Chapter 12 #3
“Trust me,” Mouse said. “Now, do your best to distract it while I climb onto the creature’s tail. And when I’m on, I’ll distract it while you get on.”
Before he could respond, she took off, leaving him pressed against the wall. She dashed straight at the creature, her robe and nightgown hiked above her knees. The dragon lowered its head, its mouth opening.
At the creature’s foot, Mouse dove to the side and caught the edge of its tail as high up as she could. She clung to the dragon, wrapping as much silk around her hands as she could. It was slippery, and she drew in tight against its scales.
Thrashing, the dragon jumped from side to side.
While its tail whipped, Mouse took a chance and let go, landing squarely across the dragon’s neck.
It roared, doubling its efforts to knock her off.
She hoisted herself upright as she searched for Thornwood.
He was watching, mouth agape, and she wanted to scream.
“Do something!” she shouted. Her fingers strained as the dragon shook its head.
“What were you thinking—a joust, perhaps? So tragic that I’ve left my lance in the forest and am not a complete lunatic.”
“You are impossible,” she shouted. “Get on its back! I did it!”
“You make my determination not to die sound like a character flaw,” he yelled back. “I may be a Faerie, but getting my head bitten off or being torn to pieces will still kill me.”
The shadows lengthened, and Mouse’s eyes shot to the fireplace. Where her body pressed against the dragon, she could feel a rattle and hear something like sand falling through an hourglass.
“Hurry up!” she cried.
Thornwood’s face screwed up into a determined frown. He crouched and, in a single bound, was across the room, and in another was at the dragon’s chest. Its tail lashed out toward him, and Thornwood latched onto it, his legs dangling in the air.
The dragon snapped, trying to catch Thornwood’s feet as he managed to clamber over its rump. His knuckles were white on one of its spikes as he pulled himself up behind Mouse.
“Do not disappoint me by saying you have no plan now,” Thornwood shouted.
Mouse pointed up, and Thornwood looked at the ceiling.
On the back of the dragon, they were much further up, and through the dark, the gray stone above looked almost close enough to touch.
Something glinted in the middle of the ceiling: glass catching the firelight.
Now that they were closer, stars flickered back at them from beyond, and the darkness of the night sky blended slowly into the dim gray of the wall.
“A window. How did you know it would be there?”
“I half guessed. If this room was part of the house, I thought it might obey the same rules. I know a broken window in the conservatory that is the same shape.”
“Brilliant!”
The dragon leaped into the air, shocking them away from self-congratulations and back into the moment. Mouse screamed, wrapping her arms as tightly as she could around the dragon’s neck. It shook again, one clawed talon nearly scratching Mouse as it reached back toward them.
“The question is, how do we get up there?”
“I was hoping we would be high enough here, but I think the dragon will shake us off as soon as we stand up.”
Now that Thornwood noticed the window, the dragon seemed to as well.
It veered out of the center of the floor, crouching lower against the arch of the wall.
It followed the shape of the room, slowly tracing a wide circle.
Whenever it reached the fire, it would strictly follow the edge of the ashes on the floor until it met the other side of the hearth.
It reminded Mouse of a tiger pacing at the zoo.
“It wants to leave this room as much as we do,” she whispered.
Thornwood cut in, finishing her thought. “If we break the glass, the dragon will escape, and as long as we can hold on, so will we.”
“Exactly. We only need to figure out how to break it.”
Thornwood shrugged. He pulled off his shoe and chucked it straight into the window. It struck the edge, sending cracks spiderwebbing through the glass.
“Nice shot!” she cried.
Then the window burst, littering the room with splinters.
Glass fell like rain, dusting in Mouse’s hair.
A large shard slit across her forehead, and she sucked in, flipping the collar of her robe above her head while still holding on to the dragon with one arm in case it decided to lift off.
Cool night air brushed her face, as precious as gold.
The dragon coiled in on itself, colors shifting and flooding over one another like joyful flames. It flapped its wings, unable to stretch fully, but in a distorted mimicry of a bird. The dragon darted back to the center of the room and lunged upward.
A snap split the air, like the ring of a gunshot. The sound, unexpected in this room of magic, briefly threw Mouse back to her time at the Front and the crack of bullets flying in the night.
The dragon aborted its jump, tumbling down.
On instinct, Mouse threw all her weight into holding on, wrapping her legs and arms around the dragon’s neck.
Thornwood’s arms reached just above her head, holding on as hard as she was.
Only when the dragon had stopped swaying did Mouse find the courage to peel her cheek away from its cloth scales.
The fire in the fireplace had doubled in size, its flames flicking upward around the fireplace opening and up the wall. Four longer flames rose in pillars above the hearth, a hand of fire.
Folding itself against the wall, the dragon pinned Mouse and Thornwood between its neck and the stone.
“Just fly away, damn you!” Thornwood yelled.
Mouse gasped in realization. “Of course, it’s terrified of fire! It’s made of cloth!”
“Excellent observation, but tragically, it does little to help us.”
The hand of flame reached further into the room, its fingers brushing the edge of the window high above. Mouse desperately searched for anything to stanch it but only found stone. Breaking the window had made things worse, fueling rather than dousing the flames.
Absently, she scratched further down the dragon’s neck, and it leaned into her. She thought of the many boys she had bandaged in France, exhausted but grateful as she covered their wounds.
“Why comfort it for being cowardly?” Thornwood asked.
“Thornwood, you may almost look human,” she said, patting the spot right between the dragon’s ears, “but your words expose you.”
She did not think her statement would hit home—after all, what did he care?
—but his face went white. Before he could speak, the dragon rumbled beneath them.
A growl echoed from the fire, but the dragon’s form rose to meet it.
Thornwood jerked Mouse back close to the scales just as the dragon took off, racing straight at the flames.
It extended its wings, flapping awkwardly but effectively until it was in the air.
The fire’s fingers scratched at them, and one caught Mouse’s leg.
She cried out as heat stung just below her knee.
The dragon cried out, too, but continued its flight.
It pulled in on itself, its limbs shrinking.
Large shards of glass still hung on to the edges of the window, like teeth standing out against the night sky.
They flew straight for the middle, but the closer they got, the clearer Mouse could see there was no way that the dragon would fit, not in time. The shards glinted, menacing.
“Wait!” she cried. “You’ll tear.”
“We don’t have a choice now,” Thornwood said, the distinct twist of panic in his voice.
Mouse looked over her shoulder to see that the pillars of flame grasping after them from the fireplace had shifted into enormous fully formed fingers that consumed the entire room.
The hand of fire closed around them, latching on to the dragon’s tail.
The dragon screeched, twisting in the air.
Mouse’s neck cracked back from the force, and for a moment, she could make out a face in the flames, mouth open in an enraged scream.
There was a snap, a shriek, a crash, and they careened through the window into the night sky above.