Part 1
Wheatley the dog ran ahead of Eric. His toenails clicked against the asphalt driveway as he jumped into leaf-pile after leaf-pile, peed on a tree, and generally stuck his nose everywhere.
"Wheatley! Wheats!" Eric called. The dog pricked up his ears for a moment, then went back to investigating the interesting smell. I've never found one like this before, he thought.
"C'mon, Wheatley! You wanna bone?" Wheatley, who normally came running at the word, only rooted further into the pile, until all Eric could see was a furiously wagging golden tail. Suddenely, the tail stopped wagging. A second later, Wheatley came yelping to Eric, his tail tucked between his legs. Eric could see that the dog had a cut on his nose, and the smell of burning leaves trailed after Wheatley as he sprinted up the driveway to the house.
"Wheats! Mom's going to kill me," Eric groaned. He followed the dog into the house, wiped up its muddy paw-prints, and made sure the cut wasn't bleeding anymore before he went back outside. "This time," he told a dejected-looking Wheatley, "I'm leaving you here."
Whatever's under that leaf-pile is dangerous, he thought. Maybe some old tin can or something - Wheats smells food from miles away. He began to poke carefully into the leaf-pile with a nearby stick.
And the stick poked back.
Eric jumped, and dropped the stick. Huh? he thought. He noticed the end was charred, like the time he went to boyscout camp and tried to toast marshmallows that came out burnt. Tin cans don't burn, though, he thought. And - he picked up the stick and looked at the end - they don't make little marks in the sitck. This is sorta dangerous...but I GOTTA know! He poked the stick into the leaf-pile once more, and hit something soft.
Suddenely, the leaves at the bottom of the pile moved, and a brownish snake poked its head out. Cool, Eric thought. He loved snakes, even though his parents thought they were 'creepy' and wouldn't let him have one at home. He looked at the snake.
"Look, dog," the snake said. "Didn't you learn the first time? I - " the snake realized it was looking at a pair of blue sneakers instead of a hairy paw, blinked a few times, and moved quickly backward into the leaf pile.
Wait, Eric thought. Snakes can't blink, or talk!
The snake stopped, and looked up at Eric. "I'm really not supposed to be talking to you yet," it said, "but a boy your age should be able to tell the difference between a snake and a dragon by now."
"Huh?" Eric said, and then got shivers up his spine. "You - you heard what I thought!" Wow, a real dragon! he thought.
"Of course," the dragon said, and blinked. "All dragons and dragonesses - like me - do that. And what," she said, "do you mean, 'real'? We're all real."
"Well," Eric said slowly, "I just thought you'd be a little...bigger?" He sounded disappointed.
The dragoness raised its head and laughed. Smoke came out of her nose, and Eric took a step backward. "Real enough for you?" the dragoness asked as a little spout of flame came out of her mouth, looking like a sparkler. "I'll grow...I'm only two hundred, after all."
Eric's mouth fell open.
The dragoness laughed a little more, then waved a brown wing to Eric. "Goodnight, Eric," she said, and scuttled back under the leaf-pile.
"Wait!" Eric said. "How'd you know my name?"
"We all know," the dragoness said, and must've yawned, because the smell of burning leaves filled the air.
"We?"
"All of us. The unicorns, the dragons, the sea-monsters, the pegasuses, the gryphons, the - "
"They - you - all know me? Why?"
"Because you're Eric," the dragoness said. "I'm Oakwing, by the way. Don't worry. You'll get to know all of us, soon enough. Now," she said briskly, "let me go to sleep."
**
"Eric! Eric!" Eric's little brother, Randy, yanked on his shirt. Eric looked at Randy. "Yeah?" he said.
"Lookit! I lost my first toot! The toot fairy's gonna come!" Randy held up a grubby little white pea-sized thing in his hand.
"Neat," Eric said. "The fairy's gonna leave stuff for you, huh?" he asked. Even though he knew there really wasn't a tooth fairy, he really liked Randy, though he could be annoying sometimes, and smiled anyway.
"Randddyyy! Erickkk! Bed!" Their mom called from the other room. Randy and Eric trudged up the stairs to bed, and fell asleep.
Eric woke up and looked at the clock. Two in the morning? he thought. He tried to get back to sleep, but then something whispered in his ear, and he remembered that's why he'd woken up.
"Eric!"
"I must be dreaming," Eric mumbled, "one of those dreams where you think you're awake when you're not," but then something pinched him.
"You're not dreaming," the tiny voice said. "I need your help! C'mon, wake up!"
Eric groaned, rolled over onto his back, and was amazed by the brightness in his room. "Ouch," he muttered, and rubbed his eyes. There was a big white bat hovering above him, and on the back of the bat was a tiny sparkling little lady with wings like a butterfly's. She had white hair, and a white dress, but her eyes were bright blue.
"What are you?" he asked. "And could you turn the light down?"
"Sorry," the tiny lady muttered, and instantly the glow in the room dimmed. "I," she said, straightening up to her full height of maybe three inches, "am the Tooth Fairy."
Eric raised an eyebrow.
"Don't look like that," the Tooth Fairy warned, "or I'll zap you!" She pointed a tiny wand at Eric.
"Zap?" Eric wanted to laugh, but he was afraid that a laugh would knock the fairy off of the bat's back.
"Yes," the fairy said regally. "Zap. You know. Static electricity, and all that. When your socks cling together."
"Ok," Eric said, getting out of bed, since he could tell the fairy wasn't really going to let him go back to sleep. "What seems to be the problem?"
"Well," the Tooth Fairy said, looking embarrassed. "I dropped the quarter."
"Huh?"
"Well, I usually have good aim. Fifty years of practice throwing quarters under pillows'll do that to you, you know...but every so often, I drop it. And they're too heavy for me to pick up again."
"That's it?"
"Yes."
"You've got to be kidding." Eric got back into bed with the hair on the top of his head still standing on end from the static electricity. That fifty years of practice really did improve her aim, he thought.
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