Chapter 3

Hilde and I stood in the dark alley gaping at a suit of silver plate armor with hulking shoulder pauldrons, massive gauntleted hands, gleaming boots as big as cinderblocks, and a breastplate large enough to serve as a coffee table. The armored figure lay on its back staring up at the cavern ceiling through black eye slits rimmed in crimson like bloodstained tears. A matching crimson cape lay crushed beneath the bulky body. A red brush rose from a silver holder mounted on the back of its head like a mohawk, similar to the ancient Roman centurion headdresses I’d seen in Evie’s holovids.

The silver breastplate bore a ragged puncture hole straight through the center. Fresh red blood marred the puckered crater.

Hilde wrung her hands and whispered, “Who is this?”

“Some dead guy.” I eyed the fatal wound. The armored figure didn’t move, didn’t even shift with any detectable breathing. I looked up at the sky to figure out where he’d fallen from and froze.

A grotesque figure stood three stories above us atop one of the sheet metal buildings. The looming beast looked at least nine feet tall and wore only the scraps of a black business suit. His face, neck, and upper body bore a network of puckered scars identical to the ones I’d seen on our angry visitor. His craggy brow ridge and bulging jaw created a hideous caricature of a human face, and massive yellow fangs like knives filled his gaping maw. Patches of long brown hair rose from his shoulders and ran in a thick stripe down his back, as well as down his arms like long gloves, more like a wolf’s fur than any downy human hair. His furry hands ended in wicked claws like long scalpels.

Fresh blood coated his right hand to the furry elbow. He glared at Hilde and me through predatory yellow eyes glowing with their own internal light.

“Hilde, run!” I raised my fists to square off with the monster. I had no idea what he was, but I knew he meant ugly business, and the last thing I wanted was for Hilde to be anywhere near a grisly killer.

Hilde actually darted toward me, skirting the crater holding the silver corpse which lay between us. But her movement caught the beast’s attention. He crouched and aimed straight for her.

I threw myself between them, accidentally bumping the armored dead guy with my foot.

As my foot made contact with the silver armor, I heard a female voice in my head.

I blurted out a startled, “Wha?” before the silver plate armor retracted across the body, metal plates shifting in unreasonable ways as the armor grew rapidly smaller and smaller. Even the cape and headbrush folded up as the armor flowed in tinier segments toward the figure’s right hand. As the metal and cloth retracted, it revealed a muscular blond man with a barrel chest, bulging forearms, and a pretty-boy face fixed in a stunned expression he’d probably been wearing when his heart was torn out through the ragged hole gaping in his chest. His fancy silk threads were soaked through with blood, and the first stupid thought my stunned brain could come up with was, Where’d someone in Midcity get such expensive clothes?

All this happened in the space it took the hulking nine-foot beast to lunge at me from three stories up. And as he hurtled toward me, the armor condensed down to a glowing silver scale embedded in the dead guy’s right hand. In a blur, the scale tore free from the corpse’s skin and shot toward me faster than the monster, stabbing into the back of my right hand and driving into my flesh with a flash of searing heat which cauterized the wound instantly. Agony flooded my nervous system as the superheated metal burrowed into my hand and welded straight to the bone.

As the leaping beast closed the last five feet between us and my body shrieked in ragged pain from the burning scale, I opened my mouth to scream.

And my world went pure white.

One moment I was in the alley with Hilde and the monster, and then suddenly I found myself standing in a great white expanse which rolled on endlessly in every direction. I squinted my eyes to discern a horizon, a sort of shimmering line between land and sky, but all was painted in that same shifting white which changed hue seemingly at a whim, sometimes arctic, sometimes eggshell. The sky wriggled like the squiggly dust shapes on your eyeball on a bright day.

I finally noticed I wasn’t wearing my face mask, which was frankly alarming, but after the streak of weird occurrences I couldn’t figure out where that one ranked.

“Hot dang,” said a girly voice behind me, “you are a pretty boy.”

I spun around, my boots scraping on the white ground. Was it dust? Asphalt? It felt loose and gritty, but there weren’t any particles flung around as my feet shifted.

A gorgeous beauty stood ten feet away wearing silver armor, but not like the hulking masculine suit I’d seen. This was a feminine suit of intricately-etched silver plate mail sporting pink metal roses in a loose chain at the throat, wrists, and ankles, a molded breastplate tastefully suggesting a feminine figure, and the poofiest lace skirt I’d ever seen, something like an ivory ballgown blended with a suit of armor.

The girl herself looked about eighteen, my age, with a neck like a swan, the cheekbones of a goddess, and legs for days. Her pale white skin looked softer than silk, but it was her hair that arrested my attention: pastel pink, hanging to her knees in massive spiral ringlets, and insanely dense, about three times as much hair as a normal woman could possibly grow. Her pink irises matched her hair and reflected the white sky in vibrant sparkles, almost distracting me from the fact that her pupils were white hearts instead of natural black circles.

In a completely surreal moment for me, the unnatural girl raised one ivory-gloved hand and waved cheerfully. “Hiya.”

I stared. “Am I dead? Did that thing kill me and I’m stuck in some weird afterlife?”

“No, you’re not dead,” the girl announced cheerfully. “The ogre hasn’t killed you yet. Here, look.” She waved her hand at the empty air. A shimmering white portal appeared, swirling with white mist which cleared to reveal a window back into the alley. I saw myself from an unsettling third-person perspective as I stood over the dead guy, smack dab between Hilde and the giant monster. His clawed hands reached for me, only about four feet from ripping open my chest cavity.

With more than a little annoyance I noticed a stupid look on my face, one of my eyes slightly more open than the other as I’d apparently blinked unevenly. My mouth hung open at a weird angle as I’d been halfway through blurting, “Wha?” In short, I looked like a complete idiot.

“Not real flattering,” I commented drily.

“You do look like a moron,” the unnatural girl agreed casually.

I took a closer look at the monster’s bloody claws. “That thing’s ready to tear me apart. So why am I here with you looking at this big white nothing? What is this, some kind of complicated hallucination where I watch my life flash before my eyes?”

“I guess it could be if you want it to be.” The pink girl’s eyes sparkled with mischief as she raised her hands and shimmied them back and forth. “Hot moron guy, thiiiis is your liiiife.”

Despite the weirdness of the situation, I started to feel annoyed. Maybe it was the airheaded tone of her voice. “Okay, so if you’re not a complex hallucination, what’s going on here? Am I going to die?”

“Maybe.” Her frank reply slapped me across the face, but she just shrugged. “I’ll do my best to help you not die, but actually surviving comes down to you. It’s up to each Dragoon to choose his own fate and heed my warnings. As long as you listen and do what I tell you, you’ll be fine. I never fail!” She pumped her fist in enthusiasm, her weird eyes sparkling with passion.

“So, the last dude,” I asked slowly, “the blond guy. He didn’t listen?”

She slumped in exaggerated disappointment. Her expression did actually look sad, but her over-the-top gestures looked more like a little girl’s playacting than what I’d expect from a grown woman. Then again, maybe I’d been spoiled by Hilde’s grace and Evie’s overcompensating poise.

“Jonathan did listen,” the pink girl admitted despondently. She straightened up and tapped her two pointer fingers together nervously as she studiously avoided my gaze. “He was just too inexperienced and soft to resist this particular ogre.” She abruptly snapped to attention, placing one gloved hand on her hip and pointing dramatically at me with her other hand, her pink eyes sparkling with enthusiasm. “But you, with your ferocious spirit, you’ll triumph where Jonathan failed! You, my faithful new host, will rise above and set the world ablaze until all are chanting your name—”

Her dramatic diatribe cut short as a look of sudden confusion crossed her face. She leaned sheepishly toward me and cupped one hand to her mouth to whisper loudly. “Psst, hey. Hot moron guy. What is your name?”

I gritted my teeth. Her airhead routine was wearing thin, and I’d only been trapped in this hallucination for a few minutes. “I’m Edgar. Edgar Salt. Call me Eddie.”

She nodded conspiratorially. “And you can call me Blossom.”

“Blossom, your mood swings could cause whiplash.” I turned back to the swirling portal which displayed the frozen image of myself about to be carved like a Christmas iguana.

“Okay, Blossom. Explain this to me slowly. That thing’s an ogre, right? And there’s a dead dude, Jonathan, who used to be wearing armor that retracted into a scale, the same scale now implanted into my hand.” I raised my right hand and, sure enough, there sat the silver reptilian scale embedded straight into my flesh. I picked at it but couldn’t get my fingernail under it. “You stopped time and pulled me here into this white void. Now you want me to fight and kill the ogre, a task that killed my predecessor. Have I got it so far?”

Blossom nodded, her massive pink ringlets bouncing comically. “Right on the money, Eddie.”

“And you said this scale makes me your host? Something called a Dragoon?”

“Right again.” She nodded cheerfully, clasping her hands behind her back and swishing her skirt back and forth. She looked like a restless toddler. “I chose you as my new bearer. You’ll get a crap ton of strength and powers, but that’ll come later when you unlock them. For now you’ll get a couple weapons and some protective attributes to help you fight better. Are you used to fighting?”

“Let’s just say I’ve taken back a few kids’ dolls from bullies, loosened a few teeth, dusted a few punks. Saved my buddy Johnny from a beatdown once. Rarely put anyone in the hospital, though, and I haven’t killed anyone.”

“Oh.” She looked deflated, but her cheerful swishing started up again after a moment. “That’s okay. Carnage is my specialty. Leave it to me, I’ll teach you to carve a bloody swath this world will never forget.”

Her cheerful demeanor and innocent expression as she said the words jarred me. I wondered if she had a handful of screws loose. “Where are we, Blossom? And who are you, really?”

She smiled happily at me. “I live inside the armor, sort of its guardian.”

“Like a magical spirit, or like an AI?”

“Umm.” She tapped a finger on her chin as she gazed thoughtfully up at the sky.

“You don’t know?”

“It’s been a long time!” she barked defensively. “I probably know. Does it matter? I’m here to teach you, that’s all I need to remember!” She pointed at me again in her dramatic pose, the crazed gleam back in her eye. “Heed my guidance, Dragoon Eddie, and no foe shall stand before you!”

“Uh huh. And where are we now?”

“We’re inside your brain, in the place where we connect. Time looks like it’s standing still because your neural connections are so rapid. We could probably stay here for a perceived year before that ogre reaches you.”

“You’re going to keep me here with you for a year while you teach me?”

“No way,” Blossom spat with disgust. “That’d be wretchedly boring. No, I’m sending you back now and you’ll learn as we go. Much more fun that way.”

My eyes bugged out. “You aren’t going to teach me at all? You’re throwing me to the wolves?”

“Not wolves,” she scolded, shaking her finger at me. “Ogre. Haven’t you been paying attention, Eddie?”

“You’re a freaking bloodthirsty psycho!”

“No time for compliments,” she said. “There’ll be ample time to fall in love with me later. Everyone does, I’m just irresistible that way.” She placed her gloved hands on her face as her cheeks blushed. “A fair maiden like myself is just too tempting for such hot-blooded young men.”

“You’re not my type. Besides, I’ve kind of got someone else in mind.”

“That’s okay, I’m not the jealous type. Just keep that in mind when you fall for me, Eddie.”

“I’m not gonna—”

“Hold that thought,” she said cheerfully. “I’m sending you back. Oh, the first transformation hurts pretty bad. Try to endure it. After that it’s all easy as pie! Well, except for fighting for your life with a magical suit you’ve never used before, with new weapons you’ve never seen…” She grimaced, then caught herself and smiled, big and insincere. “You know what? You’ll be fine. Yeah, you’ll be fine.”

“You’re not even the least bit reassuring, Blossom. You know that?”

“Relax, Eddie,” she said as she raised her right hand. “You don’t need reassurance when you’ve got me. Just lay back and let the Princess of Carnage rain gore from the sky.” She snapped her gloved fingers with a resounding crack that echoed across the white world.

“Princess of—” The words blurted from my mouth as I found myself back in the alley. The searing pain in my right hand screeched a riot of agony. I could smell the coppery blood on Jonathan’s corpse at my feet. In slow motion I watched the ogre hurtle through the air at me, his claws reaching like scalpels to slice open my chest, his huge jaw flexing as he strained to shred me with his fangs.

Hilde screamed my name.

The searing pain in my hand erupted across my entire body. I shrieked as hot metal plates cascaded outward from the scale, clicking into place at lightning speed as they spread across my entire body. Soon my arm was enveloped in a gauntlet and bracer, then a massive pauldron sprouted on my shoulder. The breastplate came next, along with the helm which covered my face and left me suddenly blind. The eye slits appeared and my vision cleared. In fact, the entire helm was invisible from the inside and did not block my vision in the slightest. The cape flowed down my back as my breastplate finished and greaves appeared, encasing me from head to toe in gleaming silver armor.

The head brush popped up with a boing sound.

Blossom’s voice rang in my head with crystal clarity. In my vision, a ghostly outline of my own arms appeared approximately where she wanted them to be. As time slowly sped up, I did as she bid, dragging my slow limbs into a rough X and lining them up with the ghostly outlines.

The ogre smashed into me like an oncoming train. His wicked claws scraped on my bracers, throwing sparks and filling the alley with a burnt metallic stink. The impact hurled me backward off my feet and we rolled together, narrowly missing Hilde with such tremendous force that we would have smeared her across the asphalt. The ogre and I smashed into a metal wall and rebounded, landing again on the road with him on top of me.

He raked my raised forearms with his claws, throwing more metallic sparks, until I grabbed his wrists in a vicelike grip more powerful than I remembered being able to produce. That just seemed to enrage him, as he leaned down with his maw gaping wide and strained to sink his giant yellow teeth into my shoulder. His breath, like rotten tuna, gagged me as ropes of his saliva splattered across my helmet. I wondered how I could possibly smell through the mask, then desperately wished I couldn’t as his body odor hit me. He reeked like barbecued cinnamon, which sounds good until you contemplate someone soaking fifty pounds of the stuff in gasoline and lighting it with a torch made from burnt hair.

I fought desperately against his titanic strength, raising my knee to shove against his chest and keep his snapping jaws from closing on my body. His fangs scraped my enchanted armor as he pressed down upon me with all his considerable body weight.

“Blossom,” I yelled, “didn’t you say I’d get weapons?”

she said with a flippancy that seared my nerves.

“How do you suggest I accomplish that?”

I glanced down and saw a ghostly outline of where my foot should be, about ten inches higher up his torso than where my knee sat. As his flashing teeth scraped my pauldron and his mighty arms strained against my augmented grip, I twisted my arms and slid my foot up his body, then kicked as hard as I could.

The ogre grunted as I somersaulted him up and off of me. I heard him crash into a metal wall behind me as I leaped to my feet and spun around.

“Weapons?” I howled. I had no idea if anyone outside the helmet could hear me, but at the moment I couldn’t afford to care if Hilde saw me lose my cool. I had an ogre to defeat. The tenacious monster was already rolling to his belly and rising into a pouncing position with his glowing angry eyes fixed dead on me, his nostrils flaring as he snarled in rage.

I did as she ordered, making fists with my hands and yanking them down several inches. To my utter shock, two gleaming silver blades sprang from the air and appeared in my hands. Red leather wrapped the thin hilts and provided a textured grip. From the top of the hilt, the blade began as a bulging crescent guard which swept forward and held a polished ruby orb hovering inexplicably along its backside through no connecting bonds I could see. The guard rose into a curved blade about two feet long, so each sword was about three feet in total.

Ghostly arms swirled in front of me, flicking their spectral blades back and forth in a rapid sequence almost too fast for me to follow. I did my best to copy the sequence as the ogre kicked off with his hind leg and pounced at me with his claws slashing.

I made the first block just in time. The ogre’s claws scraped against my blades and drew more sparks. Instead of barreling into me like last time, he pulled up short and stood on his hind legs. At nine feet tall, he towered over me, and his brutal slashes rained down on me in a waterfall of jarring blows. The second, third, and fourth block patterns Blossom displayed for me went easier than the first, and I felt myself building a rhythm. Our blows slammed together with echoing thunderclaps, and the breeze running through the alley flared my scarlet cape.

I got cocky and missed the fifth block. The ogre’s meaty fist slipped past my sword just before I got it into place, and instead of deflecting the blow with my blade I took it to the face. My helmet rang like a gong. The impact hurled me to the asphalt where I rebounded with a hard smack.

I obeyed just a second before the ogre’s massive foot crashed down where I’d fallen, leaving an impact crater of radiating spiderwebs in the alley’s pavement.

Blossom’s next guide showed me leaping to my feet, but as I tried to follow it, the ogre kicked me in the chest and sent me flying into a nearby sheet metal wall. The wall pinged as I dented it with my flopping body, and more sparks flew as I scraped down the wall to collapse on the ground. My breath left me in a whoosh, and my two silver blades flew from my suddenly nerveless fingers. The silver breastplate was dented in around my chest and made it hard to draw a full breath.

Blossom demanded.

I growled and rose to my knees, but the ogre suddenly towered over me. He kneed me in the helmet as I looked up at him, sending my head hurtling back into the metal wall. My ears filled with the ringing gong again, and my neck ached at the blow. I sat gasping for breath and struggled to raise my head.

The ogre drove his clawed fingers through my damaged breastplate, tore a burning hole through the center of my chest, drove out the back of the armor, and pierced the wall behind me. Blood gushed from both my entry and exit wounds. The ogre leered at me up close, his burnt cinnamon stink filling my nostrils. I sucked at the rancid air but couldn’t draw a full breath. It felt like the air was running out through a hole somewhere, and I knew his claws had torn open at least one of my lungs.

The ogre ripped his hand from my broken body, the same bloody hand he’d used to kill Jonathan. He stood grinning at me like a wolf with his sharp yellow teeth.

“Eddie!” Hilde shrieked. She stood just twenty feet away, looking stricken and scared but refusing to run. I wanted to shout at her to get away, to leave me, but I couldn’t suck enough air even to wheeze.

The ogre turned toward her.

I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t stand, but I reached down inside myself and found the strength to flop forward and wrap my hand around his ankle. My armored grip had been tremendously strong before, and a scrap of that mystic strength remained even as I bled out. I crushed his ankle as hard as I could, forming a vice to keep him trapped in place and buy Hilde as many extra seconds as I could to get it through her head that she couldn’t save me, that she needed to save herself.

The hulking brute turned stomped on my head. My neck screamed and my skull filled with a throbbing agony as he stomped me into the pavement, but I refused to let go.

The ogre kicked me again. The blow finally broke my grip and sent me hurtling into the steel wall once more. I slid down like a ragdoll until I sat on my butt.

I knew I was done. I couldn’t do more than twitch my fingers as I watched him raise his bloody hand to impale me again.

A woman leaped down from the rooftop behind the ogre and landed just a few feet away, her long black trench coat fluttering in the light breeze. She wore no lower face mask, which was unheard of in Midcity. The only cloth on her face was a thin black strip with holes for her slanted black eyes. Her raptor’s glare was sharp enough to cut flesh. Her belt-length black hair swayed like a heavy curtain down her back as she whipped open her trench coat, revealing a full-body suit of black leather armor and a wide leather gunbelt slung across her athletic hips. She drew iron in a flash, the first gun I’d ever seen in my life. The nickel-plated pistol gleaming in Atomic Eats’ wan porchlight looked hulking in the slender woman’s delicate little hand.

She fired four rounds straight into the ogre’s back. The shots crashed like thunder, punching into my battered ears. Her four bullets tore through his flesh, shredded his thick torso, and blew out the front of his hairy chest, splattering stinking blood all over me, then slammed into the metal wall and punched straight through into the building I sat slumped against. In my dimming brain I hoped no one inside the building had been hit by the bullets.

The ogre screamed, arching his back in agony. The move sent more of his blood gushing over me. He turned to the smaller woman with his claws raised.

But her hand flashed inside her trench coat once more. She drew out a footlong golden rod, and with a snap of her wrist, a telescoping blade shot from the end to form a long curved sword with no guard. The tiny woman beheaded the ogre with a speed I couldn’t have hoped to match, her strike so fast that his head stayed resting on his neck as he staggered about the alley. He bumped into the steel wall and fell over sideways, and only then did his head roll away into the darkness.

The masked warrior knelt in front of me. “I am sorry, Jonathan. I was not swift enough to save you.” She spoke softly but surely, her plump pink lips forming the words with crisp enunciation.

I wanted to get my helmet off, to show her she was wrong. The armor reacted to my desire and retracted with blurring speed as the segments ratcheted away, dwindling faster and faster until only the silver scale remained on the back of my right hand. My dropped swords also vanished. I looked at the mysterious woman and did my best to maintain eye contact, but my vision was blurring. I thought she looked startled.

“You are not Jonathan,” she stated flatly.

Yeah, no kidding. I flopped my head to my right to indicate her friend’s corpse. She followed the gesture and spotted the blond dead guy lying in the circle of light beside Hilde.

Hilde.

I stared at the quivering bombshell. Her face was twisted up in anguish, and with the ogre dead and the newcomer making no hostile moves, Hilde ran to me. She dropped to her knees and cradled my ravaged body against her breast. My stupid brain tried to protest with some inane worry I’d smear blood on her blue blouse, but I was weaker than a newborn kitten.

Hilde clutched me to her warm body and sobbed. “Eddie! Don’t die!”

“His wounds are fatal.” The warrior woman’s relentless eyes scanned my body as she pronounced the sentence. “There is nothing to be done. He has one minute at most. You have my condolences, both of you.” She rose to her feet and stepped away toward Jonathan’s corpse.

Hilde’s warm body shook with sobs as she held me. I tried to enjoy the sensation of her softness, her comforting scent like clean cotton and flowers, but my mind was fading. I couldn’t even be afraid, I just felt vague and exhausted.

Hilde tried to remove her protective face mask to speak with me, but I managed to raise a trembling hand just in time to stop her from yanking it down. It took all my strength to do it, and her eyes overflowed as she watched me shake my head.

As Hilde’s tears dripped onto my face, I fought the urge to go quietly. I can’t die, I thought. I can’t leave her this way. She has enough agony to deal with. I’d caught her in unguarded moments over the years as we grew up together, when she’d she let a careless word slip, and I’d seen the real expression she kept hidden away under her smiles. I knew she suffered. And I knew my death would add to it.

“You can’t go,” she begged. “You can’t leave me, too.”

Blinding light erupted from Hilde’s hands where they clasped my body. My hazy eyes widened in surprise as the brilliant light shoved through the growing fog and seized me with shock and terror. Not knowing what was happening, I tried to move but only succeeded in one weak twitch.

Hilde gasped, just as afraid as me. Orange light built inside her hands until they erupted into flames which rimmed her hands and guttered in the light breeze, filling the alley with twisting light.

The dark woman spun about like a startled cat, her hand clutching her two weapons as Hilde’s orange flames danced in her dark eagle eyes.

The flames didn’t torch my clothes or barbecue my skin, but I could feel their warmth radiating from where she held me. And then the flames pushed through her hands and into my body. I felt them burn along my nerve endings and sear through my veins like liquid fire. The flames entered my heart, roasting it, and from there they spread to every inch of my body.

Now I did twitch and jitter in Hilde’s arms, the flames giving new life to my slack body as my nerves fired reflexively.

It didn’t really hurt. I mean, it felt like molten lead was searing through every inch of my physical being, and my body spasmed as the flames took total control and left me a passive participant in my own existence, but that’s different from the ragged agony I’d expected from being burned alive. It felt more…itchy. My chest itched, my lungs itched, my back itched. Everywhere I’d been injured felt like the world’s fuzziest fire ants were biting and tapdancing.

Through it all, Hilde held me clasped tight against her body as her flames poured into me. I don’t know what she saw or felt from the outside, but she never let me go.

Suddenly, the light winked out. The flames disappeared. My body cooled in a moment, and I had control again. I sucked in a deep breath and my lungs filled with the sweetest air I’d ever tasted. I felt lightheaded but the pain was completely gone and I felt better than I had in months. Even the soreness in my shoulders and feet from standing at the stove cooking all day had disappeared.

“Eddie?” Hilde gasped. “Wh-what…”

As much as I hated separating from her, I eased her gently aside and sat up. She didn’t resist, but let her hands drop away from me as she stared at me in shock. I pressed my fingertips experimentally to my chest and found a gaping hole in my shirt with whole flesh beneath, just a small puckered circle of scar tissue already smooth and faded to white.

“Hilde, what did you do?”

“I-I… I don’t know…” Hilde looked like she couldn’t decide if she was relieved or horrified. She knelt beside me in the dark alley and kept looking back and forth between my face and her raised hands. “What’s happening, Eddie?”

The fear in her voice struck at my heart, but before I could respond, the dark woman answered from where she stood just ten feet away. “You both need to come with me.”

Hilde looked up at the masked woman, masked in the wrong sense with only her eyes covered and not her mouth, and who still clutched both her weapons. My shaken friend was too shocked to react to the ominous situation. I crawled up to squat on my haunches between the woman and Hilde. I was still too weak to stand but at least my body could shield Hilde if the newcomer got any violent ideas.

Blossom must have sensed my trepidation because she snickered in my mind.

I didn’t know how to respond without speaking out loud, and I didn’t want Hilde to think I was crazy, so I just frowned skeptically.

The dark woman raised her left hand and spoke into a small box strapped to her wrist. “I need pickup for one friendly corpse and two candidates.”

“Copy that,” a husky female voice answered through the device. No questions, no “What do you mean you have a corpse?” Just matter-of-fact. Who are these people?

The woman lowered her hand and stowed her weapons away on her belt, then leaned down and picked up Jonathan around the waist. He must have weighed close to two hundred pounds but she hefted him like he was made of feathers and slung him over her shoulder, though not irreverently.

“We’re not going anywhere until we get some answers.” I glared at her from my haunches. I suspected she’d see right through my bluster, but I wanted her to know I’d be as difficult as possible if she tried to snatch us.

She didn’t seem to care, because she strode over and seized my upper arm, dragged me to my feet, and hauled me down the alley at a brisk pace. I stumbled along beside her, and when my flimsy feet slid out from under me, she simply held me upright as she walked as if she weren’t already hauling Jonathan’s corpse.

“What the hell are you?” I demanded, though even anger couldn’t wipe the awe from my voice.

“This is not the place for answers,” she told me. “Those gunshots will draw attention, as will the ogre’s corpse. I will take you someplace where you can ask your questions.” She spoke over her shoulder to Hilde. “He is the new Silver Dragoon, so I am taking him away with me. I suggest you follow if you do not want your flames to consume you.”

I glanced back to see Hilde frozen in place. Voices rang out from the buildings all around us as people poked their noses outside to see what was going on. The entire fight had only taken maybe thirty seconds, and thirty more for Hilde to heal me. Pop and Evie hadn’t even had time to come outside yet. It was hard to believe one minute had changed our lives so completely.

As the dark woman dragged me down the alley toward the street, Hilde hurried after us. I wasn’t sure if I was glad or terrified to see her following me into unknown danger.

The masked woman got us out to the street where a hovervan waited. The van’s side bore a painted mural of a female wizard in a bikini battling a dragon in outer space. A mature woman, probably thirty and dressed in a stylish red leather jacket with a low-cut white blouse and white leather pants, opened the driver’s door and swung her long voluptuous legs into view. Her fancy high heels didn’t impede her in the slightest as she hurried to the rear doors and popped them open.

I tried to resist the dark woman as she shoved me into the van, but my best attempts were like a feeble breeze against a marble statue.

I fell on my butt inside the vehicle. I tried to get up, but the stylish woman leaned over me. Her blouse spilled open, giving me a distracting look at her generous cleavage. Against my own will, I slowed my protesting movements, and she smiled as if she understood exactly what effect she was having on me. Her long brown curls rolled over her shoulders as she leaned over me. She also wore no lower face mask, which confused me. She didn’t leer, and she didn’t look predatory, she just knew she was beautiful and used it to maximum effect to disarm me. I finally tore my gaze away from her most potent weapons of pacification and looked up into her rich brown eyes.

She smiled, and her kind expression disarmed me on a whole new level until I almost, almost forgot she was kidnapping me.

There was something hauntingly familiar about her. I found a whisper tumbling from my lips before I knew I meant to speak. “Why do I know your face?”

“I’m Mia,” she whispered in her gentle, husky voice. “I promise I won’t let anything bad happen to you.” She winked and raised one finger across her lips to shush me, then stood back to let Hilde climb inside. My friend hopped in and immediately put her hand on my chest to feel the unbroken skin for herself.

Mia closed the van doors behind us and plunged us into moderate darkness lit only by some orange running lights inside the boxy back of the van. The front area with the driver was sealed off by a metal wall. Loud thumps rang out as the two women loaded what I guessed was Jonathan’s body into the forward compartment.

“You’re really okay?” Hilde asked in a shaky voice.

I nodded as the van rumbled to life beneath us. “What did you do?”

“I don’t know!” The admission burst from her mouth as tears sprang to her eyes. “I don’t know what’s happening, Eddie. Who are these people? What was that monster?”

The hovervan shook as we took off, and the two of us slid around for a moment. I pressed myself up against one wall and Hilde scooted over to the other side to face me with her knees drawn up to her chest.

I raised my right hand with the back toward her, showing her the scale. “I got implanted with this armor. There’s a crazy chick living inside it, and she says that monster was called an ogre.”

“A crazy chick?” Hilde searched my face with her eyes. “That beast had the same outfit and scars as the creepy restaurant guy who threatened us. These things don’t make sense, Eddie. What happened to me? What was that fire? The flames did what I wanted, they went in and found your hurts and healed you. I could feel your injuries as if they were my own. I could feel your whole body.”

I blushed at the thought. “That masked fighter said we’re going to a place where we can get answers.”

“What if it’s an act? People can pretend to be one way and only reveal their true nature when it’s too late.”

Despite the seriousness of our situation, it hurt my heart to hear someone as sweet as Hilde say that. I knew why she held such beliefs, though, and knowing made it worse.

“I feel the same way, but there’s not much we can do. I’m too weak right now to fight them off. Can you control your…” I searched for the right word. “Your powers, enough to use them to fight?”

“I don’t think so,” she admitted, biting her lip.

I sighed and leaned my head back against the vibrating van wall. “When we stop, we’ll find out what they really want. If it looks ugly I can try to transform back into my armor and buy you time to escape. If things get bad, just leave me behind, okay?”

“I can’t do that. You and your family, you’re all I have. I can’t abandon you if they’re going to hurt you.”

“You have to. That warrior woman killed the ogre like it was nothing. And she had a gun, Hilde. A real gun. Even with my strength and your powers, I don’t know that we have much of a shot if they turn hostile. If it gets ugly, and you see a chance to run, take it and don’t look back.”

We plunged into silence, sitting together with our growing fear as the van rattled and shook on its way to a destination I couldn’t guess.