Salem Girl's Dormitory, 10:20 AM“Scram, Boris.”
Taryn stood in the door to the girl’s half of Salem’s dorm, scowling down at the enormous stuffed crocogator sprawled atop her trunk. Boris, being Boris, just sat there, motionless black eyes staring up like giant beads.
“I’m gonna close my eyes and count to five,” Taryn told him. “If you ain’t gone by then, I’ll toss yeh out the window and you can land in the lake for all I care.” Without waiting for its non-existent response, she did just that. “One. Two. Three….”
Something brushed by her ankles with the air of a sulk, like a kitten chased from its preferred bed of newly-dry clothes. Taryn opened her eyes and was alone in the dorm. “’Bout time. Dumb croc.”
She knelt next to the trunk to dig out the book she’d came in for, but a sound from under the lid gave her pause. What, she thought, was Boris doing in here anyway? He didn’t normally sneak into students’ dorms. Could it be that he heard it too, that scratching inside her trunk?
Not wanting to get her hopes up, Taryn inserted her key into the lock and turned it once. That’d open level one, where she kept most of her things. But if she kept going all the way around three whole times, then her Mom’s old magic traveling trunk would open to its second compartment. That’s where she’d been keeping The Egg. Nothing else. Just the egg, some warm blankets, and a few jars of sumac preserves.
But today, when she opened it up, the egg wasn’t there anymore. It’d been torn open sometime during the night, its soft shell eaten away to relieve the first hunger pains after birth. And in its place was a long, thick, beautiful snake with curled black horns resting on either side of its head.
[1] It peered up at Taryn with black eyes, and the half-giant sucked in her breath.
“Oh,” she whispered. “Aren’t you
beautiful.”
She gathered the new-born Horned Serpent into her arms, lifting him slowly from the box to cuddle against her chest. The snake twisted and squirmed, avoiding her grip, wrapping itself around her wrist and arm in an attempt to struggle away. It gnawed at her thumb with a toothless mouth, and Taryn frowned, gently prying its jaw away.
“C’mon now, no biting. What’s the matter, baby? Too cold?” She could fix that. She pointed her wand at her own temple and muttered “
Febris” under her breath. The fever-inducing charm was something she’d come across in the nurse’s office once and was meant to counter-act chills and hypothermia. Taryn’s half-giant magical immunity warded off enough of the spell that to raise her body temperature by a few degrees.
It was enough. The snake calmed, curled toward the warmth, and slithered contently in her lap. Taryn smiled through the haze the fever brought and rubbed its head. “That’s my boy,” she whispered. “I’m gonna call you Nagendra. You like that name? It’ll be Naggie for short.”
Nagendra peered up at her face and gave a lazy blink. For the moment, at least, he seemed perfectly content.
“Don’tcha worry, baby. Mama’s gonna take good care of you from now on.”
[September 12] The Hatching