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Zusatztext "An intelligent and wryly humorous fantasy." - Horn Book Informationen zum Autor Susan Fletcher is the acclaimed author of Journey of the Pale Bear; as well as the Dragon Chronicles, composed of Dragon's Milk, Flight of the Dragon Kyn, Sign of the Dove, and Ancient, Strange, and Lovely; and the award-winning Alphabet of Dreams, Shadow Spinner, Walk Across the Sea, and Falcon in the Glass. Ms. Fletcher lives in Bryan, Texas. Visit her at Susan Fletcher.com. Klappentext In this new stand-alone novel in the series! Bryn must save a dracling from adangerous modern world that seems to have no place for an ancient dragon. 1 THINGS THAT GO THUMP APRIL EUGENE, OREGON I woke in the middle of the night, came straight up out of sleep. Then sat there, heart pounding, in that numb, blind space where you can’t quite kludge together exactly what’s just happened or where or when you are. It was that dream again. That dream of running, searching. Of stepping off the edge of something, of falling. The sickening lurch in the gut. The dropping down and down through black nothing and not quite landing. The full-body spasm when I would have landed, jolting me out of it, out of the dream, out of sleep. From a dim corner, Stella stirred: a floofing of feathers, a dry click, click of talons across the perch. I kenned her, felt her in my head: edgy now, but not alarmed. Nearby, on the shelves, I could make out the shadowy outlines of other birds—ceramic and glass and stone. Safe in bed, in Aunt Pen’s guest room. No one searching. No one falling. A wind gust shook the house. Against the far wall, the shadows of rhododendrons waved in the streetlight glow. They looked huge, out-of-scale, like from a monster vid: Jurassic rhododendron. Something thumped down there—a stray cat, maybe, or an unlatched gate, or somebody’s tipped-over plastic trash can. Some ordinary, safe thing, probably jolted by the wind. A chill shuddered at the edges of the air, seeped through my PJs, raised gooseflesh on my back. I slid down in bed and cocooned myself in blankets as the other nightmare came to squat in the heartspace of my chest. The nightmare that lived with me now, a Fender bass static hum that never went away, not even when I woke. Mom. Thump. Thump-thump. I sat up. That sound again. When I was little, I was one of those scaredy-cat kids; I heard weird noises all the time. In the closet. Under the bed. Down the hall. When I got panicky, Mom would tell me, “It’s an adventure, Bryn. Just breathe.” Dad would wrap my little-kid hand in his massive one. He’d talk me out of bed, take me on a tour. Night patrol, he called it. “Think it through, Bryn,” he’d say. “Where’s it coming from? What does it sound like? What do you see?” Usually, the sounds hadn’t come from where I’d thought. Nothing under the bed—not even once. Mostly, they were outside. Ordinary things, in the days before the swarms. A tree bough scritching against the house. Wind knocking a gate against a jamb. Later, it was the swarms. Voles or mice. Possums bumping around in the recycling bin. They would stare at us, mirror-eyed in the flashlight beam, then scuttle off into the night. On night patrol, even though I could still feel my heart thumping in my throat, I could also feel this other thing happening—a leaning away from fear toward a puzzle to solve, a mystery to unspool. I would strain all of my senses against the night, hoping I would find the answer. Thump-thump. I felt that scaredy-cat kid inside me now, whining like she always used to: I don’t wanna . You’d think, by the time you got to be fourteen, that kid would have disappeared with all the other ghosts of childhood past: the thumb sucker, the training-pants wetter, the sippy-cup drooler. But, no. And I still c...
