Slayers

by C. J. Hill

  “That his men aren’t very good with their metaphors?” Bess said.

  “That the eggs are actually in a cathedral?” Rosa added. “Are there any cathedrals around Arlington?”

  Dr. B pointed to the map on his computer. “You tell me.”

  The girls leaned closer to the screen. Bess said, “Is there a key that tells you landmarks like churches?”

  Tori didn’t need one. She saw what Dr. B was talking about: a city called Winchester. There was also a famous cathedral by that name. “Winchester Cathedral,” she said. “That’s in England, though, not Virginia.”

  “Yes,” he said. “But let’s say you built a very large structure in the city of Winchester. What would you nickname it?”

  “So you think that’s where they are?” Bess said. “Winchester?” She zoomed in on the map until it showed the streets of Winchester. “How will we know where?”

  “I’ll look at some of the larger structures on the aerial view, maybe take a trip, see what I can turn up.” Dr. B ran a hand through his silver hair. “Apparently we have time. The eggs aren’t going anywhere, and they’re not ready to hatch—although whether we have weeks, months, or years left, I don’t know. But the sooner we find them, the better chance we’ll have of destroying them.”

  For one quick moment, Tori was pierced with regret. Rosa’s words came back to her: It’s a shame we have to destroy the dragons … people have been fascinated with them for so long.

  She thought of them living on a remote island for generations far away from people. “Are they completely evil?” Tori asked. “If we took them away from Overdrake, could they … ?” She didn’t finish the sentence. She was a Slayer. She knew the answer.

  Dr. B didn’t roll his eyes the way Bess was. “Are they completely evil?” he repeated as though she was a student who’d asked a theoretical question. “I’m not sure the dragons have the cognizance for that, but I believe what you’re really asking is: Could they ever be used for good?”

  She nodded, realizing only as he said it that that was exactly what she’d meant.

  “Dragons are a wild force like the fire they breathe,” he said. “For something to be good, it must be controlled, kept within boundaries. Fire, electricity, and water are like that, too. And if you think about it, so are power and love and procreation. So is society, I suppose.” He gestured to the girls, then back at himself. “We have no way to control dragons. Perhaps the dragon lords were fools to ever try—mixing their minds with something so large and dangerous. They might have had good intentions originally, but it was inevitable that eventually a dragon lord would use the dragons as weapons. It was a Pandora’s box that never should have been opened. And it’s our job to close it. Permanently.”

  He pulled his attention away from the computer and looked at Tori. “Perhaps you’ll hear more later. But it’s been a long day and right now, I think the best thing you can do is get some sleep. You’ll be less effective if you’re tired.”

  The girls said their good-byes and walked to the door. Shirley gave Bess a hug, then for good measure hugged Rosa and Tori, too. As Dr. B saw them out, he said, “I’m glad you’ve joined us, Tori. Don’t ever think one person can’t make a difference. You see the difference you’ve already made?”

  “Thanks,” she said. She hoped he was right.

  At 7:00 a.m. Tori jolted awake. She was out of bed, her blankets tangled around her feet, before she even opened her eyes. She stepped, tripped, and hit the ground with a slam that should have hurt worse than it did.

  Lilly and Alyssa both laughed. Rosa helped her up.

  Bess tossed her a glance while grabbing clothes from her dresser. “You get used to it after a few days.”

  Ten minutes later, Kody came and got them for the morning run. Dirk and Jesse were gone. Dr. B had woken them up early and taken them with him to Winchester. Kody and Shang had no idea why, so while they jogged, Bess filled them in on what had happened during the night. Both guys looked at Tori first with surprise and then respect. Kody laughed and said, “Maybe the odds just turned in our favor.”

  Shang effortlessly kept pace beside Tori. “Have you heard anything else?”

  “Nope. Just my new sound track: the creepy dragon heart.” It was a constant thud of background noise in her mind, sort of like Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” come to life.

  After breakfast, the group split into twos and went through their rotations. Bess and Tori rode motorcycles through some back trails Booker had set up. Tori zipped around the trees, with only minimal urging on Bess’s part that she needed to go faster. When they finished with that, Tori took Bane through the show-jumping range, where he cleared the fences with such grace that Tori told him he should have been named Pegasus. Bane whinnied in agreement.

  Then Tori did more target practice. Her accuracy with both arrow and gun improved. She wished Jesse was around to see it, but the morning came and went, and he still hadn’t returned.

  CHAPTER 26

  As the car neared its destination, Dirk slipped on his sunglasses and put on a baseball cap. Even though he wasn’t cold, he wore a loose-fitting jacket. This was because Dr. B had insisted that he and Jesse disguise themselves. Dr. B had not only put a temporary brown dye in his own hair, he wore a false beard, a mustache, and his contacts. He kept blinking because they irritated his eyes. All in all, he looked like a cross between a hippie and young Santa Claus who was also squinting in a dust storm.

  Dirk didn’t like the change. There was something comforting about Dr. B’s silver hair and scholarly glasses. Something that made you feel he would always take the time to listen to you and consider what you said. Or maybe it wasn’t the hair and glasses. Dr. B was just that way.

  He stopped the car on a lookout at the side of the road and he, Jesse, and Dirk climbed out. Dirk got out last. He wouldn’t admit it to the others, but his stomach had remained clenched since Dr. B announced they were making this field trip. It was one thing to train and to practice battle games for some distant time in the future; it was another thing to step out into the real world and see those plans through.

  Dr. B regarded Jesse and Dirk. “Do you feel any extra strength now that we’re close to the building?”

  Dirk shook his head. Jesse paused as though hoping he did, then shook his head, as well.

  Dr. B took his camera out of a case. “I guess that’s to be expected. The building must have some way to prevent the dragon’s signal from leaking out. Overdrake wouldn’t want that signal coming in contact with any pregnant women who drove by.” Dr. B attached a huge telephoto lens to the camera, then looked through the viewfinder, clicking pictures of the property.

  They’d also brought two pairs of high-powered binoculars. Jesse put a pair to his eyes. Dirk reluctantly looked through his, as well.

  He saw a mile-long cow pasture complete with a barn, a house, and a ridiculously large building, which, according to city records, had been zoned for an office building, but was obviously not an office building. No one put a huge, windowless office building in the middle of a cow pasture.

  “Cows to feed to the dragon,” Jesse said, and then added, “They wouldn’t be grazing so calmly if they knew.”

  Dirk watched a Holstein standing idly in the grass. “I doubt it matters to them whether they’re eaten by people or dragons.”

  “Do you see the razor wire on top of the fence?” Dr. B asked. “They definitely don’t want visitors. How high do you suppose the fence is?”

  The Slayers were all good at estimating heights. It came from jumping over things every summer. More specifically, from daring one another to jump over tall things.

  Jesse said, “If the cows standing by it are normal size, I’d say twelve feet.”

  A good guess. Dirk was about to say the same thing.

  Dr. B frowned at this number. Most of the Slayers could only leap nine or ten feet. Rosa, who was shorter than the other girls, could only clear eight. Dirk could clear nearly fiftee
n feet, and Jesse—well, it was hard to tell with him where leaping ended and flying began.

  Dr. B moved a bit farther down the road, still clicking pictures. Dirk homed in on the gate and the guard stall that stood there. Instead of paying attention to any of the computer screens around him, the guard’s gaze was focused on his laptop. He was probably playing Tetris or something. A pair of binoculars hung unused from his neck. Way to do your job, Dirk thought. You have three people scoping out your facility right now.

  Dr. B pointed out details about the property as his shutter snapped away. Jesse joined in, counting the light posts, noting where the trees were positioned. They were both so excited about this discovery. Dirk barely tried to mask the fact that he wasn’t.

  This wasn’t going to end well. It couldn’t, and Dr. B and Jesse should both realize that. The Slayers had done a lot of battle simulation over the years and in nearly every round someone had gotten killed. Did Dr. B and Jesse think it would be any different in real life?

  It was inevitable that the Slayers would come face-to-face with the dragon lord eventually. Dirk knew that; he did. Every time he came to camp that knowledge pressed into him as insistently as the smell of oak leaves and campfire smoke. But he wasn’t going to be happy about it.

  He surveyed the length of the property again, and tried to push away calculations, estimates, thoughts about who or how many wouldn’t return to camp after a mission out here.

  Dr. B moved farther down the street to get pictures at a different angle. He signaled Dirk to keep a lookout.

  Dirk nodded and focused on the stall again. The man was still glued to his laptop.

  From beside him, Jesse whispered the question Dirk had been avoiding. “Are you picking up a strong connection?”

  Dirk didn’t want to answer. He kept his binoculars trained on the stall. “The guard has a bulge in his jacket. He’s armed. And did you notice that guy trolling around the property on a Segway? That’s not a shovel he’s carrying. It’s a rifle.”

  “There’s nothing here our teams can’t handle,” Jesse said. “We’re trained.”

  “Tori isn’t.”

  “Agreed. Tori stays at camp.”

  Good. One less person to worry about. He didn’t like the idea of her getting mixed up with the dragon lord’s crew. She was too new to all of this.

  For a moment her face flashed through Dirk’s mind: her large green eyes, honey brown hair, and flawless skin. Everything he’d thought about her had changed last night. Not only because she’d stuck it out at camp, but because she might be his counterpart after all.

  He wasn’t sure whether to hope for or against the possibility. He also wasn’t sure he wanted her to get near enough to figure it out. It would change things to have someone around who could tell things about him, who could maybe even slip into his mind.

  Dirk had watched counterparts interact for years, but still didn’t know the extent of their connection. They claimed they couldn’t read each other’s thoughts, but he’d seen evidence otherwise. The way Shang always knew who Lilly’s crush would be each summer, practically before he unpacked his bags. Danielle had sometimes finished sentences for Kody. Leo and Bess used to laugh together when nothing seemed funny to the rest of them. And in the tackle hide-and-seek game, the counterparts had to be seekers at the same time, because they could always find each other.

  Would that be Tori and him now? She couldn’t be more his opposite. She acted like she’d rather be a fashion model than a fighter. And her father was a senator.

  Still, he couldn’t avoid Tori for the next month. Sooner or later—probably sooner—they’d find out for certain if they were counterparts.

  Being able to hear what the unborn dragons heard was such an odd talent. It seemed so pointless, and yet it had brought them here, to this lookout, to all sorts of danger. And this was only Tori’s third day of camp. What would happen once she’d figured out how to use all her powers?

  Dirk let out a sigh. His father was right. Women complicated everything.

  Dirk pushed away thoughts of Tori from his mind. He couldn’t let her influence his decisions. Not her, not his friends, not the urgent desire he had to keep them safe—none of that could have sway over him. How many times had Dr. B told him that when it came to a battle, you had to make your decisions objectively?

  Dr. B walked back over to Dirk, the camera held loosely in his hands. “If this is Overdrake’s compound, it explains why you’ve always been able to connect to the dragons so easily. It’s only a few miles away from where you live.”

  “Yep, that would explain it,” Dirk said slowly.

  Dr. B came closer, keeping his voice low. “We can draw all sorts of conclusions about this place, but Dirk, you’re our litmus test. Do you feel a strong connection coming from this place?”

  What he felt was an end to all their summers together. It was a pain so strong he could barely speak. Still, he nodded and got out, “The dragons are here.”

  CHAPTER 27

  While Tori ate lunch, she heard noises near the dragon eggs—not voices or sounds she could distinguish, just muffled, scraping sounds. What could the eggs be doing? Rolling over? The scraping sounds ended, replaced by a soft humming. The noise seemed vaguely familiar, like she ought to recognize it.

  She listened until she grew frustrated. She couldn’t pinpoint the sound. Besides, Tori had only understood what she’d been hearing for half a day. She had no idea what constituted normal dragon egg sounds. The hum was probably air-conditioning or something.

  After lunch she joined the others in fighting the mechanical dragon. Shang showed her around and gave her weapons: a wooden sword, a rifle that shot plastic pellets, and a compound bow that shot arrows with suction cups on the end. “Be careful shooting,” he told her as he motioned to silhouettes of people painted on the walls. “If you inadvertently kill a pedestrian, it’s minus a hundred points. If you kill another Slayer, your team loses two hundred.”

  Well, it was nice to know her life had value.

  Shang pointed out the office in the upper corner of the building that housed the mechanical dragon’s control center. Then he took her to meet Theo, who ran the controls and was also in charge of all technology-related aspects of camp. He wasn’t a Slayer, but was still some sort of techno genius that Dr. B had recruited when he opened camp.

  Theo barely looked college-age. He had uncombed brown hair, a nose that looked like it had wandered off of a larger face, and skin so pasty white she wondered if he ever went outside.

  “Hey,” he said when Shang introduced Tori. “Welcome, new dragon chick. Good luck on your first encounter with the dark side.” He laughed as though he was trying to scare little kids on Halloween. “You’d better keep an eye on Bertie, because she’ll keep an eye on you.”

  “Bertie?” Tori asked. “You named the dragon?”

  “Had to call her something so I named her after Albert Einstein. You know, because she’s so wicked cool.”

  Theo laughed and put his hands in his pockets. Even his arms were skinny. Or maybe they just looked skinny because she was used to the guys in cabin 26. “Bertie’s got a new hydraulic system this year. It’s totally sweet. I swear, one of these times, I’m going to have Dr. B run the controls, and I’ll sit on Bertie’s back and be the dragon lord. That would be awesome.”

  “Oh,” she said, because she didn’t know how else to react. He acted like this was fun, like it was some glorified game.

  “Well, gotta go to the control room. It’s party time.” He waggled his eyebrows at her, then turned and ambled up the two-story metal staircase at the end of the building. A few minutes later his face appeared in the window of the control room. The dragon hummed to life, and foot-long beams on the end of its legs twirled menacingly. As it turned, two glowing, yellow eye sockets peered across the room. A white diamond sat on the dragon’s forehead, reminding her of a star marking on a horse.

  Team Magnus spread out along one wall. The A-team spre
ad out against the opposite wall. Without warning, the dragon swung across the room at high speed. A spray of fire shot from its mouth, leaving a searing streak of smoke. It looked too strong for practice, and Tori wondered if Theo was taking advantage of Dr. B’s absence and amping up the flames.

  Kody let out a wallop, ran forward with his rifle drawn, and shot the dragon. The bullet made a soft ping as it hit against the dragon’s chest. With a metallic grind, the dragon flipped in the air and turned to face him. Kody ran sideways, then jumped into the wall so he could push off from it, narrowly avoiding a burst of flames. “Lilly!” he yelled, “Wake up!”

  “Sorry!” She ran around the side of the dragon so she faced it. “I’m getting in position.”

  “Leo’s not here, and Shang can’t be everywhere, so pay attention!” Kody called back. It was the sharpest tone Tori had ever heard him use.

  Bess shot an arrow into the dragon’s neck. The dragon turned on her, swooping downward with a screech as she sprinted out of the way. Shang came up from behind the dragon, trying to get underneath it, but had to leap away before the dragon’s swinging tail bludgeoned him.

  For the first few minutes of the game, Tori mostly stayed out of the way and watched. Her sword slapped into her leg, unused, but it was easy enough to hit the dragon using her bow or gun. She learned quickly, however, that shooting the dragon didn’t do any damage. The dragon’s attention just turned to whoever shot it, then lunged toward them at an alarmingly fast rate. So Tori shot the dragon only when it charged someone on her team, and then she made sure she could leap out of the way before it got her.

  Every few seconds the dragon blasted out fi fteen-foot-long streams of fire. Shang and Lilly generally managed to quench these before they reached anyone. The two tried to stay on opposite ends of the dragon so that one of them could always see its mouth. A few times it swiveled so quickly they didn’t have time to position themselves, and then Bess would throw up a shield to protect the others. The Slayers were good at protecting themselves from fire. They had to be, otherwise being in the same room as this mechanical dragon would have been insane.