Authors: Killion Slade
Khaldon covered my other hand with his and squeezed. His quiet reassurance helped me to catch my breath. “I noticed for some reason it glows more when it’s close to you, so I snagged it.” His devilish grin revealed
secret mission accomplished
all over his face.
Inside the bag, the green orb from the staff I was carrying in the cave was wrapped in an oil cloth. The staff had snapped in pieces, but the ornate carvings in the wood held the orb in place. I stared at Khaldon in disbelief. He guided my hand to touch it and I ran my fingertips across the runes carved in the wood. A zing of tingle rippled across my fingers when my hand caressed the cool gem. The warm green glow of the orb purred a connection between us. I could feel it humming.
Removing my hand, I re-covered it with the oilcloth. I hissed in a rushed whispered and looked around the room hoping nobody was paying any attention to us. “Are you insane? Haven’t you ever watched
Heavy Metal?
” I quickly closed the satchel and stowed it back under the bed. “That thing could represent all the evil in the Universe and be the demise of us all!”
He smiled as best he could and pulled me in close. “Who knows, maybe you’re the new Taarakian, ready to defend and protect us against the evil of the Loc-Nar.”
I shook my head again in disbelief that he would remove such a relic from their island. “In your dreams, Bucko. You must be feeling better.” I grinned a small smile and my heart sighed a tiny amount of relief knowing, in time, he was going to be just fine. “I think you just want to see me dressed up in red, thigh-high leather boots.” I checked his eyes for acknowledgment and they beamed with devious intent. “What in the world am I going to do with that thing? We have no idea what it is. Seriously, you may have just opened up the wrath of Sekmet or something on us.”
Khaldon made an erotic, appreciative noise in the back of his throat. “Right, leather boots … I think you should dress as a Taarakian for the next Comic Con.”
I would have punched him in the arm if we all weren’t still in so much pain.
“But not to worry your bonny head, since Sekmet is my direct ancestor, you needn’t worry about her wrath anytime soon.” He sat up a little straighter on the bed. “If you want, we can keep the orb at my house. I’m just trying to think how I’m going to get it past customs.”
“Yeah, well I’m just waiting for the Rakshasa to crash through those doors to recover their ancient relic.” Feeling an imminent sense of foreboding, I peeked over my shoulder toward the door. Just in case.
“I’ve the perfect place for the orb next to our crossbow bolts. I’ll hang it next to the one I dug out of my shoulder in the Civil War.”
“Our bolts?”
“Indeed, m’lady.” He flipped a bolt into the air and caught it. “This is the one I dug out of Torchy’s side and through your calf. I guess technically, the bolt is both of yours.”
He picked up the dragon scythe and pointed it at me. “That silver thermite arrow will make an excellent addition to my gallery.”
A humble smile emerged through the pain as flakes of ash fell from above his eyebrow. “Keeping mementos like these helps me to appreciate the days when life is simple.” He whisked away the ash with his hands.
“Never expected such exciting adventures when we started to date, huh?” I ran my hand down the side of his cheek where there weren’t any burns.
“Blimey, Chey, you do manage to keep things interesting. I’ll give you that.” He tried to wink, but winced in pain as scorched flesh fell off in chunks, revealing pink shiny skin underneath. Even though he looked as though he would never recover, it was miraculous to watch how his skin repaired itself.
“Looks like you’re going to need more blood. Is there any way they can bring us live donors?”
Khaldon shrugged and reclined back on the bed, slowly closing his eyes obviously still too tired to care.
“I’ll ask and see what I can find out.” I stood and tentatively stretched my newly formed calf muscles and leaned up against the windowsill beside Khaldon’s bed. It looked as though we would have a shy pink and orange sunset in a few hours. In some oddball way, the setting sun offered a renewed hope that we might live to see another day.
I picked at a silver scab pockmark on my elbow, not trying to think about why we were here recovering in the first place. “Ya know, it was really weird. Right before the explosion, I found a key around Dakota’s waist. It glowed the same as the green orb and it had a serpent’s eye in it. It was so
Lords of the Rings
cliché, but the weird thing was, the key actually called to me. It wanted me to insert it into the lock. Like it was enchanted or something.”
“What did you do with it? Do you still have it?”
“I didn’t do anything with it. Ludovic snatched the key out of my hands and called me a witch. The next thing I knew—Dakota and Ludovic were gone.”
“Wait—what? He called you a witch? Are you sure?”
I tilted my head from side to side, not saying yes, not saying no. “No, not really. I’m not sure. But Briggs accused him of calling me that and I’d never heard the word before.” I shrugged. “It’s no big deal, it just made me wonder who planted that key as the trigger for the countdown. Someone spent a lot of time planning to kill us.”
Khaldon breathed in as deep a breath as he could. “This whole shite show is nutters, but are you all right? This has been very difficult for you.” His voice was kind. So kind, it made me feel guilty for focusing my own needs and not paying more attention to him. He was hurt just as badly as I was.
“Truthfully?”
“No, please, lie to me,” he teased. “Of course, tell me what’s going on in that burnt, red head of yours.” His grin reached his green eyes, and I hoped he really didn’t care what I looked like after what we had been through.
“Please don’t remind me. It’s going to take forever to regrow at this point.” I shook my head. “Physically, I’m better. But earlier, I thought I would lose my mind when I couldn’t see. I still just can’t believe we failed.”
Khaldon reached out a hand to me. I accepted it and ran a finger up and down where the skin had grown back. My own hand was pink and rosy with renewed flesh.
“Mentally, I can’t wrap my head around who would want to do that to Dakota. To any of us. They used her as a lure to kill us.” I looked at our hands once again. My breath hitched in my chest as emotion swelled. My words were thick with shock. “I feel like my mind is refusing to believe how my heart is breaking. My brain is in complete denial of what happened. Everything I remember happening on that island was true. I feel more numb than anything and I want to crawl into a hole and hit the reset button on life.”
Harris reached over and held my hand. “Ctrl-Z, Chey.” Even with a pint of whole blood and two IV bottles hanging above him, his face, hands, and arms were still bloated as though he were a corpse pulled out of a lake several days after drowning. His hands and arms spidered out with angry punctures of red lines radiating from the dart’s impacts.
“Guys, how can we go on knowing our rescue attempt is what ultimately killed her? We weren’t prepared. We should have done so much more to make this successful, but we didn’t. We needed back up. I—I can’t handle it.”
“Chey, it’s not our fault. Don’t you dare think that way.” Harris sat two chairs down from Khaldon, so I sat in a chair between them to talk to them both. “We were set up. There’re no two ways about that. But there’s one thing I do know.” Harris pointed directly at me. “She wasn’t going to be alive much longer if we hadn’t of shown up. So you need to get that kinda crazy talk outta your head.”
“I understand it was a set up. The Rakshasa were expecting us. But we should have had more people, more ways to defend ourselves. How am I going to tell Sheridan and Daddy that Dakota is dead?” My chair creaked under me. I was convinced it would collapse if I moved or adjusted wrong, so I sat perfectly still for fear of another floor debacle.
Harris sat up and tried to stand. I stood to help him steady his balance.
“Damn, Chey, I’m sorry and you’re right. We should’ve been more prepared.” Harris pulled on the back of his pants trying to remove a wedgie. He leaned down to whisper in my ear. “I’ve got a rotten case of monkey butt. I’m in desperate need of a shower.”
“Gawd, a shower would be fantastic,” I agreed.
Torchy had walked back into our room and he picked up a chair seated closer to the door and brought it over to me.
“Thanks, Torch. Have you spoken to Dr. Ratta … Rattoko …Dr. Raattatakosin… Dr. Whateverthehellhisnameis. Have you spoken to him about the dragon adrenaline donation? Are you compatible?”
“Dr. Rattanakosin? Oh aye, they’re prepping for the procedure now. Tis very simple, but we willna be able to fly in our dragon forms for a couple of fortnights.”
Torchy picked up several bamboo darts that Harris had on his bed stand. “Starting yer own collection, huh?”
“Are those the wolfsbane darts?” I pointed toward sharp, angry shivs still dirtied and bloody.
Harris nodded with an uplift to his chin, most likely proud of the awful things. “I figured I’d take them back to my pack and tell war stories. I’m sure my Cub Scout troop will think they’re awesome.”
After running the allergen tests, we learned how Harris had been poisoned with wolfsbane in the blow darts. In the United States, wolfsbane had become a non-existent weed. But on this side of the planet, werewolves take special precautions against rarer species of the weed to avoid these kinds of poisonous reactions.
It never occurred to me that werewolves might need allergy shots. Dr. Rattanakosin said the allergy medicine would take much longer to work against this type of plant because it was so rare. The known antidotes might not be sufficient.
The nurse came back in the room and asked for Torchy to begin his prep. I asked her to please be on the lookout for a woman and an older man who were family members of Briggs. The nurse acknowledged my request with a nod and a grimace, and then she quickly left again.
“I bet she’ll be happy when this shift is over,” I muttered under my breath.
Harris tried to smile and nodded his head. “Yeah, I’m sure they’ll claim worker’s comp from you biting them so much.”
Khaldon sat up a bit. “Do they have worker’s comp in Phuket?” He tried to smile, and more ash fell away from his face as layers of pink skin shined through the charred crust.
Normally, I laughed at his jokes, but today I wasn’t in the mood. Little black spots still floated across my vision. I deliberated the situation we were in. It didn’t make any sense how each of us had been uniquely injured.
“Just look at us. Who could have known what weapons to provide the Rakshasa to mortally injure or kill each of us?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Who other than Amicula and her crazy aunt?” Harris said as he reached for a glass of water. He knocked it over with his swollen fingers. “Dammit.”
“Do you think Ludovic got a message out to her somehow?” I asked.
“Why would he take that chance when he was trying to save Dakota?” Torchy asked.
There were no answers to our questions. Only silence.
Since Harris spilled his water, the unnamed girl sitting next to him sat up in her chair and offered him sips from her cup. She also had an IV stuck in her arm to help replenish fluids.
“Thanks for helping him,” I said. “You’re very kind. What’s your name?”
The girl pulled the water cup into her lap and glanced up at me under dirty blond hair, which hung limp over her shoulders. She was filthy from being held captive in that pit.
“My name is Tiffany—Tiffany Miller.” She looked at Harris once again and gestured in his direction. “He saved me. I owe him my life. It’s the least I can do.”
Her voice was whisper quiet. It was fortunate I had what I called vampionic hearing. One of the perks of vampirism I had learned.
“Are you hurt, Tiffany?” I asked. “Can I help you with anything?”
She shook her head and stared at her feet.
“Do you know why we were there on that island?”
She shook her head again.
“We were trying to rescue my sister Dakota, but—” My voice trailed off as the explosion of my sister’s body played over and over in slow motion, in black and white until I was sure I might pass out again.
She wiped her nose, her slack expression mimicking my own. “I knew her. She was nice to me—until they took her away.”
Tiffany’s hazel irises barely encircled the black holes of her pupils. Her eyes were dull, mostly lifeless, utterly defeated.
My own bloodshot blues stared back at her. “Do you know why you and Dakota were on that island? When did you get there?”
She shook her head possibly trying to erase painful memories. Her face was haggard and beaten with time. I noticed she had a nervous twitch to her left eye. She sighed a heavy breath, and her knuckles turned white from holding the cup so tight. I was sure she was going to shut down again.
“Hey, hey.” I reached for her. “Shh—you don’t have to go there. I’m sorry for asking.”
She shook her head again, “No. I’m okay. Beyond fine. I’m downright pissed, that’s what I am. I’m thankful to you for saving my life, but I want to go home.”
Her unbridled outburst startled me. I pressed my back against the chair and stole a glance over at Khaldon. His eyes shot open. The scent of curry and turmeric filled the air. The nurse escorted a woman with long, brunette hair and an older gentleman dressed in a long-sleeved blouse with lacy cuffs, reminiscent of a pirate. He held a top hat and coat tails over his arm.
Khaldon sat up straight and reached for the dragon scythe. He pulled it up close to his chest and then tried to conceal it under the sheet.
The brunette had elaborate, ornate tattoos all over her body, or the parts visible. She swept the room with her eyes, and I saw Briggs motion to her to come to him. She walked at once to Briggs and gently took his hands. The man looked about the room and glared at the place in disgust. His lips pursed. His eyes grazed past us, and I noticed Khaldon had turned to face the window.
Tiffany continued her story. “They took me and my friends. We were shopping at the mall, and these guys came up and asked if we wanted to party. They had some booze in their car. We figured we were in a public place, so what could go wrong? Right?”