Page 31 of Flames and Blood

Every exchange starts nearer and ends further off. Somebody out there is dragging it the other way. Strange. Why aren’t they surrounding the truck?

My dragon goes still.

Not the press she’s been holding against me for days. Still. All of her aimed at the door, the way she used to go quiet on a ridge in the half second before I saw what we’d been tracking.

She’s found something. My skin starts to tingle.

The lock takes a pull from outside. It holds.

It takes a second one, and gives. The door swings open, and the cold comes in around the man standing in it.

He’s tall. Dark hair pushed back off his forehead. A straight nose, and a mouth that looks like it’s not used to smiling.

There’s a weapon down at his side, held loose, like he’s finished with it, and a dark, wet patch low on his coat where somebody has already put a round through him. It isn’t slowing him down at all.

Then his eyes come to me and stay there. Dark. Steady. Not moving over the compartment, not checking the corners. On me.

Heat goes through me, low, and it isn’t hers. I haven’t felt that in a very long time.

Oh, for God’s sake!

My mouth has gone dry. There are men shooting at each other on the road outside and my whole body has picked this exact minute to notice a stranger’s mouth and decide that it’s sexy.

Wonderful. Very useful. Well done.

He stops.

Whatever he expected behind that door, it wasn’t this. His mouth opens. He shuts it. He doesn’t hide any of it fast enough. His hand isn’t steady on the door frame. One second, maybe less. Then it is.

He looks at me the way you look at somebody you already know.

I have never seen him before in my life.

No breath. And I’m near enough to hear a heart from where I’m sitting, and there isn’t one in him.

Vampire.

He’s got one hand on the door frame above his head, and the sleeve has pulled back off his forearm. There’s a lot of strength in a man built like that, and that’s another thing I shouldn’t be noticing. But I do.

My dragon goes off.

Heat comes up my throat. Smoke on the back of my tongue. The skin across my shoulders pulls tight where wings I haven’t opened in over a year come awake all at once. My spine bows and the chains catch me halfway. I fold forward against them, hard, with my hands shaking on the floor.

I know what my eyes are doing. They’ve gone gold, and they’re throwing light onto the backs of my own hands. There’s nothing I can do about that now.

My beast was already focused on the door. She wasn’t waiting for the door to open. She was waiting for him.

Flashes come back to me. The loading bay. My head down, boots and shouting, and my chin coming up without me choosing it.

Him. He was in that yard that night at the quarry. I never saw him.

She did.

“Kalli,” he says. My name. Out loud. In a stranger’s mouth.

For over a year I’ve been a number on a page. This man says my name, and he says it the way you say a name you already know. My throat closes on nothing at all. I’d forgotten what it sounds like from outside my own head.

“We’re getting you out of here.”