“You want to know more about me?”
I looked as far away from him as I could. When he didn’t say anything, I knew I shouldn’t have asked. It had been a bad idea. No, it had been stupid. “Look, forget I said anything, okay? It was—”
“No, Eira, you misunderstand my silence. I was thinking of what to tell you.”
I looked at him through my lashes. “Really?”
Raikidan smirked. “Yeah, really.” I smiled. That was a better response than I had been expecting. “I just don’t know what you want to know.”
I shrugged. “I dunno, maybe, what it was like growing up?”
Raikidan lay back on the bed. “That’s a good one. I’ll need a second to think about that.”
I waited a few moments before lying next to him. “I guess I should narrow it down better. You told me you grew up alone, and it was hard since you were a, uh, half-color. You could tell me about that.”
“You really don’t like that term, do you?”
I shook my head. “I don’t like it any more than I like the term halfling.”
Raikidan rolled on his side and messed with my bangs. “It’s not a happy story.”
I made a pathetic complaining noise as I swatted him away and attempted to fix my bangs. “Can’t be any worse than mine.”
Raikidan sighed. “Growing up was a little tough for me, since I hatched long after my siblings grew up and left. I had to teach myself how to do things where my parents couldn’t, even if it meant I’d get hurt.”
“What was something you had to get hurt to learn?”
“When whelps cross territory boundaries and are caught, they’re usually given lenience, but when they’re a half-color, they’re attacked as if they were a full grown adult.” He touched his right shoulder. “That’s how I got this.”
I touched the scar, but then pulled it away immediately. It wasn’t right to do that.
“I wasn’t completely alone though. I had Ebon for a while.” I looked at him. This was the information I had wanted earlier. “He was from my clutch, and the only one who had stayed when the others left. He taught me a lot, and promised he wouldn’t leave until it was time to find his mate.”
I was starting to realize why Ebon had such a strong familiarity to him. “But that’s not what happened, was it?”
Raikidan sighed. “No. Our father wasn’t the easiest to live with, and Ebon, well, he was an oddity for half-colors and didn’t embrace his black scales at all, making him more like our mother. He enjoyed learning about everything, and learned skills humans and elves knew. That’s how he obtained his craftsman skills that he uses at the shop. My father didn’t like that, and after tensions grew too thick between them, they fought, and Ebon left. It upset my mother, but out of the others, she was the most okay with him being on his own. She always said his stripes represented how well he could blend in with anything.”
“Stripes?”
Raikidan nodded. “He had an interesting pattern to his scales. Like me, his predominant scale color is black, but his red scales streak across his body in differently sized and shaped lines.”
My heart slowed. I knew it. “So, like a tiger, just reversed.”
“Yeah, it was exactly like that, except he didn’t have any red scales on his face.”
I was right. Ebon had been in that dream I had about Raikidan. He had been the dragon leaving the cave and flying away. That also meant Corliss had been in his life before he had been full-grown.
“I get the feeling you weren’t completely alone after that.”
Raikidan blinked and then chuckled. “Well, I guess you’re right. Ebon would come back for visits every now and then, which was nice. And I had Corliss.”
I chose to play dumb. “I don’t get it.”
He chuckled again. “Corliss isn’t just my neighbor. He’s also my cousin. His father and my father are from the same clutch. So every once in a while, Corliss would be brought over for visits.”
“So is Corliss a black dragon?”
Raikidan shook his head. “My father’s sire thinks he’s cursed. Not only did my father take a red dragon as a mate, but Corliss’ father took a green dragon as his mate.”
“And there’s Rimu’s father as well.”
“Yes. Anahak would be the son of one of my uncle’s daughters on my father’s side. My uncle and his daughter both took black dragon mates, while some of his other offspring, along with their offspring, took dragons of other colors as mates.”
“Well your grandfather can go cut off his wings and jump off a cliff.”
Raikidan chuckled and I was glad he found humor in my dislike of his family member who didn’t approve of him.
“So, what does Corliss look like, scale color-wise?”
“Interesting. His scales are mostly green, but he has black ones that are scattered all over, making him look like the night sky.”
“If he was like the night sky, then he’d be mostly black.”
“You know what I mean!”
I laughed and then quieted down when a new thought came to me. “Raikidan, how long have you been in contact with your brother?”
Raikidan scratched his head. “Well, only recently, to be honest. Shva’sika mentioned she had seen him while out doing some shaman thing, and said we looked a lot alike, so she thought we might be related. I didn’t think it was him right off, so I brushed the idea off. But then after a while I started thinking about it, and then sent your bird to deliver a message to him. Sorry for not asking, by the way. I just really needed to know.”
My gaze was soft as I looked at him. “It’s all right. Family is important. It good to keep those good relations when you can. Besides, when they’re around, you’re less likely to accept living alone as the best thing for you.”
Raikidan stared at me. I had to look away. I shouldn’t have said that.
“I guess you’re right.” I looked at him again. “I thought I had been alone growing up, but I wasn’t as alone as I could have been. I guess that’s why I wanted to find him when I had the means to.”
“Raikidan, how many siblings do you have?”
Raikidan sighed. “It’s just me, Ebon, and our older sister from a previous clutch, I think.”
“You think?”
“No one has heard from her in about a century, so no one knows if she’s still alive.”
“Rai, how many clutches did your parents have?”
“Four.”
“And how many were in those clutches?”
“The average. Between two and four.”
That meant he could have had up to fifteen older siblings, and only two of them have possibly survived.
“What’s the likelihood of dragons surviving to their first century?”
Raikidan huffed. “Depends. If they lived in a clan and chose to stay that way, the chance is pretty high, but the clutch rates and egg numbers tend to be lower. If they come from a pair of dragons who live alone, the likelihood of them surviving their first half-century is fifty percent, and once they leave to be on their own, it drops to twenty-five percent. For half-colors, it’s very unlikely for them to survive on their own.”
“They’re actively pursued and killed, then.”
Raikidan nodded and my gaze lowered. His life was hard for a born creature. To be killed in cold blood for being different, it was no better than being a tank-born.
I sighed and stared up at the ceiling. There was one more question that was mingling in my head. “What’s it like to have memories of growing up?”
“What?”
I looked at him. “What is it like to remember growing up?”
“Well, that’s hard to say. The memories are in pieces. Some here and some there. Some are important and some aren’t. It’s not something I can remember en
tirely, but sometimes I remember pieces I could never remember before. They feel like normal memories. Why do you ask?”
I looked back up at the ceiling, and then raised my hand to look at it. “I’m a tank-born. I don’t… have any of those kinds of memories. The tank feeds us images of things to learn, like animals, trees, the ocean, and, if we’re really lucky, a person we’re supposed to know. But that’s all we get. We don’t get fake memories of being children, or memories of someone taking care of us, or even memories of sharing something with a sibling.” I sighed. “The first thing I remember was waking up too early and everything going wrong in vivid detail.
“I remember the confusion, and the struggle to survive because I knocked my breathing mask off when it stopped giving me oxygen, and I remember the tank malfunctioning and not releasing me like it was supposed to. So Jasmine had to break the glass in order to make sure I didn’t drown. I remember a large chunk of what I did that first day, but that first day was when I was seventeen. I wasn’t a child. I didn’t have memories to look back on. I didn’t get a life like most did.” I clenched my hand into a fist and held it close to my chest. “I just wanted to know what it was like to have that.”
“Eira…”
I chuckled. “Sorry. I went off into a weird place on you again. Well, now you know something about me, and why I don’t talk about myself much. There isn’t much to know after that.”
Raikidan suddenly rolled over on me and tucked his arms under my body. I tensed and my cheeks burned. I tried to speak, but nothing came out. His grip tightened as he nuzzled my neck, and my whole body warmed up. I finally found my voice, but it wasn’t strong like I needed it to be. “R–Raikidan, w–what are you doing?”
“Just shut up and let me give you a hug.”
I gulped. “This isn’t a hug.”
“It is to me,” he whispered in my ear, sending a tingling sensation down my spine. Not a comforting sign…
“Raikidan, please. This is… making me very… uncomfortable…”
Raikidan let go and raised himself until he hovered over me. “There’s nothing to be uncomfortable about, Eira. That’s why I’ve been working with you on all this.”
I pushed on his chest, but he didn’t budge. “Please…” He sighed and moved so I could sit up. “Thank you.”
He took several moments to respond. “Eira, I don’t want you to be afraid of me.”
“I’m not.”
“Then why are you fighting this so much?”
“I’m not fighting it.”
“If you weren’t, you’d be making a lot more progress. One day you’re good, the next we’re back to square one.”
I sighed. “Rai, it’s not that easy to just up and get over…”
He pulled me into his lap. “Then what else haven’t you told me?”
A lot… “You know what you need to.”
“That’s not an answer I want to hear. Don’t you trust me?”
“It’s not that I don’t trust you,” I insisted. “It’s just…” I sighed and remained quiet. There wasn’t a way for me to come up with a believable excuse, because Raikidan was right, I was fighting this. As much as I wanted to be free of Zarda, I didn’t want to face other parts of my past I had tried so hard to bury. I didn’t want to risk repeating those same mistakes…
Raikidan rested his chin on my shoulder, refusing to give up on this space issue, but willing to change topics to ease the tension. “You know, the jewelry Ebon made that you tried on, it looked nice on you.”
I turned away so he wouldn’t see the blush emerging on my cheeks. “I looked all right.”
Raikidan chuckled in my ear. “You can’t deny a compliment. You had a deal with Shva’sika.”
The flush went away and I rolled my eyes. “That was weeks ago. It doesn’t stand anymore.”
“I think it does, because you won the challenge. It didn’t take more than a day before Shva’sika realized the truth you were trying to get her to see, but that also means you have to keep up your end of the deal from now on.”
I snorted and climbed off his lap, much to his dislike, evident with his small grabbing of protest. “You have this all wrong. She only had to go a week and so did Ryoko and I. That was it. It was her choice to go longer. Missed your chance.”
Raikidan shook his head. “Do you enjoy being difficult?”
I grinned. “I might.”
He rolled his eyes. “Well, you should go back to his shop and buy something when you have the extra money.”
“None of it is casual enough.”
“You could pull it off.”
I grunted. “Right. But since we’re on the topic of his shop, I do have a question. How does him being a shop keeper work with your hoarding instinct?”
Raikidan grinned. “You and your curiosity on that instinct. You can’t just let it be, can you?”
I frowned. “Humans don’t have those instincts. We like and collect things, sure, but it’s not something that compels us. Your instinct is so strong it’s interesting to learn about. That’s all.”
Raikidan held up his hand in defense. “Easy. That wasn’t meant to be an attack on you. Hording is normal to me, so it’s just a bit strange to have someone ask about it.”
“So are you going to answer my question or not?” I muttered.
He smiled. “Our hoarding instinct is strong, that’s true, but we also understand value. My brother can sell his crafts because he’s getting more than he had before.”
“So basically he can swap for one item for another as long as it has equal or higher value.”
Raikidan nodded. “Exactly. It’s common for dragons to barter with each other, especially those in colonies. And before you ask, yes, dragons have separate hoards in colonies. We don’t like to share unless it’s with a mate.”
“Bartering hoarded items,” I mused. “Sounds like you guys get bored a lot.”
He chuckled. “We can live a long time under good conditions. Sometimes we need to pass the time. Not like humans can’t get bored, either, in their short lives.”
“Our lives aren’t that short,” I shot.
“Elves and dragons outlive you by far.”
“Wogrons, dwarves, and other races don’t.”
He grunted and pushed me down as he stood up, as if he had used me as some sort of leverage. “Whatever. You should get some sleep. I have a feeling you’re going to need it.”
“I get that feeling every day.”
He chuckled. “Well now I’m getting it, so it must be something big.”
“Perfect.” I curled up and snuggled into my pillows. “Good night, Raikidan.”
“Good night, Eira.”
A smile crept onto my face before I emptied my mind and willed sleep to take me.
Chapter 33
Everyone was quiet as we waited for Genesis to come back into the room. She had called a meeting to tell us of our next group mission, but then received a call from the rest of the Council.
I leaned on my knees patiently, but Blaze was another story. His leg bounced, and he was fidgeting with a pen.
“Blaze, that’s annoying, stop,” I ordered. He sighed and stopped, but didn’t stay that way for long. “Blaze!”
He threw his hands up in the air. “What do you want me to do? Sit still while Genesis takes her sweet lovin’ time chit-chatting with the Council?”
“Uh, duh,” Ryoko replied.
“She’s taking forever,” Blaze muttered.
“Keep your panties on. It’s only been five minutes,” I said.
“Seven actually,” Argus corrected.
“Whatever.”
Just then, Genesis ran into the room. “Sorry. The Council was divided on something and felt the need to involve me, but not lis
ten to what I had to say.”
I chuckled. “That would figure.”
She sat down on the couch between to Ryoko and Raid and sighed. “Okay, now for the assignment you all will be needed on.”
My eyebrow rose. “All?”
“Well, almost all,” she corrected. “Zane won’t be participating for obvious reasons, and I’d still prefer Shva’sika to keep a low profile due to her active shaman status.”
Shva’sika nodded. “I understand.”
Zane smiled. “I’ll give my support from afar. How does that sound?”
Genesis giggled. “That’s perfectly fine. Now for what this assignment entails. It’s rather complex so I need you all to listen carefully. Thanks to information Argus and Eira uncovered at the hidden research facility, we tracked down a high-grade weapons and surveillance manufacturing plant hidden deep in the largest military outpost in Quadrant Three.”
“The Helvan street one we found Arnia hiding in, correct?” I asked.
Genesis nodded. “Yes. With the information collected we’re pretty sure there are some weapons and surveillance equipment we could use that could give us a great advantage.”
“Only pretty sure?” Blaze asked. “We’re not dealing with a definite?”
Genesis frowned. “Sadly, no. Security is tight for this building to the point where we couldn’t even get moles close enough to give us any confirmation. This tight security is why all of you will be needed. Normally a high security situation would require us to use assassins to infiltrate the facility undetected, but we’re sure not even an assassin could go undetected in this place without help.”
Blaze pounded his fists together. “Please tell me we get to cause a commotion.”
The room echoed with laughter. Even Genesis found his enthusiasm amusing. “Yes, as a matter of fact, you do.”
“All right!” he cheered.
“Ryoko, Raid, and Raikidan will also be helping,” Genesis continued. “In order for us to get a small group in to grab plans and other information we believe having Brutes and foot soldiers with either strength enhancements or high destructive abilities causing a commotion on a destructive level to two parts of the compound will draw most of the security away from the manufacturing building. Eira will join other assassins to sneak into the building and grab what they can as fast as possible. Rylan, you’ll be assigned to watching the building to let them know if they need to get out quick.”
Secrets Page 38
