Slayers: Friends and Traitors

by C. J. Hill

  When they reached Monticello, New York, it was midnight. Dr. B found an all-night convenience store and bought a few cell phones and food for the group. While Jesse called Booker to report their location, Dr. B made another anonymous call to the police about the large violent creature up on the mountainside. He had a slightly better idea where the group had been, but his directions were still sketchy at best. They had no idea how many miles they’d traveled or the exact direction they’d been.

  After he finished his call, Dr. B turned to the clerk. “Are there any car rentals open this late in town?”

  The clerk shook his head. He was an older man, with a few days’ worth of stubble on his chin. He hadn’t stopped eyeing the Slayers the entire time they’d been in the store.

  Dr. B ran his fingers through his hair wearily. He was silent for a moment, then said, “Do you know anyone with a van for sale?”

  “Nope,” the clerk said. Since Jesse’s clothes had been burned completely through in places, Kody had given him his Kevlar jacket and pants. The clerk noticed that Jesse’s boots had melted parts and Willow’s and Tori’s pants were burned at the bottom. “Are you some sort of motorcycle gang?”

  “Junior firefighters from Scranton,” Dr. B replied without hesitation. “We were doing drills up in the mountains and our truck had problems. Listen,” Dr. B, scratched his ear absentmindedly. “I’ve called someone from the fleet, but it will take a while for them to arrive. I need to get these kids home.”

  Tori was pretty sure firefighters didn’t come in fleets like ships. It wasn’t the sort of mistake Dr. B generally made. The clerk didn’t seem to notice the slip.

  Dr. B turned so he could look out the glass door onto the parking lot. “Is that white pickup yours?”

  “I can’t take you nowhere,” the clerk said. “I’ve gotta watch the store.”

  “Could it drive a few hundred miles without a problem?” Dr. B asked.

  The man leaned against the counter. “Are you looking to buy it?”

  “If it works,” Dr. B said.

  “She works like a dream. That’s why I couldn’t let her go for under ten thousand. You got that kind of money on you?”

  Dr. B pulled out his wallet. “I do if you’ll take a credit card.”

  The transaction took a few minutes. The clerk, it turned out, was also the convenience store owner and he was more than happy to take Dr. B’s card once he knew the charge would go through.

  Then the Slayers all walked out to the parking lot. The truck didn’t seem like it was worth five thousand, let alone ten, and Tori didn’t look forward to a long drive home where they were all huddled, without seat belts, in the truck bed.

  Dr. B handed the key to Jesse. “I want you to drive Tori back to McLean. She needs to get home. I’ll walk with the others down to that motel.” He pointed a little ways down the street where a vacancy sign glowed. “We’ll get some sleep while we wait for Booker to pick us up.”

  “All right,” Jesse said, and without another word, he opened the truck door and slid behind the wheel. He put the keys in the ignition and waited for Tori to get inside.

  “Jesse can stay with the others and go to sleep,” Tori said. “I can drive myself.” Dr. B had bought the clerk’s GPS, too. She might not be able to navigate through D.C., but she could follow directions.

  Dr. B handed Jesse some protein bars and a couple of bottled waters for the trip. “It’s a five-and-a-half-hour drive and it’s already late. I’ll feel better knowing the two of you are helping keep each other awake. Besides…” He motioned for her to go to the passenger side. “You can discuss captain things on the way home. I’m sure Jesse has a lot of information he can pass on to you in that regard. We’ve got two new Slayers to train.”

  On the walk to town, Dr. B had already told Ryker and Willow that they would live with his family for a while, so Tori doubted they needed much personal training from her. She walked around the side of the truck, opened the door, then with a sigh turned back to Dr. B. It wouldn’t do any good to keep putting this off. She needed to think of a way to make him understand.

  Granted, she had acted like a captain during the first part of the battle. She’d tried. But by the end of the battle she’d acted like a dragon lord. That wasn’t the sort of captain A-team needed.

  The other Slayers were already heading down the street. Bess said something and they all laughed. Ryker and Willow seemed to have blended into the group effortlessly. Tori used to belong with them. Still wanted to. But she wouldn’t now, not really. She supposed the only way to make Dr. B understand was to tell him the truth, flat out. “Lilly was right about me,” Tori said. “I’m part dragon lord. I went into the dragon’s mind tonight.”

  Dr. B’s eyes widened. “Could you control it?”

  “Well, no. I never said I was a good dragon lord. Overdrake had control of Kihawahine the whole time.”

  “Kihawahine?” Jesse repeated, staring at Tori in a sort of horrified disbelief.

  “That was her name. Oh, I also got the impression that she’s laid more than one clutch of eggs. I don’t know if they’ve all hatched yet.” Tori sunk down onto the passenger seat. “I can’t be A-team’s captain. If the others knew what I was, they wouldn’t even trust me, let alone follow my orders. They’d be afraid I was going to turn on them and join Dirk.” She didn’t add Like he’s already asked me to do. But maybe it was there in her voice anyway.

  With one hand planted on the truck roof, Dr. B considered her. His voice was soft, coaxing. “Are you going to join Dirk?”

  “No.” She looked down at her hands. The black gloves made them seem foreign, like they were somebody else’s hands, not hers.

  Jesse watched her and his eyes narrowed. “There’s something else, isn’t there? What aren’t you telling us?”

  For someone who wasn’t her counterpart, he could read her pretty well. She shut her eyes, didn’t answer.

  “Tori?” Dr. B prodded.

  She looked at her hands again. It was probably better to let them know everything. “After the dragon’s bulletproof shield came off, she turned and for a moment I had a shot at her, but I didn’t take it. I hesitated. I couldn’t kill her. That hesitation nearly cost me my life. Next time it might cost someone else’s. The problem is, I can’t say I’ll act any different the next time. Even though Kihawahine nearly killed me, I keep thinking about what a shame it is that she had to die. If Overdrake hadn’t been controlling her…” Tori didn’t finish the sentence. If Overdrake hadn’t been controlling Kihawahine, she still would have wanted to eat one of us. She just wouldn’t have been greedy about it and killed all of us.

  That wasn’t the sort of sentence that would reassure anyone about Tori’s loyalties, and it was probably a sign of craziness that the thought had even popped into her mind. “What if I’m genetically programmed to protect dragons instead of slay them? What if in the end, I can’t even fight them?”

  Dr. B leaned closer to her. His gaze bore down on her. “No matter what your genetics are, you have the power to choose your actions. That’s true for being a Slayer as well as a dragon lord. I have faith in you.”

  He’d had faith in Dirk, too.

  Jesse sighed. She thought it was in disappointment until he said, “So you have some built-in compassion for dragons. I can live with that as long as you’re still fighting on our side.”

  “I’ll fight on your side,” she said. “But I can’t be a captain.”

  Dr. B straightened. He put his hand against the small of his back, rubbing at some discomfort there. “We’ll talk more about this later. You need to be on your way.” Before he turned away, he added, “Tori, both times we fought dragons, you were instrumental in killing them. I trust you to do the right thing.” He waved good-bye and then headed off across the parking lot toward the other Slayers.

  Jesse started up the truck and drove onto the street.

  Dr. B might trust her, Tori thought warily, but she knew herself better, and she
didn’t trust herself at all.

  CHAPTER 41

  Tori stole glances at Jesse while he drove. He was looking straight ahead. Neither of them spoke. The silence felt heavy, awkward. This was the first time she and Jesse had been alone since he saw Dirk holding her hand at the Jefferson Memorial. No, that wasn’t right—she and Jesse had been alone after he had peeled her off the angel statue. But that didn’t really count since she’d cried the whole way to the van. It was hard to talk to your ex-boyfriend about your relationship when you were sobbing over another guy.

  This was the first time she and Jesse would be talking about everything that had happened, and they had five and a half long hours to do it.

  Tori stared at the protein bars in between them. She offered one to Jesse.

  He shook his head. “Later. When I’m tired.”

  She already felt tired. Well, not sleepy, just exhausted. She fingered one of the bars. She didn’t want to be the one that brought up the subject of their breakup. All she could think to say on the subject was, why didn’t you care more about me? Why couldn’t you have wanted to be with me as much as Dirk did? That wasn’t a question she could ever ask. She didn’t know if it was the truth. Had Dirk wanted to be with her or had that just been part of his deceit?

  At a red light, Jesse ran his fingers over the radio buttons, figuring them out. “Do you want to listen to music?”

  “I’m always listening to music.”

  He dropped his hand away. “Oh, right.”

  “You can listen to something if you want. I block out Overdrake’s music pretty well.”

  Jesse turned on the radio and flipped through a few stations until he found one he liked. “Is Overdrake still playing Bee Gees greatest hits?”

  “No. When camp ended, the music changed. Sometimes it’s even songs I like now.” She realized as she said this what had happened. Dirk had taken her iPod at camp once. He claimed you could tell a person’s IQ from their playlists and he wanted to see how she scored. He gave her a rundown of her music, adding points for songs he liked and subtracting for ones he didn’t.

  Dirk had been the one who had changed Overdrake’s music selection. The songs Tori liked usually came on in the evening when she was relaxing and getting ready for bed.

  This piece of kindness unsettled her. Had Dirk’s father known about that?

  Tori kept fingering her protein bar absently. “If you could have killed Overdrake tonight, would you have done it?”

  “Yes,” Jesse said. He didn’t have to give reasons why. She already knew them: averting war, saving lives, protecting their families. “Wouldn’t you?”

  She didn’t answer. “Dirk warned us of the attack. If he hadn’t, we wouldn’t have made it out of the plane before the dragon reached us. He saved our lives, and in return we could have killed his father.”

  This was the real reason she’d told Ryker and Jesse not to go after Overdrake. How would Dirk have lived with himself if his warning had caused his father’s death?

  It was another action on her part that hadn’t been logic based, hadn’t been captain-ish—hadn’t even been Slayer-ish.

  Jesse raised an incredulous eyebrow at her. “Overdrake attacked us. With a dragon. And an assault rifle. He was trying to kill all of us.”

  “I know,” Tori said. “But I also know he has a seven-year-old daughter and a pregnant wife. I’ve met them. Bridget is this bouncy little girl with dark brown hair and blue eyes like Dirk’s.”

  “I don’t want to kill anyone,” Jesse said. “But plenty of little girls will lose their fathers when Overdrake attacks.”

  “I know,” Tori said. “It’s just…” She looked out the window at the white lines that pulsed through the highway like the rhythm of a heartbeat.

  “Now you have feelings for Dirk,” Jesse finished with a note of bitterness.

  “He’s my counterpart,” she said. “And he’s Dirk. You can’t tell me that when he left it didn’t affect you, too.”

  Jesse’s gaze swung round to hers. “Oh, it’s affected me. I don’t blame you for crying earlier. If I wasn’t so mad at him, I’d be crying, too.” It all came out then, a torrent of emotion from Jesse. Everything that had built up over the night. The deep cut of betrayal. Accusations. Questions. Disbelief. Sadness. Waves of rage.

  Discussing Dirk got them through most of New York and Pennsylvania. Tori listened, agreed with Jesse, and added questions and thoughts of her own.

  “I didn’t only trust him with my life,” Jesse said, “although I would have done that without even thinking it over first—I trusted him with everybody else’s lives. I don’t know who I’m angrier at about that. Dirk or me.”

  “We all would have trusted him with our lives,” Tori said. “Maybe it’s a good thing you told him Dr. B could track the watches. At least this way we found out the truth about him now, instead of after Overdrake attacked. We’ll have time to change plans, hand signals, and the insignias on our body armor.”

  Jesse’s profile looked stern in the darkness. “It doesn’t feel like a good thing. Dirk was like a brother.”

  “Be glad he wasn’t really. Otherwise you would have been sent to Dragon Camp as a spy, too.”

  “I wouldn’t have done it,” Jesse said.

  Tori envied his assurance. She wanted to say she wouldn’t have done it either, but her talks with Dirk about war had made her question that answer. A soldier’s participation in a fight was usually determined by location, by timing, by pay. How often was it really a matter of conviction? How much of conviction was conviction and how much was other influences?

  Tori reached out and put her hand on Jesse’s knee. “Dirk didn’t completely turn his back on us. He helped us when Overdrake captured us at his enclosure and he helped us tonight, too.”

  Jesse put his hand over Tori’s. He gave it a squeeze and suddenly things felt comfortable between them again, the way they had at camp before Jesse broke up with her.

  “Yeah,” he said, without meaning it, “I’ll thank Dirk for that sometime.” Jesse kept hold of her hand. It was ironic that Dirk had come between them, and now his betrayal was drawing them back to each other, stitching them together with consolation.

  They talked about other things then, normal things, like what classes they were taking in school. Jesse told her quite a bit about Springbrook High, probably because there was no point in hiding it now. He wouldn’t be going there anymore.

  Finally, when the sun was just beginning to lighten everything, Jesse drove through the winding tree-lined streets that led to Tori’s neighborhood. He didn’t say much as he looked at the mansions and their sprawling, manicured lawns. She directed him to her street, then had him park a little ways away from her gate so they could say good-bye before he dropped her off. Once she punched in the gate code, her parents would know she’d come home and would most likely storm out of the house to begin their lectures.

  Jesse turned off the ignition and peered at her home. It was a dark-brick two-story with high-pitched roofs. Her mother had wanted something that looked like a Swiss chalet. The home was so big, it actually looked more like a Swiss skiing lodge.

  “So that’s your house?” Jesse stared at it. “House probably isn’t the right term, is it?”

  “I don’t care where you live,” Tori told him. “You shouldn’t care where I live.”

  “I don’t care.” He turned and looked at the property on the other side of the street. “I just don’t want any butlers to come out and yell at me for loitering in the neighborhood.”

  “No one has butlers. They’re called personal assistants now. And besides, this truck blends right in with people’s landscaping crews.”

  “Oh…” Jesse was still gazing around as though the neighborhood were some sort of house museum. In another moment he would leave and then she wouldn’t see him until next summer. Or until the next crisis.

  She took hold of his hand again, casually intertwining her fingers into his the way they’d been
for a lot of the drive. “About us…”

  That brought his attention back to her. He turned in his seat so that he faced her. “Yeah, we should talk about that.” He ran his thumb across the back of her hand. It was funny how such a little motion could make her insides tingle. “You said you and Dirk weren’t ever a couple? You were…?”

  “Friends,” she said. “Who texted and called a lot.”

  Jesse relaxed. “You didn’t ever kiss each other?”

  “Well, we kissed when I saw him in September.”

  Jesse considered this. “But it was just a friendly kiss.”

  “Um…”

  Jesse’s thumb stopped caressing the back of her hand. “It was just one kiss, though?”

  Tori shifted uncomfortably. “Define one.”

  Jesse’s eyes didn’t leave hers. “Was it on a well-lit doorstep, in a semipublic place, with a foot of space in between you?”

  “Actually, it was in his Porsche out on some property his dad owns.”

  Jesse let go of her hand. “You were totally making out with him, weren’t you?”

  “You broke up with me,” she reminded him.

  “And apparently we had different ideas about what that meant.” He gestured to himself. “I was being a thoughtful boyfriend. I wanted you to socialize, casually, with guys from your school—the wimpy ones in pleated pants that I could beat up if necessary. I wanted you to go to the homecoming dance and the prom—not make out with one of my best friends in his car.”

  She folded her arms. “Do you understand what broken up means?”

  Outside, an orange leaf fluttered down onto the windshield. “All right,” Jesse said, “let’s renegotiate those terms. Broken up is out. Instead, let’s say that we’re on a hiatus for the school year, and I don’t want you kissing other guys.”

  Tori’s mouth dropped open. “This isn’t some sort of contract. You can’t just redefine our status. I’m not a book that you can put down, ignore, and then pick up nine months later and expect the story to be the same.”