“So you got the gift but you didn’t want to use it,” Shade said.
“I was going to be human not otherworldly,” Kale confirmed. “I was going to find a nice girl and have two point five children and a white picket fence. My father was okay with that, even though he said my gift was just as strong, if not stronger, than the rest of the family’s. My mother just wants me to be happy. She’s a nice mother. I had the girl and I had the budding career. Then I got cancer. Or rather, cancer got me. Dad’s been talking to dark wizards about curing me. I had to cut them off at the pass before they did something they couldn’t come back from. Dad was seriously looking at sacrificing puppies or something like that.”
Shade’s stomach lurched as a feeling of shame threatened to overwhelm him. This young man didn’t really want the money, but he’d given it to his family. He wanted to make sure his family didn’t make a huge mistake, and when an opportunity had presented itself, he’d taken it. This incredible selfless act made Kale a hero.
“Stop,” Shade said. “I’ll find another way. I don’t know what I’ll do, but I can’t sacrifice you for Claire. I haven’t known her very long, yet I know she would not want this.”
“Wow,” Kale said. He whispered something under his breath and tossed the powder he’d made against the wall. “Can you feel that? It’s a big surge of power coming down the portal. I think I called the dragon’s breath and—”
A gaping black maw appeared. Shade had seen the portal open before, though it had never looked like this. The ever growing maw seemed alive, stretching endlessly.
Then it simply shut over both of them.
Chapter 10
Dragons beget dragons. – Chinese Proverb
The floor beneath Shade’s back was cold and hard. He shook his head just to see if it would work again. His forehead hurt, as did the rest of his body. He didn’t want to open his eyes; his eyelids felt too heavy to be bothered with. His inner bear was mysteriously silent. In fact, the bear was curiously content as if the animal knew he was where he needed to be. He grimaced at the thought. The grimace made his head hurt more.
“I’ve never seen either of them before,” a female voice said.
“That one’s a were,” another female said. “Smells like bear. Maybe a black bear. Maybe a grizzly.”
Her accent was hard to place precisely, but it sounded like some flavor of Asian. Shade wasn’t good with accents from that part of the world, having not spent much time there.
“There was only one grizzly back there that I knew about,” the woman with the accent said.
“But the other one. Human. We’ve got enough humans here,” a third woman said.
“He smells a little different than most humans,” the first woman said.
“Yo. I’m right here. I can totally hear you talking,” Kale said.
“Why would the stupid portal work now? It’s been…how long has it been?”
“I haven’t a clue. You know telling time here is a little difficult. The sun doesn’t ever come up.”
“You, human,” the woman with the Asian accent said. “How long has it been since the revolt against the Council?”
“About a month?”
“How did it turn out?”
Kale laughed. “The good guys won. Scarlotte got whacked right away and the other two executed a week later. A lot of witnesses came forth to testify against them.”
“See,” the one with the accent said. “What human knows about that?”
“Okay,” Kale said. “I’m not exactly human.”
“Go get you-know-who,” the female with the accent said. Shade suspected he knew who it was. And if he was correct, it was a good thing. He was that tired, and his head felt like a balloon that was about to be overinflated. He couldn’t bring himself to open his eyes. “Maybe the doctor, too.”
It felt like the world was moving, but he knew he wasn’t moving. Somehow he had smacked his head hard on something. The shifter DNA eventually would repair any damage, but it would take several hours before the headache resolved. He concentrated on his breathing.
Kale said, “Shade.”
“Shh,” he said or he thought he said. It might have come out as “Sbb.”
“I think I figured this whole thing out,” Kale said. “But the portal opened up into a big cage made just for shifters, which is usually good enough for humans, too. Also my father’s kind.”
“Bleh.”
“It kind of spit us out,” Kale said. “Actually I think we were ejected like a cannonball. You hit the rock wall pretty hard. I, well, let’s just say you’re not a bad cushion because I’ve only got bruises.”
Shade forced his lips to form words. “What hit the rock wall?”
“Your head.”
“Yeah.”
“You probably have a concussion,” Kale said. “You need to make sure you don’t move around too much. And you definitely shouldn’t go to sleep.”
Shade considered smacking the kid with inoperable cancer yet just to get him to shut up, but then decided it might not be the most PC thing to do, even though he was sorely tempted. “Shut up, Kale. Don’t make me hurt you.”
Kale laughed. “What in our short acquaintance makes you think I’m capable of doing that? I think that was sixty percent of the reason they wanted me medically discharged.” He paused. “Hey, someone’s coming. Wow. She’s a hot, One Million Years, B.C. kind of girl.”
Shade didn’t need to be told. He had caught a whiff. The wind smelled entirely of the person and every inch of his body begged to sit up and pay attention. He felt their movement, and when they stopped outside of what he thought was the edge of the cage, he longed to open his eyes and take his fill, but his lids were being persistently dismissive. His inner beast was smugly complacent.
“Bear,” Claire growled.
Uh oh. This wasn’t going to be the pleasant reunion he’d hoped for.
* * *
“Concussion. Looks like the shoulder is dislocated,” a man sometime after a long bleary darkness. He smelled human. Shade felt hands on the bare flesh of his shoulder and on his lower arm. It didn’t seem to be worth the effort to struggle, or even open his eyes for that matter, since the human didn’t sound threatening. “We just take this.” The man began to twist and rotate the shoulder while he applied pressure on Shade’s armpit. After a sharp tug on his wrist, a sickening pop was accompanied by a wave of gut-wrenching pain.
Shade almost screamed.
“And that’s how you put a shoulder back in the joint if you don’t have the right medical equipment,” the man said with apparent satisfaction.
Shade opened his eyes. The human doctor from the Wyoming facility looked down at him. After the Council tried the doctor, Shade attempted to smuggle him out of the dungeons. Shade failed because the man vanished almost immediately following his trial. Clearly the doctor had disappeared because Scarlotte had thrown him into the portal
“I know you,” Shade said, struggling to put a name with the face. “You’re…um…?”
“Anton,” the man said.
“Yes. I remember now,” Shade muttered. He was still on his back and watched the doctor slip one shoe back on. He’d used his foot to brace against Shade’s armpit while he’d yanked on the arm with the dislocated shoulder.
Shade looked around. They were still in a large cage. The bars were made from iron and stone. Two sides were giant stone walls; one had been a natural rock outcropping that clearly had been where the portal exited. The door was blocked with a huge wooden mechanism that seemed the equivalent of jamming a chair under a doorknob. Several weres stood outside the cell looking at him. Most of them didn’t look happy. Claire was notably absent.
Kale sat beside Shade and patted his good shoulder. “Better, dude?”
“Better. What happened?”
“I think the question should be, where did you get those bones I used?” Kale asked.
“They were in Scarlotte’s quarters,” he muttered. “D
ragon bones aren’t exactly available at 7-Eleven.”
“Ah. I’m assuming they were the same she used to create the portal,” Kale nodded as if confirming his theory. “I should have asked. Memo to self: always ask about the origin of dragon bones. Here’s the thing. Look out there.” He waved at the exterior of the cage.
Shade lifted his head, and it throbbed in response. They were on a hill with great rocks jutting from the ground like giant teeth. The world looked gray and dim. On the distant mountainous horizon, something glowed red. It might have been a volcano, it might have been the sun about to rise. He saw a number of grayish trees that seemed stunted, and to one side, a series of cavern entrances from which weres and humans came and went.
“We seem to be in a Shadow Realm,” Kale said to Shade. “My father taught me about these. It’s not cursed like the one the elfish princess was trapped in. But it’s a world where the sun began to die. The occupants rightfully fled to other realms. Based on what the folks who came before us say, the occupants were dragons. So this is a Shadow Dragon Realm. Questions, because there will be a test later?”
“Is that the downside?”
“No. Killing Scarlotte closed the portal as I’ve explained to them. Of course, I can only assume that Ula wouldn’t have killed Scarlotte if she had known. However, it was a one-way portal, so it technically wouldn’t have made a difference. When I did the branwyns’ thing, I was expecting to open it up and see if I could make it both ways. Win-win. But I wasn’t supposed to be sucked in. Color me disappointed. I wish I could tell my dad.”
Shade looked at the doctor.
“The drakken says that she was attracted to the portal because she’s got dragon blood in her,” Anton said. “And it reacted to her, as well. I suspect the dragons from this realm are related to her family in some fashion. It’s oddly ironic.”
Kale nodded. “And Scarlotte used the dragon bones from this realm to create a portal. She didn’t specify where the portal was to go, so it came here. Something to do with dragon magicks. I’ve heard that the ability is inherent in their blood, did you know? I think it’s like a homing pigeon. It almost makes me want to do a science project.”
“Where’s Claire?” Shade asked.
“Where she’s at, she’s pissed,” Kale said. “Anyway, so when I used the same bones, bam, ended up here. The rat witch used some freaky magicks. I thought we were goners. It gulped us up and literally spat us out, hence your injuries. Thank you very much for being that which prevented my body from being smushed. They’re going to let me try to make the portal to return to our realm, otherwise known as Earth Prime.”
“Great,” Shade said. “I can go see Claire in the meantime.”
“Claire wants you locked up here,” the doctor said.
Shade glowered. This was going about as well as he’d expected it to go. If he could just speak to her.
“In the meantime, some of the asshole weres who were exiled here regularly try to have a go at the community that was set up here,” Kale went on. “They were the ones the Council should have just executed. There’s barely enough food here to live on for the ones who stick around. They have a water source and some game animals that don’t need constant sunlight to live. They’ve got a little town here. Maybe a couple hundred humans and weres. No branwyn that I’ve met, but I haven’t met everyone yet. Anyhoo, the bad ones want what the good ones have. It’s a tussle.”
“I can help,” Shade said. “I can fight.”
“He stays…locked…up,” someone else said.
Claire looked down at Shade. It wasn’t the first time they had seen each other, but Shade felt like it was the first time all over again. He didn’t want to look at anyone else. He even kept his eyes on her as she walked away. Somewhere she’d found a ragged denim shirt and faded Levi’s; the outfit didn’t look half bad on her. Then again, a sackcloth wouldn’t have looked half bad on her.
She looked different since the last time he’d seen her. Her black hair was longer, by nearly two inches. The cheekbones in her face bordered on gauntness. She needed more food in her. Her eyes wavered on the edge of going full wolf. However long it had been for him, had been twice as long for her.
Different realms went by different times. Judging on her appearance, Claire had been here months instead of the weeks she had been gone from their world.
Shit.
“I’ll do whatever she wants,” Shade said.
* * *
From the moment the portal had gaped open, blackly yawning and snatching the newcomers inside, Claire was aware that luck was always a factor. The lucky part was that both Tatsu and Claire were weres and could take a little damage without permanency. The unlucky part was that the portal sucked them in and flung them out like they were a chunk of overcooked, unseasoned broccoli in a petulant child’s mouth. They’d landed in a cage, a cage made for all the Council’s castoffs, and several weres had been waiting for them to wake up. Another unlucky part was that the weres were from the bad group, the ones that the Council had exiled to this purgatory for a reason.
So Claire and Tatsu had figured out who was to be trusted, or at least as far as was reasonable, and enacted a coup d’etat in a way that Claire knew her father would be proud of. After all, she might not be the fastest were or the best at martial arts, but she’d read The Art of War at least seven times. Some of it had actually sunk in. She had just been sorry she hadn’t been able to read it in the original Chinese. Her lack of ability with languages held her back in that. Not that it mattered when it came time to put the ancient military maneuvers to use: laying plans, waging war, strategy, tactics, applying energy, and seeking out weak and strong points. It was amazing how much Claire had absorbed. She owed her father an apology for all the times she’d griped about having to read the tome. (It was a moment that Claire was thankful for her father’s idiosyncratic leanings to knife throwing, munitions classes, martial arts, and decisive war-planning. Her mother leaned toward knitting, cooking, and the gentle art of napkin folding.)
By the time they’d won a few decisive victories, Whitfield Dyson had entered the picture. Once, the human in the suit was the manager of the facility in Wyoming. He’d been responsible for the experimentation, torture, and death of kidnapped weres. He’d been taken to the Catacombs of Paris and Scarlotte had done something particularly wicked to him. She’d introduced the shifter DNA into his blood just to see what would happen.
The human doctor, Anton, had borne witness.
“It wasn’t a regular animal. Not a lion. Not a cougar. It looked like something out of the last ice age, complete with saber teeth and a violent temper,” Anton had told them. “It’s twice as big as any lion I’ve seen. And he isn’t controlling his animal form. Not in the least.”
The biggest and strongest of the weres couldn’t take Whitfield down, and they couldn’t keep him in the portal cage. That explained why the Council had thrown him into the portal. They couldn’t keep him in the catacombs because he might potentially escape. If he escaped into Paris, then the jig was up. They even had a hard time trying to kill Dyson as evidenced by the silver scars all over his body.
A few others came through the portal, both immoral and innocent. Then the portal closed, and it was the end of hope and the beginning of the real fight.
Whitfield Dyson had become leader of the bad weres. He was no longer a corporate American cog in the machine, but he didn’t mind borrowing a few of his old habits. A cold-blooded killer, he didn’t care much about who got in his way. He killed the ones who resisted. Then he killed some of the ones who didn’t resist. Pretty soon the rest of the bad weres were pleading to be let back into the fold, in order to get away from Dyson. The fight shifted to being about Dyson and a few other badass weres.
Tatsu and Claire had come to the conclusion that the only way they could deal with Dyson was to kill him. It was going to take a concerted effort, and no one wanted to murder the former human, although there were more than a few who wanted to
do to him what had been done to them.
Traps failed. Weres were lost. They were surviving, but just barely and only by the tips of their fingernails.
In her darkest moments, Claire thought that someone, somewhere, was looking for her. Her parents, her sister, in her most desperate wishes, she hoped the were who had called himself Taq, the one who had told her stories when she was at her lowest ebb, the one who had lied to her for a reason she didn’t quite understand, would be the one to rescue her.
Time was so different in this place. The sun never set and never peeked more than a smidge above the horizon. The watches and cell phones that had come through the portal didn’t work. Either the batteries were fried by the magicks, or it was a matter of the physical rules of the realm. They didn’t have a scientist to tell them which it was or wasn’t.
Claire didn’t know how long they waited. They knew they were getting picked off by Dyson and his motley crew. Dyson seemed to have lost his mind and was only interested in what he could kill. Possibly even worse, he ate everything he killed. Claire sometimes wondered what would happen to himself when he’d killed all the weres and humans and had nothing left to eat. His latest killing spree had left Claire with little doubt that he put any thought into his long term future.
She took to marking the times she slept, although Anton said that it was unlikely to be regular. The doctor had found some various discarded items and developed a water clock. “Hydrostatic pressure in the upper bottle,” he said, indicating liter bottles he had acquired, “causes a change in the flow of water. If we change the bottles consistently, then we have an idea of how much time passes. I don’t know if it’s important to keep time around here, but I’m inclined to do it. ”
Claire was inclined, as well.
According to Anton approximately seventy-five Earth days had passed since he’d made the water clock. However, she had no way of knowing how much time had passed between when the time the portal had expelled them and when Anton and Dyson had been tossed inside.
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