CHAPTER 3
Jennifer
Jennifer Scales
caught her mother as she was coming in from the hospital parking
lot. Beyond her, Susan and Gautierre were smiling and fiddling with
their electronic equipment.
“How’d the interview
go?”
To Jennifer’s
surprise, Elizabeth turned bright red. “It went well. What do you
need?”
“What do you mean,
what do I need? Watch shift. I’m headed up to the
roof.”
“Ah. So where’s
Catherine?”
“I think she’s
already up there. She volunteered for last shift,
too.”
“She’s been pulling
an awful lot of shifts.”
“You’re complaining?
She’s a quick study with that rifle.”
“I’m noting that as
recently as two months ago, she was in daily rehab learning to walk
again.”
“Yes, well, she’s
fine now. You cleared her yourself.”
Elizabeth nodded.
Catherine Brandfire, granddaughter of the late Winona Brandfire,
had spent much of the last year in a hospital bed recovering from a
vicious wound to her spinal cord. The cut had meant to hobble her
out-of-dragon form and cripple her limbs, but Jennifer’s powers as
the Ancient Furnace and Elizabeth’s skill as a surgeon had restored
Catherine’s ability to walk and shift.
“I still wouldn’t
suggest she try flying soon.”
“You and me both.
She’s a trampler. She always sucked at that. Can’t even whomp worth
a damn.”
“Sniper duty sounds
about right, then.”
“Um, Dr.
Georges?”
“Georges-Scales,”
Elizabeth said automatically, looking over her daughter’s shoulder.
Jennifer felt a surge of irritation—not at being interrupted, nor
at the incomplete use of her mother’s name, but at the fact that
the doctor never seemed to catch five minutes around here.
Everybody looked for her.
Everybody found
her.
“Right. Um. Hi,
Jennifer.”
Jennifer nodded
tersely at Anna-Lisa, formerly an administrative assistant in the
administration wing, now a war scout. Anna-Lisa and her team of
determined medical secretaries explored the town for medical
supplies of any kind. It had become difficult work once the
pharmacies were empty, because recognizing the most useful supplies
required both basic medical knowledge (to avoid duplicative effort)
and excellent reflexes (to avoid attacks from
enemies).
Anna-Lisa turned to
Elizabeth. “Dr. Georges-Scales? Um, we were thinking? That maybe we
would try the homeopathic remedy store? In the strip mall by the
cinema?”
Jennifer loathed it
when women said things as questions? Because it was so annoying?
Not to mention wishywashy? She had never heard a man talk like
that.
She had mentioned it
to her mother once, who had pointed out that Anna- Lisa was busting
her ass with limited military medic training. If she talked like
this? It wasn’t worth quibbling about.
Still, it was as
irritating as a centipede navigating a groin rash?
“That sounds fine,
Anna- Lisa. I doubt you’ll find much real medicine, but bring the
homeopathics back. They may have a useful placebo effect in some
situations.”
The petite brunette,
who apparently grew new freckles across her nose and cheeks by the
day, nodded.
“Okay, so, we’ll do
that? But the reason I came out?”
“Someone needs me
back inside.”
“Yeah. They do. And
Dr. Paige thinks Mrs. Gremmel’s foot is going to have to come
off.”
Elizabeth nodded
grimly. Jennifer knew that expression. She also knew Mrs. Gremmel’s
case—a nice sixty-eight-year-old woman who had suffered exactly
zero attacks from any dragon, spider, beaststalker, or rogue
raccoon in town. She was simply diabetic, with poor circulation.
She’d received the town’s last known dose of insulin back in July.
She now sported a gangrenous foot, and Dr. Georges-Scales had
limited options. A few antibiotics. No propofol. No halothane. No
nitrous oxide. No thiopental. Very little ketamine. Even fewer
fentanyl. Maybe a little bit of etomidate.
Soon, Jennifer
figured, they would all be reduced to hitting patients over the
head.
Hey. Then I can be a surgeon, like
Mom!
She had banished the
inappropriate thought and was about to suggest to Anna-Lisa that
she bludgeon Mrs. Gremmel so her own mother could get more than a
minute’s rest herself, when she heard the air horn and cry
outside.
“DRAGON! DRAGON!
DRAGON!”
A rifle fired once,
then again a few seconds later. Then there was a commotion on the
roof—one thump as something landed, then another, then another, and
another . . .
Catherine! Jennifer was out the door and sprouting
wings before the last of the dragons had landed on the roof. The
watch-and-sniper’s structure built alongside a roof exit door was
crude but sturdy: a ten-foot-high cylinder of balanced bricks and
stones transported from ruined houses around town, dotted with
plenty of sniper holes and covered with asbestos-lined sheet
metal.
Except now, one of
the walls had been torn down, and seven dragons were sticking their
snouts into the opening and wrestling with the occupants. Flames
sprouted from their mouths, ammunition exploded in a fierce
staccato, and a man inside screamed.
The dragons were
pulling someone else out with their jaws. It was Catherine—who
thankfully had shifted into dragon form—but her fireproof scales
would not prevent these monsters from tearing her
apart.
In a blink, Jennifer
was among them, smashing one dragon with her bulk, whipping
another’s snout with her tail, and clawing at a third with an
extended wing. The other four immediately dropped Catherine and
backed up to assess the new threat. The largest was immediately
recognizable—a middle-aged dasher, at seven feet no longer than the
juveniles who surrounded her, but remarkable because her tail ended
in two swollen stumps instead of the lethal spiked fork most
dashers used.
“Ember
Longtail!”
The raiding party’s
leader straightened up, near-black scales glistening in the sun.
The mere sight of Jennifer infuriated her. The peach markings on
the undersides of her wings expanded and contracted violently, and
a blast of fire came out.
“What is the point of
that?” Jennifer asked, eyes closed and
her head turned slightly. The flames felt ticklish and warm on her
skin.
Ember answered with a
charge, which caught the younger dragons by surprise and sent them
in a somersault—half electric blue scales, half dark spines.
Jennifer felt her adversary’s teeth dig into her neck, and she
cursed herself for her carelessness as blood spilled over her
throat.
She didn’t dare shift
back into human form—it was far more fragile than this one. The
only recourse she had was to bite back, and so she did. Ember’s
left wing was available, albeit not very tasty.
The dasher grunted in
pain, but her jaws remained fixed. Jennifer blinked, wondering why
she was losing peripheral vision, then realized it was because her
jugular was pouring her lifeblood into open air.
Get her off, get her OFF. Her triple- forked tail
swung around and smacked Ember on the back of her spiny head.
Nothing. She tried again, harder. Sparks bounced off the other’s
skull. Still, nothing.
Desperately wishing
for a way to melt out of this death grip, she tried plunging a tail
tip into Ember’s eye socket. A near miss—they were both still
moving, and Jennifer’s aim was worsening as she lost more vision.
She began to feel dizzy. Off in the distance, Catherine bravely
fended off the others. Gautierre, thankfully not far away when the
attack started, was next to her.
I hope that means Susan is inside and
safe.
Now there were new
voices—had more allies come out the exit door and worked their way
through the rubble?
The answer came in
the form of a brilliant shock wave, which took both Ember and
Jennifer by surprise. The former unclenched her jaw with an
exclamation of pain at the sudden flow of sound and light, and
Jennifer squeezed her eyes and ears shut while shifting back into
human form.
She wasn’t sure if it
was the blood loss, or the beaststalker’s shout that had
overwhelmed her dragon senses, or both. She blacked
out.