Victoria Marmot- The Complete Series

by Virginia McClain

  “I said, I hate guns.”

  Dryer laughed, still keeping the tip of her Glock pointed at Albert’s temple.

  “That’s rich, coming from someone who shot and almost killed one of our best agents.”

  “Hating them and knowing how to use them are two different things, Rebecca,” I gritted.

  “Tsk, tsk, so angry. Guns have their uses. Too many of our kind get caught up in only using magic. They are unable to see the bigger picture. After all, think of the long term benefits. Why, if we adopted non-magical weaponry as well as magic, we could easily be the dominant force in our realm. Think of how many people could be spared, if we didn’t have to prove our might without modern weapons. A single nuclear warhead, and we would never have to waste another dragon on something as banal as bringing the non-magical humans in line. Can you imagine? But it was all I could do to convince the damned council that it was time we asserted our dominance over the humans at all. They’d never have given the idea a second thought if I had tried to force them to accept human weapons on top of everything else. Luckily, I was able to find a purely magical solution to the problem, and now everyone is on board. That said, I’m going to need you to move, Deary. I need to get into that storage unit. This one has a date with some Technetium.”

  Before I could even react to her strange monologue, she was marching Albert forward, and then, in a move that would make any Bond villain proud, she took a moment to point the gun at me while insisting that I step aside. I was so horrified to have the barrel pointed my way that I didn’t react to the fact that she’d pulled it away from Albert’s temple for a heartbeat. If I’d had a gun myself, that would have been the window I’d have used to shoot her, but as it was I could only watch in awful fascination as Albert raised his right elbow and sent it shooting hard and fast into Rebecca’s nose. As soon as I’d seen Albert’s momentum shift, I’d started to dive out of the line of fire, which probably saved my life, but it did not prevent the hot, awful pain of having a bullet drive its way into the flesh of my left shoulder.

  “FUCK!” I exclaimed, with no small amount of feeling. “Does anyone at MOME ever learn proper gun safety?”

  I was mostly shouting to distract myself from the pain, and to keep myself from passing out. Deciding I really didn’t want to get shot again, I launched myself at Dryer’s knees, hoping to tackle her to the ground before she could get around to pulling the trigger again. I connected and she collapsed, something she had been half on her way to doing anyway, thanks to Albert breaking her nose with his elbow.

  Albert snatched the gun from the floor and pointed it at Rebecca, whose arms I was working quickly to pin behind her back. Unfortunately, she seemed to have no interest in going down easy, broken nose or no. She bucked and kicked beneath me, and I was struggling to keep both of her arms pinned. The pain in my shoulder was spiking every time she moved. I was honestly amazed I could pin her at all, and had to assume my ability to grit through this was entirely thanks to the boost from Azrael.

  Boost or not, though, it wasn’t enough to keep me from screaming when Dryer somehow managed to buck her head up into my left shoulder, directly against the bullet wound. I managed to keep hold of her with my right arm, but my left arm went numb when she hit the wound, and I dropped her left arm as a result.

  Before I could recover from the pain, she turned and jammed her thumb into the hole in my shoulder, causing me to scream once more. I didn’t drop her right arm, though, and managed to use it to drag her off-balance and head butt her in her already-broken nose.

  Dryer let out a scream of her own, then, but I had to give her points for tenacity when she just dug her thumb even farther into my shoulder wound and screamed in my face. I went down, and she took no time in launching herself at Albert.

  Which was probably her biggest mistake.

  Because Albert had apparently just been waiting for an opening in which he was unlikely to shoot me. And I was now a heap of pain on the floor.

  The shot was deafening, somehow louder than the one that had hit me in the shoulder, or maybe it was just the stillness that followed that made it seem so loud. I tried not to let my stomach heave as the copper tang of blood mixed with the overwhelming stench of gunpowder in the tunnel around me.

  “I d-didn’t mean…” Albert stuttered, from where he stood. “I d-don’t have much experience with guns.”

  “It’s her fault for leaving the safety off,” I said, trying to get my legs to respond to my brain. Which was kinda true, because honestly, what else did she expect was going to happen?

  I didn’t want to look at Dryer to see where she’d been shot, but I needed to walk past her to get to the storage unit, because we were even closer to getting immolated by dragon fire whether Dryer was dead or not. We were surrounded by dark matter suppressing stone, which, not surprisingly, also suppressed cell signal, and we had no way of letting General Aira know that she shouldn’t light us up when the time came.

  So, I shuffled past, and tried not to notice how still she was lying, or the pool of blood beneath her. I had to assume it was a head shot, since she’d stopped moving so quickly, but I really didn’t want to find out. I kept my eyes on the old oak and iron gate, and the padlock that held it closed.

  It didn’t take long to fumble the lock open, but it felt like ages all the same.

  The crate that sat in the middle of the long, arched storage room looked incongruously small, considering how much potential disaster it held within it.

  “Is that it?” I asked, almost deflated. I don’t know why I’d expected there to be more, but some part of me had thought the room would be packed wall-to-wall with the stuff.

  “That’s more than enough to take out Earth several times over, if injected into powerful enough recipients,” Albert reminded me.

  I cringed, remembering how a single dose given to a single, not yet fully developed weredragon had taken out half of a city block and killed a few thousand people, and then my brain stuttered.

  “Albert, dragons and weredragons are some of the most dark matter heavy beings in any of the realms, right?”

  “Yes.”

  He was already getting out the small vial of Anti-Technetium Serum (we’d decided to call it ATS for short during our brief planning session) that he’d been given “just in case” when we’d sent him off to track down Dryer, and was prepping it to apply to the vials of Technetium that sat in the small wooden crate in front of us.

  “So, how is it that when they set off the weredragon in Sucre they didn’t wind up taking out the entire city and a good chuck of the rest of Bolivia?” I asked.

  Albert blinked, his hands halfway to the crate in front of him.

  “It was a young weredragon. It wouldn’t have had the reserves to cause an explosion much larger than—”

  “Would it have reserves bigger than Trev’s?” I asked, lacking patience for the long calm explanation that Albert seemed determined to give.

  “I would imagine they would be similar, although your brother is a bit of a special case and has been training to access even more dark matter than—”

  “MOME seemed to think that blowing up Trev would take out the entire city of La Paz, or more. Why wouldn’t a young weredragon do similar damage? Or, at least HALF the city, instead of half a city block?”

  “I don’t know, Vic. Are you saying you wish they’d done more damage?”

  I ignored the annoyed edge to Albert’s voice and pushed on.

  “No, Albert, I’m saying that maybe they didn’t inject the other weredragon they took. They must have switched her out for someone else. They could have used some kind of illusion to make whoever it was look like the weredragon they took, so when we only found Siara and one other, we thought we had rescued everyone. So, where is the other weredragon?”

  “Vic, we don’t have time for this. The strike force is going to take this place out in a matter of minutes, and we have work to do.”

  I sighed, thinking about how Cronk
and Sylvestra had been lured here and held captive in the dungeons, told they’d be forced to join the “right side,” and how that explosion in Sucre hadn’t been large enough to match the firepower that Albert, Siara, and everyone else had been predicting, based on how much dark matter a dragon had. Then I thought about the kind of person Rebecca Dryer was, or had been till a minute ago, and I thought about how the tunnel that led to this door kept going down and down, but didn’t have any more torches on the wall. And a memory of the message my parents had left us with an abandoned boat niggled at the back of my mind.

  “Damn it,” I muttered. “Here, Albert, take my ATS supply. This should be more than enough to get you through this box.”

  “Vic, what are you doing?” he asked, even as he took the serum from me.

  “We’re about to level this place to the ground, and I can’t live with the idea that there might be more innocent people trapped in here.”

  Albert stared at me for a long moment before saying, “Be careful.” He nodded slowly, as though the action troubled him, and then handed me back one of the four serum vials I’d given him. “Between the two of us, we have extra, and you might need this down there. Good luck. I’ll try to get out of here fast enough to tell them not to blow you up.”

  “I appreciate that, Al.”

  I winked, and Albert’s eyes teared up a bit, and then I was turning and running out the door, hurdling over the lifeless body of Rebecca Dryer, swallowing the bile and guilt that rose in my throat, and hoping beyond hope that I wasn’t about to get myself killed for no reason.

  IT HAD BEEN a few weeks since I had run for longer than it took to escape a deadly situation, and even though running is usually a favorite activity of mine, I wasn’t used to running with a bullet in my shoulder. It officially sucked. I doubted I would have managed it at all without the benefits of recently getting busy with a succubus suffusing my…everything. I’d briefly glanced at the wound after I’d started jogging and it had painfully and emphatically reminded me of its presence. The bullet appeared to have passed all the way through my shoulder. I had no idea if that was a good thing or not, but I was definitely worried about blood loss. Or I would have been, except that the wound was barely bleeding at all now and I didn’t even feel faint. So, yeah, I was gonna have to give Azrael one hell of a high five later, because succubus power exchange seemed to be like gaining multiple superpowers at once, one of which was speedy healing or some shit.

  Even still, the damned thing throbbed with every step, and I rather desperately wished I could shift into my snow leopard form to make the whole trip pass more quickly.

  “Stupid dark matter dampening rocks,” I muttered, as I ran deeper and deeper into the ever-darkening dungeon.

  I was left to enjoy the dank dungeon air in my human lungs, and try to ignore the smell of decay that seemed to only grow stronger as I hurried down the dark, rough stone corridor, occasionally splashing myself with enough water that I wondered if this tunnel ultimately led to a pool or underground river, rather than the missing weredragon I was hoping to find.

  The puddles became more and more frequent, and I was more and more convinced that I must have passed through a doorway to an alternate realm at some point, because since when is there this much water in the middle of the Arizona desert? But alternate realm or not, the steep tunnel floor was getting more and more slick, and I would have fallen multiple times as I descended if a faint light hadn’t started to flicker up ahead, reflecting off of the various puddles that streamed across the stone, thus warning me to watch each step as I wended my way farther and farther below ground.

  By the time I’d reached the source of the light, I’d had to slow to barely more than a jog. Trying to make as little noise as possible, all while keeping my footing and not landing my ass in a puddle, was taking most of my attention, despite the clock I was racing to try to keep myself, and everyone else who might be down here, from being incinerated by the dragon strike force that was supposed to follow up on our Technetium neutralization run. So, yeah, I was more than a little tense as I rounded the last curve of the tunnel.

  Which was about when I heard voices, and my legs slowed to an extremely cautious walk.

  Between the pounding of my heart, the sounds of my own breathing, and the constant drip that had accompanied me for the past half kilometer or so into the tunnel—which had lately surged into the sound of steadily running water—I couldn’t understand any of what was being said.

  Someone was shouting, and many people were… moving.

  A series of boulders strewn haphazardly around the area where the tunnel ended and something else began muffled the sounds from the other side, in addition to blocking my view. The burble of running water that had followed me for the past few minutes suddenly materialized in the form of a splashing creek. It must have been flowing underneath the tunnel I’d descended, but now it emerged to tumble over rocks and sand, running around the larger boulders that obscured my view. I had to hope its rushing would be enough to cover the sounds of my approach from whatever was on the other side.

  I absently wished again for my snow leopard form, and even tried to call on it—my human feet could never match its padded paws for stealth and agility—but my attempts brought me the same nothing they’d gotten me the whole way down here. Fuck this rock.

  For now, at least the boulders were lending me cover, as I tried to figure out what was going on beyond them. So there was that. Thanks, rocks.

  This may sound like a stupid thing to say, but climbing with a bum shoulder is hard. Super-healing aside, my shoulder still throbbed every time I used my arm, and topping out an oddly shaped boulder to get a better look at the other side definitely counted as using my arm. On top of that, all the rocks leading up to the boulder were slick with water from the no-longer-underground creek, which made my feet slick when I finally reached the boulder I decided to scale. In other words, I felt more like an asthmatic whale floundering on the beach than anything else by the time I was able to see what was going on beyond the tunnel entrance.

  So it was no wonder I nearly shit my pants when I heard a shout to my left. I was lucky I didn’t just let go and immediately splash ass first into the creek, because I was certain I’d been spotted.

  But the shout hadn’t been directed at me. It had probably been directed at one of the hundred or more armed soldiers milling about in front of the giant underground lake that extended a few hundred meters ahead of me.

  “SHIT, SHIT, SHIT,” I whispered, as I dropped back behind the rock I’d been climbing and let my brain process what my eyes had just taken in. Over a hundred people, armed, marching in formation, apparently following shouted orders from a handful of MOME operatives wearing the same uniform I’d stolen earlier.

  I took a deep breath filled with damp tunnel air and buried my head in my hands, trying to figure out how I was going to rescue these people, and… well, whether or not I should.

  I mean, look, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of added casualties, but if everyone in this cavern was a MOME-trained soldier, did I really want to keep them from getting caught up in the dragon’s strike force attack? Wouldn’t that mean rescuing a bunch of people who were just going to try to kill me and my friends later?

  I’d come here hoping to find the missing weredragon, who I suspected hadn’t been turned into a weapon back in Sucre, but I wasn’t even sure what I’d just seen. It had looked like an army. Was this the fighting force that Mom and Dad had tried to warn us about in their goodbye message? It sounded like an army, too… or did it? I took another deep breath, and did my best to listen over the sound of running water.

  “Stop that!” shouted someone, followed by the unmistakeable sound of flesh hitting flesh. A shrill whistling sound pierced the air, then someone yelled, “Pick that up and try again. Don’t test me. There’s plenty of time to send you back to the vamps.”

  That… sounded a little weird.

  I sighed, realizing I was going to
have to sneak closer if I was going to figure out what was going on here, and I cringed, because every second I spent here was one second closer to getting torched by whatever the dragons had planned for the MOME facilities after we’d neutralized the Technetium inside them. Albert would probably be done soon, and as soon as he was clear of the building… hopefully he’d have time to tell General Aira I was in here before she lit the place up.

  I couldn’t think about that. One thing at a time.

  The more I paid attention to the sounds on the other side of that rock, the more convinced I became that I wasn’t listening to the training of a willing army. And I knew I would never let myself walk out of this place if even one person down here was an enemy to MOME. Hell, I even had second thoughts about leaving voluntary MOME employees behind.

  I climbed back up to the top of the nearest boulder, grateful that my shoulder was starting to hurt less and less, careful to keep as close to the rock as I could, barely bringing my eyes high enough to see the spread of people below me.

  Yes, lots of them were marching in formation and following orders, but… dotted throughout, especially in the group with the highest concentration of MOME guards spread out among them, there were… outbursts. The majority of the shouting, and all of the physical outbursts, were coming from that one group. A group in which the “recruits” kept dropping their weapons, sitting down in the middle of drills, and… attacking the MOME agents?

  This shit was getting complicated, and I was running out of time. So I did the only thing I could think of. I dropped back down to the tunnel and prepared to swagger into the cavern looking like I had every right to be there.

  Then a hand clamped across my mouth and I stifled a scream.

  “SHHH… IT’S ME,” whispered the hazy grey figure, turning me around after pinning me single-handedly to the boulder I had just descended, before I could even shift my weight to throw them.

  I really hated how fast Renata could move sometimes.