Slayers: Friends and Traitors (6 page)

The dragon turned and wheeled toward her, eyes flashing, wings pressed tight to its body. The flight was short lived. Shang, Team Magnus’ fire extinguisher, punched a round of ammunition at the dragon’s heart.

The second dragon went limp on the wires.

Only then did Tori unzip her jacket and feel along her stomach to see what damage the hook had caused. Her fingers came away bloody. Wonderful. That would be one more injury she would have to explain to her parents when she got home. Slayer healers cured burns, but couldn’t do anything for cuts or bruises, which was what Tori always collected during practice.

On the ground beneath Tori, Jesse walked toward the weapons lockers. He took off his helmet with tense, deliberate motions. She flew over and paused in the air beside him. “Sorry I got you killed.”

“Not your fault,” he said. “Sorry I couldn’t save you.”

She flew toward Dirk then. She owed him. Big-time. Tori didn’t even want to think about what that fire blast would have done to her face if Dirk hadn’t shielded her. And he had given her his helmet—put himself in harm’s way to protect her.

Dirk was sauntering over to the weapons lockers, joining the rest of A-team. He was tall and muscular like all the Slayer guys. He had surfer-boy blond hair and the sort of face that could have been used to sell cologne—to sell anything probably. The strut in his walk said he knew exactly how impressive he was. Kody high-fived him. “Awesome shooting, man. I can’t believe you shot the target while you were falling.”

Alyssa’s gaze went over Dirk as though checking him for a limp. “I can’t believe you didn’t break a leg.”

Tori landed next to Dirk and gave him a quick hug. “Thanks again. You saved my life.”

“Or at least her hair,” Alyssa put in.

Lilly snickered. The two of them liked to bring up Tori’s first-day hair-singed-off debacle. Rather than cutting her hair to even it out, Tori had skipped out on camp, gone to a salon in the nearest town, and gotten extensions in the damaged part. Her long, honey-brown hair was restored to the point that with any luck, people wouldn’t notice the change.

Tori ignored Lilly and Alyssa and kept walking alongside Dirk. “I can’t believe the dragon harpooned me.” She fingered the blood-rimmed hole in her shirt. That was another piece of clothing camp had ruined, bringing the total to—well—just about everything she’d brought. “I don’t think Theo should be allowed to work the controls anymore. He clearly doesn’t grasp the difference between a challenging practice and inflicting hideous deaths on all of us.”

“Clearly,” Dirk repeated. “Except I’m pretty sure Dr. B was controlling our dragon this round.”

Tori let out a disbelieving gasp. “Are you kidding me?”

Before Dirk could answer, the door to the control room opened, and Dr. B and Theo started down the stairs that led to the practice arenas.

Theo was a twenty-something guy who would have looked normal enough in another place. Next to the Slayer guys, he always seemed pale, gawky, and so stringy that a strong wind could blow him away.

Dr. B looked like an ordinary middle-aged man—tall, slightly overweight, with unruly gray hair and wire-rim glasses. He often had an expression on his face that indicated he was pondering some aspect of the cosmos, which he probably was. He was a medieval history professor during the school year and acted like a concerned teacher most of the time—caring, kind, encouraging. Always, always so deceptively mild. He constantly praised them with plaque-worthy sayings.
You have the power to overcome anything. You are what victory is made of. I love each and every one of you.

And then immediately afterward he would lead a staff ambush against the Slayers while they ate dinner. Throughout camp he peppered anyone he could with paintballs and then cheerfully deducted team points for their careless deaths.

Tori couldn’t decide whether he was a brilliant leader or a sociopath. Today, she was thinking sociopath. Definitely sociopath.

Dr. B blew his whistle. It was his way of getting the Slayers attention to let them know he had comments about their performance.

Dr. B frequently had comments.

As he finished walking down the stairs, he called out, “What have you learned from this round of practice?”

You’ve got an uncharacteristic sadistic streak
, Tori thought. Although technically that wasn’t something new she learned. It had crossed her mind several times during the summer. Tori didn’t say these words. She’d been raised to be polite, and besides, Dr. B was Bess’ father. She couldn’t insult her friend’s father.

“The dragons now have fishing lines and hooks,” Tori called back to him. “Apparently they’ve evolved since yesterday.”

Dr. B waved away her point. “The hook was to simulate the dragon’s ability to reach out and grab you. It can do that.”

Bess pulled off her helmet. Her brown curls were matted against her head in sweaty tendrils. She didn’t look much like her father, but she had inherited his curls. “We’ve learned that we need both teams to work together.” She said the phrase like it was the obvious answer. “I had to help Dirk free Tori. She had to help us kill our dragon.”

Dr. B didn’t ever yell. The closest he got was a sharp tone of exasperation. He used that tone as he walked across the floor to them. “You already know you have to work together. That’s not what happened here.” His gaze went to Jesse. “Why were you killed?”

Jesse stiffened. He hated making mistakes. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

“You
were
paying attention,” Dr. B corrected. “You were just paying attention to Tori instead of your dragon.”

Dr. B’s gaze swung to Dirk. “You not only abandoned the rest of your team to rescue Tori, you used one of Team Magnus’ members to do it—thereby endangering both teams—and why? Tori was already dead.”

Dirk didn’t flinch, didn’t show any signs of regret. “Tori sounded pretty alive while she was screaming.”

Dr. B held up a hand. “The rules state that if any Slayer is hit by dragon claws they’re considered dead. We can assume the same is true for Slayers gripped in dragon claws. In a real battle, even if Tori had been alive for a few moments, she wouldn’t have been alive by the time you got to her. The dragon would have sliced her in half.”

Tori winced. It was always cheery to hear people talk about her gruesome demise.

Dr. B put his hands behind his back and divided his time between staring at Jesse and staring at Dirk. “So essentially what happened is that both teams lost their flyers. You had no way to kill the dragons and your only functioning team captain stopped functioning and turned into a one-man rescue mission.”

Dr. B let out a huff of frustration. “I want you to protect one another. That’s a good thing. But you can’t do it at the expense of the mission. Killing the dragon has to be your top priority. You need to learn to react with logic and not emotion. If you react emotionally, you’ll try to save your friends, even though logically it may be the worst mistake you can make. I know this is hard…” Dr. B’s voice dropped and his gaze swept over the group, meeting each Slayer’s eyes. “Don’t sacrifice the lives of two people—let alone your whole team—to try to save one person.” His gaze landed on Jesse again. “You’re our most experienced flyer. You can’t let anything or anyone distract you.”

Jesse nodded, somber.

Dirk was immune to guilt trips, though. He only smiled at Dr. B. “But you have to admit—shooting the target while falling was a sweet move.”

“All right—yes.” A smile tugged at the corner of Dr. B’s mouth. “That was quite well done.”

Dr. B turned to Tori and his voice softened. “You’ve come a long way from the start of camp. However, your frequent deaths lead me to believe you’re still not ready to become A-team’s captain.”

Ever since Dr. B discovered Tori could fly, he insisted that one day she would be A-team’s leader. Tori never wanted the job. It was bad enough that she occasionally got her team members killed in practice. She didn’t want to be the one responsible for their lives when it came to a real battle. She nodded. “That’s probably for the best.”

While Dr. B addressed Team Magnus and gave them specific feedback on their fight, Tori turned to Dirk. She gave him a look that said,
See, you have nothing to worry about. You’re A-team’s captain and always will be.

Dirk’s extra Slayer power was the ability to see what the dragon saw. No one was quite sure how the links worked, but Dirk had a connection with one of Overdrake’s dragon eggs. A part of Dirk’s mind always saw what the unborn dragon saw—which was darkness at night and a reddish light during the day.

That particular talent didn’t do much good in a fight, and yet Dirk was such a good Slayer, Dr. B had made him A-team’s captain four years ago.

“I think you should already be captain,” Dirk said in mock seriousness. “A-team might need their captain to die a martyr’s death in order to rally them into action.”

Tori smacked him.

Dirk laughed and put his gun on a peg in his locker. “You always fly too close to the dragon and stay there too long. Are you purposely getting yourself killed so you don’t have to be captain or do you have a risk-taking side I don’t know about?”

Tori placed her wooden sword on the floor of her locker and shut the door. “I figure it’s better to see how well I can maneuver in here than in a real attack. This is the place to push my limits, to make mistakes.”

Dirk shook his head. “When it comes to dragons, there isn’t a place to make mistakes.”

He was right about that—at least while Theo and Dr. B ran the controls. “You’re so wise,” she purred at him. “Which is why you’ll always be A-team’s captain. Well, that and the fact that I don’t want to deal with Lilly any more than I have to.”

“Coward,” Dirk whispered.

Neither of them said more after that because Dr. B had finished with his assessment of Team Magnus and turned to give A-team its critique. Most of his comments were directed at Tori. She needed to utilize the other Slayers’ abilities to optimize her strategy. She needed to make sure she was always covered. And she needed to rely less on her sight and more on her instincts. Her Slayer senses picked up things her conscious mind didn’t.

Dr. B must have seen her discouragement because he ended his assessment with, “Overall, you’re doing very well. Better than I expected. It just takes time.”

That was the problem, though. None of them knew how much time they had before Overdrake began attacking cities with his dragons and his mercenary fighters. Overdrake wanted to take over the government and would lay waste to as many cities as he needed until the nation agreed to his terms. Dr. B thought the only reason Overdrake hadn’t launched an assault already was that he was waiting for his dragon eggs to hatch. Once they did, they would mature within a year and be ready for Overdrake to use.

Dr. B walked back in front of the room and raised his voice, addressing the group again. “Before camp ends, I wanted to say a few words about safety.”

Safety. An ironic topic after he’d trapped Tori with a flame-throwing dragon and nearly roasted her.

“I know you’ve all been concerned about an informant or some sort of leak at camp.” Concerned was an understatement. At the beginning of the summer, the Slayers figured out where Overdrake kept the dragon eggs and launched a surprise attack to destroy them. Not only had Overdrake been waiting for them, he knew their names. The Slayers barely managed to escape from the dragon enclosure.

They had never figured out who tipped off Overdrake or how he knew their names. After the attack, Dr. B moved the Slayers to a hidden backup camp an hour away from their original one. Theo checked all their belongings for bugs and took their phones to search for anything suspicious. The Slayers all had special satellite phones with EMP and tracking protection—or at least they did until Theo confiscated them. The regular kind didn’t work well in the forest and wouldn’t work at all after a dragon strike. Dr. B needed to make sure he always had a way to contact the group.

In the name of security, Dr. B had added more cameras and sensors along the camp’s boundaries and had given the Slayers a few new rules.

Camp already had dozens of rules. The Slayers couldn’t give one another any personal information about their outside lives. Not where they lived, what they did, especially not their last names. They couldn’t take pictures of camp or each other. They had a complicated system for going home after the summer to make sure no one followed them. At home, they couldn’t talk about camp to their family or friends. They couldn’t use any of their Slayer powers in a way that would draw attention to themselves. They couldn’t contact one another, except in an emergency.

“The bad news,” Dr. B went on, “is that I can’t tell you where Overdrake got his information. The analysis of your old phones and your old cabins didn’t turn up anything. You’ll still have to be more careful, more diligent than you’ve ever been.”

A fair amount of murmuring went through the group at this news. If it wasn’t some sort of bug, what was it? How did they know Overdrake didn’t still have a way to spy on them?

“The good news,” Dr. B said a little louder, “is that Theo has designed a new, more secure communication device.”

Theo held up a large black plastic watch for everyone to see. It didn’t just scream tacky, it shrieked it while flashing out the time. “This is the prototype of our new emergency phones,” Dr. B said. “You’ll get yours tomorrow as you leave camp. Always keep it with you.”

Tori hadn’t realized she’d groaned until Dirk leaned toward her and whispered, “What’s wrong? Will it clash with your Dior outfits?”

“It’ll clash with any outfit.” Tori allowed herself another groan. “Maybe I could wear it around my ankle so no one will see it.”

“Hmm,” Dirk said, while Dr. B demonstrated how to send and receive calls. “It sounds to me like you’re not taking your safety seriously.”

She did take it seriously. During their failed raid, Overdrake had captured Tori and pulled off her helmet. He’d seen her face. If he came after any of them, it was going to be her. “Of course, wearing that watch around my ankle won’t work with shorts or skirts. Do you suppose the band would stretch around my thigh?”