The Last Dragon Chronicles: Dark Fire (36 page)

rushed through the house with the physical

impact of a cannon blast.

Miaow!
 
went Bella. Her fur stood on

end. She turned her head and stared at

Lucy.

Lucy in turn looked at Gwendolen. “Did you hear that?”

Gwendolen nodded. Every dragon fromhere to Wayward Crescent would haveheard
 
that
.

The great matriarch, Gawaine, hadspoken.
 
Free me
, she had said.
 
Teramelle,free me
 
.

Close call

A soft, warm shower. A long, luxurioussoak in one of Zanna’s herbal bathinglotions. A stimulating foot spa. A rubdownwith a damp cloth. Even five minutesbeneath a leaking gutter. Lucy would havejumped at any of these chances to improveher personal hygiene, for she stank likenothing she could ever describe. But foronce she put aside her private needs infavour of an urgent phone call home.

“Hello. Lucy?”

David’s voice. Her spirits lifted. Shebegan to unload everything to him. Thewords came out in a breathless gabble, asif she was speaking through a tumbler ofwater. “You’ve gotta come. It’s all

shaking. You’ve gotta come, NOW. The hill’s going to crumble. Tam’s… ” The pain nearly knifed her to the farmhouse door. “Tam’s… ”

“Lucy, slow down. Speak calmly if you

can. Are you safe?”

“I think so.”

“Right, tell me what’s happened.”

“We went into the Tor,” she jabbered. “It was a trap to kill Tam. She buried him in a tunnel.”

“She? The sibyl?”

“Mm.”

“Where is she?”

“Dead. I got away from her. Bella led

us out.”

“Bella?”

“She’s a girl. The sibyl turned her into

a cat. I touched the dragon, David. It’s trying to wake up.” Another restless thump from the Tor shook the wholeguesthouse, spreading cracks along the plaster ceiling. Lucy winced as the kitchen light fizzed out, its chandelier fittings half-breaking away and swinging precariously on their chains. Bella jumped down off the sink and ran to find shelter under the table.

“I hear crashing. Where are you?”

“In the guesthouse. In the kitchen. It’s like an earthquake!” Deep inside the house, something made of glass fell over and shattered. “The dragon’s crying for the unicorn to free it. What shall I do?”

“Nothing. You do nothing. Find a safe place and – hang on, Zanna wants to tell me something.”

Lucy sighed and turned away infrustration. She looked into the dining areaand saw Gwendolen on one of the

breakfast   tables,   creeping   gingerly towards the window, as if she had spotted something in the garden.

“Lucy, are you there?” David’s voice came through again.

“Yes.”

“Listen, something’s happened here. Zanna’s just told me your mum’s coming round.”

Mum. In all the trauma, Lucy hadforgotten her guiding light. Her anxietyonce again gathered pace. “Is she allright? Is she asking for me?”

“She’s not talking yet, but Zanna saysshe’s calm. I’m going to stay here a little

while longer to make sure the situation’s stable, but I’m sending Grockle down to protect you.”

“
Grockle?
 
”

“Yes. Go outside. Let him see you. Is

Gwendolen there?”

With the phone pressed hard to her ear, Lucy  headed   for  the   dining  room. Gwendolen was now on the sideboard

where the cutlery was kept. Her ears were fully pricked.
 
What?
 
Lucy mouthed at her. David spoke again. “Luce, did you hear me?”

“Yeah, she’s here.”

“Good. Tell her to put out a beacon. It’ll help Grockle find you. He can travel across time planes as easily as you or I could look through a window. He’ll be in

the general area before you know it. You can speak to him in dragontongue. Takes a bit of tuning, but you’ll get it. OK?”

Lucy nodded blindly. “What about Tam?”

There was a pause. David said, “We’llfind him. I promise.”

A slow tear cut across Lucy’s cheek. “But—”

“I’ll come as soon as I can,” David said. And he hung up the call.

Lucy clammed her phone shut, onehanded, and buried it into her jeans pocket. “Spread your auma,” she said to Gwendolen.   “We’re   going  to   have

company.”

Hrrr!
 
went the dragon.

Lucy screwed up her face. “Listen? To

what?”

Gwendolen cocked her head. She was

sure she could hear a distress call

somewhere. Not aimed at her, but the

frequency was—

The next heartbeat moved the house

sideways a foot, shifting the furniture at least the same distance. The windows in

the   upper   casements   shattered   and photographs of Scuffenbury flew off their hooks. High above, Lucy could hear what she thought was brickwork crashing against the roof. A shower of roof slates beyond the French windows and a bungeejumping TV aerial convinced her. It was time to get out.

“Gwendolen, fly!” she cried. She hurried into the kitchen for Bella. The cat

was poised and ready to run. “Through the hall, out the front door!” Lucy panted, not sure if Bella would understand. But the

language of falling masonry was common: wherever Lucy ran, Bella would run too. Within moments they were breathing in the garden air, where the ground was just as active as the floors of the house but there

was far less danger of injury.

But a greater threat was perched less than twenty feet away. In her hurry to escape, Lucy had fled towards the one place in the garden she thought would be stable: the dead, grey tree. Little did she know that Mary Cauldwell’s gallows still harboured evil, past and present. If Gwendolen had finished her calculations, she would have concluded that among the

tainted branches was another dragon. Unlikely as it seemed, a Pennykettle dragon. And if she had turned her ears from the mayhem, she would have heard that dragon’s warning
 
hrrr!
 
For Glade had seen Lucy emerging from the house and had measured her captor’s eagerness for slaughter in the subtle tightening of its ruthless   claws.   From   lungs   which contained less air than an envelope, Glade had bravely cried out. Her call was eclipsed by the raven’s wings as it swooped to make an ugly mess of Lucy’s head. What saved the girl was a falling chimney. It thundered to the drive like a spent red rocket, clipping both handles of the empty wheelbarrow and flipping it through the air like an autumn leaf. The

raven was lucky  to avoid the turning metal, luckier still that the dust and debris created by the crash enabled it to swerve away without detection. Halfway through its plunge, it had sensed a major ripple in the fabric of the universe and knew there

could be only one reason for that. Lucy Pennykettle had felt the rift too and was holding her breath in expectation. She was not to be disappointed. Once the clouds had settled, sitting astride the mess of bricks was the most magnificent creature she had ever seen.

The bronze-scaled juvenile dragon,

Grockle. Fearless, breathtaking and
 
huge
 
.

The right to disobey

“Wow… ”

In the circumstances, Lucy could thinkof nothing more fitting to say. The lasttime she’d seen Grockle, five years ago,he’d been something of a kitten in dragon

terms.   Impressive,   yes.   Classically prehistoric.   Charming.   Frightening. Humbling. Vulnerable.

Now he was simply mesmerising. Ten times the size she remembered. And

though he possessed all the strength and characteristics of a predatory monster (his incisor teeth were as long as her shins), there was a gentleness about him that Lucy had only ever seen before in the likes of cuddly, domestic animals. And he was

beautiful
. The soft scales which had covered his body back then had thickened up into roughened plates, though it was clear   from  his   able   versatility  of movement that their pliability was almost fluid. When Lucy raised her hand to touch his chest the scales tensed in a kind of

autonomic way, interlocking like a row of Roman  battle   shields.   But  as  they measured her warmth and sensitivity, maybe even his kinship with her, the plates   yielded   and   their   hardness reconfigured, until her palm was gliding smoothly over him and the scales were changing colour to the pressure of her touch without ever losing their glistening bronze base.

But it was his eyes that enthralled her

the most. In his youth they had resembled plain lizard eyes. Slitted, scary and uniformly yellow throughout the iris. Now his iris, like his scales, had deepened and developed. The general shade was still predominantly yellow, but there was a richness in its textured layers as appealing to Lucy as amber gemstones. And behind the iris, in the darkly mysterious oval of the pupil, was a world that Lucy could only dream of. Here she saw unparalleled beauty.    Incredible    complexity. Extraordinary history.

Her true destiny.

She decided she would formally introduce herself. But before she could

initiate a dialogue, Grockle jerked back and raised his head. With his ears

extending in a stacking motion, he stretched his neck and turned to sniff the

air. His nostrils dilated so widely that Lucy could see a fragile membrane of pale grey tissue rippling like a sail inside his snout. Above his wonderful triangular eye sockets,   the   bony   ridges   pressed themselves into a scowl.

“What’s  the   matter?”   she   asked.

Something was clearly wrong, but shecould see no dangers in the garden orbeyond.

Even so, Grockle lifted his tail, turninghis isoscele like a rudder. An angry growlsounded in his serpentine throat.

“Grockle, what’s the matter?” Lucyasked again.

The dragon stared at Mary Cauldwell’s

tree. He blew a line of smoke that was all

the colours of Bella’s fur. With a rasp like a butcher’s knife, his claws emerged from the leathery pouches at the ends of his toes. He flushed his wings and prepared to fly. So great was the draught of air that it swatted Lucy’s face away to one side.

“WAIT!” she commanded in (loud) dragontongue. To her amazement, the dragon stalled.

His eye patterns switched again, reinventing  the  human  definition  of ‘confused’.

“David sent you to protect me,” she said, with just a
 
hint
 
of truculence shading her voice.

Grockle tilted his head.

“Can you understand me?”

Hrrr
, he replied, in a low bass registerthat made her red hair lift off her

shoulders. She even felt the rumble deep in her diaphragm and realised to her amazement that she could interpret the vibrations just as accurately there as she could in the bones of her inner ear. But

then, the word was easy to render. He had spoken her name.

“Don’t leave me,” she said. “We need your help.”

Grockle sucked in through a tiny row of air vents just to the rear of his lower jaw. His jewelled eyes flashed towards the ancient tree. The scent of a raven hung in its branches, on a trail that was rapidly diminishing.
 
Help us do what?
 
he heard a small voice say. With near-preternatural

speed, he swung back and peered intently at Gwendolen, realigning his nostrils like

a   double-barrelled   gun.   From   the sanctuary of Lucy’s shoulder, Gwendolen waved a wary paw.

Lucy pointed at Grockle’s claws. “There. That’s what we need.”

Gwendolen’s  eye  ridges  mirrored

Grockle’s.

“His claws,” Lucy said. Perfect for digging. “We’re going to go and search for Tam.”

The coming of Gawaine

Hrrr?
 
said Gwendolen. Had the girl gonemad? Tam would be as dead as the tree bynow. Crushed. Suffocated. Drowned in

pee.

“He might have found a pocket of air,” Lucy argued. “If we wait for David, it might be too late.”

She noticed Grockle tilt his head again and wondered for a moment if he’d read

her thoughts. The dragon rumbled, but didn’t say a word. One eye swivelled towards her pocket as she opened it and showed him the vial of tears. “This will

help,” she said, jiggling the vial so he could see its contents. She watched his

extraordinary, multi-layered pupil undergo

a series of focal adjustments. Right at its centre, a tiny floret of light appeared.

“The moon,” Lucy whispered. She spun quickly on her heels and found it in the afternoon sky. A fragile, rice paper disk of light, sitting over the Vale of Scuffenbury.