Icefire Read Online Free PDF Page B

tight to the image. The bear was sitting in a field of broken ice, its fur dragged leeward by a howling blizzard, spicules of snow whipping up around its paws. David reached out to it with his mind. “Who are you?” he asked, and felt his heart tremble as the great bear squinted through the ice wind at him. It trod its spectacular columnlike paws and opened its black-lipped mouth to speak …
    You have e-mail,
it said.
    Or rather, that was what the
computer
said. With a start, David opened his eyes. The polar bear disappeared back into the ether. Annoyed, David swiveled to face the monitor. He pointed the cursor at his e-mail inbox and immediately let out a mild groan. “Oh no, what do
you
want?”
    The sender of the message was:
    [email protected]
    David clicked his tongue before thinking of doing the same with his mouse. Suzanna — Zanna — Martindale was a girl in his department. She was a Goth. She had a face as white as a hard-boiled egg and she dressed from head to toe in black; black tiered skirts full of tassels and fringes that danced across the laces of her black boots; black T-shirts, usually sporting some mystic picture of wolves or Indians or a heavy metal band; jet black hair (very long and very straight and usually festooned with beads or braids); black-rimmed eyes (people sometimes called her
Zan Zan,
like a panda); black nails (fingers and toes both painted); and, what really freaked David the most, her black pneumatic lips. He had sometimes thought that kissing Zanna must be like smooching with a pair of black sausages. Not that he
wanted
to smooch with Zanna. She was one scary licorice stick. She was friendly enough, in a jangly sort of way (she wore more bangles than a curtain rod), but not at all David’s type. It made him shudder when she smiled at him, which she did, often, when they passed on the campus. Peoplejoked that Zanna had only come to Scrubbley because she’d missed the train to Hogwarts. What could she possibly want with David?
    He opened her message. It was just two lines.
    Heard you were lonesome. Fancy a drink?
    A drink? With the panda? David’s blood ran cold. He hit “reply” and wrote something tactful.
Working on an essay. Another time perhaps.
    From the corner of his eye, he saw a dragon’s face. It was Grace, Sophie’s listening dragon. He’d never really looked at her closely before, but now that he did he thought he could detect a glint of disapproval in her oval green eyes. He put his nose up close to her snout. “Stop frowning. I turned her down. OK?”
    The computer beeped again.
Bergstrom’s essay? What’d ya get?
    David sighed and paddled his feet. An online conversation with the mad witch of Scrubbley was not supposed to be part of his evening’s agenda, but there was one thing he was curious about …
Dragons,
he tapped,
the existence of. Someone tipped him off thatI had one at home. I wonder who THAT could have been?
Zanna was in his tutorial group. She’d always taken a keen interest when he’d mentioned Gadzooks. It had to be her.
    Yet to his surprise she wrote,
Not guilty. Hand on my cold black heart.
    “Yeah, right,” muttered David, not sure he believed her. But it amused him, the way she’d made fun of herself.
Who, then?
he typed.
    Don’t remember anyone saying it,
she wrote.
Maybe when I went to the bathroom, perhaps?
    Maybe,
thought David, as a raindrop or two began to tickle the windows. He turned his head and watched a bullet of water ping the glass. If one of the students hadn’t let on about the dragons, how could Bergstrom have made the connection? The computer beeped again.
    I got the Loch Ness monster, by the way — just in case you were wondering. It’s a sort of geo-biological thing as I’ve got a double major. I have to find out if a lake the size of Loch Ness could produce enough floraand fauna to support a “monster” of Nessie’s size. Been grabbing pix off the Net all day. Great essay. He’s cool, isn’t he,