by C. J. Hill
Well, she’d given Rosa and Alyssa four less bikes to deal with.
No, make that seven, because three of the bikes had turned around. She was silhouetted in the glare of their headlights and they were coming after her.
She stepped on the gas, zooming away from them. The barn was the best cover around so she headed in that direction. Bullets hissed past her. One, she could tell, hit the back of her Kevlar jacket.
She didn’t return fire. Instead, she shot out every lamppost she drove by. The darker it was, the better chance she had of losing her pursuers.
In her mind, she ran through all the possible outcomes of this chase. If she drove to the gate, she would run into more of Overdrake’s men, but how long could she drive around the property? The men chasing her would keep shooting, and their bullets might find a place not protected by Kevlar. Or they might disable her bike. With her extra strength, she could beat one, maybe two men in hand-to-hand combat—but three? And they could be radioing to more men right now, setting up an ambush. She needed to disable their motorcycles before any more showed up.
Tori rounded the side of the barn and turned in her seat, aiming the rifle backward over her shoulder. As soon as the men turned the corner, she shot out each of their headlights. With those gone, they wouldn’t be able to follow her for long.
She turned back around to see a couple of wooden posts up ahead, one on either side of her. If she had realized what they were, she could have swerved her bike in time, or even tried to jump over them. But she was concentrating on the men behind her so intently that she didn’t question why random wooden posts were sticking up from the ground five feet away from one another. She was already making plans to lose the men and double back on them.
By the time she saw the wires stretched between the posts and realized it was part of a fence, it was too late. Her motorcycle slammed into the wires. Metal and wood let out a screech of protest and a section of fence wrapped around her bike, holding it back, while she flew over the top of her handlebars. She tumbled onto the pasture in front of her, gasping.
The sting of hitting the ground didn’t hurt nearly as badly as her frustration. She had run into a fence. A fence.
In her earpiece, Dr. B said, “Tori, are you all right?”
She didn’t answer. It took her a moment to catch her breath, and by then she saw the three men who’d been chasing her. They’d heard the crash and were off their bikes looking for her. And they weren’t that far away. Each held a rifle with the precision of a soldier and each took a flashlight from his belt.
That wasn’t good.
Tori’s bike was tangled in the remains of wire and posts. The only advantage she had right now was that the men couldn’t see her.
She rolled onto her stomach, pulled her rifle into position, and prayed the fall hadn’t damaged her weapons. She fired at the closest man’s flashlight. The gun worked perfectly and the flashlight exploded out of his hand. She aimed and shot the next and the next, turning them all into plastic shrapnel.
Two men grabbed their hands and let out streams of curse words that were occasionally peppered with the words “sniper,” “Slayer,” and the phrase “I’ll kill you.” The other man just shook his hand and kept looking around.
Into her earpiece, Dirk whispered, “Tori, are you okay?”
She didn’t answer, couldn’t risk speaking. The men were too close and she was crawling as quietly as she could away from her downed motorcycle. The man nearest Tori stopped shaking his hand and held his rifle out again. He took a few tentative steps forward.
“Where are you?” the man asked in a breathless, angry voice.
Tori pulled out her tranquilizer gun.
The men wore helmets that protected their faces, and body armor that protected just about everywhere else. It didn’t leave much in the way of an accessible target. A small space on their throats between their collars and helmets was her best bet.
She aimed the tranquilizer at the closest man and shot. He slapped his hand against his throat—a good indication she’d hit her mark—then he let out a yell and riddled the ground to her side with bullets.
Tori flinched at the noise of the bullets, but didn’t move away. She was too busy searching for vulnerable spots on the other two men. Unfortunately, both tilted their chins down, guarding the skin on their throats. With their rifles still pointed in front of them, the men turned this way and that, looking for her.
She couldn’t let them find her.
CHAPTER 34
Gunshots sounded through Dirk’s earpiece and he stopped at the base of the tree he’d just climbed down. “Tori?” he whispered.
No response.
Dirk turned his back on the dragon habitat, scanning the grounds for any sign of her. “Dr. B, do you have video on Tori? I heard gunshots.”
“She was behind the barn,” Dr. B said. “There was some movement on her camera a minute ago, but her feed is black now.”
The pain that had eaten away at Dirk’s stomach all day intensified. Things weren’t supposed to turn out this way. His dad had promised that none of the Slayers would get hurt during this operation. Apparently his father hadn’t emphasized this point to his guards, though, or perhaps he had never meant it to begin with. He’d gotten Dirk’s cooperation, and that’s what mattered to him.
Dirk briefly wondered if his father had lied about his other promises, too. He had said that when the dragons attacked D.C., he would keep civilian deaths to a minimum. He would only use the dragon’s EMP to take out the infrastructure. No ripping through crowds of people. No needless death.
Had his father meant any of it? Dirk wanted to yell, to demand an explanation. His dad would hear. He had been monitoring their communications on a specially tuned earpiece since they’d arrived. But Dirk couldn’t say anything, couldn’t let the Slayers know he was the dragon lord’s son.
Dirk gripped his rifle strap and whispered, “Tori better not be shot.”
Dr. B’s voice was soft but firm. “She made the choice to go in. Concentrate on defense plan two. We’ll get to Tori later if she needs help.”
The words, spoken with so much trust, such earnestness, cut through Dirk. Anything that anyone said today had stabbed at him. He could barely function. He gritted his teeth and looked toward the barn, as though he might spot Tori somewhere in the distance.
Only the empty field spread out in front of him.
Dirk had read Dante’s Inferno once. It said that in the centermost part of hell, the devil chewed on traitors. But Dante was wrong. A person didn’t have to die before hell gnawed away at them.
Dirk climbed onto his bike, hesitating as he turned the ignition. He wanted to head to the barn and look for Tori. He couldn’t do it, though. Dr. B could see what he was doing on the video camera.
In the background of his radio feed, Jesse and the Slayers talked to one another—his teammates, his friends. They were trying to figure a way out of the enclosure. There wasn’t one, and even though Dirk had known it would happen, had let it happen to them, a piece of him was inside with them, dying.
He never should have let his dad send him to camp all those years ago to infiltrate their numbers. He shouldn’t have learned the Slayers’ names, seen their faces, grown to care about them. Or found his counterpart.
Each summer at camp he became one of them, and days would pass when he forgot altogether that he was Brant Overdrake’s son, that he’d been sent to spy on them.
His father should have never asked Dirk to take part in this trap.
Dirk spent one last moment peering out into the muted gray landscape of the night. Was Tori alive and hiding or was she lying on the ground unconscious and bleeding? He cursed under his breath, then turned his motorcycle toward the habitat.
He told himself she wasn’t dead. He would have felt it if she was. His counterpart connection would have told him. He clung to that thought, unsure if it was true, but repeating it in his mind anyway.
The fact that h
e had a counterpart still amazed him. As much as he tried to figure it out, it made no sense. How had a dragon lord ended up with a Slayer counterpart? It shouldn’t have happened, and yet it had.
Was it some unknown variable in her genetics or in his?
The dragon lords had always preserved their records so that their descendants would understand their powers and know how to take care of the dragons. But the Slayers’ ancestors hadn’t kept many records, which was why Dr. B had needed to study so many different sources to piece together his information. It was why Dr. B’s knowledge of dragon lords was spotty at best.
Another jab of guilt pierced into Dirk. It had been too easy to deceive everyone. Dr. B hadn’t realized that some of a dragon lord’s powers were the same as the Slayers’; that a child who came to camp with night vision and extra strength wasn’t necessarily a Slayer. And Dirk’s ability to see what a dragon saw was easy enough since he could slip into a dragon’s mind.
But hearing what a dragon heard—Dirk hadn’t known such an ability existed on either Slayer or dragon lord spectrum.
It had certainly jeopardized his father’s location quickly enough, though.
Dirk wanted a chance to figure Tori out, to figure Tori and himself out, and instead here he was, listening to see if she was alive.
Dirk came to the enclosure entrance and turned off his bike. He had to go through the necessary motions so they would be recorded on the video feed. In his earpiece, Bess was reporting to Dr. B about their attempts to break through the enclosure door. Her voice wavered with fear. Bess had always been his willing partner in pranks. And Dirk had done this to her, betrayed her.
“The ends justify the means,” his father liked to say. As Dirk got off his bike and rolled it toward the door, he concentrated on the place America would become. A new era. Tighter laws and harsher consequences for criminals. All the nonsense in government dissolved. Like the nation’s debts. Other countries wouldn’t try to collect once his father ruled. They wouldn’t risk provoking an EMP attack. The country could become more prosperous and more powerful than it had ever been.
Dirk leaned his bike against the first doorway, keeping his mind on the future. When people realized society was better off, they’d welcome the change in rulers. His family would be appreciated, honored, and they’d live in a mansion somewhere overlooking the sea. In Dirk’s mind, he had seen himself standing on his balcony a thousand times. Every night he would watch the sun set over the waves.
And if he didn’t like anything that his father did, well, eventually his father would be too old to rule, and then it would be Dirk’s responsibility. He could remake society into anything he liked. How many people in the world ever got that type of opportunity?
All he needed to do was make it through tonight.
And sacrifice his friends’ trust in him.
Dirk took hold of the unconscious guard’s arm and dragged him to the second door. Once there, he held the guard’s hand up to the panel as though checking to see if his fingerprints would unlock the door.
As hard as Dirk tried to concentrate on the new era—on the waves, and the balcony—his mind spun like a severed wheel, lurching, reeling, thinking of the things that wouldn’t be after tonight: The long days at camp, jumping through the trees at practice, talking with Jesse like the two of them were brothers.
Into his neck mike, Dirk said, “The guard’s fingerprints don’t unlock the second door. I’m trying his retina.”
With shaking hands, he hauled the guard’s head to the panel.
Snap out of it, Dirk told himself. This is the best possible outcome . If his friends’ powers were taken away, if their memories were changed, they could go back to their old lives, neutralized, but not hurt. It was so much better than having to fight them later, having to turn the dragons on them.
His father could only mind-link to one dragon at a time, so when it came time to bring down D.C., Dirk would have to control the other dragon. Dirk had always known this. Some of his earliest memories were of his father carrying him into the enclosure and showing him the dragons. Instead of bedtime stories, his father had told him about all the things in society that needed to be fixed, and how he planned to fix them.
When a retinal scan on the guard clearly hadn’t worked, Dirk laid him back on the ground.
In half an hour, the only Slayers left with any powers would be Rosa and Alyssa. Two healers. They wouldn’t be much of a threat.
And Tori.
He had selfishly been glad she wouldn’t be a part of this, wouldn’t forget him. It meant they could have more time together. She wouldn’t even feel the crushing despair of losing the others. She hardly knew them. Not like he did.
Dirk pulled the control panel lid off the wall with his bare hands and tossed it onto the floor. “Let’s see if we can hotwire this thing.”
Before he finished speaking, the outside door slammed into the motorcycle he’d left in the doorway. He’d known it would happen. It was a waste of a good motorcycle.
“What happened?” Theo asked, his voice high-pitched with worry.
Dirk didn’t answer until he’d squeezed out the door. He barely made it through the space before the force from the wall compressed the motorcycle to the point that the space became unpassable. “Something triggered the first door to close. I made it out, though.” He forced some humor into his voice. “That’s why you should always prop doors open with bikes, even if it does make them hard to ride afterward.”
Over his earpiece he heard the distant sound of men yelling to find the sniper. They hadn’t caught Tori yet.
Then he heard more gunfire. The sound of each bullet punctured him. They were trying to kill her, and this after he’d told his father that he liked her, that she was his counterpart, that they’d kissed.
At that moment, something swung around inside his mind. As his anger built, the new era dissolved like frost in the sunlight. His father had broken his side of the bargain, and Dirk wasn’t keeping his side, either. At least for tonight, he was fighting his way out of hell.
CHAPTER 35
Tori lay flat on the ground. The man she’d shot with the tranquilizer gun had already collapsed not far from her. She had heard Dirk call her name and Dr. B report that her video feed was black. It was black because she was lying on her stomach and it was pointed at the dirt. She couldn’t answer Dirk, though, not while the men were this near. She wished the Slayers would stop talking. It was hard to concentrate on finding vulnerable spots on the remaining men with so much background noise filling her ears.
Rosa said, “We’ve got company.” Then the buzz of the motorcycles came through her earpiece. Overdrake’s men had reached the gate. Gunshots crackled over the feed.
Rosa and Alyssa—they hadn’t even wanted to do this and now the two of them had to face armed gunmen. Tori slowly reached for the controls in her pocket so she could turn off her radio feed. She couldn’t let any of the sounds from her earpiece alert the gunmen to her position.
One of the men yelled, “I see him!”
Tori braced herself. If they found and killed her, her family would never know the truth about what happened. Should she get up and make a run for it?
But the man didn’t point his gun at her. He turned in the opposite direction and sprayed bullets into her motorcycle. It clanged in protest.
Tori finished turning off her radio.
“You idiot!” the second man yelled. “Next you’ll be blasting the cows!”
The first man looked at the bike like he’d like to kick it, and while he stared down, a patch on the back of his neck became visible. She shot it with the tranquilizer.
The man grabbed his neck, clawing the dart off. “I’m hit!” He spun around and let off a round of bullets, waist high, sweeping above Tori.
“Stop it!” the second man screamed. “I’ll get him.” He took a step toward Tori, his hand outstretched, gripping his rifle. Then he took another step. He tugged his jacket collar up and kept h
is head down so no part of his neck was visible. She couldn’t get a clear shot on him—and he was walking right toward her. “Why are you using that dart gun?” he asked. “You ran out of bullets, didn’t you?”
She hadn’t, but she didn’t want to use the rifle. It would change her, she knew, to kill a person. She lay unmoving and tried not to breathe too loudly.
He was nearly on top of her. A few more steps, and he’d kick her. But with his hand stretched out, the sleeve of his jacket shrank back to expose a layer of skin between his glove and sleeve. She took aim at his wrist and shot. The dart silently pierced its target. In sixty seconds he would be down.
The man jerked his hand back at the sting, yelled, then charged forward. She was just able to sweep her foot around and knock him down before he ran into her. As he crashed to the ground, his grip on his gun loosened. She grabbed hold of it and flung it away. It clattered across the ground far to her right.
Her movement had given away her position. The man plunged into her. For a moment he was on top of her, reeking of old cigarette smoke and sweat. But it was only for a moment. She pushed him off and he tumbled over twice and sprawled out on the grass. She jumped to her feet, hands in defense position, watching him. Before he could pull himself up, a kick to his chest sent him down again.
She moved away, still counting off the seconds in her mind.
Forty-nine … fifty … fifty-one …
“We’ll feed your carcass to the dragons!” he shouted.
Fifty-four … fifty-five … fifty-six …
He staggered to his feet, swung one arm out uselessly, and yelled more threats. Dirk wouldn’t need her to report her location. He could just listen to this guy and hone in on her position from there.
