I still might get a PhD some day.

We cooked it up that Lois and I would stay at Westcamp, which was the smallest and the least used of the permanent camps, and study the incidence and patterning of found dragon scales, and any other signs of dragons, in that area. There'd already been dragon tracking studies at South, Limestone and High camps—North and East were too close to the Institute to bother—but nobody had bothered at Westcamp either even though it should have been the right general area. But there were too few dragon sightings there and grant writers had to go for numbers because the money givers tend to understand numbers.

But Dad had actually wanted a dragon survey done at Westcamp for years because what signs and sightings there were were odd, even for dragons, and that was why Westcamp had been built, and Dad might have done the study himself if Mom hadn't died. Maybe that was why he let Billy and me talk him into letting me go. Maybe he'd been trying to get used to the fact that I really wasn't going to be totally answerable to him any more soon enough anyway—and while Dad's a control freak he tries to be a
fair
control freak, and he
would
have been thinking about this. And not letting me out of his sight just wasn't an issue after Lois, it no longer existed in the new universe with Lois in it.

Maybe he'd been braced for my asking to do something much worse. I'd thought of worse things, certainly. I'd thought of trying to go to Silver Valley where we all knew there were dragons, and trying to introduce Lois there, like taking your kid to the local playground to meet other kids. I doubted that would work, and I also—selfishly if you like—didn't want to die, which seemed to me a possible side effect. I know I keep saying dragons don't kill people, but don't forget
we'd
just killed not just any old few dragons but a mom and her babies, and even if this didn't piss them off it could certainly have made them
twitchy
.

Because the dragons seemed to have noticed the poacher too, or the death of Lois' mother, after all. They're only animals, right? What really would they notice? Everybody dies, even dragons. I might keep telling myself that the dragon dreams were only dreams and what I remembered about Lois' mom was just some side effect of how awful that had been…but I kept remembering and I kept having the dreams and they had an effect. So I didn't seem to have the luxury of the old they're-only-animals thing much any more. What I kept thinking instead was stuff like if there'd been any other dragons on the spot, presumably they'd've taken Lois with them before I got there—perhaps if they'd got there soon enough they'd have rescued some of her brothers and sisters too—and all these thoughts brought me back to the pissed-off place. The weird thing, it seemed to me, was that it seemed to have taken almost two years for them
to
notice.

But the dragon movements that the Rangers could read had changed…and then a busload of tourists had been thrilled, almost into seizures, by the sight of a real live dragon flying by. It was so far away it was only just recognizable—but there really isn't anything that looks like a dragon except a dragon, if it's big enough to be even a speck with wings. A weirdly long and humpy speck with fantastically long wings, even as a speck.

And no ordinary tour-bus tourists had ever seen a live dragon before in the history of Smokehill.

It was a headline in our local papers and it made the national wire service. (Martha told me that the Searles tried to insist that we'd faked it somehow to get the public on our side, but this time the public definitely liked our version better.) As a result we got even more tourists, and we were already getting more tourists because of the Searles and their vendetta. But while a bunch of tourists seeing a dragon
really
made our numbers soar, which we were just about able to deal with and the money was nice, that made it even more urgent that Lois and I get as far away from the tourist area of Smokehill as possible.

I said we were just about able to deal with the latest increase in numbers. Usually we have like one person a year who manages to get away from their guide and start poking around where they're not wanted. In the two months after the tourists saw the dragon we had
three
escapees, and one of them (from where Nate had found him) must have gone right past our cottage. What if it had been one of the afternoons that Lois and I were outdoors training each other to fetch sticks and roll over and play dead? And talk. It wasn't. But it might have been. It was right after that that I asked Billy to help us think up a project to take us deep into the park.

The last week at the Institute I was jumping at shadows and I had to control myself really hard when I went down to the zoo because Eric knew I was leaving and while I suppose the idea that
you're
going to be stuck cleaning
odorata
's cage more often—I was cleaning it twice a week again by then—is enough to put anyone in a bad mood, Eric on a tear makes Krakatoa look like a hibachi. I was having a lot of trouble not giving him any kind of reaction that would please him. At least I could scowl because since I was a teenage boy my face was expected to be paralyzed in a sullen adult-defying expression till my twentieth birthday. But I really wanted to tell him to get the hell off me and
then
what to do with himself, only he would have enjoyed that. He got on my nerves so much I nearly put a pitchfork through my foot, which would have been really
great
, since it would have stopped me from taking Lois to Westcamp, and that made me even madder.

“It's just that he's worried about Smokehill too,” Martha said in an undertone, as we were cleaning out one of the raccoon cages at the orphanage the next day. I blinked at her. I hadn't realized she'd gotten over being afraid of him in the last two years. I wanted to say that what Eric worried about was
Eric
but I was two years older too and I finally knew what Dad had been talking about when he'd told me that we were lucky to have him. Although why it was like he had to make up for all the good stuff and hard work he did by being sheer torture to be around is one of those mysteries of life.

“He got worse right after the poacher got killed,” Martha went on. Well, I knew that, but at the time I was too Lois-possessed to recognize any subtleties about worseness, beyond the part about him cleaning
odorata
's cage more often because I wasn't available. And since then while I still put my away-from-Lois hours in as evenly around the Institute as I could I really dreaded the time within hoarse-bellow range of Eric, which I hadn't before, and lately, when I'd started taking three or even four hours away from Lois, one and a half in the morning and maybe two and a half in the afternoon, depending on how mellow she seemed to be feeling about it, that meant I had to show up at the zoo every day and I felt like Eric was leaving worse marks on me than Lois ever did.

“And he's got worse again lately,” she added. “I'm quite worried about him really.” She looked over her shoulder—toward the noise of Eric's voice roaring about something or other—with a tiny frown and she looked all grown-up and wise.

“Only you—or your mother—would waste time worrying about Eric,” I said, probably rather bitterly.

Martha was silent for a minute while we lifted the raccoons back into their nice clean cage and gave them a few peanuts to make them think the process was worthwhile. Raccoons are pretty easy if you're nice to them. It doesn't have to be a hugely complicated niceness with raccoons. When I'd first had Lois some of the orphans didn't like me for a while; I suppose I must have smelled like the enemy although I can't really see a dragon bothering with little stuff like chipmunks and sparrows. It was the raccoons that were willing to overlook my kinky new smell first and then in one of those weird ripple effect things everybody else decided that I was still okay too, as much as any human (any human bearing food) was okay and I'd never had any trouble since and occasionally something seemed to like me better. I'd had my first hands-on experience with a Yukon wolf cub about ten months before. (Because of Julie when San Diego's nursing bitch died they sent her one surviving cub to Eric.) It still hadn't started biting me—I don't mean puppy bites, I mean
biting
—weeks after everybody else was wearing heavy gloves and boots, including Eric. Curiosity probably killed the raccoon about the same time it killed the cat though.

Finally Martha said, “I know he picks on you. But he has to pick on someone and you're—you're really the most
Smokehilly
of all of us, you know? You've got that same okay-maybe-there's-a-world-out-there-but-I'm-not-interested thing that he does. You were like that before—before.” Even out of earshot of anyone else, away from Lois you didn't say her name. “Even your dad and my mom have more of a clue.”

I looked at her and felt my look turning into a glare. The idea that I was even more clueless than my dad wasn't going over too well either. “Are you trying to tell me that Eric hates me because I'm
like
him?”

Martha laughed. (She wasn't afraid of me at all.) “No. I think he picks on you because you're what he'd've liked to have been. Do you know he grew up in the city? Washington, DC. Twelve stories up. He started out with goldfish and turtles because they were small and cheap and they didn't make a lot of noise, and he could get them past his parents, who were some kind of lawyers for the government.” Which only goes to prove that Martha can get
anyone
to tell her their life story. “And you know I think he's horrible to the investigators deliberately. Let them waste their time on him.”

It kind of made me thoughtful, especially since Martha had the same idea about Eric and the investigators as I'd had. I might've come up with the idea out of perversity as much as anything, but Martha was coming at it straight on and still thought so. So on the last day—I'd be leaving before dawn the next morning, the better to smuggle Lois past anyone who might be looking blearily out their kitchen window waiting for the kettle to boil—I actually tracked him down in his office. I admit I wavered on the threshold, before he'd seen me.

He was crouched over his computer (very unhealthy posture: someone should tell him: not me) where he was surrounded by piles of papers even scarier-looking than my dad's—this was partly because the window was always open in there (any time the temperature was above freezing) and not only wind and rain came through but also Eric's crow and this summer's crow offspring. A lot of crows croaking and creaking together actually sound a lot like Eric (in a
good
mood). But it was only Eric (muttering to himself) this afternoon.

I stepped firmly over the doorsill and as Eric whirled around in his chair with a scowl no mere teenage boy could hope to compete with, I said, “I just wanted to say thanks for everything you've taught me about—about animals. And stuff. It's going to be really useful when I'm out at Westcamp.”

He'd stood up when he recognized who it was, which didn't help his mood any because in the last year I'd got seriously taller than he was, and with him glaring at me I forgot the rest of what I was going to say. So I stuck my hand out instead. This was
not
planned. There is
no way
I would have
planned
such a great opportunity for Eric to make a jerk out of me, when he refused to shake it. But he did. Shake it, I mean. It felt like a perfectly normal hand too. A little more callused than some, maybe—like a Ranger's hand. And then I turned and fled. Trying not to look like I was fleeing, of course, but I was. But Eric must have been as spooked as I was because he didn't shout anything after me.

So I got back to Billy and Grace's house—my house for the last almost two years—actually feeling kind of good, like I'd achieved something. I was in a bad way.