Mom looped her arm around mine and propelled me toward the mountainside. “Come with me. There are people I want you to meet. And there’s so much to show you! You must be hungry too—coming through the portal made me ravenous.” As we approached, the jewels in the wall began to pulse with a golden light and then rearrange themselves. Shifting, they separated to create a new archway. “Neat, isn’t it? It’s technology, not magic, I’m told. The wyverns of Home have developed and changed since the Dark Ages too. But don’t worry—you won’t meet any of the purebred wyverns. They don’t associate with us.”
“Huh,” I said as we walked through. “Mom…”
She propelled me quickly through the hallway—or more accurately, tunnel, though it was fancier than any cave tunnel I’d ever seen—which led to a set of stone stairs. Below was a vast hall filled with both people and dragons.
Not people and dragons,I corrected.
It was filled with wyverns.
“Welcome to the Hall of the Returned,” Mom said. “These caverns are set aside for those of us who came from Earth, as well as their families. While the rest of Home may be very different from what you’re used to, you’ll feel comfortable here.”
Yeah, I doubted that.
A blue dragon was stretched in front of a fireplace. Another, a red dragon, was draped on a set of steps. A third sat upright with wings folded, a circle of wyverns in human form around him. He looked as if he was pontificating about something.
“My friends!” my mother called. “My daughter has joined us!”
Heads turned—both human and dragon—and then cheers and chatter filled the hall, rising up to the gold-sheathed ceiling. She shooed me down the stairs, and we were surrounded by both people and dragons. I was hugged, was kissed, had my hand shaken. Meanwhile, my mom was saying names: Joseph, Ivan, Sophia, Serene, Alfred, and other names that didn’t sound familiar, like Kyandra, Winar, Lysinari, Gendon…I lost track of which name attached to which face. But I did see a familiar face, by the hearth, who hadn’t come to greet me.
Moving through the crowd, I headed for Maximus. “You—” I began.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
That stopped me short.
“You wanted to find your mother,” he pointed out.
“You got mecaught,” I said. “You lied to me.”
“Technically, I didn’t lie,” he said. “I merely left out details.”
“Details are everything! You didn’t know what Mr. Keene was going to do to me. He could have hurt me. Or killed me.Gabriela and Ryan could both be in danger because of you.” I poked him in the shoulder, one poke for each of them.
Mom was beside me, a formidable tower of motherliness. “You endangered my daughter?”
He spread his hands as if to ward her off. “Calculated risk. I was certain he’d send her through if he caught her. Exile is, after all, the customary way Thomas Keene deals with threats.”
“You wanted to come here,” I accused.
“Absolutely.”
It was only then that I noticed the blue dragon who had her tail wrapped around Maximus. She was watching me with swirling gold eyes. Her tongue darted around her teeth. “Maximus, did you endanger a child in order to be with me?” the dragon asked, a puff of smoke rising from her nostrils.
He smiled up at her with a look that was so adoring that I could practically taste the syrupy sweetness. “I’d endanger the world to be with you.”
“That’s sweet. But I believe you owe this girl an apology.”
His face fell. “Oh. Um, yes. Sky, please accept my apology. And please allow me to introduce my wife, Angela. I thought I’d lost her forever. She’d told me she was searching for the Door to Home—a fairy tale, I believed. I have never been so happy to be wrong.”
“I’d heard hints that a portal still existed,” the dragon said. Her voice was mellow and smooth and flowed around us as if it came from multiple stereo speakers. “I followed the clues, and they led me to Thomas Keene. Before I couldwarn anyone, he came for me. Told me that the truth would endanger his family, and he sent me here.”
“I thought she was dead,” Maximus said, still gazing at her. “But when your mother came to me, I began to hope. And then when you, Sky, showed me the gold talon amulet, I knew. Angela hadn’t been chasing a fairy tale. The Door existed, and there was a chance that my love still lived on the other side.”
“How did the amulet prove anything?” I asked.
“It came from Home,” he said. “Surely you could sense that. It smelled of this place. A wyvern from Home must have brought it through the Door.”
“He did,” Mom confirmed. “I was told it was all that remained of him after the fire beast within the Keene vault killed him, and I have no reason to doubt that. My contact was very convincing. Once I’d seen the proof, I knew what had to be done.”
