Page 49 of Flames and Blood

The bathroom is warm and full of steam. The water smells strong—oils in it, sweet and heavy, roses and something under the roses that I don’t know. I get in, and the heat sinks into my sore back, and the cramps let go one at a time. For a few minutes it’s simply good.

Then my skin starts to tingle.

Heat after cold prickles on the surface and fades. This is different. It sits under my skin, low and constant, everywhere the water touches, and it doesn’t fade. I lift my arm out of the water and look at it. Nothing to see. The tingle keeps on.

“What’s in the water?”

“Oils.” Mrs. Nell pours a pitcher slowly over my shoulders. “For your skin. You’ve been living in concrete for a year.”

She’s calm. She’s kind. She has been kind since the moment I stepped out of that truck. She’s kind now, with her sleeves rolled up and sweet oil on her hands, while my body prickles in water she prepared.

I get out of the bath. She doesn’t stop me. She wraps me in a towel, sits me by the fire, and combs my hair out in long, even strokes. My skin goes on humming under the towel. My nipples tighten, and my thighs press together.

What the fuck?

Then she takes a small bottle out of her apron pocket and holds it out to me.

Glass, with a stopper. The liquid inside is pale gold.

“What is it?”

“It will make things easier for you.”

“Easier how?”

“It’s better if you take it yourself, Kalli. In your own time. I promise you that.”

“What is it?”

She doesn’t answer that. She holds the bottle out, steady, kind, and waits.

“No.”

“Kalli—”

“No!”

My dragon comes up with the word.

She’s fed, rested, and stretched, and she is not the starved, flattened creature they shipped up this mountain. She rises fast and close to the surface, and the room changes around me. The steam rolls back off my skin. Heat pours off my shoulders. Scales lift along my forearms, gold and hard, and the towel starts to smoke where it touches me.

Mrs. Nell doesn’t move. She watches, expressionless, as the scales come up my arms, and her hands stay folded around the bottle.

Now, my dragon says. Now, while we’re strong.

And I want to. My whole body wants to.

But I’ve flown around the boundaries of this valley. There is nowhere to go. If I burn this room, they’ll cuff me, dose me anyway, and I’ll have shown them how fast they have to chain me. There’ll be a better time to use that than tonight.

I push her back down. My teeth grind, and sweat runs down my spine. The scales sink back under my skin one row at a time, slow, and she fights me the whole way.

The towel has a scorched brown line across it where it lay against my arms.

“I’m not drinking that shit.” There’s a rasp to my voice that’s pure dragon.

Mrs. Nell looks at the scorch mark. Then she sighs—a small, real sigh, the first crack I’ve ever seen in her—and she puts the bottle back in her apron. She goes to the door and opens it.

The men from the yard come in. Four of them.