21. Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty
Alex
“Will you help me bring in supplies?” I asked as I approached Odem, who was fiddling with something on his phone. “I’d like to clean in the nesting area.”
“Just tell me what to grab, and I’ll get it. You shouldn’t be lifting things.”
“True and thank you. I don’t want anything chemical near the space,” I explained. “Could you bring a few buckets of warm water, a bottle of lemon juice or lemons if we have them, vinegar and baking soda, oh and a scrub brush, please?”
“I’ll bring two brushes. You won’t be able to reach the top of the cave.”
Smiling up at him, I saw the same worry in his eyes that I felt whenever I thought about Ionus and the other brothers out their preparing to wake up unknown dragons. He wasn’t just offering because I was too short, he needed a way to occupy his hands, too, and I could appreciate that.
“Thanks, I hadn’t worked out how I was going to clean that part yet,” I admitted. “I’d probably have resorted to duct taping the brush to a broom handle and going from there.”
He blinked at me before breaking out into a toothy grin. “I like the way you think. You’ve got dragon-level resourcefulness.”
I preened at hearing that because to me there was no bigger praise, especially after learning that I had dragon blood in me. If what Gramps had said rang true, then being with my mate would start unlocking pieces of the dragon in me. Knowing that I carried the start of the next generation of our family inside of me made me want to live up to whatever dragon potential I might have and if one day I should manage to be able to shift and attain my dragon form, then the first thing I was doing was keeping my promise to our dragon.
Who I could not distract right now.
Best to curb that avenue of thinking.
Instead, I turned my focus to the space while Odem retrieved the supplies and decided to worry about the floor last, that way we’d be out of the area while it was drying. Carefully, I rolled up the tapestry, tying it in place so it wouldn’t unfurl while we were working. While Odem could probably see just fine without a headlamp, I couldn’t, at least not yet, though I wondered if enhanced sight was in my future. How cool would that be? I hated how the headlight on a strap could get in the way sometimes, not to mention how irritating it was to have something squishing your head like it was trying to make your brain squirt out your ears. The first time I’d worn it I’d felt immediate sympathy for jelly donuts everywhere.
A tiny giggle joined me in chuckling at the memory, and I rubbed my belly, wondering which egg it had come from.
“All right, we should be set for a while,” Odem said as he stepped into the space and set the supplies down in the middle.
“You take that side, and I’ll take this one?” I offered as I mixed lemon juice and vinegar with the water he’d brought.
The baking soda I sprinkled on the brush after I dunked it in the water, then I started scrubbing while he followed suit on the wall opposite me.
“Will serve Ionus right if all four are a bunch of mischief makers,” Odem said as we cleaned. “He likes to act all stuffy and proper now, but you should have seen him as a youngling.”
“Really?” I replied. “You can’t stop at that, that’s not fair. You’ve got to jump in with both feet now.”
“You know he’s going to get me for this, don’t you?”
“Think of it as a preemptive strike,” I suggested.
“True, and it isn’t often that I get to beat him at something,” Odem admitted. “The advantage of being the older brother is one none of us has been able to overcome. It does mean we’ve learned some entertaining lessons in things to avoid back in the days when he’d still try to show off for us.”
Giggling, I went up on my toes to reach a spot and wound up laughing harder when fizzy suds slithered up the inside of my arm and into my armpit. “Ohhh, this keeps getting better and better.”
Little giggles had joined mine again as I patted at the fizz until it stopped tickling me. “He’s so reserved now,” I said. “But sometimes, when his dragon and I are teaming up on him, he gets playful and cracks something close to a joke.”
“Oh, he’s got jokes,” Odem said. “I miss them, too, so I hope you’ll keep poking until he cracks up so hard he splits a scale.”
“Mission accepted.”
“He used to pull pranks on us all the time,” Odem said, his voice having taken on a wistful tone. “Or at least, he’d try to.”
“Was it a case of great idea, poor execution?”
“Nope, more like a case of having four stubborn brothers determined not to let on that he’d gotten to us,” Odem explained. “Like, this one time, our mother told us that if we didn’t start being more aware of where we put things, then the kobolds would make off with everything we treasured. Well, none of us had ever seen a kobold, and we were pretty sure she’d never served us a kobold for supper before, so we figured she was just trying to scare us.”
“Wait. Back up a moment. Are you trying to tell me that kobolds are real, too?” I asked, trying not to sound too skeptical, but come on.
Dear universe, if I may, I’d like to pause my subscription to National Geographic’s Paranormal Edition, I’ve had enough shocks for the moment and would prefer to spread them out more evenly over the remainder of my existence. Please send the next edition in eight to twelve months, or even fifteen months. Anything sooner might be too much for me.
“Well, we’ve still never seen one, or eaten one as far as I know,” Odem admitted. “But for about a week we were convinced they were stealing our stuff and hiding it in places we never would have put it and getting us in trouble in the process. The last straw was when Mother scooped flour into a bowl and my two frogs poked their heads up from the scoop, croaked and hopped off, leaving trails of flour everywhere.”
I snorted so hard that if I’d been drinking something it would have shot out of my nose and all over the wall I’d just cleaned. I could picture it in my head, though, as clear as day, these trails of frog prints in flour all over her kitchen and a scoop she’d had to throw away, if she hadn’t roasted it when they’d popped out of there.
“Yeah, see, it might not have been so bad if that had been our mother’s reaction, to laugh about it, but she was not amused, especially when she discovered another of them swimming in a pitcher of mead. She made a small pond for them in my room after that, using one of the natural indents in the stone. She brought in pondwater and lily pads and everything and made me promise that I wouldn’t stash them in her kitchen again. I hadn’t stashed them there in the first place, the kobolds had, or at least, that’s what I insisted until she raised an eyebrow at me and said that she was certain that she’d heard me say I didn’t believe in kobolds.”
“Busted.”
“I know, right! I walked right into that one.”
“So, what’d you’d say?”
“Nothing, I silently conceded defeat and slunk off to plot with my brothers, because at that point, I was really starting to believe that they existed,” Odem explained. “The question was how to prove it.”
Listening to the story and the rhythmic motion of the brush were helping to keep my mind off what might be happening at my childhood home. As much as I longed to pluck at the link and get a quick summary of what was taking place, I refused to be the cause of any distraction.
“Well, you guys are ancient, so trail cams and motion sensors weren’t options.”
“Would have made things easier, let me tell you,” Odem said. “First, we tried to learn all we could about kobolds, but aside from three lines in an old book that was mostly water damaged, we couldn’t find any mention of them in the meager library we had at the time. So much had been lost in battle or laid to waste and utterly ruined that sometimes it’s a wonder that the world was ever able to rebuild.”
The last thing I wanted was to see the hint of sadness that flickered in his eyes, not when we already had so much to worry about.
“So, what did four little dragons do to try and prove the existence of kobolds?” I prompted.
“What any predator would do when faced with prey they couldn’t catch,” Odem replied. “We set out to build a kobold trap.”
“Oh boy…I’ve got images of Wile E. Coyote rocketing through my head right now.”
After the glimpse of sadness I’d seen, it was good to hear him laugh. “That will forever remain one of my favorite cartoons. Animation has always been a guilty pleasure of mine. Everything is just inherently funnier when it takes place in a world that looks nothing like your own.”
He had a point there.
“I love cartoons, too. I can’t wait to watch them with the younglings.”
“You’ll have to let their Uncle Odem introduce them to some of the original black and white pieces,” he said. “I pride myself on my collection. They are among my greatest treasures.”
“I’d be honored. I’m sure you’d be introducing me to some I’ve never seen before, either. We’ll have to have proper movie snacks and sleeping bags for them and everything, like a slumber party,” I said, excited at the thought of them having something so special they’d be able to bond over with their uncle, and eventually their cousins, too.
I hoped in time that each of the brothers would share a piece of themselves that way. Judging from the warm pulses of energy I felt from the eggs, they were already excited at the prospect of those cartoons. I wondered if it was because they could feel Odem’s fondness for them when he spoke of them and got a sense of how special they were.
“Have I mentioned that I like the way you think?” Odem said.
“Twice now.”
He chuckled at that as he worked the brush in circles along the cave wall.
“Now that I think about it, some of Wile E.’s traps would have been helpful at the time,” he mused. “Or at the very least, we’d have found an ACME catalogue helpful. Basic snares didn’t land us a kobold, and because we had no idea what size they were or if they had fur or scales or even feathers and were flying in, we struggled to make adjustments. Then it happened. Mattias found a kobold track.”
“Wait, what? If you saw a track, how have you not seen a kobold?” I asked, unable to imagine anything that could have eluded four determined little dragons for long. I couldn’t picture them giving up, either, which meant that there had to be more to the story.
“They’re tricky, those kobolds,” Odem explained. “The one thing the book did say about them was that they liked to make mischief, and boy, did this one deliver. After the first track, we started finding kobold footprints everywhere.”
“And you were certain that they were a kobold’s footprints?”
“Nothing we’d ever seen left tracks like this. It had a claw on its middle knuckle, right between two hooves. What else were we supposed to think left a track like that?”
“You’ve got me there.”
“And Ionus got us, at least until we got him, by snaring him in a woven net that wrapped him up and left him dangling from a tree. There was a goat nibbling on his hair when our mother found him in the morning. Man was he snorting smoke, too. That old goat didn’t care. Ionus couldn’t make flames yet, so he kept nibbling away, occasionally headbutting Ionus when the smoke cloud got to be too much.”
I lost it then. The image in my head was just too much. I could picture a young Ionus indignantly swinging there while the goat chastised him for being a squirmy snack. More than one egg giggled with me this time, reminding me of what Sarah had said about emotions and how the littles would be able to feel not only mine but the atmosphere of those around me. I was proud of the way Odem and I were able to fill it with laughter as we cleaned. I felt like we were filling it with hope and good intentions.
“What happened after he got down?” I asked.
“Well, at first, Mother was laughing so hard that she couldn’t get him untangled, then she saw the sticks he’d been carrying. He’d dropped them when he got snatched up by the net. Each had an old mountain goat’s hoof tied to it with a vulture claw in the middle. He’d been running around at night making footprints while we slept.”
“Wow, seriously?”
“Yup,” Odem confirmed. “And all those ones he’d made inside using mud and flour and tree sap and a bunch of other stuff, Mother had made us clean up. Every day for a week we’d wound up scrubbing. He’d put the frogs in the flour, too, and the rest of the stuff that had been discovered in places where it shouldn’t have been.”
“He got you guys good,” I said. “Did he ever say why he did it? That’s pretty elaborate. I’m patient, but I’ve never had patience like that.”
“So we’d listen to Mother when she told us to be more cautious about our things,” Odem explained. “Guess that’s one of the things that’s always made him such a good big brother. It would have been so easy for him to join us in being careless, and in brushing off Mother’s gentle efforts to get us to listen, but he’s always cared more about what was best for us, even if we haven’t always appreciated it. He figured that if he could make us believe in kobolds, then we’d follow the instructions Mother had given, so he set out to erase our disbelief. It almost worked, too.”
“Now that’s the kind of reasoning I can appreciate,” I explained. “Gramps was always doing that kind of stuff to me, too. He’d tell a cautionary tale and then wait to see what I did with it. I’m sure he’ll have plenty to say to me once he’s had time to settle in and remember that he’d warned me about brushing up on my compass skills, as well as how to read a topographical map, but did I listen?”
Odem chuckled. “Considering that I was in the cave when you blundered through the crevice, we both know the answer to that.”
“Exactly.”
“You are so owed whatever lecture he chooses to give.”
“True,” I admitted. “Though if I had followed his advice, I probably wouldn’t have been here preparing to set up a nursery.”
“There is that. See, the next time your Gramps or Ionus tries to give you shit for being stubborn and hardheaded, you just remind them that it’s how you got here and let them sputter a little while they try to come up with another way to reprimand you.”
A dribble of fizz landed on my nose while I laughed. “Something tells me that my mate has had plenty of practice dealing with you,” I pointed out.
“Oh, the frown lines run deep when it comes time for him to really get on my case about something,” Odem said. “He almost reminds me of those vultures whose claws he used to collect. He’d fashion them together and practice throwing them at targets, too, until he got so good he could light them on fire and send them spiraling toward the bullseye on a tree. Aside from his own fangs and claws, they were his first weapons. I’m still in awe of how inventive he can be when the moment calls for it. As long as there is the sliver of something at hand, my brother will always have a tool at the ready.”
I believed him with every fiber of my being, but I never wanted my mate to be in a position where he had to cobble together a bone spear just to defend himself. That seemed too last resort for me, the kind of last resort that could lead to never seeing my mate again.