They saw not one single dragon for the rest of the drive. They did see two other drivers though, both of whom were heading into the mountains, and one motorcyclist who overtook them. Lily shared the front seat with Amanda and the girl fell asleep not long after they had taken the first several curves of the winding road.

  They reached a much larger valley and there their path deviated from the one they had taken to reach the desert. Instead of leaving the mountains behind, they drove further into a new range, not as tall in altitude but steeper and more rugged and filled with fast flowing rivers twisting their way down narrow canyons that suggested hidden lakes high up among the peaks. At the right angle, half a dozen waterfalls could be glimpsed tumbling down between tight rock walls.

  The wound their way though a tight gorge and emerged suddenly from the other side into yet another large valley, barren on their side apart from the long yellow grass that swayed in the wind, green and bushy on the far side.

  A smattering of buildings were clustered not far from a bridge they crossed on their way in, almost too few to be called a town. Cat pulled the car into the service station.

  “Where are we?” Indi asked.

  “Nowhere,” Cat replied, as she popped the fuel tank and got out of the car.

  Indi frowned.

  “The place is called Nowhere,” Amanda explained.

  “You mean the place that was closest to us was nowhere?” Indi asked.

  Arianna smiled softly, Sirius’s facial expression didn’t change at all, and Amanda simply replied, “I guess so.”

  Indi pouted and looked out the window. Zephyr would have appreciated the joke if he’d been here. She hoped they were all okay back where they’d been left, and that they weren’t too bored.

  She opened her door and headed for the inside of the petrol station, intent on finding a bathroom and seeing what candy they sold.

  As it turned out the bathrooms were locked.

  “Sorry, bathroom’s are for paying customers only,” reported the bored looking rat-faced woman at the counter when Indi asked about a key.

  “But I will buy something once I come out,” Indi explained.

  The rat-faced attendant just stared at her.

  “Fine,” Indi huffed and went to look at the candy.

  There was less variety in their stock than what Indi had had in the car. But candy was candy and so she grabbed half a dozen bags. It was only when she was on her way to the counter that she realised her wallet and all her cards had been in the car the dragon had burnt.

  It was at that moment that Cat walked through the shop doors on her way to pay for the gas.

  “Cat! Cat!” Indi said as she grabbed Cat’s arm. “I need to borrow some money so I can get the key to the bathroom, and candy. The dragon ate my wallet.”

  “Sure, sure. You need to pay to use the bathroom?” Cat pried Indi off her arm and started in the direction of the counter.

  “Bathroom’s for paying customers only,” the rat-faced attendant repeated.

  “Fine. Pump number two and the bathroom key,” Cat said.

  “And these.” Indi dumped her several bags of candy onto the counter.

  Cat gave her a narrow-eyed sideways look and a cocked eyebrow but said nothing.

  The attendant wrung it all up without a word while Indi went to the bathroom.

  When Indi got back to the car, she found the others all standing around.

  “We’re gonna hang out at the burger joint across the road while Cat picks up the others,” Amanda explained.

  Indi nodded. As they walked across the road she asked, “Do you think they have internet?”

  “Inter- what?” asked the full-bearded man behind the counter at the burger place.

  “Is that a kind of beer?” joked the only other customer, seated at one of the counter seats.

  “You have beer?” Amanda asked, perking up.

  “Sure, we got plenty of that,” said the bearded man.

  “What about wine?” asked Arianna.

  The bearded man and his one patron burst out laughing.

  “I’m gonna take that as a no,” Arianna replied.

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  Amanda leaned an elbow onto the counter. “Well, Ill have a beer, a cheeseburger and fries, and-” She turned to the others. “What do you guys want? My shout.”

  They all ordered food and then took a seat.

  “You lot don’t look like canyoneers,” remarked the bearded guy as he served them their food.

  “Canyoneers?” Arianna asked.

  “It’s the only people we get around these parts, that and mountaineers, kayakers, and mountain bikers. Lot a kayakers actually. Steepest waterfall any kayaker’s ever gone over ain’t far from here. We get people coming all the time trying to beat the record number of attempts, or they try and do it in some fancy way. Few weeks back, one guy tried to do it backwards.”

  “Tried to?” Indi asked.

  The bearded man chuckled. “We may be a small town but we got one of the best medical centres around. That’s actually the other reason people come. Well, that and the coffee.”

  Indi eyed the cup in front of her and the took another sip. It was okay, not terrible, probably a little better than average if you liked it strong. She preferred it smooth like cream, ideally actually with cream, and an unhealthy dosing of sprinkles on top. Alas, they’d been all out of cream and milk just wasn’t the same.

  “So where you lot headed?” the bearded man asked.

  “We’re going to Witchaven,” Amanda replied.

  The man’s expression fell. “Witchaven eh? What do you want with that place?”

  “We’re meeting a friend there. Anyone come through here headed that way recently?” Amanda asked.

  He shook his head. “ Not that I can think of. There’s not many people go to Witchaven. Especially with your hair colour.” He gave Amanda a pointed look and then his eyes wandered over to Arianna and back again. In a lower voice he whispered. “Rumour is they still burn witches. The last group I saw heading in there never came back out again.”

  “I’m not afraid of fire,” Amanda replied with a serene smile.

  “Aye well, they drown em too you know.”

  “Do they ever come out?” Indi asked.

  He gave a nod. “Aye, sometimes. The young ones aren’t so bad and sometimes they leave and they don’t go back. There’s one woman goes in and out on the regular and a couple who have come back to visit I suppose, but none of em talk much about what goes on in that town. The woman I mentioned, sometimes she comes out with children and then she goes back in without the children.”

  Amanda frowned. “She’s smuggling them out?”

  “I don’t know, some things it’s safer not to ask about you know.”

  “Probably child witches,” Sirius said once the bearded man had left their table. “Or suspected ones. A human can still birth a witch.”

  Amanda shook her head. “Rumours.”

  Sirius shrugged. “That’s how witches first came into the world.” He took a bite of his burger.

  “If you believe the stories. The other argument is that witches have always existed and were just in hiding until the 17th Century,” she replied.

  Sirius chewed thoughtfully and then set his burger down. “Maybe but maybe it’s both. At some point the first witch existed and we’re too much like humans for one not to have come first.”

  “Oooh, what if the witches came first,” Arianna posited “And humans are just witches who lost their magic.”

  Amanda shook her head. “What about other creatures? You have vampires-” she gestured at Indi, “and werewolves and dragons and a whole bunch of other things that didn’t really rear their heads until the 17h Century. Plus, we only look like humans, we’re completely physiologically different. If you punch a human, they bruise much worse and they’re slower to heal, not to mention the magic.”

  “We’re not that physiologically different,” Sirius argued. “We still have all the same organs and there were plenty of stories of all those other beings before the 17th Century.”

  Indi jumped in with her own theory. Not one she actually believed, but then, who really knew how it all began. “Oooh, what if the origin of all magic is human imagination and they wrote so many stories that we all just popped into existence?”

  “Sure but no bones,” Amanda replied to Sirius after giving Indi a smile of acknowledgement. Any actual proof of existence of heaps of creatures was completely wiped from the old world. Wiping memories is one thing but if they’d been around longer, there’s no way the guardians also could have wiped all the bones,” Amanda argued.

  “Ah but they didn’t.” Sirius was looking smug now and had completely ignored the rest of his burger. “The giant eagle was brought this side of the splice but the humans later found bones that proved it existed centuries earlier. Also a lot of creatures have similar bones to animals left behind, unicorn and bluecoon horns decompose like a rhinoceros horn, most vampire communities cremate their dead, and dragons don’t have bones as such, not in the way any human would recognise it as a skeleton.”

  Amanda took a sip of her beer and licked her lips thoughtfully. She narrowed her eyes at Sirius but she was smiling like she enjoyed the challenge. Sirius was giving her a wide teasing grin in reply.

  “Is that so?” Amanda asked him finally.

  He gave a nod. “I’ve got a book on it back home. I can prove it.”

  Arianna, who was sitting next to Indi, leaned close and whispered in a light-hearted voice just loud enough for the table to hear, “You getting the feeling we’re not actually part of this conversation?”

  Indi grinned. Amanda and Sirius sure looked more like they were flirting more than fighting.

  Arianna’s laugh was like the titter of a bird and Indi decided she liked Zephyr’s new girlfriend a lot.

  In response, Amanda turned her body away from Sirius and faced the group again. “Sorry guys.” But she couldn’t hide the smile that was still stuck on her face. Only Lily’s next question could do that.

  “Are we going somewhere dangerous?” The young girl asked. She’d eaten her burger already and had been slowly picking at her fries ever since, as if they were distasteful to her.

  Amanda shook her head. “No, not at all.” And she gave another smile but it was different somehow and Indi thought for the first time ever that maybe just maybe, sometimes it was possible to tell when Amanda was lying.

  She found some comfort in Amanda’s confidence though. With this group, she didn’t feel like they had anything to worry about.

  Lily, too, seemed bolstered by Amanda’s reply. “Can I have another burger?” she asked, her eyes peeking up from between her eyelashes shyly.

  “Sure,” Amanda said.

  Indi pondered the pros and cons of a second coffee and her mind wandered back to the half a dozen or so questions that had been swirling around her mind ever since the bearded guy had mentioned kayaking. If she didn’t let one out soon she would be sure to go stir crazy.

  “I wonder what the tallest falls anyone’s ever gone over is?” she mused aloud.

  “Here?” Amanda asked. “The one he was talking about earlier is 38 metres but he’s wrong about it being the tallest. Tallest narrowest one maybe, although it’s still got about 50 cumecs of water going through it.”

  “Cumecs?”

  “Cubic metres per second,” Amanda replied.

  Indi tried to visualise that in square boxes. It seemed like a lot. “How do you know all that?” she asked.

  Amanda gave half a smile. “I used to kayak, years back, in high school. And we’ve done river trips since then, as a family.”

  “You used to kayak?” Arianna asked. “In this valley?”

  Amanda laughed. “No, nothing like the stuff here. This stuff’’s all for the adrenaline junkies.” She flagged the sever back over. “Can we have another cheeseburger for Lily here, and can I grab another beer please?”

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