A single break in the southern edge of the wall allowed for a long, winding gravel driveway. On either side of the driveway, and stretching along the inside of most of the wall, were clusters of strange-looking hives. These hives contained bees of extraordinary size and temper. They never flew beyond the confines of their owner’s property—but they relentlessly attacked any stranger foolish enough to enter. Worse, they appeared impervious to weather, and remained active even through the harsh Minnesota winters.

Beyond the hives was a strip, a dozen acres thick, of wildflowers. No two blossoms were alike—Jennifer could never figure out how her grandfather grew such diverse and amazing wildflowers—but each stood as a tiny and unique monument to nature. These were primarily for the benefit of the bees, but Grandpa Crawford occasionally brought some around the countryside to sell to local flower shops.

After the flowers came grazing pastures, with horses on one side of the road and sheep on the other. Jennifer didn’t enjoy riding horses but had to admit her grandfather picked, bred, and raised some amazing animals. There were two or three that she particularly liked: black Arabians with faint white markings on the hooves.

The sheep, on the other hand, were too numerous and short-lived for her to bother with—hundreds of them, left to roam largely free over the gently sloping hills.

A brief band of untended grassland lay between the pastures and the modest forest that surrounded both the lake and Grandpa Crawford’s cabin. Bur oak, black walnut, red maple, and Norway spruce trees clustered together at the edges, and then gave way to a small open meadow to the north. Set at the back of this meadow, on the edge of the broad lake beyond, stood the cabin.

They called it the “cabin,” but it was much larger than any ordinary cabin, with room for at least a dozen guests. It was enormous. Grandpa Crawford had built the place himself, forty years ago, with additions every ten years. The first story of the cabin was lined with stone and covered nearly four acres, for every building was attached— garage, toolshed, supply house, even the barn. The wooden upper-story of the living quarters had a smaller footprint, and was pushed northward toward the lake.

Jennifer stared out the window at these landmarks for some time before she realized she was seeing them in the dark, in color, with crystal clarity. Night vision—like a monster. Her surroundings were so familiar, yet so completely different when seen through these eyes.

Her mother turned the minivan off of the driveway and drove carefully around the east end of the cabin until they could see the north side. The entrance to the barn was already open, and they drove right in. Jennifer recalled the layout of the house, and how she always thought it odd that everything was attached to each other with big swinging doors. The far end of the barn would lead into a large mudroom, and then into the kitchen, and then into a massive sitting room. The sitting room faced north through double-wide sliding doors onto a patio, and a short-cropped lawn, and the lake beyond.

It made perfect sense now, she thought as her mother stopped the car and got out, that Grandpa Crawford would have such a large living area, with such an entry. She could tell already that normal-sized rooms, normal-sized doors, and normal-sized porches just weren’t an option for the next few days.

Elizabeth lifted the minivan’s back door and waited.

Jennifer stared back. “What?”

“You need to get out now, unless you want to spend the entire week in the back of the van.”

“Right . . .” Jennifer looked warily at her legs. She had no idea how to do this. She measured her mother, up and down. “I don’t suppose you could carry me again?”

“You’re about a hundred pounds heavier than you were two hours ago,” her mother estimated. “Not exactly portable. Thought about going on a diet?”

“What a perfect time for fat jokes, Mother. After all, I just turned fourteen and morphed into a gigantic iguana.”

“Actually,” Jonathan called out from the far end of the barn, where he was working a claw into a deep groove beneath the frame of the double doors, “more eagle than iguana. Like dinosaurs, we weredragons have more in common genetically with birds than with reptiles. Your mother’s actually done some research into this. As you develop your more raptorlike capabilities, you’ll see what I mean . . .”

“And my father’s first words come in the form of a biology lecture.” Jennifer groaned. “I can see that I may have changed, but you two are as clueless as ever.” She tried to step majestically out of the back of the minivan with her right wing claw, but misjudged her weight placement and ended up tumbling tail over head onto a bed of hay. The horses in stables to either side snorted—derisively, she was sure.

Jonathan sighed as his claw caught the hidden lever he sought, and the doors into the cabin proper swung inward. The mudroom lights came on automatically, and Jennifer took a good look at her father for the first time.

The first things that caught her eye were the three thin horns that pierced the back of his head. They shone silver, like his eyes. Jennifer self-consciously reached back and felt her own skull—yep, she could feel three evenly spaced spikes back there as well.

But unlike his daughter, Jonathan Scales had no nose horn. And there were other differences.

While her blue was a sharp, electric shade, his was a deeper, almost purplish hue. Black stripes crossed over his back and wings, and his belly was a truer blue than his back. His wings were much larger in proportion to his body than hers were, and the arms at the leading edge of each wing were thinner. And while her tail had two prongs at the end, his tail had a slender, tapered point. Overall, his build was slighter than hers . . . and thinner, Jennifer noted with some self-contempt.

“Liz, why don’t you go on in. It doesn’t look like Dad’s having any guests over this cycle. He may have left a message. I’ll stay in the barn and help Jennifer with her new motor skills.”

“Grandpa Crawford isn’t here?” From her sprawled position on the ground, Jennifer was disappointed and curious. If Grandpa was also a weredragon, shouldn’t he also be in dragon form now? If so, wasn’t home the place to be? If not, when would he be back? And what was this about guests and cycles? She had been to this cabin many times, but had never seen any guests other than herself and her parents.

“He probably left for the lake. He may come back later. Get up if you can,” said Jonathan Scales, ignoring his daughter’s pout. He raised his wings, pushed gently off the doorway with a hind leg, and floated onto the hay next to her. Elizabeth went inside.

Jennifer squirmed on the ground. Flipped on her back like this, it wasn’t easy to get up. She wriggled, got nowhere, and groaned. “This is so embarrassing.”

“Fold your wings in and roll,” he suggested.

She did, and was soon on all fours, her hind legs pushing her fat bottom higher up into the air than it ever had been in fourteen years, and her wing claws grasping at the ground fruitlessly. Her snout was in the dirt. All she could see was the hay two feet in front of her.

“The humiliation just never stops, does it?”

“Push off on your front claws a bit, so your head’s off the ground . . . there you go . . .”

This was better. Now Jennifer was crouched like a cat ready to spring. She was certain she couldn’t move, but she felt somewhat poised as long as she stood still.

“Walking is not a dragon’s forte,” Jonathan explained. “Even trampler dragons prefer galloping and leaping to a simple walk. But you’ll have to learn a simple step or two before you can even think about flying.”

He took her through the basics. Jennifer quickly learned that four-legged creatures have more independent movement of legs than bipeds like humans. She discovered she needed to keep her hind legs a half step ahead of the front ones, and she needed to use a scratch-and-pull method with her batlike wing claws to get anywhere. Progress was not easy. She was still pouting, and her father seemed determined to ignore her mood. So he talked more and more, and she said less and less, and before long the walking lesson was a nearly uninterrupted stream of words from the elder dragon.

“Bend your leg a bit more, that’s it, keep your wings in closer to your body or you’ll just zigzag. No, more, there, now scratch and pull, not bad at all for a first day! No, see, you fell because you weren’t looking up. . . . Wow, that looked like it hurt. . . .”

“Okay, enough lessons!” she announced, after maybe ten minutes. “I can do enough to get inside and go to bed.”

Her heart sank as she remembered her size. How would she fit through a bedroom door, much less in a bed?

Jonathan didn’t seem worried about that. “Sure, okay. This is a lot to take in. But there are one or two things we should go over tomorrow—”

“Whatever,” she groaned. She scratched and pulled her way across the barn, then delicately navigated the three wide wooden steps . . . and then nearly somersaulted through the open doors as she stepped on the tip of her wing with a hind leg. “Aaargh!”

The sitting room was, as Jennifer remembered it, quite spacious. The plush couches and chairs were already up against the walls, which were carved with oak shelves filled with leather-bound books. The sundry titles on these had always fascinated Jennifer. The Withered Head, Hornets You Can Breed, Four-Dimensional Mapping, and so on. Some of them, such as Early Wyrms That Got the Bird and Shapes That Never Shift, took on new meaning to her now.

Carefully retracting her claws so that she wouldn’t scrape the hardwood floors or tear at the furniture, she edged up to one shelf of books that had always been her and Grandpa Crawford’s favorite. She felt a tear in her silver, alien eye as she recalled the subject of the fantastic tales he told best—dragons.

Well, duh, she thought now.

There they all were—modern classics like The Hob-bit, various tales of the Chinese dragon Nv Wa, and children’s versions of more complex works like the story of Saint George the Dragon Slayer and Beowulf.

One book lay atop all the others—an oversized, flat leather volume with deeply worn edges. Jennifer reached out with a wing claw and grasped the binding. The title was in gold letters: Grayheart’s Anatomy.

Jennifer did not say this as openly or often as she used to, but she admired her mother’s work as a doctor. She knew that biology was her favorite of all the sciences, even though she had just started her own high school course in it. Working with living things, understanding what makes them move and breathe and see, was all utterly fascinating to her. And Grayheart’s Anatomy represented the intersection of that interest and the love of dragons that Grandpa Crawford put into his stories.

It was the journal of an eighteenth-century explorer in North America who had come upon the body of a recently deceased dragon, taken it apart, and studied it. The layers of skin, the organs, the bone structure—all was in exquisite, illustrated detail. It used close study of the creature’s anatomy to make guesses at how it lived, hunted, slept, fought, and even fell in love.

The pages were large and thick enough for Jennifer to flip through them, if she laid the book on the floor. She did so, while tears welled up. This wasn’t a fanciful examination of a fictional corpse. This was her, or something very like her. Every muscle pulled back for analysis, every chamber of the upper and lower hearts split open for discovery . . .

Upper and lower hearts? The thought struck her cold.

She put one claw over her left breast.

Then she let the claw slide slowly down and to her right side, about where her appendix would be if she were a human girl.

After all the pain of the metamorphosis, seeing her new body for the first time, observing her father, trying to walk, and everything else, this finally brought home the full impact of what had happened to her.

“All right, to hell with sleep,” she told her parents, who were rolling out large oriental rugs at the other end of the room. “I have questions, and I want answers.”

They stopped short, dragon and woman, then blinked and nodded in unison.

“First question. Why did you wait until today to tell me this? It isn’t fair! I’ve had no time—”

“You’re right, Jennifer. It isn’t fair. We’re sorry.”

She was stunned at how quickly her father apologized.

“But we didn’t know this was going to happen so quickly. We thought we had years. Most weredragons don’t experience their first change until later—sixteen or seventeen years old, at the youngest. Then we saw how fast and strong you were getting, but we still thought it was all a few months away. The dragonflies at school were a complete shock—as you’ll learn, that sort of thing is a practiced skill among elder dragons.

“As soon as you did it, we knew we had to tell you so you would be prepared. So we did. But even earlier today, we didn’t know for sure if you would turn this lunar cycle, or next, or even a year from now.”

“So what am I doing like this, two years early?”

“We’re not sure.” Jonathan sighed. “It’s probably because your mother isn’t a weredragon. You’re a hybrid. That would probably affect you.”

Jennifer cringed. “So let me get this straight. Not only am a I freak among people, I’m a freak among dragons, as well?”

“Honestly, Jonathan,” her mother hissed. “A hybrid? The dog is a hybrid. Could you come up with less insulting language?” She turned to Jennifer desperately. “Please don’t see yourself that way. I know this is hard, but . . .”

“SHUT UP, MOTHER, YOU DON’T KNOW. YOU CANNOT POSSIBLY SEE THIS THROUGH MY EYES.”

The three of them stood silently for a while. Then Jennifer asked her next question.

“Dad, we look pretty different from each other. Is this also because I’m a freak?”

He paused and scratched behind his middle horn, clearly dreading the answer. “You appear to have some unusual characteristics.”

“I’ll take that as a yes. Next question: Who’s taking care of Phoebe?”

“I called the Blacktooths with the cell phone, on the way up,” her mother said quietly. “Eddie will go over and feed the dog until we get back.”

“Am I going to be like this for a few days?”

“Four or five.”

“Then I’d like Phoebe to be up here with me.”

“Sweetheart, the dog—”

“I’d like her up here with me.” Jennifer crouched down and curled into a ball. She would have thought even her parents could understand this.

“Okay,” Elizabeth agreed. “I’ll go to get her tomorrow morning.”

“Fine.” Jennifer stretched her neck out. “Do the Blacktooths—does Eddie—know about weredragons?”

“No,” her father answered quickly. “As you can imagine, Jennifer, many people would get upset if they learned the truth. And we have some enemies you will learn about later. There are not many of our kind left. Those who survived Eveningstar have been hiding since. You’ll meet them once you’re ready.”

“Eveningstar.” Memories came back to Jennifer of the early morning of her fifth birthday. “That was our home. Someone attacked the town.”

“Yes.”

“You woke me up, and we escaped . . .”

“Yes.”

“. . . over the river in a boat . . .”

“Yes. Well, no. You and your mother were actually riding on my back as I swam. You seemed nervous, since you had never seen me as a dragon before. So I used my voice to convince you who I was. That worked well enough to get you on my back and over the river.”

Jennifer closed her eyes. “There were fires all over the town. We saw them from the other side of the river. And there was screaming—I don’t remember what.”

“It was a war, Jennifer.” Her mother was talking now. “The weredragons were very nearly exterminated. Families and friends who had grown up together for generations scattered. We each moved to different towns, hoping to hide. There’s no one else in Winoka who knows the truth about you and your father.”

“That’s not completely true, is it?” asked Jennifer. She was trying to be calm, but as she pieced more things together, she became angry—at her parents, at herself, and at her neighbors. “The rumors that went around town when we first moved. The way they made you miserable at church. They must have known something.”

“They did probably feel that something was not quite right with us,” Jonathan said carefully. “It’s impossible to keep a secret like this completely. Crescent moons happen at very inconvenient times, and the stories we told to cover the truth may have changed as they passed from person to person. Your mother and I felt there may have been a presence there at the church that was not completely friendly to us. Rumors found fertile ground, and I was not around often enough to help your mother dispute them.”

Jennifer saw her mother’s hand squeeze his wing claw as he said this. She decided to change the subject.

“When will I meet some other weredragons? I mean, besides you and Grandpa.”

“Soon,” her father said. “While we’ve been careful to keep you away from this farm during crescent moons, you’ll find it’s a very different place around then. This is a refuge, one of only a few left, where we can stay away from prying, unfriendly eyes.”

“And I’ll change like this, every crescent moon, for five days, just like you?”

“Pretty much. There are small differences from one weredragon to the next. During the waxing of the moon leading to the first quarter, and the waning of the moon into a new moon, our bodies feel intense pressure to change. You’ll need a minimum of four days in this state, but most weredragons need five. But for however long, it happens on both crescents, every time.”

Jennifer slapped her wing to her forehead as another thought struck. “This is going to keep happening, twice a month! I’m going to miss school! My friends are going to figure this out—Eddie may not know about us now, but what he and Skip saw last night—”

“They saw nothing,” said Elizabeth. “When I talked to Mr. Blacktooth on the phone, he was quite positive you were on drugs. Of course, I assured him that you were not. The story we will use with people like the Blacktooths, and school, and everyone else is that you are falling seriously ill. Something chronic, and perhaps even incurable.”

“Lovely. You know, I can already hear and feel the air whistling as my friends abandon me.”

“Give your friends some credit, Jennifer. They’re not that shallow. They’ll understand your absence and support you when you’re there. We’ll keep the name of your ‘clinic’ to ourselves to avoid visitation requests, and set up a long-term plan before the end of the school year.”

“ ‘Long-term’? You mean we might have to move?”

“Yes, probably. I’m sorry, ace, but a school-age weredragon presents tons of opportunity for you to be discovered, or worse, hurt and killed.”

Jennifer’s face fell. “I’ll never go back to high school. Never go to a prom, or play varsity soccer.”

Elizabeth took a step forward. “You’ll miss those experiences. But you’ll do and see things that no one else will. Things I never will. You said it yourself—I’ll never see the world through your eyes. No one can.”

“That’s not exactly what I meant—”

“You know that we still love you, more than anything else in the whole world. Right?” Her mother seemed honestly unsure of her daughter’s answer.

“Hmmph.” Jennifer felt herself start to soften a bit, but would not allow it. She looked away.

“Do you have any other questions?” Jonathan asked.

“Thousands. But that’s enough for tonight,” she said grudgingly. “You guys are right, I should get some sleep.”

Elizabeth pulled a couple more oriental rugs out of the closet. She unrolled these across the hardwood floor of the sitting room while her husband shut the patio doors.

“We’re all sleeping here, in this room? But there are plenty of guest rooms, and the beds are large enough!”

“It wouldn’t be right to leave you alone, on your first night,” Jonathan answered. “Besides, your grandpa hates it when your mother and I use his bed.”

Elizabeth couldn’t totally stifle her giggle.

“Aw, yuck,” Jennifer groaned. The image of her parents smooching in bed together was particularly disturbing, if not downright revolting, given the shapes she saw before her now.

“Relax,” said Jonathan. “What you’re thinking is downright impossible. Anything that would gross you out happens outside of a crescent moon—”

“Please stop talking, Dad.”

Elizabeth flicked off the lights, and only the barest slice of moonlight ventured through the patio doors. It was enough so Jennifer could see her father curl up against the sofa, and her mother lie down next to him and set her head against his belly.

She stayed in her own corner of the sitting room, spread out on top of a green and brown runner they had just unrolled. This is cute, she sniffed to herself. Just like on the wildlife channel, except with oriental rug accents.