The Lobos' Heartsong

by Laura Jo Phillips

  “The male-sets onboard will eject in the next few seconds,” Trey said. Garen acknowledged the news with a relieved grunt, his eyes never leaving the ball of white that was now much larger than it had been only moments before. Together, the three stopped working to rarify the air above the tanker, allowing it to return to its normal density so that the crew could eject through that area. He could not see the men when they ejected, but he felt it, as did Trey and Val. Garen waited several seconds until he was certain they had time to clear the area around the tanker, then, once more, made the air above the tanker thinner to generate lift and keep the ship in the air longer.

  Garen felt sweat beading on his face but ignored it. “Now we need to know where it will hit,” he said.

  “Your efforts have shifted the impact point several miles,” Faron said from behind them. “From what I can see, it looks as though it is going to hit almost exactly where we are standing. Can you keep a hold on whatever it is you’re doing while moving out of the way?”

  “I hope so,” Garen replied as he took a moment to look around. “Lets move up to that low hill over there,” he suggested.

  “Yes, that should work,” Faron replied.

  “We are going to speed travel over there so we don’t let go of those air changes for too long,” Garen said. “Make sure you get everyone out of the way. We are building a partial vacuum around the tanker, and when it hits, anything that is inside of that area is going to be very short of air.”

  How much area do you think we need?” Faron asked.

  “About one square mile,” Trey said. “That gives us a little extra room in case the vacuum doesn’t work as well as we hope.”

  “I’m sorry, Faron,” Garen said. “You are going to lose your home, but the tanker is too big and moving too fast for us to alter its course enough to save it.”

  “Better an empty house than a pasture full of livestock,” Faron said with a shrug. “We have nothing of real value inside anyway as we are not here that much.”

  “Round up your brothers and meet us up on the hill as quickly as you can,” Garen said. He did not wait for Faron’s response before diverting a bit of magic and turning towards the hill he had selected as their safe area. A couple of seconds later they were on the hill and Garen was testing the air in front of and beneath the tanker. Both had thinned in the small amount of time they had taken to travel and he quickly built them back up. The tanker was growing huge in the sky above them, but it was moving far slower than it had been. Garen was hopeful that their plan would work. He tested the air below the tanker once more, carefully thickening it just a bit.

  By the time the Lobos joined them on the hill the tanker was so close it seemed to fill the sky above them. Garen built a strong shield around all of them to protect themselves from the heat and any debris that might escape the barrier around the tanker.

  “Are the Katres safe?” he asked, his voice strained with the constant effort. He had never tried to hold magic for so long and could only hope that his strength held out for as long as they needed it.

  “Yes, they are several miles away and have retrieved their brothers and the Falcoran male-set,” Dav replied. “I’ve told them to take cover and build some shield walls.”

  Garen suddenly realized that Dav was yelling to be heard over the rising roar of the approaching ship. His eyes widened as the tanker grew so large that for a moment he feared they had miscalculated and the ship was going to hit them.

  “Now!” Garen shouted above the sound of the ship which had risen several octaves to an almost shrill scream. “Create the vacuum bubble and the super-dense shell!” A few seconds later, the gigantic tanker slammed into the ground, its nose hitting almost exactly where they had been standing minutes earlier.

  The explosion was enormous. As big as Garen had thought it would be, it was bigger. The heat was so intense that even from their vantage point, protected by a bubble of vacuum around the ship and blocked by thick shields of solid air, it became so hot they could barely breathe. Garen strained harder than ever to hold the barrier surrounding the huge mass of burning metal and fuel in those first few seconds. Even as strong as their magic was, some debris escaped the areas of protection they created around the tanker. The glowing shards of metal traced arcs of flame against the sky.

  Garen immediately focused on pulling even more air out of the area around the tanker to smother the giant ball of fire.

  The women continued to watch as the ball drew inexorably closer to the ground until, finally, it dropped below their line of sight. They waited silently for long moments, expecting to see signs of a huge explosion in the distance, but one did not materialize.

  “Perhaps they were able to contain it?” Saige said, making the statement a question as she turned to look at Lariah. Lariah frowned as she concentrated.

  “They are still straining, even harder than before,” she said. “But they are also feeling relieved.” Lariah opened her eyes again. “I think they are containing it. It’s very hot, so there was an explosion, but they are holding it somehow.”

  They continued to watch the empty sky for long minutes as though mesmerized until Suly stepped out onto the patio with lunch. At first Lariah declined, but a pleading look from Suly had Riata and Saige both insisting that she eat. Lariah gave in finally, more to keep peace than because she was hungry. But all of their eyes continually strayed to the horizon throughout lunch.

  None of them had much of an appetite and they finished eating quickly, though Lariah continued to slip tasty morsels of food from her plate to Tiny. When the food stopped coming, Tiny rose to his feet, stretched, then headed off the patio and across the garden, leaping lightly over the low back gate. Saige cocked a brow at Lariah.

  “He’s going to that hill behind the house,” she explained. “He would never do his business in Pater’s garden.”

  Saige nodded in understanding and sipped her drink as she studied her friend carefully without seeming to. She and Riata were both concerned about Lariah. Even though the Dracons had placed a large protective barrier around the house that would prevent anyone with intent to harm the occupants from crossing it, Lariah seemed unaccountably nervous and restless.

  “Are you worried about your men?” Saige asked after a particularly long silence from Lariah.

  “I’m not sure,” Lariah replied cryptically. “They are very strong in their magic now. The strongest of all the Jasani. I know that and yet, I feel...edgy today.”

  Riata eyed Lariah once again. She rose from her chair, intending to examine Lariah, when they all heard a loud growling roar, followed by a short yelp, then silence.

  Garen, Trey and Val were drenched in sweat from the heat still radiating from the burning tanker, and the effort required to keep it contained. Every time they succeeded in making the air within the enclosure thin enough to extinguish the fire, it flared up again as soon as they began to let the air return to normal. Although the tanker had dumped in the upper atmosphere the fuel it had been carrying as cargo, the crew had not been able to dump the ship’s own fuel, so it had crashed with nearly a full load of the fuel it carried for its own engines and reaction control thrusters, amounting to many tons of highly combustible Hydrogen. The residual heat was so intense that it reignited all of that fuel the moment air was allowed to reach it. Garen feared their strength would give out before they could truly avert a disaster.

  “Val, break off and join with the Lobos,” Garen said. “Try to remove more air from the enclosure. Trey and I will hold the shock barrier.”

  Val did not waste time or energy discussing the plan. He stepped back, removing his hand from Garen’s shoulder and immediately joined his magic with the Lobos. He felt the weakening of the barrier at once, but ignored it as he focused on drawing all of the remaining air out of the enclosure through a small gap Garen opened for the purpose. The gap had to be small to prevent fresh air from entering and making the situation even worse, but after a few minutes they all realized that
it was working. The flames were not flaring up again this time.

  Several minutes later the enclosure was a vacuum, with no air to allow a fire to reignite. Val thanked the Lobos wearily, then rejoined Trey and Garen to help hold the barrier around the crash site.

  “How much longer before we can let this go?” Trey asked.

  “If we can cool the interior of the enclosure, not too long,” Garen said even as he worked to begin drawing the heat out of the enclosure. Without air in the enclosure to conduct heat away, the wreckage would take weeks to cool without magic. Wielding both air and fire at the same time was something he had never even attempted before, so it was clumsy for him at first. Before long he understood how to make it work and, with an influx of power from Trey and Val he was soon drawing the heat out of the enclosure and away from the wreckage through the top of the barrier.

  “Tiny!” Lariah gasped as she leapt to her feet. Hurrying as fast as she could given the large swell of her pregnancy, she crossed the garden, threw open the gate and ran through it, Saige and Riata close on her heels. All three women skidded to an abrupt stop at the sight of the three figures standing just outside the gate. Two human men, and Darleen Flowers.

  Before any of the women could react, one man shot Saige and the other shot Lariah with darts. Both women immediately crumpled. Riata stepped forward and caught Lariah as best she could, succeeding in lowering her to the ground safely so that she did not injure herself or her babies. When she looked up, one of the men had reloaded his dart gun and shot her with it. The world grew dark and she too crumpled over.

  “Hurry up before someone else comes out,” Darleen snapped.

  “What do we do with the Alverian?” one of the men asked as he bent down and lifted Lariah carelessly into his arms with a grunt.

  “We’ll have to take her,” Darleen decided. “Otherwise she will call the Dracons before we are off the property.”

  The first man reached Darleen’s red ground-car waiting at the side of the house and tossed Lariah into the open trunk before returning for Riata. Moments later, all three of the unconscious women were in the trunk, and the men were in the back seat, hunched down below the windows to avoid being seen by any of the ranch hands.

  Darleen drove the ground-car towards the gate as quickly as she dared, glancing nervously in the rear view mirror the entire time. After spending three hours on ranch property, her ground-car parked in a small grove of trees in the middle of a cow-pasture, her nerves were stretched to the breaking point. She had thought Lio’s call telling her the diversion was working would never come. Once it did come, she very nearly changed her mind about the whole thing. She had driven across the pasture and back to the gravel road, then stopped for several long moments trying to make up her mind whether to turn right and leave, or turn left toward the house. In the end she turned toward the house, mostly because there was something about Lio that warned her quitting would be a bad mistake on her part.

  Now, she was terrified that the Lobos or the Dracons would appear before she was safely off of ranch property. She did not want to think about what they would do to her for her part in this. At the same time, she felt a thrill of satisfaction that both Saige and Lariah were going to get what they had coming to them for standing in her way. She never gave Riata a second thought.

  It was nearly an hour later before Suly stepped out onto the patio to clear the lunch table and noticed that the women were gone. She frowned for a moment before deciding that they must have gone inside. She loaded herself with dishes and turned, noticing as she did that the rear garden gate was standing wide open. Her heart gave a small leap and she lowered the dishes back to the table with a clatter.

  Hurrying off the patio and across the garden, she rushed through the gate and looked around, at first seeing nothing amiss. A small movement caught her attention but at first she could not tell what she was looking at. Another small movement and she was running as quickly as her plump legs could carry her across the thick grass, falling to her knees beside Tiny’s prone body. She realized at once that the dog was breathing, and struggling to get up though he didn’t seem able to make himself do more than twitch at first. She reached out to place a calming hand on him and felt a dart sticking out of his neck, camouflaged by the dog’s patterned fur. She pulled the dart out and stared at it for a moment in confusion.

  Suddenly she realized that if Tiny were lying here drugged, then Lariah must have been taken. And since nobody else was around, Saige and Riata must have been taken as well. She murmured softly to Tiny, apologizing for being forced to leave him lying there, but she had to get to the vox right away.

  She stood up and ran as fast as she could back to the house.

  Lariah was the first to awaken, her Jasani body throwing off the effects of the drug they had used almost at once. It would not have worked on her at all if she had not been pregnant with triplets. Because the babies did not have the same regeneration ability as their mother, Lariah’s body had worked to protect them first.

  When she opened her eyes to darkness it took her a moment to sort out what had happened. The ground-car trunk was not light-proof and she easily made out the unconscious forms of Saige and Riata sharing the small space with her. She quietly tried to awaken the other two women, but gave up after a few minutes, realizing that the drug would have to wear off a bit first.

  Lariah focused on relaxing her body and rolling with the bumps and jolts as the ground-car sped along the gravel road. Obviously they were still on ranch property, she thought to herself. She did not know how long she had been unconscious, so she had no way of estimating how much time it would be before they left the property. She hoped that Suly would discover they were missing before long, and tears threatened as she thought of Tiny. She closed her eyes and sent her mind reaching for him, relieved when she sensed he was alive, but unconscious.

  She did not know why Darleen was helping those men to abduct them, or why the men wanted them to begin with. But she had been feeling edgy and nervous all morning, and now she thought perhaps this was why. Before, when she had been in danger, she had experienced strange moments of deep fear with no reason that she could identify at the time. Though she had not felt the same deep fear this time, she thought that what she had felt had been a warning. A warning that she had, once again, ignored.

  Well, she thought, no sense in beating herself up for it now. If she had the opportunity to do it later, then she would. For now, she had to think of a way out of the situation she, Saige and Riata were in.

  Realizing that she might not have any other choice, she reluctantly considered transforming into her dracon. Shifting would be risky. Her dracon had warned her that, as her pregnancy advanced and the babies grew larger, transforming could be harmful to them. The babies were not shifters, as she was. The change from human form to dracon form would not harm the babies directly since her body would automatically maintain the human environment in her womb that they needed, but it could cause premature labor. The closer she got to delivery, the higher the risk became. Also, delivering the babies while in her dracon form was absolutely not an option. She wasn’t sure why, but she had been warned that such a thing could not happen without great risk to the babies.

  On the other hand, if these people meant to seriously harm, or even kill her, then the risk was going to be necessary. She hoped it would not come to that, but if it did, she would do what she had to. In the meantime, she could only wait. She certainly could not transform into her dracon while locked in the trunk with Riata and Saige.

  Lariah wasn’t sure how much more time had passed when she heard a soft moan from Saige, but she was almost positive they were still on the ranch. Which meant that less than an hour had passed since their abduction. She shifted slightly so that she could whisper into her friend’s ear.

  “We are in the trunk of Darleen’s ground-car and we are still on ranch property.”

  “I can’t seem to move,” Saige said softly. “Am I tied up or somethin
g?”

  Lariah reached over and ran her hands down Saige’s arms to her wrists. “No, it must be the drug they shot us with. Hopefully it will wear off soon.”

  Saige tried to make herself relax when she noticed the red tinge at the edge of her vision. The disease was gone, but not the damage from previous seizures. She could not afford to have a seizure now.

  She closed her eyes and sent a mental call to Faron, Ban and Dav, but got no response. She hadn’t really expected to since they were so far away, but she had to try it.

  “Is Riata here?” she asked, remembering only that the Alverian had been with them when they ran through the gate.

  “Yes, she’s on the other side of me,” Lariah replied.

  “Too bad,” Saige said. She’d hoped for a moment that Riata had been left behind and was even now calling for help. She tried to force her limbs to move and was relieved when she was able to get a small response. The drug was beginning to wear off. She just wished she knew how much longer it would take, and how much time they had.

  “Faron told me that you can shift,” Saige said.

  “Yes,” Lariah replied. “I’ve thought of that. There are a couple of problems though. For one thing, my dracon is way too big for this trunk. If I shifted, I would be able to easily burst through the metal and get out, but I would probably crush you and Riata at the same time.”

  “Okay, I think I’ll vote no on that one,” Saige said. “For now. How about once they open the trunk?”

  “Well, there could be a problem with that too because of the babies,” Lariah said. “But, if that is what I have to do to save us, then I will.”

  “No,” Saige said at once. “You can’t risk the babies, Lariah. We’ll think of something else.”

  “I have no wish to risk my daughters Saige, but if it is that or death for all of us, then it is a risk I will have to take.”