The Slayers Three prologue

(Proof that the book is at least started–although this hasn’t been grammarfied at all.)

 

Prologue

You should never make promises you can’t keep.

 

Fourteen years ago

 

Alastair Bartholomew was about to make a deal with the devil, or at least a deal with his father—which felt like the same thing. Alastair hadn’t even asked for the loan yet, but he knew there would be a price to pay, a little bit of his soul thrown in with the bargain.

He glanced over the maps, brochures, and realtor flyers he’d spread over his kitchen table. Buying land was the first step to building the Slayer training ground. He’d been looking at properties for the last six months.  A stack of construction bids for cabins, stables, an indoor rifle range, and a cafeteria sat next to the brochures. He would also need money for research. He not only had to figure out what sort of electric pulse a dragon’s heart put out, he would need to build a machine to replicate it. There were so many expenses.

Alastair turned his attention to the maps of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. Was seclusion more important in a campsite or accessibility to the DC area? The closer his camp was to DC, the more expensive the land would be.

Shirley, his wife, had put their two year old daughter, Bess into her favorite white pajamas and was now patiently waiting for the toddler to finish her bottle.

Even at two years old, it was a battle of the wills.

“Aren’t you done yet?” Shirley cooed. “It’s time for a story and then bed.”

Bess regarded her mother while taking slow sips of her bottle. In her fuzzy white footie pajamas, she always reminded Alastair of a baby polar bear. Bess’s hair was a wild disarray of curls. Her blue eyes were much too alert for this time of night.

Shirley bent lower to be on Bess’s level. “Don’t you think it’s time for your bottle to go bye-bye? You’re a big girl now. Big girls use sippy cups.”

Bess popped the bottle out of her mouth. “No,” she said, “Ba-ba mine.” Then she inserted the bottle back in her mouth.

Shirley sighed, checked the kitchen clock, and turned to her husband. “I’d better put her to B-E-D before you know who comes, or we’ll never get her to sleep.”

Bess let the bottle drop from her mouth. Her eyes lit up with happiness. “Ice cweam twuck!” she exclaimed, and toddled fast-pace to the front door.

Instead of going after her, Shirley narrowed her eyes at Alastair. “How come every time I use the term ‘you know who’ Bess thinks I’m talking about an ice cream truck?”

Alastair kept his gaze firmly on the stack of septic tank bids in front of him. “I have no idea.”

Shirley put one hand on her hip. “You know you shouldn’t feed Bess ice cream. She won’t eat healthy food if you give her junk food.”

The doorbell rang, saving Alastair from further discussion of what he and Bess did while Shirley was gone. “That’s probably my father,” Alastair announced and went to the front room. Bess was already on her tippy-toes doing her utmost to get around the child-proof handle on the doorknob. She loved opening doors. Unfortunately, she also loved running outside and shedding her clothes on the sidewalk.

Alastair opened the door. His father—Roderick Bartholomew to people who knew him in the states—stood there, hands thrust into his jacket pocket. Years of ranch work had given Alastair’s father a lean, muscled build that was only now giving way to the softness of middle-age. He had always had a stern expression and the lines in his face had grown increasingly deeper in the years since they’d fled St. Helena.  Alastair never asked how often his father thought of Nathan. Alastair knew his father thought of him every day, the evidence was there in the grooves of his father’s face.

Now that Alastair had a child of his own, he understood the force of that emotion even more completely. You didn’t forget it when someone killed your child.

Bess saw her grandpa and lifted her small hands up in glee. “Bampa!”

The sternness on Roderick’s face melted. He bent down and swooped Bess into his arms. “How’s my princess?” He snuggled his face into her neck, a move that always made Bess shriek with laughter. After he’d extracted enough shrieks to ensure that Bess wouldn’t sleep any time in the near future, Roderick carried her into the living room and sat down on the couch with Bess on his lap. She immediately began rifling through his pockets to see if she could extract treasures such as keys, pens, or lint.  Alastair and Shirley sat down on the adjoining loveseat.

“So,” Roderick said, “You want a loan.” He was always one to get right to the point.

No one would have known by looking at Roderick’s plain clothes and worn jacket that he was a wealthy man. His businesses—some of which he discussed with Alastair, some of which he didn’t—were quite successful. Roderick had a talent for making money, perhaps because he didn’t let things like rules, laws, or ethics stand in his way.

“I need a loan for the Slayer camp,” Alastair clarified. He stayed away from his father’s money for the most part. Any time his father paid for something—usually lavish gifts for Bess—Alastair felt vaguely like he was condoning insider trading.  He had only decided to ask for his father’s help because there was nowhere else to turn. He could get a bank loan that would cover the price of land and a few cabins, but he couldn’t very well explain to financial institutions that he also needed to build a second specialized camp that would serve as a secret training ground. “It’s our best way to stop Overdrake,” Alastair told his father. “When he attacks DC, we’ll have a group of Slayers who are capable of killing his dragons.”

Alastair had mentioned his idea of a training camp to his father before. He’d never asked for funding until now though. He felt the weight of his request. It would take millions of dollars to get the camps functional, and who knew how long it would take for the regular camp to start returning the investment.

Roderick didn’t speak for a moment. Alastair was used to his father’s silences. He waited.

“You only know where one Slayer child is,” Roderick finally said. “One. And that’s Bess. How can you build an entire camp on the hope that more Slayer kids will somehow find their way to it?”

“It’ll be a dragon slayer themed camp,” Alastair pointed out. “The right children will be drawn to it.”

Bess had pulled a penny from her grandfather’s pocket. He took it from her before she could see how it tasted. “They’ll be drawn to it?  That’s a long shot, and you know it.”

Shirley and Alastair exchanged a glance. “I’ll show him,” Shirley said.  She walked out of the room. A minute later she came back with a bag of stuffed animals.

She sat down in front of Bess and took out a cat. “What’s this?”

Bess dropped the pen she had just liberated from her grandpa’s jacket and glanced at the cat. “Ki-ki.”

“That’s kitty,” Shirley interpreted for Roderick. She pulled a stuffed dog from the bag. “What’s this?”

Instead of answering, Bess made barking noises, jumping on the couch with each bark.

“Right. A doggy.” Shirley reached into the bag again. “What’s this?” She slowly took out a stuffed dragon.

Bess stiffened and scowled. “Bad dwagon!” She slid from the couch, grabbed the toy and flung it on the floor. “No, no!” she yelled and jumped on the toy several times.

Roderick watched, his mouth slightly ajar. “You taught her to do that.”

“We didn’t,” Shirley said. “You should see what she did to the fairy tale picture books I checked out of the library. I didn’t realize they had pictures of dragons in them until it was too late.” She shook her head at the thought. “I had to pay the library thirty six dollars to replace them.”

Bess stepped off the toy and watched it, seemingly checking it for signs of life. She waved a scolding finger at the smashed animal. “No, no, bad dwagon!”

Alastair regarded his daughter with a sense of resignation. “I have to keep all my dragon research books on high shelves. Otherwise I’m afraid she’ll impale them.”

Satisfied that her dragon toy would not be bothering the family again, Bess picked up the stuffed animal, trotted across the room to a garbage can, and dropped the toy inside.  “All bedder!” she chimed and padded back over to the others. She tried unsuccessfully to climb onto the couch by herself until Roderick picked her up and put her on his lap again. “Conquering dragons before you’re potty trained, eh princess?”

“All bedder!” she said again.

It wasn’t all better. Alastair couldn’t stand the thought of his daughter ever seeing, let alone fighting, a real dragon. And yet, that’s what he was planning. That’s what he was asking his father to give him a loan for.

Alastair did what he always did when those thoughts emerged in his mind. He pushed them away. He had time until the dragons attacked. Fifteen to twenty years. He would find and train so many Slayers, his daughter would only bare a small portion of the danger.

“Slayers are natural dragon fighters,” Alastair reminded his father. “Any Slayer children in the area will want to come to camp. My goal is to have the regular facilities open in three years. That way when the Slayer children are old enough to go to camps, mine will already be well established. I’ll offer scholarships for families who can’t afford the cost. We’ll find and train all of the Slayers.”

Roderick turned his attention to Bess. She was busily shoving his car keys down between the couch cushions. He didn’t give his disappearing keys any notice. Instead he ran a hand over Bess’s wispy curls. “She reminds me of Nathan.”

“I know,” Alastair said. He barely remembered his brother as a toddler and yet Bess reminded him of Nathan too—determined, mischievous, exuberant.

Roderick’s gaze swung back to Alastair, all his former sternness restored. “I don’t want her anywhere near a dragon. Brant Overdrake can’t even know she exists.”

Alastair gave the answer he told himself every time he had the same thought. “All of the Slayers, including Bess, will be safer from both dragons and Overdrake if they’re trained.”

His father couldn’t argue with that. If Nathan had known that he was a Slayer and that Overdrake was a dragon lord, Nathan would probably still be alive.

Roderick brushed one of Bess’s curls behind her ear. His hands looked rough and worn against the little girl’s smooth skin. “You can train Bess,” Roderick conceded. “But I don’t want her anywhere near a battle.”

“None of us do,” Shirley said. She was being uncharacteristically quiet and somber during this conversation.

“We’ll hope for the best,” Alastair added. “However, we have to prepare for the worst,”

Done hiding the keys, Bess sat down beside her grandfather and tried to pry his wedding ring from his finger.

“I’m not giving you opinions or platitudes,” Roderick said. “I’m telling you my terms for funding your camp. You can train Bess, but when Overdrake attacks, she stays out of it.”

Alastair glanced across the room at the garbage can and the dragon tail that stuck out. “How am I going to keep her out of it?”

“You’re the parent. You’ll figure something out. And speaking of parents, don’t tell your mother any of this. It will just make her worry.”

Over the years, Alastair and his father had kept a lot of things from his mother.

Unable to pull off her grandpa’s ring, Bess bent down to bite it. Roderick gently moved his hand away. “No,” he told her.

Bess laughed and tried to bite his finger again.

Shirley stood up, walked over, and picked up the little girl. “No biting, Sweetie.”

Bess chomped her teeth together. “I a cwocodile.”

Shirley made a tsking noise and carried Bess into the kitchen to have a talk with her about appropriate animal behavior.

Alastair watched them go and inwardly sighed. “We can’t even keep her from biting people. What makes you think we’ll be able to control her when she’s a teenager?” He lifted one hand in frustration. “Has anyone figured out yet how to control teenagers? I missed that announcement.”

Roderick leaned back against the couch. “I’ll give you two million to build your camp, clear and free. It won’t be a loan. It’s a gift.”

A gift, that was, as long as Alastair went along with his father’s demands. Alastair didn’t answer right away. He knew his father wanted the slayer children found and trained just as much as Alastair wanted it, more maybe. Nathan’s death wouldn’t be completely avenged until Overdrake was stopped.

“I could go to the government for funding,” Alastair said, attempting to force his father into a better bargaining spot. “They might help me.”

Roderick only shook his head. “You have no way to prove anything to the government. Dragons and dragon lords—they’ll think you’re crazy. Probably put you on one of those watch lists so you’re frisked every time you go to an airport.”

Silence stretched out between the two men. Alastair looked up at the ceiling then back at his father in aggravation. “It will take years to train the children. They’ll trust me. They’ll depend on me. How am I supposed to tell them that I’m sending them into a battle I won’t let my daughter go to?”

“So don’t tell them,” Roderick said. “When the time comes, Bess can call in sick.”

“And what will Bess think of me for making this sort of deal?”

Roderick pulled his phone from his breast pocket. “I don’t care what she thinks as long as she’s alive.”  He turned on his phone. “Give me your bank account number, and I’ll have the funds to you by Monday.”

Two million dollars. Alastair could buy the land within the week and start on the zoning process.

“Well?” his father asked. “Do we have a deal?”

Alastair thought of the stacks of bids and lists of expenses sitting on the table. What other choice did he have? If he depended on outside financing, maybe the camp would never get off the ground.  Wasn’t it better to assure that the rest of the Slayers were trained to fight instead of standing on principal and having none be trained at all?

Alastair nodded at his father. “All right.” A part of him felt like he had sold out, that he had compromised himself. Another part felt an overwhelming sense of relief. Bess wasn’t allowed to fight. He wouldn’t lose her the way he’d lost his brother.

Alastair would just have to come up with a way to tell her about this stipulation before the battle began.