“I know, but what if—”
“You got a choice. Go back, and you’ll get caught . . . or worse.”
Nova hesitated a moment and then turned so we could sprint after the rest.
Strangely, given the danger, after being cooped up inside for so long, it felt great to breathe some fresh air. The evening was pleasant, warm, and we were being chased by a gang of vamp killers, but the smell of fresh cut grass and the sound of the night breeze rustling the leaves in the trees was still nice. It must have been the dragon blood and my heightened senses.
We caught up with the rest and joined them, running hell-for-leather along a cycle path that ran by the side of a narrow, overgrown creek. We sprinted like that, panting eventually, for about a minute or so before Frankie slowed down and stopped. Then, he stepped over to one side of the path to the back fence of a house, jumped up, and swung himself over.
“Frankie,” I whispered loudly.
“Yeah,” his voice came back.
“What do we do now?”
“Wait there.”
“Those guys will be following us.”
“I’ll be just a minute. Hang tight.”
Then I heard footsteps pounding through the yard he was obviously in.
Penny was leaning back against the fence, blowing hard. Sparks was lying on the grass with her eyes closed. I could see she was alive, but she looked hot and sweaty and was panting like a dog on a warm day. Marty stood bent over with his hands on his legs just above his knees, while Nova was watching where we had come from for any signs of people following. I could hear what sounded like distant shouts, but I couldn’t see much for the spots that were clouding my vision. Some of us really needed to spend more time doing cardio conditioning.
After a few seconds, we jumped to attention at the sound of voices heading our way. They were still out of sight around a bend, but it would be less than a minute before they came into view and saw us.
“Quick, we need to get over the fence now,” Nova said as he stared anxiously in the direction of the voices.
“Penny. Get up here,” I heard Marty say. He had his fingers interlaced and ready to give her a boost. She stepped over, took the boost, and swung herself over the fence, landing with a quiet thud on the other side.
“Sparks, you next,” Marty said.
Sparks was still panting, so I went over to her and pulled her to her feet. “Over the fence or die,” I said, pointing back the way we came.
She nodded, unable to speak, but a couple of seconds later she was over and out of sight.
“You go next, Marty,” I said. He was about to object, so I held up a hand to stop him. Words weren’t necessary. He knew why I had said it. If SCAR caught up with us, the best that would happen would be that they would kill him. They probably wouldn’t even take him in. There wouldn’t be any public outcry if SCAR gunned down a rogue vamp on sight. He had to go.
It was just me and Nova left. We backed up to the fence. Nova easily reached the top and pulled himself up and over. Last man up was me. With the dragon blood still fresh inside me, this was little in the way of an obstacle. I jumped up, grasped the top, and heaved myself up. As I got ready to swing over, I could see the beams of the flashlights the SCAR thugs were using illuminating the path. I pushed myself off and landed on a dry lawn. The rest were already heading to the house where Frankie was waving us in.
I had to tread carefully to avoid making noise but managed to get to Frankie without any unfortunate mishaps.
I looked back at the fence to see the flashlight beams flicking around in the air and then back down where I couldn’t see them.
“Follow me,” Frankie whispered, so I turned away, happy that for the moment we had lost SCAR. But the twisting in my gut told me it probably wouldn’t be the last we saw of them that night.
Chapter Three
INSIDE FRANKIE’S HOUSE, he appeared to be talking to two clones of himself. He and his brothers looked so much alike it was almost spooky. The same thick dark hair, although theirs was showing the effects of an hour or so in bed. The same olive complexion, short dark stubble on their chins, rugged features, and soft chocolate-brown eyes. I could feel myself getting a little too drawn into those bedroom eyes, so I stopped looking and checked everyone else out but listened to what they were saying.
“Mom would go crazy if she knew you’d been home and not said hello,” one brother said. They were almost too old to be living at home, in my opinion, but it seemed to be the thing in their family. The fact that Frankie wasn’t welcome to stay probably stung, even though he was twenty-three.
“It’s one in the morning, Mikey. I ain’t waking her up to say hi,” Frankie replied. Seemed sensible to me.
“So, stay until morning?”
“We can’t. We got SCAR after us.”
“No kidding.” I glanced over just as Mikey scratched his chin and then looked away again.
“We need to borrow some clothes, your boots, and your motorcycles.”
Mikey guffawed, so I turned around again to see why.
“Okay, Arnold,” Mikey said when he calmed down a bit.
“Huh?” I asked.
I looked over at Nova who was keeping watch at the front window, holding one blade of the blind down so he could see out.
Sparks chirped. “It’s a film reference, Katie. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Terminator.”
“Oh, right.” I shrugged. I didn’t watch films.
“Only the best film ever made,” Frankie said.
“Nah, that was—”
I interrupted. “Guys. Right now, we’ve got SCAR on our tails, so maybe save the critique until later?”
Frankie, Mikey, and Johnny looked at me, two angrily and one with a pitying air that suggested I might be some kind of Philistine for not liking movies. I raised my eyebrows, put my hands on my hips, and silently dared any one of them to make a comment.
“Shhh,” Nova whispered from the window, letting go of the blind. “They’re coming.”
Nova backed away from the window, while everyone else stood stock still. I watched as the lights from one of the SUVs flashed across the blinds as it turned a corner and then slowly drove past, flashlight beams lighting up the shadows from inside the vehicles as it passed.
“I got their comms,” Sparks said in a whisper.
“What are they doing?” I asked quietly.
“Street-by-street search.”
Nobody moved or said anything for a few minutes while Sparks listened to whatever gizmo she was using with a bud in one ear.
“Okay. I think we’re safe now,” she said to the obvious relief of everyone in the room. “They said they’re heading back to HQ, and then they’re going to hit more addresses when they get them.”
“Does that mean they’ll come back here?” Johnny asked.
“We’ll be long gone by then, Johnny,” Frankie said, clapping his brother on his bulging muscular shoulder.
“Yeah, but we won’t, and what if the neighbors say anything?” Mikey looked at the window.
“Anyway,” Johnny said. “Right now we only have one bike, so it means at least six journeys to get you guys up there. Someone is bound to see us.”
“Where’s the SUV, Johnny?” asked Frankie.
“In the garage.”
“So, we all pile into that instead, you drive us up to Bogus Basin, and we get out and hike it from there. You’ll be back in a couple hours, and we’ll be out of your hair.”
Johnny and Mikey looked at each other for a couple seconds, shrugged, and then Mikey nodded. “I’ll drive. The SUV is in my name.”
The drive along the mountain road was, how shall I put it . . . unpleasant. The road itself was okay, as it led up to a popular mountain recreation area at Bogus Basin, but sharing four seats between six of us, one of whom was the giant Marty, was uncomfortable. I was glad that Penny and Sparks were tiny, but I wasn’t sure they appreciated having to sit in Nova’s and Marty’s laps on the way up.
Once we were up there and away from prying eyes, we shipped out, much to the relief of all concerned. There was just too much invasion of personal space, and when we did get out, we automatically spread out.
Mikey and the SUV disappeared, and we headed uphill on one of the many hiking trails and then took a little used track that we knew well. We had spent a lot of the last few months hiking up there, bringing supplies to a small cave system I knew of.
The entrance to the cave was well hidden and protected with a gate we’d installed, the type that keeps people from going into old mine shafts. I fiddled in my pocket for the key to the new padlock I had fitted a couple months earlier. It clicked open, and I pushed open the metal bar gate, which squealed a little on its hinges.
Flicking on my flashlight, I squeezed inside, checking the floor for unwanted visitors. Rattlesnakes were known in the area, as well as other non-venomous snakes. Fortunately, I couldn’t see anything and walked sideways through the narrow passage. Twenty feet in, the cave itself opened up into a larger space. It was not one of the grand caves that are likened to cathedrals, but it was dry, and the gear and supplies we had brought up were safe and sound.
The only thing the cave lacked was beds. They were just too bulky to get up there. I pulled a bedroll off a pile of them that was lying on the cave floor, opened it and shook it out, and then laid it on the ground.
The rest did the same until Nova questioned whether someone should be on watch. It was almost three in the morning, so I volunteered to take the first couple of hours. I was too keyed up to sleep, anyway.
I sidled out through the narrow entrance passageway and settled myself against the wall near the gate. I had to sit with my knees drawn up almost to my chin, so it was too uncomfortable to sleep anyway. I spent the next two hours looking out into the dark night sky lit only by the glow of Boise’s streetlights in the distance.
I thought about the situation we were in and how exactly we were going to survive. We had food and water. Enough for at least a week if we were sensible. We had shelter. We had no transportation, and that was a major problem. Worse, what we didn’t have and sorely needed was dragon blood. How were we going to survive without it or a willing human donor?
I rolled the problem around and around in my head the whole time I sat there, cooped up in our little den of vipers.
We were six young, fit—well, kind of fit—intelligent vampires with a problem and only a little bit of time to solve it.
SCAR was an inconvenience we could have done without. I hadn’t said anything to the rest of them, but I’d seen the guys going into my building carrying a weapon. I hoped never to be on the receiving end of it, because I recognized it from some of the documentaries about SCAR I’d watched on TV. The AV45. An automatic weapon that shot bullets with silver tips and filled with holy water. It would explode on impact, and a hit from one of those things was death no matter where on the body you got shot. When you saw one of those weapons, you knew the intention was clear—kill on sight.
As I sat there, something about the night we found the dragon came back to me. It had fallen from the sky just as the orange light had flashed across the heavens. The two must have been connected, because dragons just do not exist on Earth. So where had it come from?
Sparks would know.
In the morning, we could figure it out. We needed another dragon. The blood was just so ideal for feeding—it nourished even better than human blood and in much tinier amounts than vamps required from a human. With dragon blood, we didn’t have to worry about human donors, who were unpredictable and had become almost impossible to find, anyway.
“Hi.” Nova made me jump. I’d been so deep in thought I hadn’t heard him approach. “Go get some sleep.”
I nodded and smiled, reaching out to squeeze his hand. Then, I headed inside, found my bedroll, and collapsed into sleep with my head on my pack as a pillow.
Chapter Four
MORNING. FOOD. A drink. Check, check, and check.
Six people all in a circle around the tiny fire we had allowed ourselves. There was a draft through the caves because the narrow tunnels behind led farther down the mountain, so I wasn’t concerned about waking up suffocating in fumes.
The caves were a great emergency escape. If there were no snakes. I hated snakes. And spiders. And scorpions.
And if we didn’t get lost. I wasn’t a fan of that either.
Probably would have been better having a hideout in town, but in my mind, if someone was on the run, they headed for the hills. It felt safer that way.
“So, what do we do from here?” Marty asked. The wound where he had banged his head on the tunnel roof coming in had only bled for a second, healed and scabbed in thirty, and had then completely vanished. One of the advantages of being a vampire. Right then I was struggling to think of any others.
“I was thinking last night while I was on watch. What do you guys remember about the night the dragon appeared?” I asked.
“Orange light in the sky,” Nova said.
“Bright orange. It was pretty,” Penny said.
“Interesting,” Sparks said cryptically as she rustled in her pack for something.
“I can’t remember anything apart from that blood. That was good.” Frankie was leaning back on his bedroll, propping himself up on one elbow.
“I was hungry,” Marty said to groans from everybody else and accusations of constant hunger. “What, I’m a big guy. Look what happened when I didn’t get enough.”
That shut everyone up for a moment.
“Listen.” Sparks was about to make a speech. I could feel the excitement rising already. “Aww, never mind, I got a signal now.” She tapped with her finger at speed. Groans all round again.
“Why did you ask, Katie?” Nova asked.
“If we could work out how our dragon got here, we could maybe make it happen again.”
There were noises and nods of agreement from the rest.
“Okay, guys,” Sparks said, “I think I might have something. I never thought to check if there had been other reports of similar occurrences, but according to this, there have been several across the world. Some where nothing happened, some where people vanished, but no other reports of something appearing here that shouldn’t be here. Looks like our dragon was a one-off. Best theory is that the lights are caused by a rip in the space-time continuum.”
“Wait, what?” I asked. “How could anyone know that?”
“Sci-fi mumbo-jumbo,” Nova muttered.
“You think? How do you explain it then?” Sparks challenged.
Nova looked around at the rest of us, hoping for some support but he didn’t appear to be getting any. Sparks was rarely wrong, and I was willing to go along with it.
Nova gave in, shaking his head.
“So, that means, if you’re right, that somehow something rips the continuum and things fall through one way or the other?”
“You got it,” Sparks said, grinning at Nova in triumph. Nova snorted his derision.
Rips weren’t a new thing. Years ago, there’d been tons of interdimensional tears that let demons through. Some of them had been small, bat-like nuisances. But the bigger arch-demons had caused quite a lot of trouble because they could possess humans. Those rips had been sealed at the Cataclysm, a shift in the magical world. I’d never heard anyone talk about dragons coming through the rips. Maybe Sparks was right, and these tears led into a different dimension. The dragon we saw had looked nothing like the demons of the pre-Cataclysm era, though.
“So, what would cause the rips?” Nova asked.
“Magic,” Sparks said.
“Magic users,” I chimed in.
“Witches,” agreed Sparks.
“Witches?” Nova said. “How can someone who professes to be a scientist use witches as an explanation?”
“Because I believe in science. Science cannot explain the unexplainable; therefore, by a process of deduction, there must be other forces at work. Ergo, magic. Mag
ic doesn’t have to make logical sense.”
Nova stopped and was obviously giving that deduction some thought. After a while he sighed and held up his hands in defeat.
“So, we need to find a witch who can open a rip in the continuum. Then what? Do we go through, or do we just hope another dead dragon falls into our laps?” Penny said, looking concerned.
“I don’t suppose there’s a witch who would do that for us?” I asked Sparks.
“I know of one,” Marty said as he scratched his back.
“You do?”
“Yeah. She has a crystal and gift shop in Eagle that she uses as a front for her real business.”
“Which is?” I asked.
“Selling illegal magic spells to the normals. She only deals in rare magic, so she might know something about this whole episode. What do you think?”
“I think it’s a start at least. What about everyone else? Do you know of anyone?”
“There’s this woman over in Nampa who tells fortunes. My mom went to see her a while ago when my dad left,” said Penny. “Maybe she could help. My mom said there was all sorts of stuff there.”
“Possible,” I said, although I had my doubts. “Does anyone know of any other actual witches?”
“There’s Martha Jakes,” Frankie said.
“Who’s Martha Jakes?” I asked.
“She’s a witch. She doesn’t advertise it, but I know she helped my Mom out a couple times when my dad was messing about with magic. Stopped him from blowing up the garage. I could go see Mom and ask her where she lives.”
“Okay. What’s the woman’s name in Eagle, Marty?”
“Lynnette LeBlanc.”
“All right. So, you and I go to Lynnette LeBlanc?” I suggested. Marty nodded. “Nova and Penny try this woman out in Nampa. Frankie. You and Sparks go see your mom and find out whatever you can about Martha Jakes. Everybody happy?”
“Everybody watch out for SCAR while you’re out too. One last question, Katie? How are we going to travel?”
“We have three Ubers heading up to Bogus Basin now,” Sparks said, holding up her device.
Chasing Legends Page 3