Slayers: Friends and Traitors (16 page)

Dirk made an unhappy grumbling sound. “It sounds like someone needs to be fired.”

“Don’t bother,” Tori said. “I already knew that about you.” The third photo showed the blonde cheerleader, puckering up for the camera.

“And how would you know that?”

“Please. I’m your counterpart. I can tell.”

Dirk shook his head. “You don’t know as much about me as you think you do.”

“Oh. Well, maybe I figured it out from all of these pictures on your phone. You’ve got a whole cheerleading squad on here.” The next photo showed a girl who’d held the camera at an angle to get as much cleavage as possible. “Wow. That one is really … um, interesting.”

“What?” Dirk took the phone from Tori’s hand and glanced at the picture. Sighing, he pushed the delete button. “I wish they’d stop stealing my phone.”

Dirk turned off the road and drove up to a gated entrance. Although what it was an entrance to, Tori couldn’t guess. From what she could make out, it looked like empty fields dotted with trees.

He rolled down his window and typed a pass code on a keypad. The metal gates slowly swung open and Dirk proceeded through.

“Where are we going?” Tori asked, craning to see through the darkness.

“My dad bought this land to develop into subdivisions. He’s waiting until the market is better before he builds anything. Sometimes I like to come out here and look at the stars.”

He pulled over to the side of the road, parked, and pushed a button that slid the cover off the car’s sunroof. Then he leaned his seat back. “The stars are brighter out here away from the city lights—just like they were at camp.”

Tori looked out the sunroof. He was right. The stars were thick and brilliant out here, a bouquet of lights. She didn’t lean her seat back. Instead she turned so she could see Dirk better. “You bring girls out here and use this as your own private make-out spot, don’t you?”

Dirk put his hands behind his head and tilted his face to the night sky. “Nope. Your counterpart sense is failing you again. Or”—he grinned over at her—“were you suggesting activities?” He sat up and stretched lazily. “Fine, I’m game. Do you want music? Oh wait—you come complete with your own playlist, don’t you?”

“Overdrake’s playlist, not mine. That’s what I came to talk to you about, actually.” Funny, since she’d seen Dirk she hadn’t paid attention to the sound in her mind. She’d completely blocked it out. Now she listened for it, let it grow louder. The music was there, an instrumental, with a soft, swaying beat. No animal shrieks. “I keep hearing things that sound like baby dragons—squawks, screeches, thumps. Are you sure you haven’t seen anything odd—anything that might mean they’ve hatched?”

“That’s why you tracked me down? To ask me about dragon sounds?” Instead of looking worried, Dirk grinned. “You already know what I said about that.” He tilted his head down in mock offense. “You just came to see me because you wanted to make out, didn’t you?”

He leaned toward her, only half teasing now. His lips would be on hers in a moment. She pushed him away. “This is serious. The noises don’t sound like recordings. If the dragons have hatched, we need to get ready—to train more, to go get Ryker.”

Dirk didn’t return to his seat. He slid his hand on top of hers, caressing the skin there. “We don’t know where Ryker is.”

“I do. Well, I almost do. He’s either in San Diego, Denver, or Crown Heights, New York. I’ll know exactly where soon.”

This stopped Dirk’s advances. “How?”

“You can hide from a lot of people, but you still have to pay taxes.”

Dirk nodded, impressed. “Let me know when you find him. I’ll personally go talk to him.”

“Dr. B should be the one to contact Ryker.”

“Uh—that didn’t work out so well last time. Ryker should hear about us from someone his own age, a team captain.” Dirk intertwined his fingers with hers. “If only you knew how to get a hold of a captain … oh wait, you do.” He leaned toward her again.

She put her hand on his chest to stop him. “The dragons,” she said.

“Haven’t hatched,” he finished. “You know Overdrake likes to mess with your mind. That’s what he’s doing now. Besides, if the dragons were really screeching, they would send out electromagnetic pulses that would fry Overdrake’s music system. Have the songs ever stopped for long periods?”

“No,” she said, feeling foolish for not realizing this before. “I didn’t think of that.”

Dirk leaned over and let his lips brush across Tori’s cheek. “You don’t need to make up excuses to see me.”

“I didn’t,” she said. She didn’t push him away again, though. His lips made a trail across her cheek to her ear. Her breathing was suddenly unsteady. Sparks of emotion went off inside her. It felt warm and comfortable to have him so close. “We shouldn’t do this,” she said. She still didn’t push him away.

Jesse hadn’t wanted to see her, but Dirk did. And Dirk was handsome, and funny, and was sending electric waves of pleasure down her neck. Her hand tightened on his chest. How had she gone from pushing him away to clutching his shirt so quickly?

“You don’t see anything out of the ordinary?” Tori asked, just to make sure.

“I see you.” He ran his hand across the nape of her neck, tangling his fingers through her hair. “And when I shut my eyes, I still see you. I can’t see anything else.”

He didn’t say more. His lips had found other things to do and she was too busy kissing him back to ask more questions. It was easy with Dirk, easy to abandon herself to this. He knew her so well, sensed what she wanted, didn’t rush her. He made it seem like they had all the time in the world.

When Tori’s sanity returned enough that she realized she needed to push herself away from him, she could barely speak. “Um…,” she said. “You should, um, take me back to my car.”

Dirk kept his arms around her waist. “Not yet,” he murmured. “I need to spend some time working on my commitment issues.” He leaned in toward her again. “I think I can commit to this.”

She laughed and pushed him away. “That’s easy for you to say. You know you won’t see me again until next summer.”

“It doesn’t have to be next summer.” Dirk took her hand, intertwining his fingers with hers. “I’m not Jesse. I want to see you. We can work out something.”

Dirk also knew what to say to make her want to stay. He was dangerous that way. He could use the whole counterpart thing to his advantage. He already had, kissing her like that.

“This is happening too fast,” she said. “Us as a couple—that’s something we need to think about.”

He raised an eyebrow at her. “I assumed you were thinking about it while you were kissing me.”

She blushed. “Well, okay, I was. But now I’m thinking about it logically and I think we need to take this slowly. Things will already be awkward between Jesse and me when we go back to camp. I don’t want that to be you and me. I don’t think I could stand it.” She also couldn’t stand to be hurt again. Every time she thought about Jesse, it still slashed her insides. The way Dirk went through girls—if she handed her heart to him now, she should expect to have it handed back to her in bleeding shards by Christmas.

Dirk groaned, but didn’t argue the point. He scooted into the driver’s seat and started the car. His jaw was clenched tight, his motions stiff and deliberate.

She held up her hands apologetically. “I’ve never been good at that let’s-just-be-friends thing. I turn into the bitter ex-girlfriend. You don’t want that. You’ll end up sabotaging some mission in order to get rid of me.”

Dirk put the car into drive and turned back toward the gate. “You know, Tori, I don’t think I’m the one with commitment issues.”

CHAPTER 11

Instead of driving into his family’s six-car garage, Dirk parked his Porsche behind the dragon enclosure. The car was an upgrade from the BMW that Kihawahine had trashed—his father’s way of making a peace offering. Dirk walked past the security checkpoints and went inside to talk to his father. Dirk found him—right where he knew he would be—behind the soundproof glass looking into the nursery. That’s what his father called the rooms the fledglings were kept in: the nursery. The rooms were small compared with the stadium-size enclosure their mother lived in—only four stories high and a hundred and fifty feet across. Enough room for the baby dragons to roam and fly a bit, but not soar. They couldn’t go too far away.

“Like all children,” his father had said when the two of them put the fledglings in these rooms, “dragons need to be taught obedience before they’re given freedom.” His father had looked pointedly at Dirk while he said this.

Dirk’s father may have forgiven him for changing loyalties last summer, but he hadn’t forgotten about it, and he wouldn’t let Dirk forget about it, either.

Now his father stood in front of the partition that separated the dragons’ rooms, checking messages on his phone. Jupiter, the male dragon, and Vesta, the female, were both resting, wings tucked around their bodies so they seemed to be nothing more than boulders. Fledglings were always grayish brown, sometimes with fuzzy patches of green that looked like moss. The camouflage kept them safe until they became bigger than anything that might attack them. In a few months their adult colors would come in: red, green, blue, or black.

Dirk’s father heard him walk up and he looked over his shoulder. “Good. You’re home. Now I can do something besides keep the dragons quiet.” He gave Dirk an amused smile. “I trust you had fun on your date with Tori.”

“You shouldn’t have talked to her,” Dirk said. “She could have recognized your voice.”

“And if I had refused to talk to her—she wouldn’t have thought
that
was suspicious?”

“You could have at least tried to hide your accent.”

His father finished with his phone and slid it shut. “And then Bridget would have asked why I was talking oddly and drawn even more attention to my voice. The best way to hide something is to act as though you’re not hiding anything. Ordinary people don’t recognize a face if it’s in an unexpected place, let alone a voice.” He put his phone into his pocket with smug satisfaction. “Tori is as ordinary as everyone else.”

Dirk didn’t contradict his father. There was no point.

Inside the nursery, Jupiter opened his golden eyes, shook his head, and snapped his jaws. He was no longer connected to a dragon lord’s thoughts telling him to rest, and apparently he didn’t feel like resting anymore.

Babies of most species were cute. Nature had overlooked this trend when creating dragons. Hatchlings had loose, baggy skin that accommodated their quick growth spurts. Their mouths were proportionally too large, had to be in order to rip off the amount of flesh they ate. Later they would be beautiful. Sleek as birds, graceful as snakes, with scales that glistened like sunlight on water. Now they looked like a cross between a shar-pei and an overgrown crocodile.

Jupiter’s eyes focused on Dirk. He opened his mouth, shrieking. Angry, not hungry. The remains of a cow still lay in the corner of the room.

The polycarbonate see-through wall was three inches thick, unbreakable for a dragon of this size. Dragons, however, were slow learners when it came to recognizing their limitations. Jupiter spread his wings, opened his mouth wide, and leapt. He slammed headfirst into the wall, righted himself with stumbling steps, then glared at Dirk and screeched again.

Jupiter probably would have kept at that for a while but he caught a scent from Vesta on the other side of the nursery. He turned in that direction and in an angry frenzy of flapping wings, threw himself at the wall that separated them. Which was why Dirk and his father had separated the dragons as soon as they’d hatched. A dragon lord had to work with dragons for months to overcome their immediate attack instinct, and even then, the beasts were unpredictable unless a dragon lord was connected to their minds and could guide their actions.

Dirk had reached into dragons’ minds enough times to understand how they thought. Dragons had one goal—to rule their territory, undisputed. Any perceived threat to that goal resulted in claws and fire.

It was no wonder, really, that his father loved them. His mind worked in roughly the same way.

Dirk’s father took hold of Jupiter’s mind and the dragon immediately calmed. He swished his tail, sat down, and folded his wings. His eyelids closed in a sleepy daze.

When Dirk connected with the dragons, he thought of the power as a hand, one that held the dragon’s head and firmly turned its thoughts in the direction it should go. His father’s connection was like a spear. It shot into the dragon’s brain and blocked all other input. His father was faster, more effective, more ruthless than Dirk was.

“So,” his father said, “what brought your girlfriend out of hiding? Did she miss you?” He used the term “girlfriend” sarcastically, and yet Dirk liked hearing it. Whether she admitted it to herself or not, Tori had missed him.

“I put on some romantic mood music for you,” his father went on. “I thought you would appreciate it.”

Dirk did actually, but didn’t say so. “Tori wanted to know if I’d seen anything that indicated the dragons had hatched. She’s worried about the screeches she keeps hearing.”

His father grunted. “I hope you didn’t come here to tell me we need to keep them quiet. The only way that will happen is if one of us is here nonstop. And I’m too busy for that.”

Dirk took a step closer to the enclosure. Vesta slept so soundly it didn’t look like she was even breathing. “I told Tori the dragon lord was messing with her mind. If real dragons were screeching, they would send out electromagnetic pulses that would fry the stereo system. The music hasn’t stopped, so the dragons aren’t real.”

Dirk’s father let out an appreciative “ahh,” the way he did when he admired his art collection or listened to a symphony blending together until it became a thing of perfection. “I’ve only been using the music to block out identifying sounds and here it’s worked to ensure your lie is believable.” He chuckled under his breath. “Dr. B doesn’t know the EMP doesn’t work until the dragons’ vocal cords are bigger?”

“Apparently the medieval records left that out.”

“And his traitor father must not have known about it.”