by L. J. Smith
No. It couldn’t happen. It was undoubtedly just what the dragon wanted.
But how had he gotten to the baby? With all those wards and the agents watching the house—how?
It didn’t matter. Right now, she had to deal with the situation.
“Brett—don’t tell Iliana.”
“Huh? But I have to.”
“No, you don’t. I’ll talk to Mrs.—to Aunt Anna. I’m her niece, remember? And I have an idea where the baby might have gone. I think he’s safe, but she has to know where to look.”
Brett gawked at her. “You have an idea?”
“Yeah. Just let me talk to her. And don’t say anything to Iliana just yet.” Keller glanced toward the game room bar, which was set up like an English pub. There was a phone, but a girl with red hair was talking animatedly into it, while eating nuts from a bowl.
“It’s the other line, Jaime’s line,” Brett said. “She said she called on that one first, but it was busy.”
“Okay, where’s the other line?”
“Jaime’s room.”
Keller hesitated, looking at Iliana. Winnie was on one side of her and Jaime on the other. They were the center of attention, something like the heart of a rose, with other people surrounding them like petals.
At least she was in full view of everyone. And somebody trying to get to her would have to go through all of them first, and that would alert Winnie.
But I wish Nissa and Galen were here to take over from me.
She glanced at her watch. Fifteen minutes before they were supposed to come back to the game room. The baby couldn’t wait that long.
She forged through the crowd and touched Winnie’s shoulder.
“I have to run for a minute—a phone call. Nothing to worry about yet. I’ll make it fast,” she murmured in Winnie’s ear.
Winnie glanced at her, surprised, but then she nodded. “Problems?”
“Maybe. Stay alert.” Keller said it through a smile for Iliana’s benefit.
When she got out of the throng, she said to Brett, “Take me there.”
Actually, she knew where Jaime’s bedroom was from the plans. But she didn’t want Brett hanging around Iliana. His face alone would give away the show.
They hurried up the wide staircase. Keller’s mind was racing, making plans.
I can calm her down, at least. And I can call Circle Daybreak and tell them—if they don’t already know. They’ll make a much better search party than humans. Iliana doesn’t need to know about it at all until after the ceremony. And then…
Her mind stalled, and the sick feeling in her stomach grew.
No. It wouldn’t be enough. She knew what she really had to do.
I have to go back there. Just me. I owe Iliana that much. I owe the whole family that much.
I’ll be the best one to search. I can drive over to the house fast and see what’s going on. Borrow a car from Brett. That way, when the dragon attacks—and he’s going to attack—I’ll be the only one there.
You’ll be the only one dead, a snide little voice in her mind pointed out. But Keller gave it the cold shoulder.
She knew that already. It wasn’t important.
You’re going to risk your life—give up your life—for a baby? One who’s not a Wild Power, not even a shapeshifter?
At least I’ll get another chance at the dragon, she told the voice.
You’re going to risk the mission, the alliance, the whole daylight world, for a single individual? the voice went on.
This was a better point. But Keller had only one thing to say to it.
I have to.
“Here.” Brett gestured at the open door of a pretty bedroom, then followed Keller when she went in. “Um, can I help you?” He was getting over his worry and trying to cozy up to her again.
“No.”
“Oh. Well, I’ll leave you alone, then.” He slid out the door, closing it behind him.
And Keller let him. Later, that was what she couldn’t quite believe. That she had been stupid enough to walk into the trap and stand there while it snapped shut.
She picked up the phone. “Mrs. Dominick?”
Silence.
At first, just for a moment or two, she thought Iliana’s mother might have stepped away from the phone. But then the nature of the silence got to her.
There were no sounds in the background at all. It was dead air.
Keller hit the plunger to hang up the phone. Nothing happened.
No dial tone.
She glanced at the phone cord; it was plugged into the wall. She pushed the plunger rapidly, four times, five.
Then she knew.
She’d been suckered.
In one motion, she whirled and sprang to the door.
Only to twist the handle uselessly.
It was locked.
And it was a good, sturdy door, made out of solid wood, the kind they used to make. She found this out by throwing herself against it hard enough to bruise her shoulder. It had been locked with a key from the outside, and the bolt was a good, sturdy one, too.
White icy-hot rage swept over Keller. She was more angry than she could ever remember being in her life. She couldn’t believe it—she’d been fooled by an idiot human boy. The Night People must have gotten to him somehow, must have bought him…
No.
Keller knew she wasn’t a genius. But sometimes ideas came to her in a flash, allowing her to see a complete picture all at once where other people saw only fragments. And right now, like a bolt of lightning, realization dawned on her, and she understood.
Oh, Goddess, how could we have been so stupid? She knew how the dragon had done it.
CHAPTER 16
We were so careful, she thought, setting up wards three days early and having agents watch the house. Nothing got inside during those three days; we were sure of that, and so we thought we were safe.
But we didn’t stop to think—what if the dragon was already inside when we put the wards up?
Brett.
He’s the dragon.
It could take on any shape, assume any animal’s form, and know all that the animal knew. A human being was an animal.
So why couldn’t it touch a human and know all the human knew?
It would be the perfect disguise.
And we all fell for it, Keller thought. I knew there was something creepy about him, but I just put it down to him being obnoxious. And he’s been here all the time, inside the wards, laughing at us, waiting for Iliana to come.
And Iliana’s with him right now.
Keller felt sure of that in her gut.
She wanted to throw herself against the door again, but that wouldn’t do any good. She needed to be calm now, to think, because she couldn’t afford to waste any time.
The window.
Keller tried to open it, looking down at a hedge of rhododendron bushes below. The sash was stuck, nailed fast. But it didn’t matter. Glass was more breakable than wood.
She stepped back and changed.
Melting, flowing, jumpsuit becoming fur. Tail shooting free. Ears. Whiskers. Heavy paws thumping down. A single long stretch to get used to the new body and being on four feet instead of two.
She was a panther, and she felt good. Strong and mean. Her muscles were like steel under her soft coat, and her big paws were twitching to bat someone silly. That dragon would be sorry he’d ever messed with her.
With a rasping yowl that she couldn’t help, she gathered herself and sprang straight at the window. The full weight of her panther body hit the glass, and it shattered, and then she was flying in the cold night air.
She got cut. Panthers actually had thin and delicate skin compared to other animals. But she was indifferent to the pain. She landed and took off running, shaking her paws in flight to get rid of little bits of glass.
She raced around the mansion, looking for a place to enter. Eventually, she found a low, unshuttered window, and once again, she gathered herself and jumped.
She landed in a sitting room with glass falling all around her onto a fine, old carpet.
Brett.
And Iliana.
She would smell them out.
She lifted her muzzle, smelling currents in the air. At the same time, she expanded her sense of hearing to its fullest.
No Iliana. She couldn’t get even a whiff of her. That was bad, but she would try again from the game room, where Iliana had been last. That was where she was going anyway, because that was where Brett was.
Not Brett, she reminded herself as she loped through corridors and rooms. The dragon.
She raced through the ballroom and heard a scream. She barely turned her head to notice a girl standing frozen, just lifting her hand to point. The college band crashed to a halt, almost as one, except the drummer, who went on playing for a moment with his eyes shut.
Keller ignored them all, running at top speed and leaping down the stairs, her heavy front paws hitting the carpeted floor first, then her back paws hitting almost on either side of them. Each spring propelled her into the next.
She burst into the game room.
For an instant, she stood still, taking in the scene. She wanted to make sure with her eyes that what her ears and her nose told her was true: Iliana wasn’t here.
It was true. Winnie was missing, too, and Keller couldn’t smell them anywhere.
Then someone spotted her, a full-grown panther, jet-black, with glowing eyes and long teeth just showing as she panted gently, standing in the doorway with her tail lashing.
“Oh, my God!” The voice soared over the babble. “Look at that!”
Everyone looked.
Everyone froze for an instant.
Chaos erupted.
Girls were screaming. Boys were yelling. Plenty of boys were screaming, too. They saw her, and they fell over themselves, diving for the exits or for hiding places. They poured out of the room, dragging each other, sometimes trampling each other. Keller gave a loud, snarling yowl to help them on, and they scattered like chickens.
The only one Keller cared about was the Brett-dragon.
He turned and ran down a corridor. Luring her? He must be. Maybe he didn’t realize she had found out yet. Maybe he had some reason for continuing the charade.
She threw her head back and gave a snarl that resounded through the house. It wasn’t just anger. It was calling Nissa and Galen. If they could hear her, they would understand and come running.
Then she took off after the dragon.
As she loped down the corridor, she changed again. This time, she couldn’t just try to kill him; she needed to be able to talk. But she also needed her claws, so she changed to her half-and-half form, fur shriveling off her arms, body rearing up to run on booted feet, hair flying out behind her.
The dragon was almost at the end of the corridor when she jumped him.
She knocked him down and rolled him over, straddling him. She was braced to feel the agony of the dark power crackling through her, but it didn’t come. She pinned his arms and showed her teeth and screamed in his face.
“Where is she? What did you do with her?”
The face looked back at her. It looked just like Brett, just like a human. It was sickly white, with rolling eyeballs and spittle at the corners of the mouth. The only answer she got was a moan of what sounded like terror.
“Tell me! Where is she?”
“—it’s not my fault…”
“What?” She lifted his body and banged it down again. His head flopped on his neck like a dead fish. He looked like someone about to faint.
Something was wrong.
“She’s in the bedroom with my parents. They’re all asleep—or something—”
His forehead. When she shook him, his hair flew around. It was uncharacteristically messy, but the forehead underneath was smooth.
“I couldn’t help it. He did something to my brain. I couldn’t even think until a few minutes ago. I just did what he told me to do. I was like a robot! And you don’t know what it was like, having him in the house the last three days, and feeling like a puppet, and when he let go a few minutes ago, I thought I was going to be killed—”
The babbling went on, but Keller’s mind had disengaged.
She had lots of thoughts all at once, like layers in a parfait.
Chalk up another ability for dragons: telepathic mind control. Of weak human subjects, anyway.
Nissa was right: the Night World did know what had happened in the music room. The substitution was probably made right after that. They could have grabbed Jaime on her way back to class.
The car incident was designed to make us sympathetic and to lull our suspicions before they began. We thought of her as a victim.
The doctors at the hospital must have been controlled, too. They had to have been—they’d looked at Jaime’s head.
Jaime’s headaches have kept her at home for the past three days, so she never had to cross the wards.
Iliana trusts Jaime implicitly and would go anywhere with her without a fight.
Jaime wears bangs.
And on the last layer, rushing at her cold and sharp as crystal: Jaimeisthedragon.
Jaime is the dragon.
A vast, silent calm seemed to have filled Keller. She felt as if there was too much space inside her head. Very slowly, she looked down at Brett again.
“Stop talking.” It was almost a whisper, but his gabble stopped as if she’d turned off a faucet.
“Now. Who’s in the bedroom with your parents? Your sister?”
He nodded, terrified. Tears spurted out of his eyes.
“Your real sister.”
He nodded again.
They must have brought her in sometime, Keller thought. Certainly before we put the wards up and started checking cars, maybe even before the fake Jaime got back from the hospital.
Why they’d kept her alive was a mystery, but Keller didn’t have time to worry about it.
“Brett,” she said, still in a careful whisper, “what I want to know is where Iliana is. Do you know where she’s been taken?”
He choked. “I don’t know. He didn’t tell me anything, even when he was in my mind. But I noticed—there were some people down in the cellar. I think they were making a tunnel.”
A tunnel. Under the wards, of course. So we were made fools of twice.
She had to grit her teeth to keep from screaming. The floor plan of the house was a blur in her mind.
She hauled Brett up by his shirt and said, “Where’s the basement door? Show me!”
“I c-can’t—”
“Move!”
He moved, staggering. She followed, pushing him along, until they got to a door and stairs.
Then he collapsed. “Down there. Don’t ask me to go with you. I can’t. I can’t look at him again.” He huddled, rocking himself.
Keller left him. Three stairs down, she bounded back up and grabbed him by the shirt.
“That phone call from Iliana’s mother—does he really have the baby?” She need to know if it came to bargaining.
“I don’t know,” Brett moaned in a sick voice. He was clutching his stomach as if he were wounded. “There wasn’t any phone call, but I don’t know what he’s been doing.” He threw her a desperate look and whispered hoarsely, “What is he?”
Keller dropped him. “You don’t want to know,” she said, and left him again.
She took the stairs very quietly but very quickly. Her senses were open, but the farther she went down, the less useful they were. They were being swamped by an overpowering sickly-sweet odor and by a rushing sound that seemed to fill her head.
By the time she got to the last step, her fur was bristling, and her heart was pounding. Her tail stood out stiffly, and her pupils were wide.
It was very dark, but details of the room slowly came into focus. It was a large furnished basement, or had been. Now every piece of furniture seemed to be broken and piled in a heap in the corner. There was a ra
w hole in one concrete wall, a hole that opened into a black tunnel. And the sickly-sweet smell came from piles of dung.
They were lying on the floor all around, along with giant scratch marks that had dug grooves into the tile. The entire place looked like nothing so much as a huge animal’s den.
She couldn’t sense anything alive in the room.
Keller moved toward the tunnel, fast but stealthy. Ripple, freeze. Ripple, freeze. Leopards could move this way across grassland bare of cover and not be seen. But nothing jumped out to attack her.
The mouth of the tunnel was wet, the soil crumbly. Keller climbed in, still moving lightly. Water dripped from the mat of roots and earth above her. The whole thing looked ready to cave in at any moment.
He must have made it. The dragon. Goddess knows how; maybe with claws. Anyway, he wasn’t too fussy about it; it was meant to be a temporary thing.
The smell was just as powerful here, and the rushing sound was even clearer. There must be an underground stream—or maybe just water pipes—very close.
Come on, girl, what are you waiting for? You’re a grunt, it’s your job to move! Don’t stand around trying to think!
It was hard to make herself go deeper and deeper into that damp and confining place. Her senses were all useless, even sight, because the bore twisted and turned so she could never see more than a few feet ahead. She was heading blind and deaf into she had no idea what. At any moment, she might reach a shaft or a side tunnel where something could attack her.
And the feel of the earth above her was almost crushing.
She kept going.
Please let her be alive. He doesn’t need to kill her. He should try to make her join him first. Please, please, don’t let him have killed her.
After what seemed like forever, she realized that the angle of the tunnel was changing. She was heading up. Then a current of air swirled to her, barely sniffable under the thick dragon smell, and it was fresh.
Night air. Somewhere ahead. The end of the tunnel.
A new panic invaded her.
Please don’t let them have gotten away.