They did not have to walk far before they saw the beast.
Its body, uncoiled, would have been longer than two or three fire trucks. Its
head, with its blazing frill of cockscomb and the great wheels of its eyes,
was raised, alert, over the front end of the truck, peering out of one eye,
then the other, at the people milling around it with weapons, news cameras,
cell phones. Leith, walking toward it on the opposite side of the road, was
half-hidden by the idling vehicles. The fire truck the beast had landed on was
angled across the road, stopping traffic in both directions. Its former
occupants had abandoned it hastily, judging from the wide-open doors. A man
spoke into a bullhorn, trying to persuade people back into their cars. They
ignored him; so did the beast.
“I wonder if it knows—” Val started, then answered himself. “Of course it
knows we’re here if it’s our mother’s making. That’s why it appeared.”
“It’s another message for us,” Pierce said tightly. “She knows we didn’t
listen to the dragon. Maybe I should call her.”
“A basilisk with a phone?”
“She’s probably at home in Desolation Point, watching us in water, or in the
mist, or in a pot of chicken soup or something. I had no idea she could make
anything like this. I had no idea—” He paused, added heavily, “I’m glad I
didn’t know. It wouldn’t have been so easy to think of leaving her.”
“Maybe she didn’t know either,” Val suggested. “Maybe she was never this
angry before.” He sounded unusually somber. Pierce glanced at him, and he
added, “I haven’t seen her since I was a child. I’ve been with my father
most of my life. She doesn’t have a reason to think that I care about her.
That I even remember her. You, at least, she knows she loves.”
“She’s mad at me, too.”
“Only by default. You’re with us.”
Pierce started to reply, didn’t. He had no idea any longer what their mother
might do or not do. He watched Leith, who was hidden from the basilisk’s eye
by a long moving van. He reached the end of it, and the strange, upright coils
of the snake’s body rippled suddenly. Its head turned almost completely
sideways, staring down at the man walking toward it, visible now beside a
small convertible with its top down. The driver, in the shadow of the beast’s
oddly tilted head, dropped his cell and tried to crawl under the dash.
“That is the weirdest combination of creatures imaginable,” Val said,
wonderstruck anew. “A variation of the feathered serpent, maybe? I wonder if
it crows.”
“I think,” Pierce said uneasily, “we’re about to find out.”
The huge beak was opening wide above Leith. Weapons appeared in open windows:
Wyvern’s Eyes, hunting rifles, bows. Leith shouted something; so did the man
with the bullhorn. Leith moved to the middle of the empty lane, walked down it
in full view of the basilisk. Behind him, cars stopped in the middle of their
turns, transfixed by the knight on foot challenging the monster on top of the
fire engine. One of the trucks let out an ear-piercing wail, an effort to
distract it, Pierce guessed. Val moved impulsively from behind the line of
vehicles to walk behind his father. The snake’s coils shuddered again all
down the long body. The rooster beak answered the fire truck with a fierce,
shrill cross between a rooster crow and a snake’s hiss that must have shaken
windows all along the highway. Then it caught sight of Pierce emerging behind
his brother.
The basilisk’s beak opened again. It made no sound this time. It enveloped
Leith in a cloud of breath that was black, completely opaque, and stank of
such acrid bitterness that a flock of starlings flying overhead rained down
suddenly among the fire trucks.
The whiff Pierce caught made him gag, forced tears into his eyes. He heard
children screaming and crying, people coughing and cursing all around him. He
moved blindly, bumped into Val, who was bent over and throwing up his lunch.
Pierce wiped his burning eyes with his sleeve, blinked vision desperately back
into them, taking in dry, shallow breaths through his mouth.
When he could finally see again, the basilisk had vanished, leaving its cloud
of appalling breath for the sea winds to shred. The body of his father, his
blurred eyes told him, lay motionless on the road.
Pierce staggered toward him, still hearing sobs, moans, convulsive noises all
around him. Those nearest the basilisk were dazed, hunched over and stumbling
into the trucks, or tripping over one another. No one had yet come to the aid
of the fallen knight. Pierce reached Leith finally, dropped to his knees. He
put a hand on Leith’s chest, felt his heartbeat, then the breath move through
him. Val staggered next to him, sagged down. He couldn’t speak; he queried
Pierce with a bloodshot stare.