Hydra (8 page)

Now my mom stands. She’s not so much angry as pleading. “Dragons are almost extinct, Wren. My goal, my only purpose in life ever since I learned who I was and fell in love with your father, has been to do my part to keep dragons from going extinct.”

“You had five kids, Mom. You’ve done your part.”

“Only if those five kids find mates and have children of their own.”

I stagger backwards a couple of steps. Didn’t we just have a conversation last evening, in which my mom more or less said she understood that I was never going to find a mate and have kids? Or was she only agreeing that we should let my sisters have first dibs on the Sheehy brothers? “Mom, what are you saying?”

“I don’t want you to get hurt. I don’t understand why you think you need to go to the one spot on earth where you came closest to dying. I brought you into this world so you could live and have dragon babies of your own someday.”

I breathe out a long breath and try to overlook everything she just said about dragon babies. I could say a lot of things on that subject, but none of them is going to get me any closer to the Caspian Sea. Instead, I focus on
my
goal, which is to figure out what attacked me so I can make sure I’m never, ever caught off guard, attacked, and nearly killed, ever again.

“Mom, we’ll be careful. Ed saved me from the bull last night, remember? And Malcolm Sheehy said Ed’s very safe, the best person on earth to take a person to Loch Ness. I think he’s the best person on earth to keep me safe at the Caspian Sea, too. So unless we’re all planning to avoid the Caspian Sea for the rest of our lives, I think I’ll be safest if Ed finds out what’s out there. If there’s anything out there.” I add in that last part out of deference to her seaweed theory, not because I believe it for a second, but because I know if I don’t acknowledge it, she’ll drag it into the conversation again.

Mom makes a face. It’s one of her faces from right out of the mistakes-that-age-you articles, with her lips all pursed and pinchy, and her brow furrowed like one of those before-Botox pictures.

Just when I’m starting to think her face is going to freeze that way if she holds that expression any longer, she gives me one of those looks that says she’ll consider giving her permission, on one condition.

I brace myself for what that condition might be.

Mom sets down her book and turns toward the door with an air of finality. “I need to talk to Ed first.”

“Ed’s in the courtyard roasting a cow,” I inform my mother, then follow her there.

I can smell the roasting meat before we even step outside. As promised, Ed has an entire beef carcass roasting on the spit in the courtyard.

He turns and smiles as we enter. “Lunch’ll be ready in just a few minutes.”

“Ed?” My mom pronounces it correctly, with the long
e
sound. “I need to talk to you.”

“Alright.”

She glances back at me. “Alone.”

“What?” I look around the courtyard. It’s just me. What’s she going to say to Ed that I’m not supposed to hear? “I’m just here for lunch. Don’t mind me.”

But Ed takes my mom through the wooden door in the curtain wall, leaving me alone with the roasting beef.

I stand there for a few minutes, waiting, listening, but I can’t hear anything of what they’re saying, and I’m pretty sure the meat is ready to eat. “I’m just going to help myself to lunch.” I call out.

“Fine,” Ed’s voice carries back over the wall.

So I use Ed’s sword and the pitchfork utensil to cut myself a heaping portion, though it’s not as easy as Ed made it look last evening, and I sit down and eat, every minute expecting them to return through the door in the wall, but they’re taking their time over there and don’t return to the courtyard until I’m halfway through my second helping of steak.

“What did you guys talk about?” I ask when they finally return.

Ed looks chastened and doesn’t answer.

“If we’d wanted you to know, we’d have included you in the conversation.” Mom grabs a plate and waits for Ed to cut her some meat.

“Mom. Secrets?” I’m calling her out on breaking her own rule. My mom hates secrets on account of her dad didn’t tell her she was a dragon until she was eighteen years old. Even though it was for her own protection, she was still offended that he kept something so important from her for so long, so now she has a policy against keeping secrets unless it’s absolutely necessary.

But she carries her plate over to the table and sits beside me, shaking her head vigorously. “We just had a talk.”

“Then why can’t you tell me what it was about?”

“You’ll know when you need to know, dear.” She tears into her meat with the kind of total absorption that says our conversation is over.

Ed carries a plate over and sits opposite us, again at the far corner. But this time, I got smart and sat in the middle of the table. My mom is on the other side of me, furthest from Ed.

So maybe it’s not so much that he doesn’t want to sit by me, as that he’s done talking to my mom, at least for now.

Respecting that, I eat in silence, consumed with chewing and swallowing (if I’m going to build my strength up for a long flight carrying someone as heavy as Ed, I need to eat). When I look over at Ed a few moments later, he’s looking at me, a half smile on his lips even though he’s chewing, and a gleam in his eyes I can see even through the dusky contacts.

When he sees me looking back at him, he smiles bigger.

I can’t help smiling back. I mean, how many people can say they’ve eaten a steak dinner with the Loch Ness Monster? Even if he’s not a monster.

*

The rest of the day is consumed with preparations. I study maps with my mom, making sure I know exactly where the safe resting spot is in Romania, a little over halfway to home. I don’t have any swords with me on account of we flew here in an airplane, and can you imagine trying to get those past security? Even if we packed them in our checked luggage, it’s not worth it to draw attention to ourselves.

But that means we’ll only have Ed’s broadsword and some knives with us for the journey. Normally, I know, most people don’t worry about bringing swords and knives with them when they travel, not even through Romania, but we’re not most people.

As I may have mentioned before, dragons are nearly extinct, and the reason for that is because we’ve been hunted down and killed so that we’re almost all gone. Plenty of predators have contributed to our demise over the centuries, but our biggest enemy is currently a woman named Eudora, the very same person who lured my grandmother Faye to Siberia, which ultimately led to her death.

Eudora is not technically the one who killed my grandmother. She was behind her death, but the final blow was dealt by the yagi, which are these creepy soulless creatures Eudora created in a lab during World War Two. The yagi are a crossbreed between mercenary soldiers, and cockroaches. I know, I know, those two things don’t seem remotely compatible, and normally they wouldn’t be, but Eudora used dark magic to meld their DNA. The yagi are dragon hunters. They exist for one purpose: to hunt down and kill dragons.

The other thing about Eudora is, besides trying kill off all the dragons in the world, she’s also furious at my mom, on account of my mom is the one who changed Eudora from being a dragon, to only human. Which you would think, given how much she hates dragons, would make Eudora happy, except that Eudora has always said the best weapon against a dragon is another dragon, and now that she’s no longer a dragon, she’s lost some of her skills, but none of her ruthlessness on her quest for dragon blood.

So the big thing about the trip will be staying out of sight, both out of human sight and away from the yagi. We’ll fly at night, even though that’s when the yagi are most active. We have no choice. If we flew in the daytime, we could be easily seen by anyone. Even at night, we have to keep our glow to a minimum, avoid flying over populated areas, and stay low enough to avoid radar detection.

And in case you’re wondering, there’s a zillion reasons why we don’t want humans to see us. For one thing, humans don’t realize we exist, so seeing us would freak them out and maybe, considering how many people carry phones with cameras and even video capability these days, cause a sensation and mass hysteria, besides giving Eudora a huge clue to our whereabouts.

But more than mass hysteria, which would be ugly but not necessarily fatal, we can’t let the humans know we exist because traditionally, humans have been dragons’ greatest enemies. They’re afraid of us, so their first instinct is to kill us. Even if they let us live, they’d probably round us up and study us in a lab somewhere, or dissect us slowly to figure out what makes us different. And if they realized we had treasure hoards hidden away, they’d for sure confiscate those.

The only humans who are allowed to know who we are, are the members of the dragon world—the trusted few who love and support us, and rely on us for protection. That’s how it worked for untold millennia, you know. Every village used to have their own dragon. The dragons kept the peace, watched over their people, and generally made life pleasant for human beings.

But then land-hungry, power-hungry, war-hungry people began to realize that to conquer their neighbors, all they had to do was defeat their dragons. The great conquerors recognized that killing dragons was hard work, but they discovered that if they could turn people against their own dragons, the people would all but defeat themselves, slaying their own dragons and thereby clearing the way for invaders to conquer them.

That’s where all the bad stories about dragons started. You’ve probably heard them—myths that claim dragons are horrible, cattle-stealing, land-scorching, maiden-sacrificing beasts.

We’re not. As far as I know, none of us have ever done any of those things. Even if it happened once or twice, it was always the exception, and probably for some good reason, like stealing a cow to feed a hungry village, or something.

But whatever. With rumors like that saturating human consciousness, we simply can’t let ourselves be seen, so I’ll be flying low, by night, with Ed on my back, all the way to Azerbaijan.

“You have to check in with your father before you go to the sea,” my mom insists as we’re uploading maps to my tablet (which I charged) so that I can check it if I need to, even if there’s no Wi-Fi signal. “Ever since your attack, he’s been looking into what you may have encountered in the sea.”

This is news to me. “I thought you guys had written it off as seaweed.”

My mom sighs. “I would like for it to just be seaweed. Wouldn’t that be so much easier for everyone if it was something innocent, and not an unknown enemy hunting us from beneath the water?”

“Except that if it’s not seaweed, we need to know so we can defend ourselves.”

“That’s why I’m letting you go, even though it scares me so much,” my mom’s voice hitches up a tiny, emotional notch. “You
will
talk to your father first, won’t you?”

“Of course I will.” Crap, she’s not going to cry on me, is she? My mom likes to think of herself as this fierce dragon, and all, but she cries sometimes. And sometimes, when
she
cries,
I
cry.

I do
not
need that right now. I clear my throat. “What has Dad found out?”

“I don’t know any details. You know we can’t discuss these things over the phone.” My mom and dad have this policy—which is probably prudent, all things considered—against saying anything over the phone that might give away that we’re dragons, on account of someone (like maybe Eudora) could be listening in. “But his spies have reported Eudora’s been visiting a Siberian lake for several years now.”

“And you didn’t say anything sooner?”

“We don’t know why she’s been visiting the lake. It could be anything.”

“And it could be that she’s making water yagi.” I invent a term that’s really not anything new, just the combination of two of my greatest fears—the yagi, and whatever attacked me in the water. But if Eudora is part of the equation, it makes sense. Too much sense.

“The spies haven’t seen anything conclusive.”

“How close have they gotten?”

“Not close enough to be seen.”

“Hmm.” I don’t say anything more, because what else is there to say? If dad’s spies don’t get close enough to be seen, they’re really not going to be able to see too many details, not even with binoculars. But I can’t be too picky, because the spies aren’t really high tech secret agents or anything, just villagers from our tiny mountain kingdom, who care enough about our welfare to make sure we know what Eudora’s up to, even at the risk of their own lives.

If it hadn’t been for our spies, my grandfather would never have known that Eudora had my grandmother Faye locked away in her lair. And my grandparents never would have met and neither my mother nor any of us kids would exist. Dragons would be even closer to being extinct than we are right now.

So I appreciate the spies. I just wish there was more they could tell us, on account of, you know, my life and maybe even Ed’s life depends on what’s under the surface of the sea, whether Eudora specifically bred it with black magic to kill us, and what abilities she may have given it for doing so.

“I think I have everything I need,” I announce as I tuck my tablet into my backpack. Normally I’d wear the pack on my back, but with Ed riding there, it might get awkward, so he can wear it for me, along with whatever he’s packed for himself.

“It’s not yet night,” Mom notes, her way of telling me I can’t leave yet. “It won’t be dark for another hour or two.”

“But have you seen the low-lying cloud cover? I checked the weather radar. The clouds stretch to the North Sea. If I fly east from here, I’ll be hidden by clouds, then over the water for a good stretch. By the time I reach the coast of the Netherlands or Germany or wherever I hit the mainland, it’ll be plenty dark out. I’ve got to make it over halfway to get to our safe place in Romania.”

My mom gives me that resigned look that says she’d argue with me if she could find any fault with my plan, but she can’t, so she’ll have to resign herself to watching me fly off toward danger even sooner than she’d expected. “Let’s see if Ed’s ready, then.”

We find Ed in the courtyard roasting a brace of chickens. “I figured ye might be hungry, but a whole cow would be a heavy meal before flying. Chickens seemed right.”

I can’t help smiling at his thoughtfulness, and also because roast chicken sounds awesome. “Perfect. Then I’m ready to leave.”

I eat a couple chickens, grateful that Ed is an accomplished cook. Fire roasting can be tricky, especially with something relatively small like a chicken. It’s too easy to incinerate the bird completely, or end up with parts undercooked. But Ed’s basted the birds on the spit while cooking them over a low fire, so the meat is juicy and tender.

When we’re finished eating, Ed shows us the underwater camera equipment he’s bringing. It looks like pretty high tech stuff, even if it is a few years old. In Ed years, that’s nothing. I feel slightly better knowing we have a way to look at the monsters before we swim with them. Then Ed carefully stows the equipment in his backpack along with his spare clothes and other supplies. He hoists the pack over his shoulder, along with the huge scabbard that holds his broadsword.

Ed leads me and my mom up the stairs that spiral through the tallest tower of the castle. “Ye mentioned taking off is the hard part, climbing in the air with a burden on yer back. Thought this might make it a touch easier on ye.”

“It will help. Thank you.” I review the plans with Ed, making sure he knows what to expect, since it’s going to be almost impossible for us to talk once I’m in dragon form. Most dragons can’t talk at all. Our forked tongues and the shape of our mouths when we’re dragons make it really tricky to form words. Dragon mouths are made for breathing fire, not speaking words. They’re more like beaks than lips. But my sisters and I used to practice talking as dragons, so I can make sounds that are sometimes recognizable as words. It’s tricky, and far from optimum, but it works in a pinch.