8. Jerrid #2
“Those teeth can tear curious little boys in half,” Jerrid warned, catching him by the back of his trousers and yanking him to safety.
“She isn’t usually dangerous, but she’s hurt, and an injured creature is dangerous because they don’t always know what they’re doing. Hasn’t your pa taught you that?”
The boy grinned up at him, hands slipping into his pockets as he rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. “Nah. He doesn’t bother with that. He does teach me magic tricks, though. My da’s a magician! And a bard. And so many other things.”
Jerrid didn’t know what to make of that. Humans didn’t have magic. Everyone knew that. Although he supposed some people might argue that dragon shifters were a kind of magic.
Personally, he thought it was more of a curse.
Dragon chuckled long and low in the recesses of his mind, and Jerrid shook him off with a growl.
Not now!
“Can’t I pet her? I’ll be real quiet.” Roar took a tentative step forward, but Jerrid caught him by the back of his trousers again and hauled him away, much farther this time, putting the bonfire between them and the sleeping dragon.
“No petting,” Jerrid growled. “At least, not until she wakes up. She’ll tell us if she wants company.”
The boy’s gaze flew to his. “She can talk? Crumbly biscuits! I didn’t know dragons could talk!”
Jerrid’s mouth twitched at the childish expletive. “Ah, no, they can’t talk exactly, but if you pay attention, all creatures can tell you what they need. You have to learn to speak their language.”
“Oh! You speak dragon, then? Do it for me! Do it! Is it lots of roaring and growling, like this?” He threw his arms out to his sides as if they were clawed limbs and began to growl loud enough to wake the dead.
Jerrid clapped a hand over Roar’s mouth and dragged him closer to the bonfire, shoving him down. “No, nothing like that at all. Now sit still and be quiet while I decide what to do with you.”
Roar grinned again—did he ever stop smiling? “Oh, you don’t need to do anything with me. I can take care of myself.”
“I’m sure your ma will have a thing or two to say about that,” Jerrid retorted dryly.
He imagined the poor woman ransacking the camp, looking for her missing child.
Somebody would get a good licking over this, and he hoped it wasn’t him.
“Look, you can’t just run around the forest at night, you know,” he began, trying to sound stern and parental. “There are very dangerous things in the woods.”
Roar drew his knees to his chest and began to rock on his bottom. “Oh, I know. I’ve seen it all. Wolves, and hounds, and rats. Oh, and gremlins too. Well, I actually haven’t seen a gremlin yet, but I know we have them.”
“Gremlins?” Jerrid echoed with a frown. “What is a gremlin?”
“Oh, you know,” the boy said, waving a hand as he rocked. “They are tiny invisible sneaks who steal your things when you aren’t looking and hide them in dumb places. They’re always taking my da’s stuff and hiding it. He finds his things in the strangest of places. Definitely the gremlins.”
A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. It sounded to him like Roar’s da was just beginning to have trouble with his memory, but he could imagine why the poor man wouldn’t want to admit that to his impressionable young son.
“Ah, well, yes. You don’t want to run amok of the gremlins in the dark either.”
“Nah, they’re harmless at night. They run around all day thieving, and then they sleep all night. If you listen really carefully, you can hear them snoring. They sound like bugs going bzzzZZZ bzzzzZZZZ.”
Which meant those sounds probably were just bugs droning through the night, but Jerrid wasn’t going to try to explain that to a five-year-old. It wouldn’t do to break his faith in his father’s storytelling, no matter how ridiculous those stories might be.
But it would behoove the man to better prepare his child for the real world…so that he didn’t think it was a good idea to run off in the dark all by himself.
“Well, you’re going to have to stay here until Brynja comes back.”
“Oh, didn’t I tell you? She isn’t coming.”
“You did say something to that effect,” Jerrid replied sourly, plunking down again on the ground on the opposite side of the fire from the boy. “I just hoped I had misheard you. Did she say why?”
The boy shrugged. “I dunno. If she did, I didn’t hear that part. I was hiding in a basket.”
“Um…why?” He wasn’t sure he even wanted to know the answer to the question.
The boy’s smile held no contrition. “I wanted to know where you were hiding the dragon. So I could come see it. I’ve never seen a real dragon. I’ve heard about them, though. My da has told me all about them.”
“You’ve never—”
“Nope. Never. I was little when we left home. I don’t remember nothing. But I aim to go back one day. I want to be a dragon rider. Like you.”
Jerrid studied the boy with a frown. Why was he living in Gelaira? He wasn’t of mixed lineage. His clear skin and rounded ears, along with all those freckles, clearly suggested both of the boy’s parents were of human lineage.
“Why are you living here?”
“My da came here to find his sister, and my mum came after him. She didn’t want to be left out of all the fun. We’ve been here ever since.”
The boy continued to rock back and forth as the orange glow of the fire darkened his freckled cheeks.
“Why didn’t you all go home?”
“Da wouldn’t leave until he found my auntie,” Roar said. “She was married to one of them elves, but he wanted to find the right one to battle.”
Jerrid inhaled too quickly and coughed to clear his throat. “I’m sorry. He’s planning to battle the elves?”
“No, not all of them.” Roar yawned and shook his head. “He was just after the one that took my auntie. Boy, am I hungry. Do you have food? Oh, oh, do you have travel rations? I’d love to try some real, genuine travel rations!”
Jerrid groaned and leaned his head back against Echo’s side. He didn’t have many rations left for himself, let alone enough to share.
“No,” he muttered. “You can go home to eat. You’ll have to go back in the morning though.”
“Oh please, can’t I stay with you? I want to be here when the dragon wakes up. I don’t suppose I can have a ride—”
“No,” Jerrid interrupted grimly. “You may not have a ride. You may go to sleep now. I need to keep watch, and you’re making too much noise. You’re liable to attract all the beasties in the forest.”
Roar groaned and flopped into the grass dramatically. “Now you sound like my mum. She always says I’m too loud, too. That’s how I got my name, you know. I came out howling when I was born, and so they decided to call me Roar. Because I was roaring, understand.”
“I…understand. Well, she’s a clever lass, your mum. Now go to sleep.”
Roar rolled onto his side, staring at the fire. For about ten minutes he huffed and puffed and thrashed around on the ground.
“I can’t sleep,” he whined.
“If you lie still, you’ll fall asleep,” Jerrid said without compassion. “And if you don’t lie still, I will sit on you until you do.”
This elicited a round of giggles. But Roar lay more still after that, and within a quarter of an hour, he passed out, his mouth hanging ajar and a gentle snore filling the glen.
Jerrid breathed a sigh of relief. This was the last thing he needed, with Echo on the edge of the beyond and Ava yet again in “unfriendly” hands. At the rate he was going, he might make it home by next spring.
If he ever made it home at all.
The wind whispered through the glen, stirring the long grasses and creaking the branches in the trees.
Something rustled in the forest to his right.
Jerrid stood slowly, not wanting to wake the boy, but wanting to have a clear view of the meadow.
The moon sank behind the clouds at that exact moment and plunged the clearing into a heavier darkness.
Another rustle. And then a snap of a twig.
Even the trees began to groan, as if they’d come to life and were moaning in fear. Something was coming. Something large. The trees shivered and creaked. Dry leaves crackled in the undergrowth, and the bugs fell silent in the meadow.
Jerrid lifted his spear and eased around the bonfire to put himself between the sleeping child and the approaching unknown.
Let me help.
Jerrid gave his head a stubborn shake and gripped the spear more tightly.
But just then the moon came out from behind the clouds, and a white glow illuminated the clearing. A few dozen yards away, the trees shifted, swaying and leaning away from one another as something large forced its way between them.
Jerrid faltered backward a step, mouth sliding open as a massive void of darkness forced its way out of the trees. Two glowing, bulbous white orbs wobbled toward him.
The orbs blinked.
The horrible realization struck him that those glowing orbs were actually eyes.
Jerrid crouched slightly, his gaze glued to the massive creature staring at him from the shadows of the trees. Something creaked loudly, like a giant door closing on rusty hinges.
Then the creature dove for him with an ear-splitting shriek.
Jerrid bellowed a warning to the boy as the creature exploded from the forest, bobbing side to side as it crawled and coiled toward them on a long, sinewy body.
A snake, he realized.
Dragon howled a gleeful war cry inside his mind.
Except not a snake. This creature had legs and a scaly hide like a dragon, and yet it was proportioned all wrong to be a dragon.
Behind him, Roar began to shriek hysterically.
Jerrid risked one quick look over his shoulder and saw the child grabbing uselessly at the long grass, his huge, frightened eyes staring straight at Jerrid.
Something plucked Roar from the ground and dragged him screaming into the darkness.