We all stared at the hole in the tent. The dragon-sized hole. Making sure Flicker and the other dragons were safely in their shoeboxes, we crawled out of the tent and started hunting. But it was properly dark now.
‘It’s no good,’ said Kat, after several minutes. ‘We’ll have to wait till it’s light.’
‘He’ll have flown off by then,’ said Kai, in a full-on sulk. ‘Typical. Kat gets the artist and I get the escape artist.’
We piled back in the tent, Kai still muttering unhappily. As we all squashed back inside Ted suddenly howled.
‘Ow! Stop it.’
‘Stop what? We haven’t touched you,’ I said.
‘Someone just pulled my hair.’
‘You must have caught it on something,’ said Kat.
‘Ow! Stop it. That hurts.’ Ted rubbed his head crossly and glared at each of us in turn.
‘Well, you can’t blame us,’ I piped up. ‘You can see we’re right here.’
Ted looked about him, confused.
‘Keep very still,’ said Kai suddenly.
Ted froze in horror, obviously wondering what nasty night-time creature Kai was about to save him from. He wasn’t the bravest when it came to bugs and beasties – which may have stemmed from the time Liam dropped tadpoles in his milk.
We all sat there watching as Kai leaned forward and reached up above Ted’s head, to where the lantern was hanging.
‘Got you!’ he said with a laugh.
And there in his hand was his dragon. Only he wasn’t greeny blue with peacock markings any more; he was the exact shade of red of the lantern.
‘Cool,’ said Kai, cradling the dragon with an expression of undisguised admiration. ‘Mine can go undercover, the ultimate in camouflage!’
We learned an important lesson right there. All dragons are not the same. Not by a long shot.
I wasn’t sure how any of us were going to sleep, but eventually the dragons curled up in their shoeboxes. As the others settled down I watched Flicker, his scales rippling through a kaleidoscope of colours. And then I must have dropped off as well, because the next thing I knew it was light and someone was yelling.
‘Is that your grandad?’ Kat asked me, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. ‘He sounds really mad.’
I’d never heard Grandad raise his voice, let alone shriek like that.
I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so. Keep hold of the dragons,’ I hissed. ‘I’m taking a look.’
I unzipped the tent and peered out. Grandad was standing on the front step, Lolli tucked behind his legs in the open doorway. And planted in front of him was the fuming inferno that was Grim.
‘… Whole place trashed, that blooming kid. I told you he was trouble,’ he bellowed.
Honestly, that horrible man. How could he shout at Grandad like that?
I pictured the swarm of dragons we had seen last night. And how they had shredded, uprooted and devoured whatever they could find before taking off and flying goodness knows where. Grim must have woken up and found the devastation and of course come straight here to blame me for everything.
Without stopping to think, I stormed out of the tent towards him.
‘Hey, it wasn’t us!’ I shouted.
Lolli wriggled past Grandad and toddled towards me. She wrapped her arms round my legs and clung on tight. With me off camping, Mum and Dad had brought her for a sleepover too, taking the chance for a night out. But the rumpled frown on her face told me this angry shouting man wasn’t fitting in with her plans for the morning at all.
‘Guppie sad,’ she whispered, pointing her finger at Grandad. ‘Poor Guppie.’
‘Now then, let’s just calm ourselves down,’ came Grandad’s voice. ‘It’s probably foxes or badgers. Why not come in for a cuppa and we’ll see if we can get to the bottom of this, shall we?’
How he kept so cool in the face of all that yelling I don’t know. He deserves a medal, my grandad.
Grim was not so cool. He turned and pointed a finger at me as if he imagined lightning could fire from the tip of it. And I almost thought it would.
‘Foxes my foot! I’ve already caught him in my garden once. He’ll have been up there again, you can bet on that.’
‘What’s this, Tomas?’ Grandad asked.
‘Didn’t tell you about that, did he?’ said Grim. ‘I told you he was trouble.’
Grandad looked over at me.
‘I wasn’t doing anything,’ I spluttered. ‘I thought I saw something attacking his vegetables, that’s all.’
Grandad obviously didn’t know quite what to make of this new information. ‘Well, like he says, I’m sure he wasn’t up to anything,’ said Grandad, still keeping his voice nice and quiet. ‘And as for right now, Tomas has been camping in our garden with a few of his friends. They’ve been tucked up in their tent the whole time. Haven’t you, Chipstick?’
Although I knew it wasn’t us that had caused all the mess, I couldn’t bear to look Grandad in the eye, not after we had sneaked out.
Grim turned his laser vision on my mud-splattered boots and trousers and then fired his lightning finger at them: proof! A look of triumph lit up his face.
Grandad’s eyes dropped and also took in the muddy evidence. And suddenly I saw his shoulders sag. Like he was one of those giant bobbing inflatable Santas at Christmas and someone had come up and let the air out of him, just enough so his head flopped and wobbled a bit.
And to be honest, that felt even worse than if he’d yelled at me. Because you know that twinkle I told you about, the one that makes Grandad’s face light up? Well, it had gone.
‘Honestly, Grandad, it wasn’t us,’ I pleaded.
Grim glared at me and set off across the grass towards the tent. ‘Are the rest of them in there?’ he growled.
The noise had woken the dragons and I could hear Ted, Kat and Kai wrestling to keep them in.
Before Grim could pull the flap open, one side of the tent began to bulge. And then another. And then something shot out of the hole Ted’s dragon had chewed. Followed by two more flitting shapes. Thankfully Grim was bending down, preparing to thrust his head in through the entrance, and Grandad had turned to scoop Lolli up, so no one apart from me noticed them.
They did however notice what happened next. You couldn’t really miss that!