Scales (Avery Rome Book 1) Read online

  Avery Rome: Book one

  Scales

  P.S. Power

  Orange Cat Publishing

  Copyright 2016

  Chapter one

  The bullet that hit her second in command, Benny the Wolf, was a glancing blow. It was dark out in the woods, with three different sides shooting at each other. There was a lot at stake for the contest that evening, which was made clear by the fact that they were using real bullets. It only happened once per battle camp. There was a flag on the line. Again.

  Avery didn’t speak to Ben, who for his part was silent, even if the wound burned on his leg. She’d gotten hit before herself, so knew it wasn’t all that fun. He’d live. They’d just bind the wound this time, since it wasn’t too deep or anything. She could map that out clearly, even in the dim light. Part of being what she was, unclean, meant she had powers. Her vision was fairly normal, but her ears let her make a low frequency map of the world, even in the dark.

  She hesitated for a moment, then grabbed for the bandage pack on the medium size Wolf Shifters kit. Using what he carried to help him, instead of her own. That was the rule, so that you always had what you needed on you, if you were the one injured. Avery really expected the man to shrink away, so that she couldn’t touch him, but he simply grinned bravely, instead.

  It looked pained and a bit feral. There was a grunt inside his whisper as he looked at her in the dark.

  “Good. Let’s do this thing?” It meant getting his leg off the dirt, as Mason and Dern moved in to see what the situation was. Instead of guarding them as Avery worked. Part of her rolled her eyes, thinking it was funny. That was rude of her, but as their commander it was her job to keep them alive for the night. They were both fairly young. Dern was a Walrus, Mason a Wren. Neither was over twenty. That meant they’d been training for six or seven years. Six weeks at a time. So less than a year of actual experience, unless they’d been deployed by National at some point.

  Then, Avery, who was in command that night, wasn’t going to be sixteen for another few weeks. She thought. It was possible that it had already happened. Dragons didn’t have a great ability to track the passage of time. It had been in the Traits Book. One of her classes over the last few years had required her to study up on what everyone else was expected to be capable of. Not just Shifters, either. Other groups as well, in case they had to fight them.

  “Posts. I’ll handle this. We move in three minutes.” It would be happening in less than that if she could help it. One of the other teams had a Bat on it. Even a low whisper might be heard given that. Almost all Shifters were pretty decent as far as ability to hear went. Healthy young ears that repaired all damage every time they changed shape meant that was just true. The same was true for all their senses. That didn’t mean some Shifters weren’t better that way than others. Bats were near the very top when it came to sound.

  So she hurried. It got a low groan from the injured man, who was doing a good job at not being too loud given the conditions. The wound would hurt. Still he was sucking that up like a trooper. Not everyone could do that, in the face of pain.

  “Almost there. Let me tie this off… Three, two… Everyone move to the North East. Five meter spread.” Her voice went low and husky. Deep on a level that almost dropped under the range that most people would be able to hear. It was a sign of her own tainted nature. Being an evil serpent like she was. She could make her vocal cords create sounds so low that even the Shifters around her might miss that she was doing it. It sounded fine to her. From experience she knew that the large shifters, the horses and things of that size could all make out what she was saying that way.

  Dern, who was chubby for one of them, moved without hesitation. His alternate form was pretty large and she’d kept her words high enough that it was possible to make them out. For him.

  Avery had to repeat herself for Mason, speaking right in her ear.

  Again, it left her feeling incredibly uneasy. Getting that close to one of the Chosen, an honest two form woman, might taint her in the eyes of the Changing God. Avery did her best not to let that happen. Getting close enough but not allowing even accidental contact. No one else should be punished for what she was.

  “North East, five meter spread.” Then they walked, going no faster than Benny could manage. His last name was Peterson, but the man, who was at least thirty, had asked them all to call him that, instead of his last name. The rest of them went by the more formal family name all the time. Avery understood what he’d been doing.

  Getting the others to think of him as more familiar and common, so that his being there wouldn’t undermine Avery as much. It still did a bit, since as things got tense it was going to be natural for the others to move away from the monster and seek the guidance of an elder who had a lot of experience. This was her first time in command of anything, after all. Normally you had to be deployed at least once before you got that kind of honor, even in practice.

  They needed to get to the meet point soon, she thought. That part was hard to know for her. There was a flurry of shooting off in the distance, but Avery understood the trick without needing to think too much about it. One of the groups was trying to be clever. There was almost always shooting when the protected flags were taken. Those were most often mobile, generally carried by one or two members of the team. Their job would be to hide, making it really hard to uncover where they were. By shooting a lot, the other groups would be tempted to stop searching, in case their flag was under threat.

  Drawn into an ambush.

  Dern even took a few steps that way, which meant that Avery had to growl at him. It was embarrassing, but no one there would be able to see her blushing about it.

  “No. It’s a trick to get us to stop searching. Stay on mission.” They were going to meet up with Claremont, who was a Mole. That rally point was well away from the shooting, so unless the woman had gotten lost in the dark, which a Mole wasn’t going to do, they were still safe.

  The interesting part, once Dern winced, his chunky white face cringing, was that he started walking again almost instantly. Following her orders. Even if she wasn’t good enough for the job.

  An evil serpent. Worse, that could have been forgiven if she’d been a snake, or lizard of some kind. Anything with scales was unclean but there were levels to such things. Small evils were, by their measure, not a threat. She’d been created by the dark one as a Dragon. The very symbol of evil for her people. Avery’s old family and clan. The Gray.

  The Elect among the Chosen kind.

  The ones that had, very rightly, cast her out years before when her form had turned out to be so dark and unclean. It would have been better if she’d never shown a second form at all. Then she would have been cast out, broken and marked as inferior by the Changing God. That would be all, though. This way she was forced to carry her burden with her constantly. A mark of true evil that couldn’t be let go. There was no way for her to set down the burden placed on her.

  Avery couldn’t even kill herself. Dragons were too powerful for that.

  She was so involved in her own thoughts that she nearly missed the breathing and heart beats of the two small people hiding off to their left, about ten meters away. There was enough thumping from explosions and footfalls that the deep sound of the environment exposed them clearly. Not that Avery knew their names. This was the third to last night of the battle camp. There was a new one every six weeks, which meant new faces came and left, over and over again. She met them all, but rarely bothered to try and learn their names.

  One of them was probably the Green team’s Bat though. The form just wasn’t able to stay still, which produced a constant low rumble that Avery picked up pretty easily, now that she wasn’t stewing
on her personal short comings. The other shape was about the same size, but steadier. Male, too.

  It was embarrassing for her, but ever since her first change, nearly three years before, she’d been able to tell what people were like under their clothing. In a strange way, she could feel it. The ability made it simple to tell if a person had a gun or knife, but also told her way more than a girl should have ever known about any other person except her husband.

  Not that she’d ever be married now. Not being like she was.

  The attack on the pair had to be done with hand signals. She knew them all, having practiced them constantly for years. The problem there was that, while these others weren’t raw or on their first training session, they didn’t practice that kind of thing all the time. So she knew the correct signals, but Dern and Mason were missing parts of it. Finally, trying not to be above her place in the world, Avery held up two fingers, then pointed toward where they were being watched from.

  They needed to trap them, moving in hard and fast, since the Bat would pick up the change in their noises instantly. It was almost impossible to move silently over the loam and twigs that made up the floor of the forest they were in. Even if they could manage it, the Bat would hear it happening anyway. It was different than how Avery would have done the same thing, but it would still happen.

  It was clear from the look on his face that Dern didn’t get it really. Mason seemed to have picked it up, but birds weren’t known for being the best in actual combat. They weren’t aggressive as a rule, so for this particular job, that meant she was left with an injured Wolf, a clueless Walrus, a flighty Wren and herself. A lumbering monster. If the goal had been to simply kill the two Shifters in the woods, they could have managed it.

  Even just shooting, they’d have won.

  That was the normal way of doing it, Avery knew. It lacked in any kind of finesse, or cleverness, but she had neither of those two things. Not by training or nature. Pretending otherwise would be lying to herself. What she did have was nearly three years of constant training. Taking a deep breath, she waved for the others to keep moving as she did the same, pulling off alone after twenty meters. She had an AK with her this time. They’d changed up the weapons used for this event, since it came up in the field fairly regularly. It didn’t have a scope on it and wasn’t the most accurate weapon ever, but she could use it for sniping in a pinch.

  She’d done it before.

  The trick was going to be in hitting both of the enemy fighters in a non-lethal fashion, forcing a change that would make certain they couldn’t use firearms to protect their flag. It was tempting to climb a tree for a better position, but that would be heard. Even just jumping ten or fifteen feet straight up with a single landing would give her away.

  So she needed to find a hill, or a large rock to stand on. Hopefully no one else was around to simply shoot her. She couldn’t feel anyone, but outside of a hundred meters, she wouldn’t. She found a nice dead tree not that far away and flowed up onto it lightly. She wasn’t big herself. About a hundred and twenty pounds, five-four or so and with dusty skin. Her mother had been from Ireland, or at least her people had been. It had showed in her slightly red hair and pale white skin.

  Avery was darker than that. Her hair was a deep black. Her skin was lighter, but she was at least half African as far as that went. Her father had been darker, clearly, but an outsider, so she’d never been told his name. Not even if he was a Shifter or not. The Grey didn’t enjoy mixing with the unclean, but they did it for various reasons. Business, trade… On occasion to get new blood into the clan.

  So in their travels it wasn’t unheard of for an unmarried woman to meet up with a man and do things that could get her with child. Only if the elders ordered it, of course, but they did it often enough that they constantly had a new influx of genetic material.

  Taking aim, Avery waited. Most people got tired and would start to shake a bit after a few minutes holding a weapon up like she was doing. She would as well, but it would take nearly fifteen minutes for it to foul her aim. The hard part was that, while she could use the sights fairly accurately, she still had to be able to use her eyes to see things. She had a good picture of what was going on, but was using her ears, or some other internal sense, to do that. It didn’t line up with her face that well.

  Shooting that way was harder to do accurately. Just lighting them up with every round she had was doable, of course, since they’d probably live, but part of her simply wouldn’t allow that to happen. She was unclean, evil. These others were better than she was by their very nature. Harming them more than needed for the mission at hand would be the same as announcing that she was giving in to being what she really was.

  So Avery pulled on all of her skill, took aim at a spot that was just above the rock that they were behind, then waited. It took a long time. She thought so anyway. As a Dragon she honestly couldn’t tell, she knew. Not without a watch. She had one, but making it glow so she could see the digital face was a foolish move right then.

  After a lifetime of waiting, which had to be less than fifteen minutes, since she was just starting to shake a bit, one of them, the woman, stood up. That got her shot in the shoulder. The male was hit almost immediately, standing up to move over the fallen Bat. It was hard to hear if the hits had actually happened, or if the two were faking.

  Avery couldn’t wait, rushing the position, so they wouldn’t have a chance to get away. As she closed in, she realized that something had really happened. Both of them were changing already. That part was interesting, since she was there while they were halfway between the states. True shifters, having two faces.

  Unlike her, who had three. The Human, the Dragon and the face between. The sign of true evil. Only the Darkest could invest a being with the ability to be more than the Chosen. The fact that she existed was all the proof the world needed that she was a stain that should be removed from its face. People had tried. They’d failed of course. Good people had died that night. Leaving her standing there, triumphant in her wickedness.

  Working quickly, she moved in, ready to fight. Most Shifters couldn’t use a weapon when they changed. None did it really well. That meant they’d run, or fly, if they had to. Only they couldn’t since they all needed about two to five minutes to change shape. It had been in the book on the subject. So she searched the gear they had, took their bullets, as well as the green flag that had been on the small man and watched the Bat, who was struggling with her clothing, caught in them awkwardly since the change had started without warning.

  Avery winced. There was almost no way to help her, even though it was clear she needed it if she wasn’t going to be badly injured by the fabric. Her web belt was around her middle, tight already. If she was trapped like that as she changed it would break bones and require another change to repair the new damage. Most could only do one every four to six hours, so she’d be stuck, suffering until then.

  Her voice low, feeling ashamed of what she’d done to get her job accomplished, Avery whispered.

  “I can cut you free? I… I’m a Dragon.” The woman might not want her to do anything even if it meant her death. Instead of acting on that kind of thing, she just took a tiny, awkward, half step toward Avery.

  She tried to work fast, since it seemed that the membranous flesh under the Bat’s arms was in real danger of tearing already. It meant having to grab the other woman by the shoulder at one point, to stabilize her while the cutting happened. Fabric and webbing released with snapping sounds, but after a minute the clothing was gone. That should have meant a fight, to recover the flag but that didn’t happen.

  The Rabbit man did nobly attempt to grab the flag back, with his teeth. He was the size of a large dog. White and fluffy looking. Avery snagged it back carefully, smiling at the action. She wasn’t going to be chasing a Rabbit down if he got away, but he wasn’t taking the flag from her hands, now that she was paying attention. It was a trick not to touch him while she did it, but it was different, tou
ching or being touched by the unclean in a fight. Everyone knew that. She wouldn’t defile him if they wrestled for the green piece of material. That was allowed so that the unclean could be battled. It was in the writ.

  It was still better to avoid that. The white Rabbit made that easy, running off, leaving her with a Bat. Technically she could take a prisoner, but there was no way to properly do that without touching the woman. Instead Avery looked around, then took the weapons. There were two knives, two AKs and a pistol, marking one of the people she’d taken as a high ranking officer. That or someone that had brought their own weapon from home. That was allowed, after all.

  The rifles were interchangeable and could be turned in at the base camp with no issue but the pistol might be someone’s personal property. Taking it still made sense, though it was a bit of a risk. It could be counted as theft, if they couldn’t get it back in a timely fashion. That wasn’t allowed.

  Holding the thing up for the rust colored and black Bat woman, who was nearly totally changed and huge, for a flying mammal, being nearly five feet tall, she spoke softly.

  “I’m Avery Rome. I’ll return this in the morning? Avery Rome.” She knew the Bat could hear her, but that didn’t mean it would be easy to recall her name. Different people had varied skills that way.

  The Bat nodded, which was cute. Adorable really, since she was kind of round and fuzzy looking.

  Then the woman hunkered down, folding her wings to her sides, hiding. Avery understood that part of things. The Bat lady wasn’t going to be any more capable of flying between the trees than she would have been. They were just too close together. In her middle, evil, form, Avery had a scaled but Human shaped body with wings. A twelve-foot span to match the twelve feet tall she was in that shape. The Bat probably had wings that were nearly twice that long.

  Taking all the gear, she jogged, trying to be careful, since the flag could be taken away from her by a clever person. She clanked a bit, which couldn’t be helped at the moment, carrying all the rifles. In real life she’d have broken them and left them in the woods. This was live fire, meaning anything went except head shots, but weapons still cost money. Being wasteful was against the will of the Changing God. So she’d just need to be careful.