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Cal flushed red, and I took pity on him. Surely I hadn’t managed to hire the only hundred-year-old virgin in our society. And maybe the charred meat in front of us did look rather androgynous.
“Look at the shape of the pelvis,” I told him, blanking my mind as I pointed to the charred areas that identified her as woman. “Definitely female. And the size of her in general is consistent with that of a female.”
“Right,” Cal muttered. “I knew that.”
I opened her thighs and the burnt skin crackled. There were several tears in the flesh. Made from teeth sharp enough to leave nothing but ragged pieces behind. They hadn’t killed her for food, but for fun. There was too much meat left on the lower half of her body, and dragons never wasted a meal. If they’d meant to use her for food they would have taken the body back to their lair with them.
“They always travel in a pack,” Cal said. “But I don’t understand why they tried to cover their tracks with this one. They didn’t burn the others.”
“Maybe there wasn’t a member of the pack who could breathe fire before. Maybe they’re traveling with someone new.” I moved to the head and picked up the skull gently, just in case there was anything I missed. Her hair had been dark and probably long, but it was now melted against the bone like plastic. Where a nose had once been was now an empty cavity and the mouth was drawn and open in the parody of a scream.
“Let’s get her bagged and back home so we can dispose of her properly,” I said. “I’ve found all traces of the different scents of her killers I’m going to find. None of them are familiar to me. I’ll start hunting as soon as we get back. We’ll have to dig up all the ground underneath her and bring it with us. You know the drill. I don’t want any sign that she was ever here.”
“You got it,” Cal said. He’d already taken a shovel out of the bag.
I laid the skull back down and moved to stand up, but as I did her eyelids crackled open and immediately sloughed away like dust, leaving her eyes big and round in their sockets.
“Kill me,” she wheezed.
Cal dropped the shovel and jumped straight up into the tree above us—more than fifty feet.
“Oh, gods,” I said. It was the only thing I could think of as I stared into a pair of pale yellow eyes with pupils in the shape of diamonds.
She was Drakán—one of us. And it was now glaringly obvious why they’d chosen to burn this woman. There was no other way to get rid of the body. All of their other kills had been human, so the last thing I’d expected to find was that the victim was one of us.
I moved down to her calves where the fire hadn’t spread yet and inhaled deeply. Her scent was faint, but it was there. And it wasn’t the scent of my clan. What I had to figure out was what she was doing in our territory. I opened my mind and let my power flow, trying to read the last images she’d seen, but she was already too far gone, and I saw nothing but the blackness of impending death.
“Kill me,” she said again.
“Who did this to you?” I asked. I knew I didn’t have a lot of time to question her. She had no chance for survival, and I winced at the pain she must be suffering. I couldn’t even fathom the torture of burning to death slowly.
Cal jumped back down, and took the recorder from the bag to start documenting.
The woman tried to answer, but she was turning to ash in front of my eyes, little bits of her blowing into the wind with every small movement she made.
“What’s your name? What clan are you?”
“Jillian.” Her voice was no more than a whisper.
I wasn’t going to get anything helpful out of her, and I couldn’t stand to see her suffering any longer. “Be at peace, sister.” I took her head in my hands and twisted hard and fast so the break was clean. I held the skull between my hands and crushed it so the only thing left was a fine bone dust that fell in gray flecks to the frozen ground. She wasn’t in pain any longer. “Let’s get her home to my brother,” I said when it was done. “Maybe he’ll be able to tell us something that will help us catch them.”
Dragons were hard to kill. The head could be separated from the body to slow us down, but the skin would reknit itself if the two pieces were brought back together. The heart could be taken and crushed, rendering us unconscious for a day or two, but eventually the organ would regenerate itself. Ashes to ashes was the only way to truly kill a dragon, but killing one of our own was an automatic death sentence by the High Council.
The tortures that Jillian had just experienced were nothing compared to what would happen to her killers.
I just had to find them first.
ChapterTwo
It was almost dawn by the time we made it back to our lair. The sky was a solid wall of gray, heavy with rolling storm clouds and almost bursting with the promise of rain. I made the sharp turn into our drive at high speed, kicking up wet leaves and mud.
The big house I’d called home for the last hundred and fifty years came into view—an intimidating fortress built of dark stone, standing three stories high and barely visible amid the towering forest of trees. Stone arches and a covered courtyard surrounded the entire outer bailey, and massive gardens of evergreen shrubs sat in neat rows between the drive and the house.
We’d lived in this house longer than any of our other lairs. With the growth of the human population, all Drakán have had to move their lairs more frequently or make major adjustments to their lifestyles. Our clan members lived in either a remote location, where people were scarce and animal hunting was convenient, or they lived in a major city where the overwhelming population wouldn’t notice if humans went missing every once in a while. They had jobs, found mates, and lived among the humans, guarding the secret of their blood fiercely. The diamond pupils could be covered with contacts and their violent natures toned down with small doses of animal tranquilizers taken like vitamins. We were experts at blending.
Our home was the main lair for our clan. It’s where we had our yearly gatherings and where our people would come if there was danger. The hunting was plentiful, though not so much for my father. He was an Ancient, and all Ancients I’d ever met only ate human meat, so he had to fly to more populated areas for good hunting. I’d never been able to hunt humans the way the Ancients did. There were a lot of things I couldn’t stomach that the Ancients did. Ancients were more dragon than human—animals without a conscience trapped in a human body, tyrannical in their need for power and possessions.
The cobbled driveway crunched beneath my tires as I followed the serpentine curves around to Cal’s side of the house. Everyone in residence had their own entrance that led to their own specific wing. We didn’t spend a lot of quality time together in my family, so separate quarters were a necessity.
