“I’m trying,” Alex muttered. “I have a distinct disadvantage here, you realize.”
“That old crutch,” Samheed said. “You’ll never catch up with that attitude.”
Alex made a nasty face.
“Stop it, you two. We’re supposed to work together, remember?” Meghan was growing exceedingly frustrated and cross.
Lani looked up, somewhat bewildered. “Oh, you’re here,” she said evenly to Samheed, but he was busy studying Alex as he worked. She glanced at Alex briefly and immediately buried herself back in her book.
Alex picked up the dragon and turned it around gently in his hands, mentally going over every precise folding instruction and matching it up to the proper fold of the dragon. He shook his head. “We have it folded properly,” he said. “So why …?”
Samheed furrowed his brow. “Well, it hasn’t got any eyes,” he said. “How’s it supposed to see where to go without them?”
“That’s the most ridiculous—,” Alex began, and then stopped short. Begrudgingly, he withdrew a handful of colored pencils from his art case. “All right. Eyes.” He expertly outlined two eyes and colored them in, giving the dragon deep yellow irises and large black pupils. “There—so he can see better at night,” he said dryly.
He sent the dragon afloat once more, and it circled nearly the same as before. But this time, it landed gently on the table in front of Alex. It blinked once and looked up at the boy. “Oh, hello,” Alex said to the dragon, and then looked back up at his friends. “That helped the landing, at least.”
Meghan grinned. “He’s adorable! I want to keep him.”
Samheed rolled his eyes and snorted, bringing Lani back to awareness. She blinked, taking in the mess of papers and origami animals scattered about the table, and began to watch curiously as Alex started drawing on the dragon again.
“A tongue.” His own tongue poked out the side of his mouth as he drew. “And flames, of course,” he said when he’d added a bright orange burst inside the dragon’s mouth. When he was finished, he sent the dragon flying again. It circled just as before, landed softly in front of Alex, and blew a flame from its mouth that singed the hair on Alex’s arm. “Yeowch!” he cried.
Samheed and Meghan laughed as Alex shook his arm in surprise.
Lani, still watching, said with a bored look, “You have to tell him where to go, you dolt.” She’d picked up that word down in the lounge from Earl, who used it liberally. “Or else he’ll keep coming back to you.”
Meghan slapped her hand to her forehead. “Ugh, that’s it! Of course you’re right, Lani.”
“Mmm-hmm.” Lani nodded absentmindedly as she engaged herself with her reading again.
Alex picked up the dragon again, looking around the library. “Attack the statue!” he said, and sent the dragon through the air.
This time, the dragon flapped its wings and raced to the statue, streaking through the air so quickly that all the children could see was a green blur. It sent flames shooting brightly from its mouth when it made contact, hovering against the statue’s body for a moment until the dragon itself exploded into a little ball of fire and dropped to the floor.
The statue, a grim-looking ostrich, opened its eyes and glared at Alex. “Do you mind?” the bird said.
“Oh—sorry,” Alex said hastily. “I thought you were one of the, um, the nonliving ones.”
“We’re all alive, thank you very much. Some of us choose to not to reveal that in front of bratty, unreliable, spell-casting children, however.”
“I won’t do it again,” Alex said with a sheepish smile.
“Sure,” muttered the ostrich. She stretched out her bent leg carefully, as if she’d held that position a very long time, and then limped off to take cover behind a tall bookshelf.
The dragon had, by now, burned up completely, leaving a small heap of ashes on the floor. Samheed went to pick them up and toss them in the waste can. “Not bad, Stowe,” he said. “Can you make an army of them?”
“Sure, now that I know how,” Alex said.
Meghan caught Alex’s eye, then looked at Lani meaningfully.
“Oh!” Alex said. “Oh, I mean, thanks to Lani.”
“Hmm?” Lani said, looking up, blinking her long lashes.
Alex held her gaze for a moment before he hurriedly looked away. “Hi. I mean, thanks. Never mind,” he said, suddenly feeling terribly self-conscious. In the back of his mind he began to wonder when it was that Lani had stopped acting—and looking—like a little kid.
And then he noticed her book.
“What are you reading about?” he asked.
She turned the gilded page. “Killing spells,” she said.
“Seriously? Wow.” He tried to imagine Lani killing someone. He thought for a moment, and his eyes narrowed. “You’re not going to practice on me, are you?”
Lani laughed. “Depends,” she said. She didn’t tell him that there weren’t any actual spells in the book, just scholarly discussions on the topic written by people with names she’d never heard before. “I guess you’d better be nice to me.”
Alex felt the heat rise to his face as Lani, grinning, watched him squirm. “Okay,” he said lightly, and then he scrambled to pack up his things and disappeared.
Gaining Ground
By the end of the week all the students were ready to begin practicing their fighting skills. Team Warrior class was held on the lawn, and in addition to the hundred-or-so teen students were another hundred-or-so adults and instructors, including Sean Ranger and many other recent graduates. Leading the instruction that day was none other than Florence herself. The enormous ebony stone woman glided across the lawn so gracefully that the children had to remind themselves she was actually a very heavy statue. They kept their toes tucked in whenever she walked past, just in case.