Page 6 of The Dragon's Pet
“Well, Aria Thomas-Jones, First Airman,” he said. “My war is not with you. You will not come to any harm with me. I give you my word.”
His word was not worth very much as far as Aria was concerned. He was the enemy and she was now a prisoner of war—and the dragons never had signed the Geneva Convention. She was fair game to these reptiles.
“Liar,” she hissed at him. “Go back to your nest… be glad you lived through an encounter with me.”
The dragon threw back his head and laughed, a deep throaty sound. “Oh, your delusions of grandeur,” he chuckled. “Really quite something, the arrogance your kind possesses.”
He shook his head, momentarily distracted by his amusement. Aria took the opportunity to flee, running across the dusty ground as fast as she could. She didn’t have a solid plan for her escape, she had pure instinct and the sense to get away from the dangerous lizard. If she could find some cover, if she could hide, perhaps she could escape and make her way back to the base, perhaps…
Swoosh!
A great shadow passed over her and a moment later great talons wrapped around her, capturing her in their grip. They could easily have crushed her, but instead they held her secure as the dragon soared high into the air. Aria held onto the talons tightly, terrified of the long fall that awaited her if the evil creature were to let her go.
The military had drilled her in what to do in the event of being taken prisoner. They had trained her to resist interrogations. They had taught her to survive in difficult conditions, endure pain and even torture. But they had never taught her what to do when she found herself swept several miles into the air by a beast bigger than a 747.
The speed increased until Aria was sure they were matching, if not outpacing the speed of most jetliners. The dragons were fast, she’d seen that for herself in the dogfights. This one was fast enough to chase a Tornado down. The wind buffeted her face, making it difficult to breathe. She had to hide her face in her arms and take short gasps of the thinly oxygenated air.
They wheeled about and headed across state lines… toward Wyoming and the heights of the Rocky Mountains. She’d heard rumors that the dragons had established bases in the Rockies. It was genius, really. Places too inhospitable for most humans to get to, but easily accessed via flight. Places with natural caves that could serve as storehouses for the resources they were pillaging.
Caught in a hopeless position, Aria could do nothing for herself besides try to survive. She did not know what awaited her in the dragon’s lair. She didn’t even know if she would make it that far. Consciousness was difficult to maintain with her levels of stress and exhaustion and the low O2.
Finally, after what seemed like an endless journey, the dragon began to swoop down for landing at an obvious roost. Part of the mountains had been carved away to make a large flat area perfect for landing a helicopter—or a ten-ton dragon.
Her watch revealed that they had been in the air just shy of three hours. It wasn’t long in terms of flight time, assuming you had a plane, but it was close to forever when you were sailing through the sky seated in a dragon’s clenched claws.
The dragon’s powerful hind legs made land first, his great wings folded behind him and he placed her gently on the ground. She collapsed to the rocky surface, her knees too weak to support her weight. She closed her eyes and said a prayer. Whatever was to come next was unlikely to be pleasant.
“Come,” he said, those deep tones resonating inside her chest. The great dragon was gone again, to be replaced by the thing that looked almost human. There was no fanfare when these things shifted from one form to another. It was just like breathing to them, or maybe blinking. One moment they were one thing; the next, the other. Her mind, addled from fear, found refuge in the question of how that was even possible. It was as if they, the dragons, did not have a body like humans did. It was almost as if they were more the suggestion of a form, and that suggestion could change at any time. The dragon reached down and grabbed her arm. He didn’t feel like a suggestion. He felt like a command.
She tried to pull her arm out of his hand, not wanting any aid from her captor. He had her firmly though, and he drew her up to her feet in a smooth, easy motion.
“Easy,” he chuckled. “You don’t have much fight left in you, pet.”
“Fuck off,” Aria cursed. Swearing at her captors was not part of the training, but she was exhausted and angry and it felt as if all she really had left was her defiance. It was going to take some time for air command to realize that she hadn’t perished with her plane, if they ever found out at all. Someone would have to check the wreckage for her remains, and sending a pilot out to do that would risk another casualty. Odds were that she had been declared MIA, along with hundreds of other pilots. Odds were that nobody was coming for her. Even if they wanted to, coming into the dragon’s den meant certain death. Aria wasn’t sure why she was alive, but she wasn’t counting her blessings just yet.
The frown on his face told her that he really didn’t like the cursing—weird, given that he could only have been speaking English for a month or so. How the hell the lizards had figured out their language so quickly, Aria really didn’t know.
“That’s right,” she said. “You can fuck right off.”
This time the punishment was more than a stern look. The lizard held her in one hand while his other hand came around and dealt a hard slap to the seat of her flight suit, landing hard enough to bring her up to her toes.
“Behave yourself,” he warned her as she cursed again. “You are in my territory now.”
“You don’t have territory here,” Aria seethed. “Earth is for humans.”
“Humans, hmm?” He raised his thick, dark brows at her. “By our reckoning, this planet is home to almost nine million species. What about them?”
“They don’t count, for this argument,” Aria spluttered. “We are the dominant species.”
“Werethe dominant species,” he corrected smoothly. “You’ve fallen from that position. And you’re not taking it very well, I must say.”
Aria stared at him, very much wanting to argue back, but her mind was blank. The impartial, logical, smart part of her brain she would have immediately disavowed if anyone had been able to hear it, told her that he was right. The dragons were superior in a lot of ways, but that didn’t mean they were going to win this war. Humans had clawed their way out of evolution to get to the top of the food chain, and neither she nor anyone else was going to take slipping down a link in that chain lightly.
CHAPTER 2
Before Aria could think of something clever to say, the lizard took hold of her hand and began to walk into the depths of the cave. It was immediately apparent that the dragons had been doing some work to make the place hospitable for themselves. As soon as she passed the first twist in the rocky wall, she felt a warmth begin to creep through her flight suit. It shouldn’t have been warm. It should have been freezing cold. It should have been too cold for the dragons at all. And yet, here they were.
They had burrowed through the rock to create what she could only describe as a dragon warren. Narrow passages led into larger spaces, most of them unfurnished. It was quite a work they had accomplished, but she was not surprised. Aria had seen them use their powerful teeth and claws before; nothing man or earth made seemed to be able to withstand a dragon’s sheer earth-moving power.
