The call came while all four of us were out enjoying some mid-morning beach-time on one of the small islands in the middle of Santa Rosa Sound. Leonora and Jeff were under an umbrella with their noses in books.

Jeff preferred the shade because of his non-removable fur coat. Presumably, it was a strange roll of the genetic dice that had given him many of the physical characteristics of a cat – tail, retractable claws, whiskers, and a coat of luxurious black and white fur - among other things I won’t go into right now. If there was another explanation for his condition, Jeff wasn’t aware of it, but the fact that his father refused to have anything to do with him might mean that there was some guilt there. While it was possible that it was simply a case of raging xenophobia overcoming paternal instincts, Neeka and I both suspected that there was more to Jeff’s story than just a randomly-scrambled strand of DNA. Discussing it with Jeff was pointless because his father did the absolute minimum in terms of caring for him and during those rare visits to his ‘school’ refused to discuss anything about his family. Neeka and I had some theories on the matter of his origin, mostly revolving around his mother and her side of the family, but we couldn’t flesh those out without talking to Jeff’s father and we were certain that was something Jeff would see as a betrayal of confidence.

We didn’t bring Leonora into the discussion because we felt it would be rude to talk about his origin when we knew that hers was something she took pains to avoid. For something to be a sore point after even the hundreds of years she would admit to having lived — it had to be pretty bad.

Leonora avoided direct sunlight as a matter of preference. In the legends, vampires are fatally allergic to it. Leonora wasn’t. She just liked shade better. She was also something of a night-person, but she had no problem being up and around during the day. While some people might use this as an argument against her actually being a vampire, having personally seen her rip people’s throats open and drink their blood right from a spurting artery convinced me that she qualified as the real deal. Mind you, it wasn’t a regular thing with her. Her usual way of getting a liquid snack was to hang out at nightclubs and bars where she could find people who were deeply enough into the vampire-wannabe thing to let her nibble on them. Not that I could say anything about how peculiar that was – I let her nibble on me too whenever she felt the need. Leonora nibbles nice, and saying that I heal quickly is something of an understatement.

Neeka and I were the sun-worshipers. Both of us were down on the sand, stretched-out naked on beach towels, working on our tans.

Well, that’s what we called it. Neeka slathered-on so much lotion to prevent an explosion of freckles over her ultra-light skin that she might as well have been wearing a poncho. My own tan is more a matter of self-image than sun-exposure, so I didn’t bother with lotion. Being bare in the sun is something we got into during a prolonged, government-funded vacation/mission in the Caribbean. We like it so much, we often take the boat out to where we have all the sun we want and pretend to bask like lizards.

In my case, there wasn’t much pretending going on. I am much more in-touch with my lizard heritage than anyone else, even to the point of being able to turn into one at will. And that’s why I’m called The Dragon. My friends just call me Sam.

I heard a familiar sound and raised an eyelid to take a peek. Jeff was limp in his chair, his head lolled to one side, snoring softly.

Next to him, Leonora’s nose was still in her book. Her expression was a closed-lip smile. Either it was a really good book, or she and Jeff had been giving each other a work-out before we hit the beach. Nothing out of the ordinary there. Jeff, aka Tomcat, does his best to live up to his nickname. He tries to be fair about the sex thing, but he’s the only male in a house with three females – each of whom has needs that he is very competent at meeting. He’d spent all night with me just two nights ago, but still ... I closed my eye. Jealously wasn’t something I needed to waste my time on. We were a team, or trying to be. There was enough inadvertent drama in the house without inventing more.

The idyll lasted just over an hour. Then all our phones went off at once with the same text-alert. That was such a familiar occurrence that we didn’t have to look at them to know what was going on. We scrambled to pack-up and jump into the row-boat to get back to the house and dress for public before grabbing our work-clothes and heading for the briefing. All that made us late enough that I hustled into the ready-room and headed for the first empty seat I saw.

“Sorry!” I huffed as I slid into a folding chair next to Evan Cochran, a long-time member of the Sigma Seven team and often my personal ‘minder’.

“It’s OK,” Evan said. “Nothing yet.” He hooked a thumb at the closed door to the tiny office. “The Colonel is still waiting for a call from Mr. Solomon to get the mission.”

“Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?” I asked, knowing the answer but just trying to manufacture polite conversation.

Evan shrugged. “No way to tell. The alert could be a precaution. Like the last two.”

He didn’t sound hopeful, if hopeful is even a word that should be used if you’re waiting for the ‘go’ for a mission serious enough to need our intervention. Global tension had been high for days. It was just the usual stuff, but a few terrorist groups had made colorful threats that had the nervous types in Washington more twitchy than usual. If this turned out to be the third call-up in a row that turned out to be a false alarm, I was going to be perturbed.

Something must have shown in my expression.

“You need a distraction. Go jog. Or fly. Scratch that. Either one might attract attention. Hey, we’ve got a newbie with us. I don’t think you’ve met Tig. He’s subbing for Max.”

Evan hooked a thumb behind him. I turned to see a stranger talking to Gunny.

“Where is Max?” I asked.

“Taking leave while his first kid is being born.”

“Ah.” I didn’t know what to say about that. I knew so little about the personal lives of the Sigma Seven team members that I didn’t even know Max was married. I thought for a moment about whether familiarity was a good thing or a bad thing. I could see how personal involvement might get in the way of any of us doing our jobs. On the other hand, when your life is in someone’s hands, you want to know something about the person those hands are attached to. I decided that, like a lot of stuff, it was a matter of degree. Some familiarity was good. Intimacy probably wasn’t. I’d already decided that suggesting to Colonel Brock that he make a determined attempt to get me pregnant with his child would not be a good move, no matter how often I fantasized about the two of us testing each others sexual stamina. Before I got too far along the track on that train of thought, I got off at the next stop and found something else to do – mess with the new guy.

“Newbie, hunh?”

“New to us. Brock picked him. Tig is a Ranger.”

“Oh.”

Jeff and Leonora were talking to each other in the back of the room. Jeff had worn his robe in, but had thrown the hood back once he was inside. Tig was staring and whispering to Gunny. In any other company, Leonora would have been the object of Tig’s attention, but between an attractive silver-haired woman of elegant bearing and an anthropomorphic cat, the cat won. From this I also made the shrewd deduction that while Tig had been briefed about Sigma Seven, no one had bothered to tell him about the four adjunct members of the team. That was typical. Sigma Seven is a deep-black unit, where information is compartmentalized by default and no one has a need-to-know, until they do. This is partly why I know so little about the personal lives of the team members.

The smile that spread across my face was matched by the frown on Evan’s. In an earnest tone he said, “Whatever you’re thinking ... please don’t.”

If he had told me that Solomon had sent Tig, I would have nodded and let my smile get even bigger. Since he was Brock’s guy, I decided to rein-in my urge to mess with the newb. Not drop it completely, just enough to avoid permanent psychological damage.

“Sam...” Evan whispered as I slid out of my chair and around to the unoccupied one next to Tig and Gunny. Gunny saw me coming and broke off the hushed conversation he’d been having with Tig.

“Hi!” I said, cheerfully, once Tig had turned toward me. “I’m Sam.”

“Oh, hey! I’m...” And at this point Tig’s eyes did that thing that every guy’s eyes did when meeting me. They tried to fall out of his head and roll down between my boobs.

I said we’d grabbed our work-clothes, not that we’d changed into them. Those were still in their ready-bags. Except for Jeff, whose call-out clothes were the pair of boxers he usually wore, the rest of us wore whatever we could grab out of our closets when we got back to our rooms. Leonora wore a sun-dress that looked freshly-starched. Neeka had put on a pair of shorts and an olive-drab t-shirt. I had on one of my cheap, hacked-off t-shirts and a pair of solid-color, seamless, low-rise, lace-trimmed boy-shorts I’d bought in an assorted dozen. Neeka insisted they were supposed to be underwear, but they fit me, and since very little does, I wore them as regular shorts. On someone else, the under-sized top would have been modest. On me, it was tight enough and thin enough to show every contour of my nipples and surrounding territory just like the shorts showed off the dimples in my boyish butt and the twin mounds of my mons. Hey, exhibitionism is my hobby.

“Tig.” I finished for him. “Yes, I know. How did you get that name?”

Tig manfully dragged his gaze back up to my face. “I wish I could say it was because I was a welder. Truth is ... my sister’s kid was having a birthday. I bought him a plush toy tiger and had it in the back seat of my car when I got called back to the base. Guys saw the thing and well ... Tigger.”

I nodded. Tig got off light. I’d heard worse names and more humiliating stories behind them.

“So,” Tig began hesitantly. “You four are with the Sigma Seven team?”

Obviously, no one had bothered to brief Tig on what kind of outfit he would be joining. Which meant I could tell him any BS I liked and he wouldn’t know the difference. I smiled and opened my mouth when Evan cleared his throat. I didn’t need to turn my head to know the look I’d get.

“No,” I said, lapsing into uncharacteristic honesty. “We’re sort of an auxiliary group. We bring certain special abilities to the team.”

Since I wanted to leave myself for last, I began by trying to think of a way to explain what made Jeff special that wasn’t obvious at a glance. Dropping that, I tried to think of a way to describe Leonora that didn’t include the word ‘vampire’.

“Neeka is really good at tech-stuff,” I finally said, pointing at the redhead sitting in front next to the table and her laptop.

Tig nodded like he thought that was as lame a comment as it sounded to me when I said it.

“And what’s your special ability?”

Having flubbed my shot at inventing stories about the others, I found myself backed into a corner when it came to me. I could come off as screwy, or I could tell him the truth ... which would come off as screwy just the same.

“I’m a triple-F girl. Flirting, fighting, and ... I think you can guess the third,” I said, justifying the first F.

“Yeah, I guess I can.” Tig’s lips curled into something just shy of a leer and his gaze dropped below my neck again.

I smiled back, and inhaled a fraction deeper than I needed to, just for the heck of it.

“48 Double-H,” I told him, to save him the trouble of figuring it out for himself.”

“No shit?”

“I also do Kung Fu.”

“I’ll just bet you do.”

It was a few seconds before Tig realized that what he’d said was a response to a remark I hadn’t made.

“Sorry, what? Oh, Kung Fu! Right! No offense, but that stuff has always seemed a bit sissy to me. I mean, the combat skills instructors I had joked about guys jumping around in silk pajamas trying to look like animals.”

“Yeah, that’s the popular image of it. The man who taught me had a more practical approach – if it works, use it. That’s where the whole Mixed Martial Arts thing came from. What you were taught is stuff that was cherry-picked out of a big bag of forms and styles, which is good. But everyone gets taught to do the same the same stuff the same way. There are two problems with that. First, you use the same set of moves that everyone else uses. That means that anyone who knows where you trained knows what to expect and can plan to counter it. Secondly, what you were taught may not match-up well with your abilities. Someone who has found what works for them and worked to master it will have an advantage. Someone who has mastered a variety of techniques and can match them against your weaknesses can kick your ass.”

As I was talking, I realized that I was getting pedantic again. Unarmed combat was what I did – when I wasn’t ripping things to bits with my claws - and I had opinions about it. I’d even shared those with a group of highly-trained operators during an all-too-brief special camp not that long ago and had made my points with a great deal of emphasis.

“I’d be interested in seeing your stuff,” Tig said. “Maybe we could spar sometime.”

I managed to stifle a laugh barely in time. My initial reaction was to take him up on his offer. But, he was Brock’s guy, so I needed to damp-down my impulse to humiliate him.

Neeka looked over at me and nodded. Our mental exchange had taken less time than the proverbial eye-blink. She was as bored as I with sitting and waiting.

“I usually spar with Neeka,” I told Tig. “We’re going over to the hangar next door to get loosened-up. Would you like to watch?”

Tig shrugged. “Sure.”

It seemed to me that his tone didn’t match the blasé attitude his shrug implied. I thought it was a safe bet that Tig’s interest in watching a couple of girls fight had little to do with any martial art prowess on display, but whatever his motive – he was an audience, and I’m an incurable show-off.

I told Evan what we were up to. He nodded and said, “Good idea. Go distract yourself. I’ll come get you when we hear something.”

Jeff was still in rest-mode. His tail wasn’t even moving. Leonora did ‘chill’ better than anyone. Being restless is so very un-vampire-like, I guess. Either it was more of the image she wanted to project or just after several hundred years, waiting was something else she’d got good at.

The hangar was big enough for three helicopters, side-by-side - if two of them had their rotors folded-back. The roof was much higher than necessary, as was the size of the main door. It was empty because the helicopters that were supposed to be in it had been sent to one of the currently-active but not quite hot conflicts somewhere on the other side of the world. Not for the first time, I wondered if it had occurred to anyone to see what would happen if they sent Neeka, Leonora, Jeff and me into a live combat zone. I hoped they realized that nothing good would come of that. For one thing, I doubted we would be any more effective at winning a battle than guys with tanks, guns, and planes. For another ... well, even war has rules. And we didn’t play by those. Anything we might do had a good chance of looking like a war-crime to the media. A trivia item I remembered from one of the lectures I’d managed not to sleep through was a quote from Carl von Clausewitz saying that war is merely the continuation of politics by other means. If so, then once the war ends, politics returns, and with it all the usual finger-pointing and scapegoating for anything that went wrong during the fighting.

If I was sure of anything, it was that someone as politically-aware as the current National Security Advisor would know that. So I wasn’t terribly worried about being bundled onto a plane for a long ride to somewhere I’d be dropped into a shit-storm of bombs and bullets.

The hanger didn’t have work-out mats, just a concrete floor with surprizingly-few oil stains on it. But it did have oodles of floor-space, so we wouldn’t have to worry about bumping into things. Neeka and I walked to the center of the huge building while Tig found a stack of shipping crates to perch on.

When you spar with someone you know well, there are few surprizes. Each of you knows the other’s tendencies and preferences. It’s more a game of switching-up the combinations of moves and executing them with slight variations so you can force a response that puts your opponent at a momentary disadvantage and lets you score on them.

Scoring with us was one-sided. My scores were taps, while Neeka’s would likely have been lethal to anyone without my abilities. If she thought she had a shot at taking my head off, she wouldn’t hesitate to take it. I was OK with this, simply because in a real fight with real enemies that was exactly the reflex she needed to have, while I needed to emphasize control so I wouldn’t accidentally eviscerate someone who might be subdued by milder means. There had been a few times I had lost the opportunity to interrogate someone because I’d used more force than was strictly necessary. Not that they hadn’t been trying to kill me at the time, thereby fully-justifying my actions – just that I had gone right past the choice in the heat of the moment.

I already had a reputation for having lousy impulse-control that I was trying, with moderate success, to live-down. Part of Evan’s job was putting out any fires it looked like I might start and it grated on me that Brock thought I needed a babysitter. He was totally right, but it was still annoying to have him think that.

The most valuable thing in a fight is the element of surprize. If your opponent doesn’t know what’s coming, they can’t be ready for it and you’ve already put them on the defensive. Having them reacting to you gives you the advantage. (Han shot first for a very good reason.) Of course, if you telegraph your move, you give away that advantage. Don’t ball a fist, shift your weight, or pull back an arm or leg. Get on your toes and stay balanced and loose. The most effective attack is executed from a posture of relaxed serenity.

Neeka, of course, knew all this as well as I did. We’d learned it from the same teacher. So we stood there at slightly more than arm’s length from each other and did our best to look serene and calm ... until one of us thought the time was right to strike.

Suddenly, Neeka’s left foot was heading for my abdomen. I turned and leaned just in time and it whipped past and was jerked back before I could bring my hand down on her shin.

I responded by hopping closer and trying to get a punch in while her leg was still moving, but she threw a side-kick with her right leg even before the left touched down. Since my weight was forward, all I could do was drop down and duck.

From that position, recovery wasn’t possible in the fraction of a second I thought I had, so I tucked and somersaulted forward, swinging my right heel out in her direction.

Her legs are longer than mine, so I missed, but so did she and we both took a beat to recover before going at it again.

After that it was a mad flurry of punches, kicks, blocks, deflections, and a good bit of showboating because both of us enjoy having an audience.

For Neeka, that meant dropping to the ground and using one of her long legs to try to sweep my feet out from under me. I didn’t have time to jump. All I managed was to skip over it. She almost got me when she followed-up with her other leg.

My showy move was to pretend to lunge for her solar plexus, but then start to turn it into a forward somersault but keep my arms extended so I made it a forward flip. When she understood what was happening, all she could do was back away. I almost caught her with that move, but she saw the second flip coming and fended-off my kick.

We kept it up for what felt like fifteen minutes, but was probably closer to ten.

Time dilation is a side-effect of the acute level of situational-awareness we achieve when fighting. At first, I had thought it might be another of my abilities. But Neeka said she experienced it as well, so it was probably just the result of the high degree of focus needed to work at the speed we normally managed. Real fights are usually over in seconds, not minutes. If you’re truly trying to seriously hurt someone and you can’t manage that in under a minute of full-on effort, you are in real trouble and should probably be thinking of spending your remaining energy running away as fast as you can.

As one, Neeka and I both stepped back and executed a polite half-bow.

Tig was appropriately impressed.

“Wow! That was ... fast! You were both almost a blur. Uh, who won?”

Neeka and I had a brief silent argument over whether I had managed to tag her on the hip with an elbow or not.

“I did,” she said. “Three to two.”

“I didn’t see it,” Tig admitted, shaking his head. “I didn’t see any of that.”

I saw something. Tig was still leaning against the stack of crates, but he had his hips cocked to one side and his right leg bent with his heel hooked on the edge of the lowest crate. It seemed an odd stance – unless he were trying to hide something. Like an erection.

“Still want to spar with me?” I asked.

“Uh, no. As much as it hurts to admit. I am not in your league. Either of you.”

Poor eye-contact is always a give-away. In this case, it told me that all that exercise had caused my top to creep-up far enough that my nipples were on the verge of peeking-out from under it. I slid my thumbs under the thin fabric and tugged it out and down to regain my modesty, then I smoothed it out by running both hands down my chest, parting my fingers enough to make the contour of my nipples show through the thread-bare cloth.

This put poor Tig in a quandary. He couldn’t decide which breast to stare at, so his eyes flicked back and forth, giving each equal time. By the time he realized he was playing favorites and ignoring the redhead in the room, Evan interrupted to tell us that the call-up had been rescinded and we were to stand-down.

Back in the briefing room, Brock added that whatever was going on, the REMFs had changed their minds about the situation needing our delicate touch and they were going to rely on other resources (which I took to mean doing diddly-squat) to handle the problem.

Without even knowing what the situation was, I was sure this was a mistake. Damn few problems simply evaporate on their own and whatever other resources were being relied on could hardly come close to the level of Sigma Seven when it came to sheer bad-assery, and that was if you didn’t include Leonora, Jeff, Neeka and me.

“Politics!” I snarled, not even trying to do it under my breath. “I bet this is another political turf thing between the State Department and Homeland Security.”

When I looked around, I could see that the sentiment was shared generally. The only person who was good with it was Colonel Brock. I suppose he had been through enough of these abortive call-ups to be sanguine with the order to stand-down while someone else screwed the pooch on a mission he could have handled. I was sure his need to prove his mettle had been satisfied long ago. I tried to emulate him, but I still felt that the whole ‘they also serve who only sit on their butts and wait for some higher-up to make up their mind to do something smart about a problem’ thing wasn’t nearly as fulfilling as getting out and kicking ass.

Leonora was totally down with Brock on this issue. But I’d noticed that was only the case when she didn’t know enough about what the problem was to form an opinion. She had no difficulty stating her position on things she felt strongly about. The problem was – I never knew what might set her off. I assumed that her triggers were things out of her past that left enough of a mark on her to make her react strongly to the current situation, but the only thing I had noticed that I could point to was religious stuff.

Not that Leonora was some kind of religious zealot. She’d never brought it up in any casual conversation I could recall, but I vividly remembered how she had reacted when Neeka had said something about an event during an earlier outing which was supposed to portend the Second Coming of Christ. Leonora had said, rather emphatically, “He will not be there.”

We’d been sort of busy at the time, but the way she said it had made all the metaphysical hairs on my body stand up. It wasn’t the flat denial that bothered me most, however much that made me not want to know just how she could be so sure. It was the heavily personal emphasis on the word “He”. She’d sounded resentful, like she’d been stood-up on a date she’d spent hours getting ready for. And that made me feel like I’d been bludgeoned with a copy of The Gideons’ favorite book.

My birth-mother was, for want of a harsher term, bugfuck crazy about religion. She could attend a tent-meeting and listen to a fire-and-brimstone sermon screamed at the top of someone’s lungs and come away thinking the preacher was letting them off easy. I’d been dragged to Sunday School and Church every week and was interrogated afterward to make sure I’d been paying attention. My intense indoctrination only stopped when puberty set in and the titty-fairy awarded me the biggest pair of boobs my loony mother had ever seen. Rather than let her God-fearing, righteous peers see how her daughter had been turned into Satan’s Own Slut, she none-too-graciously started leaving me at home while she went off in search of the salvation she was certain she was going to be denied for having given birth to someone like me.

Issues? Nah! No issues here! But I did get a good grounding in The Word. I knew who Jesus was supposed to have hung-out with and some of their back-stories, including one specific wealthy woman who paid the bill at those Inns the guys stayed at during their tour of the not-yet Holy Land. Look it up. It must have pissed-off more than one Innkeeper when they discovered that they weren’t going to make any profit on wine-sales to that party. Not that I blame Him one bit for getting a little payback for his folks being stuck in a barn that night in Bethlehem. No bed, and I’ll bet no breakfast either.

I mention all this so you will know that I am as aware as anyone can be some two millennia later of certain historical events. I had been forced to concede that Leonora was clearly way-older than the few centuries she admitted. But the idea that she might have played a part in those events and even been a close personal pal of a key figure in them is still something that messes with my head when I try to imagine it. I still can’t get anywhere close to accepting the idea that Leonora – under whatever name she used at the time – might have dated ... with everything that implies ... No, sorry. I can’t get there. I hereby renew my resolution to take Leonora at face-value and not concern myself with her past.

And so, with mixed feelings about coming so close to going into action, we all departed to return to whatever we had been doing before. Once out the door to our little hut, the military team members got into their vehicles and proceeded away from the small airfield and toward the main complex while the oddball squad headed for Leonora’s BMW.

“Um, Sam?” Tig called after me. “Since we’re not doing anything after all, would you like to have a beer with me? Uh, Neeka too, if she wants to come. My treat.”

I thought that was awfully considerate of him to invite Neeka along, even if he’d done it as an afterthought. After a quick silent conversation with her, I said, “It’s too early for me to be drinking, but I’ll let you buy us lunch if you like.”

“I never thought of beer as drinking,” Tig said. “But, yeah. I’ll go lunch. Want to take my car?”

Neeka handed her garment bag to Leonora and told her she and Jeff could go ahead without us, then she and I followed Tig around the building to his car.

Tig’s car turned out to be one of those ‘project cars’ that guys start with a near-clunker and swap parts on and upgrade until they get it where they want it to be. A lot of those are still in the dented panels and missing bumper stage when their owners go into the military, but Tig seemed to have put in the effort and money to get his to the point where he could take it to local car shows. The paint obviously wasn’t a professional job, and some of the chrome could have been shinier, but overall it was well-done and from the grin on his face when he turned to see our reaction, he was quite proud of it.

“What is it?” I asked Neeka, before I dared say anything to Tig. I know very little about cars, but I know when a guy is as proud of his as Tig seemed to be, a girl should try to look impressed. Asking that question of Tig would probably burst his bubble.

“Like I would know?” Neeka replied. “It could have started as something from the 50s, judging from all the bulgy bits, but that would just be a guess.”