The Last Queen

by Christine McKay

  “Call 9-1-1, tell them there’s a fire,” Adrianne panted.

  Nikki complied. “They’re already on their way. Where now?”

  Where indeed? She glanced around. There were no hounds in sight. She crossed the parking lot at a jog and headed toward the decorative shrubbery separating the hotel from the strip mall next door. “We wait for the police?” She knew they couldn’t outrun the hounds.

  “Sounds like as good a plan as any.”

  They crouched behind the shrubs, watching the entryway to the hotel. After what seemed an eternity, but perhaps only five minutes, a police cruiser pulled up slowly, took a pass around the building and finally parked at the entrance. Two officers got out and entered the hotel.

  Less than two minutes after the police officers entered, someone walked out. He ducked his head as he went through the door. Nikki gasped. Built like a football player, he wore all black. At least it seemed like black. The colors continually shifted, sometimes a shade of gray, then almost purple as if deliberately taunting the human eye. Adrianne shuddered. This was Navarre’s nightmare. This was the unnamed terror that lurked at the edges of one’s peripheral vision when alone in the house or walking down a darkened street.

  This was the Hunter.

  Adrianne felt a warning tingle at the base of her neck, almost like the pre-throb that heralded her migraines. The Hunter’s head swung in their direction. She felt rather than saw his searing gaze. If he caught them, she knew they’d both die.

  She broke cover. “Run! Don’t look back, just run!”

  They spun around almost as one and ran. Adrianne could feel the debilitating roar building in her skull again.

  The Hunter laughed. His laughter crippled her. It felt as if her feet were churning through mud. Her movements slowed.

  Nikki grabbed her arm. “Come on!”

  Crossing through the mall’s parking lot, they headed for the highway. They hurried across the pavement, stumbling into the clump of scraggly brush separating the highway from the frontage road.

  The laughter continued on in her head, paralyzing her. Her feet continued to slow, tripping her up.

  Nikki was a step or two ahead of her.

  Get out of my head! Adrianne silently screamed.

  The Hunter’s laughter stilled.

  Adrianne hit a chain link fence and switched direction, running parallel to it. Gravel and chunks of dirty road snow churned beneath her feet, all conspiring to slow her down.

  The brush snapped behind her and beside her. The hounds! Her lungs ached for air. To her left, Nikki suddenly screamed, then was silenced mid-shriek.

  “Nikki!” She stopped, spun around, and searched wildly for something to use as a weapon. There was nothing. “Nikki!” she called, frantic.

  “Easy, lady,” a voice said close to her ear. Whirling, she raised her fists. Her first blow struck a leather-clad chest. She hissed in pain, but it didn’t stop her from striking out with the other hand. That shot met air. Arms closed around her. She flailed in the Hunter’s grasp, hands fisted, striking out where she could. Her arms were seized, pressed tight to her sides. Pressure built at the nape of her neck. She felt as if she were going to implode. “Adrianne, we are here.” A hand folded over her mouth, restrictive, but not overwhelming.

  It took her a full minute to recognize the voice. “Nikki?” she hissed against Navarre’s palm.

  “We have her. She is safe.”

  “Oh thank God.” She sagged against him, the strength draining out of her. Then she jerked up, not sure if she still might be trapped.

  Dropping the hand over her mouth, he touched her mind then, softly, as he had before, and turned the touch to a caress that made her want to dissolve in a puddle at his feet. Her body leaned limply against his. She marveled at that ability, his skill in disabling her so effectively.

  She knew instinctively that the Hunter could have done the same. He had been toying with them, like a cat with a trapped mouse.

  Navarre scooped her up.

  She couldn’t have fought him off even if she possessed the muscle to do so. Nor did her treacherous body want to. “Where are we going?” she asked wearily. She looked up, finally searching his face. It was hidden in the shadows.

  “To safety.” She felt his breath against her cheek. He smelled earthy, of wild things, woodlands, a wind-laden scent that stirred to life some portion of memory which lay dormant until this moment. This was safety. This was rightness. This was someone who did not burn, who bore a webwork of scales across his body as well. Family.

  Though she loved her adoptive parents fiercely, she was a woman who felt the safest with black-and-white answers. And there were just too many unanswered questions surrounding her birth. She was but a toddler when she was abandoned in the entryway of the hospital on a wintry night. Security cameras caught nothing. One moment the lobby was empty, the next, she lay there curled in a blanket. She’d seen the video. Abandoned. Left without even a name.

  Yet here was a man that offered her a piece of her heritage and perhaps answers.

  Was she an alien like him? She wanted to laugh. It came out a croak. She wondered if he could read her thoughts.

  “If you so desire. I am trying to grant you the privacy your society seems to crave.”

  “What have you done to me?” Cradled in his arms, she felt so safe, so relaxed.

  “Loosened your muscles. Eased your flight reflex. Your race is incredibly feckless. Hold on.”

  Something loomed large in the brush. She squinted in the wan moonlight and made out an oblong mass of taupe, lying like some giant boulder discarded by the last glacier. The boulder had an open mouth and within that, a gray ramp. They moved up the ramp and entered what could only be the Dragoon’s craft.

  She was set upon a gray blocky-looking couch. Did they have no color other than blacks, grays and browns in their world? For all its plainness, though, the couch was incredibly comfortable. Navarre draped a blanket around her body. Surprise, it was gray.

  Nikki sat beside her, looking flushed but otherwise unharmed. “Pinch me. Were we just rescued by a horde of gorgeous men? Why? Where are we going? And why is that one looking at you like you were some delicious kind of truffle?”

  “I don’t know.” What could she tell Nikki? What would she believe? “Are you scared?” Adrianne said in a low voice, eyes focused on Navarre’s back, now turned to them. Other hooded figures retreated behind a panel in the wall, their fading footsteps the only indication they ever existed at all.

  “Are you kidding? Take me now.” She flung her arms wide across the couch.

  A blob of gray rose from the floor like thick ink and formed itself into a crude chair. Adrianne was about to bolt when Navarre took a seat in it. The gray ink flowed into chair arms and a backrest. Navarre appeared unperturbed by its motion.

  Adrianne shrank back.

  Nikki watched in fascination. “Isn’t that handy?”

  Handy wasn’t exactly how Adrianne would have described the gray liquid. Downright disturbing, and perhaps a sign of delirium, was more like it. And yet, if she wasn’t questioning her own sanity at the moment, she’d be just as fascinated as Nikki.

  Screw sanity. She reached toward the newly formed chair, and fingered the material. It was warm, yielding to her touch. Her fingerprint remained embedded in the substance. Yanking her hand back, eyes wide, she asked, “What is it?”

  “Part of the ship itself is malleable. It is completely safe. Your couch is made of the same.” Navarre watched her with veiled amusement.

  Adrianne rocked back, lifting herself slightly off the couch. An impression of her butt remained.

  Nikki snickered. “This could be fun,” she murmured, then recovered herself. “Is this an alien abduction?” She appeared more captivated than scared by the prospect.

  “Abduction?” He raised an eyebrow, sounding out the word. “I do not know what you mean.”

  “Stealing us away. Taking us prisoner,” Adrianne offered.
>
  Surprised, he sat back for a moment, then leaned forward. “We just saved you from the Hunter.” Confused now, he asked, “Why would we steal you? You came to us willingly.”

  Nikki gave Adrianne a sidelong glance. “So you’re not taking us off the planet? Torturing and then dissecting us?” She sounded curiously disappointed.

  “No.” His answer was flat and perhaps a bit disgusted. “We have identified a wooded area that is secure. We will not travel far.”

  “Can those hounds track us?” Adrianne asked.

  “The ship blocks any signals you may be unconsciously emitting.” He still seemed somewhat irritated by Nikki’s abduction comment. “Adrianne, you provided me with your location. We have no wish to harm you.”

  “Timeout.” Nikki made a T with her hands. “Do you know each other? Fill me in, guys. Adri neglected to tell me about you.” She shot her a threatening glance. “To think, all this time I worried and fussed over you because you had no one but that loser, Doug.”

  Adrianne sat up straighter. “What do you mean?”

  “Come on! You’ve obviously met before. Who are these guys?”

  “We have met. Briefly.” She glanced at Navarre. “But not in person.”

  “And he,” Nikki waved her hand at Navarre, “wasn’t worth telling me about?”

  Navarre appeared entirely too pleased with himself.

  Adrianne shrugged, unwilling to pick a fight or take the time to explain. “I thought he was a dream. I met him in the hospital.”

  “I have sat through umpteen one-sided techy conversations, nodding and making sympathetic noises. Do you think you could have bothered to share something like this?”

  “I said I was sorry,” Adrianne muttered.

  “No, you basically said you didn’t trust me enough to believe you.” She crossed her arms. “That hurts.”

  Adrianne rolled her eyes. “I am sorry. I thought I was hallucinating.”

  Nikki made a disgusted noise low in her throat. She waved her hand at Navarre. “You can’t possibly dream up something like that.”

  “We are the Dragoon,” Navarre offered finally when it became apparent there was to be no compromise between the two. “Adrianne came to our attention as well as many others when her plane crashed. The Hunter and the hounds being one of the more unsavory creatures. Adrianne carries our bloodlines. We believe her to be our last Queen.”

  * * * * *

  In the whirling red light cast by the fire alarm, Agent Haynes examined the hotel desk clerk’s body. Someone had attacked the man while he was pulling the fire alarm. Clearly the body had been savaged. By what was the mystery. His throat and his heart were torn out, the heart being the more puzzling of the two. It apparently came out right through his shirt and sweater. And it was missing.

  How Adrianne Harris and Nikki Kitzerow had escaped their surveillance yet again irritated him. Their hotel room was empty. Nikki’s beat-up car was still in the parking lot. That meant they either escaped on foot or were picked up. Neither prospect was something he wanted to file in his report to his supervisor.

  One of the police officers cleared his throat. “Agent Haynes? The medical examiner is here.”

  “Send him in,” Haynes snapped.

  He leaned over the body without touching it. The blood from the missing heart did not trail past the corpse. If it was taken as a trophy, it had to have been bagged up right here.

  Haynes straightened. Let the coroner deal with the details. His most pressing concern was the lack of Ms. Harris and her accomplice. When they found them, maybe they’d find the hotel clerk’s heart.

  “Agent Haynes?” Another man approached, winded, but excited. “You’ll want to take a look at what we’ve found across the street.”

  He inwardly groaned. Not Baker. Fresh-faced and right out of the academy, Baker grated on Haynes’ nerves. How’d the kid manage to get here so quick? Wasn’t he supposed to be dealing with the other body Ms. Harris left behind on the roadside, the one with its throat ripped out? Tonight was just brimming full of weird corpses.

  Looking up at the sky, he glanced at the moon. Not quite full. What god did he piss off to be assigned to this case?

  They crossed the street together, Baker chattering away at him. “We figure they ran through here. We’ve gathered some threads from the shrubs. They entered the highway at this point, still on foot.” Baker paused, glanced both ways for traffic and Haynes rolled his eyes. When he saw nothing but empty road and a few early morning gawkers, the younger agent resumed his monologue and his half jog.

  “So they either fled or were chased to this spot.” The bushy overgrowth was an unlikely location to hide a getaway vehicle. It afforded poor coverage and with the chain link fence, but one way in and out.

  Baker scratched his buzz cut, guessing Haynes’ thoughts. “The chain link is uncut.”

  There were two points of entry into the brush. Broken branches and footprints in the crusty snow marked their paths.

  “Baker, are you telling me they went in here and never came out?”

  “Yes sir, in a manner of speaking.”

  Haynes followed one of the paths. “Lots of footprints around here, bigger ones than what the two women made back there.”

  “No sole pattern on the shoes,” Baker pointed out.

  Puzzled, Haynes bent beside one of the prints. There was a deeper indentation in the snow where the heel landed, but Baker was right. No sole patterns. “Take casts anyway.”

  “Already done. Anyway, this is what I really wanted to show you.” Baker parted the brush.

  Haynes’ mouth dropped open. The brush was smashed along side the chain link fence for an expanse of five hundred feet or more. Baker wore a smug grin.

  “What the hell?” He started to walk the cleared length.

  “Sir,” Baker was all but exploding with pent-up excitement. “I don’t think they escaped on foot. I think they flew.”

  Flew? Impossible.

  The snow beneath the brush was melted, but the crumpled branches were not burned. Nothing in his experience trained him for this.

  “Start interviewing the neighbors. See if anyone heard anything. Something of this size had to make some sort of noise,” Haynes commanded.

  He studied the area and realized it was primarily a business district. Damn it. Not a home in sight. Well, there were enough fast-food joints. Maybe one of the employees saw or heard something.

  Baker began to protest, then, after glimpsing Haynes’ face, thought better of it. “I’ll get right on it.”

  Where did a teacher and a bar owner fit into all of this? A plane sans running gear sliding down a runway suddenly halts. A man along a highway gets mauled by a huge dog or wolf. A nineteen-year-old desk clerk has his heart ripped out and although they wouldn’t know for certain until the lab results were back, was probably mangled by the same doglike animal that killed the man on the highway. The pieces were too spread out, too jumbled. But everything seemed tied to Ms. Harris. Did she have a big dog? He hadn’t seen one in their vehicle. Why bother to kill both men? For that matter, why take the heart of the second man?

  Haynes liked puzzles. All he needed now was the key piece.

  He needed to find Adrianne Harris.

  Chapter Nine

  “A queen? Yeah right.” When she saw that Adrianne wasn’t smiling, Nikki’s laughter died in her throat. “He’s serious.”

  “He certainly thinks so.” Adrianne shifted uncomfortably in her seat. The couch tried to accommodate her, morphing before she’d even resettled herself. She wished it’d quit doing that.

  “Well, that puts a whole new spin on things, doesn’t it?”

  Adrianne glanced around her, looking for a way out, or a hidden camera that might reveal they were on some new reality show. There was neither. “You can’t possibly believe this is really happening?” she asked.

  Nikki shrugged. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  Where were the others that had rescued them?
Only Navarre remained. It meant only one thing to Adrianne. The Dragoon were deliberately trying to keep her at ease. Pair her up with one of them. Let her develop a friendship in the midst of chaos, as terrorists often did to their hostages, then pow, throw their demands into the mix when they felt she was suitably influenced by them. Well, they were in for a surprise. She wasn’t dumb enough to fall for that.

  Navarre’s eyes flashed jade fire as if he were listening in on her thoughts and disagreeing. She tried to tuck them back behind her eyes. Damn him. He was too easy on the eyes. His presence was both reassuring to her body and unsettling to her mind. Couldn’t the Dragoon have sent her some homely-looking character to mediate instead? Her gaze roamed over Navarre, the coppery-tinted blond hair closely cropped and unruffled. He appeared nearly the same as he had in her dream in the hospital, save for a thick leather vest, strapped on at the shoulders and the waist. His dark breeches hugged his muscled thighs and oh my, his perfectly formed butt. She wasn’t a buttocks connoisseur, but watching him, she could quickly become one.

  “Where are the other twelve?” she finally asked when it was apparent Navarre was enjoying her attention just a little too much and had no intention of providing any unnecessary details.

  “We do not wish to overwhelm you.”

  She bet not. Capture her, lock her in their ship, offer her Navarre as a “friend” but God forbid they trounce on her delicate psyche.

  Nikki nudged her. “Mine was tall, dark and handsome.” She turned to Navarre. “If she’s your Queen, does that mean you’ll do whatever she asks?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Within reason.” The tone in his voice hinted at requests of a more personal nature. Adrianne colored and hoped she was managing to keep her thoughts to herself.

  Nikki leaned back, clearly impressed. “Cool.”

  They seemed to live in separate realities at this moment, she and Nikki. Navarre’s gaze was entirely too prying. Adrianne tried to keep from fidgeting. “What do you want from me?” she asked.

  “Everything,” he replied, equally as quiet.