The Saint of Dragons. Jason Hightman

       CHAPTER EIGHT

       The Woman who Fell in Love with a Dragon

      The boy and his father had docked the Ship with No Name in New York Harbour and made their way quickly – Simon would say too quickly – through the streets by taxicab to a perch in a giant tree in Central Park. Aldric scaled it quickly, but Simon struggled with the climb. No one could see them because they were so high up, and the tree was deep inside the park, thickly covered in autumn colours.

      Aldric St George had set the area up nicely for their needs long before his trip to the Lighthouse School. Stuck away here and there among the branches were little gunny sacks of food and water, small flashlights, a clock, some books, and below at the trunk, two comfortable easy chairs that Aldric had salvaged from a skip off Park Avenue and which would serve now as a place to sleep, something Simon found depressing. Lodged in the tree were two old brass telescopes, positioned to see in every direction around the park.

      “What are we looking for?” Simon wondered.

      “The signs. He’s been here, you can tell. Lurking.”

      “How do you know?”

      Aldric’s eyes passed over the people below. “You can see it in people’s faces. Everything weighs heavily on them. Their hearts beat slower. The fire that drives them through life is burning low. Look at them, Simon. Nothing reaches past their sadness – not the landscape, not the movement of the city, not the souls around them … They’ve lost something and they don’t know what it is. Some haven’t noticed what’s missing inside, but they know enough to suspect that the city has stolen something from them. You can feel their anger. These people don’t want to be alive any more. The gloom is falling down around them like rain.”

      Simon looked. He saw ordinary people, doing ordinary things.

      Aldric pointed down. “The cab driver at the corner, yelling at the woman crossing. The old woman in the grey coat. The priest. Don’t you feel it?”

      Quiet filled the tree as Simon tried to sense what his father described. The city was just a city. Finally he had to admit, “All I see are a bunch of ticked-off New Yorkers. I thought that was supposed to be pretty normal here.”

      His father frowned. “These are the signs of a dragon presence. Be alert to them. Now then, over there, on the eighteenth floor of that building, is the home of a woman named Alaythia Moore,” said Aldric, with a touch of sadness Simon didn’t quite understand. “She lives there alone and rarely has visitors. She works for a modern art gallery. She is an art curator and an artist in her own right, I understand, though I’ve never seen any of her work. She’s too shy and private to show off her own paintings.”