A Dragon's Guide to the Care and Feeding of Humans Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2015 by Laurence Yep and Joanne Ryder Jacket art and interior illustrations copyright © 2015 by Mary GrandPré

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Crown Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  Crown and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Yep, Laurence.

  A dragon’s guide to the care and feeding of humans / Laurence Yep & Joanne Ryder ; illustrations by Mary GrandPré. — First edition.

  pages cm.

  Summary: Crusty dragon Miss Drake’s new pet human, precocious ten-year-old Winnie, not only thinks Miss Drake is her pet, she accidentally brings to life her “sketchlings” of mysterious and fantastic creatures hidden in San Francisco, causing mayhem among its residents.

  ISBN 978-0-385-39228-0 (trade) — ISBN 978-0-385-39229-7 (lib. bdg.) — ISBN 978-0-385-39230-3 (ebook)

  [1. Dragons—Fiction. 2. Imaginary creatures—Fiction. 3. Artists—Fiction.

  4. Magic—Fiction. 5. Friendship—Fiction.] I. Ryder, Joanne.

  II. GrandPré, Mary, illustrator. III. Title.

  PZ7.Y44Dqs 2015 [Fic]—dc23 2014017803

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  TO GAIL COLLINS,

  who brought us together, with our thanks

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  CHAPTER ONE

  If you value your happiness and sanity, take your time and choose your pet wisely.

  It was a lovely funeral for Fluffy, the best pet I ever had. I was pleased by the turnout at the mansion. Mourners filled the large backyard and mingled as the sun finally broke through the San Francisco fog. Everyone had loved Fluffy. She had such a gentle temperament—quite the nicest of all my pets. Even when she was feeling out of sorts, she never bit anyone—partly because I had trained her well and partly because she wouldn’t hurt a fly.

  She was such a special pet that I knew I could never find another one like her. I intended to bide my time, perhaps sleep for twenty or thirty years, until the ache in my heart had eased a little. Even then, I wasn’t sure when I would get another pet.

  But Winnie didn’t give me any choice. Just two days after the funeral, she stomped into my lair. Without any warning, I heard a key scraping against the lock; then the door jerked open. The little creature stepped inside. She was the scrawniest of specimens, dressed all in black. Her very curly, every-which-way hair was light brown.

  Putting a fist on her hip, she studied me, her glance flicking from the tip of my tail to my glorious head. “Are you really a dragon?” She sounded disappointed.

  “Don’t be rude,” I snapped. “And how did you get the key?”

  “Great-Aunt Amelia put it in her last letter to me,” she said as she strolled farther inside my living room. Amelia was the ridiculous nickname that the other humans used for my Fluffy. “It had directions to the hidden door in the basement.” She stared at me bold as brass. “She was afraid you’d be lonely.”

  “Well, I’m not.” I held out my paw to the obnoxious creature. “So give me the key and go away.”

  Instead, she circled round my lair, stopping by the Regina and the metal song discs. She looked curiously at the large box, which was some two feet on each side. Delicate wooden inlays created lovely pictures of coral and shells on its lid, front, and sides. “What’s this?”

  “A music box,” I said. It had been a gift from Fluffy’s grandfather Sebastian, who had been fun when he was young but had become terribly boring when he grew older. Still, he had never been stingy, and the music box had been only one of many expensive presents.

  She pivoted slowly. “I thought a dragon’s den would be different.”

  “I dare you to show me a nicer one,” I sniffed.

  She waved her hand at the floor in disappointment. “I figured you’d have gold and jewels lying around in piles, not a carpet and a sofa.”

  “Have you ever tried sleeping on gold?” I asked. Then I answered my own question because I knew she didn’t know. “Gold is hard and cold, and as for jewels … well … the diamonds leave scratches on my scales that take forever to buff out.”

  If this fussy little thing had had any manners, she would have stifled her curiosity, but she was obviously quite feral. She motioned to the red velvet drapes with the tassels of gold wire. “Okay, then why do you need curtains? You’re underground.” Crossing the room quickly—her shoes tracking dirt all over the best Bokhara wool, woven by a master weaver—she jerked a drape back to reveal the painting before I could stop her.

  “Huh,” she said, surprised, and then leaned forward to examine it closer. “What’s this doing here?”

  Perhaps she had been expecting some oil painting by a celebrated artist instead of a child’s crude water-color, but I wouldn’t have traded it for ten Rembrandts. A dragon with shining crimson scales soared into dark, dark clouds from which lightning bolts shot like jagged swords. A few years ago, Fluffy claimed she had found it at a holiday sale run by the parents of the Spriggs Academy students. She said that it had reminded her of me, so she had put it into a lovely gilded frame—Fluffy always had exquisite taste—and presented it to me.

  And I’d been just as enchanted. The young artist had painted the red dragon with fiery eyes and a determined jut of her jaw as her powerful wings fought the winds. It was just the way every dragon should be.

  “Get away from there,” I said as firmly as any dragon could. But she wasn’t listening.

  She rubbed at the little spot of steam her breath had left. “The glass protects it. But even if I smudged it, I could always paint you another.”

  I gazed scornfully at this preposterous creature with the unruly hair. “Don’t be absurd.”

  She rounded on her heel. “I sent it to Great-Aunt Amelia four years ago.”

  “It came from a school sale,” I insisted, but I was less sure now. I had never been able to break Fluffy’s habit of telling little white lies.

  “Turn it around.” The creature jabbed her finger at the painting. “I wrote my letter to her on the back.”

  I decided to call her bluff. “If your writing isn’t there, will you leave?”

  She folded her arms confidently. “Sure, but I get to stay if it is.”

  The painting hung from the picture molding that ran parallel to the floor and high up on the wall. I lifted the frame upward, unhooked the wires from the molding, and tore the brown paper from the back.

  There, written with a pencil, were a child’s
crude block letters:

  DER ANT AMELEEA,

  I LIKE YUR STOREES. MAMA REEDS THEM 2 ME LOTS.

  It was signed: W.

  A bony finger pointed at the signature. “The ‘W’ stands for Winifred. That’s me.”

  “Fl—” I caught myself. “Amelia told you about me?”

  To her credit, Winnie traced Amelia’s name sadly. “I thought the dragons in her letters were imaginary. But I loved hearing them, and later, when I could, reading them myself. It was great when I found a letter in our mailbox.” She lifted her head to look at me. “Then her last one was sad but wonderful too. She told me you were real and where to find you.”

  Fluffy, Fluffy, what have you done? She had told me that she was leaving the house to a niece and her daughter and had taken care of everything. I assumed that Fluffy had drawn up a will. I had no idea she had gone so much further.

  I set the painting down on the floor. “What did she tell you about me?”

  “She said you’d ask but that it was better to keep you guessing or I’d never get the upper hand.” She plopped down on the sofa and stroked the plush cushions. “This is more comfortable than it looks.” I could see she would be rather impossible to train.

  With a claw, I wrote the word tsäm, and from the last letter, I drew an ever-widening spiral as I muttered the spell. The world disappeared in a shimmering haze as I swelled to twice my comfy-at-home size. When the haze cleared, she seemed suitably impressed.

  My head grazed the ceiling as I stared down at her. “Tell me the stories she put in her letters,” I growled, and made a point of showing my gleaming white fangs and sharpening a claw on a chest scale. I waited for the appropriate screaming, groveling, and begging me to spare her.

  Her eyes did widen, as if she was finally realizing how dangerous I could be, but she didn’t shriek or drop to her knees in terror. Instead, she stayed put on the sofa. “No,” she said with a quaver in her voice.

  I leaned forward and pointed a claw at the door. “Get out.”

  She gasped and then stared at me, eye to eye. “In her letter, Great-Aunt Amelia also asked me to visit you. She said you’d be so sad that you might hurt yourself.”

  I was so startled that I sat down on my haunches, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. That sounded like my Fluffy. Even as she was dying, she was more concerned about me than about herself. But she was also always getting things wrong—the First One bless her. I would no more hurt myself than I’d give up tea.

  I wiped a tear from my eye with a claw. “No, I’m quite all right, as you can see. So please leave.”

  She stared at the tear on my claw as it solidified into an iridescent pearl. Her mouth opened in a little O as the reflected light bathed her face in shimmering rainbows. So some magic dazzled her.

  I thought she was one of the greedy humans, so I offered the gem to her as a bribe. “Here. Take this and don’t come back or tell anyone.”

  She draped her arms behind the sofa. “I don’t want that. I want you.”

  Her audacity left me speechless for a moment. There are dragons who would have bitten her head off for the insult—as if a human could ever possess a dragon. “Well, you can’t have me.”

  “Sure, I can,” she said. “My mom got Great-Aunt Amelia’s mansion, and I got her ‘guest.’ ”

  I was going to pound my head against the wall but caught myself just before I put my skull through a painting and smashed a few of Monet’s water lilies. Fluffy, Fluffy, what were you thinking? But of course, you weren’t really thinking, were you? “She put me in her will?”

  Winnie noticed my clasped paws and realized I was upset. “Don’t worry. That was also in her last letter to me—Mom got her own letter about the house but not about you,” she added hastily. “Great-Aunt Amelia’s place looked nice in the photo, but I didn’t realize how huge it was until we got here. It’s awesome! And for the first time in my life, I have my very own room. Can you believe it?”

  “You never had your own room before?” I asked.

  “Nope. I usually slept in part of a living room.” She crossed her legs. “But now my room just goes on and on. I love it! I wish I could thank Great-Aunt Amelia somehow. We didn’t know what we were going to do after a temperamental horse Mom was riding bucked. She fell and hurt her leg, and the doctor told her she shouldn’t ride right away.”

  Though I believe the old ways are better, even I knew humans had replaced horses with cars that let them irritate more people with their noise and smells. After all, why annoy just your neighbors when you can annoy an entire state? “What was she doing on a horse?”

  “Anything and everything she could,” Winnie explained. “She was a practice rider for racehorses, but she also gave riding lessons, took care of horses, trained some … you name it. We lived in a lot of places.”

  Winnie’s mother, Liza, was the daughter of Fluffy’s brother, Jarvis, who’d been a prig and a wretched little sneak as a boy. Amelia was my pet, but he most definitely was not. I’d perfected some of my spells avoiding him in the mansion.

  It was a great relief when he’d grown up and moved to the East Coast years ago and become wealthy in his own right.

  I took a closer look at Winnie. She had Amelia’s broad forehead and Winthrop’s bright blue eyes. That happens when you raise humans as pets. Sometimes you see the ghost of an old friend staring at you from the face of a stranger.

  “Why were you living like Gypsies?” I asked.

  “My grandparents didn’t approve of anything Mom did—whether it was riding horses for a living or marrying my dad.” Winnie grimaced. “When Dad died, my grandfather tried to take me away from her because she had to work all day and leave me alone. He said he had the money to take care of me.”

  It was my turn to frown. Leave it to Jarvis to hound his own child and granddaughter. I suspected that Liza had moved from state to state, not to change jobs but to keep one step ahead of the courts and her father. I hoped Jarvis gnashed his teeth to nubs when he heard that Amelia’s inheritance had gone to them, especially since it protected them from his taking Winnie. “Well, he can’t bother you now.”

  “It’s all like a dream,” she said, almost whispering. “We got here yesterday, and I just sat and stared out my window at the bay—at the boats, at the big yard all around. It’s a bigger yard than I’ve ever seen, bigger than any of the others in the neighborhood.”

  “The other houses weren’t around when the mansion got built,” I said.

  “By Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Winthrop?” she asked. “I’m sort of named after him.”

  Ah, dear Winthrop! I called him Lucky, because that was what he was, after wandering away from his father’s hired riverboat and into the Malaysian jungle. I’d found him in the gully where he’d hurt himself in a fall and felt sorry for him. So I’d disguised myself as a human and brought him back to his parents, who were collecting plants for the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in England. His parents knew everything about plants and nothing about anything else. They would have wandered into the bandit ambush if I hadn’t saved them. Their helplessness amused me, and their curiosity and cheerfulness charmed me, so I stayed with them until their expedition ended. One thing led to another, and I wound up here, thousands of miles from any land I had known, in America.

  “Was he surprised to find out you weren’t human?” she asked.

  “I showed him my true shape about a month after I met him,” I replied, and added, “He displayed the proper sense of awe—unlike his present descendant.”

  “I know all about dragons,” she said. “I did a report on dragons at my last school. The books say Western dragons breathe fire and Eastern dragons cry pearls. So you’re an Eastern dragon, right?”

  “Humph,” I said. “What dragon wrote those books?”

  “People wrote them,” Winnie said. “I never read a book by a dragon.”

  “That explains why they are wrong,” I told her, my paw thumping the table. “I know Eastern a
nd Western dragons who can do both. As a matter of fact, so can I. Each dragon is unique. Some are more magical and learned than others. We choose to be who we are, and I choose to be the best dragon”—then I corrected myself modestly—“the best dragon I can be.”

  “Wow,” she said. “And you’re mine.”

  At that moment, I was one froggy hair from switching to barbecue mode when I was thunderstruck, absolutely gobsmacked by a thought. Was this how my Fluffy thought of me? As hers! I was speechless. It was so outrageous that it was beyond belief.

  “Can I see you change into a human?” Winnie asked hopefully.

  “Little girl, do I look like a magic show?” I said sternly.

  “I’m not little. I’m ten,” she said indignantly.

  “And I am three thousand years old,” I said. “Show some respect.”

  She leaned her head to the side. “You don’t look a day over three hundred.”

  She was grinning, so I couldn’t be sure if she was complimenting me or teasing me. “Thank you, I guess. Now, I’ll take that key.” I held out my paw. When she didn’t move, I added a warning. “I’ll hold you up by an ankle and shake you until the key drops out.”

  She tossed me the key with a smirk. “Take it. I made a dozen copies before I came down here.”

  As she closed the door behind her, I couldn’t help thinking that she was a clever little creature for a mere hatchling. But she was going to find that in a game of wits, she was playing on my board with my pieces and my rules. My victory was a foregone conclusion. It just remained for her to wave a white flag in surrender.

  CHAPTER TWO

  To train your pet, you will need three things: Patience, Patience, and, above all, Patience!

  I toyed with the idea of barricading the door. But if the other dragons heard I was hiding from a ten-year-old human, I would be the laughingstock of the Seven Seas. So instead, I wrote on a sheet of foolscap in my neatest paw-writing:

  Stay Out.