There was no scent around this area; Josh and I both checked unobtrusively. There hadn't been any contact between what had swept this family away and any of the objects left behind. "We got something!" Someone shouted just north of us. Josh grabbed my arm and hauled me in that direction. Something turned out to be a small blanket that looked as if it had been carried for years—the kind a child might refuse to turn loose of at night, though it was full of holes and should have been tossed long ago. It also held the stench; the one Josh and I both recognized yards before we reached the scene.
"Going north," I muttered to Josh, who nodded slightly at my side. Someone was saying the blanket looked as if it had been dropped from the sky. There were no footprints, paw prints, claw prints, hoof prints—nothing anywhere around. No beach grasses or plants had been disturbed; the blanket had just magically appeared there. I drew in a huge breath.
"What is it?" Josh demanded, pulling me over to the side so he could talk without being overheard.
"Nobody ever sees anything, do they?" I asked urgently.
"No. Nobody has seen anything. It's like one minute they're there, the next they're not."
"What will people think if you leave for a while?" I asked.
"I'll just say I'm following a lead; they've got more than enough here," he muttered and walked away. I watched him as he talked to somebody who looked to be in charge while the winds off the ocean whipped hair into our faces. The man Josh spoke with looked grim, but he'd looked grim before Josh approached him. The man nodded and Josh walked back to me. "We can go," he said. We made our way over loose, warm sand toward Josh's vehicle.
"Just get us out of sight; somewhere we can leave this thing behind," I said, meaning the hovercar. Josh nodded, started the thing up and off we went. We traveled two miles north of the crime scene before Josh parked at a lookout over a particularly pretty stretch of beach. There were people below us, either lying in the sun or playing in the water. I sighed.
"Are you afraid of heights?" I asked.
"Not particularly," Josh said.
"Well, Agent Joshua Billings," I said, patting his shoulder, "prepare to be airborne." I turned both of us to mist and followed the coastline, paying special attention to the higher cliff areas. Twenty miles north of the last crime scene, I caught the briefest whiff of stench and zoned in on that.
Have you ever gone looking for something, thinking it might be one thing, and when you find it, discover that it is so much worse than you'd imagined? I remember once when Don and I had a couple of cats, we'd installed a pet door so they could come and go as they pleased. One day when I was cleaning, I caught a whiff of what might have been a mouse decomposing. Thinking the cats had brought one in and left it in the house; I started moving furniture until I found what I was looking for. It wasn't a mouse. It was a snake. Dead, thankfully, but a snake, and a poisonous one on top of that. What Josh and I found was something out of nightmares.
A huge nest was situated atop a rocky cliff, built of tree limbs, grasses and anything else available. Some of those tree limbs were thicker than my arm. What lived in that huge nest, though, was the frightening thing. They looked like evil pterodactyls. There were two of them inside the nest and each was larger than an ultralight aircraft. I could feel Josh's impatience as we misted over the nest. It had to be twenty feet in diameter and the two creatures inside were the source of the stench, along with the regurgitated bones littering the nest itself. The nestlings were curled up and sleeping after a nice meal of a man, a woman and their six-year-old daughter.
I misted Josh downwind and dropped him on the ground, materializing right beside him. He was cursing softly and hauling out his communicator.
"Not yet," I put a hand over his. "Those are the babies. The parents are still out there somewhere and we don't need to blow this." Under other circumstances, I would never have called them, but I needed help and knowledgeable help on top of that. Griffin—Pheligar, can you hear me? I sent, praying that they could.
I hear you, baby, Griffin came in loud and clear. Pheligar's assent was right behind Griffin's.
We have some terrible creatures, here, and they're eating people, I sent. Please come and look before I try to kill them.
Griffin and Pheligar were beside me in seconds, frightening Josh half to death. He was used to the extraordinary, but he wasn't prepared for an eight and a half foot blue Larentii who fed on sunlight.
Pheligar was the one who transported us nearer the nest—he shielded us, somehow. "Flakkar," Griffin muttered.
"Yes," Pheligar nodded slightly at Griffin's assessment.
"Flakkar?" Josh was still quaking from Griffin and Pheligar's sudden appearance, but he kept his wits about him enough to ask good questions.
"Giant, flesh-eating, flying reptiles. They bend light around themselves, effectively hiding from any observer," Griffin muttered. "And they have a heavy shield that defies most tracking methods and mutes sounds. The only warning you have is their stench. They are next to impossible to locate."
"I am concerned over how they arrived. Flakkar do not have the ability to transport themselves across the universe," Pheligar observed, frowning at the sleeping young inside the nest.
"Somebody imported those things?" Josh was about to hyperventilate."That's exactly what happened," Griffin looked grim. He sent out mindspeech, I guess, because Pheligar's shielded space became crowded quickly. Dragon and Crane arrived, with Adam, Kiarra and Kyler.
"Why don't you let me take care of this?" Kyler stared at the Flakkar.
"Because you will release their particles," Griffin held Kyler off. "Agent Billings here would like bodies and evidence to show to his colleagues." Josh nodded rapidly at Griffin's assessment.
"I'll do it," I said. "We just have to wait for Mom and Pop to get here."
"Get them right behind the head, their necks are thinnest at that point," Dragon was at my side and offering instructions. I didn't think the little ones were going to be a problem; it was the bigger ones that concerned me. I nodded up at Dragon. He grinned and hugged me. "My sons are worried," he leaned down to whisper in my ear.
"Uh-huh," I whispered right back. "About what?"
"That you might not come home," he said, hugging me and kissing the top of my head. Dragon was saying home as if I belonged there or something.
Mom and Pop Flakkar came home right about then, letting their light-bending shields down. They clutched a large cow in each gigantic claw. I'd seen the vibration of the air around them when they first came in, besides smelling the additional stench. I'm going, I sent to the others and misted outside Pheligar's shield.
Papa Flakkar was the first to go, but maybe I should have gotten mama first. She was shrieking and flapping, causing quite a stir. And the babies? They weren't nice either. It was going to be a trick, getting close enough to take heads; the whole nest was boiling with Flakkar. I was fine, getting a good shot at one of the young, but the minute I got one of her kids, mama kicked into a higher gear, thrashing, snapping and clawing like a three-dimensional buzz saw. When I saw my chance at her, I took it, but as my hands and claws materialized to sever her spine, her remaining child got in a blow of his own. I was shrieking in pain after mama's head was separated from her body, and that's when somebody else stepped in. Baby Flakkar's body disintegrated into tiny sparks that winked out as they floated away. I was standing in the middle of the nest, hugging my arm to me; it was bleeding all over the place. My flesh had been sliced to the bone.
"We'll take care of this," Karzac was beside me, as was Pheligar, Renegar, another Larentii I didn't recognize and at least three healers. It didn't matter; I fainted in less than two seconds.
Chapter 11
"Did you see this?" Flavio handed the microcomputer to Gavin and Tony. The screen displayed the image of an FBI agent, standing beside three large corpses.
"They look like dinosaurs," Tony muttered in disbelief. "Flying dinosaurs."
"The forensic specialists are not releasing particulars," Flavio said. "However, the Larentii say these were brought here from another world. If these hadn't been found, they would have continued to feed off the population. The nest was shielded in some way unless you came very close to it; I'm not sure how that was accomplished. Lissa stayed behind and killed those things, although the authorities are taking credit for eliminating them."
"I still don't remember her," Tony said, sorting through the photographs and text on the small computer.
"None of us remember," Flavio shook his head. "Although Wlodek's memories of her are very clear, now. He wasn't surprised in the least that she was able to do what she did." Gavin didn't comment; he wanted to leave.
* * *
"We can feed you soup," Drake was sitting beside my bed and grinning at me when I woke. I slapped a hand over my face.
"Please don't feed me anything," I muttered through my fingers.
"Tummy upset?" A hand started rubbing my abdomen from the other side, and I found Drew lounging on the bed beside me when I turned my head.
"Who said you could get in my bed?" I asked. Drew gave me a lazy, heart-squeezing smile.
"We did," both said at the same time. Drew hadn't stopped rubbing my belly, either. And just like the lazy lizard I was, I enjoyed it. Those guys weren't hard to look at. Uh-uh. Not hard at all. "I feel like a cougar," I said, closing my eyes in pleasure.
"You're not. Dad says you're officially forty-nine years, eleven months and eight days old. We're a hundred and one. Way older than you, itty bitty pants." Drake was now scooting in on my other side.
"Itty bitty pants?" I frowned at him as he settled on the bed beside me. "Who taught you English?"
"We had a tutor," Drake leaned in to kiss me. "And then we went to college," he kissed me again. "Want to see our resumes and statements of net worth? Grampa Adam takes care of our investments."