Chapter 2

Cordelia didn’t even register hitting the ground before she was rolling, rolling, away from the still-crackling flames, moving by instinct.

“Cordelia!” Her father was running down the path toward her, sliding a little on the slope. She fumbled in her rucksack for her goggles and the nubby thick gloves, made of fire-retardant material, that her father had made her. Stupid to have been caught without them. She slipped on the goggles, and then the gloves, just as her father reached her.

“Are you all right?” He pulled her to her feet. She nodded shakily. “I’m all right.”

The fire—which had burned hot, in a sudden explosion of blue and pink flames—was already shriveling. As the briars turned black and curled into smoking nothing, the flames withered and died, leaving the air heavy with the smell of bitter smoke.

“Stay back,” he commanded her. He pushed into the thick tangle of growth, parting hedges and yew branches with his gloved hands, his lantern swinging. But Cordelia took a deep breath and plunged after him.

It was even darker once they were off the path, and the moon, barely peeking through the storm clouds, was eclipsed by tall, overgrown sycamores and tangles of vines.

“Where are you?” Cornelius muttered.

As though in response, there was a low hiss from just ahead, and suddenly the scene was lit up as another low-hanging bush burst into flame. Cordelia caught a quick glimpse of a pair of glittering eyes and felt her stomach drop. A dragon. Then the eyes were gone, and her father was frantically clapping out the fire before it could spread.

Cordelia saw a sudden movement to her right—a flicker, a slight shifting of the undergrowth.

“Cordelia!” her father cried, but she ignored him, parting a curtain of hanging vine, ducking under a magnolia branch. Her heart was pounding so hard, it was a constant thrum. A dragon, a dragon, a dragon.

A twig snapped. She froze, listening. The wind lifted in the trees, carrying with it the sound of her father’s urgent whispers—“Cordelia, get back here, wait for me”—and the smell of singed bark and leaves. Nothing else stirred. The dragon had once again faded away into the darkness.

Just then her father plunged through the growth behind her, panting, a streak of ash painted from cheek to chin. “Do you want to get yourself killed? Dragons are very aggressive. If we don’t approach carefully, we’ll end up roasted like—”

“Look out, Dad!” This time, Cordelia had seen the first spark, the two winking eyes. She hurled herself at her father, knocking him out of the way just in time. They rolled several feet, crashing through a mulberry bush, as another portion of the forest turned to flame.

Cornelius lost his head strap to a clutch of bushes. His lantern went out with the faint tinkle of shattered glass. Cordelia’s goggles were knocked off her head, and she landed with her nose planted directly in a soft pile of dirt. She sat up, sneezing.

And came nose to snout with the wrinkled, wizened face of the dragon.

A very, very small dragon.

It was roughly the size of a kitten. Its wings, when fully extended, were the size of an eagle’s, but full of leathery folds, collapsible as a paper fan. In the illumination of the flames reaching for desperate purchase across the wet and leafless winter branches, its eyes were the color of polished moonstone, and when it opened its mouth, Cordelia could see a row of small, sharp teeth, some of them no bigger than a pencil tip.

“It’s a baby,” she said wonderingly.

The dragon drew back its gums, as though it was trying to smile. . . .

A rough hand seized Cordelia by the collar and jerked her to her feet as the dragon released another burst of flame, incinerating the spot where her nose had been only a second earlier.

“Baby, yes,” her father said. His goggles were hanging crookedly from his nose. “Harmless, no. Did you bring the tuber root?”

Cordelia nodded. Her cheeks felt hot, as if she’d received a bad sunburn.

The dragon hopped back a few feet, hissing, passing out of the small square of moonlight that filtered in through the trees. The storm was finally passing. Now Cordelia could barely make out the soft thrush of its wings dragging against the ground—one of them, Cordelia saw, was hanging crookedly, obviously hurt.

Cornelius touched a finger to his nose, and then pointed to the left. Cordelia nodded again to show she understood, and watched him slip off into the darkness in a rustle of leaves. She had never understood how her father could move so quietly; soon he was nothing but a shadow.

Cordelia fumbled in her bag for the tuber root—a favorite among dragons, especially growing ones—but could feel nothing in her thick gloves. She hesitated for a second—take the gloves off, and she risked having her fingers turned to toasted marshmallows. But time was running out; if the dragon passed into the shadows again, they might lose it.

She shook off her gloves, letting them fall into her rucksack, and almost immediately her fingers closed around the narrow jar of tuber root. She popped the lid with one hand and shook a bit of the dark, flaky substance into her palm.

The dragon hadn’t moved. She could still see it, just barely, its wings fanned across the carpet of leaves and mud. She could hear the whisper of its breathing when it inhaled; faint curlicues of smoke emerged from its nostrils.

She didn’t know where her father was.

She took a careful step forward and the dragon scuttled backward, baring its teeth again. Cordelia hesitated, one hand extended.

“It’s all right,” she whispered, even though she knew the dragon couldn’t understand. “I’m here to help you.”

Slowly, slowly, so slowly she felt as if she were sinking through a heavy vat of molasses, she lowered into a crouch. The fires were smoldering now, into bare embers. The dragon’s dark eyes watched her, reflecting the miniature swell of a nearly full moon. Now Cordelia’s bare hand was only six inches from the dragon’s nostrils—close enough to be burned.

Close enough to be smelled.

The dragon advanced an inch, so that once again the moonlight fell over the ridged peaks of its long snout; over the hard knob of skin between its eyes; over its velvet-dark nostrils, quivering slightly.

Come on, Cordelia thought.

Another inch. Now the dragon’s snout was only a centimeter away from her fingertips. Her pulse was going crazy. It could take her hand off in one gulp, or fry her like bacon. She felt the electric heat of its breath every time it exhaled, and had to force herself to stay still, to stay calm.

Where was her father? What was he doing?

Suddenly the dragon moved, and Cordelia nearly fell backward, yelping in surprise.

At the last second, just as the dragon nudged its head into her hand, she managed to right herself. At a slight nod from Cordelia, it hungrily gobbled the tuber root from her hand, avoiding nipping her skin.

Cordelia wanted to laugh out loud. Her blood was singing. A baby dragon was eating from her palm, its jaw working against her fingers, its hot breath stinging her skin. The dragon smelled like damp leather, and fresh wind, and fire.

“That’s a good boy,” she whispered. Up close, she could see the small knob on the back of its head that distinguished it as a male. She noted a tear in its left-wing fold, and a place where the bone looked crooked. She felt a surge of pity for the monster. Who knew how long it had been earthbound, or when it had last eaten?

She hoped that it had not yet developed a taste for human fingers.

Cornelius appeared behind her. He kneeled to slip a large muzzle over the dragon’s snout. “Gotcha!”

Instantly, the dragon went still. The muzzle, secured in place by means of several leather straps and made of the same fire-resistant material as Cordelia’s gloves, included soft leather blinders meant to impair its vision. Dragons were extremely dependent on their eyes, and easily confused without use of them. The constant flow of flame through their nostrils meant that their sense of smell was practically negligible, and their ears were comparatively small and unreliable. That was why Digbert had been so miserable when his eyes began to fail.

For a moment, both Cordelia and her father sat there over the now-subdued dragon, breathing hard. At last, Cordelia’s heartbeat began to normalize. A sense of wonder invaded her whole body. The dragon had touched her. It had licked her.

Cornelius removed his goggles, resting them on the top of his head, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of a palm. “All right, Cordelia. Fetch your lantern. Let’s see what’s what.”

She stood up and hurried back the way they had come. Her knees were wet and the wind reached cold fingers down her back, but she barely felt it. She was full of a profound joy: love for her father, love for the shadows and the forest, love for all the strange and wild things that lived there.

She found her lantern lying in the dirt where she had dropped it. She soon managed to get the wick lit and returned to kneel at her father’s side.

“Let’s see, let’s see,” Dr. Clay murmured, as he did a careful visual inspection of the dragon for injuries. The lantern illuminated delicate colors threaded through the dragon’s wings: seams of gold and purple and blue and green. “The dingle clips won’t do. Put them back in my bag, will you, Cordelia? It looks like the femur is broken, poor creature. And see where the membrane has ripped away? I don’t want to worsen the tear.”

He was all business now. He indicated the injury with the tip of a pencil, tracing the outline of the wings in the air, and Cordelia tried to absorb and memorize everything. “He’ll need stitches, too, but that will have to wait. A splint might work, but I’m concerned the trauma is too deep.” He frowned, obviously deep in thought. Then, rousing himself, he replaced the pencil in his jacket pocket. “Better to be safe than sorry. Cordelia, get the rigiwings from my rucksack, will you? The smaller size should do.”

Once again, Cordelia hurried to obey. How often had she knelt with her father in the thick darkness, tending to a sick or injured monster? How often had he called her to his side, or ordered her to fetch bone splints and cough drops, heart-pumps or tentacle creams? Countless times. Measuring tablets and tinctures, patching wounds, selecting instruments, sweating in the darkness—all of it was familiar to her, as familiar as the sound of her father’s footsteps or the smell of her mother’s perfume, which she could still perfectly recall.

And yet—for a moment, kneeling beside her father’s rucksack, digging through the jumble of tools and medicines—she was assailed with a certainty as sudden as fear: this was the last time, the very last time, that she and her father would ever save a monster.

Immediately, she dismissed the idea as ridiculous. As long as there were monsters in the world that needed saving, Cordelia and her father would be the ones to do it.

The rigiwings were not actually wings, but a series of interconnected mesh plates that somewhat resembled a waffle iron. This, Cornelius eased carefully over the entirety of the dragon’s injured wing, tightening each plate carefully, so that the wing was entirely immobilized. Only then did they risk moving the dragon itself. Cornelius had anticipated they might have to return home for the wheelbarrow, but given the dragon’s size, decided it was unnecessary. Instead he removed his jacket, and they bundled the dragon carefully inside it.

It was unlikely, Cordelia knew, that they would be spotted. Still, the fishermen would stir and the bakers would start kneading their dough, even before dawn. And her father had told her a million times: no one must be allowed to see or know about the monsters.

“Why?” she had wailed as a young child, when after telling a story about naughty pixies, she had been promptly lashed by Mrs. McDonough—the final and shortest-lived of all her tutors.

“Most people,” her father had said very slowly, “want the world to look like what they know already. They are afraid of seeing the face of the unfamiliar. That’s why your mother was so determined to . . .”

He had trailed off, his eyes brightening with tears. Years after her death, Cornelius still struggled to speak his wife’s name. But Cordelia understood.

Elizabeth Clay, a naturalist, had devoted her life to monsters. She had seen her work on the origin of monsters discredited, ridiculed, even slandered as diabolical—all because she had set out to prove that monsters belonged to the world just as much as people did, that they had evolved just like Mr. Darwin had proved other animals did.

In the end, she had even died for it—absorbed into the jungle on her final trip to recover a specimen she was sure showed evidence of a branching evolutionary path definitively relating the monster and animal kingdoms.

She had never returned. Her book had never been completed. And her work would remain forever unfinished.

“Promise me, Cordelia,” her father had said to her that day. “Swear to me you will never tell anyone about the monsters we keep here.”

If people knew how many monsters Cordelia and her father were keeping, they would be afraid. They would demand that the monsters be kept in cages, or shipped off to some foreign place or even killed. Perhaps they would want Cordelia and her father to be arrested.

They didn’t understand that everyone needed saving sometimes. Everyone needed someone to care.

Even—perhaps especially—monsters.

From a distance, the home Cordelia’s grandfather had purchased on Cedar Street after emigrating to America with his wife and twelve-year-old son, Cornelius—and earning a small fortune selling wagons and supplies to westbound prospectors—looked as stately as it must have a hundred years earlier, when it was first built. There were four chimneys, a sweeping front porch framed by a grand balustrade, and a total of forty-eight windows studding the redbrick facade.

The impression of wealth began to fade, however, as you approached, like a mirage that broke apart before you could reach it. Up close, it was obvious that at least half of the forty-eight windows displayed major cracks. Three were missing altogether, and the holes had been hastily patched with plywood. Mortar decayed by decades of Boston snow and rain had slowly loosed dozens of bricks from the facade, giving an impression of pockmarked skin. Shutters hung crookedly, beating an erratic rhythm in the wind, and briars grew so thickly over the porch and balustrade that Cornelius and Cordelia had long avoided it altogether. Only the kitchen door was still in use. There, a wooden placard—once polished to a high sheen, now stained so much from wind and rain it was nearly illegible—welcomed visitors (who hardly ever came) and customers (who never did) to the Clay Home for Veterinary Services.

The inside wasn’t much better.

The great room, which had once seen dinner parties and dances, was the baku’s preferred spot for napping: the twelve-foot-high shelves, spongy with moss, no doubt reminded him of a treetop habitat. Piles of feathers lay in drifts over the carpet—a natural result of the hufflebottom’s periodic molting—and no matter how often Cordelia scrubbed, she could not fully get rid of the smell of hay and wet chicken.

Four of the bedrooms were homes to monsters in various stages of recovery: a diggle healing from a bad laceration below one of its eyes; a squinch just now getting over the flu; a goblin suffering from bouts of melancholy. A lionfish made its home in the cast-iron tub in the larger of two washrooms; Cordelia and her father shared the other.

The office, where Dr. Clay had long ago greeted clients and examined their sniffling German shepherds, their bleary-eyed Labrador retrievers, or gassy tabby cats, had been completely taken over by a family of pixies rescued years earlier from an overflowing gutter, in which they had been drowning. Now they had rooted in the leather armchair, ripped the paisley wallpaper to shreds, and built a nest out of old receipts, bills, and veterinary reports, so that entering the room gave the impression of stepping into a snowstorm of paper.

Many years ago, the veterinary office had received actual, paying clients, and the slew of injured, sick, and recuperating monsters were kept carefully locked away upstairs in case a friend or neighbor should stop by. Eventually, the clients had become tired of the Clays’ erratic hours (monsters were, for the most part, nocturnal; Dr. Clay’s office began to open later and later, until it was open only from five p.m. to seven p.m. on weekdays and five thirty p.m. to seven p.m. on Saturdays), just as they were afraid of the unexplained creaks and groans and growls emanating from the upstairs rooms.

Still, Dr. Clay had kept a handful of old clients, enough to buy milk and cheese and eggs, and enough to buy Cordelia a new pair of boots every year and the occasional surprise of a box of chocolates or a new tool for her own collection.

But that was before the Hard Times. The change to forty clients from sixty, then twenty clients from forty, then to ten clients from twenty, then nine clients from ten, then eight, then five, had happened over so many years that Cordelia hardly noticed it until her father’s stack of client records was so thin it hardly counted as a stack.

Then Mrs. Durling’s Doberman had finally been put down. Four. Then Mr. and Mrs. Brodely couldn’t afford to keep their two beloved retrievers anymore, and had to give them to a wealthy cousin in New Jersey. Three. Then the Culvers’ tabby cat wasn’t eating, and Cornelius found a suspicious lump, and the suspicious lump turned out to be a death sentence. Two. Then Mr. O’Reilly lost his job and had to pick up and move to New Hampshire, where his brother had found him work at a steel mill, taking his two Yorkshire terriers with him. One.

Cordelia remembered, with a certain wistfulness, their very last client: Mrs. Allan, a robust woman with a gray topknot, who had brought in her fluffy Persian cat for an annual examination. Mrs. Allan had been threatening to take her business elsewhere for the ten years she had been coming as a client. The waiting room was too cold or too hot. There was a strange smell. You might think they would at least offer her some tea. Her beloved Persian, Ophelia, was her primary obsession, and she seemed to blame Cornelius anytime he suggested that she might need to lose a pound or two, or require medication for worms—as if he weren’t diagnosing a problem, but causing it.

“There’s nothing wrong with little Fee,” she would say. “She’s perfect.” Cordelia wondered why she bothered coming at all.

That day, she was especially offended. There was a smell, most certainly. Ophelia was very sensitive to smells, and she was very upset. There had been strange fur caught in the welcome mat—not a very nice welcome at all, was it? And had she heard something growling upstairs? Because Ophelia did not do well around dogs, especially violent ones . . . see how upset her little princess was . . . ?

Cornelius had just managed to wrangle the enormous Ophelia onto the table with Cordelia’s help. “No need to be upset,” he said cheerfully. “Probably just the floorboards. Old houses do have a tendency to—”

CRASH.

A thunderous noise trembled the ceiling, sifting plaster into the room, and Ophelia broke out of Cornelius’s grip and launched, screeching, for Mrs. Allan’s arms. She landed instead on her face, and toppled Mrs. Allan, screaming, to the ground.

Upstairs, more than two dozen monsters decided to respond. Grunts and wailing, screeches and nattering, thuds and crashes and screams—the sound was so loud it shook the walls and crashed Cornelius’s university diploma from the wall.

It was perhaps the only time Cordelia was sorry to see Mrs. Allan leave. Luckily, since she was sprinting, Cordelia barely had time to regret it.

That was several years ago now. At the same time, Mrs. McDonough, Cordelia’s final tutor, quit after a two-week-long campaign of harassment by the pixies, who pulled her hair and put pepper in her tea when she wasn’t looking, and once, when she dropped off to sleep, inked her eyebrows together. By then, Cornelius could hardly afford to hire a replacement.

So Dr. Clay had shut down his veterinary services—at least, he’d shut them down to normal animals. Slowly, the collection of monsters grew, until the third floor, and then the second, could no longer contain them. They had three griffins alone; two bullieheads; four phoenix birds, two squelches, six squinches, two werewolves, eighteen vampire bats, three wailers, two chupacabras, four cockatrices, one baku, a lionfish, a filch, the extended family of pixies, a hufflebottom, a baby growrk and one adolescent that was growing alarmingly fast, dungaroos, a stand of diggles, a carbuncle, and even a bogey.

Every morning Mr. Clay would scour the newspapers for news that might lead them to an injured monster: unexplained howling in the woods; sightings of a monstrous, limping wolf that might, in fact, turn out to be another growrk; fishermen’s tales of strange fish with human eyes. Every few months, he and Cordelia would suit up and head out in pursuit of some poor creature. Sometimes they returned home empty-handed.

Often, they brought home another monster.

Each new monster was supposed to be only a temporary addition. But somehow, the monsters stayed. Out in the world, they might be shot or trapped, caught in nets and gutters, choked by soot, or run over by carriages.

There may have been occasions that Cordelia resented living in a home where the tub was occupied by an adolescent lionfish, still nubbing its legs; where the heavy bedroom curtains had to be sealed continuously to keep sunlight off the delicate skin of the bullieheads; where her best friends had extra eyes, or sharp teeth, or wings, or all of the above. But if there were times she longed for normal playmates, for the orderliness of a house in which carpets didn’t shake themselves and turn into hippogriffs, and pixies didn’t rattle the kitchen pots all night long, she no longer recalled them.

She loved the way the hufflebottom curled its soft black tongue around her wrist whenever she fed it carrots, the proud strut of the cockatrices, and the way the baby growrk whimpered in his sleep. She loved her father’s patience and kindness, and the way even the most dangerous and difficult monsters would eat vitamins from his palm. She loved the big, drafty rooms, the sifting snow of wallpaper and plaster, the smell of leathery hides and hay and feathers.

Most of all, she loved the feeling that she and her father lived together in their own little world, a place of secrets and magic. The attic was the North Pole, where the heat-loving baku migrated in summertime and the cold-loving hufflebottoms lived in the winter. The third floor was a continent of different habitats—marshy bedrooms where the ceiling leaked rain onto moldy carpets, and mushrooms grew in corners for the wailers to eat; stifling linen closets, where burrowing diggles loved to snooze; the old conservatory, flooded with light and filled with a jungle of overgrown plant life, where the diggles and the bullieheads often chattered late into the night. Cornelius’s bedroom, on the other hand, was perfectly normal. No one would ever guess that only a single wall divided it from a riot of squinches—unless, of course, they started bouncing.

The second floor was a series of interconnected islands, rooms with walls broken or crumbled away to allow passage between them, a constant, fluid flow of the more social monster species. Between them was a parlor they had converted into an aquarium, now full of enormous glass tanks and oceanic sloshing (the dungaroos surfed their bathwater on the floor whenever they wanted attention). Even these were connected to the rooms on either side, although outraged screeches erupted whenever the lionfish was caught in the tub with its ruffle down.

Only the walls of Cordelia’s bedroom were intact, except for a small hole in the wall the pixies had tunneled so they could play tricks on her while she slept. This, however, had been blocked by an armoire.

The ground floor was a vast city, full of bustle and energy, especially during the rush hours of midnight to four a.m. The great room was the transportation hub, where monsters slid, flew, bounced, or tumbled on their way to different places. The sitting room was a public garden, a colorful landscape of different nests, a wilderness of fur and twig and mud and leaf piles, mulchy with shredded newspaper, its walls honeycombed with miniature burrows. The kitchen, the old veterinary office, the corridors, the pantry, the root cellar: all of these were different countries, regions, landscapes on the map of her world. Every day, Cordelia traveled the globe. Every day, she journeyed from one end of the world to the other, leaving no territory unexplored, no landscape unmapped.

Except for one.

Except for the one.

There were nineteen rooms in Clay Manor. And then there was that room.

The room on the first floor, at the end of the corridor, at the edge of the world: her mother’s library, her mother’s study, her mother’s world.

Cordelia imagined that it must look exactly as it had the last time that Elizabeth Clay, PhD, had shouldered her travel bag, dimmed the lights, and closed the door firmly behind her, although she had been inside it only once since then. The mahogany desk and the old leather blotter, the row of pens gleaming dully in their stands of ink, the floor-to-ceiling shelves and the stairways of books that climbed them, her mother’s unfinished manuscript, its hundreds of pages like leaves slowly withering: none of it had been touched, or even cleaned, since her mother’s fatal journey. It was as if Cordelia and her father had, without ever discussing it, agreed that Elizabeth Clay’s study be kept waiting for her—as if she might thus be tempted to return.

So, one day, he had locked the door, and it had never since been opened.

And slowly, slowly, their house began to fill with life, and their lives began to fill the rooms, until the rooms became their lives—all of them grown around the single, quiet center of a closed door.

But Cordelia was happy in Clay Manor with her father. She knew very little about the world, but she knew enough to know she wasn’t missing anything.

Out in the world, bad things happened: mothers went on voyages and never returned from the jungle. People broke promises, lost faith, turned traitorous. Out in the world, it wasn’t the monsters you had to worry about.

Cordelia knew from experience: the monsters people name are not the real danger. They are never the real danger. It’s the monsters who name themselves that you really have to watch out for. Problem is—you can never tell just by looking at them.