Smoked

by Mari Mancusi

  She squared her shoulders. “Was anyone hurt?” she asked, fear thrumming through her veins. “Did anyone get burned? Or…” She trailed off, not wanting to voice the worst.

  “We don’t think so,” the bearded man said to her relief. “Everyone seems accounted for. Though we can’t be sure.”

  “Right.” Trinity nodded. That was something at least. “Okay,” she said. “Here’s what we’re going to—”

  “Look!” screamed a young boy, pointing his finger to the sky. “He’s back!”

  Everyone screamed, their eyes shifting to the nightmare above. Trinity followed their gazes, her own eyes locking on the black shadow swimming across the sun. She had to admit, he really did look pretty large from this vantage point—not to mention extremely angry.

  “Everyone, take cover!” she cried, attempting to be heard over all the screaming. “He may have summoned up enough fire by now for another big blast.”

  “What are you going to do?” asked the little boy, staring up at her with awestruck eyes.

  “Whatever I have to,” she replied grimly. “Now go!”

  The crowd dispersed, though Trinity noticed some dragged their feet, now appearing more curious than afraid. And there were more than a few who had their phones pointed to the sky. They wanted to see the dragons fight, she realized, feeling a little sick at the thought. But who could blame them, really? It was a Michael Bay flick come to life.

  Hopefully it would leave less destruction in its wake…

  “Emmy? Are you ready for this?”

  The dragon gave her a rueful look. As I’ll ever be, I suppose.

  “Then let’s do it!”

  She leapt onto Emmy, grabbing on tight as the dragon pushed off on her back legs, springing into the sky, her wings beating the air in rapid pulses to gain elevation. As the ground fell away, Trin forced herself not to look down, half wondering if she should have taken cover with the rest of the townspeople and let Emmy go at it solo. But she’d promised the dragon they were a team, and maybe some of her power to push minds could be used on Zavier too.

  She closed her eyes and gave it try.

  Zavier. You don’t want to do this, Zavier.

  Out of nowhere, the dragon rose up before them, popping out from a cloud of lingering black smoke. His eyes locked onto them, and his mouth opened to an angry growl, baring glistening, sharp teeth. Trin sucked in a breath, taking him in. He looked so different now than he had back at the airfield. Sure his scales were still midnight black with the same flecks of gold intermixed. But his eyes had changed. The gentle black eyes had hardened, filled with hatred and rage.

  Zavier, please stop this! she tried again with no assurance that he could hear her. I know you’re angry. And you have every right to be. But these people did not kill your sister. They’re innocent.

  But Zavier didn’t answer—only opened his mouth and let loose a cannonball of fire straight in their direction.

  Emmy! Trin cried, horrified.

  Her dragon darted right, narrowly dodging the flames. The fire shot past them, nicking Emmy’s wing before slamming into a church steeple, setting it ablaze. Emmy turned on a dime, diving toward the church and wrapping a wing around the steeple, effectively smothering the fire before it could spread.

  The heat was so intense now that Trinity was drenched in sweat, and she was half-afraid her clothes would end up simply disintegrating from her body. Of course, being naked was about the least of her worries at this point.

  Come on, Emmy. Stop him!

  Emmy turned back to Zavier, her neck jutting out, followed by her body—a dragon-shaped torpedo shooting through the skies. Trin had to hang on for dear life as they cannonballed through the air, Emmy’s claws outstretched and her teeth bared.

  The dragons met head-on, claws raking at scales, teeth biting into necks, wrestling through the air, snarling and screaming as they went. Through it all, Trin held on for dear life, pretty sure, at any moment, she would fall and careen to her death. She struggled to take in shaky breaths, repeating her mantra over and over in her head.

  She’s not going to let me fall. She’s not going to let me fall.

  Emmy roared and attacked again, this time gouging Zavier’s side with her sharp teeth. But he retaliated quickly—slashing at her neck and drawing blood. To a casual observer, they would seem evenly matched—able to fight on and on forever. But as the battle continued, Trinity realized that Emmy was tiring while Zavier didn’t even appear winded.

  Come on, Ems, she urged worriedly. Don’t give up now.

  To her credit, Emmy kept fighting like a champ, but Trin knew it was only a matter of time. Emmy’s sides were bruised and her mouth bloody. All that time spent in the government lab was catching up to her, and though her will was strong, her body was proving too weak to take the other dragon down. If the fight continued much longer, Trinity was pretty sure they were going to lose. Emmy would fall, and they would both be killed.

  But just as Trin was about to give up—to beg Emmy to retreat to live to fight another day—she heard something else in the distance. A strangely familiar sound, permeating the air. Her eyes bulged from her head as she recognized it.

  A Hunter’s song. Could it really be?

  For a moment, both dragons froze, hovering motionless in the air, caught by the song’s powerful spell. Trinity waited, hardly able to breathe as the moment stretched out in front of them. Then, without warning, Emmy broke free of the trance, charging toward the other dragon, whipping her tail around until it collided with his head. For a moment, Zavier stared at her, stunned. But Emmy didn’t pause, grabbing his wing between her teeth and ripping it clean from his body.

  Now the dragon was falling, careening to the ground at a frightening speed. Emmy spit out the bloody wing, sending it on after him, then dove down, not willing, evidently, to let him get away. He hit the ground with a thunderous crash, and a moment later, Emmy was on top of him, wrestling him into submission.

  His scale! she screamed at Trinity.

  Trinity rolled off her dragon, slamming hard into the pavement and seeing stars. Once she’d recovered, she scrambled to her feet, looking around for a weapon. At first, she came up empty. Then her eyes lighted on a street sign that had been uprooted, its metal end jutting out. She ran over to it, grabbed it, and dragged it back to the two dragons. It was heavy and awkward, but she forced herself to keep going. This was their one chance to end this.

  Her eyes roved over Zavier, looking for the mark. Locating it, she pulled back on the sign and plunged it into the dragon’s one soft scale.

  I’m sorry, Scarlet. There’s nothing else I can do.

  Zavier screamed, black blood exploding from his body, splashing onto Trinity and Emmy like a tidal wave. Trin wiped the blood from her eyes, watching, praying it had done the trick. Zavier was writhing now, still screaming, a look of pain and anguish on his face. Then, at last, he fell silent, collapsing for the final time.

  Trinity leaned over and emptied the contents of her stomach onto the pavement. Then she staggered over to Emmy. The dragon was breathing hard and still bleeding in several spots. “Are you okay?” Trinity asked her, her voice choked with tears. She reached out to the dragon, holding her in her arms. They were both soaked in black blood, but at the moment, neither one of them cared.

  I’m okay, Emmy assured her. Most of the blood is his.

  Oh, Emmy. Trinity buried her face in the dragon’s scales. I’m so sorry.

  She looked up, realizing they were surrounded. All the townspeople were coming out from hiding, rushing over to see the aftereffects of the battle. Some hung back, as if they still weren’t sure they could trust Emmy, even though she clearly had just saved their lives. Others were jubilant, cheering loudly and literally dancing in the streets. Still others were busy uploading photos and videos to their various social media accounts, as you did, Trin
supposed, in times like these.

  “You saved us!” cried the girl with the FreeEmmy.com badge. “I knew you would!”

  Trinity gave her a rueful smile; she knew she should be just as happy as the rest of them. But instead, a heaviness seemed to weigh on her shoulders. Caleb and Scarlet were going to be so upset.

  And Emmy—well, now both her children were dead. Before she’d ever gotten a chance to get to know them. A choking sound escaped her throat.

  She turned to the townspeople. “Burn the body,” she instructed. “And bury the ashes deep in the ground.” She didn’t need the government swooping in and helping themselves to any more dragon DNA.

  As the townspeople moved to obey, she turned back to Emmy. The dragon was pawing the ground nervously, looking at Zavier’s corpse with puzzled eyes.

  I’m so sorry, Emmy, Trin whispered again. You know I didn’t want it to come to this.

  It didn’t, Emmy said suddenly, looking up at her.

  Huh? Trinity cocked her head in question. What do you mean?

  “That’s not Zavier.”

  Trinity whirled around, heart in her throat at the sound of the sudden voice. There behind her stood none other than Connor himself. The Hunter looked drained and tired and filthy. But the sight of him caused her heart to flutter despite herself.

  He must have arrived just in time, seen the fight, and stepped in to help with his Hunter song when they needed him most. Saved their lives, just as he’d promised to do.

  “What do you mean it’s not Zavier?” she demanded. She stared down at the dragon’s corpse, confusion creasing her brow. Now that she had time to better look at him, she realized Connor was right. This dragon was not only bigger than Zavier, but it had a strange coloring under its wings that Emmy’s son didn’t have.

  She looked up. “But…who else could it be?”

  “I don’t know,” Connor said grimly. “But I have a feeling things are about to get a whole lot worse.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  This was bad. This was so very bad.

  Three hours later, Connor was pacing the desert floor, his eyes returning, over and over again, to the scorched ruins that had once served as a government lab. It was hard to believe, looking at it now, that he and Trinity had been there only months before, preparing to break in and steal back her dragon. At the time, it had seemed an impenetrable fortress. Now it was nothing more than a burnt-out husk.

  Once they’d realized the dead dragon wasn’t Zavier, it hadn’t taken much to put two and two together. After that, they’d acted decisively, putting aside their personal feelings and jumping on Emmy’s back to fly to the lab, hoping they wouldn’t find what they both knew in their hearts had to be true. Connor had never wanted to be wrong more.

  But of course, he wasn’t.

  He swore under his breath. He should have predicted this, he told himself. How many times, after all, had he read the original story of Trinity and her Dracken friends breaking into the lab to free Emmy only to find sixteen more baby dragons waiting for them inside. Sixteen hybrids that had been genetically altered into monsters. Sixteen hybrids that would rise up against their rescuers and decimate the world.

  But they hadn’t seen any baby dragons when they’d staged Emmy’s rescue. And so he’d tried to convince himself that it hadn’t happened that way this time—that because it was ten years earlier, the government wouldn’t have had the technology to clone. That because it was only six months versus years, they wouldn’t have had the time.

  But they did have one thing they didn’t have the first time around, he reminded himself. They had Mara, the Dracken’s Chief Birthing Maiden, working with them. Perhaps she had futuristic technology at her disposal to help them create these fiends.

  And now they’d been set on the world once again.

  “Guess with his sister gone, he needed some backup,” Trinity remarked, not bothering to keep the bitterness from her voice. Connor sighed, stepping closer to her, laying a hand on her shoulder, not sure she would accept his gesture of comfort. His heart ached as he watched her trying to be brave, trying to keep it together.

  “Go ahead and say it,” she spit out, not turning around. “You told me so. You told me so, and I refused to listen.”

  He gave her a rueful look. “It’s okay,” he said. “I didn’t want it to be true either. Believe me, Trinity, I wanted so badly to be wrong.”

  She opened her mouth to speak, but at that moment, her phone rang. Frowning, she glanced at the screen and saw Luke’s name pop up on the caller ID.

  “We’ve got problems,” Luke said before she could say hello. “The Internet has been blowing up. There have been so many dragon sightings in the last hour that they crashed my email server. It’s all over the news too. I don’t know how the hell Zavier’s getting to so many places so quickly. We’ve been trying to pin them on the map, to come up with some kind of flight pattern to follow. But they don’t make any sense. As far as I can see, there’s no way he could be in so many places at once.”

  “He’s not,” Trinity said flatly. “He’s got thirteen pissed off brothers and sisters to help him.”

  “What?” Luke’s voice was incredulous. “Since when?”

  “Just keep charting the sightings, okay?” she told him. “And send them to my email. Try to get as detailed a description as you can for each dragon, so we know what we’re dealing with here.”

  “And if any of them sound like Zavier,” Connor added, “alert us immediately. He’s probably acting as the leader, and if we take him out first, it may confuse the others long enough for us to track them down.”

  “Roger that.”

  Trinity said good-bye to Luke and stuffed the phone in her pocket, turning back to Connor. “This is not good,” she said, the understatement of the century. Behind her, Emmy gave a worried whine.

  “No,” he agreed. “It’s not.”

  She moaned softly. “If only I had—”

  Connor held up a hand. “There’s no time for ‘if onlys’ right now,” he reminded her. “We have an apocalypse to stop. And we’re running out of time.” He gave her a stern look. “I know we’ve had our differences, Trinity. But…are you with me? Will you help me now?”

  She nodded. “Of course. What do we do?”

  “We need to get into the lab,” he told her. “I need to find out what I can about these other dragons—how many there are, what their genetic makeup is. If we can figure out what their DNA is spliced with, maybe we can determine a weakness.” He shrugged. “It’s a long shot, I know. But it may be the only one we have.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  The dragons had done their worst, and the lab was pretty much in shambles, all the entrances, including the loading dock, now blocked by rubble. In the end, they’d been forced to turn to Emmy for flyover help.

  At first, the dragon had balked at the idea of willingly entering her prison all over again but eventually obliged, allowing the two of them to climb onto her back. She took flight, and together they flew over the building, looking for some kind of hole they could drop down into. The dragons had to have exited somehow, Trin surmised, meaning there had to be something to use as an entrance.

  At last they saw it, at the far corner of the building: a black gaping pit, like a monster’s mouth, ready to swallow them whole. Trinity glanced nervously at Connor, then instructed Emmy to check it out. Connor pulled his weapon from its holster. They needed to be ready for anything.

  As they dropped down into the building, Trin blinked, trying to adjust her eyes to the sudden darkness. Connor, who, of course, had much better vision, gave an excited cry. “This is it,” he told her. “This is where we rescued Emmy.”

  Trinity squinted, her eyes finally coming into focus. Sure enough, from the dim light above, she could just make out a tangle of cages and wreckage. The place looked like a scene f
rom one of the Fallout video games, she thought. And she wondered uneasily if there would be anything left to search for.

  Emmy let out a low whine, pawing the air nervously as her gaze darted around the room. Trinity didn’t blame her; so much had happened here, and now they were back at the scene of the crime. She reached out, pressing a comforting hand against the dragon’s back.

  It’s okay, girl. Nothing here can hurt you now.

  Emmy seemed somewhat comforted by this, dropping down for a graceful landing. Once she was securely earthbound, Trin and Connor slid off her back, turning on their cell phone flashlights and looking around. The first thought Trin had was how quiet it was. All the primates and pigs and other animals that had shared a prison with Emmy were long gone.

  “Do you see any—?” she started.

  Her words were cut short as a jolt of terror rang through her. Emmy’s terror, she realized with dread. She whirled around, heart in her throat, to make sure the dragon was okay. Emmy was white eyed and panting and staring into space.

  “What’s wrong?” Trinity asked, rushing back to her. “Are you—”

  Suddenly her own skin prickled, her gift picking up the presence of another—and not far away either. She bit her lower lip, concentrating on the source. She could feel it, just beyond her line of sight. Whoever it was, they were strong in the gift, she realized. Which meant it wasn’t just some janitor come to clean up the mess.

  “Over here,” she whispered to Connor, gesturing for him to follow. To his credit, he didn’t ask for an explanation, just stepped in behind her as she attempted to navigate the maze of broken cages. Meanwhile, Emmy stayed put; she was too big to get through the tangle of wires and seemed to have little desire to go exploring even if she could.

  It didn’t take long to get to the source: a large cage in the very center of the room. The only cage that hadn’t been destroyed beyond repair.

  The only cage that wasn’t empty.

  Trinity’s mouth gaped as she stared at the cage’s occupant. “It’s you…” she breathed, horrified and fascinated all at the same time.