LITMIR.BIZ

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heard the remark and left the house, patting his hair down in sudden regret. But going back would mean a lot of chatter about who she was and all that, and there was nothing he wanted less than advice from his father. His hair was a blond, wiry, standing-at-attention deal anyway; not much changed that.

      And anyway, the horse ride to town would mess it up.

      And anyway, the girl liked him enough to see past all that.

      As he rode Norayiss down the long driveway, Fenwick scampered alongside. Simon wondered how the fox knew he was leaving. Aldric came to the door and shouted after him, “Be back by eleven! After training, we’re going to look for Order members.”

      You do it yourself. What a waste of time, thought Simon, galloping down the tree-lined trail. For months, the St Georges had been trying to find new converts to the Dragonhunting cause and it wasn’t going well. No one else could see the serpents in their true form, so more often than not, Aldric and Simon ended up looking like complete nutcases.

      It used to be that the Order of Dragonhunters found soldiers from the families who had sworn to protect the St Georges since way back in the Middle Ages. These were people who passed the job down to their sons and daughters, and so on, and so on. But the modern world had forgotten Simon’s ancestor, the ancient knight Saint George the Dragonslayer, and those who knew the truth had been destroyed by the serpents. It felt hopeless. There was only Simon, Aldric and Alaythia against the hundreds of dragons listed in the White Book of Saint George.

      As Simon slowed his horse to a trot, watching the dusty, pebbled road pass under him, he remembered the last meeting he’d had with a distant cousin of an Order member. The poor construction worker from Massachusetts had never heard of Dragonhunting. The ordinary man had sat across from Simon and Aldric, near a half-finished skyscraper, and munched on his sandwich, looking bewildered.

      The guy thought Simon and Aldric were insane, and it had been no better with any of the other six candidates they’d gone to see, all descendants and distant relatives of dragon fighters. The Order of Dragonhunters was clearly a dead issue, but his father never gave up on anything.

      Simon’s horse was moving now into the town of Ebony Hollow. Past the first few quiet streets he found the novelty shop where his girlfriend – he hoped he could call her that pretty soon – was saying goodbye to her father, the shop owner, and walking to school.

      “Simon!” said Emily, surprised to see him. “You’re back from …”where was it again, Spain?”

      “Africa actually,” Simon replied, trotting his horse alongside her. “We went from Spain to Africa.”

      “On a job with your dad, right?” she said, looking at him sideways, a bit confused. “Are you ever going to tell me what kind of job he actually does?”

      I may do that, thought Simon, looking at her pretty eyes in the morning light. I may really do that.

      “Come on, I’ll give you a ride,” said Simon, offering his hand, and she smiled cautiously, but kept moving.

      He trotted down the street beside her, crossing the trolley car tracks. Any time he had someone his age to talk to, things would come pouring out of him. It just happened. It was this desperate habit he was developing. Actually, to be honest, it was just around her. She was the only one he really talked to, or tried to anyway.

      “You said it was toxic waste disposal, I think,” said Emily. “Why do you have to go round the world to do that?”

      “Well, there aren’t a lot of people who know how to handle the kind of …”dangerous material we deal with.”

      “It doesn’t make you glow, does it?” she said and laughed.

      “Uh, it can,” he said. He pretended to have trouble keeping Norayiss on course, pulling the reins to flex his arms. He was pretty sure Emily noticed how big he was getting. He was growing stronger every day with training – constant training, so he knew he’d gained quite a bit of muscle – though he wasn’t as tall as he’d like to be.

      “Nobody understands why you don’t go to school,” Emily remarked.

      “It’s just home-schooling.” That didn’t sound too strange, did it? “It’s not a big deal, I just travel so much, helping my dad, that I can’t really …”Have you ever thought about my name?”

      “Your name? Simon?”

      “No, St George. He was a real person. The legend says he fought a dragon, a long time ago, in the deserts of North Africa. A real dragon, OK? I mean, it’s not a legend, people say it was a real creature, whatever it was.”

      She creased her brow, half-amused. “And that relates to you …”how? I don’t get what you’re talking about.”

      He paused. What if there were real dragons, but they didn’t look like dragons. And they did really terrible, really evil things, making all these supernatural events you hear about that no one can ever explain, and hurting people, and killing people, and someone had to stop them from doing this. Oh, no, no, no, don’t say that …

      “It’s not toxic waste dumps, that’s not what I deal with,” he said at last.

      “And what do you deal with?”

      A species. He answered in his head. A species that drives people to do evil because it feeds off misery, soaks it right into the skin. It tortures people. If the serpent doesn’t actually do these things himself, he forces people to do it for him …

      “Maybe we can talk about this later,” Simon mumbled. Luckily, there was no more time for talking. They’d reached the school.

      Emily looked up and manufactured a smile. “I’ve got to go. Your horse is amazing, she’s really calm. So, um, I’ll see you around the shop, I guess. Maybe I could finally meet your dad,” she said.

      “He’s not real social,” said Simon, embarrassed.

      “Well, you can bring him by if you want.”

      She walked off across the grass and joined a group of girls, and he noticed her shoulders were raised and tight. When she finally shot him a glance, it was strange and Simon knew he had now put up a barrier between them. She was scared of him; he occupied a land of fairy tales and craziness. Or was he just thinking too much?

      He wished he’d kept his mouth shut.

      At that moment, a terrible shadow passed across the sun, but then was gone before it could be deciphered. He wondered if the menace was all in his mind; his world was always ordered by threat and fear.

      Fine. Live in your fantasy land, he thought, looking at the mean-eyed girls with Emily. This is real and I’m one of the few people in the world who can protect any of you. You need me. He wished they knew it.

      But he had no stomach for sulking; that was his father’s habit – Aldric’s genetic gift that he had probably passed down – and Simon didn’t want it. Strong, silent type. Right. What a joke. Silence is weak. It means you’re afraid. He couldn’t have got his father’s strength and agility, oh, no, that would have been too good, so he’d inherited a total inability to talk to anybody.

      Or had he? Maybe he would get along with everybody just fine if he got more of a chance to hang around them; if his father wasn’t always dragging him around the world or shoving hard work in his face.

      Stop it. Come on. Get out of your head, Simon thought. Here he was talking to himself instead of to other people and he realised he’d been staring at the girls as they walked away. I’m not staring at you, I’m just thinking.

      He tried to figure a way to look natural. Stop sleepwalking, he told himself. This is your life.

      Sometimes it seemed like the ordinary world was the one that was like a dream.

      

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