He straightened. “Only with you.” He smiled crookedly and I was struck by just how cute he was. “I thought you weren’t sure.”
“I’m sure. Let’s go.”
His smile broadened then and I saw how much I’d pleased him. It is kind of amazing to have that effect on someone. Would it work the other way by Friday? Or after that? “I’ll pick you up at seven, talk to your dad and stuff.” He was big on the protocol of talking to my dad. Maybe it’s a pack thing. A wolf thing. A question of respecting the hierarchy. Either way, my dad likes Derek a bunch.
Probably as much as he dislikes even the idea of Jared.
“They went to the Caribbean today. I’m staying at Meagan’s this weekend.”
Derek nodded. “Okay. I’ll pick you up there.” He glanced at Meagan. “You coming to the dance, Meagan?”
She pouted. “I don’t have a date and I don’t want to go stag. I’ve done it enough, and this year I really want to go with a guy.”
“She’s coming,” I said to Derek, and Meagan didn’t look that surprised. There’s a casualty of her being a genius—it’s tough to surprise her.
“But…” she started to protest.
“She’s coming,” I insisted, and slammed my locker. Derek looked between us, amused.
Meagan gave me a stern look. “You’re not going to fix me up. I won’t be a pity date.”
“No, you won’t be. But, yes, I am going to fix you up.” I bumped shoulders with her, the way we always do, and smiled at her. “Trust me. I have a plan and you’re going to like it.”
I did and she would.
I just had to make it work.
ABOUT THREE MONTHS BEFORE, MEAGAN had gotten her first glimpse of the Pyr. That’s the name for dragon shape shifters, or, at least, our name for ourselves. That’s what I am, although I’m the only female dragon shape shifter in existence. There’s only one female Pyr at a time, and she’s the Wyvern. I’m the Wyvern. And being the Wyvern means having a bonus pack of extra powers, some of which I’m still trying to locate.
But my point is that all the other dragon shifters I know, all of my buddies and the dragons I grew up with, are all guys. And they’re pretty hot guys. I think the dragon business works in a big way for the males of the species: it seems to make them fill out and get buff more quickly than plain old human guys. So any female with a speck of interest in the opposite sex would notice them, even when they’re in their human form.
In dragon form, they’re breathtaking.
In November, Meagan had been targeted by the Mages because of her spellsinging talents. Spellsinging is innate: you’re born with it or not. And if you are born with it, the Mages try to enlist you. They thought they could turn Meagan to the dark side, then maybe use her against me and my dragon pals. They weren’t counting on Meagan the wunderkind figuring out their plan and deciding to go undercover to learn the real deal. It all culminated at a Halloween party at the house of an apprentice Mage named Trevor who goes to our school. Meagan had been crazy for Trevor forever, until she learned his nasty secret.
Even worse, Trevor offered up Meagan as the sacrifice for his initiation rite.
But then Garrett, one of my dragon friends, came to the rescue. Garrett is garnet and gold in dragon form, his scales like jewels, and just about as magnificent as a dragon can be. He scooped up this damsel in distress, and Meagan has been talking endlessly about Garrett ever since.
Forget Trevor.
So, I can tease Meagan about Jared because I know she’s totally nuts for Garrett.
The problem is that we’re in Chicago and Garrett lives in Traverse City. Meagan and Garrett haven’t seen each other since November. Rotten luck contributed to that—the Pyr got together at our place at Christmas, but Meagan and her family were on vacation in California at the exact same time. She was devastated.
And I think Garrett was a bit bummed, too.
He’s got the same strong-but-silent-type intensity as Derek. I know Meagan and Garrett talked a bunch, because between the two of them they’ve managed to translate that treatise on the Mages that he’d found in his mom’s used bookstore in the fall.
They didn’t really need to do it, given the current state of the Mage population—the Mages who hadn’t died had become incoherent messes, with no memories left—but it just seemed mean to take that away. They’d finished a month before and officially had no more excuses to talk to each other or see each other, at least not until the big NightBlade destruction we’d planned for April.
Which I’m sure seemed a very, very long time away for them.
So, that night, when I was supposed to be doing my homework at the dining room table at Meagan’s house, I used my messenger under the table and invited Garrett to the Valentine’s Day dance. Meagan watched me from the other side of the table, flicking glances toward the kitchen, where her mom was making dinner. Her mom is serious about homework, and if she caught me, she’d confiscate my messenger pronto.
I closed my hands over it in an attempt to muffle the sound as it chimed to signal an incoming message. I peeked between my fingers and grinned.
Ha! Garrett was coming.
“That had better not be a messenger I hear,” Mrs. Jameson said from the kitchen. “We’re going to eat in twenty minutes and I want to see that English homework done.”
Who? Meagan mouthed.
I smiled as mysteriously as I could.
She wrinkled her nose at me, then glanced at her own messenger. It remained silent.
Geek, I mouthed back at her, and she wadded up a sheet of paper to throw it at me. We have an old joke that we’re not geeky enough to message each other when we’re sitting in the same room. (Even though we sometimes do.)
“I am talking to you, Zoë Sorensson,” Mrs. Jameson added.
“Just finishing the last two questions, Mrs. Jameson,” I answered, apparently the most dutiful student alive. Just so you know, I have nobody fooled on that one.
“Meagan?”
“Done, Mom.” Meagan frowned and leaned closer to me, flicking another look at the kitchen. “Who?” she whispered.
“Wait for Friday,” I replied in kind, and winked. “You’ll love it.”
Meagan sat back. Of course she knew. Her mouth fell open and she raised a hand to her lips. No! she mouthed, clearly wanting me to say yes.
It is so tedious to try to surprise a brilliant individual, you know. Impossible, maybe.
I tried to act like I didn’t understand her, but we’ve known each other way too long for that. I’d been hoping to make her wait for it, at least until we went to bed, but no luck. Meagan was too excited.
She scribbled a note and shoved it across the table at me, interrupting my consideration of English lit question number 29.
Her expression was expectant as I read it.
Actually, she was bouncing in her chair, vibrating with such excitement that I knew I’d done exactly the right thing.
For once.
GARRETT!?!
I nodded.
Meagan snatched the paper back and scribbled some more. I smiled when I saw what she’d written.
OMG! What am I going to wear?
THAT NIGHT I HAD A familiar dream. I am never really surprised anymore when I dream of snow. It’s Wyvern stuff. Snow means that I’ll have a dream visit from those two old ladies. I’ll see them sitting under that huge tree near a well, their world superimposed on mine, as if I’m standing on the cusp of another realm.
One is soft, like a sweet grandmother who knits and makes cookies and gives perfect presents—you know, exactly what you wanted before you even realized you did. I never knew my grandmothers, so maybe I’m mixing up my wishes with the dream, but I call this one Granny. She is always knitting, silently knitting a big white mound of something. I’ve thought that she was knitting clouds before. Or snowdrifts. She was the first to show up in my dreams, but she never says anything.
Last fall, when I started to dream about Granny again, she turned
up with a friend. This one talks. She says her name is Urd and that Granny is really named Verdandi and that they’re sisters. You’d never know it to look at them. Urd has a face like a skull, while Verdandi looks like Mrs. Claus. There’s a bit of edge to Urd. She pushed me down the well, for example, the dark, awful well that is right at their feet. I know it was for my own good, but still. I keep my distance from Urd.
So, when I felt cold in the middle of the night in the twin bed in Meagan’s room and I opened my eyes to find snow drifting across my comforter, I was pretty sure what was going on. I rolled over, fully expecting to find Granny knitting and Urd spinning. I thought they’d probably turned up to tell me something important.
I doubted that it involved choosing between Jared and Derek, but I could hope.
I rolled over and my eyes just about fell out of my head in shock. Oh, Urd and Verdandi were there, and so was the big tree and even the well. Meagan’s room had disappeared, and I was out on the tundra, just like usual.
The big difference was the blood.
It was everywhere. It was crimson and shone wetly against the snow. There was so much of it that my mind boggled. How could there be an ocean of blood? Where was it coming from?
Granny was knitting, but her needles were flying with superhuman speed, as if she were trying to outrun something. Urd was spinning like a crazed woman, her drop spindle a manic blur against the snow and blood. Neither was looking around. Both seemed to be completely oblivious to the change in their surroundings, all that blood. Except, of course, for their speed and determination to ignore it.
I even could smell it, and it made my bile rise.
I knew instinctively that what they were really pretending not to notice was the third woman. She stood between them with a huge pair of silver shears, slashing at the snowdrift that Granny had knit. She turned, laughing, and cut the thread that Urd had just spun with one vicious snip of those scissors. The drop spindle fell and rolled. Urd—who wasn’t shy—didn’t say boo. She just ducked her head and went after it, rummaging under the cloud of white knitting. Granny continued to knit at warp speed.
And the third one turned her smile on me.
Uh-oh.
She was young, this one, her hair hanging in a long gold braid over her shoulder. She had those scissors in one hand, while a knife gleamed in the other. She was tall and fit, a warrior princess dressed in a laced leather jerkin, jodhpurs, and black leather boots that rose over her knees. They had big, mean silver spurs on them. Her arms were bare and I could see her muscles, as well as the blue tattoos on her skin. Her gaze was steely and her expression was grim. I knew she could whup me without even trying.
I sat up and eased away from her.
Worst of all, there was blood spattered all over her. It dripped from the scissors and pooled on the toe of one boot, gleaming crimson against the black. She even had a few splashes on her cheek.
“I am Skuld,” she said, her voice deep and rough. She sounded like she’d been chain-smoking for centuries. She took a step toward me, assessing me, brandishing that knife.
I’d done my research and thought this an ideal moment to show myself an apt student. “The third Wyrd sister,” I said, trying to sound as if I wasn’t worried. I’m pretty sure I failed. “Your name means ‘what will be’.”
“No. It means ‘what may be.’” Her eyes glinted and she laughed at me. I saw the gold crown on her one eyetooth and a hint of what looked like madness in her eyes. Then she flung out her hands, and our surroundings were instantly consumed in fog.
There was just Skuld and me and a whole lot of mist. I couldn’t even hear Granny’s knitting needles anymore. It was like she and Urd had vanished.
Or been banished.
The blood, however, was still there.
The mist wasn’t normal mist, just so you know. It smelled wrong. Dirty. Like smoke. Blood. Trouble. There was also a glimmer to it, as if a red light was being reflected by the fog. Skuld didn’t seem concerned by it. She shoved her knife into the holster on her belt on one side and the scissors into a second holster on the other. A bird screamed and there was the shadow of wings flying through the mist. She smiled.
You have to know that I was not thrilled when Skuld extended her hardened hand to me. “Come along, Wyvern. I’ve got something to show you.”
There was a determination about her that had me on my feet in record time. I was pretty sure she’d just toss me over her shoulder if I didn’t go with her. Nothing really bad had happened to me yet in these dreams. I was thinking I couldn’t actually get hurt—even though the attitude of the other two sisters worried me. They clearly didn’t want to mess with Skuld.
And I was a bit curious as to what she would show me. Urd had given me the key to the past. Verdandi had helped me claim my Wyvern powers in the present. Would Skuld give me a taste of the future?
Was she going to teach me how to claim the foresight that should be part of my Wyvern bonus pack? What about the Wyvern’s supposed ability to send dreams? I would have loved to have had both powers, so I went with her.
But when I put my hand in hers, her skin was as cold as ice. Her touch sent a shudder through me, one that nearly stopped my heart. She glanced at me and shook her head, as if I weren’t good enough for her trouble, then leapt into the air, tugging me behind her. She became a pitch-black raven, her talons digging into my hand as she hauled me into the sky.
I was reminded of Kohana, the Thunderbird shifter who was sometimes my enemy, sometimes my ally, but her bird form was smaller than his. Her feathers had a blue-black gleam and her eyes were as dark as obsidian. His eyes, in contrast, were filled with the yellow fire of lightning. She didn’t have any thunderbolts in her claws, either.
Just yours truly.
Skuld ripped through the fog with a speed and a confidence that seemed crazy under the circumstances.
It wasn’t as if she had radar. I couldn’t see more than six feet in any direction. Where were we? What else was out here?
I panicked then. I tried to shift to my dragon form, thinking I’d do better under my own steam, but apparently that ability didn’t follow me to dreamland. Or maybe Skuld had shut it down. Either way, I couldn’t shift. I couldn’t free myself from her iron grip. I didn’t know where she was going, but I was getting the feeling I wasn’t going to like it.
The glimmer of red light was getting brighter.
And it had started pulsing.
Maybe, just maybe, I shouldn’t have been so quick to comply.
SKULD DESCENDED LIKE A ROCKET, heading straight for the vivid pulse of red light. As we got closer to the ground, I could see more details. It looked like we had arrived at a garbage dump—broken bottles and twisted metal in every direction I looked. The red light flashed over it all, like there was a cop car in the vicinity.
Except there wasn’t.
Maybe it was a beacon, guiding us to Skuld’s destination.
Skuld landed with a triumphant cry, shifting shape at the last minute and punctuating her arrival by kicking aside a pile of garbage. It toppled with a crash.
“What’s that?” someone demanded. I peered through the mist and saw the silhouettes of three guys. They were standing together maybe thirty feet ahead of us. They seemed vaguely familiar to me, even though I couldn’t see them clearly. My Wyvern—or maybe my dragon—sense started to tingle.
“They can’t see or hear us,” Skuld said. She blew at the fog and it dissipated, just like that. “You’ve nothing to fear.”
Then she laughed in a way that implied exactly the opposite.
“They heard that.” I pointed to the toppled trash cans.
She grinned at me. “But can’t hear us.”
It was clear she wasn’t interested in arguing the technicalities. And, really, she would know the rules—such as they were—for this dream realm better than I. Paying attention was the best I could do.
I looked around the vacant lot. Now that we were on the ground, standing in the
rubble, the red light was gone. It looked like we were in the real world. “What are we doing here?”
Her smile was chilly. “I like battlefields. I like my dead fresh.” With that, she marched toward the guys, pulling her dagger on the way.
Like maybe she was going to get her own fresh kill.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to see this.
On the other hand, I was in a dream. Theoretically, I couldn’t get hurt. Practically, the Wyrd sisters showed me stuff for a reason. I should pay attention. I might learn something useful.
The guys started to chant, as if they didn’t see Skuld coming, but I have to believe that anybody with a pulse would have noticed her. She must be telling the truth, I decided. Or at least some of it. Either way, I followed her.
The chant was creepy. It made the hair stand up on the back of my neck, which gave me a theory about it. I looked closer and, sure enough, I saw the dangerous orange light of a Mage spell. It erupted from their throats, then spun together into a kind of cord. It spiraled up into the air, getting thicker and brighter as it went, then widened into a sphere of molten gold.
So they had to be Mages.
No, they had to be apprentice Mages, who still had their own individual memory.
This was not good.
I looked back at the guys and realized I knew two of them. One was Trevor, the apprentice Mage from school who’d tried to trick and trap us shifters last fall. The other was Adrian, the senior apprentice Mage who had invaded our dragon boot camp the previous spring. I didn’t know the third guy, but it looked like he was more junior than Trevor.
At least he looked more nervous than Trevor.
What were they doing? Trying to jump-start the old Mage plan for world domination?
The full Mages had been killed or gone crazy in that big battle in the fall. I’d pretty much assumed that cleaning up the dregs of their nasty group would be easy, since just the amateurs and the damaged were left. Trevor had been sickeningly nice to me at school, as if he were scared of me, which just reinforced my conclusion.