Slayers: Friends and Traitors (36 page)

Jesse relaxed in his chair, hardly paying attention to the details Dr. B and the Davises were working out. The whole day had been a string of horrible events, but things were finally looking up. The worst was over.

It turned out, he was wrong about that.

CHAPTER 35

Tori sat on the plane, watching everyone else talk to Ryker and Willow. Well, mostly Tori watched Jesse talk to Ryker. She should have been happy that Ryker was Jesse’s counterpart—and she was. Even if it did make her feel like she’d been replaced.

Had she ever really been Jesse’s counterpart? How could she have if he was Ryker’s? What she thought was a counterpart connection might have been something else—a different emotion all together.

Bess and Rosa were trying to explain to Ryker what being a counterpart was like.

Ryker raised his eyebrows in disbelief. “So Jesse knows things about me just because he can fly, too? That’s impossible.” He motioned at Jesse. “Go ahead, tell me what you know about me?”

“I know you’re skeptical,” Jesse said.

Everyone laughed at that.

“I know you’re smart,” Jesse went on.

Ryker brushed off his words. “I had to be in order to build my own simulator. Anyone could have figured out those two things.”

Jesse’s eyes narrowed as though he was looking inside of Ryker’s mind. “I know you don’t like taking orders. In fact, you’ve got a stubborn resistance to it.”

Ryker smiled. “Nope. You’re wrong on that one.”

Willow nearly spit out the soda she was drinking. “No, he’s not. When we trained together, did you ever once let me be in charge?”

“Okay, maybe not,” Ryker conceded. “But that’s because you’re indecisive and you kept interrupting training to answer text messages. It worked out better for me to be in charge.”

Willow rolled her eyes.

“What else?” Ryker asked Jesse.

“You’re a risk taker.”

Ryker shrugged. “That’s easy. You know I hang glide.”

“And you have a problem with authority figures.”

Willow laughed again. “No, as long as he’s the authority figure, there’s no problem.”

Ryker cocked his head. “Do you only see bad things about me? Is that how this works?”

Jesse shook his head. His eyes were still focused on Ryker, studying him. “No, it’s just what worries me most. Tori and I are the team captains. You have to do what we say.”

Lilly stretched her legs out into the aisle. She was fiddling with one of the red streaks in her hair, twisting it around her finger. “Tori isn’t officially A-team’s captain.”

“I’m not,” Tori agreed, not even bothering to take offense at Lilly’s lack of support.

Jesse gave Tori a long look, then turned back to Ryker. “Don’t listen to Tori. She
is
the captain.”

Ryker smirked. “First you tell me to listen to her, then you tell me not to. See, that’s the reason I have trouble with authority figures.” He turned to Tori, looking her over more thoroughly. “So you’re my counterpart, too, right?”

“Nope,” Tori said.

Ryker asked the inevitable question. “If you’re Jesse’s counterpart, doesn’t that automatically make you mine, too?”

“I guess not,” Tori said, keeping her voice light. “I can’t sense things about you or tell where you are without looking.”

Rosa spoke hesitantly to Tori. “You can’t tell where Jesse is without looking. Are you sure you’re counterparts with him at all? We thought you were because you could fly, but Dirk can fly, too.”

Lilly unwound the red streak from her finger. “Yeah, I’ve been wondering about that. How is it possible for a Slayer to be counterparts with the dragon lord’s son? Wouldn’t Tori have to be a dragon lord herself to do that?”

The skin at the base of Tori’s neck prickled. She stiffened. Here it was. The conversation she’d dreaded. “What are you insinuating, Lilly?”

“You hear what the dragon hears,” Lilly said. “That’s a way of connecting with the dragon’s mind. You fly. So do the dragon lords.” Lilly’s gaze swept around the seats at the other Slayers. “Oh, come on. We’ve all thought it ever since we found out what Dirk was. Tori isn’t a Slayer.”

Bess waved away Lilly’s words. “I don’t care what Tori is. She’s helping us. That’s what’s important.”

“Dirk was helping us, too,” Lilly said, “right up until the time he betrayed us.”

Anger flashed through Tori. “Are you saying I’m a traitor, too?”

Rosa didn’t let Lilly answer. “Tori is the one who told us that Dirk was a dragon lord. She wouldn’t have done that if she was in league with him.”

Lilly shrugged. “What I’m saying is that we need to make sure of everyone’s loyalties. I’m not sure how we do that with a dragon lord as a team captain.”

“She’s not a dragon lord,” Jesse said firmly. “She’s my counterpart, too, and I’m a Slayer.”

Lilly eyed him. “Are you sure you and Tori have counterpart abilities?”

“Yes,” Jesse said. “We’ve always been able to sense things from each other.”

Maybe Jesse was right, because Tori didn’t have any trouble sensing that he was lying.

CHAPTER 36

After Dirk got off the phone with his father, he flew to Reston. One of his father’s men met him there and drove him back to Winchester. Dirk didn’t go in the house. Instead he went up on the roof, looked at the stars, and did his best to block out the events of the night.

So what if the Slayers hated him now? Let them be pious about their position. It wasn’t any more worthy than his. Besides, he’d known one way or another his old life was ending tonight. This was just another move in the game. Emotions didn’t matter. Not his, not Jesse’s, not Tori’s.

Dirk wasn’t as good a liar as everyone thought. There was no way to make that lie work. He sat underneath the ancient stars and let his emotions rip through him until he couldn’t feel anything else. Then when he was completely miserable, he went inside, got his laptop, and searched the Internet to see if anyone had posted pictures from his air chase with Jesse and Tori.

Several people had. Some said it must be a promo for a Supergirl movie. Most people speculated it was some sort of publicity stunt Senator Hampton’s office was doing. The girl in the Supergirl outfit was clearly a Tori Hampton look-alike.

Dirk watched the clips over and over. Stopped them frame by frame. He’d seen that look of grim determination on Jesse’s face a lot of times, but never directed at him. And Tori. Her lips were set in an angry line. The same lips that had smiled softly at him earlier today. The same lips he’d kissed not that long ago.

Now that Dirk was out of the picture, it had probably taken Jesse about thirty seconds to get Tori back. After all, she saw Dirk as a villain, and girls never went for those. Until the villains won, that was. Winning changed everything. That’s why Alexander of Macedon was known as Alexander the Great, instead of Alexander the Guy Who Decimated Persia, India, and Asia Minor.

Dirk walked into the living room and found Bridget sitting on the living room floor. He had expected her to be asleep. It was nearly ten o’clock. She had a jumbo variety bag of candy in her lap and was opening the candy bars and stacking them in front of her. She still wore her cat costume. The tail on her leopard dress was bent and the cat-ear headband was on crooked, making her costume look wilted.

“Did you get to go out?” he asked her.

She shook her head and ripped open a Baby Ruth. She laid it on top of the rest of the pile. “Mom was too sick to go. Nora said she’d take me, but she’s mean, so I said no and Mom gave me this candy.”

Which was why Bridget was ruining it all by making it into a pyramid. Dirk sat down beside her and picked up an Almond Joy from the stack. He took a bite. “Sorry.”

“What happened to you?” Bridget asked. “Your eyes are all red.”

He shrugged like he didn’t know the cause. “Where’s Dad?”

“Out,” Bridget said. “Mom went to bed.”

Dirk nodded, wondering if his father had personally gone to Rutland to oversee the search for Ryker.

“Do dragons eat candy?” Bridget asked. “I could give them mine.”

“You know they only eat meat—and naughty little girls.”

“Don’t the baby ones eat candy?” Bridget was used to Dirk’s threat about feeding pesky sisters to dragons, she didn’t even react to it.

“Do you have any meat-flavored candy?” he asked.

Bridget stopped ripping the wrappers off her candy stash. “Can you take me to see Vesta and Jupiter?”

Dirk didn’t want to, but Bridget had already had enough disappointments for the night. She was only allowed near the dragon enclosure when either he or their father was with her. “Sure,” Dirk said. “Climb on my back and we’ll fly over.” He might as well spend time with Bridget. It was better than sitting around thinking about how the Slayers hated him now.

Fifteen minutes later, Dirk and Bridget had gone through the security checkpoints and walked into the nursery’s observation room. A firmly locked door stood next to the window. It opened for only a few sets of fingerprints. Dirk’s, his father’s, and the head vets. The door led to another locked door, which opened for the same people. A desk and computer sat near the door. The vets recorded data there, checked schedules, and probably played a lot of games.

Bridget took Dirk’s hand, refusing to walk across the room to the observation walls. Jupiter and Vesta both raised their heads—transforming their appearance from two boulders into dark scaly beasts with glowing yellow eyes. Vesta hissed at Dirk, and Jupiter flung back his wings menacingly.

Bridget scowled at this behavior. “I should have named them Grumpy Face and Mr. Mean.”

“Yeah, Dad would have gone for that.”

Dirk’s father had scoured myths and legends with Bridget for an entire year before these dragons hatched, looking for the right names. Kihawahine was named after the Hawaiian dragon goddess and Tamerlane was named after the medieval ruler who conquered Asia. “Names shouldn’t be given lightly,” his father had said. “I named my daughter, Bridget, after the Celtic goddess of fire, poetry, and wisdom. The name Dirk means ‘dagger,’ and that’s what he’ll be: a knife to cut away the evils of society. A knife that will slice through any who oppose us.”

A knife in the back, too.

“Make the dragons nice,” Bridget told Dirk. Jupiter screeched and leapt toward the glass in a flurry of stone brown wings, teeth, and claws. Vesta opened her wings in warning.

“I’ll take care of Vesta,” Dirk said, already slipping into the dragon’s mind and calming her. “You try to reach Jupiter.”

“I can’t do it,” Bridget chided. “Girls never can.” In front of them, Jupiter bared his teeth in anger.

“Tori probably could reach into the dragons’ minds,” Dirk said, “and she’s a girl.” He had never talked with Bridget about Tori before—in fact, after the football game he avoided Bridget’s questions about Tori. He wasn’t sure why he was bringing her up now. Maybe speaking about Tori made him feel like she wasn’t completely gone.

Bridget blinked at him, confused by this information.

“Girls might be able to reach into the dragons’ minds if they have an ancestor who was a dragon lord and an ancestor who was a Slayer,” Dirk clarified. Vesta tucked her wings at her side and settled back down on the ground, eyeing Dirk and Bridget suspiciously.

“What’s a Slayer?” Bridget asked. She still hadn’t let go of Dirk’s hand, wouldn’t until both dragons were subdued.

“They’re people who are born to hunt dragons just like we’re born to protect them.”

Bridget wrinkled her nose. “You mean like those bad people who killed your dragon?”

“Yeah,” Dirk said. Their father told Bridget that bad people killed Tamerlane. By an unspoken agreement, Dirk’s father didn’t mention that Dirk was there helping the Slayers. In return, Dirk didn’t tell Bridget that their father used the dragon to attack him and his friends.

Bridget tilted her head. “How can people be protectors and hunters at the same time?”

It was called internal conflict. Dirk didn’t say this. He shrugged instead. “I guess eventually they have to choose which to be.”

Vesta lowered her head, laying it limply on the floor. Dirk had made her so drowsy she was half asleep and completely tame. He disconnected from her mind.

Bridget tugged on his hand to get his attention. “Does Tori have her own dragons?”

“No.”

“Then what’s the point of being a dragon lord?”

“There isn’t one,” Dirk said.

Bridget sighed as though this were a great waste. “Tori could come live with us and help you with the dragons.”

Yeah, she could. But she wouldn’t. Dirk reached into Jupiter’s mind. It felt like a storm of aggressive impulses churning around him: Hunt. Pounce. Catch. Eat.
Nothing is threatening you,
Dirk told the dragon.
You don’t need to fight. Lie down and relax
. The dragon obediently did, lowering the lids on his golden eyes while he preened the scales on his tail. His oversize talons clicked on the ground absently.

Bridget went to the glass then, putting both hands on the wall as she peered at the dragons. “Eventually they’ll know I’m their friend.”

“Dragons don’t have friends,” Dirk told her. It was something he and dragons now had in common. He would have to move again, have to cut all ties with his friends from Winchester so the Slayers wouldn’t be able to track him down.

It would be easier for Bridget. She was homeschooled. Their father wouldn’t let her go to a public school until she was older, until she could keep secrets.

Bridget turned away from the glass. “Can you take me for a ride on Kiha?” Kihawahine was more dangerous than her children, much faster and more powerful. She was easier to handle, though. It was simple to slip into her mind, and she didn’t fight Dirk’s control. Bridget liked Kiha because she was prettier and more elegant then the fledglings. Her deep blue scales changed to purple at their tips, making her look exotic and beautiful.

Bridget wasn’t allowed anywhere near the baby dragons. They were still too unpredictable, but Dirk could take Bridget for rides on Kihawahine.

“It’s not a good night for rides,” Dirk said.

“Why not?”