Chapter 28

"So Amanda's dead, then?" Taylor said, keeping her eyes down.

They were sitting in the house's kitchen, eating breakfast. If breakfast had been anything other than slightly wilted baby carrots, Daniel almost could have believed that it was an ordinary morning.

"Yeah," Kelly said. "Did you know her?"

"I used to hang out at her place after school," Taylor said, smiling slightly. "My parents always wondered why I was out so long. They probably thought I was doing drugs or something." She shook her head slowly. "My dad left before I was born. I think he must have been a Guardian. My mom never knew anything about it. I had all kinds of crazy dreams and stuff, and my mom never knew what to do about them. She had me go through all kinds of psychological tests and crap. I was so glad when I met Amanda." She glanced up at Kelly. "It's good to know I'm not crazy. And that it's all good for something."

Kelly reached out and squeezed the girl's hand. Taylor smiled quickly, then looked back down and pulled another carrot stick out of the bag -- the only salvageable food they had found in the refrigerator. She kept her head down as she ate.

Daniel looked at the two of them, sitting with him at the kitchen table, with the morning sunlight slanting in through the windows and gleaming off the cheap wood laminate on the table. He was struck with a sudden pang of homesickness, and for an instant, he lost himself in a fantasy where he and Kelly were happily married, raising their daughter Taylor, and sharing a moment around the breakfast table before everybody went off to school and work.

He quickly reached for his glass and took a drink. It was Kool-Aid, but he thought Kelly had spiked it with something, and he was immensely glad for that.

"So how far are we from her place?" he asked.

"I wasn't really paying too much attention yesterday," Taylor admitted, "but I went for a ride this morning before you guys got up." She batted her eyelashes at them innocently. "I guess you must have gotten to bed pretty late last night, huh?"

Kelly laughed and threw a stale piece of bread at her. Taylor ducked, and came up laughing. Daniel's pang of homesickness returned with full force, knotting deep in his stomach, and he looked away.

"Anyway," Taylor went on, still grinning, "we're a ways north and west of her place. It's probably two miles east and two or three miles south from here." She reached for the last carrot and paused. "What do you want there, anyway?"

Kelly looked at Daniel, who shrugged and took a deep breath. "Anything we can find. If she has anything that would tell us more about the raptors and how to fight them... how to fix the veil, or push the raptors back where they belong... maybe names of other Guardians around the area. Whatever."

Taylor nodded. "She had a lot of books, I know that. Some that she'd done the binding herself, so either they were really old and the spine had fallen apart, or she'd totally made the books herself."

"Sounds good," Daniel said. "Better than I'd hoped for. We'll see what we find when we get there."


They took turns riding Goewyn along the way. The autumn leaves were mostly fallen now, exccept for the occasional tree still clinging tenaciously to its cache of yellow or brown. Wind-blown drifts of leaves covered lawns and backed up against the sides of houses. It had echoes of a peaceful painting of a fall day in the suburbs, and, at the same time, of a ghost town, long deserted.

They passed a school playground. Daniel noticed a basketball court, little more than a rectangle of blacktop in the middle of the schoolyard with a pair of basketball hoops. An abandoned basketball was sitting at the boundary between the asphalt and the grass, rocking gently back and forth in the wind that scattered leaves in swirling patterns across the ground. The wind came from the north, and whispered of winter. Daniel pulled his jacket tighter around himself as he walked.

The miles passed quickly, and soon they were making the next-to-last turn before reaching Amanda's house.

Daniel thrust his hands deeper into his pockets, trying to settle a vague sense of uneasiness that was beginning to creep through him. He looked up to see if the others noticed anything. It was Kelly's turn to ride Goewyn, and aside from Goewyn twitching her ears back, they both seemed fine. Taylor, however, had also dug her hands into her pockets, and seemed absorbed in thought.

He picked up his pace until he was walking next to her. "You all right?" he asked.

She looked up at him in surprise. "Oh. Oh, yeah. I guess." She shrugged, looking away. "I don't know."

"Something's bothering you, isn't it?" he said.

"No," she said, still not looking at him. "No, I'm fine."

"What is it?" he said.

She stopped and turned on him angrily. "What makes you think anything's wrong?" she shouted.

"Whoa, whoa," he said, holding his hands up in a placating gesture. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to nag. It's just..." He looked uneasily over his shoulder. "I know this is going to sound clichéd, but I have a bad feeling about this."

Taylor stared at him suspiciously for a moment, then turned and walked quickly to catch up with Kelly, who had stopped Goewyn and was looking back at them. Daniel followed.

"Is everything okay?" Kelly asked.

"Yeah," Kelly muttered. Daniel shrugged. They continued on their way.


As they walked, they had passed a number of cars in various states of damage. Mostly the hoods were ripped off, but a few were smashed into buildings, missing their windshields, or even flipped over entirely.

Just after they turned onto Amanda's street, with about three blocks to go, they came to a car that had been quite thoroughly crushed. The engine compartment was the tallest part left of the car, and it barely came up to Taylor's knees. Three of the tires had been punctured by bent metal and were flatter than a cookie sheet; the fourth had snapped right off of the axle and lay in the gutter next to the car.

They all looked at the car as they went past. Taylor glanced at Daniel, set her jaw, and looked away again.

In the next block, two more cars had been crushed.

Then they came to an open space between houses, where tall power lines crossed the street and ran to either side mid-block. Hedges had been planted to fill some of the space and discourage kids from using the area as a big playground.

Daniel looked at those hedges, and something crawled up and down his spine.

He glanced over at Taylor, and stumbled as he missed his footing. "Jesus. Taylor? Are you okay?"

She was still walking with her hands jammed into her pockets, but she had begun to shiver, and her face was pale. Kelly turned around, saw her, and pulled Goewyn to a stop. "Oh, my God, Taylor, you look awful."

"I'm fine!" Taylor snapped, wiping the cold sweat off her face.

"God damn it, Taylor, we're on your side here!" Daniel snapped. "Quit being a goddamned teenager and tell us what's going on!"

She stared at him, then sat down abruptly on the curb, her head in her hands. "I'm sorry," was her muffled reply. "I've just got this vicious migraine. I didn't mean to snap at you."

"Taylor, why didn't you say so?" Kelly said, slipping out of the saddle and walking over to sit beside her. "We could've tried to scare up some Excedrin or something."

Taylor started to say something, then looked up, an odd glaze in her eyes. She looked around, sniffed the air, then bolted to her feet. "Oh my god," she said, sounding faintly hysterical. "Oh my god, oh my god."

"What is it?" Kelly said, staring up at her.

Taylor pointed a trembling finger toward the line of hedges dividing the space under the power lines.

Daniel and Kelly looked where she was pointing. "Kelly, honey, there's nothing there," Kelly said, but still she kept looking.

Daniel rose to his feet. "I'll check," he said. "I have a feeling she may be right."

He strode into the clearing and down the length of the hedges. For the first hundred yards or so, all was normal. But then he spotted something, deep under the branches.

He peered through, but couldn't see it clearly. Maybe from the other side, he thought. There were breaks in the hedge every fifty yards or so, and he retraced his steps to the nearest one, then headed down on the other side of the hedgerow to look again.

And slowed as he approached. There was something black and gleaming. Wrong shape to be an egg. He moved cautiously closer, until he was standing directly in front of it, his jaw falling open.

The hedges were quite tall -- about eight feet -- but the thing was longer than that; it was angled diagonally so it could fit into that space. It was vanishingly thin at both ends where it attached to the branches, and four or five feet thick in the middle.

He reached cautiously out to touch its surface. It felt like there were grooves running radially around it, grooves that would have been horizontal if the thing had been able to hang vertically.

"Oh, my, God," he breathed.

He was looking at an enormous black cocoon.


He looked up and down the hedge. There were more of them. Probably more than he could see, if they were buried more deeply inside the hedge.

He backed away a step, shaking his head violently. He looked back up at the street, where Kelly and Taylor were waiting. With a deep breath to steady his nerves, he began slowly walking back up to them.

It wasn't so much a sound, more a motion of air. His spine prickled to the point of pain. Taylor screamed.

He turned around very, very slowly.

The head resting on the ground was twelve feet long from base to tooth, and seven feet high. The scales were shining black; the yellow eye that was facing him, fully two feet wide with a vertical pupil like a cat's, blinked lazily at him. The immense, powerful neck arched away toward a huge, lean, reptilian body, with enormous wings folded quietly away against its back. Beyond that, in the distance, its tail lashed playfully, catching a small tree and tearing it out of the ground by its roots.

"Hello, mortal," said the dragon.


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