Dragon's Teeth

by Mercedes Lackey

  On the other hand . . . he looked up at the top of the wall. If he could get up there, and didn’t get slashed up on whatever was up there . . . .

  He prowled around the outside until he found a section in shadow. The wall itself was no challenge for a lad who had been scampering about the Highlands most of his life. It was the glass and added razor-wire atop it that made it a challenge, and if he got too cut up, he’d bleed, and a trail of blood was not invisible.

  Finally he balanced precariously atop the support and peered at the roof of the building itself. This was going to be very tricky—because he couldn’t teleport himself and stay invisible at the same time.

  Oh, oh, let there be no lads with sharp eyes at those windows.

  He waited until the dog and handler were out of sight. Waited until everything seemed quiet. Fixed his eyes on a shadowed nook where the chimney met the slippery slate roof, took a deep breath and—

  —found himself sliding momentarily down the slates until he lodged against the chimney, cast frantically about himself to make sure he hadn’t been seen, made the little twist of his mind that made him invisible again and—

  —clung to the tiles and tried to catch his breath. No turning back now.

  It took careful climbing and hunting, spread-eagled on the roof-pitch, to find the entrance to the roof that he knew must be there. A building like this one, with over a dozen chimney-pots and three or four times as many fireplaces would have needed the attentions of a chimney sweep regularly, and people who put walls with glass atop them around their buildings did not want sweeps leaning ladders against their walls, so there had to be a roof access. By now, of course, the fireplaces were disused and probably boarded up, but the roof access was still there.

  He paused and listened with every fiber, but heard nothing. Cautiously, he tried the hatch.

  It was locked, but he could tell it was a simple slip-catch. A bit of knife-work, and it wasn’t locked anymore. It opened up on complete blackness. There was no way of telling if the attic was clear or crammed with rubbish, or full of snoring soldiers.

  Well maybe not the latter, not unless they could sleep without breathing. He glanced up; he didn’t dare risk a match. Not with the air above full of the drone of planes.

  Breathing a prayer, he lowered himself down until he was hanging on by his fingertips, then let go.

  It was just about a four-foot drop; he hit as “softly” as he could, and remained crouched in place, frozen, listening. Had anyone heard him? Was anyone coming?

  Nothing. Feeling his way inch by inch, he moved away from the open hatch and took a chance with a match.

  Except for some crates piled up in half the attic, the low-ceilinged room was empty. And there was another hatch in the floor. He let the match burn almost down to his fingers, memorizing the room, then blew it out.

  Once again, he listened with everything he had at the hatch, and heard nothing. If luck was with him, this building, now labs, had once been a stately old home, and this hatch gave out into the little rooms that had once been the servants’ quarters. Provided they hadn’t been gutted to make more lab space.

  He raised the hatch open a hair.

  There was light, but it was dim, and seemed to come from some distant point. There was no one he could see immediately. He raised it a little more and took a better look. It looked like the hall of servants’ quarters. They were probably used for storage, being more convenient than the attic. Moving as quickly as he could and still be quiet, he slid through the hatch and let it down.

  Again, he sighed. Now he was safer. The soldiers would notice doors and hatches opening and shutting, but they could not see him, and the dogs were all outside.

  Halfway down the hallway, he heard the tramp of boots on stairs and the sound of voices speaking what he assumed was German. For a moment, he froze—then slipped quickly to the end of the hall and the blacked-out window there. He squeezed himself in next to it as four soldiers, smelling slightly of wine and sausages, clumped their way past him and separated, two to a room. So the guards on duty here were using these rooms as their quarters . . . so much for using the roof as an escape route if he was spotted and pursued.

  Pressing his back to the wall, he inched his way down the stairs to the second floor.

  This one was lit, much better, and he realized that now he had another problem.

  He didn’t know where, exactly, Belle and Yank were being held. Which essentially meant that he was going to have to check every room—wouldn’t he?

  It was a big building. Why, there must be twenty rooms on this floor alone!

  His moment of hesitation was cut through by the sound of a child screaming.

  The sound sent a rush of electricity fueled by fury across his nerves. As the child continued to cry out, screams fading into a pitiful whimpering that was worse than the screams, he raced down the hallway, following his ears. And he was just about to break down the door that the cries led him to when his good sense kicked in, and instead of crashing through it, he placed his hand on the knob and opened it just a crack. Just enough to see inside.

  He saw the back of someone dressed in a surgeon’s gown, as pristine and white as bleach and scrubbing could make such a garment. The man leaned over something or someone, utterly preoccupied, muttering to himself. Silently, Roddy slipped inside, closing and locking the door behind him.

  At this point the contents of the room were in full view. There were four beds here, if you could call something with straps and harnesses like a torture device a “bed.” Only one was occupied, by a frail-looking girl who could not have been more than thirteen or fourteen years old, dark-skinned, black-haired; without thinking twice about it, Roddy knew what she was. A gypsy—one of the Travelers.

  The man turned away from the little table he had been fussing with, and back to the girl strapped down to the bed. There was a wicked sharp scalpel in his hand, and at the sight of it, the girl’s whimpers turned to screams again.

  Less than a second later, the man was on the floor, with his own scalpel sticking out of his eye. He was quite dead. Roddy was no stranger to killing, although this was the first human being he had killed. Then again, anyone that would do what that man had been doing to that poor little girl—her body was a mass of scars, healing wounds, and fresh ones. Even as he fought with the straps to get her undone, one of the fresh wounds began to heal before his eyes. It was pretty clear what had been happening here; the wee thing was a metahuman too, one that could heal herself, and this butcher had been cutting on her, trying to find out how she was doing it.

  Now, she watched him silently, looking remarkably calm for someone who had just been rescued from torture by a man who had been invisible. But when he got her right hand free, the first thing she did was to reach for him, and rest her fingers lightly on his forehead.

  He froze, as a picture formed in his mind, which pretty much confirmed what he had guessed. The Auld Woman had quite a bit to do with the Travelers, or the Romany, as they liked to call themselves. There was a lot of Magic in some of their bloodlines, and when one magician entered the territory of another, it was only polite to come calling, unless you planned on open warfare. And no one in his right mind would go to war against the Auld Woman. So he knew a bit of the lingo, and he struggled to make himself plain. “I didn’t come here to fetch you, but I’ll get you out anyway, lass.”

  Her eyes widened and filled with tears, and another picture came into his mind . . .

  It fair made him sick to his stomach and infused him with an energy he hadn’t known he had. Fired by it, he gathered the girl in his arms and—

  —landed heavily on the painfully clean stone floor of the Auld Woman’s cottage. As he knew she would be, the Auld Woman and her Gathering were convened in their Circle, one small cog in the Great Work going on that was keeping the worst of the German menace from falling on the heads of the evacuation at Dunkirk. And because they were only one small cog, it did no harm for the Auld Woman
to rise from her place, and take the fainting girl out of Roddy’s arms.

  “Her people be dead, I got no time. Take care of her!” he said, the first time he had ever issued an order to the Auld Woman. He barely had time to register her nod before he gathered himself again and—

  —landed back on the corridor, outside the door to the room of horror.

  He made himself invisible again, then knelt where he had landed, exhausted, and unable to move. That was the longest he had ever jumped before. He wasn’t sure he could ever do it again . . . .

  Fortunately, it seemed that the sick bastard that had been torturing the girl was not exactly popular with the rest of his lot. The rest of the floor was empty, and there was not even so much as a single soldier guarding the area. Roddy was left undisturbed while he waited for the weakness to pass.

  And it was while he was kneeling there with his head down that he realized that, no, he was not going to have to hunt through every room in the building to find the American metahumans.

  He was only going to have to look for the room with all the guards on it.

  That room was on the ground floor, and whatever its purpose had been when this was a house, it had been heavily reinforced with a banklike vault door. The purpose of such a thing puzzled Roddy for a moment, as did the symbol on a sign beside the door; a small red dot with five red lightening bolts radiating outwards from it. Whatever it was that the former owners of this place thought needed such protection, it must have been dangerous.

  But not nearly so dangerous—at least to the Nazis—as what was in there now, judging by all the guards.

  But Germans were nothing if not precise. And that very precision made it possible for Roddy, moving slowly and carefully, to ease his way past them and into the room beyond just in time to hear a resonant voice say in heavily accented English—

  “ . . . I think that there is no more need for a mask to hide behind, little white dove—Gott im Himmel! Du bist ein Schwarze!” He jumped back, giving Roddy a clear view of the female captive, her arms and legs encased in what looked like layer upon layer of anchor chains.

  “Watch who you’re calling white, you Ku Klux Klan reject!” spat Dixie Belle, her dark, handsome face contorted with contempt as she looked up at the chiseled features of Eisenfaust. Roddy recognized both of them from photographs, although he was probably the only person outside of the select circle of enlisted metahumans that knew Dixie Belle was not, in fact, the blond-haired, blue-eyed girl on the American recruitment posters. Then again, the ongoing romance she had with Yankee Doodle—assuming there really was a romance and not that it too was a complete fabrication—was illegal in several states. Or so this had been explained to him as the reason why the rescue had to be kept secret.

  “Dieses ist unmoeglich,” the German muttered, the back of his neck going red. Then he straightened. “I was going to offer you the opportunity to join us,” he said, his voice so cold as to freeze the very air in the room. “But—”

  “Oh, don’t I fit in with your Master Race?” Belle replied, the sweet sarcasm in her voice as palpable as the ice.

  “I guess you don’t, sugar,” said a second voice. “Not that we would have accepted, of course. Beer gives me gas, and that tinpot despot of yours gives me worse gas.”

  Eisenfaust pulled back and slapped Yank with the back of his hand so hard that the crack sounded like a gunshot. Belle screamed an obscenity and Eisenfaust raised his hand to slap her too—then thought better of it.

  “I will not contaminate my flesh with touching you,” he said contemptuously. “Contemplate your fates. When Herr Doktor Herbsten is finished with his subject upstairs, he will come to study you. Most of his subjects have not lived too long. Perhaps you will be the exception.”

  With that, Eisenfaust turned abruptly and marched out the door, which swung ponderously shut behind him.

  Now Roddy could see that, like Belle, Yankee Doodle was tied hand and foot to a chair that had been bolted to the floor. But the top half of his head was encased in a kind of helmet with an opaque visor. That visor, Roddy realized immediately, must be mirrored on the inside, so that anything Yank tried would just get shot back into his own face.

  But the important thing was not what their captors had intended to do to them. The important thing was that he and the prisoners had the entire room to themselves.

  He allowed himself to become visible; Belle reacted with a startled, smothered squeak.

  “Marie? Baby?” Yank reacted with alarm, turning his head blindly from side to side. “What is it? What—”

  “’Tis all right, laddie,” Roddy assured him as he stepped forward to take the helmet from Yank’s head. “I’m Sgian Dubh of MI6, and I’m here t’ help.”

  With a little puff of displaced air, the Scotsman landed beside his French Resistance guide, falling wearily to the ground as she bit back a scream that turned only into a swift intake of breath. “Sacre merde!” she whispered harshly. “Do not—what happened? Were zey not zere? Could you not free zem? What—”

  Roddy tiredly held up one hand for silence, forgetting that in the dark she couldn’t see it. But it hardly mattered as in the next moment the old stone mansion literally erupted with the sound of the pride of the USA metahuman forces as they began the grimly joyful task of kicking and blasting their way out of imprisonment. Holes began to appear in the slate roof as Yankee Doodle’s energy blasts reached for the heavens.

  Under cover of the ruckus, Roddy and his contact slipped away. He looked back only once, just in time to see the two figures, illuminated by the flames licking up from the ravaged building beneath them, shooting off into the sky.

  Roddy smiled. The Auld Woman couldn’t have done it better herself.