by Romi Hart
She let her hands fall and the tension drained out of her. “All right. I’ll come back.”
He bowed even lower and closed his eyes. “Thank you.”
12
Victor sloped back to the village with Riley right behind him. He didn’t want to face his father. He couldn’t stand to explain why he went to all the trouble of rescuing Riley from the water, only to abandon her now. He’d explain it somehow, though. He had to.
He hit the ladder and vaulted up. His father and Bryce looked up when he entered. Cameron glanced toward the door. “Everything all right?”
“Yeah.” Victor passed his hand across his eyes. “This is why I didn’t want her knowing about the rules.”
“Sorry, man,” Bryce interjected. “I didn’t mean to stick my oar in.”
“It doesn’t matter. I explained it. It should be all good now.”
He moved into the room, but when he prepared to sit down, Cameron looked past him toward the door. “So where is she?”
“She’s just coming up.” Victor waved behind him, but even as he did so, an eerie silence gripped him in the chest.
No footsteps climbed up the ladder. No vibration translated through the house. No sound came from outside at all. His heart plummeted into his stomach. That silence dragged out longer and longer. It didn’t end. Nothing interrupted the horrible nauseating emptiness.
Out of nowhere, Cameron cleared his throat. He did it quietly, unobtrusively. Anybody might think he just needed to dislodge a speck of lint from his neck.
The sound snapped Victor out of his stupor. He whirled away and stuck his head through the door, but he already knew what he wouldn’t see. Riley was gone.
Without waiting an instant for confirmation, he plunged back into the house. He snatched his shotgun from the corner and dove for the ladder. “Get all the fliers in the air pronto. Send Lincoln and the other cats on the ground to track her, but make sure no one goes out in the open. We have to bring her back alive.”
He took a flying leap off the step and landed in the soft soil. He hit the ground running and barreled into the undergrowth. He didn’t need to worry about his father and brother doing what he said. He also didn’t have to worry about giving his father a direct order. In a matter of seconds, Bryce and Cameron would join the fliers searching for Riley.
He wouldn’t join them. He had to catch up with her. He couldn’t let her reach the highway. These New Breed people would never be able to retake her with humans around. He knew that. He only prayed to High Heaven she didn’t realize it.
He wheeled and ran parallel to the stream. It broadened a few miles south to join the Atchafalaya River. If she came from this part of the country, she probably already knew that. She would follow the river to the highway and that would be the end of it. That would be the end of her.
Why didn’t she listen to him? Why did she persist in this irrational notion of getting back to the human world? Anybody with half a brain cell could tell it would be suicide.
Never mind. He had to find her. Even if he hated her and never wanted to see her again, even if he lived for the day she lost interest and moved on to someone else, he would still have to find her. The rules dictated as much, but he would have to do it regardless.
Some force at a chemical level drove him to her. It wouldn’t let him rest, in her presence or out of it. If anything happened to her, it would destroy him.
He froze for a second. He panted listening in the dark. He didn’t hear the cats moving into the trees. He wouldn’t hear them if they were right on top of him.
No, a new realization struck him. Finn sent her to Breaux Bridge. Victor knew without a doubt Finn did that to kill Riley to strike at Victor. He did it to destroy Victor by breaking the bond between him and Riley.
How would Finn know to do that? He must know about the bond. He must know that killing Riley would destroy Victor. How could Finn know that when Victor didn’t know it himself?
Victor started running again, but dead calm swept through him. It calmed all his horror and uncertainty. Finn knew. He knew all about this maddening compulsion driving Victor and Riley together in spite of their animosity. Finn knew all about the gripping spell that wouldn’t let them be in the same room with each other without attacking each other in a death struggle.
How did he know? How could Finn know unless he went through it himself? Finn must have bonded with another dragon shifter in the same way. He must have mated with her in the air and gone through the same convulsion.
So what happened to the girl? Who was she? Where was she? How did Finn turn into this dreaded shade instead of falling into her arms and living happily ever after?
Maybe she died. Maybe someone killed her and left Finn in ruins. Maybe Finn killed her himself. Victor shuddered. At all costs, he had to stop Finn from finding Riley.
At that moment, a deep, rumbling boom sounded overhead. A hurtling flash of movement zoomed through the night sky. A serpentine shape crossed the stars. It disappeared in an instant.
He stuffed down the urge to launch and join them. He could get to Breaux Bridge in a matter of minutes on the wing. He wouldn’t find Riley that way, though.
How did she get out of the village so fast? She sure as fuck didn’t walk. He would have seen her or smelled her if she did. One of the cats would have picked up her scent before they got ten yards.
She flew out of the village. He knew that. She lifted off the ground and vanished into the night. She couldn’t have escaped so silently any other way.
Either she flew straight to Breaux Bridge or she landed somewhere in the Quag. If she flew straight to Breaux Bridge, the other fliers would pick her up in no time. Finn would have found her by now and Victor could go home and face the music.
She didn’t fly to Breaux Bridge, though. He was never more certain of anything. She was too damned smart for that. She already knew Victor posted someone to watch the gas plant. She would hide somewhere and wait for the hunters to give up the search.
She knew the bayou. She felt comfortable here. She could hide anywhere, but she probably didn’t count on hiding from panthers and jaguars and wolves. Fuck, who was he kidding? She probably was counting on exactly that. Leave it to her to anticipate that, too.
He cursed himself as he ran. Where would she hide? If she had a brain, she would hide among humans. She would reckon out the details and come to the understanding that humans were the New Breed’s one weakness.
They would hesitate to follow her into the human world. Humans scared them. Riley might saunter into Breaux Bridge, bat her eyelashes at some trucker, and hitch a ride back to Barksdale without ever making any distress call. Victor would never see her again.
His stomach turned at the thought. He wanted out of this wretched situation. He wanted shut of Riley Strickland, but not like this. The military would interrogate her and find out everything she knew. They would get the camp’s location out of her one way or the other. If he had no other reason for tracking her down, Victor had to find her for that alone.
He ran for ten miles. He halted where the stream gurgled into the Atchafalaya. He trained his ear to listen to the murmur of turbulence over stone. It suggested all kinds of possibilities to him. His friends never considered this.
He slotted his gun into the fork of a tree. He gave it a comforting stroke before he turned his back on it. With luck, he would come back and get it…. sometime.
Then he turned around and dove headfirst into the water. The instant he broke the surface, he shifted. His neck erupted to several feet in length. His tail extended behind him. The slippery water combed over his scales.
He propelled his talons off the murky bottom and set off swimming downriver. Gators and turtles glided out of his way in the dark ooze, but he didn’t give them any passing notice. His nose detected Riley’s smell. Clever girl. She learned fast—a lot faster than most humans who turned from contact with the water.
She was here. She was in the water—or was very re
cently. He closed his eyes and swam by smell. He flattened his wings against his back and undulated his spine to slither with the current. It carried him faster than he could swim on his own.
He shut down his brain and sank into that smell. It would lead him straight to her. His dragon self didn’t care about anything else. His dragon self considered her his mate. He belonged with her no matter what.
All at once, the smell evaporated. He floundered his limbs to check his progress. He whipped one way and then the other in a wild search for her trail. The full force of the current hit him.
The churning mass of muddy water kept rushing onward, but he heard a faint murmur to one side. Then he remembered. The Atchafalaya cut off from the main torrent while most of the water ran on into the Whiskey Bay Channel.
He swam toward the noise and dove into the river that now dwindled to its former tiny trickle. He found the swimming more difficult here. The course twisted and turned. Rocks bumped his underside.
He picked up the smell right away. It soothed his fevered mind to know he was getting closer to her.
The river turned south. A distant hum of activity drifted to his ear from above and he slowed. He was getting near the highway. As he suspected, the smell faded again, but it didn’t cut off the same way. It gradually reduced to nothing.
He stopped under the highway. Her scent ended here. She must have gotten out at the highway. He did a mental calculation. She was near enough to Breaux Bridge. She would leave the river without much trouble. Then the vast, flat expanse of Lake Bigeaux separated her from the town. A thousand tiny tributaries and ponds surrounded the Lake. They made an impenetrable network of swamps for her to hide in.
Of course. Now he knew where she was…. roughly. He paddled to the bank and waded out. He shifted on the bank and squeegeed the water off his shorn head. He looked around in the dark. He couldn’t smell her.
Now came the hard part. He had to find her in the maze of lakes and trees. A truck rumbled past on the highway. Would she think to show herself? Would she hitchhike into Henderson on the chance some kind soul would let her use a phone?
13
Riley paused to listen to the woods around her. They clicked and pulsed with a thousand insect voices. Other than that, she didn’t hear anything.
She almost hated to shift back into a woman. She could see and hear everything so much better as a dragon. She flew away from the village only to find her mind worked a lot better than it did before.
Victor was right. The more times she changed into this new form, the more rationally she could think in that state. The raving insanity of her first few times decreased and left her cold, purposeful, and deadly.
The hardened determination to accomplish her objective didn’t go away. She still intended to contact Major Dickerson and get the hell out of the bayou. That would never change.
She squeezed the muck out of her hair and started walking, but she kept stopping every now and then to listen. The hunters would come after her. They would try to stop her making contact with anyone.
She already knew they would stake out the natural gas plant. She couldn’t go near that—not yet. She came to a small lake and skirted around it. Dragons and God knows what else could be crawling all over these swamps. She had to be careful. She had to be able to take wing at any moment, but not even that would help her. If she launched, she would attract the attention of every dragon in the neighborhood.
The memory of Victor snapping at her jet’s tail made her shudder. She didn’t like the idea of fighting him in the air. Even as she pushed that thought away, she knew she could never fight him, on land, in the air, or anywhere else.
This rotten whatever it was bound them together. It made them loathe and desire each other to the limit of their strengths and abilities. She couldn’t break that unless one of them died.
Part of her secretly hoped he would die. That would leave her free. No, it wouldn’t. It would leave her maimed. Losing him would amputate a part of her that needed him, that couldn’t live without him. Knowing that made her hate him all the more.
A truck rattled over a bridge nearby. The highway seethed with life. It called out to her with the voice of cars and technology and computers and…..and phones. She might not be able to go near the gas plant, but she might be able to make a distress call from somewhere else.
She wandered around a few more lakes and marshes of varying sizes. She hunted for somewhere to spend what was left of the night, but her attention kept drifting back to those cars. She planned to lay low in the bayou until daybreak, but why should she? Why not make her move now? The sun would rise pretty soon anyway.
She struck out for the highway, but she still didn’t approach it. She marched parallel to it until the eastern sky began to grow light. Birds exploded out of the trees. The traffic increased.
Up ahead, she spotted the lights of Henderson winking in the shadows. This was her chance. She scrambled up a bank. Several more cars whispered past before she dared to make eye contact with the drivers.
She continued on for fifty yards. She walked on the shoulder until she heard an engine coming up behind her. She turned around and stuck out her thumb. The pickup drove right by her without stopping. Oh, well.
She knew how to hitchhike. She kept moving and only flipped around to thumb it when she heard a car coming. The tenth time she did this, a minivan pulled onto the shoulder.
She whirled around and ran to the car. She dove into the passenger seat before she saw the grizzled old swamp rat behind the wheel. “Thanks!” she gasped.
His bushy eyebrows quivered. So did his mustache and scraggly beard. His gaze skipped down to her wet clothes. “Did your car break down?”
She cast a glance behind her before she remembered to lie about her real situation. “No, I got in a fight with my boyfriend. I had to get out and walk.”
He switched on his turn signal and merged into the traffic. “Where are you going—Breaux Bridge?”
Where was she going? “Just take me into Henderson, if you don’t mind. I just need to call my mom to come and pick me up.”
She had to keep all these lies straight so no one figured out what she was really doing in the bayou at five o’clock in the morning.
He motored on toward the lights. “You’ll catch cold if you don’t dry off soon.”
She sighed. The farther away she got from the Atchafalaya, the safer she felt. She could leave all that mutant bullshit behind her. “I’ll change when I get home.”
He shot a fleeting glimpse at her. “Where are you gonna call from? How are you gonna pay for it?”
She didn’t think of that. She didn’t have a penny to her name. Houses flitted by her window. She could see their doors and windows in the gathering dawn. “I’m not sure. I’ll work it out somehow.”
“You can use my phone if you want.” He put his hand in his jacket and tossed her the device. “I do so hate to see a damsel in distress.”
She stared down at the thing in her hand. It was an iPhone—a really good iPhone. She had to concentrate to remember how to use one. It contradicted everything that happened in the last few days. Her time in the wilderness since she crashed seemed like a thousand years.
“What’s wrong?” the guy prompted. “Can’t you remember the number?”
She looked up expecting him to sneer in suspicious disdain. She wouldn’t expect someone to buy her flimsy excuse for an explanation.
He only smiled at her. “I forget people’s numbers all the time now. I used to have a couple hundred phone numbers memorized. Now I got me a new phone and I don’t have to remember a single one. I push a button and it remembers the number for me.”
So that’s what he meant. She nodded down at the phone, but she couldn’t answer. All she had to do was dial the number and she was home free.
He pulled off the road into a driveway. He threw the vehicle into Park in front of a convenience store. “I’m going in to get me some milk for my coffee. You take your t
ime making your call. If you need a ride somewhere, you just tell me. I got all day.”
He climbed out and slammed the door. She just so happened to get picked up by the most helpful old man on the planet. She couldn’t waste this opportunity.
She tapped the phone and it lighted up. No passcode. Another stroke of luck. She navigated to the phone. Her fingers shook entering the number.
She swallowed a lump in her throat pressing it to her ear. She almost burst into tears when a familiar voice boomed down the line. “Major Dickerson speaking.”
Her throat cracked when she tried to speak. “It’s me, Major. It’s Lieutenant Riley Strickland—Pocahontas. I got shot down over the False River four days ago.”
An oppressive silence followed before he snapped in her ear. “Where are you, Lieutenant?”
“I’m in Breaux Bridge and I need help.” She started to prattle. “I can’t explain right now, but I’m in danger. Someone is trying to stop me from leaving. I need help to get out of here. Can you send someone to pick me up?”
Another crushing silence nearly robbed her of the will to go on. She couldn’t bear to hear him turn her down.
“We all thought you were dead,” he growled. “Why didn’t you contact us before?”
“I tried,” she blurted out. “Some people were holding me against my will. They have a camp in the Atchafalaya Wildlife Refuge and they wouldn’t let me leave. I just managed to get out. I’m in Henderson west of Lake Bigeaux and some guy let me use his cell phone. I’m heading for Breaux Bridge, but they posted guards there, so I have to be careful..”
“Where do you want us to pick you up? If these people are still after you, we can send a chopper to….”
“No!” she cried before she got herself under control. “That will only alert them to my whereabouts. I’m going into Breaux Bridge later. I’ll….”
“What do you want to do that for?” he interrupted. “You don’t want to get any closer to them than you already are.”
