Dragonhaven (26 page)

The way she smelled was kind of the same. It was a monster smell to go with the monster critter but it wasn't a bad smell, exactly, even if you slightly felt that if you peeled it off the dragon somehow and then it like fell on you it would probably crush you just as thoroughly as if the dragon itself sat on you. It was intense. Of course the famous Smokehill dragon smell was always a lot stronger once you got into the park away from the Institute—but here was living fire-breathing proof that the famous Smokehill smell was definitely
dragon.

I tried not to run to the other end of the meadow from wherever she was as soon as she arrived, but I somehow always found myself at the point farthest from her kind of soon after. It gave Lois lots of exercise galumphing between us. Ha. She didn't always come at the same time and she didn't always stay for very long, but she came every day after the first.
Every day.
Every day I got out of bed with a knot in my stomach and wondered if she'd be back. Gulp. And she always was.
Gulp
. We weren't always in the meadow when she arrived either but like being called into your dad's office to get yelled at—I mean when you know that's why you're going—I used to turn around from wherever we were and trudge back there, if we weren't there, to get it over with.

I never didn't see her flying in, although I never really got used to not feeling the ground shake when she landed or as she was walking around. I don't know if we—I—got points for going to meet her or not. First time we weren't there she was sitting up looking around when we arrived. (A sitting-up dragon looks a lot bigger than any two-hundred-foot cliff, just by the way. Dragons have a
corner
on the whole looming thing.) After that first time she was always lying down when we arrived. Like she knew we'd come and she might as well get comfortable. If lying flat
is
comfortable for a dragon, which actually I wonder. But she lay down like I came to the meadow, I think. We were both trying hard.

She never fired at us—well, me—again. Although some days when she showed up she smelled smokier than other days and I wondered if she'd been hunting and if so, what. Oh, Jake,
stop
it. Dragons don't eat people. They never have. As far as we know. They just
could
. What Lois' mom did to that guy was self-defense—she wasn't trying to eat him. And it didn't even work.

But Gulp's first act on seeing me and Lois had been to try and toast me. That was almost as hard to forget as what the dead poacher had looked like.

Lois and I went on with our games, or our lessons, or whatever they were, although my concentration was a tiny bit shot somehow. I was getting used to the pressure, that is pressures, now, in my head, having something more particular to do with Lois than I'd recognized back at the Institute, where I thought it was all just some kind of hangover from the shock of Lois' mom after my mom, plus my la-la dream sense that Lois' mom's ghost or spirit or something was hanging around giving me a hand with things. But now Gulp. There'd been nothing like Gulp at the Institute.

“Getting used to” is a joke though. There was no “getting used to” about it. I was so far out of control in this situation it wasn't worth even
pretending
anything else. If life with Lois the last two years had been sort of day-to-day, I was down to minute-to-minute now, with Gulp around. Maybe second to second. But, I don't know, it was also maybe like the dragon had fried my worry list instead of me. I was still here. New world. New Jake, maybe.

Telepathy in books is always sort of
misty
. All woo-woo and staring earnestly into the middle distance and delicate and sensitive and stuff. This was like having rocks in your head. Ha ha. A whole freaking boulder field, but two of them—one big, one little—were especially active. Having two of them like that was what finally made me begin to pay attention to them as, uh, communication, even if they didn't communicate much besides “ow.”

I don't know how long it might have taken me if it was just Lois and me, but thinking about it, I was pretty sure the real
rock
feeling had only started after Kit left—when Lois and I were alone together. I'd had Lois-related headaches since I'd had Lois, bad headaches, some of them, and kind of
self-motivated
. But they were still all maybe understandable—just—in terms of stress and worry and the boy lost his mother when he was twelve and was a little peculiar after that wasn't he? (Humans always want stuff to be understandable the way they already
do
understand it.) So why
wouldn't
I have visions of old Mom dragon? When I was still dreaming about my own mom, and sometimes I'd woken up from those dreams with headaches too.

It's kind of embarrassing now to remember me assuming that since I was the human I was the only one of us who had anything to teach the other one. But Lois was a
baby
…it wasn't only species arrogance. I hope. I came around pretty quickly after Gulp arrived. I want to believe it's not only because I was too scared to be arrogant.

When Gulp was there she moved her head around to be as near to Lois as she could be, according to some rule of her own (I guessed) about not getting too close. At first Lois ignored her, but I've already said that Lois was curious about everything, and Gulp was far too big and strange not to be interesting. And didn't it occur to Lois that there was something, you know,
familiar
about Gulp? It had been her roar that had jolted Lois out of terror and into defiance. Maybe Lois had just decided that she was going to go down fighting (while her pathetic mom remained glued to the spot, draped in his ripped T-shirt). But she'd reacted to that roar almost as if it meant something to her.

I was really torn, watching Lois begin to pay attention to Gulp, and Gulp trying to respond—I was sure—in a way that would make Lois, well,
like
her. I was torn because this was what saving Lois was supposed to be about: raising her till she could go back and live with dragons and
be a dragon
. Not have to spend the rest of her life at Westcamp or some other human place. If we could figure out how to socialize her first so the dragons would take her. But I hadn't expected to have to think about it so soon (speaking of my reigning tendency to want not to think about things). It would be a huge, HUGE load off if Gulp was going to take Lois away from me…it should be the most WONDERFUL thing, that ultimate miracle I desperately
wanted
for Lois. Why wasn't I leaping for joy? But…I would miss her. A lot. (Duh.) Like I'd maybe adapted too far or something, headache-blasted dragon-mom Jake. Could I
remember
how to be an undragoned human any more?

And even in the middle of worrying about losing Lois and/or being made into humanburger it occurred to me pretty strongly that Gulp was acting, well, weirdly. Isn't it this whole big thing when you try and return a human-reared animal to the wild? It doesn't know how to be what it is, and its real relatives won't have anything to do with it because it stinks of human and doesn't know how to behave. And here was Gulp trying hard to win Lois over—
and
letting me hang around. The first successful reentry of two half-grown Yukon wolf pups to a wild pack had involved the gruesome death of one of the human minders, and they'd given up trying to reintroduce griffins and Caspian walruses and brought them back to their nice cages before they died. Which has to have been really depressing for the humans. (Although less depressing than being eaten by your fosterling's relatives.) I could maybe guess how they felt. (I don't know what they'd've done if they ever found an orphan baby Nessie. Sat down and cried, probably.)

But that's supposed to be at least part of the excuse why saving a dragon's life is against the law. A great big fire-snorting
flying
thing that got a taste, even accidentally, for human was
way
too dangerous. We weren't going to
hand
them any ops. And a smelly hot palm-sized slimy grub that was going to grow into a great big fire-snorting flying thing that couldn't be sent back to live with its relatives was going to be even
more
dangerous. I couldn't bear to think about Lois growing up to be dangerous but…. Maybe the lawmakers weren't quite as stupid as I thought. They probably had in the backs of their tiny mean minds too that humans who do stuff like half kill themselves and/or get paid crap wages and/or live a hundred miles from a decent restaurant and/or have never seen a movie in a real theater, are crazy, or they wouldn't do it, but the reason they do it (besides being crazy) is that they get kind of
fond
of the animals they rescue. Which is maybe the most dangerous thing of all.

The first time I saw Lois climb up Gulp's shoulder and hang over her neck like a two-year-old dragon would do with its own real mom, there was a big lump in my throat that had nothing to do with the prospect of what might happen to me the next time Gulp lost her temper.

But Lois always came back to me—so far. And I didn't know whether I should be trying to persuade her to stay with Gulp, or whether that would just mess her up further. Who knew what she'd had to learn to survive her weird upbringing. I sometimes felt I was “overhearing” conversations between the big rock and the little rock, but if you're going to ask me, I'm going to say that they weren't speaking the same language. Like if a German parent was suddenly reunited with his kid who'd been being raised by a French family. They wouldn't talk to each other very well. And Gulp was always silent, and Lois, having spent her first two years hanging out with yacketing, nontelepathic humans, was always, well, chattering. I wonder if Gulp got this. I hope so.

I didn't talk to Lois anywhere near as much when Gulp was around as when she wasn't, but I still talked to her. For one thing, if Gulp was watching over our shoulders (
brrrrr
) while we played one of our learning games, I needed to hear myself talk about what we were doing to steady myself down. I just didn't chat. It also occurred to me, rather uncomfortably, that if I talked, Gulp might get the idea that Lois didn't talk because she was defective, but because
I
talked. This probably wouldn't make Gulp like me any better, but…well, like what if the German-speaking parent found out that the French family that had been raising his kid were all drug addicts or serial murderers or something? How do you balance the fact that your kid's alive at all because of them with the fact that they're really
bad
for her?

And the little rock in my head got all sort of warm and soft and glowy and gooey every time Lois left Gulp and came galumphing back toward me. I wasn't making it up. I
wasn't
.

 

So, this non-idyll had to end, one way or another, right? It ended a lot sooner and more dramatically than I might have guessed, although if I hadn't been so preoccupied with Gulp I would have picked up that something was going on back at the Institute. Among other things it should have occurred to me that there was no way I was keeping my own interesting new preoccupation to myself. Anyone who had any spare brain for noticing anything except that I was still signing in like I should, should have noticed that I sounded funny. Distracted. Okay,
more
distracted. And they didn't.

I wasted some time trying to figure out some kind of code to get the idea of Gulp across to Martha, but I couldn't think of any. It wasn't anything we'd set up code for. “Hey, guess what, there's this big dragon who comes to visit Lois every day.” We had a phrase (“good sunrise this morning”) for having
seen
dragons, but I was afraid if I said that every day she'd get frightened, so I didn't. I didn't even say it once. It didn't occur to me to say it after Gulp's first visit, because there's a big difference between seeing a dragon or dragons flying gloriously silhouetted against the sky at a nice distance and having a close encounter of an almost fatal kind with a dragon.

I tried to remember if Billy had ever mentioned any close sightings of dragons on the ground—coming around an outcropping or out of a narrow pass or something “gee what's the funny smell, smells like dragon only stronger…oh”—and I couldn't remember any. I personally had never even seen one of the trees they used as scratching posts although Billy had—not till Gulp I mean: and watching her make a big pine tree shake like a sapling in a gale is another of those little awe-inspiring details of time spent in the company of a full-grown dragon. Mostly dragon sign like that is way far in (the scales blow in the wind, so you get them everywhere), farther than I've ever gone. Westcamp's on the edge. It wouldn't have been surprising if I'd, uh, had a good sunrise at Westcamp, but Gulp was cruising out of normal dragon range.

So I should have been worried when I didn't hear from Martha for three days. Martha checked in most days. But all I was was disappointed—and a little worried that maybe she'd tried some time when my radio was pretending to be ornamental art. (Pretending
badly.
Our radios are not beautiful objects.) But since I hadn't figured out how to tell her about Gulp, I wasn't missing talking to her as much, if you follow me. I just wanted to hear her voice. Even radio-squeaky.