Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls - Jane Lindskold [52]
I keep going. Only a few yards more.
“Fools!” a cool calm voice cuts the darkness. “She’s getting away.”
I hear a click, a wheeze. There is no way for me to dodge as the tranq sliver solidly hits my shoulder, knocking me off-balance and crashing down through the floor. I concentrate on falling, slowing my descent when I can by grabbing at protrusions. One hand is badly skinned when I thump down into a foot of stagnant water.
The stuff in the sliver is screwing up my head, but not so much that I can’t hear a voice from my back wailing, “God! We’re hit!”
Dragging myself to my feet, I assess my position. From the distance I’ve fallen, I’m probably in the basement of the abandoned building.
The sliver pierced through my pack and apparently through some portion of Betwixt and Between before hitting me. I guess that this is why I haven’t been knocked out yet. Still, I am feeling woozy. I can tell the direction of the Jungle and slog that way. Above me I hear shouting, but the words are indistinct.
I crawl out of the pit, breaking the fragments of a rotted wooden door. While I am crouched in the doorway, two figures in navy jumpsuits run by. “She can’t have gone far….”
They’re out of my erratic hearing before I can find what they are going to do. I stagger out, my course a jagged line. I’m not sure where I’m going, but the vague idea comes that if I can find the Lesser Trail we used to enter the Jungle, I can hole up there and surely Grey Brother or Abalone will find me.
I hide again when two figures appear, but I am too dizzy to pull my feet in from a patch of light. As I stare stupidly at them sticking out, wondering if they might be mistaken for soggy shadows, a hand touches my shoulder.
I look up and see Abalone’s blue lips curl in a smile, a smile that fades as I try to speak and only manage to faint.
Eleven
TWO DAYS LATER, I AM FINALLY WELL ENOUGH TO GET UP and move around. It seems that Dr. Haas—or one of her cadre—managed to hit me twice. One dart spent most of its drug piercing through Betwixt and Between’s foot before hitting me. The other hit squarely. The force of the combined impacts was enough to make me fall and though Professor Isabella mutters about the damage I did myself wading to get out of the basement, she admits that I was lucky.
“Not only did you survive the fall but the doubled dosage could have killed you,” she tells me as she winds fresh gauze around my hand.
Head Wolf has not been so fortunate. Although he no longer drools or stares vacantly into space, he has fallen into a coma from which he does not awaken. Members of the Pack take shifts at his side, patting water onto his chapped lips, checking the IV Bumblebee has hooked up.
We are currently holed up in a most peculiar cave: the Cold Lairs. Midline had discovered it when he was still a Cub and it had become a secret between himself and Head Wolf.
“Paid my dues for a month or so with the information,” Midline recalls when telling me about it.
The cave is a pocket beneath a freeway. Apparently, once there had been a tunnel, perhaps a water main here, but when the freeway was restructured and magnetized, the tunnel was no longer needed. Instead of filling it in, the contractors had sealed it over, no doubt padding their pockets with the money not spent on the job.
The weather shifted the asphalt and concrete used to seal the place, breaking a crevice to the underworld. After Midline reported his find to Head Wolf, the Pack leader arranged to have the freeway’s power grid tapped, another entrance made, and then both openings concealed behind thick curtains of kudzu.
This retreat is not as comfortable as the Jungle, but it serves to keep most of our Pack together.
Professor Isabella has drawn medical supplies for Head Wolf on her ElderAid card and now the Pack views her as one of their own. I am pleased, if slightly jealous, to see the littler Wolves crowding to her, begging her for stories or asking questions.
The first night when I am well enough to walk