by Ruby Dixon
Her eyes go wide at the sight of me. “Claudia! Where the heck have you been?”
I flop down on my small mattress, wrapping my blankets around my body as makeshift clothing. “Where’s Amy?”
Sasha puts a lid over the small metal half-barrel we use for cookfires and then crawls over to my side. “You look awful. Are you okay? And why are you naked? Did they hurt you? Did the militia keep you?” She gasps. “Are they making you—”
Sasha’s a talker. Her stream of worried chatter makes me feel better, though. It’s normal, and so few things feel normal lately. “I’m all right, I promise.” I touch her arm. “Long story, and one I’ll share later. Where’s Amy?”
“Gone looking for you,” Sasha says, pulling out a beaten-up water bottle and passing it to me. “Are you…okay? Really? Did the guards assault you? Is that why you’ve got no clothes and you’re all scratched up?”
“Nope. Seriously, I’m fine. But Amy—”
Sasha’s eyes widen. “And can I just say this? You smell…really weird, girl. Like garbage and something else. Were you out scavenging and you got robbed? I mean, you smell like you were scavenging, but you’ve been gone for days and no one scavenges naked.”
I give Sasha a weary smile and take the water from her. I intend to only take a sip…and end up downing the entire thing. I’m completely dehydrated, and the feverish feeling is growing. The wound on my neck is bothering me. Actually, everything is bothering me at the moment, from the rough feeling of my blankets to the way my dirty hair falls against my skin. “I think I’m sick,” I tell Sasha.
“Sick? How?”
A dragon bit me during sex. “Dunno.”
“Is that why you smell?” Her brows furrow together.
I lift my wrist to my nose and sniff. I do smell strange. There’s an underlying stink of sweat and garbage from the dumpster, but there’s a stronger, much more unusual scent coming from my pores. It smells, oddly enough, like Kael—dragon skin, spices, and heat. I frown and sniff my other wrist, then my hair. It’s definitely coming from me. Maybe his scent rubbed off during sex…but wouldn’t it be gone by now? “I need a bath.”
I want to say I stink, but the truth is…I kind of like the smell. Just another reason why I’m sick in the head. Kael’s scent is appealing and comforting, and I wish I hated it now.
“You can bathe later. You have to tell me this story first, though.” She turns back to the fire and lifts the lid, and as she does, the scent of soup wafts through the air, making my mouth water. “I’m making stew if you’re hungry. There’s some squirrel meat and potatoes in it.”
“Stew?” I look at her in surprise. “How did you get the ingredients for a stew?”
Sasha averts her gaze, stirring the small pot nestled in the coals. “How do you think? We were hungry, and you didn’t come back. There was nothing to eat. I had to do something.”
Right. Sasha’s ‘friend’ in the militia who trades her a few coins or snacks in exchange for sex. Well, more than sex, I think, because she always returns with bruises or a haunted look on her face. I’ve warned her before, that ‘seeing’ this guy for food is a slippery slope. We know far too many girls who started out with one guy friend and ended up with twenty, or a hundred. They always end up at Blowjob Becky’s as one of the whores. Sasha swears she’s careful, but the bruises on her face and the despair in her eyes tell me something else entirely.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I should have been here.”
“It happens.” She shrugs. “It wasn’t so bad, and it bought me and Amy enough to eat for a few days. There are worse things. You hungry?”
Suddenly the bite on my neck doesn’t seem so awful. Kael was kind to me, in his own way. Sasha’s soldier friend doesn’t have a kind bone in his body. She sacrificed for this food, and I’m not going to turn it away and hurt her feelings. “I’ll eat. Thank you.”
Sasha ladles out a bit of stew into a chipped bowl and passes it to me. “Tell me what happened. You’ve been gone for weeks, and we’ve been worried sick. Amy said she went and visited Tucker, asking about you. He told her that the militia had you, so she went to go ask them what happened.”
My stomach flips uneasily. “When was this?”
“Two days ago.” Sasha gnaws on her lip, giving me a worried look. “I asked around, but I didn’t get anywhere.”
“It’s okay,” I say, even though it’s not. It’s normal for me and Sasha to disappear overnight at times, me on scavenge runs and Sasha with her friend. But Amy? Amy always waits here at home. Her leg’s bad, and she can’t walk far without it hurting. For her to be gone two days is…bad. I gulp down my food. I have to go find her. “She talked to Tucker, huh? That fucking bastard.”
Sasha looks confused, cradling her bowl. “What did he do?”
“He sold me out to the militia, that’s what.” I chew angrily, determined to eat quickly. I won’t think about the fact that the meat’s a little spoiled or that it’s spread so thin that you can barely taste it in the broth. I won’t think about the fact that I’ve had fresh meat with Kael every night. He betrayed me. I focus on Sasha instead. “I brought some stuff to Tucker to sell, and he had the militia waiting when I got there. Bastard sold me out to save his own skin.” At Sasha’s dismayed gasp, I go on. “The militia arrested me and locked me up for over a week, deciding what to do with me. Then they put me on trial in front of the mayor, and you can guess how that went.”
Her jaw tightens and she frowns. “That fat hypocrite?”
“Yup. Sitting there using a laptop, too. He had the nerve to look me in the eye and tell me that scavenging was bad and I shouldn’t do it, all the while using scavenged equipment. He’s a piece of shit. Anyhow.” I shiver and set down my empty bowl, dragging my blankets closer. “He decided I should be permanently exiled.”
Sasha sucks in a breath of alarm.
“It gets worse,” I tell her. “The militia had a different idea.”
Sasha reels. “Worse than exile? That’s death! Where can you go? Oh, Claudia! This is awful! The nearest fort to here is Fort Orleans, and that’s hundreds of miles away. You won’t make it.” Tears flood her eyes. “If the nomads don’t get you, the dragons will—”
“It’s okay, Sasha. Really. Just listen.” I put my hands up in an attempt to stem the tide of her worry. “The militia had heard that someone in Fort Orleans tamed a dragon, and they decided to use me as bait.” Her expressive eyes widen, and she opens her mouth, but I jump in before she can freak out again. “Before you ask, I’ll tell you. It seems that the dragons like human females. The militia cleaned me up and chained me to a post in one of the abandoned buildings, and then left me for a dragon.” I make a wry smile. “Wouldn’t you know, one showed up not too long after.”
Sasha’s jaw drops. “But…how…”
“I know. It was…weird.” I shiver at the memory of seeing Kael for the first time. “He didn’t hurt me. Actually, he’s kind of fascinated by me. I think the militia was right—the dragons do like human females. The one that found me was a big gold, and he sniffed me and tried to feed me.” I tug the blankets higher, wondering how much I should tell her. Might as well spit it all out. “Oh, and, uh, he turns into a man.”
“Turns into a man?” Sasha’s head tilts slightly, as if she’s having a hard time digesting this. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, they’re shapechangers. He landed in front of me and turned into a guy.” I gesture at the air, as if that’s somehow going to help explain things. “He’s almost seven feet tall, and his skin is this weird, dappled shade, but he’s got hair and eyebrows and everything. He really does look human except for the eyes, and he’s got claws. And fangs. And um, some spikes in his arms. And um, bigger than average equipment.”
Sasha stares at me. “You saw his equipment?”
“Well, he was naked.”
“And you were naked.” Her brows go up. “Did you—”
“That’s not important. I was just, you k
now, telling you about how they’re different from us but still similar.” I am blushing so hard right now.
“Was it barbed?”
I stare at her. “Was what barbed?”
“His dick. I read that in a book once,” Sasha tells me. “Before the dragons. There were these shapechanger guys and they had barbed penises. Some of them even had two penises.”
“God, no! It was just, uh, different. Thicker. And he’s hot to the touch.” I’m not going to tell her about the scorching release of his semen.
“So you touched his dick!”
“His skin,” I cry out. “His skin is hot to the touch.”
“But you did touch it, didn’t you?” she whispers. “You can tell me.”
“Um. Maybe.” When Sasha’s eyes go wide, I hastily add, “It wasn’t like that, though!”
It was exactly like that, but she doesn’t need to know the details.
Sasha clears her throat, blinking. “So you did try to tame him?”
“No! I don’t want to tame him! It was just…” I struggle to explain it. “So…he captured me, and he was really nice and kept trying to talk to me. But he also made it obvious that he wanted me.”
“Wanted you wanted you?”
I nod. “I guess they don’t see females much? He kept trying to touch me, but when I said no, he backed off. He wanted me to want him, too.”
Sasha’s nose wrinkles at the thought.
And I want to protest that she’s misunderstanding. That Kael can be really sweet and flirty, and at the time it felt kind of right to be with him. But then he bit me and everything changed again. It’s going to be damn hard to explain the dynamic with Kael. The constant possessiveness followed by intense tenderness. Sasha won’t understand. Heck, it’s hard for me to wrap my brain around things sometimes, and I was there. It’s hard to think of a dragon as tender and caring…and bitey. That there’s a duality to Kael, and one side is incredible and the other side is incredibly scary. “You had to be there. He protected me from another dragon.”
“Another dragon?”
“Yeah. It tried to snatch me from him.” I skip the part where dragons can apparently smell arousal and that’s how the other dragon found me. “Kael stole me back from the other dragon and he was all emotional. He wanted me, and I started cleaning him up, and one thing led to another…”
“Cleaning him up?”
“The blood. He ripped the throat out of the other dragon.”
Sasha’s eyes go wide again. “And you slept with him after this?”
“I wasn’t going to tell him no,” I tell her. But it feels unfair to paint that image. I could have told Kael no again. I could have pushed him away. The truth is, when he started touching me, I’d responded, and I’d wanted to have sex with him.
But Sasha won’t understand that. She doesn’t like sex, and she only does it with her officer friend to score food. She wouldn’t understand the sheer longing and need I felt for Kael to touch me, or how it felt when he put his mouth on my pussy and went to town.
“And…so you had sex with him and he let you go?” Sasha looks impressed. “Wow. They really are tamed by women.”
“Not exactly.” I rub at the hot bite on my neck. God, I feel hot all over now. Achy, really. “In the middle of sex, he bit down on me, and it hurt, so I knocked him on the head with a rock. I left him unconscious and ran away.”
Sasha puts a hand to her mouth, gasping. “He bit you? Let me see it.”
I pull down the blankets and push my hair aside, exposing my neck. “Is it bad? It was ugly earlier.”
Sasha leans in, clicking on one of our precious flashlights that are used only for emergencies, and shines it on my skin. The light flicks back and forth on my neck. “Where did he bite you?”
“Are you kidding?” I can feel the heat from the bite racing through my skin like poison. I touch my neck to show her. “Here.”
“I don’t see anything.” Sasha’s fingers run lightly over the skin, and they feel strangely cool. “You’re hot, but the skin’s not broken and nothing looks infected. You sure you didn’t panic and imagine it? I would think having sex with a dragon can get a little distracting. All those scales.”
“He’s not scaly,” I murmur, hand on my throat. How strange that the bite’s gone. “His skin is soft.”
“Uh huh.” Sasha clearly doesn’t believe me. “Look, I’m not going to judge you for having sex with him. You do what you have to do to survive. Trust me, I understand that.” She clicks the flashlight back off and sits down across from me. “Do you think he’s going to be mad?”
“I don’t know.” I’m trying not to think about it.
“Will he come after you?” She shivers at the thought, pulling her own blankets closer to her body.
“I don’t know that, either,” I say, but I suspect I’m lying, even to myself. Of course Kael’s going to come after me. “I’m safe in the city, though.”
Sasha looks skeptical but says nothing. “Did you finish eating? There’s more.”
I hand my empty bowl back to her and shake my head. “I’m good. I need to get dressed.” I turn to my small trunk of belongings and pull out a shirt and a pair of jeans.
“Where are you going?” Sasha asks.
“I have to find Amy. She’s not back yet, and I want her to know I’m okay.”
“You look exhausted, Claudia. Can’t it wait a few hours?”
There is nothing I want more than to crawl into bed and sleep for a few hours. This has been the longest day of my damn life, starting with a dragon kidnapping, then dragon sex, and then a sprint across half of Old Dallas to get back home to Amy. Even my flat, sorry mattress seems inviting. My body aches with exhaustion, and I feel hot and dizzy.
But I have to find Amy. She’s not safe. My little sister is far too trusting, and I don’t want her in the hands of the guards.
Sasha says nothing as I quickly dress and slip on a pair of heavy boots. My spares are just a bit too tight for my feet, but they’re a good pair of boots and so they’ll do. I tuck a spare knife into my belt and then give Sasha a confident smile. “I’ll be back soon with Amy. Don’t worry.”
“I can’t help but worry,” Sasha says in a small voice. “You two are all I have.”
I feel the same way. But Sasha can survive on her own. Sasha’s already safe. I don’t know where Amy is. “I have to go,” I tell her. “I’ll be back.”
“Okay.” Sasha doesn’t sound convinced.
I don’t blame her. I’ve got a bad habit of not coming back.
18
CLAUDIA
I look everywhere for Amy. I check with her friends. I check with the children’s home, where the orphans are raised, because Amy likes to volunteer her time. I check at Blowjob Becky’s, too, just in case, but Amy’s not among the girls working there. Thank god.
I even check around Tucker’s place, but no one’s seen her there, either. Not for days and days. I don’t know what to do until Tucker gives me a sly look. “Militia’s been looking for you. Mayor wants to see you and all.” He picks at his nails with a pocketknife. “Was kinda surprised they expected you to come back, but they said to me, ‘You never know.’ Thought they were full of shit, but here you are, smelling like a dumpster. You been scavenging?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” I bluff bravely. “I’m just looking for Amy. That’s all you need to know.”
“Might be some people interested to hear that you’re back,” he comments.
“Save yourself the trip,” I tell him. “I’m heading to the militia barracks right now.” And I turn and walk out of his shitty little shop. If Amy heard that the militia was looking for me, just like Tucker says, she’d go straight to them and ask questions. That’s dangerous. Not only is the militia full of dicks too high on their own power, but they’re the ones who offered me up to the dragon in the first place.
What if they offer Amy to a dragon?
Rubbing my neck, I race through the dark alleyw
ays, heading for the outskirts of Fort Dallas and the rows of barracks that house the militia. If my sister’s anywhere, she’ll be here, I suppose. I just have to find her. The militia barracks are tucked into an old department store. The glass doors have been reinforced with steel, and a flimsy chain-link fence topped with barbed wire has been erected all around the place, just in case anyone decides to storm the castle, so to speak. There’s a set of gates, though, and I head for those.
They have guards posted in front, of course. One holds a rifle and raises a hand when I approach. “No citizens allowed here.”
“I’m Claudia Jones,” I tell him. When his face remains blank, I add, “The chick they gave to the dragon?”
His eyes widen, and he looks me up and down in surprise, as if astonished that I’m whole and in one piece. “You’re the dragon girl?”
“That’s me. I’m looking for my sister.”
“Wait here.” He pulls out a walkie-talkie and turns away, murmuring something in it. I hear the loud clicking buzz and something mumbled in response. The soldier nods and moves to the gate, undoing the lock. He pushes it open and glances at me. “Someone’s coming to meet you.”
“Great.” I head in, arms crossed over my chest. Wariness replaces my exhaustion, my senses growing alert. Every time I’m around the militia, something bad happens. I don’t expect it to be any better now.
But Amy will want me to come for her, so I’m going to. My sister’s the most important person in the world to me. I won’t abandon her.
Eventually, a pair of soldiers show up, also armed with guns. “Follow us,” the first one tells me, and gestures with his gun, indicating I’m to follow them inside now.
I go with them. No one ever tells an armed militia man no, of course. And if Amy is in there, that’s where I need to be. They lead me into the large building that houses the barracks. It’s neat and clean in here, and surprisingly empty, probably because it’s night. Areas have been sectioned off to make different ‘buildings’ inside the bigger one, but overall, it still feels like too many eyes are watching me. Is Amy somewhere in here? In someone’s bed? Being kept captive? God, I hope she’s not anywhere near here. My sister’s fragile in both spirit and body. Her limp and weakened leg have made it so that she needs soft places to sit, and to rest her leg frequently. Sasha and I do our best to take care of her, but she’s still more fragile than most. She’s not strong and resilient enough to survive in the After, I worry, so I do my best to pick up the slack.
