Shadow Sister by Carole Wilkinson

ointment on the cut above Kai’s eye.
    “We were lucky to escape. I hope we never see it again.”
    “We are going to search for it.”
    “Why would we want to do that?” Tao thought Kai was making a dragon joke.
    “I am beginning to understand this creature. I think it is hungry.”
    “A hungry ghost?”
    “No, a creature of the world, like you and me, but starving.”
    Tao realised that Kai was serious. “I don’t care how hungry it is! It’s responsible for the deaths of all those people – the baby’s mother, his poor sister. It is merciless, an unnatural murderous beast that has no place in this world. We need to get as far away from it as possible.”
    “It is not unnatural.”
    “But you saw it! It changed from one thing to another and then it disappeared completely. It had no real body of its own.”
    “It is a shape-changer, like me.”
    Tao remembered how he’d felt sick whenever the beast took on a different form. He’d thought it was fear.
    “I am sure that when it is not so hungry,” Kai said, “it will be less dangerous.”
    “I notice you don’t say ‘harmless’,” Tao said. “How do you know it won’t kill us?”
    “This is the beast I have been tracking. I learned from its dung that it eats caterpillars. I believe it has wandered from its natural habitat and cannot find the food that it normally eats. We must help it.”
    “But it would take a cartload of caterpillars to fill a creature that size.”
    “You are right. We need something larger. We must find woodworms. Lots of them.”

Chapter Ten
W OODWORM
    Tao was searching through rotting logs, muttering to himself. “This is not how I thought I would be spending my time when I left the monastery.”
    He pulled apart the rotting wood with his fingers and revealed one of the woodworm lava Kai had instructed him to find. It was larger than his thumb and a creamy white. Its body was divided into fat segments like beads strung together. He pulled it out of the wood and placed it in the bronze bowl, which was now full of larvae.
    “I don’t understand why we are trying to attract this monster,” Tao said. “I’m glad it’s disappeared. We should be running away from it.”
    “It is not a monster,” Kai insisted. “It is just hungry. You will see.”
    “All the more reason to keep out of its way. It’s killed many people.”
    From pools of disgorged food that he had come across, Kai had discovered that the beast had tried all sorts of
wuji
– spiders, beetles, worms, all the creepy-crawly creatures without a backbone – but it had regurgitated most of them. Caterpillars were all that it could digest, but that wasn’t enough to satisfy its hunger. Kai knew they weren’t moths. Moths had large larvae, found in rotting logs. He had been collecting them as well – except he’d only found three.
    “Have you been eating them?” Tao said.
    “No. There are not many.”
    “There are lots of them. Can’t you hear them chewing through the wood?”
    The dragon made a sound like small bells ringing. “I cannot!”
    Tao didn’t think this was a time for laughter.
    Kai took his three larvae and put them down on a large leaf. Then he and Tao hid in the trees and waited. Nothing happened. The larvae gradually started to move. Unused to crawling, they lumbered slowly like small fat emperors.
    Tao was ready to give up, but when he opened his mouth to say so, he found it stopped by a dragon paw. Kai was sniffing the air. He took his paw from Tao’s mouth and pointed a talon into the forest. There was the sound of rustling leaves. Something was approaching the larvae. Something they couldn’t see. Tao knew it was there because tree branches were moving, even though there was no wind. A twig snapped. Where the branches were moving, the trees looked a little smudged, as if it was part of a painting where the artist had smeared with his sleeve. Tao didn’t want to come face to face with the monster. He was looking around for the