When the men appeared from around the far side of the machine shed, I let the last few chords of my song disperse on the wind.
They were dressed in the new farm colors—a mix of black and yellow that milled around, seemingly without purpose.
My companion leaned forward to take a look and snorted an uneasy laugh. “They look like a cluster of demented bumblebees.”
I glanced to her blue blouse and black skirt. “Uncle has absolutely zero color sense,” I agreed. “Why he thinks a uniform is necessary when we spend a lot of time scraping up crap, I have no idea.”
“Well, at least you’d look good in yellow.” Mary Jane reached to wiggle a lock of my chestnut hair. “If you ever wore it.”
“I reject the official look on principle,” I stated firmly. “Nothing wrong with an old tee shirt and jeans.”
“Just one reason your uncle and you don’t get along…” My mom’s best friend moved her hand to my forehead and frowned. “You still feel hot to me, Tessa.”
I forced a smile as she pulled her hand away. “Still feel kinda lousy. Whatever was in that stuff they gave me has thrown me for a loop.”
“Wish they’d told you why they injected it in the first place.” She peered past me to regard the small crowd and stated with trepidation. “They’ll find you.”
“They couldn’t find their own noses if Uncle didn’t help.” Still, I pulled my long legs back from where they had dangled through the hayloft door. No sense in making it too easy for them.
Mary-Jane placed a hand at my elbow to help me up. Not that I usually required assistance, but my legs did have a wobble to them as I stood. Damned mysterious goop. Or maybe it was just nerves. Impossible to know.
The transport had landed almost twenty minutes ago, and the tracking tag now fastened to my ear ensured that I couldn’t hide for long.
At least I had been granted enough time for my friend to hear my latest song. With a pounding pulse, I cradled the Gibson guitar against me. It had belonged to my mother, who had shared a name with the diminutive gray-haired woman who now brushed straw from her skirt.
Our movements disturbed the small flock of birds who swirled down from the barn’s rafters. The wind from their wings buffeted me as they flitted out the door. One paused to hover hopefully—I dug out the last bit of cracker from my pocket and flung it to him. My aim was off, he had to dart downward to grab it before it fell, and he swallowed it whole.
Chirping happily, he rejoined his flock. Only if you looked very closely could you tell that he had four wings instead of two—proof that he and his friends were as alien to this world as those that now owned us.
“Did you like the song?” I asked my human audience as I restored the guitar to its case and placed it back into its hiding place amidst the old bales.
“The song was beautiful.” Mary-Jane’s voice was hoarse. “One of your best.”
I cast her a smile as I moved back to the door. This old barn was precious to me. It, my music, the birds, Mary-Jane, as well as the chocolate cupcakes she often baked, were firmly entrenched in the “Fun For Me” paddock. Paddock was a good farm-girl label for what I called the carefully organized mental compartments into which I placed things. I had many others, ranging from “Lambing” and “Baling Hay” to “Ignoring Uncle’s Tirades” and “Avoiding the Perverted Foreman’s Son”. Perhaps not the best way to cope with my life until now, but it had always worked well for me.
Even without the Gibson, my music continued to drift through mind and soul. I hummed to myself as I peered carefully around the doorframe to the bumblebee men, still clustered nervously around the door to the shed. “Evading My Evaluation” had just earned itself a new paddock, lined up right after “Ignoring How The Goop Makes Me Feel”.
Even as I contemplated that, my brain was getting rather crowded with internal fencing, I noticed that the yellow and black cluster had a new focus. My inner song added a bass beat as two Drolgoks joined them—the same two that had both tagged and injected me a couple of weeks before. At least, I thought so, judging by the colors of the clothing that swathed their four-foot, rather stout bodies. Despite the early fall warmth, you could not see past their woolly layers to their scaled skin or the faces beneath it. Even their tails, twitching like a cat’s, were wrapped.
As I watched, one of them tripped in his overlarge boots and was saved from a fall by his companion. Barely. The drumbeat in my brain hiccupped as he did so—they weren’t especially fearsome. The booming bass undertones more accurately reflected who they served, as well as what they were here to do.
The stuff they’d injected into me on their initial visit shivered through my veins, making me sway and clutch at the doorframe. Meanwhile, the bumblebee brigade gathered around the Drolgoks, and things suddenly got more serious.
Mary-Jane moved to peer past me, and whisper. “What are you going to do?”
“I am going down there,” I replied. “But I want you to stay here until they take me with them.”
“I want to be with you when they do the evaluation,” she protested.
“That is not a good idea,” I stated. “There is nothing you can do about it, and I don’t want Uncle to be angry with you.”
“He can’t do anything to me,” she scoffed.
“That isn’t true, and you know it.” She might be older and paired off to the sales supervisor, but my uncle could, and would, make her life miserable if she kicked up a fuss with my evaluation. Which she very well might. There were two possibilities for me, and neither was good. Option one was being paired off with the foreman’s son, a young man who spent most of his free time ogling me—he’d even once placed a camera in my bedroom. Creepy was an understatement.
It was either that, or being shipped off somewhere else. And no one knew where that was…
So I pulled her close and hugged her. “Please. I need you to stay here until I am gone.”
Mary Jane had tears in her eyes as she hugged me back, but she didn’t protest further. Because she really was afraid of my uncle.
“Your mother would have been so proud of you.” As she stepped back, her smile trembled. “You look so much like her. She had that same hair—she could never get it to behave, either. And you have her marvelous gray eyes…”
“I miss her,” I whispered. I didn’t want to let Mary-Jane go, either… but I did so. And then I smiled, because if I didn’t look brave, she’d follow me for sure.
Seconds later, I was clambering down the loft ladder to the main level of the old barn. But once there, I paused. My pulse pounded hard, and I trembled like a trapped hare.
Like that hare, I wanted to run.
Don’t be a fool, Tessa. It would be pointless to do so. The eartag ensured they could track me anywhere on this planet, and the Drolgoks had taken pains to tell me that if I tried to tamper with it, it would explode. As I rather liked the head it was attached to, attempting to lop off the tag or even the ear wasn’t in the cards.
My mind filled with rapid-fire, rather shrill notes that matched my pulse. Escape wasn’t really an option—proven to me by my multiple attempts over the years. Yet walking out there, and giving myself up…how could I just accept what the mighty overlords had planned for me? Or rather, what my uncle had bribed the overlords to decide—he’d spent months and many trade deals in his attempt to have me paired with his best friend’s son.
Thoughts of that unsavory fate had me slinking—with a marked tendency to staggering—past the dust encrusted tractor and forgotten implements to the loose board along the side wall. A quick glance through it showed that the searchers hadn’t yet dispersed to the nearby hayshed.
If I evaded them for long enough today—the Drolgoks might re-book the evaluation. It wouldn’t help my end fate. And those few days of relative freedom would also earn me the wrath of my Uncle. Not an insignificant thing…
But the decision had been made at some deep, primitive level. I shoved past the board and darted across the gap between barn and shed. In moments I was creeping through the stacks of bales. I tripped over a broken one, and barely stopped myself from falling. Apparently there were limits to what adrenaline could do. My mind scrambled for a plan as I breathed in the scent of freshly baled hay—if I could get to the far side, I might be able to cut across the sheep pasture to the forest beyond…
If it was too much trouble to find me, how much would it delay the evaluation? As a hope, it wasn’t much of one, but it was all I had.
Picking my way between the stacks, I reached the far side and gazed out across the pasture. The woolly bodies of sheep dotted the emerald grass like the scene out of the old painting that graced the farmhouse’s hall. The gangly lambs galloped and leaped joyfully around their mothers.
My heart squeezed tight as I gazed above them to the broad expanse of blue prairie sky. The music within me soared. Despite my uncle and his best friend’s perverted son, I loved this farm. Loved caring for the animals while following the seasonal rhythms of the land. The thought of possibly being shipped off somewhere else was as hard to bear as what it meant to stay.
A shout from behind me—they were checking the barn. They would find Mary Jane, but she could truthfully say that she didn’t know where I was.
I pushed past the last bale…
Something huge dropped from above.
My ‘too much trouble to pursue’ theory had hinged on a foot pursuit by the Drolgoks and bumblebee men. I hadn’t expected the boss to accompany his minions…
And the boss had wings.
They blocked the sun as forty feet of black-scaled beast sank its long talons into the earth. A head longer than I was tall tilted to orient a gleaming obsidian eye and the sharp-toothed jaws opened and closed once with a harsh ‘clack’.
The music within me hiccupped as every fiber of me froze. Because this wasn’t any ordinary animal. He was something straight out of Earth-based myth, only the joke was on us humans--
Because dragons had always been real.
And they could never be called ordinary. He—and from this angle, there was no doubt it was a he—was an invader to this world. A species who had moved in and taken over without effort. Every weapon the humans had wielded against them amounted to no more than a teardrop against a tsunami.
I’d only ever seen them as distant silhouettes soaring the thermals, not huge and looming over me. But even those glimpses had fired my imagination—because I’d always loved reading about dragons. Sang about them often.
The stories hadn’t come close to capturing them. And as much as he was magnificent, he was also terrifying. Despite the fact that I trembled, my mouth opened, and words dropped free. “Excuse me, but you are blocking my view.”
The dragon’s snort gusted warm air through my hair as he replied in my native language. “Human funny.”
Rather garbled, but I got the gist. My own jaw dropped open—I hadn’t expected such a beast to speak at all. Then the muscles writhed beneath the glittering scaled skin. I backed away as the humanoid form emerged from the beast…
I was tall for a woman, but he towered over me. Seven feet of clearing cobwebs from high places, much taller if you counted the wings arching over him. The images I’d seen of our resident overlords failed to capture the cold arrogance that he wore like a second skin. Or the scale of his muscular body—even on just two legs, he was huge. The piercing dark eyes regarded me with indifference—as though I were a mere insect that he could squish on a whim.
He would have been a whole lot easier to deal with if he wasn’t naked. I supposed that pants weren’t something that survived altering from forty feet of dragon to seven feet of humanoid, but did I ever need him to be wearing them. Because I couldn’t rip my eyes away…
Okay, I had to rip my eyes away.
But I couldn’t.
As a farm girl, I was well versed in various sorts of male anatomy. This Drake took ‘hung like a horse’ into an entirely new and spectacular dimension.
Yikers.
The Drake sneered and laughed, the rumble coming from deep in his chest. Was it true that they could mesmerize humans with a look? I didn’t want to find out. His whippy tail twitched slowly like that of a stalking cat, and I struggled to focus on that, as he raised his head, and inhaled.
“You are Ripe,” he said in Primal.
Ripe? I’d had a shower only this morning. The universal cosmic language was sometimes tricky to interpret, but the burst of outrage freed my feet.
“The name,” I insisted, “Is Tessa.” As I backed between the bales, the Drake came after me.
Movement beyond him revealed the Drolgoks. One of them waved an odd looking gun—with any luck, maybe he’d shoot himself in the foot.
The panic of a trapped animal flooded through me. But as I turned to run, I realized that the human bumblebees had moved into the hay shed from the other side and now blocked my exit.
Terror and rage combined with a sudden surge of notes through my soul. It all connected to something visceral, pure and primal…
A burst of what seemed like wind blasted through the hayshed. Bales burst and toppled, the air was thick with drifting strands. Curses and flailing black and yellow forms obscured the path through the mess.
Dammit. Trapped, I swung back around…
The Drake was right behind me. I swayed on a wave of dizziness, and before I could stop myself, I met the obsidian gaze,
It seized hold of me. And as I stood there, trembling, he smiled, revealing long, sharp and very dragony canines.
“Perfect.” His voice sounded like thunder. “You are perfect.”
One of the Drolgoks appeared beside him. Unable to move, I was only peripherally aware as he raised the odd looking gun, and shot a dart into my leg.
It had no problem penetrating my jeans. There was a sting as it injected something into me, and a moment later, everything went black.
They were dressed in the new farm colors—a mix of black and yellow that milled around, seemingly without purpose.
My companion leaned forward to take a look and snorted an uneasy laugh. “They look like a cluster of demented bumblebees.”
I glanced to her blue blouse and black skirt. “Uncle has absolutely zero color sense,” I agreed. “Why he thinks a uniform is necessary when we spend a lot of time scraping up crap, I have no idea.”
“Well, at least you’d look good in yellow.” Mary Jane reached to wiggle a lock of my chestnut hair. “If you ever wore it.”
“I reject the official look on principle,” I stated firmly. “Nothing wrong with an old tee shirt and jeans.”
“Just one reason your uncle and you don’t get along…” My mom’s best friend moved her hand to my forehead and frowned. “You still feel hot to me, Tessa.”
I forced a smile as she pulled her hand away. “Still feel kinda lousy. Whatever was in that stuff they gave me has thrown me for a loop.”
“Wish they’d told you why they injected it in the first place.” She peered past me to regard the small crowd and stated with trepidation. “They’ll find you.”
“They couldn’t find their own noses if Uncle didn’t help.” Still, I pulled my long legs back from where they had dangled through the hayloft door. No sense in making it too easy for them.
Mary-Jane placed a hand at my elbow to help me up. Not that I usually required assistance, but my legs did have a wobble to them as I stood. Damned mysterious goop. Or maybe it was just nerves. Impossible to know.
The transport had landed almost twenty minutes ago, and the tracking tag now fastened to my ear ensured that I couldn’t hide for long.
At least I had been granted enough time for my friend to hear my latest song. With a pounding pulse, I cradled the Gibson guitar against me. It had belonged to my mother, who had shared a name with the diminutive gray-haired woman who now brushed straw from her skirt.
Our movements disturbed the small flock of birds who swirled down from the barn’s rafters. The wind from their wings buffeted me as they flitted out the door. One paused to hover hopefully—I dug out the last bit of cracker from my pocket and flung it to him. My aim was off, he had to dart downward to grab it before it fell, and he swallowed it whole.
Chirping happily, he rejoined his flock. Only if you looked very closely could you tell that he had four wings instead of two—proof that he and his friends were as alien to this world as those that now owned us.
“Did you like the song?” I asked my human audience as I restored the guitar to its case and placed it back into its hiding place amidst the old bales.
“The song was beautiful.” Mary-Jane’s voice was hoarse. “One of your best.”
I cast her a smile as I moved back to the door. This old barn was precious to me. It, my music, the birds, Mary-Jane, as well as the chocolate cupcakes she often baked, were firmly entrenched in the “Fun For Me” paddock. Paddock was a good farm-girl label for what I called the carefully organized mental compartments into which I placed things. I had many others, ranging from “Lambing” and “Baling Hay” to “Ignoring Uncle’s Tirades” and “Avoiding the Perverted Foreman’s Son”. Perhaps not the best way to cope with my life until now, but it had always worked well for me.
Even without the Gibson, my music continued to drift through mind and soul. I hummed to myself as I peered carefully around the doorframe to the bumblebee men, still clustered nervously around the door to the shed. “Evading My Evaluation” had just earned itself a new paddock, lined up right after “Ignoring How The Goop Makes Me Feel”.
Even as I contemplated that, my brain was getting rather crowded with internal fencing, I noticed that the yellow and black cluster had a new focus. My inner song added a bass beat as two Drolgoks joined them—the same two that had both tagged and injected me a couple of weeks before. At least, I thought so, judging by the colors of the clothing that swathed their four-foot, rather stout bodies. Despite the early fall warmth, you could not see past their woolly layers to their scaled skin or the faces beneath it. Even their tails, twitching like a cat’s, were wrapped.
As I watched, one of them tripped in his overlarge boots and was saved from a fall by his companion. Barely. The drumbeat in my brain hiccupped as he did so—they weren’t especially fearsome. The booming bass undertones more accurately reflected who they served, as well as what they were here to do.
The stuff they’d injected into me on their initial visit shivered through my veins, making me sway and clutch at the doorframe. Meanwhile, the bumblebee brigade gathered around the Drolgoks, and things suddenly got more serious.
Mary-Jane moved to peer past me, and whisper. “What are you going to do?”
“I am going down there,” I replied. “But I want you to stay here until they take me with them.”
“I want to be with you when they do the evaluation,” she protested.
“That is not a good idea,” I stated. “There is nothing you can do about it, and I don’t want Uncle to be angry with you.”
“He can’t do anything to me,” she scoffed.
“That isn’t true, and you know it.” She might be older and paired off to the sales supervisor, but my uncle could, and would, make her life miserable if she kicked up a fuss with my evaluation. Which she very well might. There were two possibilities for me, and neither was good. Option one was being paired off with the foreman’s son, a young man who spent most of his free time ogling me—he’d even once placed a camera in my bedroom. Creepy was an understatement.
It was either that, or being shipped off somewhere else. And no one knew where that was…
So I pulled her close and hugged her. “Please. I need you to stay here until I am gone.”
Mary Jane had tears in her eyes as she hugged me back, but she didn’t protest further. Because she really was afraid of my uncle.
“Your mother would have been so proud of you.” As she stepped back, her smile trembled. “You look so much like her. She had that same hair—she could never get it to behave, either. And you have her marvelous gray eyes…”
“I miss her,” I whispered. I didn’t want to let Mary-Jane go, either… but I did so. And then I smiled, because if I didn’t look brave, she’d follow me for sure.
Seconds later, I was clambering down the loft ladder to the main level of the old barn. But once there, I paused. My pulse pounded hard, and I trembled like a trapped hare.
Like that hare, I wanted to run.
Don’t be a fool, Tessa. It would be pointless to do so. The eartag ensured they could track me anywhere on this planet, and the Drolgoks had taken pains to tell me that if I tried to tamper with it, it would explode. As I rather liked the head it was attached to, attempting to lop off the tag or even the ear wasn’t in the cards.
My mind filled with rapid-fire, rather shrill notes that matched my pulse. Escape wasn’t really an option—proven to me by my multiple attempts over the years. Yet walking out there, and giving myself up…how could I just accept what the mighty overlords had planned for me? Or rather, what my uncle had bribed the overlords to decide—he’d spent months and many trade deals in his attempt to have me paired with his best friend’s son.
Thoughts of that unsavory fate had me slinking—with a marked tendency to staggering—past the dust encrusted tractor and forgotten implements to the loose board along the side wall. A quick glance through it showed that the searchers hadn’t yet dispersed to the nearby hayshed.
If I evaded them for long enough today—the Drolgoks might re-book the evaluation. It wouldn’t help my end fate. And those few days of relative freedom would also earn me the wrath of my Uncle. Not an insignificant thing…
But the decision had been made at some deep, primitive level. I shoved past the board and darted across the gap between barn and shed. In moments I was creeping through the stacks of bales. I tripped over a broken one, and barely stopped myself from falling. Apparently there were limits to what adrenaline could do. My mind scrambled for a plan as I breathed in the scent of freshly baled hay—if I could get to the far side, I might be able to cut across the sheep pasture to the forest beyond…
If it was too much trouble to find me, how much would it delay the evaluation? As a hope, it wasn’t much of one, but it was all I had.
Picking my way between the stacks, I reached the far side and gazed out across the pasture. The woolly bodies of sheep dotted the emerald grass like the scene out of the old painting that graced the farmhouse’s hall. The gangly lambs galloped and leaped joyfully around their mothers.
My heart squeezed tight as I gazed above them to the broad expanse of blue prairie sky. The music within me soared. Despite my uncle and his best friend’s perverted son, I loved this farm. Loved caring for the animals while following the seasonal rhythms of the land. The thought of possibly being shipped off somewhere else was as hard to bear as what it meant to stay.
A shout from behind me—they were checking the barn. They would find Mary Jane, but she could truthfully say that she didn’t know where I was.
I pushed past the last bale…
Something huge dropped from above.
My ‘too much trouble to pursue’ theory had hinged on a foot pursuit by the Drolgoks and bumblebee men. I hadn’t expected the boss to accompany his minions…
And the boss had wings.
They blocked the sun as forty feet of black-scaled beast sank its long talons into the earth. A head longer than I was tall tilted to orient a gleaming obsidian eye and the sharp-toothed jaws opened and closed once with a harsh ‘clack’.
The music within me hiccupped as every fiber of me froze. Because this wasn’t any ordinary animal. He was something straight out of Earth-based myth, only the joke was on us humans--
Because dragons had always been real.
And they could never be called ordinary. He—and from this angle, there was no doubt it was a he—was an invader to this world. A species who had moved in and taken over without effort. Every weapon the humans had wielded against them amounted to no more than a teardrop against a tsunami.
I’d only ever seen them as distant silhouettes soaring the thermals, not huge and looming over me. But even those glimpses had fired my imagination—because I’d always loved reading about dragons. Sang about them often.
The stories hadn’t come close to capturing them. And as much as he was magnificent, he was also terrifying. Despite the fact that I trembled, my mouth opened, and words dropped free. “Excuse me, but you are blocking my view.”
The dragon’s snort gusted warm air through my hair as he replied in my native language. “Human funny.”
Rather garbled, but I got the gist. My own jaw dropped open—I hadn’t expected such a beast to speak at all. Then the muscles writhed beneath the glittering scaled skin. I backed away as the humanoid form emerged from the beast…
I was tall for a woman, but he towered over me. Seven feet of clearing cobwebs from high places, much taller if you counted the wings arching over him. The images I’d seen of our resident overlords failed to capture the cold arrogance that he wore like a second skin. Or the scale of his muscular body—even on just two legs, he was huge. The piercing dark eyes regarded me with indifference—as though I were a mere insect that he could squish on a whim.
He would have been a whole lot easier to deal with if he wasn’t naked. I supposed that pants weren’t something that survived altering from forty feet of dragon to seven feet of humanoid, but did I ever need him to be wearing them. Because I couldn’t rip my eyes away…
Okay, I had to rip my eyes away.
But I couldn’t.
As a farm girl, I was well versed in various sorts of male anatomy. This Drake took ‘hung like a horse’ into an entirely new and spectacular dimension.
Yikers.
The Drake sneered and laughed, the rumble coming from deep in his chest. Was it true that they could mesmerize humans with a look? I didn’t want to find out. His whippy tail twitched slowly like that of a stalking cat, and I struggled to focus on that, as he raised his head, and inhaled.
“You are Ripe,” he said in Primal.
Ripe? I’d had a shower only this morning. The universal cosmic language was sometimes tricky to interpret, but the burst of outrage freed my feet.
“The name,” I insisted, “Is Tessa.” As I backed between the bales, the Drake came after me.
Movement beyond him revealed the Drolgoks. One of them waved an odd looking gun—with any luck, maybe he’d shoot himself in the foot.
The panic of a trapped animal flooded through me. But as I turned to run, I realized that the human bumblebees had moved into the hay shed from the other side and now blocked my exit.
Terror and rage combined with a sudden surge of notes through my soul. It all connected to something visceral, pure and primal…
A burst of what seemed like wind blasted through the hayshed. Bales burst and toppled, the air was thick with drifting strands. Curses and flailing black and yellow forms obscured the path through the mess.
Dammit. Trapped, I swung back around…
The Drake was right behind me. I swayed on a wave of dizziness, and before I could stop myself, I met the obsidian gaze,
It seized hold of me. And as I stood there, trembling, he smiled, revealing long, sharp and very dragony canines.
“Perfect.” His voice sounded like thunder. “You are perfect.”
One of the Drolgoks appeared beside him. Unable to move, I was only peripherally aware as he raised the odd looking gun, and shot a dart into my leg.
It had no problem penetrating my jeans. There was a sting as it injected something into me, and a moment later, everything went black.