School Nathaniel Hardman (the best ebook reader for android txt) 📖

and jacket were a dark green identical to the skin of the dragon he rode.

Ushegg’s dad was shouting back, pointing his wand straight at the alien, baring his teeth. Suzy had never seen the long-suffering warrior look so angry. She edged back a few steps.

Below the dragon, a movement pulled Suzy’s gaze away from the conflict between the aliens. A group of human students was cowering in the courtyard, standing in front of the outhouses directly below the dragon. As Suzy looked, one terrified girl made a break for the door of the school.

“No!” she started to yell, as guards all around the courtyard began to shout and point their wands at the girl. The dragon’s head whipped down to follow the girl’s movement, and the rider cried out something incomprehensible.

The moment was too charged. Someone was going to do something stupid.

“Wait!” Suzy screamed in Alien. Then, “Katherine! Freeze!” The girl ducked and covered her head. A tense silence followed. “She okay!” Suzy yelled again in Alien. “She is a kid!” She couldn’t think of anything else to say, so she walked with forced calm across the courtyard toward the still-cowering girl.

The alien on the dragon shouted something again, turning his attention back to Ushegg’s dad, who began shouting back. Suzy walked faster, scurrying over to Katherine, picking out bits and pieces of the argument between the aliens.

“…another quirn!” and “That tree is otiax xi zuus!” and more that she couldn’t understand. Just as she put her arms around the quivering girl, the dragon roared, a sound like Two-Head’s roar, amplified a hundred times.

All around the courtyard, guards began shooting spells up at the dragon and rider. The dragon lunged forward, and with a flap of its massive wings, it began to rise. Suzy felt each flap as the wind smashed down on her. Dozens of spells rippled up at the dragon.

“Suzy?” The girl, Katherine, whispered next to her.

 “What?”

“They say you’re figuring out magic to get us home.”

“Yes,” Suzy whispered. “We’re working on it. Hopefully soon.”

“It HAS to be soon.” Katherine clutched her arm, eyes boring in to her. “PLEASE. Get us home soon.”

“Soon.” Suzy agreed. And silently she added, Before that dragon guy comes back with reinforcements.

THIRTY FIVE

“What did you say the teeth came from?” Shen asked.

“Lizards,” Jeff answered. “The spell is zxerc, and it makes a sting.”

Shen made notes in the binder. They were working on re-constructing Qush Yurwush’s book of animals and magic that Ushegg had shown them. Shen kept insisting they had overlooked something, or that there was some combination of magics that could teleport them, if they could just think it through and experiment.

“That’s not what got us here,” Shen muttered. “That’s useless.”

In the days since the dragon, some of them – like Shen – had become re-energized to figure out how to get home, pouring over the vocab list, trying and re-trying combinations of words with the classroom wand.

Others in class had reacted differently. Jeff felt it in the way they looked at him when he got back from the zvuiy, a look of tired resignation, even before he could shake his head to say, “No. We didn’t figure it out.”

Jeff glanced toward the window and locked eyes for a moment with Tanesha. The girl was petting Dusty, and after the glance, she put her head down on the dog’s back, murmuring, “You guys are so lucky.” Jeff sighed, and she went on. “You have your sister here, you get to go out every day and do stuff. You even have your dog.”

“I know,” Suzy said, overhearing her. “I’m sorry. Kind of…”

“Yeah, why DO you have your dog here?” Shen’s voice broke the silence.

“What, you want us to get rid of Dusty?” Jeff asked, feeling defensive.

“No, I mean, why is your dog here?” Shen said. His eyes had lit up. “Listen! The first alien things that showed up on Earth were at YOUR house. There was like a butterfly? Or a dragonfly?”

“Yeah, both.”

“And the two-headed dog, and then the orange spider thing. Those all happened at your house. Why? WHY?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t – we didn’t do anything.” Shen’s questions were pushing Jeff from defensive to angry.

“No!” Shen waved away Jeff’s hostile tone, “It’s not that. Why was it at your house? Look, none of the aliens know the magic that brought us here. It isn’t in the magic teacher’s book. So the king or one of his magicians figured out a new spell, and no one knows what it is, right?”

Shen stared at Jeff, at Suzy, at the rest of the class. “We don’t know HOW he did it. But I think we DO know WHERE he started doing it.”

“At MY house?” Jeff asked incredulously.

“NO! At the house where you found Dusty!”

They processed this. “That house is his secret lair.” Shen went on. He walked them through the evidence, recalling how they had found Dusty inside that house, reminding Jeff that he had called it broken-down, as if the person who lived there had been gone for a while (“‘Cause he’s on Earth!”).

Jeff hardly listened. His mind was reeling, and he was retracing his steps to the house, trying to remember the way there. He waved down the chatter in the class and locked eyes with Shen, then Suzy, who nodded. “We’re going there tomorrow.”

PART 3

GRADUATION

THIRTY SIX

When they found the house after school the next day, the broken shutter still hung crookedly, half-open on one hinge. They peeked through the window into the dark house. Suzy couldn’t see very well, but what she did see gave an impression of great neglect. “Let’s knock,” she whispered.

No one answered.

They went back to the window. They looked around at the quiet street. Ushegg swung the shutter fully open, and said, much too