Warmth flooded me. “Tell her I love her, too.”
“She likes being with you, especially when you understand her pictures. But…”
“What?”
“She misses her friends. She’s sad not to know if they’re all dead or not. She thinks about them every day.” Jenah paused. “Every time she shows ‘them’ it seems to have ‘female’ associated with it?”
“Male dragons were apparently very nasty,” I said. “And more visible. We’re pretty sure they’re all dead. Elementals don’t die of old age, but they can be hunted and killed.”
“She doesn’t have a way to call them. Her—something like radar?—won’t go far enough. There could be more sister dragons farther away that she doesn’t know about. She can’t—boost her signal, I guess it is—any higher.”
“Let me listen,” I said. I settled in next to Jenah, and got images I was familiar with, of a dragon’s-eye view in the sky, of Moonfire soaring and looking for someone like her. But as usual, the images were faded and flickering for me, whereas Jenah seemed to feel aloft. Her eyes were closed in wonder as the dragon dipped and flew.
“One by one, she lost contact with her friends,” Jenah narrated, in longer sentences now as she grew more comfortable with the dragon’s mode of communication. “More people settled here. Most of them couldn’t see her, but sometimes people could. Witches, of course. And other people, too. They hunted her. This went on for a long time. Then one night, exhausted from a flight from a man who was hunting her, she flew straight into a storm. Her wing tangled on a power line and broke. She sent out a distress signal, and that’s when she met Sarmine. Sarmine offered her a safe place to stay in exchange for her milk and discarded scales.”
I saw that image crystal clear, with a young Sarmine, almost as young as me, in a T-shirt and a ponytail. Another house, one I didn’t recognize. A man raking the yard while a smiling Sarmine painted that other garage a familiar shade of sky blue.
“Sometimes she wants to leave, but she gets worried about being chased by men with guns again. So she stays. Because what’s out there anyway to look forward to?”
“Poor Moonfire,” I said. I toyed with the brush bristles. “Stuck here in a witch’s garage, nothing to look forward to but two more centuries of giving the witch her milk, till the witch kicks the bucket. I haven’t even gotten the demon to come look at her lungs.”
“The not knowing, that’s the worst,” murmured Jenah.
Tears splashed into the glass jars hung around the dragon’s face.
“See, that would be cool,” I said. “If I were a witch, I could do awesome spells like trying to help the dragon find her friends. Working toward good in the world. Like Alphonse, but without the breaking and entering. That’s what I’d do.”
“I don’t see why you couldn’t,” said Jenah. “If you were a witch, of course. Or if spells worked for anybody. Then you could do them.”
If I could do spells. The thought sent strange shivers up my spine, and for the first time since I was five they weren’t shivers of horror. What if I could do good things with spells? Use them to help people, to help animals? What if I could do things that were the opposite of Sarmine?
But no, that’s not what real witches did. I’d seen that often enough. Being a witch corrupted you just like having a demon inside you did. Power ate away at your soul. “Did you see Sarmine’s trick with the pumpkin patch?” I said. “That’s what real witches are like. Conceited paranoid monsters, who’d as soon punish you as look at you.” Devon was just dying with that horrid thing in him and there was nothing I could do about it as a plain ordinary human. Help him with the tasks, stop him from the tasks, it didn’t seem to matter. I couldn’t do a darn thing to stop Devon’s soul from getting eaten. I smacked the floor with the brush. “This sucks.”
Jenah stroked the dragon’s hide and considered. “You said that when the spell went wrong, the witch tried to shove Devon in the pentagram to trap him. Is there some way you could trick the demon into a pentagram?”