Jennifer Scales and the Ancient Furnace by MaryJanice Davidson Read Free Book Online Page A

see, you fell because you weren’t looking up… Wow, that looked like it hurt___”
    “Okay, enough lessons!” she announced, after maybe ten minutes. “I can do enough to get inside and go to bed.”
    Her heart sank as she remembered her size. How would she fit through a bedroom door, much less in a bed?
    Jonathan didn’t seem worried about that. “Sure, okay. This is a lot to take in. But there
are
one or two things we should go over tomorrow—”
    “Whatever,” she groaned. She scratched and pulled her way across the barn, then delicately navigated the three wide wooden steps… and then nearly somersaulted through the open doors as she stepped on the tip of her wing with a hind leg. “
Aaargh
!”
     
    Grandpa Crawford had left only two words for a message: crescent valley. The letters were scrawled with charcoal; a large piece of it was left on the floor of the sitting room, next to the newsprint he had written on. Neither parent would tell Jennifer what Crescent Valley was or when they expected her grandfather back—and they reminded her that sleep was probably a good idea.
    The sitting room was, as Jennifer remembered it, quite spacious. The plush couches and chairs were already up against the walls, which were carved with oak shelves filled with leather-bound books. The sundry titles on these had always fascinated Jennifer.
The Withered Head, Hornets You Can Breed, Four-Dimensional Mapping
, and so on. Some of them, such as
Early Wyrms That Got the Bird
and
Shapes That Never Shift
, took on new meaning to her now.
    Carefully retracting her claws so that she wouldn’t scrape the hardwood floors or tear at the furniture, she edged up to one shelf of books that had always been her and Grandpa Crawford’s favorite. She felt a tear in her silver, alien eye as she recalled the subject of the fantastic tales he told best—dragons.
    Well, duh
, she thought now.
    There they all were—modern classics like
The Hobbit
, various tales of the Chinese dragon Nü Wa, and children’s versions of more complex works like the story of Saint George the Dragon Slayer and
Beowulf
.
    One book lay atop all the others—an oversized, flat leather volume with deeply worn edges. Jennifer reached out with a wing claw and grasped the binding. The title was in gold letters:
Grayheart’s Anatomy
.
    Jennifer did not say this as openly or often as she used to, but she admired her mother’s work as a doctor. She knew that biology was her favorite of all the sciences, even though she had just started her own high school course in it. Working with living things, understanding what makes them move and breathe and see, was all utterly fascinating to her. And
Grayheart’s Anatomy
represented the intersection of that interest and the love of dragons that Grandpa Crawford put into his stories.
    It was the journal of an eighteenth-century explorer in North America who had come upon the body of a recently deceased dragon, taken it apart, and studied it. The layers of skin, the organs, the bone structure—all was in exquisite, illustrated detail. It used close study of the creature’s anatomy to make guesses at how it lived, hunted, slept, fought, and even fell in love.
    The pages were large and thick enough for Jennifer to flip through them, if she laid the book on the floor. She did so, while tears welled up. This wasn’t a fanciful examination of a fictional corpse. This was
her
, or something very like her. Every muscle pulled back for analysis, every chamber of the upper and lower hearts split open for discovery …
    Upper and lower hearts
? The thought struck her cold.
    She put one claw over her left breast.
    Thu-thump, thu-thump
.
    Then she let the claw slide slowly down and to her right side, about where her appendix would be if she were a human girl.
    Da-da-thump, da-da-thump
.
    After all the pain of the metamorphosis, seeing her new body for the first time, observing her father, trying to walk, and everything else, this finally