Dragon Shield Read Online Free Page B

grinned, though he didn’t feel like smiling at all. ‘Yeah. Well. I bet I’m more scared than you are.’
    She tried to smile back at him but didn’t quite manage to.
    They were both too busy trying to be brave for each other that they didn’t hear the creak in the tall tree across the road in the park.
    They didn’t see the angry silvered eyes peering through the thin canopy of leaves at them. They didn’t see the metal talons gripping the tree, scarring the bark as they squeezed in anticipation. They didn’t see the dragon at all.
    But it saw them.
    It was watching them.
    Waiting to jump.

4
    She-who-is-powerful
    There was another place in London where there were sounds, another building in which there was movement. But what was moving through its galleries was not human, nor was it made of flesh and blood.
    Deep in the endless rooms of the British Museum a large dog was growling, making a deep, almost sub-sonic rumble. Anyone walking through the museum would have read the label on the wall behind him and believed that his name was ‘Molossian Hound’.
    Not that anyone one was walking through the museum. All the people under its roof were as unmoving as most of the statues and exhibits they had come to see.
    His name was not Molossian Hound. That’s just what the museum called him. He knew his real name, though no one living now did. His name was Filax. He knew this because that is what the sculptor who spent months of his life freeing him from the block of Italian stone in which his shape had been hidden had called him as he chipped patiently away with his chisel.
    True artists and craftsmen put something of themselves into everything they make, and the man who made Filax was the truest of artists. He set out to make a deep-chested guard dog with a rough mane of hair around his neck and shoulders, and that is what he produced, but more than that he was a man who loved dogs for their great hearts and their loyal friendship, and so he made a dog that had an inner spirit that was both staunch and playful.
    Filax had one other characteristic of real dogs. He had the ancient, unthinking hatred of cats. And that was why the hair on his back was standing on end, and why his lip was curling back, revealing his powerful teeth.
    There were cats prowling the galleries, and they were getting close to him. He could sense them. He could smell them. He could see a strange blue light moving closer, sending shadows scuttling across the walls. And above all, he could hear them talking.
    ‘Dog,’ said a voice, a scratchy voice, half hiss, half yowl. ‘Careful sisters. There is a disgusting dog in the dark.’



The ancient, unthinking hatred works both ways.
    The movement stopped. Filax listened to the sound of the silence listening right back at him.
    He rumbled another warning, deep in his chest.
    ‘He is growling,’ said a new voice, much like the first.
    Filax lowered his head, ready to spring at whatever was about to turn the corner and enter his space.
    But what he saw was not a cat. It was a woman’s legs, a woman made of black stone that both shone and sucked in light. And then the legs of three more stone women walked in and stood around him in a half circle.
    Filax smelled cat, more cat than he had ever smelled in one place, but the human bodies confused him. And then he looked up and saw there was something wrong with their faces.
    It was hard to see exactly, because their eyes blazed a blue light that dazzled him, but he could tell they were not human heads. They were the faces of lionesses, and their great cat-heads wore Egyptian headdresses that fanned out behind them like cobra hoods. The hoods matched the single small snakehead that topped off each headdress, vicious mini cobras that sat above their brows moving from side to side, hissing as they did so.
    The cat-women looked at him.
    Filax growled.
    The lion-women didn’t move. One of them laughed.
    ‘Bad dog,’ she purred.
    ‘Careful sister’ said