Year of the Snake

Chapter 1 Excerpt: The Dream Sickness

~Samson, American Southwest, Present Day~

Get off the plane.

Samson Carver's eyes snapped open, his irises lengthening vertically under the shifting shadows. Xu Xiang's warning lingered in his mouth like ash. The window shades were drawn in business class, voices hushed and a faint tapping on laptops echoing here and there. Deputy Minister Dema, alerted by Samson's accelerating heartrate, already sat to attention.

"It's here. We need to go now," he stated simply.

The werehyena glanced out the window, where miles of freefall awaited them. "Quinn can't shift until nightfall."

"He better figure it out, because there's no time to warn him. You and me, Dema. If you value your sanity, we need to leave now."

She didn't question him. Good hyena. It was how she had survived for so long. Samson grunted as he unbuckled the tiny seatbelt. He didn't believe in the gods, but damn if this wasn't a sign he should travel by sea from now on.

"Sir, the fasten seatbelt sign is on—" the flight attendant began.

A shrill whinny sounded in coach. The infection had begun, and the human believed herself to be a horse. Samson closed his eyes for a moment, the closest he got to sleep these days. A goddamn filly. Of course it couldn't have been something docile like a turtle that just holed up in its shell.

The flight attendant's mouth hung open. The human bucking around coach in an impressive rodeo was joined by more infected, one who believed themself to be a braying donkey, and the other a tiger. The man roared in a terrified mother's face as she fought to protect her baby.

"I believe there is a small containment problem that requires your attention." Samson elbowed past the stunned flight attendant and into the aisle. An armed marshal and two more attendants ran past, but they would be taken, too. Samson spared a glance to where the werecondor, Quinn, tried to fight his way over, and then he turned back to the exit. His roar crumpled the door in an instant. The fury of the jet stream answered him, just as overpowering and loud, enough so that he didn't have to listen to the screams. Nodding to Dema, he took her hand and jumped.

The Red Phoenix Xiang caught them—not before they had tumbled, head-over-heels, through several hundred feet of clouds, their stomachs picked up and torn inside-out.

They flew in the opposite direction of the doomed plane, past valleys, past streams, to where the green ended and the desert began. It was so bright that Samson's vision blurred, but still he watched until he saw the telltale solar panels glinting like black diamonds in the middle of nowhere.

"Home sweet home."

The holding dock of Saja Corp swung down to meet him, from where it was carefully camouflaged in the sandstone mesa. Attendants rushed over, their body sensors blinking as they took temperature readings and asked questions. Samson let Dema answer, his excitement at being back growing as they rounded the tunnel into the main hall of the clandestine research facility. A for-now-extinct woolly mammoth and a saber-tooth cat towered, while rosy light poured through the viewport, illuminating the natural spring trickling down a black quartz wall behind them.

"Welcome," he told Xiang, bowing him into the command room with its panoramic screens catching broadcasts from around the world.

"I am impressed," the goshawk leader said. "From the outside, it does not look like much."

"Like me." Samson smiled, placing a hand on the map console in the center. "You'll find that I do not flout my wealth like Mun Mu did, friend. A lesson I learned in the neighborhood I grew up."