by May Dawson
“You don’t have to worry. That’s why you have us.” His voice is gruff, as if he’s put out with me for feeling like I’m alone, and guilt twists in my stomach.
I exhale softly. “You’re what worries me.”
“Me?” His eyebrows rise.
I’m getting into dangerous territory. I avoid his relentless gaze and rest my fingertips on the edge of the egg. “You’re all right. Come on out.”
The egg rocks, and before I can pull back, the shell cracks open where I’ve been touching it.
I yank back. A tiny, clawed paw curls, batting out of the egg as if searching for me. The claws are short and iridescent white, like mother-of-pearl, and the paw curls over and over, as if it’s testing itself out. The paw wraps around the egg, yanking it, and more of the shell crunches in.
“They’re going to be sad they missed this,” Airren says. “No one’s seen a dragon egg hatch in a long time.”
The egg tumbles over as it cracks open. The creature inside kicks its legs out lazily, splitting the shell, and lies back as if its exhausted. It folds its tiny paws on its furry chest.
The critter is a bright shade of reddish-gold, the color of a polished copper penny, and it doesn’t look much like a dragon. It looks like a cat.
It opens wide golden eyes and mewls, looking up at me.
“That’s it?” Airren asks skeptically. He reaches for its hind legs, examining it brusquely, and it hisses at him.
“Well, they are supposed to be shifters.” I scoop my hands carefully under the critter, not sure if it’s going to rebel at my touch or not. But it chirps as I pick it up and cradle it against my chest. Sharp claws scrape down my shirt and then latch into the material with a tug. “What do they eat? Did the scary librarian tell you that?”
I’ve researched this, of course. But now this is a living thing, clinging to my shirt and staring up at me with ridiculously wide and adorable eyes, and I’m afraid of making a mistake.
“They eat all kinds of things. Dragons are omnivorous scavengers—just like Cax.”
Belatedly, I try to smile at his joke, even though hearing the name Cax sends a jolt of heartache through my chest.
“By the way, it’s a girl,” he tells me.
“Good,” I say, and he looks at me strangely. Lord knows I don’t trust any males right now.
“They’re supposed to be dragons,” he says. “Having a kitten in your pocket isn’t going to improve your reputation.”
“Having a dragon in my pocket wasn’t going to help either.”
He holds a finger out, and the little thing sniffs it curiously. “Do you even breathe fire?”
She grabs his finger with her claws, making him wince, and drags his finger closer. Although she doesn’t breathe fire, she does lick the pad of his thumb. Airren grins the most boyish smile I’ve ever seen from him.
“I need to name you,” I croon to it. “And I need to show you to Stelly.”
My heart feels lighter as she curls against my chest.
“I’ll go get Stelly and a midnight snack for your beastie.” Airren stands, then seems to hesitate.
“I’ll be fine on my own,” I remind him.
“You won’t disappear again?”
I don’t grace that with an answer.
He leans down and ruffles my hair with one hand, the gesture quick and playful, and I smile up at him as he turns and heads for the door. He closes it carefully behind him.
When I’m left alone in the room, I fall onto my back, holding the critter’s furry sides. She’s as small as a newborn kitten, although far more alert than a typical infant of any type; those eyes watch everything curiously.
She jumps, big golden eyes meeting mine. I grimace as I fish inside the shirt, unhooking the claws from my skin.
“Try to be gentle, okay, baby?” I stroke the reddish fur in slow, gentle ripples. “What’s got you so frightened?”
Light flashes in the doorway as it swings open. It’s brighter than the hall light was just a moment before.
Two men in black masks rush in.
She runs up my shoulder, her claws scratching deep into my skin.
I scream, but when I do, one of the men throws up his hand, as if he’s throwing something at me.
I suck in a lungful of dark, thick smoke and topple forward. The last thing I see is the floor rushing up toward me.
21
“You’re all right.” The voice is distant, and I can barely hear it through the fuzziness of my head.
It feels as if my brain is wrapped in cotton.
Tiny claws sink into my skin and I jump, my hand automatically closing on her body—which is underneath my shirt now. She’s clinging to my torso with her claws hooked into my skin.
I pat her anyway as I blink my eyes open. I’m cold and exhausted, as if I’ve spent hours shivering outside on a winter’s day; as my eyes open, another deep shiver wracks my body, rattling my bones and tightening my muscles.
“Easy.” Airren’s voice? I can’t quite make it out, but I want it to be him and I open my eyes, turning toward him—
Not Airren.
I jerk back as I take in dark eyes, mussed blond hair, a cocksure smile. Behind whoever this is, there are a handful of other men.
“Sorry about that,” he says.
Another man—older, gray at the temples and quite portly—glances up from his conversation in the back, then strides over to me and sticks his hand out confidently. “Pleased to meet you, Tera Donovan. Forgive the messy introduction.”
I glance at his hand, then at his face. “It’s not an introduction. You kidnapped me.”
His eyes narrow, but he keeps smiling. He turns his head over one shoulder. “Leave us.”
There are shuffling noises as they trickle out of the room. The blond haired boy backs up to the wall, and then pauses.
When he speaks to the boy, his eyes are still intent on me. “You too. You can go.”
I sit up, even though my head pounds when I change position. The room is dark and windowless, big and cold, and smells faintly of hay and earth. Ahead of me are raw wood beams and when I follow them up the ceiling, I lose sight of them in the darkness. This is not the room that Airren and I snuck into recently.
“I didn’t intend to frighten you,” he says. “Our last meeting was interrupted.”
I stare back at him. My heart pounds frantically against my chest, and I wrap my hands around my cat under my shirt. Her claws raking my skin are not helping my sense of restless panic.
He doesn’t have to know my heart is pounding, though. My face might be pretty, but I also have a pretty powerful case of Resting Bitch Face. I have a role to play.
“I’m not afraid.” My voice comes out flat, irritated. “I’m horrified by your brazenness. If I wanted to talk to you, I would find you.”
The bland smile on his face freezes. Then he goes on, a little bit less smoothly. “We have to talk, Tera. I want you to know you have friends here in Corum.”
“I know I have friends.” I pull my unnamed pet out from underneath my shirt and set her high on my chest, her furry face brushing my chin, as if she’s my baby.
His eyes sharpen. “So it’s true.”
“It’s true. I’ve got a dragon.”
He leans in, curious, and she turns and hisses at him.
“She has exceptional taste,” I say, petting her to calm her.
“Doesn’t look like much of a dragon,” he grumbles as he sits back.
“Appearances can be deceiving,” I say. “What did you want to say? I hope it’s something worth all that fuss and drama.”
“We needed privacy.”
“Maybe. Or maybe someone just loves their theatrics.” My voice is icy. “I’ll give you ten minutes of my time, since I’m here anyway.”
His cheeks color. He looks like he wants to tell me off—or maybe hit me—and something inside me wants to shrink back. Don’t be stupid, Tera.
But the girl I’m supposed to be woul
dn’t be afraid of this little man with his shiny head and his ridiculous gray curls around his ears and his fancy smoke.
“Let’s start over,” he says. “I was a friend of your father’s. My name is Lerak.”
“Really?” That’s interesting because I tend to remember my father’s friends. Once you’ve seen a person, with their lips parted in the exultation of dark magic and eyes alight, as they disembowel an innocent victim, it’s hard to forget their face. I squint at his soft jaw and round nose, but I don’t recall his face.
“I’ve tried to bring you home, Tera,” he says earnestly, reaching out as if to touch my arm. My gaze follows his hand, and he pauses. “The Crown hid you.”
“They didn’t do a very good job,” I say wryly, thinking of the people who found me and hurt me.
“What do you mean?” he asks.
I mean he’s full of shit, but maybe I should pretend I buy his lie for now.
“I’m surprised no one found me,” I muse out loud. “When I was young and pliable. I would have been useful for True like you, wouldn’t it?”
“The True was in a bit of a state,” he says. “With the public executions and all.”
“The Crown’s been lacking in a sense of humor, apparently.”
“What do you think of it all?”
“I think people ask me that question without being terribly interested in what I think. They just want to know if I’m on their side.”
“I’m genuinely interested,” he promises me.
“I’m sure you must be, to have kidnapped me out of my dorm room.” The way the door flew open tonight, the way that kidnapping was so perfectly coordinated… Someone had been watching me. “Is that why you needed the bubble?”
“Bubble?” He sounds grouchy, annoyed by my stupid question. Men like him hate when they don’t understand a question since they always have to have an answer.
I replay the night. The man in the mask, the one who was being piloted. The armed True who stormed the ball. Are there two different True leaders here? Two entirely different cells?
“Did you send armed men to bring me to you the first time?” I ask.
The look he gives me is cagy, and I know to expect some kind of lie or another even before he says, “Corum needs a bit of a shake-up.”
“I’m not sure I agree about that.” I say absently, although my mind is racing in an entirely different line. He has no idea what I’m talking about. He doesn’t work with—or for—Cax’s old lover, or if he does, they have serious communication problems.
“You’re clearly a very bright girl,” he says, in the most patronizing way. He doesn’t really think I’m bright at all. “I hoped you’d be interested in working with me.”
“You mean, you hoped I’d be interested in taking leadership of the cell?” I draw my legs in to sit cross-legged on the table where they laid my unconscious body. He sits on the edge of the wooden chair in front of the table, which puts him a lower level than me, as if he’s looking up at me on a dais.
“No,” he says, unable to hide the smile that crosses his face. “Of course not. You’re a bright girl, but you’re so young. And you spent so much time Earthside—”
“Since no one came to rescue me.”
He soldiers on. “And we all know Earthside is a tainting force.”
Anxiety wiggles through my stomach—does he know I lost my magic there?—but I lean forward, holding his eye contact. “I’m. Not. Tainted.”
He glances away. “Of course not. I didn’t mean that. We would love to have you join us.”
I nod. Of course they would. But he doesn’t want me to think I could take his place.
“What would that look like?” I ask. “Do you want me to come to your meetings?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t want to draw attention to you from the authorities. I want to protect you, Tera.”
My lips twist in a rueful smile. “I don’t think you have the power to undo that one. Speaking of which. Did you have Erik murdered?”
He hesitates. “There’s a woman who styles herself a would-be leader of the True. She’s terribly dangerous, Tera.”
“Really?”
“Has she tried to contact you?”
I dug my fingers into the tuxedo sleeves of the man I was trying to save from going over the railing. The last of the True’s light faded from his eyes…
I smile at him instead of answering his question. “I don’t know if we’re friends yet, Lerak.”
“I’m trying to help you.” He sounds so doggedly earnest, but it doesn’t make me trust him. “I could be tried and killed just for speaking to you.”
“Just for terrorizing Corum and re-igniting the fears of a nation? I can’t imagine.”
“Whose side are you on?”
“Tera Donovan’s.” My kitten curls up on my shoulder, her furry head resting against my cheek. “I’m also quite fond of the dragon.”
“I hope you won’t betray our trust, Tera.”
“That sounds like a threat. But I’m sure you don’t mean it that way.”
“Of course not. You are your own person—if you don’t want to be involved with the True, that’s your choice. But I hope you will join me in exonerating your father.”
My father. The scourge of Avalon, the man who read me bedtime stories and let me sip from his coffee on lazy summer mornings having breakfast in the garden. “Exonerating?”
“Almost everything they said about him was a lie,” he tells me.
Does he really believe that, or is he telling me what he thinks I want to hear?
Despite knowing better, the word exonerate and father in the same sentence makes my heart beat faster in an entirely different way.
Something doesn’t add up for me about what happened here in Avalon while I wandered dark gritty streets Earthside.
“And how are we going to go about that?”
“I want to take you home, Tera.”
The word home conjures memories of cold marble floors and my father’s grim meetings with his men, of doors shut in my face and then, worse, doors opened, revealing dark magic—twisted faces and bloodied bodies. Another memory flares, one almost lost: my father running down the hill from the house, his robe flapping behind him, hands outstretched toward me, his handsome, aristocratic face alive with fear. “That doesn’t sound like a solid plan.”
“I hope, in time, you’ll be ready to be the face of the True,” he says. “But it will take time. You have so much catching up to do.”
He’s so full of nonsense. He has no intention of seeing me as a leader—I’m simply a useful step on his way to the top of True leadership. I can’t imagine this man taking over all Avalon. “The problem with this is that I’m already the face of the True as far as the Crown is concerned. And, as you already mentioned, the executions bit…”
“We won’t let anything happen to you,” he promises. “No one knows you were taken from your room.”
“I’m betting someone has noticed by now.” Someone being an overprotective Marine with pretty eyes and a bossy attitude. And besides that, it isn’t my room that they took me from. “How did you know where I was?”
“You have friends in Rawl House.”
Yeah, of course I do—someone must have reported back that I was in Airren’s room. He may intend that to be comforting, but it’s a threat too.
“Oh? I’d love to meet them.” My tone comes out appropriately cool and arch.
“Soon. We hoped you would do some work with us first. Toward that goal of exonerating your father.”
My lips twist. It’s a test. My life is full of those, and I don’t seem to pass many. Tests. My Casting test. I’m pretty sure I missed it in the blur of days, and my stomach drops. Then I realize how idiotic it is to worry about that while I’m face to face with the True, and I turn my attention back to the old bald wizard. My voice comes out rough. “What do you want from me?”
“I don’t want anything from you,” he rushes to assure
me. “I want to help you.”
I nod at his lies, although I don’t try to school my face to look as if I believe them. The dark lord’s daughter doesn’t have to be an idiot, no matter how much some people might prefer I was.
“Where did you find the dragon’s egg?” he asks me.
“That’s my secret,” I say. “Just like you want time before you trust me.”
“I’m deeply committed to the True.”
“I’m sure you are.” I cross one leg over the other, touching my hand to my neck absently. There’s no comforting chain against my fingers. For once, I’m not wearing one of the enchanted baubles the boys have given me.
No one is coming to rescue me. There’s no way for Airren to know I was taken through that portal.
“I’m not sure yet what I want,” I tell him. “But why don’t you tell me what you want? Perhaps our interests will align.”
“There are worse dangers to this nation than the Crown’s lies and our poisoned, ever-withering magic.” He hands me a photograph.
The smiling face in the photograph is familiar: a small woman with dark hair, a pointed nose, and rounded cheekbones. Cax’s mature woman.
This time around, I might agree with the True asshole.
“Stay away from her.” He says it sternly, but there’s a desperate edge in his voice. He doesn’t want to see my power—whatever it is—on her side.
“And why should I trust you?”
He looks into my face, studying me, before he says, “You look so very much like your mother.”
It’s a blatant attempt to distract me from a very good question, and even though I know that, I ask, “You knew my mother?”
“You sound like her too. She was so very bright—brighter than Padrick, although wise enough to keep that her secret.” He shakes his head. “Although in the end, he did outsmart her.”
“What are you talking about?” Memories of my mother twist through my mind: the bright-eyed woman who was so quick with a joke, and the shell she became.
