The Dragon in the Volcano (8 page)

The next morning, Jesse woke up with a pounding headache. He staggered out of bed and found the backpack sitting on top of the pretend computer. He pulled out the purple canteen and took a swig of Fiery Elixir. While it didn’t taste quite as strong as it had before, he felt almost instantly better.

Daisy stirred in her bed. She rolled over and
groaned. Her face was hot pink against her pale-blond hair, her eyes bloodshot. “Feel my head. I think I might have a fever,” she croaked.

“Here,” Jesse said, holding out the canteen to her. “Have some of this. You’ll feel better.”

Daisy groped for the canteen and took a sip. She sat up and smacked her lips. “You’re right!” she said, looking much more like herself again. “I feel fit as a fiddle.”

“Fit as a
griddle
, you mean,” Jesse said with a laugh.

Emmy appeared in their doorway. “How is everyone this morning?”

Daisy, about to repeat Jesse’s joke, decided not to and said, “We’re fine.”

“Finer than fine,” Jesse said. He could not remember ever having slept so well.

“You were going to show us what you do here instead of reading books,” Daisy said.

“Oh, yes,” Emmy said. “We do this.” She waved her arm across the wall where the window overlooking the driveway would have been if they were at home. Suddenly, it was as if they were peering through the wall into the next room, where Aunt Maggie and Uncle Joe were pacing across a black-and-white-tiled kitchen, each jiggling a tiny, blanketed bundle. One of the babies was crying, and
Uncle Joe was singing a sweet, silly song to it. Somewhere nearby a teakettle rattled and whistled.

“I know where that is! That’s my brother’s kitchen on Mass. Avenue in Cambridge!” Daisy exclaimed.

“They don’t seem to hear us,” Jesse said. “How come we can see them?”

“Because they are standing in front of the gas stove, where there is a fire in the burner,” Emmy said. She waved again. This time, they saw strangers in sombreros, bathed in the red glow of a campfire and singing a song in Spanish to the strains of a guitar. Another wave revealed fire trucks and a family lined up along a sidewalk, clutching pillowcases full of belongings, the reflection of their burning house shining in their wide, anxious eyes. More waves showed people blowing out birthday candles, lighting pipes, and mending fenders with welding torches. Jesse found it more than a little disturbing but also kind of mesmerizing, like staring into a fire.

“Wherever there is a fire in the Earthly Realm, we can see through to it,” Emmy said. “It’s called the Fire Screen. Everybody has one. The fire fairies love to watch the Fire Screen. They get almost all their decorating ideas from it.”

“So how do you control what picture you’re
going to see?” Jesse asked. “Is there some sort of remote channel changer?”

Emmy chuckled. “I use dragon magic,” she said, waving and banishing the screen. “You probably won’t have very much control. You might see something or someone familiar … or you might not.”

“I wonder if that’s what the professor was doing,” Jesse said thoughtfully.

“When?” Daisy asked.

“Last time we saw him. When he was messing around with that pipe. Maybe he was looking in on Emmy in the Fiery Realm.”

“Makes sense to me,” Daisy said.

“Now come along, Keepers,” Emmy said. “We’re due at the royal runching. The fiery mote of my heart awaits me.”

When they stepped out the door, Jesse said, “Nice night.”

It was, in fact, every bit as dark as it had been when they went to bed.

“Do what I do,” Daisy said. “Just pretend you’re wearing sunglasses with dark-red lenses.”

Jesse nodded and looked around with new eyes. “Okay,” he said slowly, “that ought to work.”

When they arrived at the Great Hall, they found that the throne room had been transformed
into the world’s biggest cafeteria. Acres of huge tables stretched out before them. The room roared and flamed with the sound of dragons and fire fairies all talking and laughing at once. One long table stood on a raised platform. Lady Flamina sat at one end and Lord Feldspar at the other, with an assortment of fire fairies and dragons seated in between.

“So this is a runching, eh?” Jesse said, looking around.

“A
royal
runching,” Emmy said. “Jasper and I will be sitting up there with the Grand Beacons and their Aura, but my boons Opal and Galena will keep you company.”

Emmy sat them at a table with her boons, and the three fire fairies, Spark, Flicker, and Fiero, soon flitted over to join them.

“Do you guys go everywhere together?” Jesse asked.

“We didn’t use to,” said Flicker. “But Lady Flamina says we younger fire fairies must now travel in groups … for safety’s sake.”

If there is safety in numbers
, Jesse thought, looking around at the mob,
this is probably the safest place in the Fiery Realm right now
. He wound up seated between Opal and Fiero. Opal was talking to Daisy, so Jesse struck up a conversation with Fiero.
“So do all the fire fairies watch the Fire Screen?”

“Not only watch,” said Fiero. “Some of us even lick in.”

There was that word again. “What’s ‘lick in’ mean?” Jesse asked.

“It means we can join up with the flame in the Earthly Realm and get ourselves a really good look at what’s happening on your side of things,” Fiero said.

“What she isn’t telling you,” Flicker put in shyly from across the table, “is that licking is considered very rude, because it causes reception problems on everyone else’s Fire Screen.”

“Oh, right,” said Jesse, nodding. It was sort of like standing up in a theater and blocking the view of the person behind you.

The roar of the runchers rose to an even higher pitch. Two doors burst open, and a procession of fire fairies and dragons filed in bearing trays and platters piled high with food. Jesse, expecting the food to be weird, was pleasantly surprised to see all sorts of familiar-looking dishes: roast suckling pig and spaghetti with meatballs, hamburgers and hot dogs, tacos and Chinese dumplings, and even pizza pie. It might not be traditional breakfast food, but it looked delicious. A blue dragon draped in a voluminous white apron placed a platter of steaming roast
turkey on their table. Bowls heaped with mashed potatoes, green peas, and yams followed.

“It’s a Thanksgiving feast!” Jesse said, helping himself. “This tastes
great
!” he said after sampling a little of everything.

Daisy nodded enthusiastically and said, “Amazingly good!”

“The secret ingredient—in fact, the
only
ingredient,” Galena said mildly, “is air.”

Jesse and Daisy stopped with their forks halfway to their mouths. “Air?” they asked the lilachued dragon.

Galena nodded. “We’re fire beings here, dragons and fairies alike,” she explained. “All we need is oxygen to keep ourselves going. We whip the oxygen into other forms … just to make it more interesting … and runchable. We get most of our ideas from your world by watching the Fire Screen.”

“Of course!” Jesse said. “Because we cook with fire, so you would see into kitchens all over the world. I bet it’s sort of like watching the Food Channel.”

Jesse dug in again but stopped when he saw that neither Galena nor Opal had touched her plate of food.

Daisy noticed, too. “Aren’t you hungry?” she
asked, with the half-gnawed turkey drumstick halfway to her mouth.

“Actually,” said Opal, the skin above her eyes rumpled with concern, “we wanted to talk to you about Emerald.”

“What she means is,” Galena said, “we’re worried about what will happen when Jasper’s fiery mote comes back from her patrol of the Outer Reaches.”

“Whoa!” Daisy set down her turkey leg slowly. “You’re telling us that Jasper already
has
a mote?”

“So does Emmy know yet that Jasper has a girlfriend—um, mote?” Jesse asked.

Opal shook her head. “I don’t think Jasper has the heart to tell her. He’s afraid … of hurting her feelings.”

“But won’t it hurt her feelings worse the longer he waits?” Daisy said with a pained look on her face.

Jesse looked up at the dais. Emmy and Jasper, foreheads touching, were in a world of their own. It looked like nothing in this realm or any other could ever come between them.

“Emmy thinks they’re TLFEE,” Jesse said.

“What is that?” Galena said.

“True lovers for ever and ever,” Daisy said with a contemptuous wave of her hand. “That’s just some tripe he and Emmy read in
Shimmer
.”

“What’s tripe?” Opal asked.

“What’s shimmer?” Galena wanted to know.

“Tripe is meaningless drivel, and
Shimmer
is a magazine that prints it,” Jesse said.

“For Young Women in the Glow,”
Daisy added with a curl of her lip.

“Well, Emerald is certainly glowing,” Opal said with a worried shake of her head.

“And it’s all that rascal Jasper’s doing,” said Galena.

“The big two-timing galoot!” Daisy said, brandishing her drumstick.

“Shhhh,” Jesse hissed. “Emmy and the big two-timing galoot are headed this way.”

Emmy, strolling beside Jasper, approached their
table and said, “Are you cousins finished with your runching? Because Jasper and I are going to take you for a jaunt in the country.”

Jesse and Daisy nodded dully. Suddenly, both of them had lost their appetites.

“The country is very different from the city,” Emmy explained as, immediately following the runching, they made their way through the streets of the Ruby City toward the outskirts. Here the buildings were lower, though no less dazzling. “It is very wild and sometimes dangerous. You must stay close to me at all times.”

Daisy said, “We’ll be riding on your back, won’t we?”

Daisy was already burning with jealousy of the fire fairies. The cheery little trio had ridden Emmy’s tail all the way to where they now stood at the entrance to a sprawling structure made from ruby and clear quartz bricks. Its long, wide central aisle had stalls on either side. It looked like the stable of an important and very large king. Daisy couldn’t see inside the stalls, but she could hear snorting and stomping, and the air was filled with glittery dust and smoke.

Emmy was shaking her head sadly. “Fire fairies hitchhiking on my tail is one thing, but
you
cannot ride me here in this place. The other dragons would
frown on it. It would be disrespectful to me. Dragons here are very proud. I must learn to have more pride in myself if I am to stay.”

“But we’re your
Keepers
,” Daisy protested. “Can’t they make an exception?”

“No exceptions allowed, but I have the perfect mounts already chosen for you. Fire salamanders!” Her green eyes shone with excitement as she flung open two of the stall doors.

Two six-legged, alligator-size salamanders with red and white stripes slewed out into the aisle. Jesse let out a yip and jumped to one side.

“Meet Speedy and Clipper,” Emmy said proudly. “Aren’t they sweet?”

Daisy gulped. In spite of their playful names and their candy-cane stripes, the fire salamanders were anything but sweet. Red ruffs wreathed their massive heads, through the top of which smoke puffed out of two holes. But Daisy didn’t want to spoil Emmy’s surprise, so she said with grim determination, “What do we hold on to?”

“The ruffles,” Emmy said. She reached down and plucked playfully at the ruff surrounding Clipper’s smoking head. Daisy was surprised to see that Jesse was already gamely perched on Speedy’s back, leaning forward like a jockey braced for the starting gun, baggy flaps of skin gathered up in each hand.

“Do these things fly?” Jesse asked, looking a little pale.

“No,” said Emmy, “but they go like the wind, so hang on tight.”

Daisy scrambled up on Clipper’s back, which was smooth as snakeskin, warm, and a little slippery. Her feet dangled about a foot off the ground. She could feel the creature’s ribs heaving beneath her and hear the rumbling of its guts.
This must be what it feels like to be on a revving motorcycle
, she thought. “Okay. So how do we get them to start and stop?” Daisy asked.

“Don’t worry. They’re herd animals. They’ll go when Jasper and I go and stop when we stop,” Emmy said.

Then they were off, the two fire salamanders neck and neck on the heels of the two bounding dragons.

Daisy was expecting a bumpy ride, so her hands clenched the ruff. She fixed her eyes on the fire fairies bouncing up and down on Emmy’s tail, giving the impression even from a short distance that Emmy’s tail had caught fire. But the ride turned out to be as smooth as velvet, and after a while Daisy’s grip eased and she sat back and took in the sights as well as she could in the perpetually dim light.

Beneath the deep-maroon sky, pendulous blossoms and leaves as long as surfboards grew together in a vast, rubbery, steaming tangle, none of it green. Every so often, the jungle would thin out and reveal a cliff face of dazzling ruby or topaz or a towering butte of sparkling sapphire. Now and then, what Daisy took for a blossom would open its mouth and spit fire and shuffle off into the undergrowth. There were airborne insects here, too, igniting mid-flight like flicked matches, and birds swooping overhead on wings of flame.