Chapter Twenty-Two
Fireheart’s story was, on the surface, something Frida already knew.
The LEZ was well versed in such tales, translated into colourful pamphlets written by highly paid communications experts.
It was grace, wonder and happiness followed by great and terrible losses.
By humans with new weapons, roaring guns, chainsaws, concrete and diggers, flames and screaming.
Ending, of course, in the safety of Melody-Upon-Sea.
However, it was different to hear it from Fireheart’s own lips.
In her voice, it was like a scalding wound, and it burned Frida, bone deep.
‘I wasn’t young, but I was arrogant,’ Fireheart told her. She had hunched up against the wall as she spoke, her voice emptied of all of its fire. Her spine arched tensely, her wings locked. She positioned herself between Frida and the Jewel, blocking the Jewel’s fragile glow.
‘I thought I couldn’t be bested,’ Fireheart sighed. ‘I was wrong.’
Frida sat with her knees against her chest, the monkeys arrayed around her in a loose circle. She wondered whether Fireheart had ever told anyone this story before.
‘What did they do to you?’
Fireheart was silent for a long time. Twiglet crept over, extending a small paw to the dragon’s heaving chest, before slinking back to her place next to Cream Pie.
‘It was some kind of weapon that stunned me first,’ Fireheart started haltingly.
Her wheeze seemed to be greater now, whether from extended speech or emotion.
She looked down at the rocks, dragging her claws along their surface with a painful, elongated screech.
‘I didn’t understand. I’d never seen anything of that ilk before.
None of us had, although there had been rumours, rippling through the worlds.
Of wrongness. Can’t you feel it, zookeeper?
Can’t you feel the way your magic shrinks from it, whimpering in pain? ’
Frida slowly lifted a hand to touch her temples, where the burn of a headache still lingered. She didn’t have time to consider what Fireheart meant though, before the old dragon went on brokenly,
‘When I woke up, they’d sawn off my wings.’
There were no words for such a thing. The pain was so raw, so visceral, Frida felt the ghost of greedy hands, sliding knives down her own back, cutting tendons, slicing bone. The crack of sinew, the blinding grief.
‘My home was taken.’
The lights of desert stars, winking out one by one by one.
‘My mate was murdered.’
A silhouette against a rock face, the dark shape of another cat-like dragon covered in blue blood, teeming with the tiny shapes of humans using those same knives to carve pieces out of dead flesh.
Frida wanted to beg Fireheart to stop, it was too much, too painful, too private, but there was no pause, no mercy in the telling.
Fireheart continued, low and unyielding, as though she were a storm, a roiling tornado of flame.
‘The world that I was part of, and that was part of me. They took everything from me. They shattered me in every possible way. From then on, I didn’t have the energy to fight. You will ask why I have stayed.’ Her eyes were ancient and weary. ‘But where would I go?’
Frida felt a deep and helpless sorrow etched into her chest. Fireheart was right. There was nowhere for her to go, not with her wings like that.
‘But that’s why the LEZ is so precious,’ Frida said emotionally.
Fireheart just looked at her, the ink in her milky eyes scarred with fire.
‘Please,’ Frida beseeched. ‘You have to help me save it.’
‘I will help you,’ Fireheart answered, her voice a deep puff of smoke.
Frida was so surprised, she reeled backwards. She hadn’t expected it. ‘Truly?’
The small, ragged frill around Fireheart’s neck shivered, and she raised her snout imperiously.
‘Yes, I will help you, but there is a cost. You must help me first.’ She glanced behind her, at where the broken Jewel smouldered.
‘Find the rest of my Jewel, the rest of my soul,’ her voice broke, causing Frida to sway, ‘and I will help you put your world back together. Find my Jewel,’ she said roughly, ‘and I will do what you ask, azizam.’
Frida’s head rang, a high hollow hum that deafened her.
Like the beat of distant wings. Find Fireheart’s Jewel.
She rose up to her feet, her hands in fists.
‘I will do it!’ she exclaimed. Although, as the wingbeats faded, she realised she had no idea where to start.
As if reading this on her face, Fireheart gave a low chuckle, like rocks shifting, and for once, there was a shadow of sympathy on her lined face.
Frida almost heard her maligning the small brains of humans.
‘Go back to the beginning,’ Fireheart said, her filmy eyes surprisingly kind. ‘Only there will you find the knowledge you need.’
‘The beginning?’ Frida asked, furrowing her brows.
The beginning of what? Her first thought was to go back to the Hawthorn, for that was where this whole nightmare began, but she wouldn’t find the Jewel at the tree.
This had to be something different. Fireheart’s beginning, then?
The Jewel’s? The beginning of the very world? ‘Please, I need more–’
‘The hatchling,’ Fireheart cut her off, her moment of patience evaporated. ‘He knows where. Go and bother him. It’s his turn now.’
Frida was shaking her head though. ‘No, he’s asleep! I already tried–’
‘Oh, azizam. Dragons do not succumb to mere sleep spells. If he’s napping, give him a sharp poke in the belly.
Now go away.’ Fireheart punctuated this with a massive, jaw-cracking yawn.
‘I’ve done my part. You can figure out the rest. This plot has so many twists and turns it makes my head ring, and I grow tired of you.
’ A sulphurous wind rushed through the cavern, making Frida choke.
When it cleared, Fireheart’s scales were ablaze, like ribbons of lava pouring over her bones.
‘Come, little-storms,’ she muttered to the monkeys.
‘There is much to do, and we do not want to distract the zookeeper.’
Jellybean gave a little peep of complaint, but when Fireheart levelled a scathing look at him, he hung his head, marble-storms frothing. He looked at Frida with his round yellow eyes.
‘Pink crackles,’ he trilled desperately. ‘Free, pink crackles.’
Then he leapt away with a shriek.
Frida didn’t have time to call after him in dismay before the dragon roared.
The power in the cavern flared, and Fireheart and all sixteen of the storm monkeys disappeared with a smoky pop.
The cavern was plunged into darkness, and Frida was all alone again.
It might have crushed her, and for a moment it did.
A moment, however, was all she allowed, before she straightened her shoulders and pulled out her phone to switch on the torch.
She only had 4 per cent battery, but she hoped it would be enough to get her back down the cliff.
As she ran, it seemed desert stars still twinkled every time she blinked.
‘Just give him a poke!’ she repeated, laughing in despair as she passed under the fence, the red-hot metal cool now. How much time had passed? She didn’t know. It was night, probably. She didn’t dare think about how much time she’d lost, here, at the library, being chased by the Nuckelavee.
Silly Friduska. Why didn’t you think of just poking the sleeping baby dragon?
Grace was well and truly deceased, but Frida had expected as much.
There was only so much Nuckelavee any one buggy could cope with.
With an apologetic pat on her dash, Frida pocketed the last energy bar and drained Antony’s water bottle, before continuing on foot.
She refused to allow herself to miss the electric peels of the monkeys.
The quickest route back to Forest, and Dragon’s Deep, was a thirty-minute walk.
With Fireheart’s mission lit like a fire in her bones, she did it in fifteen.
As she’d seen from up on the cliff, the electricity was patchy, many of the spotlights within the enclosures, and the warm Narnia-style lamps along the roads, out of action.
Thankfully, the last remaining juice of her phone held out and although she twitched at every shadow, the sense of sleep hung heavily in the musky loam-filled air.
She saw no more sign of hellish sea demons, nor homicidal box trees.
Even the wood seemed to have settled, as if it had finally decided that it had done enough work for the day, and it, too, was ready for a well-deserved nap.
It was . . . eerie.
Taking barely a second to catch her breath, the beep sounding on the security panel (thankfully this area of the LEZ seemed to still be online), she was just stepping into the rabbit-warren of corridors leading to Dragon’s Deep when she heard a deep muffled roar that set her teeth on edge.
Goosebumps rose, all along her arms. Maybe she wouldn’t have to poke him, after all.
Gathering herself, she lunged into a sprint.
‘Lucky,’ she breathed. ‘I’m coming.’
He was pacing back and forth when she burst onto the brightly lit tarmac of his management area.
His belly was like a blazing hot forge. The wards were a discordant hum coming from the glass between them, drowning out his cries.
She was already pressing a thumb to the security panel, the one that would get her inside the glass, when Lucky reared up on his hind legs, golden eyes rolling in his head.
He chirped and roared, chirped and roared.
The uptilted spotlights gilded the sides of his violet scales, which seemed to ripple like flames.
‘I’m coming, love!’ she cried, terrified. Had something happened to him?
Finally, the panel gave a beep and she was through, pulling open the first heavy gate and then the second.
The moment she passed beneath, the now familiar vice-like pain tightened around her skull.
She tried to shake it off, that brutal maul-like pressure stabbing behind her eyes, as the muggy green jungle enveloped her.
He howled, in pure misery, ‘I’M SO HUNGRY! SO HUNGRY! SO, SO HUUUUUUNGRY!’
She only had a moment to feel blinding relief before he went on.
‘You said you’d come back, you said you wouldn’t leave. You promised.’
Mortification slammed into her.
His molten irises swirled with a thousand different hot, accusing yellows.
‘I am so, so sorry. I thought you were asleep!’ But then she put her head in her hands. She couldn’t imagine how he must have felt. Abandoned. ‘I bet you’ve been really lonely.’
For a second, Lucky seemed to waver between wanting to tear her limb from limb and wanting to burst into tears.
Pretty much all the foliage had been crushed beneath the rapid flaring of his wings, and a number of the palm trees were starting to smoulder dangerously.
Baby dragons had about as much ability to emotionally regulate as a teakettle, and Frida didn’t have a team of firefighters on hand.
But as if he’d heard her, a look of alarm came over his face, and he started blowing gusts of icy steam over the palm leaves.
When everything had stopped smoking, he sat down with a ground-shaking thud and sank into a position of utter dejection.
‘I’m so sad. I don’t have any friends,’ he whimpered, followed by a litany of chirps that ended with little hiccups of dismay. ‘I . . .’ He hiccupped again. ‘I thought you were my friend.’
‘I am!’ she cried, distraught. Then she did the only thing she could think of. ‘Look, I’ll get you some food, ok? Right now.’
He gazed at her under long, golden eyelashes. ‘You will?’
‘Dragon butler to the rescue!’ she cried, already rushing away through the tunnel.
Any zookeeper worth their salt knew they’d never be able to get a baby dragon to do anything on an empty stomach.
The frill around his neck fluttered, all the purples of the rainbow, and his forked tail began to jiggle.
In no time at all, she’d lugged almost an entire cow, frozen appendage by gory appendage, back inside. Lucky watched her, askance. Only when the meat lay in a pile in the centre of the crater that he’d made a nest out of, did he deign to sniff the nearest piece.
She nodded, gesturing enthusiastically. ‘Go on, it’s for you.’
Although he looked distressed at first, when she picked up a bone and mimed gnawing on it, he soon got the knack.
As he ate, Frida retreated to a far corner and sat in a pile of gladioli petals, trying not to think about the blood of the cow seeping into her uniform.
She’d once helped Sora conduct a study on how well the zoo’s cows, crickets, earwigs and other edible critters were cared for.
Ultimately, they were not cared for all that well at all.
And as she sat there in the mud, covered in blood, the symphony of cracking bones in her ears, she couldn’t help but feel like one of those bones was lodged in her own throat.
It was hard to stay there, silent.
‘Lucky?’ she asked tentatively, when she could wait no longer.
Lucky startled. He dropped the final leg bone and tried to cover it with one oversized paw, as if ashamed to have been caught eating.
‘No, it’s ok, Lucky.’ She tried to smile. ‘It’s yours. You can finish it.’
‘I am full,’ he pronounced plainly.
Then he frowned, a shadow crossing his face.
Alarmingly slowly, he craned his neck bit by bit until he was so close to her, she was almost knocked out by the sweaty, meaty stench.
Blood dripped in long, malodourous strands from his gigantic yellow teeth.
As she trembled, doubting whether he wasn’t so full after all and maybe they weren’t quite as good friends as she’d thought, he sniffed her, streaks of lava rupturing around his pupils.
He let out a globular cloud of purple smoke, right into her face, and she was wondering if she hadn’t made a terrible, bone-crunching miscalculation when he growled,
‘What is a Lucky?’