Mrs. Erickson didn’t seem to be concerned about surviving a Dragon. She lifted both hands, dragging the one locked in Kaylin’s up, as if beseeching. Kaylin looked at the Dragon’s eyes.

“Hope—can you bring Sanabalis back?”

No.

“Can’t or won’t?”

Cannot. Not even if you were willing to pay the price of it. There is power here with which I cannot interfere. I am not a god, Kaylin.

At any other time, Kaylin would have been interested in the statement. Now she was too worried about other things: Sanabalis. Mrs. Erickson. Even herself. Teela was present, but anything Kaylin and Mrs. Erickson could survive had no chance of killing the Barrani Hawk. She could say the same about Sanabalis; her fear for him was different.

Mrs. Erickson’s eyes were wet.

The not-Dragon roared with Sanabalis’s throat—but the roar was attenuated, the echo of a Dragon’s voice, not the sound itself. She wondered if Sanabalis was somewhere behind the white eyes that were focused almost entirely on Mrs. Erickson.

“Mrs. Erickson.”

The older woman failed to hear.

Kaylin’s arms hurt. Mrs. Erickson stood behind a moving shield of True Words, and Kaylin didn’t have the time to attempt to read them. She glanced at her arms. All of the marks on both had lifted themselves from her skin to form this shield of words, this moving cage.

“Mrs. Erickson! Mrs. Erickson!”

The old woman attempted to walk through the words; Kaylin wasn’t certain whether the thing that stopped her was Kaylin’s hand, or the words themselves. Those words shivered in place as Mrs. Erickson attempted to move toward the possessed Dragon.

Something was terribly wrong—which was a ridiculous thing to think because it was so obvious. Kaylin tightened her grip on the old woman. Whatever now inhabited Sanabalis probably didn’t intend to harm her, given Mrs. Erickson’s tears and the expression that transformed her face; there was no awe in it, no joy, just a kind of bitter recognition. Whatever this ghost was, Mrs. Erickson appeared to instinctively grasp some greater part of it.

Kaylin understood that Mrs. Erickson and the Dragon had to remain separated.

Yes, Hope said. The awe that Mrs. Erickson lacked, Kaylin heard in the voice of her familiar. It is a ghost, Kaylin. You should not have brought her here.

Mrs. Erickson spoke, lifting a quavering voice to be heard. She had always been soft-spoken, but a thread of steel underlay the syllables that left her mouth now—syllables that Kaylin herself couldn’t understand.

The Dragon replied.

Kaylin understood Amaldi and Darreno. She understood the children trapped in Mrs. Erickson’s home. She could not understand whatever it was that now inhabited the Dragon. Dragon voices—even attenuated and distant as this one was—lacked nuance or subtlety. This one didn’t.

Mrs. Erickson was speaking the same language, modulated by an entirely human throat.