Mara looked up in time to see a large section of ductwork peeling away from the ceiling and swinging directly at her. Rolling on her side, she moved just as the large pipe broke free and crashed down onto the concrete floor where she had been.
Flat on her back, she stared up at the remains of the ceiling to see if anything else would try to flatten her. Not seeing anything impending, she stared out at the starry night and wondered where the dragon was going this time.
Her phone rang. She slid it from her pocket, sat up on the floor and tapped the phone’s screen.
“Hey, Mom. I was just about to call you,” Mara said.
“You sound out of breath. Is there something strange going on I should know about?” Diana said.
Mara swallowed and tried to measure her breathing. “Why do you ask?”
“Hannah’s sitting here in the kitchen with me, while I’m cooking, and all of a sudden she begins to giggle. When I turned around from the counter to see what she’s up to, she was sort of green, like someone was flashing a green-colored light on her. She said she thought you were doing it, but, when I asked her to explain, she couldn’t.”
Mara tensed. “Is she okay?”
“She seems fine, but it was a little odd. Do you have any idea what is going on?”
“Not completely, but I want you two to stay in the house until I get home. I have to stop and pick up Sam at the bakery, but we should be there in less than an hour.”
“Why stay in the house?” Diana asked.
“I don’t want you to freak out, and I have no reason to think it’s on its way over there, but the dragon is loose again,” she said.
CHAPTER 52
There were no parking spaces in front of the bakery when Mara pulled up, so she illegally swung her Outback alongside a bus stop at the end of the block. Two old women, sitting on the bench in the Plexiglas shelter, glared at her as she bent forward to see if her brother waited down the street. Sam had said he would be there when she arrived, but light was still streaming from the front windows of the bakery, so he had yet to close up. Groaning in frustration, she was about to shift the car into gear and cruise around the block, when the bakery when dark. However, the inside of her car suddenly filled with light. A bus pulled up behind her, and the driver honked his horn. Mara pulled away from the curb.
She inched forward, looking for Sam on the sidewalk, while watching the flow of traffic on the street. Just as she approached, he darted out the bakery door and turned to lock it. Hitting her brakes, she tooted her own horn three times. The bus pulled up behind her again and honked. Slamming her palm against the steering wheel, she pressed the gas, just as she heard a knock on the passenger side door. Sam jogged alongside the car in the middle of the street. She braked again, and he jumped in.
“You said you would be waiting when I got here,” Mara said.
He threw his book bag into the backseat and slipped on his seat belt. “This crazy woman nabbed me, when I came out the first time, and insisted that I let her buy a pumpkin pie. Ping must be putting something addictive in them. They’re good but not that good.” Settled in, he looked at his sister and said, “What’s the big rush? When I talked to Mom earlier, she said dinner wouldn’t be ready until late.”
“The dragon’s loose again,” Mara said. “We need to get home in case it shows up at the house, in case it’s still stalking Mom.”
“Tell me that you didn’t try to do something stupid to Ping,” he said. “You did, didn’t you?”
Mara pretended she was busy navigating, took a turn south and then said, “It never got that far. I never activated the Chronicle.”
“Yeah, but you did something, because you’ve got that stubborn-but-guilty look on your face that you get after you’ve done something you thought was right but went all wrong.”
“Look, before we went over to the warehouse, I spent all afternoon working with Ping, and I’m telling you that he has completely lost himself to that dragon. Even when he doesn’t physically look like the dragon, it influences everything he says and does.