“Damn it, Sol! I can’t just let MOME take my brother again!”
“I know. But we need a plan.”
“Guys,” Seamus said, finally joining us, in human form. “I don’t feel so good.”
I turned to look at him, and indeed, for someone who never wanted to be described as coffee with a touch of milk, he was looking awfully milky.
Shrugging off my own pain, I stood up, covering the distance between me and Seamus quickly. Just as I reached him, he started to slump. I caught him by the shoulders and could feel a slick wetness coat my fingers. Soon I was holding all of Seamus’ weight, and my right hand was soaked in blood.
“Sol, he needs a healer. We just lost Rhelia, can we risk the Tree?”
“If I’d been planning this mission for MOME, I would have specifically left a unit there, in hopes that we’d be injured enough to need it.”
“Damn it, what do we do?”
“It seems like a slow bleed. A regular healer might be able to help him. Take him to his parents?” Sol suggested.
Unable to think of anything else, I nodded, waited until Sol put her arm on my shoulder, and then shifted us to the small Unterberg apartment on the opposite side of town where Rhelia had arranged for Seamus’ moms to stay.
IT WAS WITH no small amount of embarrassment that I learned that Rowan was a doctor. I really needed to work on asking my friends more personal questions. Especially the friends I was sleeping with, and might be fairly romantically attached to. I tried to give myself a break for it, since it had been a particularly trying couple of weeks, but it still bothered me that I didn’t know the professions of my best friends’ parents. At least I could console myself that I knew just as little about Sol’s family…. On second thought, that didn’t really make me feel any better.
Fortunately, since Rowan was a long practicing ER doc, I felt quite confident leaving Seamus in her care. Unfortunately, since Sol and I were likely to bring down a horde of MOME agents on any location where we were present, as far as I could tell, we decided it was safest to leave Seamus with his moms and try to find somewhere else to regroup, despite Rowan’s protestations that she should really take a look at my shoulder before we went anywhere.
Of course, I couldn’t really think of a place less likely to attract MOME attention than the place where Rhelia had hidden Seamus’ parents, but, even still, we had a couple of errands to run before we could settle down anywhere anyway.
I shifted us directly to the middle of Rhelia’s apartment, in hopes of avoiding whatever surveillance might have been left at her place. We didn’t stay long at all. Just long enough to grab the journal, the file, and—thanks to Sol, who spotted it on the floor just as I was about to shift us out of there—the flash drive that Rhelia had been carrying when she’d first come back to the apartment. It was ridiculous to think that had only been a few hours earlier.
I sighed as Sol grabbed my arm and I rallied to make another shift. I had a feeling this would be the last one I was going to be able to manage until I was able to rest, and/or get my shoulder healed. As such, I had one specific destination in mind, even if it was risky.
So it was that a certain creeptastic vampire managed to hitch one final ride back to Arizona with us. I didn’t see or hear him, but I felt his creepily cold grasp on my shoulder as I was already reaching for the small, familiar glade that had saved my life so many times already.
While I was somewhat unsurprised to see Edik as we landed in a tumble in the middle of the glade that held the Tree of Life, I was completely in shock when I stepped back and an ebon-skinned hand clamped down on his pasty neck, ripping it from his shoulders before I'd even had time to scream my rage at him.
I half expected to lift my eyes and see Rhelia, since she certainly had plenty of reasons to wish Edik dead, but aside from her being currently locked up by MOME, the skin of that hand was missing the iridescence that suffused Rhelia’s skin. My brain had almost filled in the blank by the time I looked up to see Azrael, once more in their feminine form, grasping a very surprised looking Edik by the shoulder while his body slumped to the ground.
Then Azrael threw the head into the woods. My stomach turned at the sheer violence of the whole thing, but I couldn’t get my brain to drum up any sympathy for the vampire.
“Umm… dare I ask what he did to you?”
Azrael shrugged. “I loathe vampires.”
When neither Sol nor I said anything for a very long moment, they added, “It’s a succubus thing.”
“Right. Ok,” I agreed eloquently, just before passing out.
WHEN I WOKE up, I felt infinitely better than I had in a long while.
“Dare I ask how long I was out?” I queried… possibly no one. I was staring at a beautifully tiled ceiling, but since I hadn’t looked around at all yet, I had no idea if anyone was here with me. Something told me that I wasn’t addressing an empty room, though.
It was Sol’s voice that answered.
“Only a day, this time. Not bad, really, considering how many times you shifted us while missing a third of the muscles in your shoulder.”
I sighed.
“Did Life heal me up? Or did we have to flee another herd of MOME agents?”
Sol laughed.
“No. No one was there besides Azrael and the Tree. Life healed you up, as usual, as soon as I took you over to him. Azrael ran off before I could ask any more about why they felt the need to decapitate the vamp, and then Gwen showed up out of nowhere and shifted us to Rhelia’s apartment in the dragon realm, claiming that the dragons would be angry if you weren’t turned over to their care.”
“Huh. At least I didn’t miss anything interesting.”
Sol laughed again.
“I appreciate your sense of humor, Gatita. One of these days you’re going to need a really good cry, though.”
I chuckled, trying not to think about how right she was. I didn’t feel like sobbing right now. I needed to—I knew that. I could feel it building up, threatening to tear my lungs apart if I let it, but… not yet. I needed to come up with a plan first. I needed to get Trev back. Get Rhelia back. Then I could sob for a while.
“I wonder why Gwen really dropped us here,” I muttered, even as my eyes began to drift shut again.
“You think she has ulterior motives?” Sol asked.
“I think she’s a goddess of good fortune who ‘helps those who help themselves.’ So she, at least, thinks that we have something to gain by being here. The question is, what?”
“Indeed, that is an excellent question to ask, youngling.”
That was decidedly not Sol, and I snapped my head towards the voice’s origin just in time to see a woman who looked like she could have been Rhelia’s sister walk into the room. Sol inclined her head respectfully as the woman came in, then left the room.
“Weird,” I said, as the woman approached the bed on which I was lying. I now saw that it stood in the middle of a colorfully decorated room, tiled from floor to ceiling and draped with vibrant tapestries all over. “Sol isn’t ever that subservient, in my experience. You must be Rhelia’s grandmother, or some shit.”
I liked the dragons quite a bit more than I liked the folks who ran Unterberg, but something about authority figures made me flippant, and this woman simply oozed "elder in charge of important shit," even though her human form looked no more than five or ten years older than Rhelia’s.
“Ha! Rhelia said you were irreverent to a fault, little one. I like it. I’m not a fan of obedience, myself. And I can assure you that your friend didn’t initially react to me with that amount of deference…. Though, I do hold a certain amount of respect for those who are old enough to have witnessed the beginning of the civilization from which I crawled.”
She added that last bit with just a hint of reproach.
I laughed.
“It’s not my fault that you’re really fucking old, lady. I just got here. Do you have a name?” I asked, in a hurry to figure out who she actually wa
s so I could be flippant without blatantly shoving my foot in my mouth every other sentence.
“You can call me Grandmere,” she replied.
“Why would I use French to address you, and why would I call you Grandma, anyway? Are you actually Rhelia’s grandmother?”
“More or less. And, as you are her ward, I am essentially your grandmother as well.”
“First of all, weird. Second of all, I’d prefer to call you by a name. I already have a handful of grandparents.”
After a long pause, I added, “Thank you for the offer, though. I appreciate how welcoming you’ve been.”
She sighed.
“You can call me Siara. And, as to being welcoming… well, you are dragonkin in more ways than one, as you no doubt understand by now.”
“Right, the whole turning-into-a-dragon thing… so that’s really a genetic thing, and not some special power conferred to me by the whole my-brother-married-a-dragon thing?”
“Correct. I believe your maternal grandmother had a dragon form as well.”
I thought about that for a moment, trying to remember if I’d ever seen Momo turn into a dragon, and when I couldn’t come up with anything, decided to file it away under the giant-assed list of crap I was going to have to figure out later, after I rescued my brother and discovered what had happened to my parents.
“So, when you came in, you hinted that you might know something about what we stood to gain by being here.”
“Did I?” she asked, with more than a hint of mischief in her eyes.
“Look, you don’t seem like the type that allows for coincidental timing. We were discussing why Gwen brought us here and you waltz in, saying, 'that’s an excellent question.' Don’t pretend you don’t have the answer. I’m not the type of person to underestimate you just because you come in a petite, feminine human package.”
“Quite so,” she admitted. “Well, Soledad has informed me that my granddaughter and her mate have both been taken captive by MOME. That is a crime we do not take lightly in the dragon realms. They have been warned before that they are not permitted to interfere with our people. Rhelia’s previous capture was affront enough. We won’t stand for it again, no matter what manufactured crimes they accuse her of.”
As understanding began to take root, I sat up.
“What exactly are you saying?” I asked.
“We have reason to believe that MOME presents a threat, not only to dragon kind, but to everyone inhabiting the human realm you know as Earth, and all of its associated seams.”
“So…”
“So, when you go after your brother and my granddaughter, you will do so with the full might of the dragon realms at your back.”
SOL AND I spent the next day searching through every scrap of information we could piece together about what secret weapons MOME might be working on. It wasn’t like we needed any more reason to go after MOME, as it was. We had more than enough. And with the dragons behind us, we might even have enough firepower to succeed. But that was the problem, might wasn’t good enough for the dragons. It also wouldn’t be good enough for the leaders of Unterberg, to whom Siara would shortly send an envoy, attempting to persuade them to join us. It would be difficult to persuade anyone to aid us, if we didn’t have an accurate prediction of what we were up against. A possible army of misfit soldiers like Trev was one thing. A secret weapon that we were completely unaware of the nature of… that was something else entirely.
Thankfully, it didn’t take too long before we found a few clues in the material that Rhelia had brought back to her apartment. My family file provided our first clue, buried in a note scribbled on the margin.
Both subjects present during incident 72197, but not directly involved. Subjects’ exit interviews suggest they chose to leave program after incident due to rumors and in protest of research tactics used.
It was an oddly worded note, and I wasn’t sure what it meant, but the fact that it was the only note in the margins of the entire file made me feel like it was worth looking into. Besides, we’d found precious little that stood out in their file up to that point. I mentioned it to Sol as something to keep an eye out for, which paid off a few hours later when she found another tidbit in the files that she was sifting through on the computer—the ones that were on the flash drive Rhelia had brought back.
Sol dragged me away from my mom’s journal, which I’d just started on, after carefully going through the family file first, and plunked me down into a comfortable leather chair in front of a twenty-four-inch computer monitor. I hadn’t realized that she and my brother had quite so much in common, until I saw her computer set up. From what I saw in this room, Rhelia was an accomplished hacker. Which probably explained where she’d gotten ahold of the files Sol had just been looking through.
Special investigation: Stripping Incident 7/21/97
After carefully considering patterns of destruction in the lab, the amount of damage overall, and the few notes retrieved from the site, we have determined that the explosion was a direct result of the stripping experiment. We recommend a full cease and desist for all experiments related to this research for the foreseeable future. The risk of another such incident is too great, and the results of the first experiment have clearly demonstrated the practice to be entirely inhumane.
That was a decidedly short and vague report, all things considered, but the thing that had me dropping my jaw and grabbing Sol’s shoulder was the fact that it was signed, Albert Bumblebee & Evelynn Keeler.
Sol turned, caught my eye, gave me an emphatic nod, and I was gone.
~~~
Sol had probably wanted me to bring her along for the ride, but I wasn’t sure that I had enough energy to take us both from the dragon realm to wherever Albert was, and back again. Especially since I had zero idea where Albert was. My Gwen-given powers hadn’t failed me, though. I had focused hard on Albert’s presence and then, sure enough, wound up plopped into the seat of his red velvet wingback chair, complete with hissing, disgruntled iguana.
“Vic! What a delight to see you here. I don’t suppose you’ve come with good news?” he asked.
I stared at his earnest face, partially covered by the thick white beard, bushy white eyebrows, and flowing long hair that made me wonder if he’d once looked up “wizard” on the internet and done his best to cosplay the whole thing. He was really nailing it. I still wondered if the whole thing was an act, though.
“Like what?” I asked. “Like, oh hey, found my parents’ killers, overthrew MOME, NBD? Just wanted to let you know? That sort of good news?”
“I’m afraid I’m not familiar with NBD.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Not really what I’m here to talk about.”
Albert only smiled beatifically and took a seat in the wingback across from me.
“Do tell,” he said encouragingly.
“I’m here to ask you about the ‘Stripping Incident.’”
Ah. There was the reaction I had been hoping for. Albert’s face darkened, and his mouth turned down at the corners. I hadn’t wanted to upset him, but based on even the vague description I’d read in his report, I could only assume the subject would be a bit of a downer. Still, I was relieved not to see blank indifference.
“What do you wish to know about it?”
“Everything you can tell me. I think it could be very important.”
“It undoubtedly is, but I’m afraid I can’t tell you about it if I don’t know what you plan to do with the information.”
I frowned. If that was true, then this was even bigger than I suspected. But if I told Albert the truth, would he still tell me what was going on? I didn’t think he held any love for MOME anymore, but I didn’t really know the guy. He could still be a MOME sympathizer, for all I knew. Still, I didn’t think I could come up with an overly convincing lie, and besides, he might have some way to tell if I didn’t tell the truth. If he was truly on my side, the truth would weigh heavily in my favor, and if he wasn’
t, then… well, I doubt I could trust anything he said anyway.
“I plan to use whatever you tell me to help take down MOME and get my brother and his mate back.”
Albert smiled the smile of a hunter closing in on its prey, which wasn’t completely reassuring until he said, “Right answer.”
Then, of course, he took out a joint, lit it, took a long drag, offered it to me, shrugged dismissively when I turned it down, and then exhaled just before starting his story.
“I worked for MOME for many years, as I believe you now know. I worked in research for most of that time. That was how I met your parents. They both joined a study I was running in the mid-nineties. It wasn’t long, however, after meeting your parents that I realized they were more than mere research subjects. They were both powerful enough to be at the cutting edge of dark matter theory, if they were willing to work with me. However, I already had reason then to be suspicious of some of my colleagues, so I didn’t publicize their talents, nor did I change their status from that of research subjects, even though it would have been far more fair to call them colleagues. I didn’t want them attracting attention from some of my less scrupulous workmates. We continued to work together to research expanded dark matter theory. Are you familiar with the concept?”
I nodded, not wanting to interrupt, but added, after Albert left an expectant pause, “Trev gave me a brief explanation and demonstration just before he was taken by MOME.”
Albert looked dour again for a moment, but took another drag on his joint before continuing.
“Very well, if you’re familiar with the basic concept then at least I won’t need to prove it to you. So, your parents were already well versed in the concept of expanded dark matter and its possibilities by the time that the Stripping Incident occurred. Consequently, when they left the program immediately afterwards, MOME wished to keep an eye on them. That’s only relevant later. First the incident itself. I can’t be entirely certain why my colleagues were exploring it, but the evidence I found in the aftermath of the experiment left little doubt as to what they were experimenting with. They were attempting to strip a human who possessed dark matter in their blood of said dark matter.”
Victoria Marmot- The Complete Series Page 34
