Slayers

by C. J. Hill

  With a snap of Kody’s fingers, one end of the stick caught on fire, making it look like a giant birthday candle.

  Dr. B showed the burning branch to Tori so that she could see it was legitimate fire. “I suppose this gift is for those times when you need to fight fire with fire.” He stepped toward Shang and called cheerily, “Extinguish this, please.” Shang flicked a finger and the flame went out.

  Next, Dr. B turned the blowtorch knob until a small flame protruded from the end. Kody walked back to the group, and Alyssa came forward, replacing him. Unlike Lilly, she didn’t look smug. She ran a hand through her hair, then shook out her hands nervously.

  “I don’t like to do this,” Dr. B told Tori. “But it’s important for you to see the power of healing.” Without further warning, he pulled back his sleeve and ran the flame across the back of his wrist.

  He only flinched as his skin charred white and broke open, but his short, quick breaths revealed his pain. Alyssa immediately put her hand above the wound. She waved her fingers, plucking, pulling, making swirling motions. After a few seconds, Dr. B relaxed. “Well done.” He patted her shoulder. “You get faster every year.” He walked closer to Tori and held up his wrist for her to see. Only a faint white scar ran across his hand, as though a smaller wound had happened there years ago. “In an attack, make sure to protect Alyssa and Rosa so they can heal your battle wounds.”

  Battle wounds. Tori gulped at the words.

  “You’ve already experienced the gift of flight. The last is the gift of sight. This ability isn’t easy to demonstrate. I can only have Dirk tell you what it’s like.” Dr. B waved Dirk over, giving him the floor.

  Dirk crossed his arms. “When I concentrate, a split screen opens up in my mind and I can see what the nearest dragon sees. Since they’re still in eggs at this point, all I see is a faint red glow when it’s daytime and black when it’s night. And I can only catch snatches of it, like a TV with a bad cable signal. Hopefully when the dragons hatch and get closer, I’ll be able to make a stable connection. Until then, it’s not a real exciting skill.”

  He turned around and walked back to the rest of the group without waiting to see if she had questions. Which she did, but not for him.

  “How do I know which skill I have?” she asked.

  Dr. B regarded her with his binocularlike glasses. “When I showed you the others’ powers, did you feel a sharp instinct to do something?”

  “Not really.” Although when he’d told her she would have to fight a dragon, she’d felt a clear and insistent need to run as far away from here as she could.

  “When you flew with Jesse, did you want to try it on your own?”

  No, mostly she’d wanted to cling to him. And if she was being completely honest, some of her thoughts strayed into the realm of noticing how built he was. But she wasn’t about to tell Dr. B that.

  “I didn’t want Jesse to let me go.” As soon as the words left Tori’s mouth, she wondered if flying might be her gift after all. Her favorite dreams were the ones where she flew, drifting above unknown buildings and streets. It felt so natural to twist through the air. But everyone dreamed of flying. It didn’t mean she could actually do it.

  “Shut your eyes and concentrate,” Dr. B told her. “Can you see the split screen Dirk spoke about?”

  She shut her eyes. There was nothing but darkness and the feeling that everyone was staring at her. She shook her head and opened her eyes.

  Dr. B looked upward for a moment, considering, then said, “Perhaps you have the gift of sight. All you would see right now is blackness. And it might be hard for you to tune in a real dragon anyway. You can’t see what’s in the simulator’s mind because it doesn’t have one.” He shrugged. “Then again, perhaps the shock of the night is interfering with your instincts.”

  Or perhaps she just didn’t have an extra ability. Was that possible? “I’ll have you practice with the others. Whatever your talent is, it’s bound to manifest itself before long.” Dr. B smiled and with his binocular eyes, it looked ominous. He motioned to Alyssa. “Why don’t you work with Tori on her leaps? That’s probably the easiest thing to teach.”

  Alyssa let out a sigh, clearly not thrilled by this assignment, but she took Tori across the clearing. When they got to the far side, she said, “The whole point of leaping is to avoid the dragon. You know, like if he happens to shoot flames at you or tries to swipe you with his tail or claws.” She pointed toward the boulders. “See if you can leap to the fire pit.”

  The boulders were about fifteen feet away. There wasn’t much of a chance Tori could reach them. “Um, aren’t you supposed to give me some instruction? Isn’t there a trick to it?”

  “Yeah. Run a few feet, swing your arms, and jump.”

  The other campers had moved slowly to the edge of the forest. They were about to go somewhere, but apparently they wanted to see her attempt at leaping.

  I might not be one of them, Tori thought. It might all be a mistake—my night vision might be a fluke like my hearing. She wasn’t sure if this was a comforting thought. On one hand, it would be nice to have a pass on fighting a dragon. But if she wasn’t one of them, what would they do? She knew their secrets.

  She clenched her fists, took a few running steps, and jumped toward the boulders. She zoomed toward them too quickly. Her speed and height surprised her so much that when she landed, she nearly tripped. She only saved herself by taking stumbling steps into one of the boulders.

  An assortment of laughter floated toward her from where the others stood. She wasn’t sure whether to glare at them for laughing, or laugh herself because she’d done it. She had jumped a huge distance. If she could have this extra strength with her when she ice skated she would blow the crowds away.

  “A fine start,” Dr. B called to her. Then to the others, he said, “Don’t you have some eggs to find?”

  “Oh, come on,” Lilly called back. “We want to see her flatten a few trees.”

  “You’ll never find them if you just stand there,” Dr. B said. “Points are at stake.”

  At that, Lilly and the others faded into the forest. When they’d gone, Alyssa yelled over, “Now jump back here!”

  Tori did. She thought it would be easier to control now that she knew what to expect. She ran and jumped, but when she landed, she pitched forward again, this time stumbling into a tree. The trunk shuddered and dropped a shower of leaves onto her. Tori’s palms stung from where she’d hit the trunk. She shook them, trying to get rid of the pain, and was surprised she only had tiny scrapes on her skin.

  This was cool.

  “Next time try to avoid the trees,” Alyssa said.

  “Yeah, thanks for the tip.”

  Alyssa sat down on the ground, and waved a dismissive hand at Tori. “Okay, keep at it until you get the hang of it. Once you get the basics down, I’ll teach you a few of the fancier moves.”

  Tori ran and leapt toward the ring of boulders and again slammed into one. A piece the size of a bread loaf broke off. She picked it up. It felt as light as a book. She really was stronger now.

  “You’re supposed to be leaping,” Alyssa called.

  So she did. Tori leapt back and forth, running into boulders one way, trees the other direction. Her landings always made her feel like she’d stepped out of a moving car. She couldn’t keep her balance. Her only consolation at being so bad at this was knowing that everyone else must have struggled, too. Otherwise Lilly wouldn’t have expected her to flatten trees.

  Dr. B divided his time between watching the other campers in the forest, and shouting words of encouragement to Tori. Alyssa just said things like, “So, you understand that the point of this is to get away from the dragon, right? It won’t do you much good if you leap away from his claws and then crash into his body.”

  Very helpful.

  A few times she managed to avoid solid objects, and a few times she fell down when she landed. She always checked her hands, surprised they weren’t bloody. Apparentl
y her skin was stronger, too. Her landing powers, however, remained unchanged.

  “Why don’t you try straight up for a while?” Alyssa suggested.

  The idea of launching straight up into the air frightened Tori. Well, not the jumping part—the falling straight down and dying part.

  She tried a hop, went a couple feet into the air, and landed with a thud. Alyssa rolled her eyes. “Come on. You can go higher than that.”

  Tori jumped again, this time adding another foot to her height.

  “Are you even trying?” Alyssa asked.

  Tori jumped using all of her energy and went so high she screamed. On landing, she pitched forward and had to take several steps to steady herself.

  “Well,” Alyssa said with forced cheerfulness, “the dragon probably won’t hatch for a while, so you have time to practice.”

  That was the most encouragement she’d gotten during her jumping lessons from Alyssa. Tori never tried to land gracefully on a tree limb like Kody had done. She was afraid she’d end up impaling herself.

  After half an hour of this, the other campers came out of the forest, carrying an assortment of diving rings—the kind kids play with at pools. Tori couldn’t see how they would help fight dragons. “What’s the point of finding rings?” she asked.

  “It’s not finding them,” Alyssa said. “It’s retrieving them from the trees. You’ve either got to leap up there to get them or throw something to knock them out, and you’ve got to do it fast because the other team is gathering them, too.”

  Dr. B took the rings, and tallied the points in a notebook. “Tori,” he said without looking up, “why don’t you join the others for the next game?”

  She wasn’t sure if he wanted her to learn the next skill or whether he’d decided she was hopeless when it came to leaping. As though he could read her mind, he said, “With so many members gone, Team Magnus is undermanned. They need your help during hide-and-seek.”

  Hide-and-seek seemed tame enough, juvenile, actually. Well, at least until Kody explained the rules of the game. He sat out the first round and gave her a play by play. The game was actually tackle hide-and-seek. Two people—one from each team—were seekers while the others hid. When you were the seeker, you tried to find the members of the other team, but it wasn’t enough to find them. You had to tag them before they could run around the stone circle and touch their original hiding place. If they made it without being touched, they got ten points for their team. If you managed to tag them, your team got ten points. As a seeker, you could help your teammates by interfering with the other seeker’s ability to catch your teammate.

  The game involved lots of very dramatic leaps where hiders tried to get around pursuing seekers. Seekers had no compunction about ramming into people, sometimes several feet in the air.

  Tori watched it with her mouth ajar. She didn’t want to play this game. She couldn’t tell where any of them hid before they sprinted around trees or dropped from branches, and she was lousy at leaping. She was bound to lose every single time. Besides, the game looked a little savage. Wasn’t it enough that she’d already slammed into trees and boulders? Did she need to get knocked to the ground repeatedly? Lilly and Alyssa were both on the A-team, and they would probably enjoy sending her face-first into the dirt.

  When the players had either scored or been caught, Kody stood up and stretched. “Ready to play?”

  “Can’t I just give up my ten points and sit out again?”

  Kody laughed and pulled her to her feet like she’d been joking. She hadn’t been.

  The first three rounds went like she thought they would. When Lilly was seeker, she pounced on Tori from five feet away. Tori had no idea how to avoid people smashing into her that fast. She tried to leap over Kody when he was seeker, but she couldn’t regain her balance when she landed, and he scooped her up like a basketball on the rebound. The only reason she didn’t get tackled when Dirk was the seeker was that Jesse was the seeker, too. As Dirk bounded toward her, Jesse cut him off with a midair slam.

  The next round, she and Alyssa were the seekers. Tori walked into the forest, searching, trying to keep track of where Alyssa went at the same time. Tori couldn’t spot anyone. They would most likely wait until she passed by their hiding places to dart toward the boulders. She took cautious steps forward, staying on the balls of her feet. Dead leaves crackled beneath her shoes.

  Every once in a while, branches waved. She couldn’t tell if it was the wind or movement from someone hiding. She had just decided to go farther into the forest when Jesse dashed out from a nearby tree. Alyssa took off after him.

  Was it better to block for Jesse or try to find one of the A-team hiders? Dirk didn’t give her time to decide; he jumped out from behind a tree to her left. She tore after him, cutting off his way to the boulders. He tried to leap over her, but she jumped up, twisting in midair. She grabbed hold of his shirt and pushed him to the ground.

  It should have hurt him, especially since she landed on top of his chest. Instead, he lay on the ground, surprised, and let out a satisfied laugh. “Hey, maybe you’re one of us after all.”

  Kody whizzed by them. “Typical Dirk,” he called over his shoulder. “Can’t keep the girls off him.”

  Dirk smiled as though he agreed. Which is when Tori realized she should do something besides lie on top of him, exchanging pleasantries.

  She stood up and bounded after Kody, dodging around the trees at high speed. She was almost to the clearing when a fireball the size of a dinner plate zipped past her shoulder. It smashed into a tree in front of her with an explosion of sparks. She spun around, her pulse hammering in her ears.

  A whistling sound at her side told her another fireball was coming. An assault—Overdrake had found them. Her first thought was one of recrimination—she had said too much to Cole and David. Now they were being attacked, and it was her fault.

  Tori didn’t have time to dwell on her guilt. She leapt up, trying to dodge away from the fireball’s path. It shot past her, so close that heat licked against her neck. Worse still, she crashed into a huge branch above her, slamming her head into the wood. The branch cracked apart, and both she and it fell to the ground. It landed squarely on top of her, a mass of leaves and bark splinters.

  She lay there, stunned, wanting to breathe but finding her lungs uncooperative. Her back throbbed. The smell of acrid smoke surrounded her. If another fireball came at her now, she wouldn’t be able to move away fast enough to escape from it.

  CHAPTER 12

  No other fireballs came. Instead, Jesse pulled the branch off her with one hand and held his other hand down to help her up. No fear flashed through his dark eyes, no worry, no frantic hunting for their attacker. It was over, then. They were safe. Tori didn’t take Jesse’s hand, didn’t move, just let air refill her lungs.

  Dr. B came from somewhere and stared down at her. She knew he would ask if she was okay and wondered if she was. She shouldn’t be. Not after hitting her head, falling several feet, and having a huge branch land on her. She moved her fingers and wiggled her toes to make sure she could.

  “When the fireball came at you,” Dr. B said slowly, “what was your first instinct?”

  The breath whooshed from her lungs for a second time. This hadn’t been an attack. It had been a test to determine her power.

  Just as slowly, Tori said, “My first instinct was to yell at someone for throwing fireballs at me.”

  “And after that?”

  “I wanted to find out who threw the fireballs and hurt them.”

  Dr. B let out a huff of exasperation. “As a means of protecting yourself, what did you want to do?”

  Tori pulled herself to a sitting position and wiped at bits of dried leaves that clung to her. “I thought I should duck, but I’d spent all of that time learning how to jump, so I did that instead. As you saw, that worked out real well.”

  She stood up and ran her hand over her hair. Part of it felt twiggy. And short. She held up her hair to c
heck. A huge section by her face was now six inches shorter than the rest, and the ends curled together like melted plastic. She gasped at it, unbelieving. She would have to cut all of it now.

  The thought stung worse than crashing into the tree branch had. Her long, beautiful hair was gone, sizzled, breaking off into ashy pieces in her hand. And it could have been much worse. It could have been her face.

  She turned to Dr. B, still gasping. It was his fault she’d been scared out of her mind and hurt and had now lost six inches of her hair. “Look what you did! You don’t hurl fireballs at people! What is wrong with you?”

  She didn’t wait for an answer. His shocked expression was answer enough. He wasn’t sorry. Her anger seemed to surprise him. She spun on her heel and stormed off toward the trail.

  As she walked away, each quick step carrying an exclamation mark, part of her realized that real superheroes didn’t care about their hair. The rest of the campers were probably watching her with disdain. Well, she hadn’t asked to be a dragon knight—or Slayer, or whatever ridiculously out-of-date name they called themselves. And if these were the people who were supposed to be on her side in the fight, they could forget about her help. She didn’t want to be part of their competitions anyway. They were probably more likely to kill her than any dragon was.

  Dr. B called her name. She didn’t turn around, didn’t slow down. She wasn’t running, not yet. She wasn’t about to let them see her run away. Still, she pounded down the trail, thinking about the places she could have gone this summer. Places with oceans and cable TV and sidewalks instead of dirt trails.

  Besides, if dragons existed, it was the military’s job to take charge. Who was Dr. B to say they couldn’t do it? She would just have to figure out a way to explain the whole situation to her father and let him take care of it.

  She didn’t realize Jesse was behind her, floating off the ground, until he spoke. In a voice that he probably meant to sound consoling but that came out patronizing, he said, “If you aren’t ready for an attack, you’ll end up with a lot more than singed hair. It’s part of your training. We’ve all gone through it. Being under attack is what usually gets your extra skill to manifest itself.”