The Screams of Dragons #3
It was his mother whose family was from Cainsville.
Gran only accompanied them because she didn’t like to be left out of family trips.
She didn’t like the town and she certainly didn’t like Mrs. Yates.
But that day, as she went off to visit his great-aunt, Gran sent him off with two dollars and a suggestion that he go see what Mrs. Yates was up to.
Just be back by four so they could make it home in time for Sunday dinner.
He went to the new diner first. That’s what everyone in Cainsville called it.
The “new” diner, though it’d been there as long as he could remember.
It still smelled new—the lemon-polished linoleum floors, the shiny red leather booths and even shinier chrome-plated chairs.
The elders could often be found there, sipping tea by the windows as they watched the town go by.
“Holding court,” his grandmother would sniff, saying they were watching for mischief and waiting for folks to come by and pay their respects, like they were lords and ladies.
He didn’t see that at all. To him, they were simply there, in case anyone needed them.
Today, he found Mrs. Yates in her usual place. He thought she’d be surprised to see him, but she only smiled, her old face lighting up as she motioned him over.
“Mr. Shaw said he spotted your car coming into town,” she said. “But I scarce dared believe it. Did I hear the rest right, too? Your gran brought you?”
He nodded.
“Does she know you’re here?”
“She said I could come talk to you if I wanted.”
Then he got his look of surprise, a widening of her blue eyes. “Did she now?”
He nodded again, and he expected her to be pleased, but while her eyes stayed kind, they narrowed too, as she surveyed him.
“Is everything all right, Bobby?”
He nodded without hesitation. Gran thought she was clever in her plan, that he would tattle on her to Mrs. Yates without realizing that’s exactly what she wanted. He had no idea what she hoped to gain, but if Gran wanted it, he wasn’t doing it.
“Are you sure?” Mrs. Yates said, those bright eyes piercing his. “Nothing is amiss at home?”
He shrugged. “My sister’s annoying, but that’s old news.”
He thought she’d laugh, pat his arm and move on.
That’s what other grown-ups would do. But Mrs. Yates was not like other grown-ups, which was probably why he liked her so much.
She kept studying him until, finally, she squeezed his shoulder and said, “All right, Bobby. If that’s what you want.
Now, do you have your list of gargoyles? ”
He pulled the tattered notebook from his back pocket.
He’d been working on it since he was old enough to write.
Cainsville had gargoyles. Lots of them. For protection, the old people would say with a wink.
Every year, as part of the May Day festival, children could show the elders their lists of all the gargoyles they’d located, and the winner would take a prize.
If you found all of them, you’d get an actual gargoyle modeled after you.
That hardly ever happened—there were only a few in town.
It sounded easy, finding all the gargoyles, and it should be, except many hid.
There were ones you could only see in the day or at night or when the light hit a certain way or, sometimes, just by chance.
He’d been compiling his list for almost four years and he only had half of them, but he’d still come in second place last year.
“Let’s go gargoyle hunting.” Mrs. Yates got to her feet without groaning or pushing herself up, the way Gran and other old people did.
She just stood, as easily as he would, and started for the door.
“Now remember, I can’t point them out to you.
That’s against the rules.” She leaned down and whispered, “But I might give you a hint for one. Just one.”
Behind them, the other elders chuckled, and Bobby and Mrs. Yates headed out into town.
He found one more gargoyle to add to his list, and he didn’t even need Mrs. Yates’s hint, so she promised to keep it for next time. They were going back to the diner and the promise of milkshakes when Mrs. Yates glanced down the walkway leading behind the bank.
“I think I hear the girls,” she said. “Why don’t you go play with them a while, and then bring them to the diner and we’ll all have milkshakes.”
He hesitated.
“You like Rose and Hannah, don’t you?”
He nodded, and her smile broadened, telling him this was the right answer, so he added, “They’re nice,” to please her.
“They’re very nice,” she said. “It’s not easy for some children to find playmates. Some boys and girls are different, and other children don’t always like different. You’ll appreciate it more someday, when being different helps you stand out. But children don’t always want to stand out, do they?”
He shook his head. She understood, as she always did. His parents lied and tried to pretend he wasn’t different. She acknowledged it and understood it and made him feel better about it.
“Do you want to go play with the girls?”
He nodded. He did like the girls—Hannah, at least. What bothered him was the prospect of sharing Mrs. Yates with them later. But it would make her happy, and he was still her special favorite, so he shouldn’t complain.
“Off you go then. Come to the diner later and we’ll have those milkshakes.”
Mrs. Yates said Hannah and Rose were in the small park behind the bank.
They were often there on the swings, and when he rounded the corner, that’s where he expected to see them.
The swings were empty, though. He looked around the park, bordered by a fence topped with chimera heads.
Walkways branched off in every compass direction.
He heard Rose’s voice, coming from the one leading to Rowan Street.
The girls crouched beside a toppled cardboard box.
Hannah was reaching in and talking. He liked Hannah.
Everyone liked Hannah. His mother said she reminded her of the Gnat, but she couldn’t be more wrong.
Yes, Hannah was pretty, with brown curls and dark eyes and freckles across her nose.
And, like the Gnat, she was always laughing, always bouncing around, chattering.
But with Hannah, it was real. The Gnat only acted that way because it tricked people into liking her.
Rose was different. Very different. She was a year younger than Bobby and Hannah, but she acted like a teenager, and she looked at you like she could see right through you and wasn’t sure she liked what she saw.
She had black straight hair and weirdly cold blue eyes that blasted through him.
She wasn’t pretty and she never giggled—she rarely even laughed, unless she was with Hannah.
Rose saw him coming first, though it always felt like “saw” wasn’t the right word.
Rose seemed to sense him coming. She stood and when she fixed those blue eyes on him, he quailed as he always did, falling back a step before reminding himself he had done nothing wrong.
Rose only tilted her head, and when she spoke, her rough voice was kind.
“Are you okay, Bobby?”
“Sure.”
Her lips pursed, as if calling him a liar, then she waved for him to join them.
As he stepped up beside the girls, he was chagrined to realize that as much as he’d grown in the last few months, Rose had grown more.
She might be only seven and a girl, but he barely came up to her eyebrows.
She moved back to let him stand beside Hannah.
“See what we found?” Hannah said.
It was a cat, with four kittens, all tabbies like the momma, except the smallest, which was ink black.
“Show him what you can do,” Rose said.
Hannah glanced up, her forehead creasing with worry.
“Go on,” Rose said. “Bobby can keep a secret. Show him.”
He looked at Rose, and she nodded, giving him a small smile—a sympathetic smile, as if she knew what he was going through and wanted Hannah to share her secret to make him feel better.
He bristled. He didn’t want Rose’s sympathy.
Didn’t need it. But he did want the secret, so he let Rose cajole Hannah until she blurted it out.
“I can talk to animals.” Hannah paused, face reddening. “No, that doesn’t sound right. It’s not like Dr. Dolittle. I don’t hear them talk. Animals don’t talk. But they do…” She turned to Rose. “What’s the word you used?”
“Communicate.”
Hannah nodded. “They communicate. I can understand them, and they can understand me.”
He must have seemed skeptical, because her cheeks went the color of apples in autumn.
“See?” she hissed at Rose. “This is why I can’t tell anyone. They’ll think I’m crazy.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy,” he said. “But you’re right—you probably shouldn’t tell anyone else.”
Hannah’s gaze dropped, and he felt bad. Like maybe he should tell her about the dreams and how he admitted it to Gran, and what happened next.
Did they know what happened? His grandmother always said Cainsville was a “backwater nowhere” town, where they acted as if they weren’t sixty miles from one of the biggest cities in America.
Gran said they were ignorant, and they liked it that way.
They didn’t read newspapers, didn’t listen to the news or even watch it on television.
That wasn’t true. He’d once told Mrs. Yates about going to the site of the World’s Fair, and she’d known all about it.
She’d told him stories about the fair, the sights and sounds and even the smells.
He’d gotten an A on his paper and his teacher said it was almost like he’d been there.
He’d asked Mrs. Yates if she’d been there, and she’d laughed and said she wasn’t that old.
No one was. So people in Cainsville weren’t ignorant, but he supposed that knowing about the 1893 World’s Fair wasn’t the same as knowing what his teacher called “current events.”