Embers (The Slayer Chronicles Book 2)

by Val St. Crowe

  “What are you doing up here?” I said.

  “Well, we convinced that Naelen guy that we should be able to go out in shifts and get our belongings. Because if we’re all bunking down in the rec room, then we need blankets and clothes and toothbrushes and stuff.”

  “Go back to the rec room,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “Anyway, I’m not the only one out. There are people in the other wing.” She pointed.

  Great. How had I missed that? The door didn’t much look like a door, that was why. It was painted the same color as the wall—completely blended in. Now that it was open, I could see that there was another identical corridor heading perpendicular to the one we were on, but when I’d come off the elevator, I hadn’t even noticed it. And I thought I’d been so hyperaware of everything.

  Inwardly, I scolded myself.

  I looked the girl over. “What’s your name?”

  “Kinsie Young,” she said.

  “Kinsie, get behind me,” I said.

  She laughed.

  “I’m serious,” I said. “Two of them were up here, and I’m betting the other one is around here somewhere too.”

  “Were up here?”

  “I killed them,” I said. “Well, one sort of killed itself, but I killed the other. And I don’t care what you think about that—”

  “No, I’m with you,” she said. “They’re killer dragons. Only way to be safe is to kill them now.”

  “All rogues are killers,” I said.

  She shrugged. “I’m just here so I can put it on my resume. I think the moral implications can be sorted out by the philosophers.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  She got behind me.

  I started to ease my way into the other corridor.

  There was a scream.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I yanked arrows out of my quiver and ran down the hallway.

  The first door I came to was open, and I whipped around it, leading with my notched arrow.

  “Uh, hey?” A guy—one of the students—was standing in the room and he raised his arms in a don’t-shoot gesture.

  “What are you doing up here?” I growled.

  “Getting my stuff?”

  “How many people are up here?” I demanded.

  Another scream.

  I backed into the hallway, which was filling with other people. Three other students in addition to the guy and Kinsie.

  “That was Annika,” said one of the students.

  And they all took off running.

  I followed them down the hall to what I assumed was Annika’s room. A billow of smoke poured out of the doorway followed by a tiny ribbon of flame.

  More screams.

  The students pushed in, yelling at the top of their lungs about the prods or something.

  “Out of my way,” I shouted, coming into the room.

  I saw the students first. They all had their backs to me, gathered around the closet in the room.

  They were all facing the dragon, which was a deep blue color, almost purple. It had its teeth bared, growling at the gathered students.

  They backed up.

  “Move,” I said.

  Now I could see that the dragon was on top of a girl. She was bloody and burnt. The dragon had its claws in her belly, and she’d been badly gored there. Her shirt was soaked with blood. The top of her head was blackened and blistered. Her hair was gone.

  She wasn’t moving.

  Shit. I was too late.

  I pushed my arrow between two of the students, let it fly at the dragon.

  But one of the students jostled me, and my arrow went wide.

  The dragon locked its gaze onto me, and I was lost in its black, empty eyes. Looking into a rogue’s eyes was like staring into the abyss. There was nothing there.

  Cold washed down my spine.

  The dragon open its mouth wide and fire poured out.

  “Down!” I screamed, yanking the two students beside me to the ground with me.

  The fire went over us, singeing the hair on the back of my neck.

  I scrambled to my feet.

  The dragon was gone.

  “Where’d it go?” I said. I hurried forward, stepping over Annika’s body. There was nothing here except the closet.

  “It probably went into the tunnels,” said one of the students.

  “Who are you?” I said.

  “Tate Wright,” he said. “I’m an intern here.”

  “What are the tunnels, Tate?”

  “Well, they’re, um, a kind of emergency exit,” he said. “They wind through the whole facility, and they come out on top of the mountain somewhere.”

  I turned to face him. “Funny, because Doyle didn’t mention that as another way in or out.”

  “Well, it’s not really a way out,” said Tate. “The exit’s got to be covered in ten feet of snow. It’s never been plowed out or anything. Whoever designed this place didn’t really think that part through.”

  “Still doesn’t make sense.” I looked back at the doorway and the other students. The dragon had breathed out fire over our heads, but it hadn’t gone out the door. “How’d it get away?”

  Tate pointed at the closet. “The tunnels,” he said again.

  I turned back to the closet. “There’s an entrance to the tunnels in this closet?”

  “Yeah,” said Tate. “There’s an entrance in my dorm too.”

  “And the dragon could find a way out of the facility by following the path?”

  “Uh huh, but like I said—”

  “Dragons breathe fire,” I said. “So melting snow is not exactly a problem.”

  “It’s sealed off,” said Tate. “It can’t open the door.”

  “We don’t know that,” said one of the other students. “Maybe they can. How do you think they got out in the first place?”

  “They can’t open doors,” I said. “Rogues are not particularly intelligent. They’re aggressive and they eat. That’s about it.” They didn’t even mate or have any social behaviors. They were sub-animal, truly monstrous.

  “How do you know that?”

  I looked the other student over. “You are?”

  “Rose,” she said. “Rose Garcia.”

  “Rose, I know this because I’m a dragon slayer. I hunt these things. I know a thing or two about them. Trust me.”

  “Well, they had to get out some way,” she said.

  “It’s not important how they got out,” I said. “What’s important is making sure that they don’t kill anyone else.”

  “Annika’s dead?” said Rose, her voice going high-pitched.

  “Well, I can’t be sure,” I said. “You should have her checked out. Doyle said something about medical doctors on the staff?”

  “Looks pretty dead to me,” said Tate.

  Rose put her fingers to her mouth.

  “Rose, go find someone to have a look at her,” I said. “Tate, you stay here in case she wakes up.”

  He knelt next to her, taking her wrist. “There’s no pulse. She’s not waking up.”

  “What are you going to do?” said Rose.

  “I’m going into the tunnels,” I said.

  * * *

  The tunnels were cold and small, and I didn’t like them. I wasn’t exactly claustrophobic, not really, but I wasn’t a big fan of enclosed, dark places.

  It reminded me of hiding in the coat closet in the barn that Mrs. Clarice was turning into apartments when I was a young teenager. Hiding there with Logan, his wings brushing my body, his voice a harsh whisper in the darkness as he peered through the crack in the doorway and told me whatever it was that Max was doing.

  Max is dead, I thought to myself.

  Thinking about Max accomplished nothing. I needed to focus on finding this dragon. I’d wasted some time back in that room talking to the others, but it still couldn’t have gone far.

  The tunnel would be a tight fit for the dragon, but wouldn’t be impossible, not if it had folded
in its wings. Dragons weren’t typically taller than humans, even the kinds that hadn’t ever shifted into one.

  I could barely see anything, so I took my phone out and used the flashlight app.

  Then I thought better of it. The light only advertised my position to the dragon, if it was around somewhere.

  I turned off the light, put the phone back in my pocket.

  Then it was even darker.

  The only light was up ahead, a sliver coming in from some doorway that opened into the tunnels, like the sliver of light under the door in the coat closet.

  “He’s still drinking. He’s got to be wasted. I bet I could take him,” said Logan. “I’m strong.”

  I shook myself. I needed to stop thinking about Max. Max was dead. He wasn’t important.

  I approached the sliver of light, pushed the door open a bit and peered out into another dormitory. The dragon could use these tunnels to get all over the facility. Maybe the tunnels had been built as an emergency exit, but they were proving to be nothing more than a liability.

  Turning my head to my left, I peered down the tunnel. Nothing I could see there but darkness. I looked to the right. Nothing there either. Should I keep going the direction that I’d been going, which was further up, towards the exit at the top of the mountain? Or should I go back down to the rest of the facility? What would the dragon do?

  I had no idea.

  “No, Logan, it’s too dangerous.”

  “He’s dangerous. The things he did to Gina? Someone has to stop him.”

  I shut my eyes tightly and then opened them again, as if that would somehow clear the memories from my head.

  I cast an uneasy glance up at the top of the tunnel. I felt as if it were closing in on me, as if I were trapped inside the body of a big snake. Its body was constricting and undulating, and it was going to squeeze itself around me, choke the life out of me.

  I shuddered.

  And then I started marching towards the exit at the top of the mountain. Up, up, up.

  That wasn’t even the way snakes killed. They didn’t constrict their prey in their bodies. Instead they wrapped around them and squeezed. Then they swallowed them whole.

  Actually, though, if they swallowed them whole, they’d have to do some kind of squeezing on the inside, though, because how else would they digest the animal?

  Oh, what did it matter?

  I was not worried about the damned tunnels. I was not feeling claustrophobic, and even if I was, it was just my body playing tricks on me.

  “I can breathe fine,” I said out loud, trying to reassure myself.

  And then I wondered. If I were going up to the top of a mountain, then the altitude… Hadn’t Naelen said something about that in the jet? Something about oxygen and the lack of…?

  My throat closed over.

  Logan’s fists rained down on Max, and Max was already nothing more than bloody meat. He wasn’t moving. He was bleeding and twisted and ruined and Logan wouldn’t stop hitting him.

  I put my hands over my face, digging my fingers into my skin.

  This was all in my head. It wasn’t real. I needed to remember that. I needed to breathe. Just take in air. One breath. Two breaths.

  I forced myself to suck air in through my nose and to hold it in my lungs for a moment before releasing it. I repeated this process until I felt calm.

  This was embarrassing, anyway. Here I was, hunting this dragon, and I was afraid of a stupid, dark tunnel? No way. That wasn’t me. I wasn’t that girl.

  I squared my shoulders and began walking through the hallway, walking with a purpose. I could do this.

  Another sliver of light up ahead. I steeled myself for another flash of dead Max or a memory of Logan, but nothing came.

  Thank goodness. I was back in control of myself.

  I opened the door when I came to it, but it only opened onto another empty dormitory. I kept going.

  That was the last door I came to. Within fifteen feet, I rounded a bend, and I was plunged into utter darkness. I couldn’t see anything.

  I stumbled forward for several steps, but it was ridiculous to try to walk this way. I really couldn’t see a thing. I was forced to get my phone out and use the flashlight, which wasn’t a lot of help anyway, because it only illuminated a tiny circle, and there wasn’t anything to see besides the tunnel walls.

  I might alert the dragon that I was coming, but that was a risk I was going to have to take.

  The longer I walked, the colder it got. I wanted this over, but I didn’t want to overexert myself, so I forced myself to keep a steady pace, not to allow myself to get out of breath or anything like that. It seemed more difficult to get a good breath in here, anyway, and I didn’t know if it was lingering effects of claustrophobia, or altitude, or what.

  But before I could puzzle over it much longer, I turned a corner, and I came face-to-face with a locked door.

  I checked it for tampering. For scorch marks. Scratches from claws. Anything.

  But near as I could tell, no dragon had done anything to that door.

  The dragon wasn’t up here.

  * * *

  “Clarke, where have you been?” said Naelen as I eased my way back into the rec room.

  “Looking for the dragon,” I said. “Can’t find it anywhere. I’ve been up and down those tunnels, but this place is so big. It’s moving before I can get to it.”

  “You need me,” he said. “You can’t do this on your own.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “But we need to make a plan, and—”

  “You killed the dragons,” said Doyle, making his way across the rec room towards me. “After everything we said, you went up there and killed them. Ruby found a body in her room. That dragon used to be a student at Kensington, but you just put arrows in it. When his family finds out what you did—”

  “He was dead the minute he shifted out of water,” I said. “He’s been dead. That carcass has been moving around and breathing fire, but it’s not alive, not really.”

  Doyle snorted. “Not really alive? What does that even mean? Things are alive or they’re dead. There aren’t degrees.”

  “I’ve been hunting these things for years,” I said. “I know that there’s nothing left inside them. You can see it when you look in their eyes. Their eyes are black and empty and dead.”

  “You’re making the decision that these dragons aren’t really alive based on gazing into their eyes?” Doyle was incredulous. “That’s almost as bad as if you told me you just had a gut feeling. Evidence is how we decide things, Clarke, or at least it should be. Evidence. Where’s yours?”

  “My evidence is observation,” I said. “Surely, you’ve observed the dragons as well. How long have you been working with them here?”

  “Since the lab was opened,” he said. “Of course I’ve observed them. It’s my job to do that.”

  “Then you understand that they don’t even behave like animals. They have no social behaviors. They are as aggressive to each other as they are to us, and that aggression doesn’t translate to a pecking order or deference or anything of that nature. You’ll note that they don’t mate. They eat, but that often seems like an afterthought. The kill is more important. Often, when they kill, they leave the victim behind. That’s what happened upstairs earlier. Which makes me wonder how on earth you could be so concerned about dead dragons when one of the interns was killed.”

  He had the decency to look away. “Of course, it’s quite tragic what happened to Annika,” he said. “Quite tragic, indeed.”

  A female scientist had appeared next to us. She’d been listening to the conversation. She looked at me, her forehead creased. “You really think that there’s nothing inside the dragons? That they aren’t even animals?”

  “I don’t know that they are,” I said. “I’ve been told that they aren’t native to this world. That they are nightmare creatures from another world which were sent here by magic. That early wizards bound themselves to the bodies of
the dragons and became the first shifters. But I don’t know if that’s true or not.”

  “Not native to our world?” She pursed her lips. “As in they’re aliens? Extra-terrestrials?”

  “More like they came from a parallel world,” I said.

  “Emma,” said Doyle, “you aren’t giving this folktale anymore importance than it deserves, are you?”

  She shrugged. “What she’s saying is theoretically possible. We’ve had conversations about this before, don’t you remember? We were talking about magic, how it breaks the laws of nature, and how it could be because it follows the rules of some other system.”

  “It was only talk,” he said. “Speculation. She’s behaving as if she knows the truth, when she’s got nothing to back it up. It’s all wild speculation on her part as well.”

  “I know that,” I said. “I know I can’t be sure where dragons came from.”

  “But you can’t be sure that the human part of them is dead either,” he said. “You only want it to be true, because then your conscience can be eased about killing them all. If you knew that all the dragons you killed were people too—”

  “They aren’t,” I snapped.

  “And you’re wrong,” said Naelen. “Because I wanted it to be true. I wanted to think that the rogues could be cured, could eventually shift back. But all it took was watching one rogue attack. Then I knew there was nothing left inside it that was curable. It was dead, like Clarke said.”

  “You can be convinced all you like,” said Doyle. “We have no proof. Until we get some, there is no reason to accept your point of view.”

  “Maybe not,” said Emma, “but I do think we have to accept the fact that the escaped dragons have to be killed.”

  “What?” Doyle turned on her. “What changed your mind?”

  “Annika, of course,” said Emma. “I examined that poor girl’s body. If you had seen it, Doyle, seen what that dragon did to her—”

  “I will see it,” said Doyle. “Take me there. I’ll stare at her dead little body, and I’ll still fight to save the dragons. No one is fighting for them. They need me.”

  “Trust me,” I said. “They don’t.”

  “Come on, Doyle,” said Emma, “I think we have to give Clarke our blessing to destroy that thing. Out of respect to the families of those who have passed away.”