by Lee French
The dragon put up the claw-fangs again, pointed to itself, then pointed outside. Kaitlin nodded. “Yeah, good idea. You go wait for Stephen, intercept him. I can keep myself clear.” She held out a finger to rub the dragon’s belly, which it liked more than he expected it to. “Sorry I couldn’t save anyone else. I didn’t understand what I was seeing until it was too late.”
Hoping she wouldn’t spend much time beating herself up over that, he patted her knee and took off. She deserved zero blame for any of this. He, on the other hand, needed to have his ass kicked. That trip down to White Sands had to be the way they found the farmhouse. The timing hit too close for coincidence. Maybe someone found the car while Jayce had been banging that park ranger and slipped some…thing… Actually, now that he thought about it, the trunk had popped open randomly when they picked Sam up. Considering their varied abilities, one of them could’ve hit the release while they were all distracted and jumped in or thrown in a tracking device.
The assault on the farm had been his fault. Chicago had been his idea. Afghanistan had been his call. Albuquerque had been his plan. Everyone else suffered for it. Sebastian’s screams echoed in his head again, and some part of his mind helpfully replayed the memory of seeing him hauled away, terrified.
This hiding crap ended now. No matter how it fell out when they got free, there would be no more hiding, no more huddling together for anything other than kinship and camaraderie. He’d stand up and tell the whole world what he could do and how little he cared what they thought about it. The bunch of them would do what they wanted to do, not what other people wanted them to do.
Perched in a tree again, the dragon sat and stared out at the sky, expecting Stephen to come from the southwest. He’d fly in a straight line, and should pass by this point to reach the house. Hopefully, he actually would come back this morning. If they all had to wait a couple of days while he got laid and fed a few times, there might be a problem.
Trying avoid thinking, Bobby dozed and wondered about the condition of his body. Would they try to reason with him, or judge him too dangerous and unreasonable to bother? If he hadn’t managed to get a dragon off, they could’ve set him up to be drugged into unconsciousness for the rest of his life. Finding that depressing, he forced himself to think about something else.
His mind latched onto Will, the one person here whose situation seemed weirder than his own. He could easily imagine how they got Jasmine confused enough to actually believe she was doing the right thing. Now they’d have to convince Will, a guy smart enough to become a genuine veterinarian. Either that, or they’d have to tread a line between threats and action to get him to play along without alienating Jasmine.
That led him to wondering about the others. Arralt seemed to think he’d picked the right side. That girl in his room seemed conflicted about hurting him, so they hadn’t been turned into assassins or monsters. Unlike himself, a tiny voice reminded him. Stephen probably had the right of it: nothing was as simple as he wanted it to be.
With dawn, Bobby saw a dark spot appear in the sky. The dragon leaped into the air to intercept him. Fortunately, Stephen happened to be the one person who, upon being accosted by a single dragon, knew to accept it and start asking simple questions. He looked good, well fed and sated. Bobby caught up with him near the edge of their property. The vampire had already pulled his gloves on and settled his balaclava into place. “One dragon? Bobby, are you in there?” Nod. “Something happened, then.” Nod. “Are you in there because your body is in trouble?” Nod. “Is this all an epic joke you’re helping to play on me as penance for our trip?”
Stunned and stung by the accusation, it took Bobby a few seconds to come up with an answer. The dragon shook its head fervently.
Stephen snorted. “Sure, right. I believe you.” Rolling his eyes as turned to face away from the sun, he continued at full speed to the farmhouse.
Unwilling to give up, the dragon grabbed his coat and clung, chirping madly to get his attention. Dammit, if he could just talk!
“Cut it out, Bobby, seriously. I get they’re all pissed at us, but you’re trying too hard.” He landed in the clearing in front of the house.
Bobby saw a dart thump into the vampire’s chest, a few inches away from the dragon. The dragon trilled out the curses he wanted to shout and he let go to watch Stephen blink stupidly at the dart, drop to his knees, and collapse.
Something wrapped around the dragon, encasing him in a world of distorted light. It pressed close, then it crushed him and everything went black.
Epilogue — Brian
“Damn, I didn’t mean to crunch it.” Brian pulled his hand back. It returned to normal from its liquid state with a smashed dragon in his palm. “I hope that didn’t kill him.”
“Call it in, Ten.” Nine nudged Cant with a boot.
Ten pulled out his phone and made the call. “Alpha Base, this is Alpha Ten, we have Cant.”
Poking the little metal corpse, Brian sighed. “Ask them who the last missing one is, and if Mitchell is okay. I just crunched one of his dragons.”
Ten relayed the questions for him while Nine used zipties to secure Cant. Ending the call, Ten said, “Base reports Mitchell’s vitals are clear. The last one is Kaitlin Tremont, abilities unknown. None of the captures are awake yet to interrogate. Orders are to sweep the house and property one more time, then call for pickup. Here’s a picture. She’s cute.”
Brian rolled his eyes. All the girls were cute, or hot, or had plenty of potential. “I’ll go look through the woods. You guys check the house.”
“Copy that.” Nine dragged Cant into the shade and left him by a tree trunk. “Watch your six.”
“Yeah, you too.” Brian’s entire body liquefied, becoming a mass of water with an outer membrane stronger than steel. Some day, he wanted to understand how what they could all do didn’t violate every law of physics. For now, he sloshed through the trees and shrubs faster than a person could run, his ability to see somehow spread across his entire outer skin. Everything about his superpower was weird, much like Mitchell’s. He really hoped the guy was actually okay, because out of all of them, he really wanted to talk to Mitchell. About being this level of crazy weird, mostly.
Dragons In Flight
Prologue
This moment needed to last, as long as possible. Will couldn’t help but let a few tears free with his arms around Jasmine and face buried in her neck. Even if they were in a helicopter piled with the sedated bodies of everyone he’d come to trust, he had her. Finally, after so long without her, they were together again and he could smell her scent. He had no idea what was going on. That didn’t matter right now.
“Will, you’re squeezing too hard,” Jasmine shouted over the noise of the helicopter.
As little as he wanted to loosen his grip, he did, though he still held her close. “I missed you.” He didn’t really care if she heard it or not, but her ears were sharp, and the way she rubbed her cheek on his told him she probably did.
The ride felt excruciatingly long and unbelievably short at the same time. As soon as it landed, he’d have to let go so she could walk. Also, they’d be able to find quiet and have time to talk. Hopefully. When the helicopter touched down and he was ushered out with Jasmine, the gun pointed at him made that hope seem foolish. Obviously, they wouldn’t want him to ruin whatever they told her to get her to work for them.
Before anyone could rip them apart, Jasmine stopped and wrapped herself around him, kissing him again with joy and lust and longing. It might be the last time he got to do that for a while, so he returned it with everything he had. For a few minutes, he forgot where he was and how he got there and why.
As such things always must, it ended. Someone tapped him on the shoulder. “C’mon, we gotta get you in for a debrief.”
Will stared into Jasmine’s eyes, the part of her he’d been initially attracted to years ago when she brought Walnut the injured wild squirrel into his practice. The rest of her, from mind to toe
, was a delight, and she kept him sane and alive, but her eyes—icy blue and so exotic—made him ask her out the first time. He put a light kiss on the tip of her nose, still oblivious to nearly everything going on around them.
“No, really. Let’s go, loverboy.” The soldier stepped behind Jasmine where Will could see him easily and gave him an unamused, impatient glare.
Granted, that guy had a really big gun, but he had a squirrel-girl. “I’m not going anywhere without her.”
Jasmine smiled up at him brightly and squeezed him. “No, never again. No more being apart.”
The soldier, a square-jawed muscle man, glared at Will, brown eyes hard and unfriendly. “That’s not how this is going to work. Boss says you come alone, so you come alone. Milani can grab a bunk and wait for you.”
Will clenched his jaw. “No, I’m not playing that way. If you want to haul me off at gunpoint, then Jasmine,” he turned his gaze back to her, giving her a look he hoped she would understand, “is going to run for it and you’ll never see her again.” The guy had orders, Will knew that. He didn’t care. “Tell you what, though. If you let it go until morning, I’ll come willingl and, tell them whatever they want to know without a fuss.”
The soldier growled in the back of his throat, eyes narrowed and mouth a thin line. “I’ll see if I can get authorization for that,” he grunted. A gesture got some other soldier to hold a gun on them both and he trotted away.
Jasmine wanted to be hugged more, so he pulled her close again and held her there. He shut his eyes against the sight of people he knew and cared about being carried past unconscious on stretchers. He had no superpowers, unless being a licensed veterinarian counted. What could he possibly hope to do about all of this? If he got a chance to help them, he’d do it. Jasmine could only do so much, too.
“Nope, your offer was refused. Let’s go.” Hands grabbed him and dragged him away.
“Jasmine, run!” Hands grabbed him and dragged him away. He opened his eyes to see Jasmine blinking in shock. “RUN!” He saw her blink one more time, then she shrank down into her squirrel shape and took off faster than the eye could track. The men around him swore. Several fired guns at her. All of them missed.
“I ought to shoot you right now for that.” The soldier pressed the barrel of a pistol to his temple and cocked it. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t.”
Will had never been seriously threatened with a gun before. The feel of the metal on his flesh scrambled his brains with panic. “I warned you,” he whimpered. One thought sustained him: Jasmine got away. If he couldn’t stop hyperventilating, though, it wouldn’t matter much.
“Might as well take me in to be questioned at this point, or duping Jasmine was all for nothing. It isn’t like she won’t know it if you kill me.” Hopefully, that quaver in his voice wouldn’t undermine the message.
The soldier restraining him coughed. “Sergeant, we should just take him in. Those are the orders.”
Sergeant grunted in the back of his throat.
Will squeaked in panic, cringing away from the gun. If he had to die right here, right now, at least he knew Jasmine was safe. Thoughts about how she would manage without him flooded his mind. She’d been fine before he met her, but did so much better with him than without. He imagined her weeping over his grave and consoling herself by binge eating mixed nuts.
An eternity later, the gun left his temple and Sergeant clicked the safety on. “Get him out of here,” he snarled.
“Oh, thank God.” Will sucked in a lungful of air, grateful for whatever made this man not kill him.
“We’ll see how you feel in an hour.”
Chapter 1
He wriggled down a tight, dark, slimy tunnel with squishy sides. It meant he couldn’t go as fast as he wanted and couldn’t fly. That mattered because he was a dragon, and dragons had wings. It wasn’t important, though, because he had a mission, and he’d be there soon. Another few steps and he reached it.
Blowing fire at the tunnel floor made it weak and he punched his sharp claws and face through it, then launched himself forward. More fire made the gunk he found shrivel up. Soon, he punched out into open air and could finally fly.
He turned to see what he’d ripped his way out of to find a flat chest with a faded red shirt covering it, the gory hole spraying blood up at him. The girl had dusky skin and big brown eyes, wide with shock. She couldn’t be more than five years old and clutched a fuzzy brown bear in one hand. Her hair was swept up out of her face in twin pigtails.
While he watched impassively, she fell to the ground in slow motion, reaching out her hand to touch him. Her eyes went rigid and glassy, yet they still stared at him with silent damnation. “Why did you kill me?” Her mouth didn’t move; the words came out of nowhere.
“I don’t know.” Bobby’s voice was cold, wrong. “I just did.”
“I died for nothing?”
“Yeah.” He looked around and saw more of his dragons bursting out of the chests of more children. They surrounded him, a circle of babies and toddlers and kids. All of their dead eyes stared at him and he felt nothing. The dragons came together, burning the blood and gore off each others’ bodies. These were just foreign kids, they didn’t matter.
One little white boy stood in the middle of all the carnage, looking around with his icy blue eyes. “What happened?”
Bobby the dragon flew toward Sebastian. The boy didn’t need to see this kind of thing. Before he could reach the spot, Lily stepped out of nowhere and grabbed Sebastian up. “Stay away from us, Bobby.” That hate-filled glare, he knew it too well.
“Wait, it was an accident!”
“Everything is always an accident or a mistake with you, Bobby. We won’t be your next mistakes.”
“Come on, hurry up and wake up.” The voice didn’t fit her this time. It belonged to someone male that he vaguely recognized. All of a sudden, a bright light flared in his face and something patted his cheek.
He tried to pull his claws up or turn his neck. Everything refused to obey him. “What in heckbiscuits?” His speech came out slurred, sounding like himself. No more of that cold, flat stuff.
“We don’t have time for this. They said you have some kind of super-metabolism.”
Bobby groaned and blinked repeatedly. Though he tried to roll to his side, something held him in place. In reaction to that, he struggled to get free, to no avail.
“Quit it. You’re tied down. All I want is answers.”
“Turn down the lights or something. I can’t see nothing.”
Something got between him and the source of the light. He blinked a few more times to see icy blue eyes looking down at him. Two pairs. Both belonged to men about the same age as him, so nineteen or maybe a year or two older. One was taller than the other and in better shape, and he had short, light brown hair in a messy-on-purpose sort of style. The other one had shorter red hair and lots of freckles. Brown Hair looked angry, specifically at Bobby. “Where’s Elena?”
Bobby wished he could rub his eyes. Instead, he kept blinking. “Who? I don’t know no Elena.”
“Don’t lie.” Brown Hair turned to Redhead. “Is he lying?”
“I have no idea.” Redhead shrugged. “I told you I couldn’t read him.”
He didn’t understand any of this. They were talking gibberish or something. “Read me? What in heckbiscuits is that s’posed to mean? I ain’t lying, I ain’t never met no—” He frowned. Actually, now he thought about it, that name did sound familiar. Sort of. “Wait. She about five and a half feet tall, long hair, nice rack, don’t speak no English, Mexican looking?”
Brown Hair’s nostrils flared with annoyance and his eyes narrowed. “Spanish. She’s from Spain. And yes, that’s her. It’s nice to know you can’t be bothered to remember names. Now, what have you done with her?”
“Whoa, wait a minute.” If he could put up his hands to ward the guy off, Bobby would. “I ain’t done nothing to, with, over or under her. I met her is all.” This d
idn’t make any sense. “Why don’t you just ask your buddy Privek? He knows where she is.”
“I don’t think he’s lying,” Redhead said. “It’s hard to tell, but I don’t think he’s lying.”
Brown Hair reached up and ran a hand through that messy hair in frustration. He paced out of and back into Bobby’s sight. “He said you took her, you and Cant.”
“Stephen didn’t do…well, it weren’t like he—” Bobby frowned and struggled fruitlessly against his bindings again. He couldn’t lie there and not want to be free. “What I mean is, we didn’t grab her or nothing. She was working for Privek when we met her.”
“What?” Brown Hair hurried back to Bobby’s side and looked down at him with a face full of disbelief. “What do you mean? Why would she be working for him?”
“That there’s a question I’d like to ask you, turns out. On account ain’t nothing good never happened around him.”
Redhead frowned down at Bobby. “You’re not getting out, the drug is still in your system and the bindings are secure. But, more importantly, I’m a telepath. If Privek was jerking us around, I’d know.”
A telepath? Bobby stopped squirming and looked up at Redhead. He knew what that meant, the guy could rifle through a body’s head and read everything there. “He had a guy killed and framed me for it. He had me trussed up in a lab and experimented on. He had me shot, he sent goons after me, he’s been abducting everybody like us, across the country, and you think he’s an okay guy? Where in heckbiscuits your head get shoved up?”
“Hang on,” Brown Hair said.
Bobby cut him off. He knew getting cranky didn’t help anything from his perspective, but he was the one tied up on the damned slab. “Look, either you’re gonna let me go and we’re gonna figure this stuff out together, or you’re gonna throw me back under whatever rock I done got shoved. Make up your damned mind and get to it already.”
“Fat chance,” Brown Hair snorted. “We’ve seen what you can do. We’d have to be stupid to just let you go.”