Free The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children) by Manda Benson Page B

police!”
    “I’m Dana Provine!” Dana held her hands up in front of her face. “Do you not remember, in the hospital, when I hit my head, and you told Ja—”
    Osric had suddenly thrown his umbrella on the floor. “Don’t speak that name here, where anyone and his brother may overhear it! What is it you want?”
    “Perhaps I had better tell you it in your house,” Dana suggested timidly. “If you don’t want people to overhear it.”
    Osric glanced back at his porch as though Dana’s appearance might be foil for a burglary. “Very well, then, but don’t touch anything.”
    “There’s someone else with me, can I just get him?”
    The man stared down at her, suspicion in his face. “Make it quick.”
    Dana went back to the hedge. “He says we can come in,” she told Eric.
    Eric followed her back up the drive and into Osric’s porch. Osric did not invite them into his living room nor offer them somewhere to sit. He merely closed the front door and led them into his hallway.
    “You can speak now,” he said.
    There was no light on in the hall, a narrow corridor with a dingy carpet, a coat hanging from the end of the banister, and a telephone sitting on the second stair. Through the various doors leading off could be seen unwashed dishes in a kitchen, an armchair with paperwork strewed about it in the living room.
    “We found a, a creature,” Dana began.
    “A machine,” Eric countered.
    “A sort of mechanical creature. It flew down from above the school and attacked me, but there was a collar on it that was telling it what to do. We managed to get the collar off it and hide it, but if we leave it there until tomorrow someone will find it.”
    Osric folded his arms. “What?”
    “It’s a wyvern,” Eric explained. He’d lost the confident air he’d had before, and now he looked insincere, like he was playing a joke on Osric and not managing it very convincingly. “You know, like a dragon but with only two legs.”
    “It’s a weapon… some sort of technology. We need you to tell…” Dana knew she couldn’t speak Jananin’s name in front of Eric, “…someone about it for us.”
    “Well,” Osric regarded them both through narrowed eyes, “before I tell someone about this rather unlikely sounding thing, I will need to see it for myself.”
    “You’d better come and look at it then,” said Dana. “But if we’re going to move it, you’ll need to get a van.”
    Doctor Osric’s eyes became even narrower. “I can get one. I’ll need to go somewhere else first, though.”
    “You’ll have to meet us at the back of the school, then. Have you got SatNav?”
    Osric produced a GPS-enabled smartphone from his pocket and let Dana enter the school’s postcode.
    Dana and Eric walked back to the bike while Osric locked his front door. “Who the hell is he?” said Eric in a low voice. “He’s a git.”
    “He’s some sort of scientist who works for the Meritocracy. He knows people in the military and stuff like that. And ya, he is a git,” Dana admitted. “But at least he’s listened to us and he’s going to come and look.”
    “Mint.” Eric hesitated, a frown deepening on his face. “But what will the people in the army and the scientists and all that do to the wyvern? I mean, what if it’s, like, an alien or a cyborg or something, and they kill it so they can dissect it? Like in America, when a spaceship crashed at Roswell and the government covered it up?”
    Dana wasn’t sure what he was talking about, or even if it was true. “America is different to England. They don’t have meritocratic law there.”
    “But how do you know what they’re going to do?”
    A sick, guilty feeling was starting to close on Dana, like an iron fist around her stomach. Jananin would know what to do. Jananin must know what to do. There wasn’t anywhere else. “It’s not like we can keep it hidden even if we don’t give it to them. It might be a terrorist weapon. Or it might belong to the