“There’s a problem with that?” Lina asked as she shook off Zack’s arm.
“Yeah, that’s a problem,” Callie said. “We need to interrogate them first.”
Lina felt her rage dissipate. “Good reason.” She allowed Zack and Brodey to lead her outside.
“Wow,” Brodey said. “I think you’re getting the handle of this Goddess gig,”
Zack agreed. “I think you’re overthinking stuff. When it comes to needing to do something, you seem to instinctively know what to do—”
A shout of surprise from inside was all the prompting Lina needed. Before Zack and Brodey could stop her, she dodged past them and back inside the building. One of the cockatrice was trying to shift while Wally and one of the dragons wrestled with him.
Instinctively, Lina raised her right hand. A fireball formed over her palm. The cockatrice completed his shift and now stood nine feet tall. He slung Wally and the dragon off him. As the cockatrice raised his head to howl, she hurled the fireball at it, vaporizing him before the final echoes of his cry even silenced. Nothing remained of him except a sooty pile of ash that settled gently on top of his discarded clothes and shoes.
All the other cockatrice and most of the other shifters froze and looked at Lina.
She had another fireball ready in her palm. “Any of you other fuckers want to try something like that?” she said to the cockatrice prisoners.
The remaining seven cockatrice shook their heads. They all looked young, even younger than Gunther.
She let the fireball dissolve. Wally and the dragon both climbed to their feet. “Glad you’re on our side, Lina,” Wally quipped.
They interrogated the other cockatrice. When they finished, Jan and Rick looked at Zack and Brodey. “Take her back to the hotel,” Rick said. “We’ll handle this.”
“I want to help!” Lina protested.
“We don’t want you helping,” Jan said. “You don’t need to see this. I’m afraid what it’ll do to you.”
She started to argue with him when Callie grabbed her arm. “I’ll take her.” Lina was going to argue with her, too, when Callie dug her fingers into her upper arm. “No, you listen to me,” Callie said, storm clouds brewing in her expression. “The guys are right. Let them handle this. Please.”
Something in the way she said it brought Lina around. She quit fighting her. “Fine.” On the way back to the hotel, Lina said, “I thought you were on my side.”
Callie smiled. “I am. Do you really think we’re going back to the hotel? Have you learned nothing from me yet?”
Lina stared at her for a moment before she broke into peals of laughter. “Where are we going?”
Callie’s face turned grim. “To the nest.”
They drove for twenty minutes, into a dark rural area that looked like it was more farmland than anything. Callie switched off the headlights as she turned onto a dirt track that didn’t resemble a road so much as it resembled a really long, rutted mud puddle. She let the car coast to a stop and shut it off.
“What are we doing here?” Lina asked.
Callie smiled and reached up to switch off the dome light. “Hope you don’t mind a short hike.”
Lina followed Callie out of the car and across the darkened field. Clouds obscured the moon and stars, but as Lina’s eyes adjusted, she easily found herself following Callie.
After a few minutes cross-country trekking, they hunkered down behind a low stone wall near a farmhouse. Inside the house was dark with the exception of a light in one window on the end closest to them.
“That’s the nest?” Lina whispered. It looked like a normal house.
She nodded. “Sir’s going to spank the crap out of me for this, but it’s worth it.” She looked at Lina. “I saw this address come up in the stuff we got at the carver’s. It was there again in the silversmith’s stuff. Delivery address. And one of the phone numbers we pulled off Gunther’s phone is registered to this address.”
“Do we tell the guys?”
She grinned. “Fuck, no. Why do you think we’re here? This is their next stop, but I have a feeling if those yokels at the warehouse don’t report back sooner rather than later, these assholes are going to bug out.”
They crept across the farmyard. Lina’s heart pounded in her chest. She was armed with a sadomasochistic immortal, sarcastic wit, and unreliable fire and ice skills.
She was no longer sure this was such a great idea.
Callie pointed up to where an electric line entered the house near the roof. Lina wasn’t sure what Callie wanted her to do. Then Callie made a motion at it like she was tossing something.
Lina got it. Taking a deep breath and trying not to think about it, she held out her palm as if holding a softball and envisioned throwing a fireball at the wire. To her shock and amazement, it worked.
With a shower of sparks, the electric line burst into flame and fell from the wall, where it started arcing on the ground.
Inside the house, they heard several male voices shout. Callie whispered, “I’ll get the front door,” before dodging around the house.
Lina waited there. As two men rounded the corner from the back of the house, she threw fireballs with both hands. One took out one man, the other went a little wide and caught a barn on fire.
“Ooops!”
She didn’t have time to think, because the other man immediately began to rip his clothes off as he shifted into a cockatrice.
Answers that question. No doubt about his identity. She lobbed another fireball at him, which he dodged. Then she was standing face-to-face with a fifteen-foot-tall cockatrice even uglier than Lenny and Edgar had been.
“Fuck!” She heard Callie engaged in a fight on the front side of the house. She tried another fireball, which the cockatrice ducked. Then she had an idea and lobbed an icy mist at its feet.
It laughed at her, but when it took a step it slipped and fell right on the downed power line, which still arced in the grass.
The cockatrice let out a horrific screech as it shuddered and shook, the current frying the evil clucker where he lay.
Lina dusted off her hands and with a pleased smile turned to help Callie.
A really angry looking woman stood there behind her. Before Lina could react, the woman launched herself at Lina, swinging with both hands and screaming epithets in something Lina thought was Dutch, but she couldn’t be sure.
Lina fell to the ground under her assault. As the woman sat up to punch Lina in the face, a shot rang out and a hole appeared in the middle of the woman’s forehead. She fell back, dead.
Lina scrambled out from under the woman’s body and turned, ready with a fireball in her hand. Zack ran up carrying a rifle.
“I’d kick your ass for this,” he said, “but I suspect Rick and Jan are going to beat me to it. Come on!” Before she could ask him how the hell he’d followed them, he dragged her around the back side of the house.
He chambered another round in the rifle. “Callie’s got two on the front side of the house she’s wrangling with. You go around the far side, I’ll go this way, and we’ll pen them in between us. Got it?”
She nodded, her adrenaline pumping and her body on automatic pilot. With a fireball in hand, she took off running around the far side of the house. By the time she rounded the corner, Callie was actually engaged in battle with a third cockatrice, who’d shifted, as well as two men who hadn’t.
“Hey, cluckhead!” Lina screamed at the shifted one. When it turned its feathered head to her, it had just enough time for its eyes to widen in shock before the fireball engulfed its head. Zack shot one of the men, and as the other turned to flee into the house, Callie kicked his feet out from under him and bashed his head in with a rock.
They all stood there, no noise except for the sound of the barn behind them engulfed in flames. Then, Zack started to laugh. Callie joined him.
Lina, not sure what was so funny, finally caught the giggle bug from them both and sat down, unable to stand she laughed s
o hard.
“Come on,” Zack said to Callie. “Help me pull them into the house.”
“Why?” Lina managed to ask as Callie stood to do it.
“Because,” Zack said, “you’re going to burn the house down.”
Ten minutes later, they were trudging back to the car with the sky behind them lit in a golden glow from the house burning. A motor scooter was parked behind the car.
“So that’s how you trailed us?” Lina asked.
“Duh. It belonged to one of the guys at the warehouse. Did you honestly think I wouldn’t keep tabs on you, sweet cheeks?”
Callie smiled. “I knew he was back there. I saw him tailing us.”
“And you didn’t say anything?” Lina asked.
She shrugged. “Why? What was there to say? ‘Hey, your Watcher is right behind us’? Duh, he’s your Watcher. It’s his job.”
Lina was going to say something when the shakes hit her as an adrenaline crash set in. She collapsed to the ground, trembling, then crying. Sobbing was more like it, and both Zack and Callie surrounded her and tried to comfort her. That’s where they were five minutes later when Jan, Rick, Kael, Brodey, Jocko, Andel, and Daniel pulled up in the rental van.
Her mates ran over to her. “What the hell’s going on?” Jan demanded. Other shifters also pulled up in different vehicles. “Lina, are you okay?”
She nodded and sobbed even harder as she collapsed into his arms. He and Rick took over the job of comforting her while Daniel eyed Callie.
“Anything you want to say, pet?” he sternly said to her.
She looked down. “Sorry, Sir?”
He started to shake his head. Then he laughed and opened his arms to her. She raced to him and he engulfed her in a huge hug.
“Okay, so what the fuck happened?” Kael said, pointing at the burning house across the field. “That’s the nest.”
“Not anymore,” Zack said. “We took care of it. Or, I should say, Callie and Lina took care of most of it. I just helped with the cleanup.” He winked at Lina.
She guessed he was going to leave out the part about him saving her bacon so as not to freak out Jan and Rick.
She winked back.
* * * *
Later, back at the hotel, everyone reconvened in Lina’s room. “The bad news is,” Brodey said, “with the place burned to the ground, we lost any intel evidence they might have had.”
Daniel shot Callie a dark look. “It was Zack’s idea,” she said, pointing at him.
“The barn was already fully engulfed,” Zack said. “I figured it was only a matter of minutes before a fire brigade or someone showed up to investigate. Hell, you could see the fire from miles away.”
Andel nodded. “He has a valid point. Besides, we got plenty of evidence from the ones at the warehouse. This was only a small nest, and its sole purpose was running their drug operation in this area.”
“We still haven’t found Fat Boy,” Lina grumbled. Try as she might, she hadn’t been able to produce any more visions of him. When she’d tried asking Baba Yaga, the matron had dismissed her with a smile and a wave of her hand.
Callie had tried to explain it to Lina. “She isn’t allowed to get in the way of free will.”
“I’m not asking her to deliver him to me. I just want his fucking name. Is that too much to ask?” She looked at Callie. “Can you find out his name?”
“Not the way you’re thinking. I don’t have the powers she does. I told you that. I’m as hamstrung as you are.”
“Why couldn’t he have been one of the assholes at the nest?” Lina griped. “That would have made life easy.”
“Because I don’t think he’s part of that nest anyway,” Kael softly said. They all looked at him. “He’s one of the three who killed my family. We know this because of Lina’s visions. The group we took out today were mostly younglings and half-breeds, but they were all cockatrice. Fat Boy, as she calls him, isn’t even a cockatrice. Cockatrice won’t let outsiders into their nests. They might have to work with outsiders, but their nests are sacrosanct. They’re too distrustful and closed off to allow any non-cockatrice in. Even humans they’re mated to.”
Lina looked at Callie. “What do you think he was?”
“I was too busy trying to keep us from getting arrested or run over to pay attention,” she said, “but no, he wasn’t a cockatrice. They have a distinct…aroma. Well, to me they do. I don’t know if you all can smell them the same way I can.”
Brodey smiled. “They smell like chicken to me,” he quipped.
Lina snorted with laughter. “Crispy?”
He gave her a high five. “You know it, girl. Definitely crispy. The crispier, the better.”
Chapter Seven
Before they returned to the States, Lina wanted one last talk, alone, with Uncle Andel. She met with him for coffee downstairs in the hotel restaurant before she and the others headed for the airport. Andel would head home from there by train.
He gave her a sad smile. “Seer, you have a specific question for me?”
“How could you tell?”
He shrugged. “I suspected.”
She looked down at the table, where she slowly turned her coffee mug around in her hand. Their coffee wasn’t as good as Baba Yaga’s.
The thought nearly made her laugh, but she clamped down on it.
“When we first met in Yellowstone,” she said, “I noticed this grey cloud sort of surrounded you. It’s still there.”
He nodded, a sad smile on his face. “Yes. It doesn’t surprise me.” He took a sip of his coffee.
“And?”
He let out a deep breath. “I’ve had a lot of good years on this earth, Lina. Seen a lot of things, had more than my fair share of love. I’m tired. And, unfortunately, I’m not immune to things.”
“Cancer?”
He nodded. “It’s in my bones. Metastasized. I’ve had it for a couple of decades now.”
“Decades?”
“Being a dragon, it’s slowed the progress of the disease. Being half human, however, left me vulnerable.”
“You can get treatment though!”
He snorted, amused. “I’m part dragon, Lina. I don’t intend to spend the remaining years of my life locked up and being experimented on, or in hiding.”
“But, don’t we have doctors or something who are one of us? Or who are at least shifter of some sort, who can help you?”
“Sure we do. And I was given the option of trying treatments in hospitals where they couldn’t guarantee my safety, or living my life the way I wanted. I would rather the cancer take me with dignity than die as an experimental lab rat.” He glanced around and lowered his voice. “My wife, Ella? She was a beauty. We had a lot of good years together, more than any human ever has a right to expect. Our kids grew up and left home. Do you know how I lost her?”
Lina shook her head.
“She died in the bombing of Hamburg in 1943. She was trying to help her cousins escape.” He looked down at his coffee cup. “I spent a lot of years feeling bitter and angry. At the Nazis. At the Allies. At everyone. We didn’t have a side in the battle, we were simply trying to survive and keep our families alive. I found out about the cancer twenty-three years ago, when my first grandchild was born. Beautiful little girl. They named her after my Ella.”
He looked back up at Lina. “I made an active choice to live for that little girl. The Nazis are long gone. So are the RAF and others who bombed Hamburg. They are no threat to my little Ella. There are many dangers in this world, but there is only one danger that has directly sworn to try to kill her and others of our kind, as well as other shifters.”
“The cockatrice,” she whispered.
He nodded. “My hate is directed only at them now. I will do everything in my power to keep our people and others safe from those bastards. I will die fighting them, if I have to. Once I decided that, I felt a peace in my life I haven’t felt since losing my Ella.”
“Does anyone else know? About y
our cancer?”
“Bertholde did. She promised not to tell anyone. She’s the one who came to me and told me to get it checked out. That I was sick.” He shrugged. “I will die a happy man if all Ella has to worry about in the future are the same things the rest of the world usually must worry about. Only the cockatrice are deliberately out to harm her.”
“I won’t tell anyone.” Lina reached out and laid her hand over his to give him a gentle squeeze. Instead, her vision went blue. She was standing with Jan, Rick, Zack, Kael, and several others in a funeral home. She turned and at the front of the chapel she spotted a bronze urn. Next to it sat a picture of Andel looking a few years older than he did now. She realized she held something in her hand and looked down.
The program. On the front, the same picture of Andel, a made-up birth year that put his age approximately right, and the date of his death.
In seven years.
Her vision cleared and she was once again sitting in the booth in the hotel restaurant with Andel. He stared at her, curiosity on his face.
She let go of his hand and quickly tucked hers in her lap, under the table.
He laughed. “Don’t tell me. You saw how long.”
She forced a smile and nodded.
He sat back with a sigh. “I don’t want to know when. I’m guessing not right away?”
“No. There’s a while, yet.”
“Good. Plenty of work left to do.” He finished his coffee and left money on the table to pay their bill. He climbed out of the booth and helped her to her feet, giving her a hug. “Take care of those boys of yours,” he said with a smile. “The fanged as well as the furry ones. I’ve got to get checked out of the hotel and to the train station so I can go home. Safe journeys, Goddess.”
She smiled. “Safe journeys, Uncle Andel.”
He laughed. “See? Family is family. Adopted or not.”
She headed back to her room where Jan and Rick were struggling to get all the luggage stacked on a cart so they could make it downstairs in one trip.
“What are you two doing?”
Rick looked up. “It’s not obvious? We’re taking rumba lessons.”
“I’m the Goddess of Snark, buster, not you. I meant why not take two trips?”
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