How to Slay a Dragon - Bill Allen [30]
He preferred to think it hadn’t.
Aside from the crow, Greg saw no evidence of life. To be honest, he felt he was being generous when he considered the crow evidence of life. He tried to get the shadowcat to come out from hiding so he wouldn’t feel so alone, but the creature wouldn’t budge. Greg had to admit if there were any way he, too, could have hidden beneath the drab fabric of his tunic, he would have done the same.
Not a single leaf hung from the branches of the surrounding scrub, yet the sun couldn’t find its way to the path. Even so, Greg was able to make out a dark shape ahead. Hazel’s cabin. Actually, he could hardly call it a cabin. He hesitated to call it a shack. It reminded him of his rundown tree house back home, except that the tree house brought with it feelings of security, while Hazel’s shack stole away any secure feelings Greg might have left, and replaced them with an uncomfortable lump in his throat—the type of sensation he’d expect to feel if he swallowed something wrong, like his new shadowcat.
For the first time since Greg crossed Black Blood Creek, the air stirred. A soundless breeze wound its way between the scrubs, up over Hazel’s decaying porch and across the face of the shack. The front door banged open against its hinges and shut again, abruptly ending the silence. Suddenly the scrubs looked less charred. Branches began to sway gently in the wind. Greg even noticed a green leaf here and there, though certainly too few to conceal the monkeydog he couldn’t see but swore he heard somewhere off to his right.
In spite of every instinct telling him otherwise, Greg willed himself forward. He stopped just short of the porch and debated how he should approach the witch.
From a larger distance preferably, and with an assortment of weapons.
Again the door swung open, and out stepped a wretched crone in torn rags. She had the deeply furrowed skin of a woman who had spent a good many years under the sun, perhaps wrestling with it. Her hair hung gray and matted, and she stood bent over so far she had to crane her neck backward just to look Greg in the eye. No warts though. Greg had always heard witches had warts.
“Go away,” she squawked.
Greg might have expected such a sound from a goose, if it were sick or injured, but not from this woman, whose neck was barely long enough to prop her head off her shoulders. Still he was relieved. She might not be the most hospitable woman he’d ever met, but at least she seemed human. During the past day he had pictured far worse.
“Are you the wit—are you Hazel?”
The woman scowled. “What do you want?”
“I need some things my friends say only you can provide.”
Her scowl deepened. Using a gnarled cane she pushed herself upright and peered over Greg’s shoulder. It took all of Greg’s willpower not to spin around to check what she was looking at.
“I don’t see any friends,” she said after an excruciatingly long interval.
“They’re waiting in the forest. They didn’t want to cross Black Blood Creek.”
She nodded. “You should have stayed with them. They sound much smarter than you.” She turned then and hobbled into her shack. Greg watched her stooped form disappear into the darkness.
Well, that went well.
He stood awkwardly before the porch for a time, listening to a monkeydog rustle behind no more than three leaves. Eventually he hopped up the steps and, holding Nathan’s staff out like a baseball bat, peered through the front door. Inside, the air hung thick and musty with the nearly overpowering scent of unfamiliar spices. The room was so dark he didn’t see her at first, but Hazel stood no more than six feet away. He jumped back when he spotted her.
“S-sorry, you startled me.”
“The eternal torch is on the stand by the door,” Hazel said, her voice little more than a whisper. “It will light when you pick it up and stay lit until you set it down again.”
Greg stepped over the threshold and groped in the darkness, trying not to think about what he might touch, or what might touch him. His knee banged into something hard, and a wooden object