As she swooped for another blow to the beast’s head, the dragon lunged suddenly and viciously. Rosie ducked beneath the gnashing teeth, but the motion forced her into a shallow arc. The dragon’s long, jagged tail whipped up and caught her as she passed. She was powerless to avoid it, pinwheeling out of control to land in a cloud of dust.
The dragon roared, deep and thundering, but its triumphant victory call was cut short. I did not hear the weapon discharge over the din of the creature’s bellowing, but I saw, as if in slow motion, the harpoon sailing through the air. It struck the dragon solidly in the chest. A foot higher and it might have slipped through the broken scales to do some damage, but instead our best shot clanked off the dense hide and thudded into the dirt below.
The dragon swallowed its roar in surprise and turned its golden eyes to my employer. Jackaby tossed the spent harpoon gun aside and drew the dull machete from his belt. Silhouetted against the firelight, it was almost possible to imagine that he was some brave knight from the storybooks. My desperate mind could turn his ragged coat into a cape and the rusty blade into a sword—although it refused to let the atrocious knit cap become a shining helmet. Even delusions have their limits.
Jackaby stood alone against the looming dragon. “Well, Peanut?” he called out. “Shall we finish this?”
The dragon licked its chops. It stretched its sinewy muscles and advanced. The creature was fifty feet long, four stories tall, with teeth like longswords and talons that could tear through heavy timbers like toothpicks. Jackaby stood unwavering as it approached.
It was fifty yards away, then thirty, then ten, its limbs pumping rhythmically like massive pistons. Its wings scraped deep troughs in the dirt to either side as it came at him. Jackaby did not flinch. His eyes were focused on the few gaps in the towering monster’s armor that Rosie had afforded us. He might as well have been gauging where to throw a pebble at an oncoming train. The dragon’s golden eyes flashed with fury and hunger, and even from across the site I could hear its stomach rumbling in anticipation of its next meal.
A thought sparked in my brain. I took a deep breath as it built, held tightly to my axe, and vaulted out of the trench. The dragon’s head reared back as it prepared to lunge at Jackaby, the scales along its muscular neck glistening blue green in the last of the flickering firelight.
I threw myself forward into a frantic dash over the uneven terrain. Ahead of me, a flaming, soot-black log had rolled from the little campfire. Without breaking stride, I skewered it on the point of my axe and leapt the last few feet to my employer’s side. With a graceless heave, I lobbed the firewood, axe and all, into the dragon’s mouth and slammed into Jackaby, allowing my momentum to knock us both beyond the path of the creature’s snapping jaws.
Almost as soon as we had hit the ground, Jackaby was back on his feet, pulling me to mine. His urgent tug threw me back the way I had come. I careened forward, half stumbling, half racing, until I was close enough to dive back into the trench. I landed hard in the furrow and spun around. Jackaby was not far behind. Above him, the dragon seemed not to have noticed what had happened at first—but then the smoldering log slid down its gullet. I watched the creature’s face contort. It craned its emerald neck and stared at its own distended belly. Jackaby leapt. He looked as though he might fall short—right up to the moment the dragon exploded.