Stoneheart by Charlie Fletcher Page B

go. Dictionary looked scandalized.
    “Now, children, there shall be no occasion for snick-or-snee here in the very shadow of God’s house!”
    “Snick-or-snee?” said George, floundering again.
    “A barney. A bust-up. A fight,” said the Gunner wearily.
    “With knives, mark you, with knives,” harrumphed Dictionary.
    “It wasn’t a fight. She pushed me. Look, I’m sorry but—”
    He stopped talking. Edie was crouched over the thing that had fallen out of her ripped pocket and clinked on the pavement. It was the weathered disk of glass. Her eyes were transfixed by it.
    “They’re here.”
    The warning glass was blazing blue-green light, brighter than she’d ever seen it.
    “There’s taints. Here. Now.”
    They all looked up into the evening sky—still stained orange by the fluorescent city lights—except Edie, who swept the glass into her other pocket and zipped it shut.
    For one terrible moment George felt his gut turning to water as a winged shape dropped out of the sky and flapped over them. He relaxed when he saw it was just a large black bird, not some gargoyle.
    “It’s just a bird,” he said with relief.
    It flapped around them above their heads, flying as if in slow motion. Dictionary waved his book at it, trying to shoo it away.
    “A strick,” he said wonderingly, almost to himself. “A strick if ever I saw one.”
    “Strick?” asked the Gunner, not taking his eyes off the eerily slow bird.
    Dictionary waved his book at the Gunner, as if trying to shake the meaning out of it and onto him.
    “Strick. A bird of ill omen.”
    He twitched and jerked, and George found himself shivering as if the movement were contagious.
    “What do we do now?” His arm was gripped in a small vise. Edie yanked at him. “Run.”
    She dragged him stumbling into the traffic. After two stutter-steps he was running faster than she was.
    The Gunner looked around from where he had been watching the wheeling bird. Horror flashed across his face. He kicked into a sprint and shouted in one movement “No! Not that way!”
    George and Edie had to stop short as a red double-decker bus turned in front of them, blocking the way down Fleet Street. George heard the Gunner shout, and spun around. He got a glimpse of the big man running toward him, pointing, yelling something—then another bus turned behind George, and for a moment, he and Edie were sandwiched in a narrow red canyon as the two buses passed each other.
    It was like being in the eye of a hurricane—a beat of quiet as the two red walls ground past them in opposite directions.
    Then, with a whoosh of sound and diesel fumes, the bus ahead of them swept away, and Edie tugged him onward—a good three fast steps until she saw what they were running into. The thing the Gunner was shouting about behind them as he ran around the other double-decker bus. The thing with the fiery eyes and the scales and the wings that cracked like thunder. The thing that saw them from the top of its tall stone perch planted in the middle of the street.
    Then she braked, and George stopped, still looking back to see what the Gunner was trying to say, not realizing what they had just run into.
    “What is it?”
    “I think it’s a dragon.”
    And he turned, slowly.
    And it was, exactly, a dragon.
    And then there was nowhere to run.

C HAPTER S IXTEEN
    The Dragon at the Bar
    D ragons come in all shapes and sizes, from vast nightmares whose wings unfold with a thunderclap and block out the sky, to tiny furry mascots that dangle in a harmless but irritating way from people’s rearview mirrors. The first thing George and Edie noticed was that the dragon that guards Fleet Street is not one of the fuzzy cuddleable ones. Its wiry body looked like that of a lion crossed with a muscular greyhound, and then covered in scales like chain mail.
    The thin spiny tail cracked like a whip and the wings snapped wide as it reared back on its hind legs. The front claws—and these were proper