Defender Raptor (Protection, Inc: Defenders, #2) Read online

  Defender Raptor

  Protection, Inc: Defenders, Volume 2

  Zoe Chant

  Published by Zoe Chant, 2020.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  DEFENDER RAPTOR

  First edition. March 1, 2020.

  Copyright © 2020 Zoe Chant.

  Written by Zoe Chant.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12 | MERLIN’S STORY

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  Also by Zoe Chant

  CHAPTER 1

  In retrospect, Dali should have been more suspicious of the pigeons.

  The park where they lurked was unfamiliar territory to her. In the year since she’d been forced to leave the Navy, she’d spent every minute doing physical therapy, job-searching, or working. She wasn’t an “I have important things to do but it’s a beautiful day so I guess I’ll blow off my responsibilities and stroll through the park instead” type of person.

  But she also wasn’t the type of person who’d refuse to do a favor for her own grandmother. When she’d visited for dinner the night before, Dali had confessed that she’d been fired again and she needed to find a new job immediately.

  Grandma had fixed her with a stern look. “You never used to make your job into your whole life. Yes, you worked very hard. But when you weren’t working, you had fun. You spent time with your friends. You read books. You climbed rocks—”

  Dali didn’t intend to call attention to her prosthetic left hand, but she couldn’t help glancing down at it.

  Grandma followed her gaze, then raised it back to Dali’s eyes. “You laughed. How long has it been since you laughed?”

  “I haven’t had much to laugh about.”

  “So go see a funny movie!”

  “Really, Grandma?”

  “You know what I mean. Go on a date! Get a pet!”

  “I’d need to meet someone I liked to go on a date,” Dali said. “And I don’t have time for a pet.”

  Her grandmother shook her head and sighed. Then she got up and left the room. When she returned, gold flashed in her hand. Dali recognized her lucky necklace, the one she’d worn when she’d met the man who would become Dali’s grandfather. It was an antique, heavy and intricate, a family heirloom whose origins even Grandma didn’t know.

  Grandma draped around Dali’s neck. “Here you go. May it bring you luck.”

  “I can’t take—” Dali had begun.

  Her grandmother cut her off with a wave of her wrinkled hand. “It’s not a gift. I expect it back when you come for dinner next Sunday. In the meantime, take a break. Don’t look for a job tomorrow. Instead, wear the necklace and a pretty dress—do you still have that red silk dress?”

  “Yes.” It had been years since Dali had worn it, but she’d lost weight while she’d been recovering, and she was sure she could fit into it.

  “Good. Put it on, take a walk in the park, smell the roses, and remember that you’re a beautiful, smart, strong woman with your whole life ahead of you. Promise me you will.”

  Grandma had so much faith in her—more than she had in herself. Dali, her eyes stinging with unshed tears, had promised.

  So she’d gone to the park in a scarlet cocktail dress and a pair of cute black shoes, and she’d tried to enjoy the roses. But she was too conscious of the weight of Grandma’s heirloom necklace around her throat and the weight of her prosthetic at the end of her left arm. The first was a promise she couldn’t fulfill, and the second was a reminder of everything she’d lost. They weighed maybe one pound put together, and yet they were a heavier burden than any pack she’d ever carried on duty.

  How could she have her entire life ahead of her when the Navy had been her entire life?

  How could she be satisfied selling products that nobody needed when once she’d been a small but essential part of something as huge and important as the Navy?

  Images of the day that had changed everything flashed before her mind’s eye. Her phone waking her up with “Girls Like You”—if she heard that song play now, she had to leave the room. Braiding her hair without looking in a mirror—there was another thing she couldn’t do anymore. Her prosthetic hand had no sense of touch, so she needed to watch it to get it to move correctly. Now she used a pair of mirrors to braid and pin up her hair.

  She was so distracted by her own depressing thoughts that she didn’t notice the pigeons until four of them swooped down and landed on her shoulders, flapping their wings and sending a cloud of tiny gray feathers into her face.

  She had a moment of heart-jolting shock, but she didn’t scream. She didn’t run. Nor did she wildly flail at them. Instead, she fell back on her training and stood absolutely still, processing the situation so she could calmly decide what to do about it rather than reacting in mindless panic.

  This isn’t a war zone, she told herself. You’re not under attack. These are pigeons. They’re harmless. People must feed them.

  Silly people. Who’d want pigeons all over them? Dali was about to take a quick step forward to dislodge them when she felt the catch of her grandmother’s necklace open.

  The next thing she knew, the weight had left her neck and she was watching with astonished outrage as four pigeons flew away with Grandma’s priceless family heirloom.

  “HEY!” Dali yelled at the pigeons. “Get back here!”

  The pigeons, clutching the gold necklace in their scaly feet, flapped steadily away.

  She stooped, grabbed a small rock with her right hand, and hurled it at them. Her aim was as good as ever. There was an anguished squawk and an explosion of feathers, but the necklace didn’t fall.

  The pigeons veered upward, out of rock-throwing distance, and vanished behind a skyscraper. Dali pelted around the back. But by the time she reached it, the birds and Grandma’s necklace were long gone. She stood alone, sweating and furious, in an alley that reeked of garbage.

  So much for smelling the roses.

  “The pigeons stole your necklace,” the police officer repeated. He clearly found the phrase extremely amusing, because that was the third time he’d said it.

  She glared at him. He avoided her gaze... by staring down her cleavage. Dali wished she’d gone home and changed her clothes rather than marching straight to the nearest police station in a party dress. Then she reminded herself that it wasn’t on her to hide her body, it was on him to be professional.

  Dali cleared her throat loudly, making his head jerk up. “That’s right. Shall we get to the paperwork?”

  “You want to press charges against birds?”

  She kept a tight grip on her temper. “I want to press charges against whoever trained the pigeons to steal for them. Just like if someone trained a dog to bite and sicced it on their enemies.”

  A cop at another desk glanced over his shoulder and remarked in some bizarre acc
ent, “Oi! Pigeons stole me necklace!”

  It took her a moment to realize that the accent was supposed to be Australian, and he was making a “dingoes ate my baby” joke. She was not amused. “Since you two seem incapable of taking my theft report seriously, I want to speak to your watch commander.”

  “I’m the watch commander,” said Officer Pigeons Stole Me Necklace, dropping the accent and replacing it with a sneer. “And I assure you, we’re taking your complaint exactly as seriously as it deserves.”

  Dali’s temper flared. “I’m a veteran of the US Navy, and let me tell you, if you were working on my ship—”

  Officer Pigeons Stole Me Necklace let out a high-pitched screech, then dove under his desk.

  She folded her arms, unimpressed with his theatrics. “If you think that’s going to distract me...”

  “A rat!” yelped Officer Pigeons Stole Me Necklace, crawling rapidly out from under his desk in a most undignified fashion. “A rat bit my ankle!”

  The other cops rushed to his side, examining his ankle and peering under the desk. Dali stayed where she was, wondering whether this was yet another stupid joke or if he was on drugs and had hallucinated the rat. Then she saw a furry gray animal dart away from the desk. Before she could get a good look at it, the little creature scurried out the door.

  Raising her voice, Dali said, “I’m reporting this office to the police commissioner for failure to take a crime report, and to the health department for the rodent infestation!”

  Without waiting to see whether that pack of uniformed idiots had heard her, she spun around and marched out the door.

  Her anger carried her for a few blocks. But by the time she’d finished mentally writing the complaints, its heat had died away, leaving her with nothing but ashes. She’d lost Grandma’s precious necklace, which had been handed down for generations. And the only reason Dali had been wearing it to begin with was that Grandma had wanted to make her feel better. It was her fault twice over.

  What do I tell her? Dali wondered. She knew her grandmother wouldn’t blame her, but somehow that made her feel worse rather than better.

  She started to walk past a gloomy alley, the sort people got mugged in, then turned around and marched on in. It was a shortcut, and she wasn’t about to let herself be ruled by fear any more than she already was.

  Dali half-hoped someone would try to mug her. She might not have fought in combat, but she’d gotten the same training as everyone else. And while she wouldn’t want to test her prosthetic hand against a human jaw, that still left her with one hand and both feet. Any mugger that messed with her deserved the ass-kicking she felt perfectly capable of handing out.

  Something small and gray flew into the alley.

  A pigeon? Dali thought. A trained, thieving pigeon?!

  She lunged for it. It darted away, then stopped and hovered. And that was when she saw that it wasn’t a pigeon.

  “No way,” Dali muttered aloud. “That’s impossible.”

  The impossible creature meowed.

  Dali stared incredulously at the little animal. She took in every detail, searching for the one false note that would prove that it was an elaborate puppet or a special effect or a drone in a fur coat or anything other than what it appeared to be, which was a gray kitten with a pair of translucent, rapidly beating dragonfly wings, hovering a good five feet above the ground. The wings made a soft buzzing sound.

  Cautiously, Dali passed her right hand over the air above the kitten, feeling for hidden strings. There were none. The kitten’s bright blue eyes followed the movement of her hand. When she let her hand drop, it flew forward, landing on her chest with all paws outstretched.

  “Ow!”

  The kitten clung to her dress with its sharp little claws. The buzzing sound stopped as it closed its wings neatly over its back. Once they were folded up, they became almost invisible except for a rainbow shimmer and a faint tracery of veins. And without the distraction of the wings, Dali recognized that soft shade of gray. The kitten was none other than the police station’s “rat.”

  “Did you bite that nasty rude policeman?” Dali asked.

  The kitten purred and butted its head into her cleavage.

  Dali took that as a yes. “Good for you!”

  Her disbelief vanished at the very solid feeling of the kitten’s head smacking into her cleavage. She cupped the kitten in her right hand. Its fur was very soft. It released her dress, settled itself in her palm, and purred even more enthusiastically.

  “Hey there, cutie pie,” Dali murmured. “Are you a boy or a girl?”

  There was no response from the kitten, but it wasn’t like she’d expected one. She lifted it high and nudged aside its tail with her left hand. It was a girl.

  Now that Dali had more of a chance to look at the kitten without being distracted by the wings, she could appreciate all the adorable details. The kitten had a triangular head and slim build, much like a Siamese. In fact, Dali realized, she also had colored points like a Siamese: rather than being the same shade of light gray all over, her face and ears and paws and tail-tip were a darker gray with a bluish tinge.

  “I think you are a Siamese,” Dali said. “Or bred from one, anyway. Weren’t they owned by royalty? Maybe I should call you Princess. Princess Absolutely Adorable?”

  The kitten spat indignantly.

  “Or maybe not,” Dali said, trying not to laugh too hard at the kitten’s injured dignity. She was so pretty, though, with those sky-blue eyes and fur like a cloudy morning, that Dali wanted to give her an equally pretty name. “Cloud?”

  Cloud purred and began to lick her hand with a little rough tongue.

  “Where’d you come from, Cloud?”

  Unsurprisingly, Cloud did not reply. But when Dali thought about her question, she came to some very unsettling conclusions.

  The dragonfly kitten must be some kind of genetic engineering experiment, created in a private or government laboratory.

  There was no way scientists would have randomly released a dragonfly kitten into the city, so she had to have escaped. Which meant they’d come looking for her soon... if they weren’t already searching for her.

  Labs dissected and experimented on animals. God knew what they’d do to her if they got her back. The absolute best outcome was that she’d be locked in a cage for the rest of her life.

  Cloud nibbled her fingertips and purred some more. Dali had always loved cats and regretted that her career had prevented her from having one. She’d rather lose her other hand than let this precious little darling come to harm.

  She moved with the decisiveness that had been her hallmark back in the Navy. In a second, Dali had popped Cloud into her purse and was striding through the alley, holding her right hand over the opening as if it was casually resting there. Her heart was pounding, her senses on high alert.

  A tiny sound, the faintest scrape of a metal against concrete, instantly flooded her with adrenaline. Dali hit the ground and rolled, clutching the purse and Cloud to her chest and protecting them with her body.

  Something small and dark pinged against the ground, missing her face by inches.

  A bullet, she thought, already rolling again. But she’d heard only a faint hissing sound, not even the muffled pop of a silencer.

  Another hiss, and something bounced off her prosthetic hand. She caught a glimpse of it before it rolled away. It was a black dart, not a bullet. A tranquilizer dart?

  Dali half-rolled, half-lunged behind a metal dumpster. She rose into a crouch, catching her breath, and saw that it concealed a narrow crawlspace between buildings. She crammed the purse and Cloud into her blouse and crawled through.

  If Cloud starts meowing, we’re dead, she thought. But if she keeps quiet, we might be able to get away.

  She could feel the kitten’s trembling and rapid heartbeat, but Cloud was silent. Dali emerged from the crawlspace into another alley. She staggered to her feet and ran, darting from alley to alley until she finally came to one t
hat ended in a busy, crowded street.

  She leaned against the wall, catching her breath. No one seemed to be chasing her. Either she’d lost them, or they’d given up. For now.

  Dali slung her purse back over her shoulder and left the alley, trying to blend into the crowd. It was a typical Refuge City street, full of old people, young people, parents with small children, hotdog carts, skateboarders, bicyclists, cars, trucks, dogs on leashes, one loudly protesting cat on a leash, a woman doing cartoon sketches for tourists, and a frantic-looking young father jiggling a howling baby. What she did not see were any people who looked like they might shoot darts at people or experiment on kittens.

  Which didn’t mean they weren’t there, of course. It wasn’t like they’d be wearing white coats stamped with WINGED KITTEN EXPERIMENTS, INC.

  Once upon a time, Dali would have felt entirely equal to the task of protecting a helpless creature under her care, no matter what stood in her way. But now she felt small and alone and inadequate. It was bitterly ironic that the last time she’d have felt confident enough to protect Cloud herself, she’d also had as many people as she possibly could have wanted to pitch in, all of them smart, professional, and highly trained.

  But she couldn’t call on her old Navy buddies now. Some were dead. Some were deployed. And if she contacted any of the rest, they’d want to know why she’d left the Navy. They’d know she could still do her job with a prosthetic hand and a few scars. And then she’d have to tell them...

  The thought of revealing the awful truth made an all-too-familiar tightness close around her chest, squeezing her heart and lungs. She forced herself to breathe deeply and rhythmically until the threat of a panic attack subsided.

  Like everything else in her life now, this situation was something she’d have to deal with all by herself.

  If she brought Cloud to her apartment building, she’d potentially be putting her neighbors at risk. And they weren’t all tough like Dali. Most of them were more like Esther, who must be at least eighty and brought Dali homemade bread once a week. Or like Tirzah, who never did anything more strenuous than tooling around the neighborhood in her wheelchair. Tirzah’s fiancé Pete was a veteran... but his thirteen-year-old daughter lived with them. And there were other kids in the building. Dali couldn’t do anything that might endanger them.