The Story of Owen by E. K. Johnston Read Free Book Online Page B

area, but there was enough variation that a refresher never went amiss. Also, as our instructor pointed out, there were some differences when it came to avoiding a dragon while driving.
    Draconis lakus
was first, as it was the most common dragon in the Trondheim and Saltrock area. It hunted primarily alongthe shoreline of large bodies of water, but was making forays further and further inland. It was slow, though, and once it landed, it didn’t always get back into the air quickly. If you were in a car, it was fairly easy to drive away from it. A grounded
lakus
couldn’t even catch you if you ran. Next was
Draconis siligoinis
, the smallest dragon native to Canada. It was fast enough to catch a car, in theory, but it was also pretty stupid. It got its name because it like to hide in corn fields, which it did at all times of the year, including when the corn was not high enough to conceal it. It was also stupid enough that sometimes it couldn’t tell corn from beans, making it easier to track. If you were attacked by a
siligoinis
, the key was to get off the road, leave your car, and hide.
    Draconis urbs
was, like the
lakus
, big and slow. It had once been predominantly associated with cities. The
urbs
was cause for concern in that it had previously stayed in urban areas but was now encroaching more and more into the rural parts of the country. Trondheim, set in from the coast of the lake and a two-hour drive from the closest city with more than a million people in it, was slowly being sandwiched between the
urbs
and the
lakus
. Fortunately,
urbs
could be evaded the way the
lakus
could.
    The most concerning dragon, however, was the
Draconis ornus
, the soot-streaker. This was the dragon that had brought down Michigan, and until a decade ago, it had never been seen in Canada at all. It had been content to plague Michigan and then to pester the other industrial states that took Michigan’s place after it was abandoned.
Ornus
had crept across the border at last, to harry Hamilton and Toronto, and was even encroaching on the paper mills and nickel mines in Sault Ste. Marieand Sudbury. And, of course, it was also making its presence known at the mine in Saltrock. The
ornus
was big enough to make off with a tractor, and our instructor explained that if you were beset by an
ornus
on the road, your best chance was to find something that was emitting more carbon than you. There was, apparently, no honor in driver’s ed.
    By the time the afternoon wore out, a few members of the class were clearly having second thoughts about the whole driving thing, but I was not one of them. My car, after all, looked so desperately unappetizing that I was pretty sure no dragon in its right mind would go for it, no matter how much carbon I was emitting.
    After class got out for the day, I walked down to the clinic where my mother worked most Saturdays when she wasn’t on call at the hospital. We’d driven into town together that morning in my car, since I still had to have an adult drive along until I passed driver’s ed, and then gone our separate ways from the clinic parking lot. I guessed that she’d probably spent her whole day as bored as I had been that morning, since if there had been an emergency we would have seen the ambulances go past the driving school. At least I’d gotten to watch mildly entertaining videos all afternoon. She likely spent the day assuring various denizens of our aging population that their medication was, in fact, necessary and would not, in fact, make them more attractive to any dragon that happened to pass by.
    After class, I drove us all the way home, with only one stall and not so much as a dragon-scale sighted in the distance. By September, I was driving myself everywhere with minimal oversight from my parents, which is how I managed to get all the way to Owen’s house for dinner and back before they realized I was friends with a dragon slayer.

DINNER WITH LOTTIE