Mason Henry came in from the living room and quietly sat down across the table from Argus. He stretched out his hand and patted Argus' hand softly.
"Charlie went back", he murmured, and Argus nodded.
Startled, Alex rushed back to the front of the house and for the first time noticed that his uncle was gone. He went back to the kitchen.
"Where?" he asked from down the hall. "Where did Uncle Charlie go?"
"Back inside", said Mason Henry. "Isn't that right, Argus?" he asked, and Argus nodded again.
"You saw him go in, son, didn't you?"
"It was a bus", Argus said and Mason Henry sighed. He looked up at Sapphire and Alex and said,
"I guess I'll never know now".
"Know what?" Sapphire asked.
"What happened to my wife", he said. "She went inside too. Went in with Charlie the last time. Charlie swore he doesn't remember that, but I saw her. Following behind him just like Argus was just now, and then poof, gone. Like that. When Charlie came back, I thought maybe Henrietta would too, but now I don't think so. Not with only a week left to go."
"What do you think will happen?" Alex asked.
"They'll tear everything down, rip everything up, pour in a lot of new concrete and put steel and glass on top of it all. We'll never see it again. It's all gone."
"It was a bus", Argus repeated, and for the first time he looked up at his brother.
"I didn't think it would be like that", he added.
"We couldn't let you go", Sapphire said. "I didn't see anything, but I knew."
"You did the right thing", Mason Henry told her.
"I wanted to go", Argus said, and he started to cry again. "More than anything", he blurted out. "I wanted to go".
Alex knelt down beside him and tried his best to comfort him, but Argus needed to cry, and he cried for maybe the first time since he was a little baby, and he cried enough to make up for all those years of never getting things his way.
Chapter Twenty - Sea Dragons Stadium
It might have been the sorcery, or it might have been from paying off all the right people this time, but whatever it was, Daniel Fulsom saw his plans fulfilled. As he sat in the luxury box high above Sea Dragons Stadium ten years later, he proudly looked over the popular and highly profitable urban shopping mecca slash sports complex he'd built.
Snapdragon Alley, the name of the massive complex, was now on everybody's map, the talk of the town, the centerpiece of the city's economic revitalization, and his name, Daniel Fulsom, was in the headlines almost every day. He had become the legend he had always dreamed of becoming, and the price he'd paid was nothing to him now, a short time in prison, a temporary setback, some unpleasant but necessary dealings with a stubborn old man who now, god bless his soul, was resting in peace in some unmarked location unknown to his murderer's employer.
A young man also sat in the stands that day, along with his older brother and their friend. None of them were really football fans, but they put a few bucks on the spread in honor of their uncle's memory, and had a habit of visiting the streets around the stadium. The older brother was mostly interested in girls and beer these days, and drank a lot of the latter while he looked around at the former, while his friend occasionally jabbed him in the ribs when he was being especially obnoxious. The younger one stuck to soda, especially diet lemon lime, and liked to pop the tops off the soda cans and hold them up to the light, as if he expected to see something, as if the world could be different merely by looking at it in another way. After a moment he'd shrug, drop the tab on the concrete steps and say to himself, "well, you never know", and then pretend to be interested in the game again.
The End
Dragon City - Book One
Followed by 'Freak City', 'Dragon Town', and 'Happy Slumbers'
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