“Nailsworth, you’re a pathetic piece of shit.” Burton disconnected. The wailing was still coming from the cave and the woman was screaming something he couldn’t make out.
Theo’s sneakers were still showing, sticking out between Steve’s teeth. Molly grabbed her broadsword, ran up the Sea Beast’s foreleg, and leapt onto his broad neck. She brought the broadsword down hard between his eyes and the impact made her hands go numb. “Spit him out! Spit him out!”
Steve tossed his head, trying to throw her off, but she gripped him with her thighs and hacked away at his head. Chunks of his scales flew off and the blade sparked. “Spit him out! Spit him out!” Molly screamed, punctu-ating the panicked chant with blows from the sword. She’d seen this before. She knew that if she heard a crunch, Theo was finished.
The Sea Beast opened his jaws to deliver the coup de grace and Molly could hear a gurgling scream come from Theo. She leapt to her feet on Steve’s forehead, put the tip of the broadsword in the corner of his eye, and prepared to leap on the hilt to drive it into his eye socket. “Spit him out! Now!”
Steve went cross-eyed trying to see his attacker, then made a grunting noise and hacked the constable out on the cave floor. He whipped his head and Molly went fly ing, hitting her back hard on the cave wall ten feet away and sliding down.
The pilgrims’ wails turned to sobs as Steve slunk to the back of the cave.
Theo, mired in a puddle of blood, bat guano, and dragon spit, pushed himself up on his hands and knees and looked to Molly. “You okay?” he gasped.
She nodded. “I think so. You?”
Theo nodded and looked down to make sure his legs were still there. “Yeah.” He crawled over to her and sat back against the cave wall beside her, still heaving to get his breath back. “Nice friends you have. Why’d he stop?”
“I think his feelings are hurt.”
“Sorry.”
“He’ll get over it. He’s a big boy.”
Despite himself, Theo started laughing, and before long he and Molly were leaning against each other, giggling uncontrollably.
“Steve, huh?” Theo said.
“He looks like a Steve, don’t you think?” Molly said.
Theo wiped the dragon spit from his mouth and leaned over to kiss her. She caught his chin in her hand and pushed him away. “Bad idea.”
Another roar rose from the back of the cave, this one less angry and more sad than the last.
“I guess so,” Theo said.
“What in the hell is going on in there, Crowe?” Burton called from outside. “You don’t have a lot of time to dick around here. There’s a SWAT team on the way. What do you want?”
“I don’t even know what the hell you’re talking about,” Theo shouted.
“What do you want to walk away from this? Leave the state. Forget everything. How much? Give me a figure.”
Theo looked at Molly as if she might have the answer. She said, “I thought we made our demands pretty clear.”
“He’s not going to let me go, Molly. And now he’s not going to let you go either. If there’s a SWAT team on the way, we’re in big trouble.”
“I need to go talk to Steve.” Molly stood and walked between the sobbing pilgrims to the back of the cave. Theo watched her fade into the dark where the Sea Beast was pulsing with dim spots of green and blue. Theo rubbed his eyes to try to clear his vision.
“Well, Crowe? What’ll it be?”
“Make me an offer,” Theo said, trying to figure out some kind of insurance. Something that would keep him alive more than two seconds after he stepped out of the cave.
“I’ll give you a hundred thousand. It’s a fair offer, Crowe. You can’t prove anything anyway, not if Leander is dead. Take the money and walk away.”
“I’m dead,” Theo said to himself. The size of the bluff offer itself betrayed Burton’s seriousness. There was no way he was letting Theo get away alive. “We’ll talk it over!” Theo shouted. His head was throbbing from the pistol whipping he’d taken and the vision in his left eye was blurry. His cell phone chirped from within the pile of pilgrims’ clothing and he scrambled through the clothes and pill bottles to find it. His vision went black with the move-ment and he had to steady himself until it cleared. He found the phone nestled in a pair of panty hose and hit the answer button.
He knew an enemy when he saw one. He could sense waves of aggression and fear coming from them, and he had felt those things coming from his warmblood lover. He could feel the fear even now as she approached him through the feeder people. Why, if she was going to find another mate, did she go to the trouble of unwrapping the feeder people for him?
He didn’t mind being hit with the sharp thing, that felt good, he thought she wanted to mate again, but when she put it in his eye, he knew she would have killed him. He felt it. She had turned her loyalties to another. He considered biting off her head to show her how badly he felt.
He tucked his head under his foreleg as she approached. She rubbed his gill tree and he sent a bolt of scarlet over his back to tell her to stop.
“I’m sorry, Steve. I don’t have many friends. I couldn’t let you eat Theo.”
He could sense benevolence in her tone, but he didn’t trust her now. Maybe he would just bite off an arm as a test. His back pulsed magenta and blue.
“You have to go, Steve. There’s a SWAT team coming. You can get past that guy outside without a problem. In fact, you can eat that guy outside if you want. In fact, I’d really appreciate it if you’d eat that guy outside.”
She stepped back from him. “Steve, you have to get out of here or they’re going to kill you.”
He pulsed a dull olive drab to her and tucked his head farther under his foreleg. She wanted him to go away, he could feel it. And he wanted to go away, but he didn’t want her to want him to go away. He knew she could never be what he wanted, and he understood never now, but he didn’t want the warmblood to have her either. Colors ran like sorrow over his scales.
“I’m not rejecting you,” Molly said. “I’m trying to save your life.”
She pushed through the pilgrims, who were all on their knees sobbing, and one woman, a thirtyish redhead with gravity-defying fake breasts, grabbed her arm. “I can sacrifice,” the woman said. “I can.”
Molly pulled her arm away from the woman. “Fuck off, lady,” Molly said, “Martyrdom’s easy, it comes with the plumbing.”
It was only when he answered the cell phone that Theo realized one of Burton’s blows had caught him on the ear. “Ouch! Goddamn it. Ouch!” Theo limped around in a circle, despite the fact that his limbs weren’t injured at all.
“Theo?” Gabe said, his voice tinny in the receiver.
“Yeah, it’s me.” Theo changed the phone to his other ear, but still held it a few inches away, now that it had bitten him once.
“Where are you? Who answered your phone?”
“That was Molly Michon. We’re in that cave up on the ranch where the mushroom farm used to be. Burton has us pinned in here and he’s called in a SWAT team.”
“Have you seen it?”
“Yeah, I’ve seen it, Gabe. I think you were right about the brain chemistry thing. There’s a bunch of people here all tranced out, saying they were called to give sacrifice. They all have prescriptions written by Val.”
“Wow,” Gabe said. “Wow. What’s it look like?”
“It’s large, Gabe.”
“Could you be more specific?”
“Look, Gabe, we need some help. Burton is going to kill us. I need witnesses up here so he can’t claim that we fired on his men. Call the TV station and the paper. Get a news helicopter up here.”
Theo felt Molly grab his shoulder. He turned to see her shaking her head. “Just a second, Gabe.” He covered the mouthpiece with his hand.