Valley of the Dragons (Rule 9 Academy, #3)

by Rain, Elizabeth

  But as the class wound down, our conversation turned to a darker subject.

  “I talked with Melanie—Jake’s sister?” he admitted.

  He frowned in concentration as his throw nicked the bark off the tree and spun wide. He waited for my last throw before we went to collect them.

  I threw my own. It swung low below the target, embedding itself in the rough bark of the tree where it stuck. I grunted, my eyes meeting his. “Yeah? Any news or information on the toxicology report? I’m curious to know what really killed him. I’m having a tough time believing a wolf shifter, raised on the mountain, and a star lineman on the football field just fell, you know?”

  We walked together and picked up our stars. Niel grumbled as I helped him look for two of his, embedded in the grass and difficult to find.

  “Agreed. I asked about that. She said the report came back with traces of LSD and some drug the government calls SP-17. And before you ask, the sister swears he was as straight as they come and did nothing like that.” We found the last star and went back to the starting line.

  I shrugged and went first. This one missed entirely, and I frowned. Dammit! “LSD? I believe her. I mean, if you were going to do recreational drugs, seems like you’d start with weed or something a lot lighter than that. And what’s SP-17? I never heard of that?”

  Niel threw and smirked with satisfaction when he hit dead center, but about two feet below the target that taunted us. “I wondered the same thing. So I Googled it. It’s basically a truth serum. KGB used it to confirm loyalty in their troops. It’s illegal as hell.”

  I frowned and my next two went wide. My concentration was suddenly off. “That makes no sense at all. Where would he even get a hold of something like that?”

  “That’s just it. He wouldn’t. So the other answer is that he had help. Someone gave it to him. Still, it’s not what killed him.”

  I gave him a skeptical glare. “Please don’t tell me he just fell and hit his head.”

  Niel threw his last two stars as well, and they both went way wide. I wasn’t the only one whose concentration was suddenly off. “They beat him to death, Sadie. He wasn’t left to die on the mountain, he was already dead when somebody dumped him.”

  We had no more time to discuss it, but I had plenty of questions saved for later. Llyr Ryan called time and assembled us together. While we’d been practicing, he’d been using a hose and filled a large round barrel full of water in the center of the field. Around the barrel he’d chalked a circular white line fifteen feet back from the center.

  He gave us all an enormous grin filled with fun. “Okay hatchlings, it’s time to wind this thing down with a tried-and-true class competition. Here’s what we’re going to do...”

  He divided us all into two random groups and lined us up on both sides. He had pitted us in a throwing contest to improve our stamina and aim in a fun game. We’d run from our starting point and around the white line, pitching our stars into the barrel as we ran. We each had five stars, so would have five turns. Stars that hit the barrel were worth a point. Those that were on fire and made it in counted for two. He set a timer to up the stakes. We had five minutes to get as many stars as possible in the barrel. I noticed Nick was on the other team with Niel. I had Sirris on mine.

  I danced on the edges of my toes, my first star grasped lightly between thumb and forefinger. Sirris frowned by my side. I hadn’t paid attention to how she was doing in class, so I had no idea what she was capable of. Behind us stood nine other classmates. I shook my star in the air with a grin. “Ready?” I challenged.

  “Ready Cross!” they all shouted back. The whistle blew and I was off, the disk flaming beneath my fingers as I reached the edge of the white circle and went left. The disk whipped smoothly from my fingers and headed straight for that blue barrel and then bounced harmlessly off the lip and into the grass where it smoldered in a wisp of gray smoke. I growled in disgust and ran back to tag Sirris, the next in line.

  Sirris ability to conjure an electric current that flamed on impact was well-known—when it was attached to her staff. The stars, not so much. But what she lacked in ability to conjure fire, she made up for in accuracy. As the contest wound down, five out of five of her stars made it in. All of mine flamed, but only three hit the water with a sizzling pop. Six points for me. The other team still came out ahead, but it was close at 28-31—them.

  After class, the disks sorted, dried and stored in their cases, we headed back towards the cabins. If I hurried, I’d beat Sirris into the shower before the hot water ran out. She was notorious for taking showers that used up every bit of warm water. As we hit the path together, I glanced up and met Nick’s brooding stare. He pulled up short and angled away from me, falling in behind us all on purpose, I knew—to avoid me.

  My temper sparked and I clenched my fists. What the heck had crawled up his butt lately? Seemed like he was mad at me for something every time I turned around and I was getting sick of it. If he didn’t want to be around me, then he should just say so. I raised my chin and hurried to catch up with Niel and Sirris in the front.

  Fern, taking everything in at a glance, shook her head. “I am surrounded by idiots,” she decided aloud.

  THE LAST OF THE CAMP counselors filed in and took a seat at the massive roughhewn oak table that sat almost dead center of the old cabin. Franz’ Old eyes moved around the room, watching old friends and acquaintances take their seats. He’d known every one of them their entire life. The life expectancy for most Dragon shifters was double that of a human and Franz had spent all of his 101 years in Basilisk Valley, growing up in the mountains under his father Finnegan Hobert’s watchful eye and tutelage.

  As the last of the counselors took a seat, Franz swung the door shut. He wasn’t interested in curious ears listening in on what they had to discuss. There was a dull ache in his gut as he took his place at the head of the long table. He’d been head of the board here for close to eighty years. He’d taken over for his father Finnegan when he passed in his one-hundred second year.

  Llyr Ryan sat, their eyes meeting. Each silently acknowledged the solemn gravity of tonight’s conversation.

  Nobody was laughing or trying to make light of why they were there. He cleared his throat and there was silence at once.

  “We’re here to discuss what occurred last week in Purdy. I say the town because Jake Winters did not die on that mountain.” He thumped a manila folder laying closed in front of him. “The toxicology reports are misleading, and there are a few in town who are struggling to use their brains to find out what really happened.

  “We, as Dragon shifters, cannot afford to be so complacent.”

  “What do the reports say Franz,” Rhiannon, a two-hundred-year-old Dragoness asked. Her English accent bled through, a gift from her father, Finn, who had been one of the original fifteen to escape to the valley almost three hundred years before.

  Franz flipped the folder open with disgust, flinging a sheath of copies into the middle of the table. “Go ahead, I made copies. Look.”

  Everyone reached out and grabbed one and for several moments there was silence as they perused the contents.

  Brian Smith spoke up, crumpling the paper in his fist. “LSD? That’s heavy crap, don’t you think? I wasn’t aware the students were doing anything that hard core...” he said doubtfully.

  Fergus Kelly shook his head, watching Franz. “That’s the point. I don’t think they were. It also says something here about SP-17. What’s that?”

  Franz nodded grimly. “Yeah. I didn’t know either. I had to look it up. Apparently at one time, it was a favorite of the KGB’s. They liked to use it on their POW’s as well as their own soldiers to confirm their loyalty. It’s a truth serum.”

  Bryn O’Sullivan spoke up, looking as confused as the rest of them. She was the youngest member at only forty-seven. “That’s an odd cocktail, don’t you think? And dangerous, it wouldn’t take much to be too much, if you know what I mean.”

 
“Yeah, real strange. I was reading up on SP-17. What also struck me was that part of its appeal is that it's easy to administer. It’s tasteless and odorless. Made me think of Rohypnol; date-rape drug? Same result, incapacitates the victim so they are vulnerable. It can also be injected directly into the bloodstream.”

  “However... if you read further, you’ll realize that isn’t what the coroner believes killed him. It would have messed him up, especially since he was a wolf shifter, but it wasn’t what took his life.”

  Franz nodded to Llyr. “Finish it and tell them the rest.”

  Llyr got to his feet while Franz, suddenly weary and feeling old, took a seat. Gnarled fingers reached up to squeeze the bridge of his nose.

  “What killed him was the beating and the wounds. He was a wolf shifter in the prime of his life. It’s hard to believe that a single human could have taken him under any circumstances. Unless they incapacitated him somehow first. I think they took him and tortured him to death. He was dead before he ever left the town of Purdy, and I believe this is the work of a group rather than the random act of one. Someone administered those drugs and extracted what they could from him and then beat him to death when they were done.” Llyr glanced at Franz.

  Franz finished, “He was a young high school student in Purdy. His biggest claim to fame should have been he played a brilliant game of football. But there was something else that set him apart from most of his classmates, and that’s the part that worries us. Drugs like that? They’d have made him pliant and cooperative, maybe chatty enough to divulge what he was when the moon went full and he ran the mountains in pursuit of the hunt with the rest of his family. I don’t have to tell any of you the disaster that would be. This Valley camp and refuge for shifters, especially Dragon shifters, was built on escape from the Salem Witch trials. They weren’t just persecuting Witches or what they thought were witches in the 1700s. Some of them were Dragon shifters. Our ancestors.”

  Franz stared bleary-eyed at the council members as he spoke. Most were too young to remember the stories told properly from the knees of their parents and grandparents. He worried they wouldn’t take the information with the proper seriousness.

  His eyes met Rhiannon’s. But the elders—they got it. “Tell them the rest, Llyr.”

  Llyr cleared his throat and opened another folder that sat in front of him.

  “Well, you know I’m a bit of a true crime nerd, right?” A few titters were heard.

  “Well, I keep track of serial killers. Those that are caught, and those that aren’t. Of special interest to me are those that are Magical related. Mostly in serial cases, the death of a Magical is just dumb luck on the victim’s part. But this one,” he tapped the papers in front of him, “This one is different. Every single victim was a Magical or Other. When Jake was killed, I dug deeper into the common threads between his death and the other suspicious killings along the coast in recent years. How were they alike?

  “What I found, was that in every case, they’d been drugged somehow. Not all the same drugs, mind, but distinct combinations. What all the blood cocktails had in common, though, was their ability to hinder the mental and physical function in some capacity in the victims.”

  “But why? What are they trying to accomplish?” Bryn asked, looking confused.

  Franz nodded and spoke up. “Well, we can’t be sure but it seems to me, and Llyr agrees, that they are targeting Magicals specifically. We think that maybe we aren’t dealing with a serial killer at all, but maybe a Rogue faction of humans that are targeting and killing Magicals. Last month in San Diego County there was a rash of similar killings attributed to this ‘serial killer’. All totaled, they left eleven dead. Cops are still having a field day trying to figure out a motive. The victims were all over the board. They had male and female ranging in age from 18 to 72. Six of them were Caucasian, three were African American and two Native American. The only thing they had in common was they were all part of the same pack of Wolf Shifters. The authorities there don’t know this, of course.”

  The silence in the room was palpable. Bryn spoke up, her voice so low they had to strain to hear her. “So what does that mean for us? I mean, we don’t know that this is related, do we? We have one victim here, not eleven.”

  Franz stood up, as tired as they’d ever seen him. “We don’t, no. But I believe we’d be foolish not to consider the possibility. We pay attention. Anything out of the ordinary happens in town or otherwise, we report it. I think for the time being, we also increase the number of guards keeping watch along the valley rims. We’re going to put a limited fly schedule into effect. Probably only a couple times a month. I want to implement the buddy system for every single dragon or Other in this valley, adults included. Nobody should go anywhere alone, and if you don’t know someone well, don’t trust them.

  “What do we tell the kids?” Brian Smith asked.

  “We tell the youngsters an abbreviated version of the truth. It’s enough for them to know that the ‘boogie man’ may have come to town and they have to be careful and stay in groups.” Nods all around.

  “As for the teens attending camp? We tell them the truth. If they are old enough to be killed by some sick freak, they’re old enough to know what’s happening, don’t you think? Nothing can be gained from hiding the truth from them. It might just save their lives.”

  Nobody argued. Shortly after, the meeting disbanded. Franz sat back down and watched them fade through the door, inexplicably weary to his bones. He was so tired of fighting the ignorant and self-righteous. Those who thought their own agenda was king and nobody else’s mattered.

  Franz was old and what he most desired was peace. It had been such a long time coming.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE EXHAUSTION WEIGHED me down and pulled at my lids the moment my head hit the pillow. They had worked us with special vigor in class today. So much, I almost wondered if they had a hidden agenda we didn’t know about. As a restless sleep pulled me under my mind wandered to what had been discussed in class about the valley and how it had formed from tragedy; out of desperation by those fleeing for their lives.

  The sudden screams and gunfire outside our door brought me rolling out of bed and to my feet with everyone else, standing in our pajamas in the middle of the room. Something was going down and it had caught us napping. We ran to the windows and stared out. Light was just breaking and we were just able to see. People were flooding from their cabins in various stages of undress, weapons hastily grabbed as something uninvited entered our camp. The popping of guns going off sounded like popcorn and I watched the confused horror in a student’s eyes as it hit him, and then the shocked vacancy in his eyes as he fell.

  There was no more time to waste. I tossed on jeans and shoes and grabbed my bow. Sirris waited at the window, hand raised and watching. Fern’s eyes met mine, expression grim. A downward slash of Sirris’ hand and we went through the door together and swung wide around the side of the building. The guys in the cabin next to us were already there and hiding.

  “What’s happening?” I screamed to Thomas, whose eyes were already lighting with battle readiness, narrowed and focused.

  “Not sure, something is attacking us and they aren’t Magicals. They’re using guns,” he hissed, knife in one hand, bolos swinging from the other. I notched a bolt and looked out to the utter chaos as Magical after Magical was cut down. My hands shook as I tried to steady my grip and find a likely target. There, a shadowy figure with a gun bearing down to take aim at Niel as he fled. He’d change, I knew as soon as he could. I took aim and let my bolt fly. It was a direct hit and I watched in shocked amazement as the figure exploded in a puff of smokey ash that drifted to the ground. I blinked. What the hell?

  I didn’t have time to ponder what had just happened. We were all up and moving, following Thomas’ direction. We moved building to building, using them for cover as much as possible as we fought the shadowy figures killing us one by one. Sirris screamed, her hands a blur as she mov
ed. I looked up in time to see her fingers swipe at her cheek and come away bloody. Eyes narrowing, her staff swung forward and landed point down in a shattering line of energy that vaporized the human that had shot her. And they were that, I realized. We were being attacked by humans with guns. But we were dying, we didn’t have time to worry about whether they’d found out what we were; we were just trying to survive.

  In the distance I watched as a dozen or more Magicals run for the forest. And then I saw Franz Hobert, standing on the porch of his cabin, waving his hands and screaming.

  “To the woods, get to the woods and to the top of the mountain, it’s your only chance,” he screamed suddenly, clutching his shoulder and looking like he was a party to his worst nightmare.

  Niel did too, apparently. He should have been running for the woods himself, but he’d waited for us to join him. His fingers were a blur as he worked with the shuriken’s. I watched the sharp edges cut into the shoulder of the man who’d shot Franz. Like mine, he exploded in a puff of smoke. They had shot our camp director.

  “He’s right, we have to get to the woods, it’s our only chance,” I shouted. My fingers tightened on my bow and I waited for an opening. My fingers ached and I wasn’t surprised to see the line of scales flatten and erupt. Only this wasn’t a few. These covered my arms in a cape of bronze armor. Beside me, Fern was whispering and weaving her hands, creating small fiery darts, sending them winging into the fray, mowing down three hunters in a triple explosion of black dust.

  “Now!” Thomas screamed beside us and we were running on his order as the tide of the fight turned away from us for a second. Nick ran beside me as we darted towards the woods, backpedaling as fast as we could, taking shots at the humans who had tracked our bid for freedom and were now pursuing. Shots winged past my shoulder and kicked up the dirt behind and beside me. I followed their direction and took out another chasing figure with a direct hit. I was running out of bolts. I turned and patted the small bag at my waist as I dug in, eyes on the forest. I’d grabbed my own shurikens on my way out the door.