by C. J. Hill
Rosa rolled on her side and pulled up her covers. “The guys love the added awareness because it makes them better at sports—and okay, it’s sort of nice that no one can sneak up on you—but most of the time it’s just annoying.” She shut her eyes and yawned. “Don’t worry, though. You get used to it.”
Alyssa turned out the light, and darkness swallowed the room again.
Tori lay wide awake on her bed. Sleep was impossible with the sound of a dragon heartbeat ticking away in her ears. She might as well have tried to doze off with a serial killer breathing down her neck. She kept thinking relaxing thoughts like It wants to eat me, and They’re the size of lions when they hatch.
How was she ever supposed to get used to any of this?
CHAPTER 24
After an hour or so of trying—and failing—to banish both the sound of the heartbeat and the happy thoughts that accompanied it, Tori drifted into a fitful sleep. Her dreams were filled with dragons whose roars sounded like drumbeats. They stretched their scaly wings over her bed, creating a canopy she couldn’t escape from. And the next moment she saw Dirk, sitting across the room watching her, his blue eyes serious, deep, brooding. He seemed sad about something, and she wanted to take his hand to comfort him. In her dream, she kept walking toward him, but never reached him. Little creaks from the forest would shoot her back into breathless wakefulness. She had to keep concentrating on the sounds in the cabin to make the heartbeat fade into the background again.
Around 3:00 a.m., voices woke her. A man said, “Look, right there—it’s at least two inches.”
Tori’s eyes flew open. She sat up, trying to figure out who was in the room.
Another fainter voice said, “Check the other one.”
The first voice faded, now sounding like it was far away. “I don’t see any cracks on this one.”
People’s voices didn’t normally go from loud to faint like that. The voices, she realized, weren’t in the room. They were in her mind.
Tori shook her head as though she could shake away the noise. This was bad. She was hearing voices. That was the sort of thing that happened to crazy people.
And then Tori understood why she was hearing the voices. The men were talking next to the dragon eggs. The dragons’ ears could pick up the noise, so she could, too.
Tori hugged her pillow to her stomach. She could spy on Overdrake. She was a living wire tap and these men might say something that the Slayers could use to fight the dragons.
Shutting her eyes, she concentrated on their voices to make them grow louder. Part of her wanted to wake up the others and tell them what was happening, but it was the middle of the night, and what did she have to report? Two strangers were talking about something she couldn’t understand.
“Are you sure that’s a real crack?” a man asked, “It’s only a couple inches.”
“A two-inch crack is still a crack.”
Tori gripped her pillow tighter.
“It might just be an irregularity in the shell.”
Sarcasm dripped from the first man’s voice. “Let’s ignore it, then. When bacteria gets through the crack and gives the dragon an infection, we’ll say we thought it was just an ‘irregularity.’”
“So what do you want?” The second man said. “You want to try gluing it back together? A few superficial cracks are normal at this stage. Or … maybe they’re hatching ahead of schedule.”
There was a silence in which all Tori could hear was the thump of the heartbeat.
Hatching?
Then the first man’s voice grew louder, as though he’d leaned closer to the egg. “We should do a scan to see whether the crack goes all the way through the shell.”
The second man scoffed. “We can hardly see the dragon through the shell. How are we going to detect whether the crack goes all the way through?”
“We need an MRI. We should take it to Arlington—”
The second man let out an exasperated grunt. “The worst thing we could do to a cracked egg is haul it down the interstate for an hour.”
“We’ll make sure it’s insulated.”
“Don’t you remember the last time we took an egg to Arlington? That’s just asking for trouble.”
“But what do we do about the crack?”
Someone sighed. Perhaps both of them. “We’ll have to wake up Overdrake and ask what he wants done.”
“You can go wake up the king of the cathedral. I still have temperatures to record.”
Tori heard footsteps, and then the only sound was the constant thumping of the heartbeat. She dropped her pillow, went to her dresser, and felt along the top for her flashlight. The men hadn’t given her a lot of information, but she didn’t want to forget anything they’d said. She found the flashlight and flipped it on.
Bess pulled the covers over her face, Alyssa groaned, and Rosa turned over and squinted at her. “What now?”
“I need a pen and paper.”
Lilly peered at the clock on the dresser. “Do you mind? We’re trying to sleep.”
Tori ignored her. She found a pen on her dresser and the report she’d written for dragon class. Tori scribbled the conversation on the back as fast as she could.
Lilly said, “Next meeting, I’m proposing a new rule. Anyone who wakes up other Slayers in the middle of the night gets thrown in the lake.”
“I second,” Alyssa said.
Tori underlined: “An hour to Arlington on the interstate.” Then wrote down the last bit: “Overdrake, king of the cathedral.” An address would have been more helpful, but at least they’d given her some information.
“I’m done.” She folded the paper and slid into her flip-flops. Dr. B needed to know this information right away. Only a limited number of places in Arlington could do MRIs. If Overdrake decided to move one of the eggs there tonight, perhaps the Slayers could track down the egg’s position. Tori headed to the door, the information churning in her mind.
Overdrake couldn’t just show up at a hospital and ask someone to scan a huge egg—especially when it contained a dragon. He must have a contact at one of the medical places, someone who was working for him. Tori took three steps out of the door before she realized she had no idea how to get a hold of Dr. B. He wouldn’t be at his office.
She walked back into cabin 27. “Can somebody show me where Dr. B’s cabin is?”
Lilly squeezed her eyes shut. “I can show you where the bottom of the lake is.”
“I’ll take you.” Bess swung her legs out of bed. “I might as well. I’m awake now anyway. But why do you want to talk to my dad?”
Tori half listened for the men’s voices to come back. “I heard some guys talking near the dragon eggs. We might be able to narrow down their location.”
“Really?” Bess asked, eyes blinking. “You’re sure you weren’t dreaming?”
“I was wide awake.” Tori held out the paper to Bess. “This is what they said.”
Bess read it, shaking her head in amazement. “Wow. You either have an amazing ability or you’re completely insane.”
Lilly pulled her covers up higher. “Do you want my opinion on that?”
Tori didn’t. She walked to the door and Bess followed. Before they’d made it down the porch stairs, Rosa came after them. “Now I’m too curious to sleep. What exactly did you hear?”
As they headed up the trail, Tori told her everything she remembered. The cold night air seeped through her thin flannel pajamas and she couldn’t help shivering. She should have grabbed her jacket when she’d gone back inside. That was the problem with being kept up all night—you couldn’t think clearly.
Bess and Rosa both wore sweats. The camp literature had failed to tell Tori what the others already knew, that in this camp sometimes you had to go outside in the middle of the night.
When Tori finished her description, Rosa’s eyebrows drew together in discontent. “It’s not enough information to pinpoint the eggs’ location.”
Bess was more optimistic. “There
can’t be that many places an hour away from Arlington that you could hide dragon eggs away from the general population.”
“An hour going at what speed?” Rosa asked. “And what if the man meant they had to take back roads for half an hour and then the interstate for a half an hour. Besides, he probably rounded the number. The trip wouldn’t take exactly sixty minutes—it might take fifty or seventy. That’s a difference of twenty miles.”
Tori tried to keep her flashlight beam straight even though her hands were cold. “But if they go to Arlington with a dragon egg, we can tip off the police. It can’t be legal to harbor something that dangerous.”
Bess grunted. Her long legs ate up the distance on the trail so she hardly had to hurry to keep up. “The way people think about dragons now, if the public found out about an egg, they’d build a zoo for it and coddle the thing until it grew big enough to eat a few tourists.”
“It’s a shame we have to destroy the dragons,” Rosa said. “I mean, people have been fascinated with them for so long.”
Bess swept her hand at Rosa as though presenting her as evidence. “You see my point?”
Rosa lifted her chin. “If the dragons were in the right hands, think what science could learn from them.”
“But they’re in Overdrake’s hands,” Bess said, “and he wants to use them as weapons. It won’t help to feel sorry for them. The dragons aren’t going to have any qualms about skewering us.”
The thud of Tori’s footsteps intermixed with the heartbeat that kept intruding in her mind. It sounded like a stopwatch now, counting down the seconds. “How is Overdrake going to take over the whole nation?” Tori asked. “Even with dragons, he couldn’t threaten more than a few cities at a time.”
“That’s the magic of EMP,” Bess said. “Every time the dragons screech, they’ll do damage. A few flybys and a city’s cars, computers, TVs, refrigerators, and cell phones will stop working. Farmers will have a hard time planting and harvesting their crops without machinery, and even if they do manage to grow a decent amount, they’ll need trucks to get it out to people. And you can imagine what EMP would do to a nuclear reactor. How many cities will Overdrake have to cripple before people decide it’s better to have him as their ruler than their enemy?” Bess shook her head grimly. “It’s one of those subjects we discuss a lot while sitting around the campfire. Most of the A-team thinks that if we don’t manage to kill the dragons, the government will fold quickly. When D.C., New York, and a couple West Coast cities are taken down, the country will surrender. Dirk thinks that all Overdrake will have to say to Arizona is, ‘Hey, do you still want air-conditioning? ’ and they’ll not only accept him as America’s leader, they’ll rename their state in his honor.
“We on Team Magnus believe America is a bit more resilient. People will fight for freedom even if it means losing modern conveniences.”
Tori shivered in the night air. “I don’t want to find out who’s right: A-team or Team Magnus.”
“Oh, you won’t,” Bess said. “If it comes to that point, we’ll be long dead. But who knows, maybe one or two of us will survive.” Her voice took on a wistful note. “Maybe Leo and Danielle will get their powers back in a real attack.”
“Do you think so?” Rosa asked hopefully.
Bess hesitated, then said, “No, I doubt it.”
They walked silently for a minute. The trees stood along the path like dark sentinels, their leaves rustling angrily every time a breeze went through them. Tori kept wondering about Brant Overdrake. How did a person become so power hungry, so devoid of decency, that he didn’t care about killing innocent people? And how had he gotten other people to help him? Was it all about money like it had been with Dr. B’s father?
Tori wished she could talk this over with her own father. He would know what to do. But even as she thought about it, she knew she couldn’t share any of what she’d learned in the last forty-eight hours with him. He would yank her out of camp and send her to the best mental hospital money could buy. She’d be sedated, her memory wiped clean.
“I wonder why Overdrake hasn’t found and attacked the camp?” Tori asked.
“Maybe he hasn’t thought to look for us in the obvious places,” Rosa said.
“Or maybe he doesn’t think we’re a big enough threat to risk murdering us,” Bess said.
But Tori supplied her own reason. Maybe he was waiting until the last moment—waiting for all the Slayers to show up at camp so he could wipe them out in one swoop. No sense leaving around people who could fight him.
They didn’t speak for the rest of the way to Dr. B’s cabin. But with every footstep she took, Tori wondered if Overdrake knew she’d come to camp.
CHAPTER 25
Tori wrapped her arms around herself to keep warm while she waited for Dr. B to answer his door. It didn’t take long. He peered out the door at them, his hair sticking up in odd angles and his blue robe hanging crookedly around his shoulder. He glanced at Bess, then surveyed the area behind them. “What’s wrong?”
Bess strode inside. “You mean, besides your attachment to that ratty bathrobe?”
Rosa and Tori followed Bess into the cabin and Dr. B shut and locked the door behind them.
“What’s wrong?” Dr. B asked again.
Bess gestured toward Tori. “It turns out that sometimes the dragons hear more than just their own heartbeats. Tonight they heard some of Overdrake’s men talking.”
Tori handed Dr. B the paper. “Their conversation woke me up. They said they’re an hour away from Arlington and they might take one of the eggs there.”
Dr. B’s bushy eyebrows lifted as he took the note. While he read it, Shirley came out of the hallway, robe on, her curly hair in wild disarray. Really, it was no wonder Bess kept her hair short. With her parents’ hair genes, she would probably look like a dandelion that had gone to seed if she didn’t keep her curls under strict control.
Shirley put one hand on her hip. She carried a gun in the other. It went slack in her hand and she made tutting noises with her tongue. “Bess Bartholemew, you ought to know better than to burst inside here in the middle of the night without giving me any warning.”
“I didn’t burst in. Dad opened the door.”
Shirley tutted some more and went to put the gun away.
Dr. B lowered the paper and smiled at Tori. “It seems the gift of hearing is a useful skill, after all. Let’s see what we can find out about Arlington.”
He walked over to the computer on the kitchen table and sat down as he logged on. The girls perched on the chairs around him. After a few moments, he brought up a map of Virginia and zeroed in on Arlington. There were so many places surrounding it. The eggs could be in any direction.
Tori heard the faint sound of voices in the back of her mind and closed her eyes, concentrating. While Dr. B discussed locations of Arlington labs and hospitals, Tori heard clips of a different conversation.
“ … said hairline cracks are normal in this stage. It’s part of the shell’s stretching and thinning process, and I, of course, should know that.”
“Yeah, but if you hadn’t woken him, he would have yelled at us in the morning for not reporting it.”
The voices grew quieter. The men must be walking away from the eggs. “Next time some issue comes up, it’s your turn to wake him. Forget about the dragons; he’s the one who’s most likely to rip someone’s head off.”
And then the voices faded completely and all Tori could hear was the steady sound of a heartbeat. She slumped in her chair and opened her eyes. Dr. B, Shirley, Bess, and Rosa all stared at her.
“Are the men talking again?” Dr. B asked.
“They finished checking the eggs and left. But they said they’re not going to Arlington. The crack is a normal part of the shell’s stretching and thinning.”
“Interesting.” Dr. B picked up a pen and jotted down the sentence on a piece of scratch paper. “That’s not how bird or reptile eggs behave. But I suppose in order to last a hund
red and fifty years, dragon eggshells must be made of sturdier material. Now that the eggs are getting ready to hatch, the shell has to change in order for the dragon to break free.”
Rosa put her chin into her hand. “But none of that will help us find them or defeat them.”
Dr. B sat back in his chair. “I think they’ve given us a clue to help us find and defeat them. Don’t you, Bess? Tori?”
Tori glanced over at Bess to see if she had any insight into what Dr. B was talking about, but Bess’s expression was as blank as her own.
“We know the eggs are somewhere near Arlington,” Bess said.
Dr. B waved a hand over Tori’s notes. “What sticks out to you in all of this?”
“They took an egg out before and had some sort of problem,” Rosa said.
Dr. B nodded. “What else?”
“The men don’t like Brant Overdrake,” Bess offered.
“Tori?” Dr. B asked.
She had no idea what he was getting at. She could only lift her shoulders and let them fall.
Shirley didn’t offer any opinions and Dr. B didn’t ask her. He kept his gaze on the girls and tapped his pen against Tori’s paper. “You need to learn how to analyze this sort of thing. I might not always be around to tell you the answers.” He pointed to the phrase “king of the cathedral.”
“You don’t see anything odd about this?”
The three girls studied the paper. “It should say ‘king of the castle,’” Rosa said. “Cathedrals don’t have kings, they have priests.”
Tori turned the memory over in her mind. “He said ‘cathedral.’ I didn’t write it down wrong.”
Dr. B held up a hand, a teacher again, guiding the discussion. “Let’s assume he said ‘cathedral’; what does that mean?”