Henchgirl (Dakota Kekoa Book 1)
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Authors: Rita Stradling
RITA STRADLING
Henchgirl
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents and places are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, or real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Rita Stradling.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit this book in any form or by any means. For subsidiary rights please contact the author.
Email:
[email protected]
Cover by Rita Stradling. Photo on covers: Image ID: 54649460 Copyright Alex Malikov. Image ID: 42977932 Copyright Algol. Both used under Royalty-Free License.
This novel is for my mother, because she always selflessly gave me her ear to cry into and her shoulders to stand upon.
This novel is also for my father for bringing to life the works of JRR Tolkien, Douglas Adams and Jane Austen for me; it made an impression.
Table of Contents
An excerpt from: The History of the Dracons
Henchgirl
An excerpt from
The History of the Dracons, a Human Perspective
Version II, by E. Frasier (banned from the public school system).
“The children of dragons, known as the dracons, came from the unnatural joining of two beings that should have, by their very nature, been forever separated.
Dragons and humans were never meant to meet. They were natural opposites and balancing counterparts. Where humans were creatures considered devoid of magic, dragons were magic. Where dragons were immortal and infertile, mortal humans prolonged their genetic existence through their fertility. Where humankinds’ numbers ever multiplied, the dragons’ numbers only dwindled through the ages of their existence, until the time that dragons discovered that human women were not solely fertile to their own species.
Natural barriers should have kept the species from crossing. Dragons, creatures of fire, could not cross into the bitter cold of the world’s surface and humans, creatures of water, could not dig deep enough to find, nor survive, the heat of the dragons’ world.
Simply put, if humankind had not polluted their world it would have remained too cold for dragonkind. However, humans had an industrial revolution and then turned to and survived on industry with no thought to its multiplying waste. They changed the chemical makeup of their world heating the air and creating weakness in the very crust that kept the dragons in an impenetrable penitentiary wall. As the world’s outer layer thinned, volcanoes broke through from the deep, creating pathways of fire.
The first immortal who successfully crossed through a fire-portal found that he could only endure a day outside the world’s crust before he weakened. However, the dragon also discovered that it only took an hour to morph his body to that of a human male, only a scratch of his claws or a nip of his teeth to infect humans with his own brand of magic and little effort to find a human female willing to carry his young.
Nine months later, the first dracon was born, extracted from his dead mother’s womb.
Nearly one-hundred years after the industrial revolution began, the human queen and king of Anglo were deposed and Anglo was declared a draconic monarchy. Three hundred years later, draconic monarchies controlled eighty-five percent of the world’s governments.”
Chapter One
The vampire looked me up and down. A cloud of cigarette smoke blew out of her mouth and curled around her like a sickly opaque aura. "Sweetheart, you are begging to die," she said.
I had known she was going to give me trouble as the vampire had been shooting me disapproving glances since I came to stand behind her in line for the Midnight Club.
The Midnight Club sat somewhat apart from its neighbors, looking as harmless as any shady nightclub in a run-down area could. The building had only one adornment, a small sign that read ‘Midnight’ in thickly printed white letters.
Its sleazy neighbors, a long line of buildings promising instant cash for your cherished possessions, blood or unnecessary body parts, had all closed up for the night. Metal bars gritted through every visible window on the street and the windows themselves rattled their disapproval of the techno music pumping through the air. Even if all their windows shattered, I doubted whether the meanest pawn shop owners would dream of complaining. The Midnight Club was the kind of place that people just vanished into.
I knew that.
The citizens of Mabi knew that.
Yet the line outside the Midnight Club was threatening to circle the block. That line, I now stood in and had been standing in for the last fifteen minutes, fifteen minutes I did not have.
Most people could not tell the difference between a human, vampire, werewolf, witch, or dracon until they revealed themselves with something pretty obvious. I had identified what type of infection every creature in this line had within the first three minutes of standing in it. It was easy to identify them if you knew which signs to look for. For instance, werewolves revealed themselves in their posture, vampires in their complexion and skin quality, and almost every creature revealed themselves in the look in their eyes, if you were brave enough to meet their gaze. Not only did I know that the lady standing in front of me in the line was a vampire, I could tell that she had only been undead for a couple of years.
When the vampire noticed that I was looking at her, she shook her head. "What are you... twelve? Little girl, go home." The line finally moved forward and when she caught up to the others, she glanced back, raising her eyebrows.
The costume I wore was about as far from my standard fare of school uniform and high tops as you could get. There were more boots than skirt covering my legs. The overdone black bustier halter top contrasted with my makeup-free face and managed to accentuate my childish features showing I was trying to look older.
I walked straight up to her, stepping in close enough that she would know I wasn’t afraid of her. "I’m twenty two,” I lied in a quiet voice; the lie was obvious, I could not pass for a day older than my real age, sixteen even if I dyed my hair gray and painted on wrinkles. “Why don’t you mind your own business?" I stared directly into her eyes, refusing to look away first.
She smiled too widely at me, exposing her long sharp canines. "Usually I feel sorry for lamb-chops like you, but you seem desperate for the dinner table. Don't let me get in your way.” She spun away.
The line picked up pace, and the vampire only had the chance to shoot me a couple scathing glances before she was in and it was my turn to hand my ID to the bouncer. I reached into my purse for my High School student ID which I had taped a hundred dollar bill under and handed it to the vamp. He glanced at me, my ID, then handed it back, less the money.
Even though it wasn't my money, it hurt.
I stepped in front of the werewolves and vampires unloading personal arsenals into plastic bins and went directly to the short line leading to the security detectors. I unloaded nothing.
I touched the blue charm bracelet around my wrist, I had already known it was there, but feeling the small smooth blue charm calmed me. I held my breath and stepped through the detector.
The bored looking troll at the monitor said, "Human, no weapons."
With unhurried steps I made my way further into the club. The deeper I went the louder the techno grew. The music sunk into me, my blood, my breaths, all in line with the beat. The neon lights that flashed over the club made me feel like I was inside an arcade machine.
I pushed through the bodies feeling the range from room-temperature vamps, to fever hot were-animals and the witches and humans somewhere in between. I moved all the way to the front where a vampire DJ moved one lightning quick hand on his turntable while dancing on the stage.
I glanced at my watch, twenty-three minutes, three behind schedule.
I scanned the crowd and caught up my three minute delay automatically as I spotted the club's manager, Mr. Rustom Barns. Honestly, he was hard to miss, a three hundred pound giant ascending the stage. He was also a man-eating were-tiger or so I was told.
I ran off a quick text to my uncle Bobby: ‘
all is well
’ and then started dancing.
The dancing was short lived though as the music cut off abruptly and the vampire DJ threw one of his discs straight into the audience. "You're going to kick me off stage! I invented techno!" he shouted into the microphone before diving at the crowd. In half a second, security took him down. The vamp yelled the entire way as they escorted him out.
Freaking vampires.
Not looking the least bit bothered by the vampire’s very public tantrum the were-tiger grabbed the microphone and purred in his low raspy voice, "We have a special guest band for you tonight. Let me introduce you to: The Prowlers." The were-tiger lifted the entire DJ stand off the stage; discs fell and shattered all around him.
Two werewolves and two dracons took the stage.
I blinked up at the stage, confused. Then, I immediately checked my arm for my charm bracelet which was still there.
When wearing my charm bracelet, my powers were supposed to be gone; I should have experienced people as a human would and my senses should have been just like a human’s were. I should not have been able to see the power that came off these dracons; however, I still saw a distinct aura of power around each of them.
After the tiger returned once to bring on a drum-set, the werewolves started howling, and then the full group started playing a Celti-punk song.
What in all the human hells?
I grabbed out my phone to shoot off a text to Bobby:
there’s a
werewolf and dracon punk band?
It's a school night,
I received back, translation:
get out of there
.
No. Way.
I sent:
I did my homework
He did not send anything for a long minute, then:
Twenty minutes.
Me:
Thirty five.
Him:
Thirty or I’m coming in there to get you.
I swallowed and then slipped my phone back in my pocket. For a moment my heart dropped to sizzle in my stomach acid when I thought I had lost track of the were-tiger, until I found him to the side of the stage leaning and surveying the crowd.
Focusing on the music while keeping him in my peripheral vision I started dancing again. The upbeat music was all too easy to move to and when the guitarist switched out his guitar for a fiddle, I almost broke character laughing. What did this band think this place was: a concert hall? This was a sleazy dance club for the infected.
I had never seen the dracons that were on stage before, not that I met every dracon that came to the island; the Mabiian Island chain was one of the biggest tourist destinations for dracons in the world. There was nothing extremely ostentatious about their clothing and I would have labeled them as just average-wealthy if I had not noticed their shoes. Both wore drake serpent leather shoes, shoes that probably were worth more than the average “rich” dracon’s entire hoard. Drake serpent leather wasn’t too obvious from snake leather, but my grandfather had a money clip made from drake serpent leather which he kept locked away and showed me once; that particular sheen only came from leather imported from the dragon kingdoms.
Most dracons were rich, but these two were obviously ‘rent out the resort’ rather than the ‘hotel suite’ type of tourists.
The singer was shaggier, less polished than the fiddle player, but when I took a closer look, he was unkempt in a manner that appeared like stylists designed his ‘look’ to be that way.
The dracon burning through his fiddle strings was startlingly different in appearance than his companion. The only colors in his features were his dark brown eyes and lips the faintest shade of pink. His skin, long pulled-back hair, eyebrows, everything else was a pale ivory. His face was chiseled and not the least bit delicate, the lines were broad and sharp. His looks were startling, striking, and at the same time cold and almost terrifying.