Page 60 of Flames and Blood

“Hold on to the blanket.”

“I am holding the blanket.”

We get off the drive and down the bank into the trees. I go another two hundred yards in before I stop. Right now, deep cover matters more than speed.

Kent crouches. Meyer stands and watches the road.

“Where’s the truck?” Kent says.

“Where we left it. Half a mile down, off the road, in the ditch under the pines.”

“Good. So we drive.”

“Where?”

He opens his mouth and stops.

“Go ahead and say it,” I tell him. He’s not going to tell us anything we don’t know, but it’s probably good to get it out.

“There’s one road,” Kent says. “One gate. It’s shut, and the wall’s still up.” He rubs his face. “We’re inside it. We got in, and now we’re inside it with her, and the only way out is through that locked gate.”

“That’s it. That’s the problem.”

“So what do we do?”

“We wait.”

“We wait?” He looks at me. “There must be a hundred men back there. They came out of the ground.”

“They came with the old dragon.” I keep my voice down. “A man like that doesn’t drive up a mountain on his own, and he’s been sitting in that house waiting on her. They were inside the wall before we ever got here. That’s why we watched that gate for a day and a night and never saw them. And there are less than a hundred.”

“So how many?”

“Thirty. Give or take. They’re spread over a big property in the dark, and they’ve just lost their leader, which makes them harder to read, not easier.”

Meyer speaks without turning around.

“He’s right,” he says. “Whoever runs that house won’t sit on this. He can’t. We’ve got his dragon, and we killed the old male in there who seemed pretty important. Every hour we’re loose is another hour we could be out on the road. He’ll send men out to look for us.”

Kent looks at him. “And to send them out…”

“He has to open the gate.” Meyer nods at the dark down the hill. “So we don’t need a way through the wall. We need to be sitting close enough to the gate when he opens it himself.”

Kent is quiet for a second.

“That’s genuinely a good plan,” he says, “and I hate how much of it depends on a man being efficient.”

“He’s efficient,” I say. “It’s the one thing about him I’m sure of.”

We go to ground in a ditch above the road, four hundred yards up the hill from the gate, under a low stone wall that’s been there longer than the house has. Kent and Meyer take the two ends. I sit with my back against the stones and Kalli across my lap, still wrapped up.

We wait a long time.

The blanket has come off one of her hands. Her wrist is burned all the way round where the cuffs sat, old marks with newer ones on top of them. Then I look at the hand again, at the two fingers curled into my jacket, at the way it’s resting against me. She’s warm through my sleeve. I’ve been cold for sixty years, and I can feel exactly where she is. I tuck her hand back into the blanket.

She doesn’t sleep, and she doesn’t stop talking.

“Your coat smells like somebody else’s blood,” she says.