“You have to.” He’s exuding complete confidence, but is it another facade? I’ve seen how good he is at lying.
I study my hands. My thoughts whirl so violently inside my brain I can’t catch hold of a single one for longer than five seconds. I can’t be the one to make these decisions. I just can’t. How did we get here? And what if we can’t get everyone out of this mess? I shudder as I begin imagining what could happen to the dragons under the CIA’s control. Maybe I’ve seen one too many alien autopsy videos. While I don’t believe any of them were legitimate, the fear and curiosity that drives people to them is very real. From freak shows to Hitler, humans don’t exactly have a great track record when it comes to facing people who are different.
“Try this.” Sani’s voice yanks me from my downward spiral. “Which should we focus on next? Finding Jacob or helping the dragons?”
He’s right. I have to do something. Standing here imagining the worst isn’t going to help anyone. I don’t have enough information to make this decision. In fact, I don’t have enough information, period. Solution: acquire more information.
“I’d like to have a look at the situation at DIC.”
Sani smiles encouragingly. I can’t tell if he’s happy with my decision or just happy I made one at all.
“Let’s ride,” he says.
…
Sani’s arms wrap tightly around my neck just below my dragon-head. He usually rides farther back, but storm winds tear at us. The sunny weather from earlier has been wiped out completely by a storm that looks to be as big as the D.C. metro area. Sani and I have to yell at each other to be heard over the wind and occasional rumbles of thunder. Lucky for him, it hasn’t started raining yet, but it’s only a matter of time.
Lightning snakes down to connect with the earth a few miles in front of us, but it seems so much closer. The weird magnetic fields of the storm are already messing with my flight, and I struggle to keep the ride smooth. Sani’s grip tightens.
“Last chance to get dropped off and hide somewhere dry!” I yell.
“Never!” he says, laughing. For a short second, I almost forget what’s at stake. Sani’s laugh, fierce and a little crazy, sends a thrill through me, mixing with the raw animal power that comes with flying. The wildness constantly knocking at my self-control flares up and screams in my brain.
“Then hold on!”
I push the magnetic fields around me until we’re soaring as fast as I dare with Sani on my back. If I were visible from the ground, I’d probably look like a drunken lizard barely able to maintain altitude, let alone a straight path. DIC comes into view, and I realize we’re flying straight into the heart of the storm. Lightning flashes every few seconds in the clouds in front of us, and the air hangs heavy with the impending downpour.
“Let’s check out the gym door first,” Sani says. Or he says something like that, at least. I can’t hear too well with the wind crawling down my ears.
Circling above DIC, I don’t see any indication of an occupation or invasion. As usual, there’s not a hint of activity above the surface.
“Can you sense anything?” Sani asks.
“No,” I answer, trying not to let my disappointment show in my tone. I can’t feel the emotions of a single dragon. Even worse, in human form, they can’t sense me. Does anyone beside Wallace and my dad know I’m still free?
There is a large four-story training room on the upper levels that allows us to run drills in dragon form. It seems my kin aren’t only being held in custody, they’re being kept from shifting, too. It’s cruel. And not too bright, if you ask me. I’m not sure the entire strength of the CIA is ready to deal with a herd of highly trained operatives, restless from not being allowed to stretch their dragons after a few days.
I swoop down to the tree line and slow my speed so I can dodge through the trees until we reach the manhole. Before I’ve stopped, Sani leaps to the ground and sprints to the manhole with two long strides. He crouches down and leans closer to listen, but freezes before he’s close enough to hear anything. He runs his finger around the circumference of the opening and frowns.
Sani doesn’t waste any time in running and leaping onto my back. I don’t even have to make myself visible again so that he can find me, he just knows somehow.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“It’s welded shut.”
Crap on a firecracker. There’s only one option left, and I have a feeling it’s going to suck quite a bit. “Let’s see what’s behind door number two, then.”
The thunderclouds choose that second to open up. This is the kind of rain that feels like someone is dumping a big bucket over your head continuously. Sani wraps his arms tight around my neck and clasps his hands together below my head in preparation; wet scales are as slick as a used car salesman on a soaped-up Slip’N Slide. I take to the air and instantly feel him slipping. I start to swoop back to the ground, but he urges me on.
“Go ahead! I’m good.” He wraps his legs around me, too, crossing his ankles to anchor himself even more. I try not to think about how his entire body is literally wrapped around mine, pressed as tightly to my skin as he can.
Heavy, fat raindrops pound my eyes until I squint as much as I can without flying into a tree or a building. We stay low to the ground and soar through the tunnel that leads to the covered parking area. As soon as we’re under cover, I slow down so that Sani can relax his hold and wipe his eyes.
“You alr—” I start to ask.
“Shh!” he hushes me.
I shake my head to clear the water dripping down my face. Tanks stand guard in two rows, guns facing the entrance to the tunnel. About twenty armed military personnel are behind them, standing around, pacing, joking.
Joking. Laughing while they oppress an entire species. Chuckling as who-knows-what is being done to my family. Yeah. Hilarious.
A red haze filters over my vision. I swallow a growl that rumbles quietly in my belly.
“Let’s get a closer look,” Sani whispers. “Carefully.”
The storm’s insane magnetic fields are calmer in the tunnel, thanks to the thick concrete shielding. I stretch the length of my body out straight and hug the roof of the parking structure as I creep toward the small assembled army. These guys are prepared. I’m close enough to see that they all have a pistol on each hip plus the machine gun hanging from their shoulders, when a loud beeping sounds. One of the men runs to a monitor, and his eyes go wide, then frantically search the cavernous space. All I see is a red line on a field of green with yellow splotches.
“Confirmation?” a man barks. I almost lose hold on the magnetic fields when I realize who he is. CIA-grade asswipe Cleft Chin. AKA the guy who took my dad in.
“Heat signature confirmed,” the slack-mouthed lackey says.
Heat signature?
I’m this close to diving in and swallowing Cleft Chin’s head when he shouts, “Open fire! Open fire!”
Crap. My heat signature. Always with the freaking heat sensors. These guys are really prepared.
Thank the Gods I don’t have to tell Sani to hold on this time. His body goes flat against mine, arms squeezing tight before I even have the presence of mind to bust a U-turn. Bullets chase us and whizz past my head. I press myself as close to the roof as I can without bumping Sani’s head and curl the back half of my body to shield him completely. I could get hit a few times and survive, but if a bullet hits his other heart—I don’t want to think about that now.
Thankfully, their guns don’t also have heat sensors, otherwise we’d be dead meat. They have to guess at our exact position based on frantic glances at the monitor behind them. We burst out into the rain unscathed by lead. The full strength of the storm is centered over DIC now. Thunderbolts threaten to deafen me and lightning bolts race each other to the ground. I put us on a vertical path, fighting against the rain pushing down, to get out of range of the machine guns, in case the guards intend on chasing us.
The lightning flashing all around
me is seriously messing with the magnetic fields now, but I manage to keep us aloft, if not super steady. Manipulating the fields is kind of like swimming, except I push against them with a magnetic force that I can work as easily as humans can work their hands and legs. Flying through the heart of a lightning storm feels the same as trying to swim through a riptide.
“That was close,” I yell.
Sani doesn’t respond. My hearts pound painfully. Did he catch a ricocheting bullet somehow? I have a moment of clarity and realize his arms and legs are still tight around me. And he’s not the type to go into shock because of a silly little narrow escape into the storm of the century. I turn my head almost completely around to check on him. His head is cocked slightly and he’s staring at the storm clouds.
“Do you hear that?” he says.
“You mean the crashing thunder and pounding rain?”
He shakes his head. I listen closely, trying to filter out the sounds of the storm.
Then I hear it. A whooshing sound with a fast buzzing underneath it. It’s so, so familiar, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. A very definite black spot appears among the dark gray clouds. The spot lengthens horizontally.
The puzzle pieces click into place and I get the full picture: fighter jet. Headed straight for us. It could be a coincidence, right? F-22 Raptors fly low through giant thunderstorms over major metropolitan areas in the middle of the night all the time. Right.
My illusions of a coincidence are shattered—by a missile flying straight at me. It would seem this guy has infrared, too. I mean, missiles? Really? Isn’t that a bit overkill? I start flying away, but Sani stops me.
“Dive!”
“Dive? We’ll be an easy target down there!”
“They’re not going to shoot missiles at the D.I.C. with all of those CIA agents inside.”
Well, he has a point there. And we both know I can’t fly well enough to avoid the missiles without losing Sani.
I drop over DIC, staying well away from the opening of the parking tunnel just in case any of those CIA monkeys decide to bring a tank out against me. The missile whizzes above us, inches from my tail, and buries itself in a nearby hill. The whooshing sound gets louder as the jet prepares to make an overhead pass.
It turns out Sani’s right—they won’t shoot missiles at DIC. The Vulcan twenty millimeter cannon, on the other hand? I guess DIC is too far underground to worry about those. The rat-a-tat is occasionally drowned out by peals of thunder, but the bullets never stop raining down.
“The trees!” Sani yells.
I skim the ground, racing the Raptor to the trees. Closer to the ground, the Earth’s magnetic fields are more stable than up in the clouds, so it’s easier to maneuver. I hit the tree line just as the jet reaches us. A spray of bullets rips through the tree branches above. Some of the bullets make it through, sending up bursts of dirt and stone around me. I barrel roll, putting my body between Sani and the cannon. His grip stays strong, and he doesn’t make a sound, which tells me he’s okay.
I put on the magnetic brakes and huddle under the densest part of this mini-forest. The jet soars past us overhead. Trees aren’t the best for covering heat signatures and the forest doesn’t lead anywhere useful. Just miles of flat, open land in all directions. We have to get out of here, and faster would be better than slower.
“It’s coming back,” Sani says. “Can you outrun it?”
“Not with the lightning. Normally I’d be able to out-maneuver it, but the storm’s mucking up my flying.”
“What are our options?” Sani asks.
I have a feeling he knows what they are. He picked a fine time to help me develop leadership abilities. He knows I don’t have any way to actually fight the jet, short of ramming it. An English dragon would be so much better-suited to this task. Too bad they’re all locked up tight a few dozen yards below me.
“Option one: stay here until the jet banks on the odds and hits us both with that Gatling.”
“I’d rather not.” I can hear the frown in his voice.
“We could run. Hope we get lucky.”
Sani drops to the ground and pulls rope out of his backpack. “Have you noticed anything about our luck today?” He starts tying the rope together in a confusing pattern of knots.
“What are you doing?”
“Your mother once told me a good agent makes his own luck.”
“Care to elaborate?”
“We’re going to run.” He wraps a few coils of the rope around me, just above my front legs. “But we’re not going to tuck our tails between our legs while we do it.”
The shape of his rope contraption starts to look familiar. “That’s a saddle!”
“Something like one, anyway.” He looks unsure for a second. “You don’t mind?”
I give my overactive brain a very strict order not to think about the overtones related to Sani literally saddling me. I swallow hard. “No problem.”
I drop invisibility to make his task easier. He can only see me if he’s touching me directly, and he needs both hands to shape the rope. He finishes tying knots and lowers himself into the makeshift saddle/harness/thing. He pulls two semiautomatics from his bag, stuffs extra clips into his waistband, and straps the bag back on. A low growl sounds in my throat at seeing this side of Sani. He’s the living embodiment of stealth and calm and—don’t get me wrong—I like that. But this Rambo thing he has going on right now? With the torn, soaking wet shirt and a gun in each hand and that badass look on his face. Mmm.
The whoosh-buzz sound of the jet breaks me from my totally inappropriate thoughts. Take care of the life-and-death situation before continuing with the slobbering, Kitty.
I huff a big breath. Am I really about to take on the most effective fighter jet in the world in a lightning storm with two pistols for weapons? “Now or never.”
Fifty feet to the east, the forest thins. I shoot straight into the air through the opening in the branches. I’m invisible again, but it doesn’t matter. The pilot doesn’t waste a second in laying on the trigger. I’m in between him and the city, so he’s not going to shoot a missile from this angle. I try to fly in a corkscrew pattern, but the lightning flashes, and their resulting magnetic fields, make it more like the flight of a bee in the spring. A few shots ring out over my head, but there’s not so much as a spark from the jet. And Sani is a great shot. Granted, I’m nearly blinded by the rain, even with the thick cornea of a dragon eye protecting me.
“We need to get closer!” Sani shouts.
Getting closer to a fighter jet trying to shoot me down has never exactly been on my to-do list. Sani’s voice echoes in my head. You have to. I have to be a strategist. My dad, my mom, even Director Bean—I have to be all of them.
I swallow my reactionary instincts and think for a second. This jet has me outclassed and outgunned. I need to outsmart it if I’m going to survive. Shots dance around me as I swerve wildly in the air. My eyes zone in on the source of the bullets, the Vulcan cannon. One word resonates in my head: fixed. It can only shoot in front of the plane. Yeah, the plane can maneuver, but there’s one place the heat sensors probably don’t even go.
I go vertical. The jet is almost on us now. The bullets whiz by me as fast as the lightning crashing to the earth. Then a searing pain rips through my midsection. I drop dozens of feet before catching myself. White light flashes across my vision. I loose a roar that rivals the thunder crashing all around us.
“Kitty!” Sani places both hands on either side of my neck, guns still resting in his palms. They feel like hard chunks of ice against my scales. “You’re hit.”
My breath comes quick. Every pulse of my hearts sends pain shooting through my belly. My ascent slows but doesn’t stop. “I’m okay! Let’s finish this fast!”
The terrible burning pain in my midsection means the bullet has damaged a lot of muscle. That’s the good news. Injured muscles hurt like hell but they heal easily and are less likely to kill me. As far as I can tell, no orga
ns have been hit. I’ll live. If I can escape this F-22 without getting hit again, that is.
I clench my jaw against the pain and circle up without warning, aligning the length of my body with the top of the plane. Sani fires round after round down at the plane, but it doesn’t have any effect. The bullets even bounce off the clear material covering the cockpit, barely leaving a scratch. The pilot, realizing we’re on top of him, and he can’t shoot us like this, starts evasive maneuvers.
Blood drips from my wound and flies out behind me like a long red ribbon gently pulling my strength away from me. I can’t keep up with the jet much longer.
“This isn’t going to work!” Sani shouts. I think I feel his words vibrate through my back, more than hear them.
I scan the jet for weaknesses. How can we take this down with just a pistol? Not even Rambo himself could manage this.
Lightning flashes close to us and the smell of ozone fills my nostrils. Magnetic fields spasm around me. A weight pulls hard at my right side, sending me into a large-diameter barrel roll. I catch myself before falling too far and fight against it.
That gives me an idea. The jet weighs far more than I do, so a simple tackle would be difficult—and would probably kill both Sani and me in the process. But I don’t have to knock him out of the sky to knock him down. I think. “Hold on tight!”
Sani presses his entire body against me, and I feel the ropes tighten. I pool every bit of energy I can muster and shoot straight into the clouds above us for about a hundred feet. Then I reverse direction without turning, my tail end aimed at the jet’s right wing. I pull on the Earth’s magnetic field as hard as I can. Air whistles in my ears. Sani closes his arms even tighter around me just before the lower half of my serpentine body slams into the middle of the jet’s right wing.
A crash, very different from the thunder, rings out, punctuated by little snapping sounds. Those would be the bones in my tail and lower body breaking in half. I roar with pain.
The F-22 wrenches to the side. I dodge out of the way in case it starts rolling. But it doesn’t. The pilot is beginning to regain control. I straighten my neck and clamp my jaws over the right wing. I don’t have the energy left to pull against the fields again, so I simply let go of them. The combined weight of Sani and me pulls the Raptor back into a spin. With my front feet, I push away from the jet, which is now losing control. But I don’t push fast enough. The tip of the left wing, swinging around, strikes my tail and sends me spinning, too.
Dragons Are People, Too Page 7