by Loki Renard
But she wasn’t that kind of girl. She wasn’t the kind of girl who went to guy’s houses. There were other easier, obvious targets for that. So she was left with her suspicion and nothing else.
“Whatever you’re into,” she said. “I’m not interested.”
They exchanged another look that she didn’t like, nodded and moved on. She didn’t see where they went, exactly. The bar had once been a house, so it had a few different areas—poker machines around the corner, a pool table further in—and the crowd soon filled in the spaces where they’d been. Brianna brushed the encounter off and got back to selling her wares to the regulars who came by in a slow trickle, giving her just about enough money to make rent, not quite enough to eat.
It was a slow night so she hung around until closing, hoping to sell the rest of her inventory. She even waited outside the bar in the parking lot as the last stragglers cleared out and stumbled on their way. When it became apparent that she wasn’t going to shift her stock, she started on her way home. The choice was a short trip through an alley, or a longer walk through the streets. Neither way was exactly safe, so she chose the short trip. She knew most of the homeless guys around the place anyway. None of them seemed particularly dangerous to her.
She was about halfway down the alley when two figures emerged from the shadows behind her. She heard their footsteps and quickened her own. The footsteps behind her sped up as well. She broke into a full run, but far too late.
Four hands descended on her, pulling her off her feet and wrapping around her mouth. She couldn’t scream, she couldn’t shout, but she could bite and kick and she did both. She managed to catch one of her assailant’s fingers in her mouth and bit down as hard as she could.
The act produced no result at all. There was a grunt and then an accented voice growled in her ear.
“Settle down.”
Settling down was the last thing she planned to do. The bite had made him move his finger, which gave her a chance to shout.
“Fuck, get off me!”
“Easy, girl,” the dark-haired man from the bar rumbled. “We’re not going to hurt you.”
“Fuck off!” Her scream hit a desperate pitch as she lashed out with a kick that didn’t connect with anything. Her senses were screaming, but before her mouth could do the same, she felt a prick in her upper left arm and then everything got real slow and real warm and…
Chapter Three
“She’s a fighter,” Chak noted as he swung her limp body up into a better grip. The girl wasn’t heavy, but now that she was an insensate lump, she was a little harder to carry.
“I hope she is not too troublesome,” Valkimer nodded, his brows drawn down as he looked at the unconscious young woman in Chak’s arms. “Perhaps we should have chosen a more compliant girl.”
“She was frightened. We assailed her in the dark,” Chak argued. “I want this one.”
“She isn’t for us,” Valkimer reminded him. “Don’t get attached to her. This is a business. We are obtaining stock.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Chak snorted. “I’m just saying, I think we have good raw material here. Let’s go, before we get caught and have to fight these humans.”
Their exit was located in an abandoned warehouse not all that far from the bar. The outskirts of the semi-rural town were littered with buildings that had once housed great machinery, much of which stood rusting beneath broken roofs. Nobody saw them as they made their way through the quiet of the night, carrying their prey quite openly.
“Humans are strange,” Chak noted as they moved through the shadows, broken glass and graffiti marking their path. “Why build all this just to let it rot? It’s not even fifty years old, some of it.”
“Humans are simple,” Valkimer said. “They’re like animals. Very smart animals, granted, capable of making tools, but everything they build decays. They do not have foresight. We plan for hundreds of years of life. They do not even plan for tomorrow.”
“So what are the bus timetables for?”
“What?” Valkimer shot a sharp look at Chak.
“If they don’t plan for tomorrow, what are bus schedules?”
“You know what I mean,” Valkimer snorted. “Lay her down somewhere safe. We have to get her ready for the next realm.”
They had arrived at the place of crossing over, where their portal stood in the middle of the decay, a bright rectangular doorway to their home realm. Within their world, they had opened the portal outside to save any potential damage to their home, so inside the dark and dingy warehouse was an incongruous view out to a flagstone courtyard and a bright blue sky beyond.
“Hold her for a minute,” he said, handing the female over to Valkimer, who took her with a little sneer on his lips and a questioning quirk to his brow.
“What are you doing?”
Chak didn’t answer. It was pretty obvious what he was doing when he pulled his coat from his shoulders and laid it down on the dirty ground before taking the girl back and laying her on it.
“You’re spoiling her already,” Valkimer sneered.
“I’m making sure she doesn’t get cut or contract some kind of human disease. They’re very prone to all sorts of things,” Chak replied, shaking his head up at Valkimer. “We have to take good care of her if we want to sell her. She’s precious cargo.”
“Hmph,” Valkimer said, turning to prepare the materials needed to transport her.
Chak looked down at the young woman. Now that he saw her in the flowing light of the dragon realm that was passing through the barrier of the portal, he noticed how very tender and small she looked. In the low lights of the bar, she had seemed older than she did now. Now her red eyelashes were fluttering, very incongruous with the dark mass of her hair, and her dotted skin marked with little red spots gave her an appearance of innocence that was starting to concern him.
“I hope she’s old enough,” he said. “She has to be mature.”
“They’re mature at eighteen,” Valkimer said over his shoulder as he worked. “They’re not allowed into bars until they are twenty-one years old. She must be old enough.”
“Assuming she followed the rules.”
“Check her belongings then,” Valkimer said impatiently.
Chak rifled through her pockets. He found a few bags of a green plant substance, strangely wrapped in fingers of foil, around fifty dollars of human currency, and two identity cards. One bore the name Sarah Brown. The other had the young woman’s face on it and a different name, Brianna Packard.
“She has two identity cards,” he said. “One of them has a date a few years earlier than the other. Why would she hold two different cards?”
“She was probably lying about her age,” Valkimer sighed.
“Well, one of them has her picture on it,” Chak said. “According to that one, her name is Brianna Packard and she was born…” he hummed under his breath as he did the math in his head. “Nineteen years ago. According to the other one, her name is Sarah Brown and she’s twenty-two.”
“Nineteen is old enough,” Valkimer said, disinterested in the little mystery.
“She wasn’t supposed to be in that bar,” Chak noted as Valkimer worked to mix the formulas that would enable their acquisition to survive the transition that was about to take place. “Their drinking age is twenty-one, and we didn’t want one younger than that, remember? She might not be resilient enough for the training we’re going to put her through.”
“Just help me with this, would you?” Valkimer snapped impatiently. “We’ve come too far to start questioning things. Don’t lose your nerve now, Chak.”
Chak’s brow rose, but he turned from Brianna Packard to help Valkimer with the fiddly little tubes. The formula Valkimer had created based on the texts in the royal library was not stable as a single substance. It needed to be mixed together from three separate vials into one larger one, shaken and then sucked into a syringe that would be used to deliver the solution to the human’s bloodstream.
> When they had been planning the idea, this had all sounded easy enough. But now he actually had some unconscious young female at his mercy, Chak was starting to feel uneasy about the part of the plan where they injected her with a serum of Valkimer’s making. Valkimer was incredibly intelligent and an avid engineer in his own right, but this was a medical matter and historically they had both been far better at taking lives than saving them.
“You’re sure this will work? It won’t hurt her?”
“We didn’t exactly have a whole lot of humans to test it on,” Valkimer replied. “But most of the ingredients are inert. It’s a biological compound. I suppose there could be a reaction of some kind. We won’t really know until we try it. However, it is based on a human’s formula. So if it doesn’t work, blame the humans.”
A motion out of the corner of Chak’s eye caught his attention. He turned and looked and saw that his coat was still lying on the floor, but there was no longer a young woman on it. He stared at the absence before his gaze was caught by another movement, that of their captive backing slowly along the far wall, trying to blend in with the decay of her civilization. His jaw dropped. According to Valkimer, they had given her enough sedative to keep a grown human male down for several hours. She had woken up after mere minutes.
Chak began to move toward her, his hands outstretched in a calming motion.
“Easy,” he murmured. “We’re not going to hurt you.”
“We’re not going to hurt who…” Valkimer hadn’t yet realized what was going on. When he turned his head and saw that she was awake, his response was not calm like Chak’s.
“Get her!”
Valkimer’s shout panicked the young woman. She bolted. Chak let out a curse of annoyance at Valkimer and gave chase, but instead of heading out of the warehouse, the girl instead ran for the open portal.
“No!”
They both shouted at her, but she wasn’t listening. Maybe she was still disoriented from the sedative, maybe she was just panicking. Whatever the reason, she threw herself through the portal head first and disappeared into their world.
Chak and Valkimer stared at one another for one shocked moment.
“Well, that’s definitely going to kill her,” Valkimer snarled. “Get in there and bring her back. I’ll clean up here and make sure we don’t leave any traces of this total disaster behind.”
“Once I get her, we are going to talk about your ordering me around,” Chak growled back at him. “I am not your foot soldier, Valk.”
With that, he ran through the portal. The girl’s life was now in very real danger. The radiation inherent in the dragon realm made every breath of air toxic to humans. She may very well already be past the point of saving. The thought of that made his heart clench in his chest. They’d screwed this up completely.
Fortunately, she had escaped into a walled garden outside the main hall of their estate. That meant that she should be easily contained. The walls were three times his height and so sheer that they were not easily scaled. On the other hand, the house was very large, a grand mansion by human standards, so there were nooks and crannies she could have hidden in on the exterior.
He ran in her wake. “Brianna!” he called out, using her human name. “Brianna, it’s dangerous here, I have to get you back home!”
There was no response, unsurprisingly. They’d abducted the terrified girl. He could imagine how this entire ordeal had looked to her, being assaulted in the alley, waking up to two men arguing over her with a large syringe in one of their hands. He didn’t expect her to come running to him.
That was the first thing they were going to have to address. Trust. A pet that ran in fear from her master was going to be utterly useless.
Chak searched everywhere, but he could not find any sign of her. It was as if the human had simply disappeared into thin air.
“Do you have her yet?” Valk stuck his head through the portal.
“I can’t find her,” Chak said. “She’s just gone!”
Valkimer swore and came through, closing the portal behind him. “We have to find her,” he said. “She could be dying a painful death somewhere in our garden.”
Chak was more than aware of that. He felt his stomach clench and turn. His warrior code had instilled a sense of honor and decency that precluded the killing of women. Now they had probably allowed some poor innocent to run to her death. For the first time, he cursed their ranging estate.
“We have to find her, Valkimer.”
“I’m sure we will find her at some point,” Valkimer said coldly.
“Do you even care that we’ve killed a girl?”
“She killed herself, panicking foolishly,” Valkimer replied. “We did nothing.”
“Nothing? We grabbed her, sedated her, and left her in front of a portal to run through… we’ve done a lot more than nothing.”
Valkimer didn’t reply, but Chak could tell by the set of his jaw and the tension in his body that Valkimer was not as comfortable with the situation as he was pretending to be. Neither one of them had ever intended any harm to come to their human pet. They had certainly not wanted her to die.
They searched for hours and hours, going over the same bushes and corners and crevices until the light faded, and with it, any hope for her survival.
“The first and only human who came here without prior treatment didn’t last thirty minutes. She may have crawled away into some corner or hole to die,” Valkimer said, his voice heavy with finality. Chak could tell he’d given up.
“This was a stupid idea,” Chak snarled. “We should never have done this. Taking humans from their realm into this one is immoral and cruel.”
“I’m going to fill my belly,” Valkimer said after one last glance around him. “I’m hungry.”
“That’s it? You’re hungry?” Chak stared at him, shocked at how callous he was being.
“My not eating won’t make her any more alive,” Valkimer said mercilessly.
Chak scowled after his brother in arms. Valkimer went in, but Chak searched on through the night. There was no sign of her at all. Once or twice he thought he heard a rustle in the undergrowth, but when he investigated it proved to be nothing but small creatures. He started to think that she must have evaporated entirely upon entry into their realm. Was that even possible? Maybe. Maybe the reaction to radiation was so severe she’d simply fizzled out of existence.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured to what remained of the night before turning and taking his exhausted body to bed.
* * *
The next morning, Chak felt no less guilty for what they’d done to the poor human girl who had perished somewhere on their estate. He hoped that Valkimer would be in a less arrogant frame of mind, ready to admit that what they’d done had been a mistake.
Valkimer was hard to find, until Chak went back out to the garden where they had first initiated their entrance to the human world. He heard familiar sounds, but refused to believe what they indicated until he found Valkimer kneeling on the grass, working on the little machinery boxes that generated the portal between worlds.
“What the blazing virgins are you doing!” Chak burst out in pure disbelief.
Valkimer didn’t even look up. “We need another female. Otherwise this has all been a waste of time.”
“You still want to do this? After we killed an innocent?”
“It was an accident, Chak,” Valkimer sighed, pushing pale hair out of his eyes. “We’ll be more careful the next time. We won’t let her go until she’s been inoculated.”
“With our untested injection that may or may not be toxic,” Chak reminded him. “How many women are we going to kill just to make a little money?”
“Your conscience is starting to annoy me,” Valkimer growled.
“Your lack of one is a concern too,” Chak snarled back. “A woman is dead!”
“Not a dragon woman. A human woman. It’s not the same thing.”
“It’s not that different a thing,” Chak
insisted. “It was a life we ended.”
“One of many,” Valkimer grunted under his breath.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Valkimer rose to his feet, a long metal tool clasped in his hand. He waved it in the direction of Chak’s nose as they glowered at one another and spoke in growling voices that made the very ground beneath their feet rumble with their rage. “We have both killed, Chak. We were warriors. We killed plenty…”
“Of other warriors!”
“And sometimes not. Sometimes more burned,” Valkimer reminded him. “You insist on pretending that you are one of the good guards, but you’re not. I’m not. We’re. Not. The. Good. Ones.”
“We may have made mistakes in the past. We might even have taken innocent life by accident. But we can try not to be evil,” Chak replied. “If you take another girl, I won’t be part of it.”
Valkimer threw down his tool and went nose to nose with Chak.
“We’re in this together. You’re not backing out now.”
“We were, until someone died, Valk!”
Valkimer’s handsome features twisted with arrogant contempt. “You used to be the most fierce of us all. You used to wear the blood of your enemies in battle. You used to strike terror into the hearts of all who saw you. And now you whimper like a whelpling because one human girl kills herself foolishly.”
“We were responsible for her.”
“We could not control every variable. It was an accident, Chak! I gave her enough sedative to keep her out for hours. She ran through the portal. There was no way to know either of those things were going to happen.”
“You’re being so short-sighted!” Chak’s voice rose along with Valkimer’s. “If King Casimer ever discovers what we have been doing, he will be furious. If he then discovers a trail of dead female humans, we will forfeit our lives. The crown princess of this realm is mostly human, Valkimer. This isn’t some game.”
Valkimer took a sudden step back and looked around himself. “Where’s my lunch?”
