by C. J. Hill
She leaned into Jesse, letting her head rest against his chest. She could hear the steady beat of his heart. So strong and reassuring. The two stayed like that, Jesse quietly holding her.
Theo, who sat in the chair nearest the cockpit, got up to rummage through one of the food bins. As he pulled out a box of zebra cakes, he glanced across the cabin, saw Jesse and Tori, and rolled his eyes. “Do we have to have PDA on the plane? I thought the two of you broke up.”
Jesse kept his arm around Tori. “We did.”
Theo snapped the food bin closed. “You don’t seem to understand the concept of breaking up.”
Jesse didn’t move. “And you don’t understand the concept of sympathy.”
Theo ripped open the package and gave a dramatic shrug. “Oh. Excuse me. I guess some of my sympathy evaporated after the two of you flew off, abandoning me in the woods with a megalomaniac gunman and his fifty-ton, fire-breathing carnivore.”
Jesse let out a not-so-patient breath. “Overdrake had already left. You were perfectly safe.”
“He could have come back.” Theo bit into one of the cakes. “You didn’t know he was gone for good. Don’t you watch horror shows? The villain and the monster always come back.”
Tori lifted her head from Jesse’s shoulder. “We were in a hurry to get Dr. B to the hospital, and we weren’t thinking clearly. We’re sorry.”
Theo sat down sullenly. “You know when you’ll be sorry—the next time you need to break into some high-security building. You never forget about me then.”
“Sorry,” Jesse said, although he didn’t sound as sincere as Tori.
Theo held up a hand as though giving in. “Just go back to your PDAs. I’ll sit up here and you can pretend like I don’t exist again.” He sat down with a thunk and made a show of putting in his earbuds.
“Tech guys,” Jesse muttered. “I wonder if they’re all such prima donnas.”
Tori settled against Jesse’s side and he put his arm over her shoulder again. It felt natural to sit like this, warm and comforting. Snug. “Theo isn’t as smart as he thinks,” she said. “He can’t even distinguish a real PDA.”
“I don’t blame him for having a hard time,” Jesse said with mock seriousness. “Women flock to men who’ve been wading through debris, underbrush, and have suspicious blood stains on their clothing.”
The two of them were a mess: smudged with ash, dirt, and bits of bark. “Helmet hair is one of my best looks,” she agreed.
He nodded. “We’re practically ready for prom pictures.”
Prom. It was so far off she hadn’t given it any thought. Now she wondered who Jesse would take. Tacy? “Black is formal wear,” she said.
Jesse wiped at a spot of dirt on his jacket. “And women love a man in uniform. This thing qualifies, doesn’t it?”
“I’ll let you know if I start loving it.”
“Right,” he said. “Let me know.”
She wondered what exactly he meant by that for the rest of the flight home.
Chapter 27
Dirk hadn’t heard his father leave. He’d been outside with Aaron, teaching him diving maneuvers. But Dirk heard his father come home. As soon as soon as his father stepped through the door, he called Dirk’s name, loudly and repeatedly.
“Coming,” Dirk answered.
What was wrong now? He walked toward his father’s voice, intercepting him in the family room. He was dressed in battle gear and smelled of dragon and gunpowder. His face was flushed, either from riding without a helmet or from anger. Probably anger.
One glare at Dirk cleared up any doubt. Yep, anger. What had he found out? Dirk took a slow breath and kept his expression calm. He couldn’t afford to do anything that would make him look guilty.
His father pulled off his gloves and flung them on the couch. “What did you tell Tori about the eggs?”
Dirk tilted his head in confusion. He’d given his father more than one reason to be angry with him but none of them involved dragon eggs. “What do you mean?”
His father stepped closer, looked like he was about to grab Dirk by the collar. “What did you tell Tori about the eggs?”
Dirk held his ground. “Nothing. She found out there were more eggs from being in Kiha’s mind when you attacked her on Halloween.” He added the last bit to remind his father that he was to blame for that part.
The reminder didn’t curb his father’s temper. “How did she know they were in the Energize building?”
Dirk didn’t have to fake his surprise. “She doesn’t know that. What are you talking about?”
“The Slayers broke in and destroyed five eggs.” Dirk’s father held up one hand, fingers splayed to emphasize the point. “Five. How did they know?”
A wave of sickness hit Dirk. Five eggs were gone. Years of breeding destroyed. Tamerlane, Dirk’s favorite dragon, had fathered four of those eggs. To lose those—it felt like losing Tamerlane all over again. He had to sit down on the couch.
“How did they know?” his father repeated, louder this time.
“I don’t know,” Dirk insisted. Tamerlane’s scales had been an orange-red, unusual for a dragon. Dirk had hoped one of Tamerlane’s offspring would carry that trait, but if not, he’d planned on breeding the siblings until flame-like scales appeared again in their line. Seeing that color would be like bringing part of Tamerlane back to life.
Dirk’s father paced in front of him, scowling. “Someone obviously told Tori where the eggs were, and you’re the only one who had contact with her.”
“I didn’t tell her,” Dirk said, his own voice rising now. “Why would I do that?”
“To save your friends.”
“They’re not in danger from the eggs. If I were trying to save the Slayers, I would have told them where the dragons were.” He threw his hands up to show the ridiculousness of the argument. “Actually, I wouldn’t have even done that. I would have just killed the dragons myself and fled. All four are still alive, aren’t they? I’m still here.” He ran a shaky hand through his hair. “Is the remaining egg one of Tamerlane’s?”
His father must have heard the cautious hope in Dirk’s voice, hope for that egg, and despair for the rest. He let out a long breath and with it some of his anger. “Yes. It’s one of Tamerlane’s.”
At least there was that.
His father kept at his pacing, each step coming down hard on the floor. “You must have let the information slip somehow.”
He hadn’t, though. He knew he hadn’t. “I’ve never talked to Tori about the eggs or mentioned the building. I couldn’t have let anything slip.”
A sick feeling settled in his stomach. Had his father said something around Khan or Minerva, thinking that Tori was connected to Vesta? No, that couldn’t be it. His father would never be that careless. The leak was elsewhere. But Dirk decided not to mention Tori’s change of dragon connections anyway. He wasn’t going to let the blame for this be pinned on him.
Dirk shifted on the couch. “Someone in your organization must have told the Slayers.”
“Who?”
Dirk shrugged. He didn’t know all the people who worked with his father. How could he come up with the traitor? “Did you find out who leaked the information about the arms shipment?”
His father made a grumbling sound from deep in his throat. “I have my suspicions. But Ethington didn’t know the eggs’ location.” He paused and his eyes narrowed. “Although he knows Hancock.” Hancock was one of his father’s eagerly ruthless men who headed up the security of the building.
Another grumbling noise. “Ethington might have gotten the information from him and passed it on to Senator Hampton. Although why he’d double cross me…” His father trailed off as he considered this possibility. The slap of his footsteps against the floor was the only sound in the room.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself,” his father said the phrase like it was a school lesson that needed repetition, “you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you
know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer defeat.” He looked to Dirk to say the last sentence of Sun Tzu’s quote. The Art of War was just one of many books his father had studied like scripture.
Dirk obliged him. “If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
His father nodded. “Perhaps we haven’t known Senator Ethington as well as we should have.”
Dirk had been so busy denying involvement in the killings, it wasn’t until this moment that he processed the other fact his father had given him. If the Slayers had only destroyed five eggs, they must have been caught before they could destroy the sixth.
Panic took hold of his chest and squeezed. “Did you capture the Slayers? You didn’t kill anyone, did you?”
Not Tori. She had to be safe. She wouldn’t have gone with the Slayers—not to destroy dragons. Even as Dirk told himself this, another part of him was certain she was part of the mission. She was the only one who could connect to the eggs to make sure they were legitimate.
Dread clutched at his throat. No, he thought. And the word was meant for Tori as much as for his father. He knew he couldn’t retroactively stop any of this from happening, and yet the word repeated over and over in his mind. No. No. No. Why had she gone?
Dirk’s father grunted in disapproval at his concern. His words became clipped, accusing almost. “I got a phone call about the attack and flew Khan to Lock Haven. As I neared our building, Hancock called, reporting that the Slayers had flown off with an egg. I tracked the GPS chip embedded in the shell, hit the area with EMP, and retrieved the egg.
“Tori went into Khan’s mind,” his father added with irritation. “She was trying to reach his control center.”
“She did what?” Dirk asked, incredulous. Why would Tori do something so foolish, make herself vulnerable that way when an angry dragon lord was right there? “Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. I saw her faint. I felt her poking around.”
Dirk stared at his father, alarm filling all the places the panic had hollowed out. “What did you do to her?”
“Nothing,” he snapped, his anger shifting back to Dirk. “I flew away with the egg. Although if I had known then that the Slayers weren’t just thieves, but murderers too, I would have tried harder to kill them.” He pulled his phone from his pocket and yanked it from an EMP-proof case. “I was halfway home when Hancock sent this picture.”
Dirk’s father shoved the phone at him. The screen showed the carnage. Broken bits of shell everywhere. Cracked eggs. A pale, mangled dragon lying among spatters of blood. Its half-formed wings looked like canvases that someone had torn. How had the others died? Stabbed, he supposed, before they’d taken their first breaths.
“One of the dragons tried to escape,” his father continued. “They bashed in its head against a wall.”
Dirk handed the phone back to his father. He couldn’t bear to see the pictures anymore. Five dead. Five. Brutally killed.
How could Tori have been a part of this? Why did she let it happen? He’d shown her that dragons were majestic, powerful creatures. She’d seen them, ridden them, been in their minds. She should have protected those eggs, not slaughtered them.
And she’d done this, knowing how upset it would make him.
A shuddering breath pushed its way from his lips. He’d been trying to show her that she was a dragon lord. Instead, she’d shown him that she was a Slayer.
Dirk’s father put the phone back in its case and snapped it closed. “This won’t go unanswered. Two weeks from tonight, we’ll take out our stage one military targets.”
The sentence, spoken so easily, had implications that pushed all other thoughts from Dirk’s mind. Did his father mean it? “I thought we weren’t going to attack until Vesta and Jupiter were full-grown.”
“Change of plans. The revolution starts January third. By then I should have everything in place.” He shoved his phone case back into his jacket pocket. “I’ll need your help preparing the dragons. Don’t make other plans.”
This was happening too fast. Dirk wasn’t ready to make this sort of leap yet—a complete break with his country, with everything. “We shouldn’t let the Slayers force us into acting prematurely. We need to make sure we have the best hand possible before we play it.”
“It’s too late for waiting,” his father said. “I’ve already called operatives and put plans in motion. While most of the nation is busy with their holidays, our men will plant explosives in congress’s bunkers. We’ll destroy them the same night we take out the military bases.”
Congress’s protocol if DC came under attack was to move the leadership to secret bunkers and direct the nation’s doings from there. Ethington had given the location to his father long ago, allowing his father to maneuver his men inside the government so that they had access to it.
“Why hit the politicians’ safe spots then?” Dirk asked. “They won’t be there.”
“Because I’m sending Congress a message. They have no place to run.”
With that, Dirk’s father stalked upstairs.
It was happening. Whether Dirk liked it or not, the revolution was about to start.
Chapter 28
When Tori woke up in the morning, she checked the internet for messages from Dirk. She didn’t find any. She hadn’t heard from him near the dragons either. How angry was he? He must know by now what she’d done. Certainly, his father had told him not only about the dragons, but that she’d been one of the Slayers involved in the attack.
Tori held her phone, contemplating what to write to Dirk. She wanted to explain why she’d destroyed the eggs, but he already knew her reasons for being a Slayer. The two of them had talked about the subject enough times. Still, saying nothing seemed worse.
She wrote a sentence, erased it. Wrote another, then erased it too. Finally, she wrote one word—Sorry—and sent the message.
That word sat alone on the site all day. And the next day. And the next.
School let out for the holidays, and Tori’s family went to Hawaii for Christmas to take a break from winter. She tried to keep her mind off Slayer things and did her best to be just another tourist—one with bodyguards trailing in her family’s wake. But it was hard not to let her mind drift back to DC, back to the last few months of training, to stealing kisses with Jesse after practice, to kissing Dirk while dragons lounged nearby, and then to Lock Haven where she could still smell the dust and smoke—to explosions that had destroyed so much.
Sunshine, sand, and aqua blue water couldn’t change who she was, what she had to do, or what she’d done already. Dirk and Jesse. Each so important to her, and yet she’d managed to hurt both of them so deeply.
She and her family flew back to DC on January second and she steeled herself to face school, practice, and everything else. Snow lined the streets, a cold, white reminder that made the tree branches droop. Winter had patiently waited for her.
Chapter 29
At midnight on January third, Dirk was riding Khan over Hampton, Virginia. His father sent him to take care of the jets at Langley Air Force Base.
He had one goal for the night: disable as many fighter jets as possible.
The base spread out in front of him. Planes, jeeps, runways, homes—all lit up like so many birthday candles, waiting to be blown out. No wishes today, though, just darkness.
He circled near the base, hesitating. He’d known this moment would be hard for him—attacking his own country. But he didn’t feel as much regret as he expected. Superimposed on the civilization down below him, was an image of battered eggs and a dead hatchling, one that lay crumpled on a floor, wings torn.
When the Slayers killed Tamerlane and Kiha, they’d been acting in self-defense. The attack on the eggs was different. The Slayers had killed the dragons for one reason: it was human nature to destroy things that opposed you.
The Slayers opposed him and so did the government. A government built on waste,
corruption, and hypocrisy. Dirk would handle them in kind.
In Khan’s mind, Dirk commanded the dragon to let out an EMP screech. Khan drew in a breath, chest expanding. He lifted his head and sent a high-pitched careening wave of sound that rolled through the sky. Below Dirk, the landscape blinked into darkness.
He turned Khan and headed to Andrews, the next target. It was going to be a long night.
Chapter 30
When Tori woke up in the morning, she dressed in her Veritas uniform and went downstairs for breakfast. School. Do not ask for whom the school bell tolls. The bells toll for thee and all the other students who didn’t finish their English reading assignments over break.
Her father was gone but Aprilynne wasn’t. Which was odd because they usually drove to his office together. Tori’s mother was flipping through news stations on the TV and had her laptop open to another news channel.
Tori trudged over to the cereal cupboard. “Where’s dad?”
Aprilynne cut a bagel in half and spread cream cheese on one side. “He was called in early. Government stuff.”
“You didn’t go with him?” It was worth going in early to avoid rush hour traffic on the beltway. Tori grabbed a cereal box and went to get a bowl.
“Dad left super early,” Aprilynne said. “He told me to stay home and work on campaign stuff.”
Tori’s gaze went to her mother, noticing for the first time her serious expression and the crease of concern between her eyebrows. Whatever was on the news, she wasn’t happy about it.
Tori poured her cereal, only half paying attention to it. “Is something wrong?”
Aprilynne glanced at their mother, then lowered her voice. “You’re not supposed to tell anyone, but several military bases were hit with EMP last night.”
Tori’s hand froze on the cereal box. Flakes skittered unnoticed onto the table. It had started. Overdrake had attacked. That wasn’t supposed to happen yet. She hadn’t expected Overdrake to strike until Venezuela was doing exercises off the coast next April. Tori had assumed America would be safe at least until then. Had Overdrake attacked sooner as retaliation for the eggs? “How many bases?” Tori asked.