The Dragon Queens (The Mystique Trilogy) (52 page)

Albray and I were keen to follow, but the captain moved into our path. ‘I’m sorry, but both of you still have time to serve within the Earth scheme, therefore you are not permitted entry past this point at this time.’

‘What!’ Albray protested, even though he accepted that to permit us to see what lay beyond would cause a breach in security. ‘We opened the damn thing!’

‘It is in the best interest of the plan.’ The captain taunted Albray, just as my husband had taunted him earlier. The look on Albray’s face made me fear a punch-up was imminent, but, to my great relief,
Albray saw the humour and both men began to laugh.

‘You have not seen the last of me, captain,’ Albray warned.

‘I have for at least a decade, my friend,’ replied Sinclair. ‘It is time to get you both home, but before you go take this.’

He handed me what appeared to be nothing and at first I thought he was being funny, but as I closed my hand I felt something enclosed there…a ring.

‘It has been retuned to a frequency beyond the band widths accessible by the Dracon,’ the captain explained, ‘and so its signal is untraceable. Wear it until your daughter comes of age, and then pass it to her. If either of you are ever in trouble, I will learn of it.’

I took his gift with gratitude, as any additional safeguard for my daughter was welcome by me. That was the last time I laid eyes on Captain Sinclair or the Dragon Queens.

Below this finishing line was a freshly scribbled note:
Until today.

My heart jumped into my throat as I read these words; in my gut I knew my mother had penned it today. All the events that had taken place at the mall this morning suddenly made sense. It wasn’t mall security who had arrived to deal with our two mysterious stalkers; it was the Dragon Queens protecting me!

‘My own personal, really hot, kick-arse security team—all right!’ I punched the air, at once inspired and terrified by the notion. That was why my mother could be so sure that the stalkers had
been adequately dealt with. And this invisible ring was how the Dragon Queens found us.

I felt safer knowing the ring’s true function, and realised Mum had known this when she gave me the ring and her journal to read. Then I burst into tears, overwhelmed by what lay ahead.

Destiny will come for me this evening, when the last of the time codes is integrated into my being. This isn’t a fantasy! The tales of the Dragon Queens I’ve so wanted to contribute to have really been about me all along. For I am the reason wars are fought, religions are created, secret societies are formed, conspiracies are executed and plagues are released upon the Earth.

The globe inside my reading light unexpectedly popped as I was writing my journal; it scared me witless as I was left in darkness. I glanced at my clock to realise that it was past 7 p.m. and rather later than I’d expected. I rose and flicked the switch for the overhead light, whereby the bulb in it promptly popped and darkness prevailed.

‘Just great.’ I decided it was time to have a good heart-to-heart with my parents anyway.

When I exited my room, however, I heard my mother speaking with someone in the lounge room. I froze still to listen. It was my father; he must have come home whilst I was absorbed in my reading.
I hesitated to go in and greet him, as he and Mum were speaking in hushed voices—which would seem to indicate they were talking about me.

‘How much danger is she in?’ Mum was saying. ‘Should we relocate her before tonight?’

‘Nobody wants to relocate her before Kali finishes her work with
The Book of Codes
,’ Dad replied.

‘I think we should just ask Tamar what she knows, and see how best we can be of aid,’ Mum suggested. It sounded as if Dad was agreeing with her, so I backed into my room to avoid being caught eavesdropping.

As I waited in the darkness for my parents, wondering if I should just walk out and confront them, a bright ball of light came shooting through my window and stopped dead in the centre of my room. As I looked on, amazed, a feeling of time slowing crept over me. Then I was suddenly aware of being constrained for I could no longer move.

I awoke naked on a cold, flat metal surface in an entirely white room that was awash with light. My being was panicked to the core at being so exposed and vulnerable in an unfamiliar place. Strange grey beings with large black eyes peered down at me—they reminded me of descriptions of aliens in accounts of human abduction. Was that what had happened to me?

‘Hello, sweetheart,’ a voice said.

My instinct told me this was a malign presence. I looked around but could see no one beyond the grey beings, who by now had backed away from the table. Then I glimpsed an undulating shadow moving about amid the glare of the white room.

‘It seems I found you just in the nick of time, princess. One more day and you would have been a force to be reckoned with.’

It was Pintar, I knew it in my gut—a hell of a time to finally learn the difference between a psychic premonition and my imagination.

‘You do remember…I’m touched.’

‘Where is Mathu?’ If my enemy was going to read my mind, better that the subject was of my choosing.

‘Dead!’ Pintar barked, annoyed by my concern.
‘
I chewed up his soul and spat it out.’

I didn’t believe a word he was telling me; I didn’t want to believe it. ‘Then why aren’t you wearing Mathu’s form?’

‘It caved under the pressure of our struggle.’ Pintar clearly enjoyed breaking the news. ‘And so his soul has been cast adrift of the plan, just like mine and many others.’

Sorrow filled me against my will, for I did not want my enemy revelling in my pain.

‘So you see, there is no point in you seeking Amenti, your Majesty, for your prince will not be awaiting your arrival,’ the horrid entity gloated. ‘Hence you, the last of the Dragon Queens, are now the underworld’s most eligible widow.’

I was filled with so much hatred that all I could do to release it was to cry, like the useless weakwilled girl I was.

‘Two things,’ Pintar continued. ‘Firstly, to prevent you from ever completely joining with that Anunnaki witch, my little grey friends here are going to microchip you and bring you under our frequency fence, along with fifty-five per cent of the Earth’s population.’

He was trying to imply the bad guys were winning the war for human consciousness. I assumed that the frequency fence he spoke of worked in the same manner as other artificial seals that had been placed within the frequency bands of mankind’s subtle bodies by both sides in the intertime war. The frequency seal would act as a barrier to prevent a soul-mind ever progressing beyond a certain frequency, thereby stunting the evolution of the species until the seal was lifted.

‘Secondly, as you may note, I still have no body.’ Pintar’s tone was more malign now. ‘And in order to regain the body to which I am accustomed, I need a Dragon Queen to mate with one of my Dracon warriors. Guess who that lucky lady is?’

I didn’t hear what Pintar said beyond that, for I began to scream. Beneath my panic, however, my mind was still working. If only Kali were here, I thought, she would equalise this situation.
Oh, why isn’t she here?
Then it struck me: all I had to do was fall asleep before I was sedated and Kali
would
be here.

I ceased screaming and fell quiet and still. My focus moved inward to block out the evil distractions around me and I focused on sleep as if my life depended on it. Which it clearly did. As panicked as I was by my predicament, I was also exhausted and my body didn’t require more than one invitation to shut down.

Albray had come home early to calm my fears about Tamar’s safety, but somewhere during that conversation we realised that over five hours had elapsed that we could not account for. Upon noting
the time irregularity, our first concern was for Tamar. She was not in her room as expected, nor anywhere in the house—she had simply vanished!

Panic gripped my heart, for I knew that this time in her life was critical to Tamar’s development; I could not have picked a worse time in all her thirteen years to drop the ball.

Calling in the police was not an option for us, for we had done our best to keep Tamar hidden and an extensive search would expose her to those we wanted to protect her from. The task force we needed to call was no longer available to us, for I had forsaken my main connection with the Dragon Queens when I gave Tamar the ring. My only hope was that the ring would help our allies track her down and keep her from harm. Of course, there was also the option of connecting to my sisters in my sleep, but in my current state of panic I had precious little chance of dropping off.

I stood forlornly in my daughter’s bedroom after checking it for the third time, when I spied her diary sitting by her bed. It was begging me to break its lock to reveal my daughter’s experiences of the week just past. I reached for the item, then placed it back down again.

‘What’s wrong?’ Albray asked. ‘Just force the lock.’

‘I promised her I’d never read it,’ I explained.

‘I feel this situation overrules your promise,’ Albray appealed. When I shook my head, he lost his patience. ‘Well, I never made such a promise.’

He reached for the journal, but was distracted by a noise coming from within the house.

We both slipped into the hallway, straining our ears to pinpoint the location of the disturbance; it
seemed to be coming from the library, which we had only just searched, twice! Albray retrieved a large broadsword from one of the many on display on the walls in our hallway. I grabbed up a couple of daggers, just in case.

Towards the library we crept, then put our ears to the door to get some idea of the identity of the intruder before entering. A guttural snarl sounded behind us and we turned to confront several reptilian warriors closing in on us from both ends of the hallway. Albray guided me around into the library doorway behind him, to protect me while he engaged the reptilians. The library door opened behind me and I was pulled into the room. The door slammed shut, trapping Albray in the hallway.

My aggressor held me under the arms and was restraining my head with both his hands, but my arms were still free.

‘Sedate her!’ my captor ordered his companion.

I could not hope to kill a Dracon with a blade, unless I had the opportunity to stab where I could sever the spinal cord. However, Dracon, like humans, had to breathe to function properly, and as they relied on their rib muscles to draw breath in and out of their lungs I aimed for the reptilian’s ribcage. My aim with a knife was lethal since I had journeyed the Halls of Amenti, for there I had remembered my skills as a
ventilatore
priestess in Ancient Egypt, where I juggled knives to predict the future and cast them with deadly accuracy to protect the greater interests of my homeland and our Pharaoh.

My blade took the reptilian warrior down, but not before he got his shot away. The dart hit me in the leg and my body went to jelly.

‘Next time you’ll be quicker off the mark,’ my captor jeered to his fellow warrior, who was clearly in agony and, so I thought, incapacitated for a while. ‘Shoot yourself, will you, and then get up here and give me a hand.’

To my dismay, the wounded reptilian removed my knife, extended a metal spike from his wristband and gave himself a mini injection—of ORME, I assumed, for the wound healed straightaway.

My captor thrust me roughly into his companion’s grip. ‘Hold her,’ he ordered.

The angry Dracon squeezed one of my breasts and stuck his long pointy tongue in my ear. ‘I’ll finish her off,’ he growled.

I spotted a nice heavy vase sitting on one of the library shelves and willed it to collide with my attacker’s head. ‘Argh!’ He dropped me to nurse his wound, now oozing green fluid.

‘You’re not going to have any juice left to kill her if you can’t avoid getting wounded for five seconds!’ the warrior in charge said, and reached for the picture that concealed my wall safe.

They were after
The Book of Codes
! I knew Tamar had yet to complete the activations that her alter ego, Kali, was running her through in her sleep. If the activations that would draw her higher self into her human form were not completed, she would never realise her full potential as Kali and would be unable to unlock Amenti—which was precisely why the Dracon were seeking the book.

‘Bring her here,’ the leader commanded. When his colleague hesitated, he gathered me up himself and, clutching my hand, sank my fingertips into the keypad. The safe lock deactivated, the door flipped open and I was dropped to the floor.

I willed anything in the room that was not pinned down towards the thief; I simply could not allow them to steal this precious family heirloom that was an esoteric treasure of vital import to the world. But the Dracon ducked and fended off the various flying objects that hurled themselves towards him, and tucked
The Book of Codes
under his arm. Then he activated the metal spike in his wristband and bent down towards me.

‘She’s mine!’ his colleague objected, and dragged my attacker backwards to battle it out.

Albray burst through the door, a reptilian head in each hand. ‘She’s mine actually,’ he said, and tossed a head at each of the reptilians. ‘Give me the book, or you shall force me to take it.’

But the Dracon vanished from our midst. I would have cried had I had any control over my bodily functions. Albray came to check on me, but I was unable even to blink my eyes to assure him that I was okay; I looked like a complete zombie, I was sure.

‘What in God’s name have they done to you?’ my husband asked.

There was a knock on the front door. Albray was hesitant to leave me, but when it was repeated with more urgency, he relented. ‘I’ll be right back,’ he said.

I heard the door open and Albray greet our guest with astonishment. ‘Captain Sinclair!’

‘I’m here for
The Book of Codes
,’ the captain said, and I heard the door slam and both men move rapidly up the hallway.

‘You’re too late,’ Albray said as they entered the library. ‘And where is our daughter?’

‘We have her,’ Sinclair said, crouching down next to me to see how I fared. ‘We recovered her
before Pintar’s little grey men could bring her under the control of the frequency fence.’

‘Is she all right?’ Albray demanded.

‘She’s fine,’ the captain assured us both, ‘but she is vulnerable until she integrates those last codes.’

Albray placed a hand on Sinclair’s shoulder so that he might understand his sincerity. ‘Thank you, captain.’

‘No, thank you.’ The captain surprised Albray with his response. ‘Pintar had taken most of us out with these darts when your daughter showed up and saved all our arses. These bullets don’t affect her, so long as Tamar is asleep and Kali is in control. Once the last codes are integrated, Kali and Tamar will permanently be as one and she will be unstoppable.’ The captain’s tone was a little uncertain.

‘You sound somewhat worried about that,’ Albray said.

‘Well…Kali seems a little overzealous about her duties.’ Sinclair was clearly choosing his words carefully so as not to offend Tamar’s parents. ‘She asked every one of those reptilians today whether they chose to join her in life or in death, and when all chose death she killed them precisely and mercilessly. When I asked her how she felt in the wake of taking so many lives, she said that only when every reptilian form is destroyed will the evolution of the lost Anunnaki be assured.’

‘A fair reason,’ Albray, the warrior, agreed. ‘Now, what’s wrong with Mia?’

‘The effects of the dart will wear off presently,’ the captain said, and lifted me in his arms.

‘Do you mind?’ Albray objected.

‘So sorry…you were always taking off with my wife, so I just figured it was kosher.’ The captain bundled me into my husband’s arms. ‘You want to see Tamar, I take it?’

‘Of course,’ Albray said.

‘Then follow me.’

The captain led us out of the library and towards the front door. I had to wonder where he’d managed to park his transport in the middle of Sydney.

‘Ta-da!’ Sinclair motioned to the park across the road from our house, which was devoid of people at this late hour. ‘Our entry lies right over there by the bins. Follow me.’