by Rena Rocford
“And you think the authorities are going to handle two teenage girls driving into a hospital with a bunch of unconscious–possibly dead–people very well? Not to mention, normal doctors might do more damage than good. That stuff”–I pointed to the IV machine–“is definitely not covered in med school, I’ll tell you that.”
“Goddamit, this just isn’t fair. We’ve found them! That should be it.”
I nodded. “Just think of the story we’d tell when we drive into a hospital. ‘We stole a car and just happened to run into these kidnappers, so we stole their car, too.’ I mean, they’d lock us up for sure. And who are all these other people?”
Beth clunked her head into one of the bunk supports. “I know, I know. There’s no way we can take this to the normals.”
“We steal the van and take it to the unicorns. I bet Dr. Targyne would know what to do.”
“Yes! I like this plan.” Beth hopped out of the truck, and I hesitated. The Kin barely moved in their bunks. The murky magic filled them, slowly killing them.
The cabin door slammed, and Beth came back scowling. “No keys.”
“Crap.” Why hadn’t I thought of that?
Beth shook her head. “Why would someone kidnap all these people?”
It didn’t make any sense. If someone wanted to exterminate the Kin, then why bother transporting them across the country to San Francisco? The troll map showed they were headed to the Bay Area, so why did they need unconscious Kin in San Francisco?
And why stop in a completely backwater campground in the middle of the desert?
A plan formed in my mind.
“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. You are going to call Dr. Targyne. I don’t know if he’s a particularly reasonable man, but evidence is evidence. If he doesn’t work out, call Mr. June. He’s already cracked over Steve; I bet he’ll go outside the monohorn chain of command to get his son back. I’ll follow the trolls and figure out what’s going on.” I tossed her my aunt’s cell phone, and hopped out of the van.
“Allyson, are you sure about this?”
“No.” I walked back to the fire and tossed my makeshift tripod into the flames. My stomach hurt too much to eat. And we needed more information. “Stay here and call the doctor. I’m following them.”
As I passed the MGB, I wished for a minute that I could just hop into the sleeping bag and take a night off. But that was my Aunt Agnes in there; one of only three constants in my life: Mom, music, and Aunt Agnes, who always showed up at birthdays no matter what part of the country Mom and I happened to live in.
I followed the path into the mushroom valley, moving slowly, trying to do some sort of dragony stealth thing. What I wouldn’t give for Harry Potter’s cloak.
The hoodoos came into view, and this time, I wasn’t imagining it–they were moving.
And they were goblins.
At the far end, three trolls sat around the base of a large rock. Nestled in the large rock sat a scraggly creature with a stone crown to match the surrounding rocks. He had a beer in each hand, and one on the armrest. The rest of the six-pack lay at his feet.
Melting into the shadows of the rocks, I perked up my ears. Maybe dragons really did have some super powers. Even over the noise of the shuffling goblins, their conversation carried to me.
“Your master asks too much,” the goblin king said.
Bob rocked back. “We brought the offering,” he said, holding up his beer.
The goblin took a drink. “Your master thinks beer will be enough to gain my army?” The goblin king tilted his head toward Bob and took another drink. “Your master is a fool to think I would like this piss.” He threw the bottle on the ground just in front of Bob. The bottle shattered, spraying beer and glass into the trolls. A gash across Bob’s forehead knit together as I watched. The blood barely made it down his face.
Bob wiped at the blood and shook it off his hands. Bright red globs fell to the ground, lost in the dust. “So you’re refusing to join the Stein team, then?”
“I’m not a filthy mercenary, not like you trolls. You have no honor, whereas my kind created the world you know.” He popped the top off a second beer and took a swig. He threw the second bottle at Bob. “Tell Kurt he’ll have to do better than trolls bringing me Bud Light. I want to meet his dragon, and he’d better have a nice gift.” The Goblin King absently waved the trolls away and took the third bottle, bit the neck off in his stone teeth and tossed the beer to a nearby goblin.
The trolls stood, storming away from their failed recruitment.
As they made it to the edge of the hoard of goblins, the king yelled over the din. “And next time, boys?” He waited for the trolls to turn around before rattling the cardboard six-pack of beer. “Bring enough to share!”
The goblins around the king roared with laughter. He handed out his remaining bottles to the two largest, and the other goblins looked on hopefully. “Idiots,” the king muttered, loud enough for the trolls to hear.
As the trolls headed my way, I checked my hiding spot, but there was nothing better. I stood as still as possible and prayed they wouldn’t notice me. I focused on thinking rock-like thoughts. John looked right at me and winked.
He was way smarter than the average troll.
waited in the shadows, praying Beth had moved everything and locked up the van. When I knew they wouldn’t be able to hear me, I slunk back to camp. I felt like a lizard, not a dragon, eavesdropping and stealing stuff. My stomach growled. The shock of seeing my aunt had worn off a little, and I seemed to have a cavernous pit instead of a stomach. I really hoped Beth had thought to bring the kabobs back to our campsite. I slithered back to the tent and slipped between the door flaps.
In the half light, Beth knelt by the sleeping bags, rolling them quickly. “We can’t stay,” she said, tying her sleeping bag with a vicious yank.
“Now what?”
“Dr. Targyne wanted me to stay put. I don’t think he believes me. He’s sending a team.”
“Fantastic.”
“Yup.” Beth moved from her bag to mine and quickly rolled it up. I scanned the inside of the tent for anything I could do to hurry along the process and yawned.
Beth looked up at me. “Don’t do that. We need to move.”
“Oh, come on, it took us all day to get here, it’s not like they’ll just appear out of thin air,” I said, indulging in another protracted yawn. My mind produced an image of unicorns flying into the campground. The thought sent buckets of cold water down my spine. They did have magic–could they…?
“Can they?” I whispered.
“Can they what?”
“Fly here?”
A half twitch pulled at Beth’s mouth. “No. And the monohorns can’t teleport yet, either. Currently, that resides in the realms of Star Trek and video games. But they are ridiculously well connected. One phone call, and the closest set of unicorns is headed our way. We may have less than an hour. Probably more like two, but not long enough to sleep here.”
“Damn, do they know what car they’re looking for?”
Beth snorted. “Dumb, not stupid. I didn’t tell them we were driving in a highly conspicuous red convertible. I did tell him about the moving van.”
I helped Beth move our sleeping bags and camping mats to the trunk, and we hastily disassembled the tent. As I unsnapped the tonneau cover, an envelope fell from the cover into the car. I fished out the envelope. It was addressed to Beth and had a stick drawing of a bouquet on it. I handed the envelope to my friend.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“I don’t know, but if you’re ready to go, we should put some distance between us and here.” I pulled the rest of the cover off and stuffed it in its customary spot.
Beth climbed into the passenger seat and tore open the envelope. Flipping open the glove box for light, she read quickly.
I jammed the key into the ignition and turned the car on. “You ready, or should I wait before you pull out the map?”
Beth looked at me with the guilty semblance of a child who’d been caught swiping cookies. “Sorry.” She brought out the map, and stuck it under the reading light. “Just head toward that big freeway; we can stop at a rest area or something to figure out what to do next.”
I pulled out, and we started down the dark winding road. “Who’s the letter from?”
“John,” she said with a sigh.
I tried not to make gagging noises. “Does he have anything useful to say?”
“I don’t know, I had to stop reading it,” she said.
If John had said anything important, I wanted to know. “How did it start?”
Beth was quiet. I stole a glance from the road to look at her; she kept her gaze dead ahead, not wavering toward me at all.
“How did it start?” I nudged.
Beth smiled then frowned almost as quickly. “A poem.”
I drew breath to laugh but stopped. She was serious. I looked at her again. She stared at the road, unable to make eye contact with me. She liked the poetry. Beth had said she didn’t have to beat the guys off with sticks. And John liked her. He liked her a lot. In her shoes, I could see how she might really like being liked, even if it was by a troll. But then again, Beth was half troll. How did she identify herself? Did she feel trapped in two worlds, torn? Or did she feel like a troll living in a human world?
And, shoot, who wouldn’t want a little poetry?
But a love poem from a troll?
I concentrated on the road, and we drove on in silence. Rocky outcrops loomed in headlights every time the road bent. I lost track of time, but the moon had moved by the time the road wound its way out of the rock monoliths and into more typical desert flatlands. In the distance, the headlights of cars speeding by on a highway made a trail of light. When we got there, the road hitched up and over the interstate, and I turned onto the westbound lanes. Trucks ruled the roads at this time of night, and I just tried to stay out of their way.
It seemed a small slice of forever as I drove, eyes sagging and thinking about falling asleep. Beth hunched down in her seat to get out of the driving wind, and after a few mile markers, she snored. I took the next exit with a gas station for trucks as well as a diner with more dirt than paint on the walls. The parking area was huge, and I pulled the MGB up alongside a barbed wire fence at the edge. Pulling my ushanka as far down as possible, I closed my eyes and tried to sleep.
“Hey,” Beth said, thumping me in the chest. “Get up.”
I blinked my eyes open. I couldn’t have slept for more than a couple seconds, but sleep-sand caked my eyes closed. Rosy light stretched across the eastern sky, and the wind sweeping through the car bit through the seams of my jacket.
Beth pointed at the diner. “Monohorns.”
“How many?”
“I saw two, but there could be more.”
I nodded. “Wait here.” I hopped out of the car and headed for the diner.
“What are you doing? Get back here!”
“Hide,” I hissed over my shoulder.
“Crazy dragon,” she muttered.
I smiled. Crazy or not, we needed to know what the unicorns thought they were doing here.
The diner doors opened with a creek when I pulled the handle. The place was stuck in a time warp. The Formica counters had that sparkle from the fifties, the seats were redone into seventies orange, and the linoleum tile had more chips than whole tiles. Even the waitress wore a light blue frock with a frilled apron.
At the front counter, a man and a woman stood holding out a picture of Beth. They both wore the black suits of FBI agents in movies.
“Any information would really be useful,” the woman said to the waitress.
“I’m sorry,” the waitress replied. “I just didn’t see any teenagers last night.”
“We think she might be traveling in a moving van,” the man said.
The waitress shook her head and shrugged. “Sorry.”
The woman drooped, but the man nodded. “It’s okay.” He handed the waitress a flyer. “If you see her, please call. It’s really important.”
The door opened behind me, and the smell of moisture washed over me. It was so out of place in the desert that I stopped. The weather hadn’t suddenly changed, but three men and a woman blocked the whole entryway of the diner. They wore leather vests and chaps, and their bare arms bore tattoos. All of them had tattoos of gryphons standing on hind legs, forelegs raised as if to attack. The tattoos on their right shoulder were like an old fashioned coat of arms. Feathers braided into their hair made them look part gryphon themselves. Each of them had a gun, and the man in front held a shotgun.
The dusty scent of feathers swept into the room. Feathers, fog… were they flying creatures? Kin?
No, their tattoos weren’t random. My eyes widened at the realization. Gryphons! Did they work for the unicorns, too? I slipped back into the tiny waiting area between a glass counter and a candy dispenser with Chiclets from long ago and a decade far away. I turned my attention to a musty old stack of newspapers.
The lead gryphon racked his shotgun, sending a menacing cah-clunk through the diner, yanking my gaze back to the situation unfolding. The waitress’s eyes honed in on the gun and she backed away. The two unicorns spun around to face the gryphons.
“I told you not to come into our territory,” the gryphon said.
“It’s an emergency, Reggie,” the woman said.
“Like when my son disappeared?”
The unicorns both backed away, and the waitress fled to the kitchen.
“Now, hold on, Reggie,” the male unicorn said. “That was completely different.”
“Different how? You called my son a runaway. And now, here I see you showing flyers up and down the interstate of two runaways, a girl and a boy. You assholes only care about your own?”
“I’m sorry about your boy.”
The gryphon pointed his gun at the unicorns. “Sorry isn’t good enough.”
The gun roared, filling the diner with an explosion. Fire lashed out from the tip of the barrel. The unicorns fell into a heap of tables and chairs, and flyers flew into the air. I let out a startled scream, and the smallest gryphon glanced over at me, but looked away quickly, unfazed by my presence.
Climbing out of the tangle of chairs, the male unicorn wiped blood off his cheek. “I’ve had enough of you feather-headed bird brains, Reginald.”
Reggie racked the shotgun once more, sending a spent shell flying through the lobby. It clanked on the ground as he pulled the trigger. Shots blasted into the unicorn, and he staggered but kept his feet.
Reggie looked at the gryphon with white streaks in his hair. “You said silver shot should do it.”
The unicorn shifted, and a spiral horn grew out of the man’s forehead. His skin slowly morphed to white and sprouted fur. His tail was like a lion’s, long and thin with a tuft at the end.
I tried to melt into the tiny lobby area desk, hopeful they might be too distracted to notice one little dragon.
The unicorn leveled his horn at the gryphon and charged. Reggie put two more shots into the unicorn before it skewered him in the navel. The older gryphon pulled a knife and sunk it into the unicorn’s neck. A sound halfway between a whale’s song and a dying horse squealed out of the unicorn, and he tossed aside his victim.
“I guess knives will have to do.” The female gryphon pulled a long knife from a sheath on her chaps. She stepped toward the unicorn, and slashed viciously across his neck. A deep red gash opened up, and he sank to the ground, spilling blood across the linoleum floor. He morphed back into a human, but blood continued to gush from his neck. I had no idea if it would be fatal, but there was enough blood to be worrisome under the best of circumstances.
The female unicorn jumped between the gryphon and her prey. “Stop! We didn’t come here to fight; I came to catch a kidnapper. Just let us leave, and we’ll get out of your territory.”
The biker chick shot a look over to Reggie. He knelt on t
he floor, bleeding heavily, and gasping in pain. He gave a curt nod. The gryphons stepped aside, and the female unicorn collected the injured man over her shoulder and hobbled out of the diner.
The uninjured gryphons descended on their leader, laying him down in the entryway of the diner.
The woman looked back at me. “Well, aren’t you going with your friends?”
“I’m not with them,” I said.
“Then do something useful.”
“Do you want me to call 911?”
She turned her glare on me. “Don’t be daft, kid. You’re like us. Get some real help.”
How does everyone know but me?
I launched myself out the door and ran across the pavement. I saw no sign of the unicorns, but Beth was already getting out of the car.
“What happened?”
“The unicorn gored a gryphon. They’re still inside,” I said.
Beth sprinted past me back to the diner. I followed, but my throat closed. I didn’t know if I was about to have another incendiary regurgitation, but I didn’t want to spit fire in another room with automatic sprinklers. Then again, the diner didn’t look like it was exactly up to code.
Inside, Beth knelt in front of the biker gryphon. “Lay back, I need to take a look.” She pulled up his leather vest, and her face darkened.
“Are you an EMT?” the gryphon woman asked.
Beth shook her head. “I’ve got a lot of experience with unicorn wounds.”
The waitress burst out through the swinging kitchen doors carrying a first aid kit. She handed the case to Beth. “Those other two were looking for you.”
“I know,” Beth said. “They think I did something I didn’t.”
The grey-streaked gryphon stared at Beth. “What’s going on?”
“Give me your knife,” she said.
The older gryphon handed over his bowie knife, and Beth took the giant blade. In her hand, it looked well proportioned. Beth turned the blade around and poked the palm of her hand with the point. Bright red blood with a hint of green welled up in her palm, and Beth made a fist and squeezed. Blood dripped from her hand into the wound.