“They let you cavort about in public wearing a Robin Hood outfit, to what I can only assume was a deluge of cruel taunts from your peers. It’s easy enough to guess how they’ll treat their pets.”
“Oh, no. They didn’t know about my Robin Hood outfit. I had it in my backpack and changed into it in the bathroom at school. But you’re right about the taunts. That was a dark day for Harper Frances Willowes.”
“Frances! Lovely. May I call you Frannie?”
“No. You may call me Harper.” She rested her chin on the top of the bow. “My dad got me my first bow for Christmas, when I was ten. But he took it away before New Year’s.”
“Did you shoot someone?”
“He caught me soaking arrows in lighter fluid. I just really, really wanted to shoot a flaming arrow at something. It didn’t matter what. Still do. I feel like that would complete me: to see a burning arrow go thwock into something and set it afire. I suppose it’s how men feel when they imagine sinking balls-deep into the perfect piece of ass. I just want one sexy little thwock.”
John choked on another mouthful of banana rum. She had to pound him between the shoulders to get him breathing again.
“I am certain you are drunk,” he said.
“No,” she said. “I’ve limited myself to a very responsible two cups of banana-flavored dog vomit. I’m pregnant.”
He gasped, began to cough once more.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go shoot flaming arrows. Want to? The fresh air will do you good. You need to get out of this hole more often.”
He gave her a look through watering eyes. “What are we going to shoot?”
“The moon.”
“Ah,” he said. “A nice fat target. Do I get to shoot, too?”
“Sure,” she said, and pushed back her chair. “I’ll get the arrows. All you have to do is bring the fire.”
13
The cold was so sharp after the banana-scented heat of the Fireman’s shed, it drove the breath out of her and stung her cheeks like a slap.
She led him around the shed, up through the high sea grass, and down the dune to the ocean-facing side of the island, out of sight from shore. When he struggled in the sand, she reached back and took his hand to help him along.
They stopped at one corner of the big cruising sloop, sitting in its steel carriage. From here, Harper could see the name written across the stern in sparkling gold cursive: THE BOBBI SHAW. The Bobbi Shaw featured prominently in their plans, appearing in steps F, H, and M–Q.
The Fireman looked around, wearing his rubber fireman’s jacket like a cape and clutching himself inside of it. Finally he found what he was hunting for—the moon, an ice-colored button pinned to the black cape of the sky.
“There it is. Kill it so we can go back inside where it’s warm.”
She had the bow in one hand, a clutch of arrows in the other. She dropped all but one of the arrows onto the blue shale, held the last out to him, point first.
“Got a light?”
He closed his fist around the black carbon of the arrow and slid his hand along it. Blue fire followed, as if the arrow were soaked in gasoline and he had touched a match to it.
She nocked the arrow and sighted along the burning shaft. Fire lashed off it in a red banner. She aimed for the moon and let go.
A blazing red comet sliced through the darkness. The ar row climbed two hundred feet, hooked hard to the right, and dropped in a shower of embers.
She held the bow over her head, feeling joyously savage.
“Isn’t that beautiful!” he said.
She turned his hand over and looked at his palm. “And it didn’t hurt?”
“Not even a little. It isn’t so hard to understand. Not really. The Dragonscale will burn a host to the ground if it has to, but it won’t destroy itself. I taught it to stop thinking of me as a host. I hacked the code and reprogrammed it to forget there’s any difference between me and it.”
“I hate when you explain things. By the time you’re done explaining something, I always feel like I know less than I did before you started talking.”
“Look at it this way, Willowes. You know it’s in your brain. You know it feels, just not in words. Feed it stress and panic, it’ll read that as a threat, and will burst into flame to start its reproductive cycle and escape. Feed it harmony and contentment and a sense of belonging, and it will read that as security. It doesn’t just sense your pleasure, but amplifies it. It provides you with pleasurable feedback, gives you the world’s cheapest high. But in both cases, it’s not acting, it’s reacting. What Nick taught me—”
“What?” Harper said. “Nick? What Nick taught you?”
He blinked at her, flustered, losing his way. “Yes, well, Nick—Nick won’t—doesn’t—I mean, obviously not anymore, not after—” He shook his head, waved a dismissive hand in the air. “Why are you bringing Nick into this, anyway? You’re throwing me off.”
I didn’t bring Nick into it, she was going to say. You did. She even got as far as opening her mouth. Then she shut it again and let him go on.
“When you’re all together in church, you sing to it. It likes that. That’s how you pacify it. But you’re still mucking about with words and it doesn’t care about words. There was some writer who said language is no way to communicate, and the Dragonscale couldn’t agree more. All those words in your head are constant reminders that you’re a host. You have to think about what you want the Dragonscale to do for you without words. Imagine what it must be like to be deaf, to think deaf thoughts, with sign as your first and primary language.”
“Like Nick,” Harper murmured.
“Yes, if you like,” he said, waving a hand in the air again, as if brushing off an irritating midge. “Nick can feel the thump of a drumbeat in his bones, and if you teach him the lyrics to a song, he will sing to himself, but in the wordless words of the deaf. If you can sing to the Dragonscale without words, then, then you’re speaking its language. Then it no longer looks at you as separate, but as the same. That’s all I did. That’s all I ever do. I sing it one of my favorite songs, but without words. I sing for my coat of flame and my sword of fire, and the Dragonscale produces them.”
“And Nick taught you how? Nick can do it too? Cast flame, like you?”
He gave her a bleary, baffled, miserable look. Then, in a voice so soft she hardly heard, he said, “Quite a bit better than me, actually.”
She nodded. “But not anymore?”
The Fireman shook his head. She absorbed that, decided they could return to it later.
“What song do you sing to it?”
“Ah. You don’t know it.” Waving the hand again and looking away. She thought, though, he was relieved to be off the subject of Nick. “Although I thought when I met you—well, one of the first things you said to me was a line from the song. For a half moment I thought I had encountered someone who loved Dire Straits as much as myself.”
She stepped back from him. Swayed in the frozen air. Shut her eyes, inhaled deeply, and began to sing, in a soft, low-pitched, tuneful hush.
“A lovestruck Romeo
sings the streets a serenade
laying everybody low
with a love song that he made
finds a streetlight
steps out of the shade
says summin’ like:
‘You and me, babe—
how ’bout it?’”
She opened her eyes. He stared at her with his mouth hanging open, eyes bright and watery, as if he might start crying.
“You’re glowing,” he said. “You’re singing my favorite song in the world and you’re glowing like a diamond on an engagement ring.”
She looked down and noticed it was true. Her throat was a collar of coral light. She was shining through her sweater.
He leaned toward her and kissed her then—a warm, affectionate kiss that tasted of rum and coffee and butter and pecans and cigarettes and Englishman. He drew back, looked at her uncertainly.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I hope not.”
“You taste like a candy bar.”
“A spoonful of sugar, I understand, does make the medicine go down.”
“Is it medicine?”
“An important part of your recovery. Take two and call me in the morning.”