Page 40 of Flames and Blood

“Fair enough.”

At dusk I stand up and walk out past where the light sat all day, into air that won’t kill me.

The truck’s cold and it starts on the second try. Kent’s already up, holding the door with his good hand. Meyer comes out behind him, gets in, and says nothing.

Neither of them asks what we’ll be facing next.

I’m thinking about eyes with fire in them.

Chapter 9

Kalli

They drive hard through the night and into the day. Nobody talks to me. Two heavily armed men sit across from me now, and they watch me the whole time. Neither of them says a word. The stops are short. The engine never turns off. When the men outside move around, their voices are tense.

I can’t move. The second chain runs through both cuffs and down to the floor, and it holds my hands up under my chin. If I sit up straight, the cuffs drag across the burns on my wrists. If I let my shoulders drop, the weight pulls on my neck instead. I shift positions through the trip, trying to get comfortable, and failing. My arms went numb at some point, and woke up again worse.

My palms are the real problem. The blisters from the floor plate haven’t closed. The runes in the cuffs keep them open. At home, a burn like this would be gone by morning.

Breathe. In, out, slow.

In the afternoon, I feel the wall before we reach it.

It starts as pressure behind my teeth, the same feeling my cuffs give me, and the same bitter taste. But this is not a cuff. This is wide. It fills the whole road ahead of us, and we drive straight into it.

It rolls through the vehicle from front to back. My ears fill. The burns on my wrists heat up and then cool. Then it’s behind us, and it stays behind us, closed.

I know what that was. I’ve lived inside ward-work for over a year. That was the same thing, built big enough to hold a valley. Nothing gets through a wall like that unless someone has allowed it through.

The road climbs. The trees outside the mesh thin out and then stop. The cold coming through the window seals turns thin and dry, and under it I can smell stone and snowmelt.

I grew up in this air. My clan spends every winter in air exactly like this.

I’m not surprised. The doctor who measured me was a dragon. I knew it the moment he walked into my cell, and I’ve known since that day that my own kind are behind this. So this is not news. It’s confirmation. And it hurts.

We slow, and turn, and stone passes close on both sides. A gate. The sound under the tires changes to gravel. We stop.

The doors open, and two guards stand at the entrance.

“Don’t pull any moves,” one of them tells me. I think he’s the one I bit. I grin at him, and his expression darkens. He reaches in, unlocks the chain at the floor plate, and gives it a tug. I don’t resist; there’s no point. As I clamber out of the vehicle, my knees give once, then hold. I blink as I look at what’s in front of me.

What the hell?

It’s the last thing I expected.

There is no cell block. No intake office. No bars, no floodlights, no yard full of guards.

There’s a long stone house with lit windows. There’s a raked gravel drive, and lamps along a path, and people standing at the edges of the light. The house is old, and it has been looked after. Everything I can see looks expensive. Like old money.

I take in the people around me, picking up their scent first, then how much heat comes off them. The escorts are human. The man holding the front door open is human. The two people at the edge of the light are human. The gray-haired woman waiting on the steps is human.

A house on a mountain, in the kind of country my own people live in, and there is not one dragon in this yard.

Then boots come down onto the stone step, and that changes it.

A man walks out of the lit doorway. He doesn’t hurry. The staff stop moving as he passes them. The escorts straighten their backs. The one closest to me takes a step away from me without being told to.

Heat comes off the man in waves. Under it there’s a dry smell, warm stone, the smell that lives in every hall of my mother’s court. He’s one of us. He’s old—older than anyone I’ve ever been this close to—and I pick it all up before he says a word.