Hydra (22 page)

“Jala!” Zilpha and I shout in unison, both of us bounding through the woods in the direction of her scream.

I reach the area first, but I don’t see anything. I’m casting about with my flashlight when I see three more beams moving swiftly through the woods toward us.

“Wren? Zilpha? Are you okay?” It’s my mother’s voice.

And Xalil’s voice is mixed with hers. “Jala? Girls? Are you okay?”

Their questions grow in volume—they seem more concerned about our safety than the risk of giving away our presence to Eudora or any of her spies who might be about. And their flashlight beams grow brighter as they near us, even as I search the woods, looking for Jala.

“Oh, ow. Yes, I think I’m okay.” Jala’s voice echoes distantly from somewhere, but I can’t see where. It almost sounds like she’s…below us?

I turn my flashlight beam in the direction where her words seemed to originate. There’s no one there, but I’m close enough now I can see that what looked, from a distance, like the skeletal outline of the limbs of a fallen tree, is, in fact, the skeletal outline of…a skeleton.

Several skeletons, actually.

Not human. Bigger than human. Mostly elk, I think, and maybe bear.

Felix runs toward the bones, which are lit by the beam of my flashlight and now his, as well.

“Careful!” Jala calls up from somewhere still out of sight. “Watch your step or you’ll land on me!”

“Where are you?” Felix asks.

“Turn your lights off.”

We obey Jala’s request, even though it seems strange. Only in the absence of our light beams can we see the faint glow of Jala’s light shining upward from somewhere underground.

Felix and I approach the spot cautiously.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Felix asks.

“I scraped my arm on the rock as I fell,” Jala confesses. “And I thought I might have twisted my ankle, but maybe I just wrenched it. I can put weight on it. Can you see to help me up?”

“I’d rather help myself down.” Felix sits on a lip of stone, then disappears downward.

I train my light on the spot.

There’s an opening in the ground, a natural fissure in the stone, like a narrow, deep ravine, no more than four or five feet long, and hardly two feet wide at its widest point. But it’s deep—maybe ten feet deep, and the floor slopes off out of sight under the lip of stone I’m standing on.

“Jala? Are you okay?” Xalil finally reaches the rest of us. My mother and Zilpha have come up and had a peek, then ducked back to investigate the animal skeletons while Jala assures her grandfather she isn’t seriously hurt.

Felix offers to boost her back up, and she stands on his bent knees and reaches for my hands. I pull her up, then hop down in her place as Felix shines his flashlight beam around the subterranean space.

“It’s a cave,” he observes. “A deep cave.”

“Any sign of Eudora down there?” Mom asks from above.

“Nothing that I can see.” Felix has his light trained on one rock wall, which is jutted and uneven. Footprints mar the dirt. I start to head that direction to investigate when my mom’s words pull me up short.

“I think you need to come back up from down there,” my mom informs us. She’s looking down into the hole from above, her flashlight beam joining ours.

“But look, Mom. Footprints,” Felix points out.

“Yes—and you’re leaving footprints of your own. Did you think of that? Come up out of there. It’s getting late—that dragon could come back anytime, and if you’re in his cave he might leave and never come back, and we’ll never know who he was or if there were any more of him.”

Felix helps boost me up toward my mother, but asks, “Do you really think this is the dragon’s cave? The entrance isn’t big enough for a dragon, not in dragon form.”

“The dragon must come and go as a human. Look at these elk bones. They’re recent kills, the marrow sucked out, but the bones aren’t fully dried.” My mom catches Felix by the hand as he leaps toward the lip of the cave, bounding atop a small boulder from below. She pulls him out.

My brother and I inspect the bones, which look similar to those we’ve left behind after dinner the last few nights. “Sure looks like a dragon’s been here,” I agree. Either that or some other large, carnivorous beast.

“This is the same area where Eudora disappeared before,” Xalil informs us solemnly. “She must have gone into that cave, perhaps to meet with the dragon. It’s getting late—near the time the dragon arrived before. We should hide and watch from a distance.”

Everyone agrees Xalil’s idea is a good one, but my mother also suggests some of us could go back to the cabin to find out what the men have learned about the lake.

I volunteer to be part of the group that returns. Don’t get me wrong—I’m as curious as anyone about what’s been going on at this cave, and with the dragon, and everything, but far more than that, I want to make sure Ed’s okay and find out what he learned.

Besides which, I know Zilpha and Felix are both hoping this new dragon might be a potential mate, so they want to stick around to make sure the dragon doesn’t get away, and maybe get a head start on flirting with him or her. And much as I want Zilpha to get together with Ed, mostly I just want Zilpha to be happy.

Jala wants to rest her ankle a bit longer, so she agrees to stay behind with Felix and Zilpha while Xalil leads me and my mother back toward the cabin. Xalil scouts ahead, finding the path in the darkness, and my mother and I follow at a bit of a distance, keeping his flashlight beam in sight.

We walk in silence for a bit. Once we’re well out of earshot of those we’ve left behind, I inform my mother bluntly, “I’m not mad at you.” And then, when she doesn’t respond right away, I ask, “Are you mad at me?”

“I’m not mad. I’m…concerned.”

“Concerned why? How? For my safety?”

“I’m always concerned for my kids’ safety,” my mom admits, “now more than ever, since we’re on this dangerous mission. But no, I’m concerned you may be making a choice you’ll later regret.”

Her words hit me kind of low, like a punch to the stomach, and for a few minutes I’m quiet again, trying to digest what she’s said. It’s funny, because this whole time, pretty much from the moment we got to Nattertinny Castle, I’ve felt like I need to be on my guard, to protect myself from falling into something I’d regret. Or starting something. But perhaps I have started something, the very thing I’ve been trying not to start.

So finally, sick of stewing over what she must mean, I ask, “What choice?”

Mom sighs. “Ed.”

“Ed.” I repeat. Zilpha had said she and my mom both agreed. “You and Zilpha think that I…” I swallow back the rest of the words. I can’t say them. I’ve fought against them for too long to say them now.

“Why are you so scared of it?” My mother asks in a whisper, as though she’s afraid she’ll frighten me away from the subject if she speaks at full volume.

She doesn’t say what “it” is, but I know. Marriage. And I’ve thought about this a lot lately, mostly because my mother and now my sister keep bringing the subject up. So I put it in the best words I can. “Remember how you used to tell us stories about your childhood and going away to Saint Evangeline’s School for Girls, and how one of the worst part wasn’t the food or the dreary cold or even being away from your family—”

“Those were all the worst parts,” my mom assures me.

“But the
worst
worst part was that they made you wear shoes.”

“Ugh, yes. That was the worst. Not in a big way, but in a constantly oppressive sort of way.”

“That’s what it feels like, Mom. That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“Shoes?”

“No. Being…fettered. Shackled. Constrained. Restricted. I mean, I haven’t even ever been on my own yet. I’ve never yet been
me
. I can’t be a
we
until I’ve learned who
I
am. I’m not ready to be fettered.”

“Love doesn’t fetter you.”

“Not love, Mom.
Marriage
.”

“Marriage?” My mom suddenly sounds horrified. “Marriage? First of all, no, marriage doesn’t shackle you. But Wren, Sweet Baby Doll,” (Don’t ask me why my mom sometimes calls us kids
Sweet Baby Doll
. For being a wicked cool dragon, she can sometimes be embarrassingly sentimental.) “You don’t have to marry Ed. Not anytime soon.” She laughs. “You’re both immortal. He’s lived hundreds of years, I think he’d be willing to wait a few more. Just don’t push him away, or hurt him. Don’t shut down a good thing.”

So then we tromp through the woods in silence a lot longer, because I don’t know how to respond to what my mom is saying. Aren’t love and marriage the same thing? Love, marriage...a baby in a baby carriage? I’m pretty sure that’s what I’ve always heard. And anyway, hasn’t that been the whole point of finding dragon men all along, so we can marry them and have dragon babies?

And then we get to the spy cabin (I know it doesn’t feel as though it took nearly as long on the way back as it did on the way out, but we aren’t looking for signs of where Eudora may have disappeared anymore, and we walked in silence a good bit).

The men have the camera footage playing on the large monitor as Xalil and my mom and I enter the room behind them. The screen is filled with the swarming shapes of the yagi. They are even creepier up close.

Though I’m repelled by the sight, I hurry over for a closer look.

“I don’t see any fish in the lake,” Ram observes aloud. “I think they must have eaten them all, and now they’ve gone cannibalistic.”

“What?” I hadn’t thought about water yagi actually eating anything. Especially not each other. “I can’t imagine that tasting good.”

“You missed it,” my dad explains. “The camera caught a yagi eating another yagi. Ram’s theory makes sense—the lake is overpopulated with these creatures. They’ve eaten all the fish, so now they’re desperate enough to turn on each other.”

Ed’s sitting in the chair in front of the computer, with the camera equipment connected by cables, zooming in here and there and fiddling with the brightness settings to try to improve the picture. I clamp my hands on his shoulders. “You can’t go in that lake.”

“But I have to. We were just discussin’ the plan before ye arrived.”

“Ed!” There might be a note of panic in my voice. Just a tiny one. “The water yagi will
eat
you.”

“Not if I’m a sea dragon. They canna pierce me armor.”

“You don’t know for sure they can’t. Maybe those other water yagi were early models, and these new improved ones can eat you just like they eat each other.” As I’m talking, a water yagi swims close to the camera, teeth bared, as if to reinforce the threat.

“But I have to go in the water,” Ed explains patiently, pointing to the screen as the underwater scene unfolds. “We found where they’re comin’ from. There’s an underground stream that’s spittin’ out small ones. That’s why the larger ones are feedin’ here—these are the newest, weakest yagi. All I have to do is swim up that stream, and I’ll find the source of the water yagi. Then I can destroy it.”

“And we’ve got to act quickly,” my dad adds, so close on the tails of Ed’s words that I don’t even have time to voice the fear that’s freezing inside my veins at the thought of what might happen to Ed in the lake. “Now that Ram and I have changed into dragons, we may have been seen. Eudora may even now be making preparations to launch an attack against us, or to move her operation. If she does that, we’ll lose our chance to destroy it.”

“I’m ready.” Ed stands and turns toward the door.

“Wait. What? Just like that?” I head after him.

He turns part way around, but he’s still headed outside. “I’ve got me sword, got me daggers. Might as well go now. There’s no gain in waitin’, and plenty to lose.”

Ed’s plan seems crazy dangerous to me, but my dad and Ram act like it’s the only sensible option.

“I want to bring the camera equipment again,” Ram notes, disconnecting it from the computer. “That way we can see how you’re doing underwater.”

“Won’t be able to see me fer long.” Ed notes, but doesn’t argue further.

While my dad helps my brother with the camera equipment, I tug Ed by the sleeve out to the porch. If he’s going in that dangerous water, I need to say what I can quickly. Who knows if I’ll get another chance?

Ed looks at me with that familiar raised eyebrow of curiosity, the one that says he knows I have something to say, and he wants to hear it.

“I’m afraid.” I announce without preamble.

Ed raises the other eyebrow as if to open the floodgates of confession.

But I’m stuck. I’m not sure what I’m confessing, exactly—just that I might sort of somewhat care about Ed, and love and marriage may not be the same thing, but what do I know about either?

“Yer afeared? Of the lake?”

“Well, that too,” I acknowledge. I’m afraid the lake might claim Ed before I get a chance to explain myself—that he might never know how I truly feel. But all that’s stopped up by the fact that
I
don’t know how I truly feel.