Dragonbreath #8 Read online

  For Mz. Faunce

  DIAL BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Published by The Penguin Group • Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books, Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North 2193, South Africa • Penguin China, B7 Jaiming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China • Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2013 by Ursula Vernon

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Vernon, Ursula.

  Nightmare of the iguana / by Ursula Vernon. p. cm. — (Dragonbreath ; 8)

  Summary: Wendell the iguana’s dreams are all nightmares and a Dream Wasp wants him as a host for its eggs—so, with Great-Grandfather Dragonbreath’s help, Danny the dragon and Suki the salamander enter

  Wendell’s dreams to try and defeat the wasp.

  ISBN 978-1-101-59232-8

  1. Nightmares—Juvenile fiction. 2. Iguanas—Juvenile fiction. 3. Dragons—Juvenile fiction. 4. Salamanders—Juvenile fiction. 5. Wasps—Juvenile fiction. 6. Best friends—Juvenile fiction. [1. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 2. Nightmares—Fiction. 3. Iguanas—Fiction. 4. Dragons—Fiction. 5. Salamanders—Fiction. 6. Wasps—Fiction. 7. Best friends—Fiction. 8. Friendship—Fiction.] I. Title. II. Series: Vernon, Ursula. Dragonbreath ; 8.

  PZ7.V5985Nig 2013

  813.6—dc23 2012010861

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Copyright

  DARK DREAMS

  CANDY CURE

  ARE YOU ASLEEP NOW?

  WHAT'S THE BUZZ?

  MAGICAL, MYTHICAL JAPAN

  A DREAMY REUNION

  IN SEARCH OF A BAKU

  BARKING MAD

  THE ULTIMATE MIDNIGHT SNACK

  INSIDE THE BRAIN

  HEALTH FOOD HORRORS

  THE NERD-BRARY

  EMBARRASSING BRAIN BOOKS

  MONSTER BULLY

  INTO THE ABYSS

  THINGS GET STRANGE

  RIDING THE NIGHT MARE

  BATTLE ZONE

  THE GIRL OF WENDELL'S DREAMS

  Wendell the iguana was having problems.

  He had problems normally, mostly related to his mother’s obsession with health food. After the past week, though, bran waffles and beet casserole held little terror for him. Not even the threat of Tofu Surprise* for the weekend could trouble him.

  Wendell was having nightmares.

  It wasn’t just one nightmare, either. It was all of them.

  Monsters chased him, carrying quizzes he hadn’t studied for, making him late for class, while his teeth fell out, and when he got to the class that he hadn’t been to all semester, it was being taught by the goldfish he had forgotten to feed for the last ten years. And he wasn’t wearing any clothes.

  Then he generally fell off a cliff.

  Wendell knew that you were always supposed to wake up before you landed, but he didn’t. He didn’t die, either. Anybody who said you died in real life if you died in a dream was wrong. Sometimes he just hit the ground and then got up again and wandered around—for some reason, he always landed in the desert—and then the whole thing would start up again.

  He didn’t wake up feeling rested. He woke up feeling like he’d been driven over by a steamroller, and when he dragged himself down to breakfast, his mother would make him drink a vile concoction made of brewer’s yeast and macrobiotic kelp proteins, because “you look a little off, honey.”

  He didn’t tell his mom about the nightmares. She’d take him to see a therapist.

  But he had to do something Thursday he’d gotten an A minus on a test.

  An A minus.

  After another week of nightmares, what would happen? Might he even slip into the dark realms of . . . B plus?

  It didn’t bear thinking about.

  And Danny Dragonbreath, his very best friend in the world, would listen to him, but he might not understand. Danny thought a B plus was a gift from heaven. Danny would be sympathetic about the nightmares, but he was just a kid, like Wendell, and he might not know what to do.

  He needed to talk to an adult. Somebody who knew things. Somebody who might be able to help.

  “I can’t believe you called my grandfather,” said Danny, draping himself over the back of the bus seat. “You hate talking to my grandfather! He always gets your name wrong.”

  “I thought he might be able to help,” said Wendell, clutching his tail tightly.

  Danny considered. This was not unreasonable. Great-Granddad Dragonbreath was a repository of all kinds of knowledge. He could read your past lives and he knew stuff about fairies and ninjas and all kinds of cool stuff.

  He was also crotchety and mostly deaf, couldn’t keep any of his grandkids’ names straight, and was convinced that fairies were stealing his spoons. Still, he was a good dragon to have at your back. “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Maybe.” Wendell frowned. “Can you spend the night tonight? He told me what to look for, but I can’t do it myself. You have to watch and see what happens while I sleep.”

  “Sure!” said Danny. He couldn’t think of anything more boring than watching somebody sleep, but maybe there would be monsters. Monsters would be awesome.

  Christiana Vanderpool, who was definitely Wendell’s friend and more or less Danny’s, got on the bus at the next stop and plopped down on the seat next to the iguana. “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “There was a show on last night about worms that live in deep-sea volcanic vents,” said Christiana. “Did you see it?”

  “I saw some of it,” said Wendell. He’d fallen asleep halfway through, but fortunately a really loud commercial had woken him up before the monsters could corner him and begin asking him about square roots. “It was cool, I guess.”

  “There were tube worms as big as your arm! They could only live in water that was super-heated from volcanoes, so they had to survive in a zone like six inches wide around the vent! And they were bright red and hundreds of years old!”

  Danny was willing to admit that this sounded both cool and amazing. Super-heated volcano worms! He wondered if you could keep one in a goldfish bowl with a space heater under it.

  “It was amazing, then,” said Wendell dutifully.

  Christiana took a closer look at him. “Y
ou don’t look so good.”

  “I haven’t been sleeping well.”

  Christiana frowned. “Have you tried melatonin? The claims about it are drastically over-inflated, but there seems to be solid experimental evidence that it helps you get to sleep.”

  Wendell sighed. Sleep wasn’t the problem. He was so tired that he had started to fall asleep right after dinner. It was just that he spent his sleeping time running away from nightmares, and so he wasn’t getting any rest.

  “He’s having nightmares,” said Danny helpfully, dangling over the back of the seat some more.

  Christiana shrugged. “Well, that’s different. There’s all sorts of stuff you can try with auto-hypnosis and whatnot, but if any of them work, it’s probably luck and the placebo effect.”

  Christiana had been around Danny quite a bit by now, and so did not sigh or scream or attempt to pitch him out the bus window, no matter how much she might want to. “No,” she said. “It works because you believe it should work, not because it really does anything. It’s all in your head.”

  “Ohhhhh,” said Danny, understanding. There were lots of things that were all in people’s heads. Not his, of course. Wendell, though . . . Wendell had a lot of stuff that was all in his head.

  Nerd stuff, mostly. The history of Western Civilization, including dates, and the value of pi worked out to forty places, and most of the periodic table.

  And nightmares, apparently.

  “Don’t worry, dude,” said Danny as the bus pulled into the parking lot with a hiss of air brakes. “I’ll come over tonight and we’ll get this all sorted out.”

  “Okay,” said Wendell, consulting his notes. “He said there are three possibilities.”

  “Lay ’em on me,” said Danny. He had just had a dinner so healthy that he had nearly expired on the spot. This would have put him in a bad mood, except that Danny was an expert at staying at Wendell’s house and had brought a backpack full of snacks and some slightly squashed cupcakes, so their second dinner had been really good. He was still picking bits of frosting out of his teeth.

  Danny was forced to admit that this was more cool in theory than in practice. Still, he was a bit disappointed they’d attached to Wendell instead of to him. He’d totally handle freaky dream monsters better than the iguana. Wendell could barely handle breakfast.

  Still, if Wendell was in trouble, Danny wasn’t going to let him go it alone. “So what am I looking for?”

  Wendell checked his notes again. “If it’s a Night Mare, there will be glowing hoofprints. And if it’s Sandmen, you’ll see sand piling up right in the bed. The Dream Wasp . . . well, he said you’d probably smell something funny.”

  “What, like dream farts?”

  Wendell rolled his eyes. “Your great-granddad didn’t say. He just said that you’d know it if you smelled it. And it’s possible there’s more than one thing. Apparently Night Mares are scavengers, like jackals, and super-common, and they might show up if some other dream predator had already . . . er . . . latched on . . . to pick up the leftovers . . .”

  Wendell was looking a little green. Danny patted his shoulder. “It’ll be fine. We’ll figure it out. We kept you from turning into a were–hot dog, didn’t we?”

  It turned out that falling asleep with somebody watching was not easy.

  At all.

  Wendell lay in bed and tried not to look at the clock. He had to get up at seven to watch his favorite cartoon, and it was ten thirty now, so if he went to sleep right this minute, he’d get eight and a half hours of sleep. No, now it was ten thirty-one, so he’d get eight hours and twenty-nine minutes. Wait, now it was ten thirty-two, so that was eight hours and twenty-eight minutes . . .

  It occurred to him that this was not productive. He shut his eyes and rolled over so that he wouldn’t be tempted to peek.

  It was even harder to sleep knowing that Danny was lurking somewhere at the foot of the bed, watching him. He could feel the dragon staring at him. He put a pillow over his head.

  Danny wasn’t having an easy time either. It turned out that watching someone try to fall asleep was boring.

  Like, really boring.

  Nothing was happening at all, and if you tried to hurry it up, it actually took longer.

  Danny eventually pulled out a comic book and started to read. He was yawning himself, and had to pinch his own tail repeatedly to stay awake. When the comic book had gone blurry and dull for the third time, he set it down and looked over at Wendell.

  The iguana was dead to the world. Mr. Higgins the stuffed bunny was tucked under his arm. As Danny watched, Wendell started to snore.

  It was a commanding snore for such a small lizard. It started with a sort of “Sng-sng-snggk . . .” and grew to a full-throated “Hgrrrrrnnnnk!” Danny was grudgingly impressed.

  Nothing else happened.

  Danny waited, much more awake now—surely it was about to get good! There would be monsters!—but still nothing happened.

  Wendell rolled over, which damped the snoring for about five seconds, and then he started up again. Danny wasn’t sure how he managed to sleep through this when he spent the night.*

  Nothing continued to happen.

  Just when Danny was about to give up and go to sleep himself, Wendell’s snores changed.

  “Hggnnk . . . hnn . . . kk . . . no . . . stop . . . go away . . .”

  “Wendell?” asked Danny, worried.

  The iguana moaned in his sleep.

  This was not cool. Wendell sounded really miserable.

  And then the nightmares came.

  For Danny, sitting next to Wendell’s bed, the first sign was hoofprints. Strange glowing hoofprints.

  They started up near the ceiling and walked down the wall over the head of Wendell’s bed. Danny fell backward, startled. You just didn’t expect to see hoofprints coming down the wall at you!

  “Dude,” he said. “Spider-horse!”

  Each hoofprint was the size of a saucer, and lasted for a few seconds before it faded away.

  He tried to remember what Wendell had said. Hoofprints meant a Night Mare. So there was a big evil horse invading Wendell’s dreams. That was . . . well . . . not cool, exactly, but certainly interesting.

  The hoofprints reached the head of the bed. It looked like there might be more than one of them, and they’d all made a beeline for Wendell.

  Still, now that they knew what it was, Danny could wake Wendell up. The iguana was moaning louder now, and starting to thrash around in the blankets. Mr. Higgins had slipped unnoticed to the floor.

  Danny sat up. He’d grab Wendell’s shoulder and shake him, that ought to work. And if that didn’t, there was still a glass of water on the nightstand; he could just dump it over the iguana’s head.

  Come to think of it, that would be a lot more fun to begin with . . .

  He was reaching for the glass of water when the smell hit him.

  The smell wasn’t bad, exactly, but it was really strong. It smelled like lemon floor cleaner, only with some weird spices thrown in. Danny felt like he’d shoved a cough drop up his nose.

  The glowing hoofprints, which had stopped over the head of Wendell’s bed, suddenly began to move again. Danny couldn’t really tell, given that the Night Mares were invisible and all, but he’d swear that they’d begun milling about uncertainly on the wall over the bed.

  The cough-drop smell got even stronger. Danny’s eyes started to water, and he scrubbed at his nose with the back of his hand.

  Suddenly the hoofprints turned around and fled upward, toward the ceiling. They stopped at the top of the wall, as if the owners of the hooves had vanished through the roof.

  Had something scared them away?

  The smell was so thick that Danny could f
eel it on his tongue and the back of his throat. He was amazed that Wendell’s mom couldn’t smell it down the hall.

  A vibration seemed to fill the air, then a strange whining note. It sounded like distant power tools, as if somebody was using a chain saw or a weed whacker outside. Danny looked around wildly for the source, but he couldn’t find anything. Nobody was going to use a chain saw in the middle of the night, not in this neighborhood.

  The vibration got louder. Danny could feel it through the soles of his feet. Mr. Fins, Wendell’s geriatric goldfish, swam agitated circles in his bowl.

  Danny was sure that Wendell’s mom was going to burst in the door at any moment, and that would be bad. I mean, not that he was doing anything wrong, exactly, but . . . well, in Danny’s experience, there were very few situations that were improved by having Wendell’s mother around.

  The dragon was on his feet and looking around wildly when he realized what the sound was.

  It was buzzing.

  “Dream Wasp!” said Danny. “Of course—the smell—” His great-granddad hadn’t mentioned buzzing, but what else could it be? It sounded as if an entire hive of yellow jackets had moved into the walls of the room, possibly carrying weed whackers.

  “Noooooo . . .” moaned Wendell.

  Danny was sure of one thing. This had gone far enough. The Night Mares had been kinda cool, but there was nothing cool about this buzzing. It was a nasty, angry, whiny noise. No good was going to come of a noise like this.

  He grabbed Wendell’s shoulder and shook it. “Wendell! Wendell, get up!”

  “The square root . . .” Wendell moaned into his pillow. “I have to find the square root . . .”

  “Forget the square root, Wendell! We have problems!”