The Story of Owen (31 page)

“Okay,” he said.

“For Owen and his loyal bard were hastening north in the bard's intrepid Toyota Corolla,” I said again, backtracking to get back into the groove. “Their destination was Tobermory, and the small boat that would take them to Manitoulin Island, where the dragon eggs were waiting, unhatched and, if the lure in Saltrock had worked, unguarded.”

I was so caught up in the story that I nearly blew through the red light where Country Road 10 turned into Highway 6 and intersected with 21. There wasn't anything around to hit, but it was the first traffic light we'd seen in an hour, and missing it would have been a shame. It would have been faster to take Highway 21, but that road hugged the lake and was, for obvious reasons, a bad idea tonight.

“After driving quite safely and legally all the way to Tobermory,” I continued, having gotten the car back into fifth gear after its sudden stop, “Owen boarded the waiting tug and made his way to Manitoulin Island, where he found the waiting dragon eggs as unhatched and as unguarded as he had hoped.

“Using the flamethrower built by his multitalented Aunt Hannah, Owen ignited the eggs, causing flames from one end of the island to the other. They burned all day long, and when the sun set and the flames were extinguished, nothing remained of Manitoulin but the Precambrian Shield from which it came, and the dock where the boat was moored so that Owen could make his journey back to civilization.”

“Convenient,” Owen murmured. I ignored him.

“Thus did Owen, dragon slayer of Trondheim, return home to much glory and success. And birthday cake! As he had recently turned seventeen.”

“I like that story,” Owen said, after a few moments of silence had passed.

“So do I,” I told him.

But that's not what happened.

The boat was ready, just as promised, and rigged so that I could drive the car right onto the deck behind the wheelhouse. We were installed on the boat by just after three in the morning, having stopped for gas and a brief meal at the Mountie station. We weren't due to take the boat out until daylight, or until the dragons deserted the island, whichever came first. Even though I thought I was too tightly wound to sleep, I must have drifted off because the next thing I remember after putting the parking brake on was Owen gently shaking my shoulder to wake me up. There was a strange sound, unlike anything I had ever heard before. It was like the softest percussion imaginable played by hundreds of musicians; the slow, soft roll of brushes, multiplied a hundredfold.

Owen was leaning forward and looking up. I unfastened my seatbelt and mirrored his movement, squirming to avoid accidentally pressing the horn. What I saw very nearly stopped my heart.

There were dragons in the sky, hundreds of them, and some not very far above the car. The whisper I could hear was the sound of their wings cutting through the morning air as they flew. They were leaving Manitoulin, and they were heading for Saltrock.

I like to consider myself a fairly rational person. I knew that these dragons had already zoned in on a carbon source and were unlikely to turn away from it for any reason. I knew that the car hadn't been turned on in hours and that any carbon it had emitted had long since dissipated. I knew that the dragons were flying so quickly they probably didn't even see us. But that didn't stop the bubble of absolute panic that rose in my chest. I fought down a scream and sat back, my knuckles whitening around the steering wheel.

Owen pried my fingers loose, also careful to avoid the horn, and laced his fingers with mine. We sat there in complete silence, hardly daring to breathe, until the last of the dragons passed over our heads and out of our sight down the coastline. Then I pulled my hands back into my lap and took a deep breath.

“Next time,” I said when I got my voice back, “you can feel free to let me sleep through that.”

“Next time?” Owen said, but his voice cracked a bit, and that rather perversely made me feel better. He'd woken me up because he couldn't face the dragons on his own.

“You know what I mean,” I said. I looked around again, making absolutely sure it was safe to get out of the car. I reached over to put the keys in the glove compartment and then opened my door. “Let's get this show on the road.”

Dragons fly much faster than boats putter across nearly
open water, so by the time Owen and I made landfall on Manitoulin, Aodhan and Catalina had already engaged the main horde in Saltrock, with Hannah helping out where she could and Lottie monitoring them from above. The dragons had begun to fight amongst themselves over the burning ships almost immediately, but there were other sources of carbon in Saltrock, and a group of them had splintered off and headed for the downtown core instead of in the general direction of Michigan like we had hoped they would.

But I didn't know any of that as I maneuvered the tug up alongside the sturdiest-looking of the piers that still remained standing at South Baymouth.

“Tie us off as close as you can,” I shouted to Owen. “We have to get the car on there.”

“In hindsight, ATVs might have been a better idea,” Owen said, but he did what I told him.

“Where would you carry your sword?” I asked.

“Good point,” he replied, pulling as hard as he could. “That's as good as it's going to get.”

I looked at the mooring, not entirely pleased with what I saw.

“Okay, this is what we'll do,” I said. “Take everything out and put it on the deck. Then I'll get the car onto the pier and drive to land, and then we'll load back up again.”

“You are not ending up in the lake!” Owen said.

“Not on purpose,” I said. “But no one has put anything but illicit drugs on this pier in two and a half decades. I can swim to shore from here. Our stuff can't.”

“Fine,” Owen said, but I could tell he wasn't happy. “Roll down the windows.”

Once everything was unloaded, I started the engine and tried not to think about the fact that I was probably the only source of carbon emissions between here and Sudbury. Hopefully all the dragons were gone. I carefully drove onto the dock, thankful for the hours my father had made me spend parallel parking, and then inched backward until I was on solid ground that I think had, at one time, actually been a road surface.

“Okay,” I called back to where Owen stood watching. “We can reload now.”

Owen took the opportunity to reorganize, unwrapping both his usual sword and mine so the latter lay across the backseat and the former was tip-down between his knees, his hands resting on the pommel. I repacked the trunk, removing some of the breakfast food that Hannah had packed, and passed Owen some beef jerky, which I knew he liked better. I checked the flamethrowers to make sure that nothing had shifted and made sure the gas cans were still closed properly. Then I closed the trunk and got back in the car.

“You ready?” I asked.

“I am,” he said. I knew he meant it. “Just do me one favor.”

“Today you can have anything,” I said.

“When you tell people this story, don't mention any of the times I throw up,” he said.

“As long as you don't do it in the car,” I told him.

I put the car in gear and we pulled out of South Baymouth on what remained of the Highway 6 extension. It was eerie, driving through ghost town after ghost town. This island had once been a tourist destination, where people from the city came to escape the brutal Toronto humidex and spend their time swimming and boating. You could see the skeletons of old
vacation memories, stretching thin fingers out of the scorched shells of restaurants and hotels and creeping along the edges of signs for fish bait, miniature golf, and small motor repair. It was like some kind of nightmarish theme park.

Evidence of draconic occupation was all around us. There were gutted animals everywhere, insides ripped out and hides left behind like some sort of half-finished taxidermy project. That meant corn dragons, which were picky eaters and didn't like fur. There were also smashed cement blocks and torn-up beach front, signs of
urbs
and
lakus
. And then there were the soot stains, long and dark against the grass, or mixing in with the sand. There were soot-streakers to be found here as well.

I found that I was cataloguing each observation, like Aodhan had taught us to do, and was a bit relieved to learn that under stress I still maintained some of my higher faculties. Owen was scanning the sky, while I did my best to avoid some of the more egregious potholes.

“Where are you?” he whispered. “Where are you?”

We continued on Highway 6, through The Slash and past the oddly named Squirrel Town. As tempted as I might have been to see what the town of Two O'Clock looked like, we stayed on the highway and made for Manitowaning.

By now, the only thing keeping Owen from rocking back and forth in his seat was the fact that he would put his sword through the floor of my car if he leaned on it any more heavily. He was driving me crazy, but I knew better than to try to stop him. I couldn't drive very fast, because of the road, and that was only making his anxiety worse. But even with the worsening roads, we were making good and careful progress. More important, we didn't see any dragons.

“Turn left,” Owen said. “I can see a lake.”

We'd overlooked Manitoulin as a good place for a hatching ground because Lake Huron was so big and lacked many concealed bays. In doing that, we'd forgotten that, as the largest freshwater island in the world, Manitoulin actually contained lakes inside it. The sign said we were coming up on Lake Manitou, and the vista we could see from the car looked like a page straight out of the Dragon Education and Defense Manual.

The town was called Vanzant's Landing, and when it had been a town, it hadn't been very big. There was a burned-out hotel, presumably called the Manitoulin Resort based on the unscorched letters, and not very much else. The lake was blue to match the sky, and dark where there were clouds above it, but neither Owen nor I was really looking at the lake.

All along the shoreline, in burned-out swathes or half-buried in the sand, were the eggs. The smallest were the size of my head, and the biggest were larger than the car. They were light brown and speckled with dark blues and greens and golds. They were almost beautiful. Or they would have been, had I not known what they contained.

And there were hundreds of them. Thousands, probably, but I couldn't see that far. I didn't know what we were going to do.

Owen didn't hesitate. He undid his seatbelt and leaned across me to pop the trunk. While I sat there, in more than a bit of shock, he got out and removed the flamethrowers from the back. Hannah had rigged the harness so that there was enough space for him to put his sword across his back as well, and she'd set a smaller harness for me and the sword that I carried. Owen pulled me out of the car and put the flamethrower
on my back. By then, I had taken the sword in my hands, so I put that away myself. He reached in, awkwardly because of his burden, and turned off the car.

“Leave the keys in,” I said. We might need them in a hurry.

“Okay,” he said. He turned back to me. “You ready?”

“As I'll ever be,” I told him.

“Siobhan?” He said it like a question.

“Yeah?” I replied.

“Would it be okay if I asked Sadie out, do you think?”

“Really?” I said. “Now?”

“I figured you'd be honest,” he replied.

I hadn't said anything about Sadie yet because I knew she wanted to make her case herself. It never even crossed my mind that Owen would clue in before she worked up the courage to talk to him. Still, I was nothing if not honest, so I told him the truth.

“You know she's only interested in you because she wants to be a dragon slayer, right?”

“I think that might be why I like her,” he admitted.

I was profoundly relieved that he wasn't harboring unspoken feelings for me. I really didn't know what I would have done with that, and we were about to face extreme danger together, which, as fiction has shown me, often brings out inconvenient feelings in even the most levelheaded of people.

“Well, I don't think it would be weird,” I told him. In fact, I thought it would be a really, really good idea, but there was only so much honesty I could handle right now. My nerves were starting to get the best of me.

“Good,” he said. He reached for my hands, which were shaking, and held them still. “And Siobhan?”

“Yes?”

“I'm glad we were late for English.”

I smiled. The shaking stopped, and not just because he was holding me still. The path that had brought us here was bizarre and twisted, and I wasn't sure I bought into the whole epic destiny thing, but I couldn't deny that we were here, and we were probably here for a reason.

“Me too,” I said.

And then—

And then, there was fire.

It was like no dragon battle I had ever been a part of before. There was no defense from the air, no reason to draw swords and engage at close quarters. To be completely honest, it seemed a little one-sided, but I knew that there was no other way.

Starting on the shores of Lake Manitou, Owen and I burned our way across the island. As we went along, we got better at it, and we realized that whatever Hannah had put into the tanks was very efficient at lighting dragon eggs on fire. It took very little to ignite the eggs, and if we cracked them a little bit first, they went up in flames all the faster. Once an egg was lit, it would overheat in a matter of moments and explode, causing a chain reaction all along the beach. It was simply a case of getting any that got missed in the spray.

I watched the first egg burn the whole way, though. I don't know why. I guess I thought that if I saw the dragon, it would make me feel better. The thing that was left over after the egg burned looked like a dragon, but it was slimy and covered with membranes and goo. After that, I just followed Owen's lead and
progressed as robotically as possible across the beach.