by Lee French
“We’re gonna hit a fence, it might rock us around a bit, so hold on.” He glanced at her, hoping this risk turned out to be worth it. Of course, the look on her face when she’d seen the sun bolstered him. Nobody deserved what she’d been through, nobody. With her in tow, he’d be able to convince Liam, too, even without Elena. They’d still find her, somehow, because he’d promised.
His dragons swarmed the drone and chewed it up. They hit the fence and plowed over it without issue. None of the tires blew out on the razor wire at the top, and he could only hope none of them took on a slow leak. They had a long way to go yet. He had to somehow get Asyllis across the country to meet up with Liam, Paul, and Kaitlin without anyone noticing and with no money. Damn, he wished Stephen could be here to carry her.
His dragons returned, allowing Asyllis to take her hand back. All things being equal, he preferred having both his own hands on the wheel. She did nothing wrong, except give him one more thing to worry about while escaping from a covert military project.
Actually, he didn’t think for one second they’d really escaped. Someplace like this probably had a satellite pointed at it all the time, or a giant radar installation staring at it. Heck, they might even have a tracking device in the Humvee. They needed to get lost in Vegas.
“So, I gotta ask you about what you’re capable of and stuff. You seen me, how I turn into dragons and all. We gotta cover a lot of distance, can you do anything to make that go quick?”
Startled by his voice, Asyllis jumped, then curled her legs up and stopped looking out the window. “I’m not sure I understand the question. I have no special abilities. My mate and I, we were rangers, trackers and hunters, not magi. If I’ve ever been out of the ordinary, it was only in my skill with a bow. That you can do what you can do is fantastical to me.”
Bobby frowned and tried not to let this distract him from driving. They hadn’t reached a road yet, and he had to avoid the big bushes and things. “A bow? Like, you can control the arrows with your mind or something?”
“No, nothing of the sort. I am merely a good shot. Or, I was a good shot, anyway. The muscles have certainly withered from disuse by now. I could probably still hit a target—I still know how to do it—but not exceptionally well.”
What did that mean? The Humvee bounced over a particularly rough bump, neatly distracting him from the quandary, and he spotted a road off to the left, which he turned to head for. They’d go much faster on it. “Okay, so, how’s it that if you’re normal, we’re all not?”
“I have no idea. I knew nothing about what they were doing. Perhaps if we knew more, we could make educated guesses.”
They’d done plenty of guessing so far, and seemed to have done a decent job getting close, if not right on. “Pretty sure all our daddies are different and human, else we wouldn’t none of us look more human than you. Ain’t a single one of us got pointy ears, we only got your eyes.”
“Then it is reasonable to suspect the mixing of the two races is the cause of your strange abilities. Tell me, what of the others? You said there are thirty-five.”
“Most of them are locked up in boxes right now, by a guy name of Privek. I can’t figure why he’s doing it, except maybe he wants control over us. The ones’re out, aside from me and a couple others, they’re working for him. But of the ones I know, there’s a girl what can make fire, another can make ice. Hannah can make a force field, Jasmine can turn into a squirrel, Kaitlin sees the future, Violet can fly, all kinds of stuff like that. Some of them are harder to explain, but it’s all stuff that don’t make no sense, not really.”
Asyllis nodded and went quiet for a few minutes, curled up in her seat.
Bobby had to pay attention to driving anyway. The way over to the road was bumpy as heckbiscuits and he had to keep a sharp watch to avoid putting them in a ditch or hitting something too big to give way. He let out a breath of relief when they reached the road and the drive smoothed out.
“I first arrived here in my sleep beside Tarilyr, my mate. You would use the word ‘husband’. We slept in a hammock for the night, bound between two trees. Our son had just reached the age of adulthood, and we went off to spend time together, just the two of us, as we had not done for so long.”
She sighed heavily. “I had a very strange dream. It happened so long ago, I barely remember it. Blue light, a feeling of being stretched. When we woke up, we were in a strange place, and there were men, human men, approaching. Everything happened so quickly. We tried to speak to them. We were frightened and confused, but their language was so thick and strange. More and more men came. They had guns. We didn’t know what guns were until they demonstrated by shooting one.
“There was nothing to be done. Neither of us could resist them with such weapons, not with our two bows. They separated us, locked us in cages. Tarilyr went mad, he tried to escape and they cut him down. I saw it happen, I watched him die. I have been locked in a box ever since, though not long after that, they moved me to this place. I was drugged for the trip. I saw nothing. I learned English, they taught me so they could question me.
“They want to open a way between our two worlds. They’ve been trying to reproduce whatever brought us here ever since they realized what must have happened. I know this because of the questions they asked. There is no other possibility. After a while, they must have realized I’d told them everything I could, because they stopped asking questions and all I was left with were guards. They grow older and get replaced. My people, we live much longer than humans do. I couldn’t say how much longer, but quite a bit.”
Bobby listened and kept quiet until she left a long silence. “I’m sorry about your mate, that musta been a real hard thing to see. And being all locked up like that…pretty amazing you didn’t just lay down and let yourself die.” He saw her turn away to look out the window. “That’s what they’re doing at White Sands. They want to open up that path and make contact with your world. It happened once, they must figure it can happen again.”
What would they do when they managed it and went through? He could just imagine a tactical team with some kind of translator crossing over and deciding the only safe thing to do would be blowing the other place up. Or worse, they’d find it great and send settlers through after that. Like humans hadn’t done that before. He’d seen some movies that made it pretty clear what had been done to the Native Americans. Only this time, the people on the receiving end wouldn’t actually be human beings, they’d be people like Asyllis and her mate.
Not on his watch. Those people? They were his people, too. He couldn’t say if he really believed in God anymore, but he’d been raised Christian, and as far as he saw, that meant he ought to do whatever he could to keep it fair, at the very least. Now, more than ever, he knew they had to go public, and they had to do it as a group, not as one cowboy taking matters into his own hands and doing it his way. Granted, if he wasn’t careful, he might not have a choice.
He glanced at Asyllis again, still watching out the window. The question of how to get her across the country without anyone seeing her still had no— Wait a minute. He wasn’t alone, he wasn’t the Head Cowboy. He had Liam’s number and could find a phone. Maybe they could come here, or Kaitlin would have an idea, or Paul could do something. They could talk it out and figure something. Or Liam would tell him to stuff it because he couldn’t find Elena. Still, at least then he’d know he had to stand on his own.
Part of him thought he should go back to the Monte Carlo and hit up Beverly again. She’d been nice, and he could lay it all out for her. If he meant to spill it all publicly anyway, what difference did it make if he told a person or two here or there along the way? He wouldn’t be able to find a phone anywhere without letting people see Asyllis anyway.
Something else popped into his head, and the words spilled out before he could stop himself. “Hey, I wonder, do you know why they called your project ‘Maze Beset’?”
Asyllis snorted. “Yes. One of the men, he was so pleased wi
th himself for it, thought it was horribly clever. The two words are unrelated. ‘Maze’ is a wordplay. It sounds like ‘maize’, Spanish for corn, which has yellow silk, like my hair. Also, it is a maze to get through the bureaucracy and red tape and whatever else to find out about me. And, as you saw, I was kept in a maze of a prison. As for ‘beset’, it refers to how I am surrounded on all sides, and a bizarre notion that humanity is under threat of invasion or attack from my people. That threat is preposterous, of course. We have bows and swords, you have machine guns and nuclear bombs. Tarilyr and I were not advance scouts for an assault, either. They never believed me that my people pose no threat.”
Unexpected noise distracted Bobby from thinking about any of that right now, and he looked all around before spotting the helicopter heading straight for them. “We got a little problem,” he said as he floored the gas, knowing they had no chance of outrunning it. The Humvee flew down the road.
“Can’t your drathikén handle it?” She turned to face forward, full of grim determination, and braced herself again.
“That there is full of soldiers. I ain’t keen on killing soldiers, so no, there ain’t a whole lot I can do about it. If’n I knew how to disable it without sending it crashing to the ground, I’d do that, but I sure don’t.” The Humvee slowed and bucked, making sputtering noises. Bobby looked all around in a panic and noticed a needle that might be a gas gauge. The needle sat all the way to the empty side. “I take it back,” he said grimly. “We got a big problem.”
“Is that the city ahead?” Asyllis pointed down the road. They’d just crested a rise high enough to see the taller buildings of Las Vegas in the distance. More importantly and usefully, a residential subdivision perched not too far away. If the guys in the helicopter had orders to capture instead of kill, and they could run fast enough, they might make it to the houses. Once there, they might be able to evade the soldiers.
That many of ifs and mights gave him little confidence. The alternative, though, force him to kill people, and Bobby wasn’t ready to let his dragons do that again yet. Maybe he wouldn’t be ready for that ever. Maybe that was a good thing. “Yeah, it is. We’re gonna jump out and run like heckbiscuits for those houses nearby without stopping the vehicle. I’ll help you, just jump for it.”
Asyllis nodded her understanding and took off her seat belt. The helicopter came around in front of them, making this plan even better. He shifted the thing into neutral and took a deep breath. “Now.” As the word left his mouth, gunfire sprayed across the windshield. He burst into the swarm and flew out with her, cushioning her fall as he’d done for Kaitlin in that car crash. The dragons found her light enough to carry a short distance, so he kept going, unable to pull her up higher than a few feet off the ground. Not that doing so would get the helicopter off their trail, but with luck, his speed would give them enough of a head start to get somewhere worth getting.
Some dragons noticed her breathing strangely, and a few caught sight of blood. Did she get hit by the gunfire or flying glass? Needing every last dragon to carry her, he couldn’t check right now. Behind them, the helicopter let two soldiers out to scramble after the Humvee, then followed after the dragon swarm. That Bobby and Asyllis went into a residential area had to reduce their options. They couldn’t just land a military helicopter on the street and send soldiers door to door. Right?
All the houses in the subdivision looked the same. In this particular part, they weren’t trying to grow grass among the scrub, they just filled the yards in with rocks or covered the dirt with some kind of low growing creepers, a few shrubs or trees mixed in to make the yards actually worth looking at. Some had rock walls, most had no fencing of any kind.
When he reached the closest houses, Bobby had to stop and let the dragons rest. He set Asyllis on her feet as gently as he could and re-formed just in time to catch her as she collapsed. Now that he looked her over, he sucked in a breath and felt like someone kicked him in the gut. Three separate blood stains spread swiftly on her clothing. Bobby had no medical training at all, but he knew that digging the bullets out and burning the tissues could save her life. It worked for Dan, anyway.
“I can fix this,” he told her firmly. If he didn’t, he’d spend the rest of his life wondering about her, wishing he’d had time to get to know her. Three of his dragons popped back off and dove at the three injuries.
She hissed with sudden pain. “It’s alright,” she said, voice breathy and strained. Her hand weakly gripped his arm. “You gave me back the sky. Like you said: go down in the sun, not waste away in the dark. You’re a good man, Bobby. I’m proud to call you my son.”
He’d found her an hour ago and had barely learned anything about her, yet the sight of her drifting away brought pain to his heart and tears to his eyes. The dragons yanked on bullets, pulling them out. One found itself flooded with blood for its efforts and he knew that he’d killed her instead of saving her. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I’m so sorry.”
“Save the rest. Stop them. Don’t let them destroy my home.” Her words slurred, her grip weakened.
Nodding, he held her close, his world shrunken down to the woman in his arms. “I promise. I’ll put things right.”
She smiled at him, then her eyes slipped lazily to the sky overhead. “I wish,” she began. Her last breath left her before she could manage anything else.
“Put your hands up,” he heard behind his back, the voice exasperated and tense, like he’d already repeated this a few times.
“Fuck off,” Bobby said as he pushed Asyllis’s eyelids down. Rage boiled inside him. They’d killed her. She didn’t deserve to die, she deserved to be free. Now that she was dead, they’d probably cut her up and pin her open like a frog in science class. They’d study every bit of her, trying to figure how she lived so long or something. He could see those damned scientists all relieved she could be treated like a thing now instead of a person. If that had even been what stopped them before.
“C’mon, buddy, let the lady go and show us your hands. Otherwise, we’ll have to shoot you.”
“She’s dead.” His voice came out flat and hard and cold.
“Damn, you killed her?”
Bobby turned his head, so angry he could barely think. “No. You did.” They were soldiers, not much older than him. If he let this rage loose, he’d kill them. “Back off.” He didn’t want to kill them. The dragons did. They didn’t care who these men were, they only cared about Asyllis being dead by their hands. Bobby cared, and he was in charge.
“Put your hands up.” One of them kept a gun trained on him while the other took a tentative step toward him, attention flicking between Bobby and Asyllis.
“Turn around and walk away now, before I lose control and you both die.” By the end of the demand, he found himself begging. “What you saw was real. Just walk away.”
Both of them froze and stared at him. “Are you sure she’s dead?”
“Yeah.” Bobby closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Was an accident, right? Guy busted her out and she got killed in a crossfire. He carted the body off, but you’re sure she’s dead.” When he opened his eyes again, they had both taken a step forward and looked ready to try to take him down.
“Right. Sure. Look, just come with us.” The one with the gun put it up to show he wouldn’t shoot. “We can sort this all out back at the base. I’m sure you didn’t mean any real harm, buddy.”
Bobby didn’t know what to do, just that he had to do something. “I don’t think you got the slightest idea what you’re dealing with. I don’t want to hurt any of you, but if you make me, I will.” He heard the helicopter settle overhead, the steady thp-thp-thp of the rotor loud enough he had to shout. At least the wind from it helped him cool down.
“I don’t want to hurt you, either, buddy. Just come along quietly and we can all avoid lots of trouble.”
He put his hands up and thought about what he could do and still get out of here with her body. Like waiting in that geek�
��s pocket, he had to watch for the best opportunity and take it, not bolt at the first chance. The helicopter moved off enough to land as the soldier gave him reassuring words about doing the right thing and he’d make sure to tell someone about it, and other pointless nonsense.
His opportunity came sooner than he expected. The helicopter door opened. Soldiers jostled in an attempt to surround him and load him up where he couldn’t cause any trouble. Getting shot didn’t scare him, leaving him free to act as he pleased. His left hand fell to dragons while he threw a punch at his captor with his right. Above their heads, two dragons sacrificed themselves in the engine, now making hideous screeches and crunches. More dragons burned and clawed whatever looked important.
Someone shot him while he shoved one soldier aside and knocked the other over. Dragons took the bullet and kept it from hitting anyone else. Thank goodness for that. The swarm blew out and carried Asyllis away again. Bullets flew around him. He ignored them.
What, exactly, should do now? By himself, he could fly for it and get to a phone. With a dead body, he needed a car. He broke into a random house and looked around. With luck, he’d have five minutes to find something that might help. Backup would come. Privek would find out.
Standing in the living room with Asyllis in his arms, he caught sight of a cordless phone sitting on a table. He first thought to call Liam. However, since Privek would toss a magnifying glass over everything here, the call would be traced, which could lead him to Liam. His attention went back to Asyllis, peaceful and still.
Setting her on the couch, he picked up the phone and called for an ambulance. The operator told him to stay on the line, but he hung up. He called information and got himself connected to a local TV station. “I seen a guy go into a house,” he told the young woman who answered. “He had a lady in his arms, I think she was hurt, or maybe dead. Thing is, she looked kinda weird. I know this’ll sound crazy, since we’re so close to Area 51 and all, but I think she had pointy ears, like one of them elves in a video game. I’m just calling you in case it’s something and they try to cover it up.” He hung up on her before she could ask him any questions, then did the same thing with the local newspaper.
