Chapter 1

Squeak. Squeak. Squeak.

“Cordelia.” Dr. Cornelius Clay spun around, and the lantern attached to his forehead bobbled slightly. In his oversize goggles, which were misted slightly from the drizzle, Cordelia thought he very closely resembled the species Cavorticus poison, otherwise known as the lionfish—a monster Cordelia had only ever seen in illustrated form, on page 432 of A Guide to Monsters and Their Habits, Cordelia’s favorite book.

Cornelius’s eyes darted nervously behind her. He had been anxious all night. “What have I told you about wearing your mother’s boots? I can hear you coming from a mile away.”

“Sorry.” Cordelia wrestled the boot off her right foot and, balancing on one leg, allowed the moisture to drip out of its toe. She shoved her sodden sock back in the boot and wiggled her toes experimentally. Better.

Blue Hills Park looked very different at night than it did during the day. During the day, hikers huffed red-faced in the cold along winding hiking trails; children hunted the marshes for frogs, losing the occasional mitten, and even boot, to the sucking mud along the estuary; and fishermen returned again and again to the same fishing holes, breaking through the morning ice to drop their lines. It was a beautiful place, crowded with dogwood trees and lady’s slippers, herds of white-tailed deer, copperhead snakes. But during the day, even the wildness seemed tame, almost deliberate, as if it had been made specifically for the enjoyment of its visitors. The hills and woods, the marshes and the ribbons of streams that fed them—all of them had been named, surveyed, and bounded, and their outlines appended to new maps of the Greater Boston area. Tamed and flattened, like a dead butterfly pinned beneath glass, and now property of the newly formed Metropolitan Park Commission.

But at night, Blue Hills wasn’t a park at all. It was a vast, strange, wild thing, alive with insects and movement. It watched Cordelia and her father with yellow eyes, winking in the grass. It tracked them by their echoes, bouncing news of their progress to great geometries of bats that passed back and forth overhead. It swept in on gusts of wind and touched their necks to make them shiver. It carried news of their skin into a thousand different corners, whispering warnings of intruders.

At night, it was very obvious: they belonged to Blue Hills, not the other way around.

At the beginning of a steep pathway that wound up and through the hills, Cordelia’s father stopped. He squatted, his lantern swinging slightly, and brushed his fingers to the damp grass. Then he straightened up.

“Look, Cordelia.” He extended his hand to her. His fingers were streaked with black.

“Ash,” Cordelia whispered.

Her father nodded solemnly. “We must be on the right track.”

Rector Cushing’s wife, Mary Cushing, was the first person to have spotted a fire. On an evening stroll with her husband, a rhododendron bush had, quite without explanation, burst into hearty flames, nearly frightening her out of her skin. For several days afterward, there had been a steady stream of visitors to the spot, claiming to see in the blackened husk of the bush various saints and spirits. Her husband had even declared that portion of Blue Hills Park sacred ground, and Mrs. Cushing had enjoyed several days of fame, though many accused her of being overly imaginative, and the minister of a rival church, Mr. Buchanan, had even suggested that witchcraft was involved.

Then Miss Finch, who worked as a schoolteacher, and whom no one would ever accuse of having an imagination, had spotted another bush—this time, an ugly pricker—go up in flames. This had provoked a roaring debate. Was Blue Hills haunted? Was it blessed? Was it cursed, and harboring demons? Were the events, as the scientific community declared, merely a product of a bizarre chemical reaction stemming from various alkaloid concentrations in the soil?

Only Cordelia and her father knew the truth.

The fires had a different cause altogether: an injured, and possibly dying, dragon. “We must go very carefully from here on out,” her father whispered, selecting a pair of dingle clips—like handcuffs, but with flexible openings, meant for restraining dragon wings without injuring their delicate membranes—from his rucksack. After a slight hesitation, he switched them out for a slightly larger pair. “The fire-sites suggest that the dragon is mobile, though of course it can’t have the use of its wings, otherwise it would—”

“—have retreated at the first sign of humans, I know.” Cordelia’s palms were sweating. Five years earlier, when she was just seven years old, she and her father had once treated a dragon. Digbert, as they had come to name him, was ancient: a withered creature, roughly the size of a couch, whom they had found after locals complained of mysterious bonfires on the beach. His eyes had been clouded by cataracts so solid, he could no longer navigate—and even the eye drops Cordelia’s father had prepared, a special tincture of chicken blood and crushed lily pads, had done little to help. They could do nothing but keep Digbert in the living room and make sure he was comfortable until the end. The rug and sofas still bore large, singed holes as proof of his existence. Patching them would have simply been too sad.

Digbert had been one of Cordelia’s favorites. He loved to be tickled on the chin, where several silvery whiskers had grown, and to be stroked on the leathery-soft joint behind the wings. When she came in from the moors with her fingers crooked from cold, he used to warm her hands by exhaling on them.

But not all dragons, she knew, were so gentle.

They moved up the narrow dirt pathway. This was where Cordelia was happiest: in the deepest, blackest portion of the night, under a great sweep of stars and a rolling fog, like the touch of velvet; walking with her father while the rest of the world was asleep. Out here, she didn’t have to think about Sean O’Malley, who hurled stones at her whenever she passed and had started the rumor that Cordelia and her father were vampires; or Elizabeth Perkins, who giggled behind one gloved hand when she spotted Cordelia in the street, and whispered freak when Cordelia passed. She didn’t have to think about Hard Times, and the money dwindling in the pantry, and the marchers in the streets.

Then her father spoiled it.

“I heard about your scuffle with Henry Haddock,” he said, and Cordelia’s heart plunged into her boots. She’d been sure, when her father had said nothing after Cordelia returned home with a scraped knee and swollen cheek, that she would somehow avoid getting into trouble for her latest fight.

“He told everyone that you were bonkers,” she said. “He told everyone that we keep locked rooms full of eyeballs.” Henry Haddock had said plenty more besides that, over the years. That was not why Cordelia had punched him. But just thinking about what had really happened made her skin tighten with rage, and her fist throb, as if it wanted to punch him again.

“That’s no excuse,” her father said. “The boy had an eye as swollen as a tomato. He was terrorized.”

“He deserved it,” she muttered, shoving her hands into her pockets.

Dr. Clay kneeled so he was face-to-face with Cordelia. The lantern lit up the crags and hollows of his cheeks, and the web of lines around his eyes. Cordelia experienced a sudden shock: her dad was growing old. “I know things aren’t always . . . easy for you,” he said quietly. “I blame myself for that. If you hadn’t grown up among so many monsters—”

“I love the monsters,” she interjected.

He smiled. But his smile didn’t reach all the way to his eyes, and once again Cordelia had the impression that he was anxious about something. “I know you do,” he said. When he was very serious, the Scottish accent that had trailed him all the way from Glasgow grew warmer and richer, rolling his vowels and consonants together. “But people can be cruel. They are afraid of what they don’t understand.” He put two fingers under Cordelia’s chin. “You’re too old to be brawling in the street. At St. George’s—”

“I’m not going to St. George’s,” Cordelia said, for what felt like the hundredth time.

Even the mention of St. George’s filled her with a vague panic, an image of coffin-like rooms and a thousand girls, all of them as cruel as Elizabeth Perkins, all of them laughing at her.

Her father shook his head, but he let the subject drop. “You have to learn to control your temper, Cordelia. That’s part of growing up.”

“Maybe I don’t want to grow up,” Cordelia fired back.

She expected her dad to yell at her, but instead he just sighed again. He stood up slowly, wincing, as though even his bones hurt.

“We all grow up, Cordelia,” he said, in a strange voice. “The world changes. We have to change along with it.”

She knew he was talking about more than her fight with Henry Haddock, but before she could ask him to explain, he was walking again.

The wind sounded like distant voices, howling and whispering and sighing by turns, and the rain felt like a fine spray of glass against Cordelia’s skin. At one point, she was sure that she heard footsteps behind her and turned, hefting her lantern. A man with glittering shark eyes, a sharp beak of a nose, and neatly parted hair was moving through the mist.

Cordelia started to call out to her father, but then the man turned down a bend in the path and was gone.

Cornelius Clay was unusually quiet. Normally, when they were on the trail of a monster, he told Cordelia stories about the world when it was young: a time when the hills of Scotland, where Cornelius had lived until he was twelve, had been packed so densely with werewolves it was death to go out after dark; when phoenix birds warmed their feathers by the high noon sun; when magic and monsters were everywhere. But now he responded to her questions with a grunt, or not at all. She wondered whether he was angry with her.

For an hour they traveled in silence, their lanterns casting twin circles of light on the rough and rocky ground ahead of them. Cordelia was aware of the faint fizzing sound of the rain against the hills, and of the rustling of the underbrush as unseen animals scurried about their business. She was aware, too, of the smells on the air: wet grass and rotting leaves, and the smell of her father, like lint and tobacco.

Cordelia’s father had taught her long ago that monsters—who liked the dark and knew all about skulking in the shadows—could be identified not just by sight, but by sound and even by smell. The mordrum smelled a little bit like burnt toast; the filches let out rumbling farts that smelled like rotten eggs. Cordelia had once found a diggle caught in a ditch, its hind leg twisted at a hopeless angle, because of the sudden and overwhelming smell of freshly baked gingerbread cookies.

Which was why, when halfway across the foothills that rose like gentle waves toward the moon, Cordelia smelled the faintest wisp of acrid smoke on the wind, she knew that they had found their dragon.

Her father was walking ahead of her, head bent, lost in thought. “Dad—” she started, to call him back to her.

But she didn’t finish her sentence. Just then a large tangle of briars at her left elbow burst into lively flame, and Cordelia was knocked backward by a sudden whoosh of air.