Suddenly scared of meeting this dragon, Annie’s eyes pleaded with the Big Foot. No matter how grumpy Gran Pie was, having her near made Annie feel safe. It was like having a super-size teddy bear that could talk. Okay, maybe not as cuddly.
“Oh, and I forgot to ask you? Are you good at riddles?” Gran Pie stared at her as the gull flew off Gran Pie’s finger to land in Annie’s hair.
“At what?”
“At riddles.”
“I don’t know.” Annie tried to think of riddles. She couldn’t think of any.
“Dragons love riddles. You can bribe them with riddles. Try to think of some.”
“Oh, okay,” Annie looked at Bloom. “Do you know any riddles?”
“A few.”
“Tell me one,” Gran Pie demanded.
Annie bit her lip. “Um, er … what’s black and white and red all over?”
“That’s no good. That’s too easy!” Gran Pie blustered and reached out to grab the gull on Annie’s head.
“What’s the answer, then?”
“A newspaper.”
“No, it’s a zebra with a sunburn.”
Gran Pie rolled her eyes, and the gull made a long series of annoyed chattering noises. “That is not a good enough riddle for a dragon.”
Annie had had enough of this dragon bashing. “Please, just tell me where to go.”
Gran Pie pointed. “Walk along the tide line. Go to the double boulders. One is shaped like a giant beaver, to remember the beaver’s sacrifice for man. When you get there, turn. Anyway, just follow the gull down the beach. She will lead you.”
“That’s it?” Annie pushed her hair back behind her ears.
“That’s all you need.” Gran Pie looked away from them and out to the sea. Dark clouds tumbled across each other off the horizon. Bloom gave her a thumbs-up.
Annie knew he was being brave for her and she smiled, heart soaring. “Okay, then. Let’s go. Thank you, Gran Pie, for your help.”
“Remember: dragons—no matter what I think of them—are rare. This one is the rarest of all, because it is not supposed to be. Secrets are kept hidden and safe for a reason. Stories and histories are woven together in such a way so that time can march on. Corny, of all people, knows this, and she is the only one for whom I would ever reveal the dragon. It is for her and for her alone that I am telling you this. Remember well.”
Annie turned and started off, but two large hairy arms wrapped around her in a Big Foot hug, which, by the way, is much, much bigger than a bear hug and much, much tighter. Annie couldn’t breathe. Big Foot fur surrounded her nose and teeth. She closed her eyes and fought back a sneeze.
Gran Pie swayed with her, rocking back and forth. Then one arm shot out and caught Bloom up in the embrace as well, smooshed right up against Gran Pie’s belly.
“Oh, my poor wee brave ones,” she crooned. “The sacrifices you make and don’t even know it. My brave, brave little elf, the last one left, off to face the hideous dragon to save poor Miss Cornelia from the wicked talons of the Raiff. Oh, I wish I could go with you, you sweet, sweet things. Two new friends with bonds greater than—”
“You are smothering them!” a shrill voice interrupted, the Woman in White.
Gran Pie reluctantly let them go.
“And you know dragons are not all that bad,” the ghost said, hands on her hips.
Gran Pie snorted. “Not if you’re a ghost and already dead.”
Gran Pie wiped at the tears that collected in her eyes.
“You children should go,” the Woman in White said, floating over toward Gran Pie and holding her. “She gets emotional. I’ll take care of her.”
Gran Pie had started to sob, horribly racking sobs that shook the trees. Annie touched her arm. “We’ll be fine.”
“Oh, so brave.”
“Go!” the Woman in White said, ethereal hand pointing down the shore. “Time runs short. Go!”
The gull took flight and the children ran after her. Stopping, Annie turned around one last time. Gran Pie waved good-bye. It reminded her of an overprotective mother seeing her kindergartners off for the first day of school.
“Be careful!” she yelled. “Think of a riddle!”
But a riddle was the last thing on Annie’s mind.
The trip was not too long. They passed more seaweed and discarded mussel shells, a giant mound of dark sand, and some broken-apart crabs. Their shells bleached from the air and sea’s workings. The old wooden hull of a long-ago ship lay on the beach, also broken apart, but in the middle, its supporting beams sticking up from the sand like giant ribs.
“They say that was Blackbeard’s,” Bloom said in a low tone.
“The pirate?”
Bloom nodded.
“In Maine?” Annie thought pirates were just down in the southern Atlantic waters, like in Charleston, South Carolina, Florida, and the Bahamas, not in cold, boring Maine.
“He came to Aurora.” Bloom shuddered.
The gull turned left and brought them right to the face of a huge, almost sheer granite cliff that went up at least four hundred feet. It had no trails up, only cracks and crevices and outcroppings. The gull began spiraling higher, the way gulls do when they fly, twirling in looping circles.
Annie and Bloom craned their necks to watch her ascent. She went halfway up to a place where there seemed to be a dark hole in the cliff’s face. She hovered there for a moment and then soared back down. The sun caught her wings, making them shine.
The bird landed on a boulder in front of them. The boulder was shaped like a gigantic beaver with a big flat tail attached. That’s what Gran Pie had said to look for. Annie stared up at the sheer cliff.
Her heart sank. “All the way up there?”
The gull squawked.
“I could never climb up there,” Annie said, apologizing. “I’m afraid of heights.”
“Afraid of heights? I thought you did gymnastics?” Bloom said.
“The uneven bars aren’t that high,” Annie said, craning her neck to look all the way up.
When she climbed things, her head always became all dizzy and swirly. Even when she was on top of a mountain and looked down, it felt like her breath all whooshed out of her and that she’d faint. Bloom’s tree home was about as high as she could go without stressing. Even being in Jamie’s hair had twisted her stomach in two.
Annie turned away from the cliff. Storm clouds thundered over the sea. They came quicker and quicker, gaining power as they moved across the sky. The dark rolling mass of them gobbled up the blue as it moved closer and closer.
Annie despaired. She was no good at adventure or at being a hero. She kicked at an old clamshell. She felt so bad for Miss Cornelia since she was the one who was supposed to rescue her.
She scooped down and picked up a clamshell and hurled it at the rock face. “Yoo-hoo, Mr. Dragon! Or, Mrs. Dragon. Yoo-hoo! Hello!”
She grabbed a mussel and threw it, jumping so hard her feet left the beach for a moment and she was airborne. The mussel barely went up halfway. Hardly missing a beat, Bloom took a handful of clams and tossed them right into the dragon’s cave, lost in the dark.
“Show-off.” Annie laughed, smiling at him. Sea glass, purple and blue, had been under the mussel shell. She scooped it up and put it in her pocket.
“Dragon!” he yelled. “Would you mind coming out, please?”
Nothing moved.
“Hello, dragon! Dragon!”
“Dragon!” Annie yelled.
“Excuse me, Mr. Dragon.”
Nothing happened.
“Dragons need doorbells,” Annie said.
“Or hearing aids.” Bloom whipped another shell into the hole far above their heads.
“Or manners. Do you think he’s just ignoring us?”
The wind began to pick up. Their arms and voices grew tired. Annie closed her eyes, and a desperate Miss Cornelia appeared. Her face was bruised and looked as if it had been bludgeoned. Annie gasped. They were trying to break her sp
irit.
What had Miss Cornelia told her at the house? It seemed so long ago.
Annie, you can be brave.
Cannot. Cannot, the other voice in her head droned on.
Annie shut it out. Enough!
“Okay.” Annie sighed. “I’m climbing.”
“But you’re afraid.”
“There’s no choice.” Annie shrugged.
Bloom put his hand on her shoulder. “I go first, then.”
By the time they began their climb, the sun had already moved midway across the sky, keeping just ahead of the storm clouds that were trying desperately to catch up. The granite cliff soared up straight and defiant against the ocean.
Bloom’s feet sprinted up the cliff, already a good twenty feet above her. The bottoms of his shoes had no treads like boots or running shoes. They were smooth and seemed to meld with his feet. He scurried up the massive stone face easily, gracefully using the tiniest of holds as if they were gigantic ladder steps.
Annie wiped her hands on her pants and then rubbed them together. They were red from the cold. She let out a low whistle as she scanned the rock’s face.
“Darn elves,” Annie muttered.
I can do this. She brushed some hair from her face with her left hand. There was nothing else to do with it at the moment, since she couldn’t find a handhold. Then she spotted a crack. Okay, there.
She grabbed the crack and began her ascent. Tucking her body tight against the cliff, she struggled to find places to put her feet and hands. But slowly she located them and began climbing up. The wind began to blow against her, but she clung to the cliff’s gray and rocky side. Then she just kept climbing. One inch, then two.
“You okay, Annie?” Bloom called down.
He had stopped to wait for her and was crouched on one foot in what seemed to Annie to be more of an impossible position than those of human contortionists.
“I’m fine,” she said, pulling up another inch or two with her arms. “Having the best time ever. Can’t believe people actually pay to do this.”
Annie came up a few steps more. The muscles all along the tops of her arms burned from the effort of heaving her body up over the rock ledge. Her fingernails, although never long, were broken and cracked in tiny parts, and barnacles and rocks scratched at her fingers and hands making little cuts. She wondered how far she’d come. She peeked down to see, without thinking about it. That was a mistake.
“Oh,” she murmured.
The world swirled. They’d climbed about 150 feet. The beach looked so far below her. The clamshells were just black pebbles. The five-foot swells were tiny splashes. Her head churned, and her stomach came up to say hello to her tongue and teeth. She pressed her face into the rock ledge again.
Don’t look down. Don’t look down.
“Annie, are you all right?”
“I looked down,” she whined.
“Okay. Okay. I’m coming down to you. Don’t look again, okay?”
“Uh-huh.” Her fingers trembled.
“You don’t need to come back down. I’m fine.”
“I’m coming.”
Annie gulped and her fingers shook more. They could barely hold on, and the rock beneath them crumbled. A piece fell into her mouth. It tasted like metal dirt. She spat it out and heard it fall to the beach below. She knew she had to move, to find a place for her foot. She had to stop being a wimp and climb up. It wasn’t safe where she was with her handhold crumbling away and the hard world so far below her. If she fell, she would be cracked in half like those crabs they’d seen as they walked, dropped from gulls’ beaks and split in two. She would be split in two. Her stomach fell back down to its proper place. I will not think that.
“Okay, I’m coming up, Bloom,” she said. “No more wimpy Annie.”
“I’m almost there. You wait.”
But Annie didn’t listen. She had something to prove to Bloom and to the voice inside her head. She thought of Tala and how much she missed him, missed putting her hand in his soft fur, kissing his big black nose.
Her right foot squirmed along trying to find a hold. She crept it up at a forty-five–degree angle. There was something there, a little nook. Yes, that would be good. There. Right there. She shifted her weight to it just as the gull came swooping by.
The gull landed on her shoulder screeching encouragement much too loudly into her ear.
“I know you are trying to be nice,” Annie said. “But that really isn’t helping.”
She reached her left hand over on top of her right, and shimmied her left foot up another four inches into a tiny groove that ran up and down the rock wall.
“In fact,” she said with a grunt, “it’s very, very distracting.”
“Craawkk,” she said, lifting off her shoulder and soaring up toward Bloom.
Some little rocks crumbled away from beneath her left foot, but it held.
“What I need right now, Mrs. Gull, is some luck.”
Luck, said a voice inside her head at precisely the same time the gull squawked and blasted out some poop that landed right on her head.
That little disgusting surprise was too much for Annie, who had been barely hanging on as it was. Her hand shot up to her hair to feel what happened, letting go of its precious hold.
That was all it took. She fell, scraping her cheek as she ricocheted off the cliff. Screaming, and arms flailing through the air, Annie fell back into a terrifying, weightless free fall. Bloom was above her on the rock wall. He was frantically reaching for his bow while holding onto the cliff face with one hand. He was a master archer. Bloom could shoot an ant off a tree branch three hundred feet away if he had to, but she knew whatever he tried to do wouldn’t make it in time. She would die. Miss Cornelia would be all alone against the Raiff.
Annie closed her eyes, but her mouth opened in a silent scream and in it were the names of everyone she’d already loved: Tala, Miss Cornelia, Bloom, Jamie, Eva. The wind whooshed by her and the ground rose up. The seagull landed on her shoulder squawking hopelessly in her ears.
Luck, luck, luck.
Annie just kept falling.
8
Grady O’Grady
Falling is nothing like jumping. It is a freewheeling lack of control. It is a skydive without a parachute, and it is terribly quick. It was too quick for Annie to think of anything intelligent to do to save herself. If she stopped time it would do no good. She only stopped it for other people—not herself—so theoretically she would have just kept falling while the rest of the world stopped. And when she reached bottom and smashed—kaput—into the hard beach rocks below her, sprawled across the one that resembled a beaver, she would be dead.
So, luckily for Annie, she really thought of nothing as she fell except the faces of the people she loved. She thought, too, of how she’d failed Miss Cornelia and Jamie and everyone. She quickly wondered if it would hurt when she hit the boulder. She imagined it would, quite a bit, actually. That only made her squeeze her eyes shut tighter.
Because her eyes were clenched closed, she was completely unaware of what was happening in the world around her. How Bloom had laced an arrow with hands far quicker than any man’s. How he just had it notched when from above him came a monstrous flapping noise. How he refused to pause and look, and instead he shot the arrow down, hoping to latch onto Annie’s jacket. How he had let go of the bow and put it around his arm, along with the end of the rope, so that he could clutch a rock, praying that his hand would hold and he would not be pulled over when the arrow hit Annie’s coat.
Because Annie’s eyes were closed, she didn’t witness how Bloom’s arrow, while exactly on track, completely missed her jacket and didn’t even lodge into her pant leg. In fact, it didn’t hit Annie at all.
Instead, Bloom’s arrow sank into the scaly end of a dragon’s tail.
The dragon soared down, underneath Annie, pulling the arrow’s rope … which was still wrapped around Bloom’s wrist … with it.
The elf’s mouth opene
d in a wide O, and he shouted “Annie!” as he plunged off the rock face and swung through the air above the rocky surf, attached to the dragon by the rope’s long tether.
Annie opened her eyes at the sound of her name. Bloom was falling toward her. And then she landed with a hard thump that forced her eyes back closed and made it feel as if her entire brain had smashed into the top of her skull. Her cheek scraped against something hard.
I have died, she thought. I am dead.
Then she realized what that meant. Oh no, I’m going to be a horrible ghost like the Woman in the White. I am going to be stuck forever searching for the dragon. I will never have peanut butter and fluff sandwiches again. And I’ll go twirling off, shrieking when anyone asks me questions … And—
She was listing all these things in her head when she suddenly heard another voice. It wasn’t like the mean voice that sometimes told her she was stupid. It was a low, mellow voice that reminded her of kind men who drank too much Scotch at night when watching old cowboy movies and baseball games.
Hold on, we’ll get your friend, it said.
Out loud, and much to her surprise because she didn’t usually talk to the voices inside her head, she said, “Okay.”
She twisted onto her belly and grabbed something solid that she assumed wrongly was a beach rock. Her head throbbing, she expected to see sand and coral bits, maybe a piece of a broken shell or bones bleached white by the sun. She hoped she didn’t see bits of her broken, dead self.
My bones will be like that, she thought with a shudder, unless Bloom buries me.
That thought was entirely silly, because Annie was not, in fact, dead and facedown on the beach with her ribs cracked open. She did have a bit of a concussion and was dizzy, but she was very much alive and very much on the back of a medium-size, red dragon, whose deep color reminded her of a Patagonia fleece.
“Ahhhh …,” she said, clutching at the spine she’d previously believed was a rock. The dragon! She had found the dragon! Or rather, the dragon had found her and saved her life.