Moonborn

Alarms

Evelyn woke in the dead of night, her sleeping dragonet coiled by her side. There was something on the edge of her conscious, something not quite right with the world. She got up slowly, careful, the glowing spheres of light in holders along the wall the only thing left to discern light from dark.

It was dead quiet in the hallway as well, though Marvin and Seraphine were playing guard-dog across the hall. At first glance she thought them both asleep until she saw Marvin's eyes shining through the darkness. He stood up and crossed the hall in a few, sturdy steps.

Oh, God. Not here, not now.

"Evelyn?" he whispered softly, his voice causing her spine to do a tap-dance. "Is something wrong?"

Everything, she wanted to say. It's all wrong without you. "I th-thought I f-felt--" She cocked her head and paused; that something that was wrong was coming in on an audible radar. "Do you hear that? It sounds like . . . whining . . ."

Oooooeeeeoooeeeooooeeeeoooee . . .

It took Marvin a few seconds less to compute. "Seraphine!" he shouted. Then to Evelyn he said, "Get your dragonet and hurry to the bunker! I'll be right behind you as soon as we finish delegating! Come on, Seraphine!"

Evelyn had just taken a few steps down the hallway with her dragonet in her arms when she heard her roar--the second time in nearly a day. In mere moments the corridor was filled with riders and dragons coming in and out, and she felt herself lost in the overwhelming presence of bodies. Her dragonet stuck her head under her armpit to hide from the noise, and Evelyn felt herself wanting to do the same. Suddenly a hand clamped down on her shoulder, and she had to suppress the urge to scream.

"It's me," Marvin said close by her ear, making her shiver. "Come on, we're getting you out of here."

With a hand wrapped around her shoulders he drove her through the crowd to the outside, where the ground trembled with the screams of malcovs. Up in the sky the dragons and malcovs were indistinguishable from each other. As she watched, a dragon crash-landed in front of them, bleeding heavily front a gash on his neck, his rider struggling to stop the bleeding. Evelyn froze. In this light, any one of them could have been Indigo . . .

"Come on, Evelyn!"

Marvin's voice jerked her out of her nightmare and into a nightmare of the present. They ran across the lawn towards a smaller building built into the side of a small hill. Malcovs, howling the dreadful cry she had heard earlier, swooped down on them, but Seraphine, covering from the air, chased them away, singeing their feathers with dragonfire. Then Marvin looked down at Evelyn and swore.

"No wonder they're coming straight for us! Cover her, or something!"

Evelyn looked down, surprised, to see her dragonet shining as bright as the moon itself. She put her in her shirt, which didn't help much, for the light just shone through. Then she tried communicating in her mind, as calmly and patiently as possible under the circumstances, to the dragonet, trying to see if she could control her brightness. The light dimmed almost immediately, to Evelyn's surprise, and they reached the building on the hill without another malcov attack. Seraphine swooped into the entrance almost immediately afterward to guard them.

The cave went down to fifty feet below the Wings compound and had been built as a sort of bunker in the days when World War I had started on Earth. In the rare times that the compound was attacked, vulnerables always went into safety through several entrances hidden around the compound, including this one, an old storage shed for riding and training gear. But Evelyn had always imagined herself fighting above, not hiding below. She comforted herself by comforting her dragonet, who was shivering with fright and cold.

Marvin led the way through a door posing as a cupboard to a tunnel, tight but not claustrophobic, which sloped steadily downwards to the bunker. This one was just wide enough for two people to walk comfortably side-by-side, but a hatch in the floor of the shed under the old riding gear could be opened for a full-size dragon to fit, though narrowly.

Fifty feet under, the tunnel leveled out and opened into a large, wide cavern, dimly lit by small, glowing spheres, where stacks of nonperishable foods waited and a few kitchen maids sat. Evelyn found all eyes on her and hurried after Marvin, who had settled in relative privacy behind a few potato sacks that nearly formed a wall.

After she had sat down he glanced at her, opened his mouth as if to say something, blushed red and then pointedly turned away. Evelyn looked down and realized also with embarrassment that putting a frightened dragonet in your shirt with untrimmed claws does little for your modesty. She furtively tried to piece together her dignity, but it didn't help that she could imagine exactly what Marcy would say about this, when she and Marvin had been alone together. Her dragonet, no longer overtly frightened and back to her usual amount of brightness, was lying across her ankles in a semblance of a dog lying across its bones, or perhaps something important that it had torn up.

Marvin finally looked at her again. "Have you seen her do that before?" He asked.

"What? The brightness? No."

"Or any dragon?"

Evelyn wondered where this was going. "Controlling it, no, not really. But I think Aurum seems to fade or strengthen color sometimes." Aurum was Aldebar's dragon, a golden orange color.

"Hmmm."

They sat in silence for a while, Evelyn mostly trying not to focus on the fact that her feet were going numb. Marvin seemed to be brooding over something.

"Evelyn?" he said finally. "Can I ask you something?"

Evelyn tried to breathe normally. "Of course," she said, rhythms of sick nervousness making her shiver.

He hesitated. "Do...do you ever wish—"

Harsh banging and a malcov screech from above cut him off. In an instant he was on his feet, and Evelyn had gathered her dragonet back into the safety of her arms.

"What was that?" she whispered to herself, though she had a guess.

Marvin was rigid in his posture; she knew he was probably listening to Seraphine. Then in the next instant he had sprung into motion, erecting a crude barricade of potato sacks around her and yelling loudly to the rest of the bunker, "Get under cover!"

He jumped behind the sacks just as the ceiling imploded.