The dragon was almost at the end of the corridor when she jumped him.
She knocked him down and rolled him over, straddling him. She was braced to feel the agony of the dark power crackling through her, but it didn't come. She pinned his arms and showed her teeth and screamed in his face.
"Where is she? What did you do with her?"
The face looked back at her. It looked just like Brett, just like a human. It was sickly white, with rolling eyeballs and spittle at the corners of the mouth. The only answer she got was a moan of what sounded like terror.
"Tell me! Where is she?"
"-it's not my fault..."
"What?" She lifted his body and banged it down again. His head flopped on his neck like a dead fish. He looked like someone about to faint
Something was wrong.
"She's in the bedroom with my parents. They're all asleep-or something-"
His forehead. When she shook him, his hair flew around. It was uncharacteristically messy, but the forehead underneath was smooth.
"I couldn't help it He did something to my brain. I couldn't even think until a few minutes ago. I just did what he told me to do. I was like a robot! And you don't know what it was like, having him in the house the last three days, and feeling like a puppet,
and when he let go a few minutes ago, I thought I was going to be killed-"
The babbling went on, but Keller's mind had disengaged.
She had lots of thoughts all at once, like layers in a parfait.
Chalk up another ability for dragons: telepathic mind control. Of weak human subjects, anyway. Nissa was right* the Night World did know what had happened in the music room. The substitution was probably made right after that. They could have grabbed Jaime on her way back to class.
The car incident was designed to make us sympathetic and to lull our suspicions before they began. We thought of her as a victim.
The doctors at the hospital must have been controlled, too. They had to have been-they'd looked at Jaime's head.
Jaime's headaches have kept her at home for the past three days, so she never had to cross the wards.
Diana trusts Jaime implicitly and would go anywhere with her without a fight
Jaime wears bangs.
And on the last layer, rushing at her cold and sharp as crystal: Jaime is the dragon.
Jaime is the dragon.
A vast, silent calm seemed to have filled Keller. She felt as if there was too much space inside her head. Very slowly, she looked down at Brett again.
"Stop talking." It was almost a whisper, but his gabble stopped as if she'd turned off a faucet "Now. Who's in the bedroom with your parents? Your sister?"
He nodded, terrified. Tears spurted out of his eyes.
"Your real sister."
He nodded again.
They must have brought her in sometime, Keller thought. Certainly before we put the wards up and started checking cars, maybe even before the fake Jaime got back from the hospital.
Why they'd kept her alive was a mystery, but Keller didn't have time to worry about it "Brett," she said, still in a careful whisper, "what I want to know is where Iliana is. Do you know where she's been taken?"
He choked. '1 don't know. He didn't tell me anything, even when he was in my mind. But I noticed-4here were some people down in the cellar. I think they were making a tunnel."
A tunnel. Under the wards, of course. So we were made fools of twice.
She had to grit her teeth to keep from screaming. The floor plan of the house was a blur in her mind. She hauled Brett up by his shirt and said, "Where's the basement door? Show me!"
Ic-can't-"
"Move!"
He moved, staggering. She followed, pushing him along, until they got to a door and stairs.
Then he collapsed. "Down there. Don't ask me to go with you. I can't. I can't look at him again." He huddled, rocking himself.
Keller left him. Three stairs down, she bounded back up and grabbed him by the shirt.
"That phone call from Iliana's mother-does he really have the baby?" She need to know if it came to bargaining.
"I don't know," Brett moaned in a sick voice. He was clutching his stomach as if he were wounded. "There wasn't any phone call, but I don't know what he's been doing." He threw her a desperate look and whispered hoarsely, "What is he?"
Keller dropped him. "You don't want to know," she said, and left him again.
She took the stairs very quietly but very quickly. Her senses were open, but the farther she went down, the less useful they were. They were being swamped by an overpowering sickly-sweet odor and by a rushing sound that seemed to fill her head.
By the time she got to the last step, her fur was bristling, and her heart was pounding. Her tail stood out stiffly, and her pupils were wide.
It was very dark, but details of the room slowly came into focus. It was a large furnished basement, or had been. Now every piece of furniture seemed to be broken and piled in a heap in the corner. There was a raw hole in one concrete wall, a hole that opened into a black tunnel. And the sickly-sweet smell came from piles of dung.
They were lying on the floor all around, along with giant scratch marks that had dug grooves into the tile.
The entire place looked like nothing so much as a huge animal's den.
She couldn't sense anything alive in the room.
Keller moved toward the tunnel, fast but stealthy. Ripple, freeze. Ripple, freeze. Leopards could move this way across grassland bare of cover and not be seen. But nothing jumped out to attack her.
The mouth of the tunnel was wet, the soil crumbly. Keller climbed in, still moving lightly. Water dripped from the mat of roots and earth above her. The whole thing looked ready to cave in at any moment.
He must have made it The dragon. Goddess knows how; maybe with claws. Anyway, he wasn't too fussy about it; it was meant to be a temporary thing.
The smell was just as powerful here, and the rushing sound was even clearer. There must be an underground stream-or maybe just water pipes- very close.
Come on, girl, what are you waiting for? You're a grunt, it's your job to move! Don't stand around trying to think!
It was hard to make herself go deeper and deeper into that damp and confining place. Her senses were all useless, even sight, because the bore twisted and turned so she could never see more than a few feet ahead. She was heading blind and deaf into she had no idea what. At any moment, she might reach a shaft or a side tunnel where something could attack her.