Fireborn (The Dark Dragon Chronicles Book 2)

by Ripley Harper

  “No,” I say. “They’ll spot me straight away. We’ll only make a bigger, slower target.”

  “I’ll hide you.”

  “It won’t work.”

  “Get. In.”

  “Let’s just run. Please.”

  Zig is grinding his teeth, just about vibrating with impatience, but I can’t get myself to step closer. I’ve had guns pointed at me before, shoved right into my face, and a teacher was shot dead right in front of me. I’ve seen for myself what guns can do in real life, so I don’t care how good Zig is supposed to be. There’s no way I’m walking past a whole gang of professional snipers if my only protection is going to be a goddamn coat.

  Zig swears, grabs me by the arm and yanks me closer.

  “No! Please, Zig!”

  His name is a high, terrified cry on my lips, and at the sound of it, he lets go of me abruptly. For a second he stares right into my eyes, frowning as if I’m a puzzle he can’t solve. Then he takes a long, slow breath.

  “You’re right. This coat won’t protect you from a sniper’s bullet. If we were trying to escape their fire, it would’ve been a much better idea to run.”

  I’m so surprised that I almost forget to panic. Zig has never told me I’m right about anything before in my life.

  “But there’s no need for your fear. The Skykeepers are gone. I wasn’t planning to hide you from their bullets; I only want to hide you from the cameras outside.” He opens the coat again, but this time he waits patiently. “By the truth of the Old Words, I swear that you will be safe if you come with me now.”

  Well. If he’s swearing on the Old Words.

  I give a small step closer.

  Zig pulls me into the folds of his coat, pushing my head down against his shoulder and covering my head. Then he leads me outside and we step into a chaos of voices and bodies pressing against me in the darkness.

  By the time Gunn arrives at the Pendragon mansion, I’m almost sick with worry. My stomach is hollow, my heart is racing, and I’m sweating in spite of the coolness of the room.

  For the past six hours, Zig and I have been waiting in almost complete silence. (Fortunately, we’re not waiting in the room with the stuffed buffalo head again—I honestly don’t think I could’ve handled that. Instead, we’ve been shown to a bright and airy yellow room with high windows and a notable lack of fireplaces.)

  I jump up when Gunn walks in, looking a lot less bloody than the last time I saw him. “Gunn!” He catches my hands before I can throw my arms around him.

  “Don’t worry, I’m fine.”

  “I thought you’d been shot!”

  He avoids my eyes.

  “No.” I feel my knees starting to wobble. “You did get shot. And you promised me you’d come back. You promised.”

  Gunn takes me by the shoulders and sits me down in a chair. “It was a calculated risk, okay? And look, here I am. Back safe and sound as promised.”

  I look at him closely. He is wearing a clean t-shirt and he seems perfectly healthy.

  “But there was so much blood…”

  “I was hit in the shoulder and the impact knocked my head against the open door. Head wounds bleed a lot; it wasn’t serious. A powerful Earthkeeper helped me out. He Healed Ingrid too.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “See for yourself.”

  She walks in a second later, as healthy as I’ve ever seen her.

  “I thought you were dead.”

  “I’m a little surprised myself by how difficult I am to kill these days,” she says drily.

  I stare accusingly at Gunn. “So that was the plan? Walk out, get shot, and hope it creates enough chaos for us to escape?”

  His smile makes his dark blue eyes crinkle up at the corners. “Pretty much. I knew they couldn’t resist taking a shot at me if I exposed myself so openly.”

  “That’s a terrible plan!”

  “But it worked: they walked right into the trap. The Skykeepers are so convinced of their superiority that they hardly bother to keep up with human affairs anymore. My guess is they barely noticed that the place was crawling with reporters, most of whom had cameras with ridiculously powerful lenses.”

  “It was a crazy risk to take,” Ingrid says.

  “But worth it. Once those shots were fired it was over. Two of the snipers were caught on camera; there’s a massive manhunt underway at the moment. Only the guy in the back garden escaped unseen.”

  “This is a mistake,” Zig says tersely. “The Order of Keepers has always kept itself separate from human affairs.”

  “I know. But things are different now. Technology has given them powers very similar to our own; they’ve become a force to be reckoned with. And Jess’s anonymity was blown anyway.”

  “Yes,” Ingrid says. “Another problem we’ll have to fix soon.”

  Gunn shakes his head. “You haven’t seen the news. The story has blown up even bigger. The inspiring tale of an unarmed schoolgirl who singlehandedly prevented a mass tragedy is just the right thing for the current moment—people are loving it. They’re making her into a hero; there’s talk of presidential medals and God knows what else. It’s far too late to stop it. What we need to do is use it to our advantage.”

  Chapter 9

  People who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder may find it hard to express their feelings. They often lose interest in activities they enjoyed in the past and may choose to forget about the traumatic events by avoiding all memories.

  Physically, they may have trouble sleeping or concentrating on a task. Some are always on the lookout for danger and may become angry or irritable for little or no reason. Feelings of shame, despair and hopelessness are also common, and sufferers may have difficulty in controlling negative emotions. Excessive tearfulness is common.

  Extract from website Overcoming PTSD

  We spend the next hour watching TV and checking the internet to see how far the story has spread. It’s bad. Really bad. Worse than I could ever have imagined.

  My face is everywhere.

  Most are old photos of me that they must’ve gotten from my friends’ social media accounts. (Ingrid made me close all my apps after the trial last year.) In some of the pictures I look okay, in others I look terrible. Mostly I just look very young and too normal to be on TV.

  The worst one is a close-up shot of my face that someone must have cut from the security footage. It shows me looking frantic and kind of feral: my hair wild, my face bloody, my eyes wide, my mouth open in a silent scream. The shot is grainy and black-and-white but weirdly compelling, perhaps because it’s so obviously raw and unposed. Every time they show that photo, I have to look away from the screen.

  There’s a lot of confusion about what happened at the house today: the internet is already teeming with all kinds of conspiracy theories, and on television there’s talk of “bizarre twists” and there being “more to this story.” Strangely enough though, the actual shooting at Ingrid’s house wasn’t caught on camera, which means that the focus, for the moment, remains very much on what happened that night in the library.

  I guess you don’t see a schoolgirl kill someone with her bare hands every day.

  There are people talking about me on every news channel. They analyze my life by looking at everything from random old photos to recent school reports. They talk about my hair, my clothes, my friends, my mother’s death. They also interview people at school, all of whom are suddenly claiming to be close friends of mine. I listen, stunned, while Taylor Wilson describes me as “a peach, just so nice and bubbly and sweet.” Cayden Hunt calls me “a real team-player,” Brooklyn Davis, sobbing hysterically, swears I’m “a true child of Jesus,” and Josh Bankson claims we’ve always “had a hot vibe going.”

  Amanda Roberts is the only one who gives anything resembling an honest opinion. “I never really liked her,” she tells the camera, her face so contoured it looks as if she fell face-first into a bowl of flour. “Something inside me always just sensed she was
dangerous. Like, different, you know? Not normal. People say she saved us, and maybe she did. But I could never look at her again without imagining her smashing my head to pieces—I mean, could you?”

  Fortunately, Amanda’s seems to be a minority view. Gunn was right: they are trying to make me into a hero. I’m called “a schoolgirl savior” by pretty women with lacquered hairstyles and “a courageous young woman” by handsome men in dark suits. Feminist analysts applaud me as “a role model,” and conservative commentators call me “a small-town hero.” Both the anti-gun lobby and the gun-lobby describe me as “a symbol of hope” in the battle against school shootings. Everybody agrees that I prevented “an unthinkable tragedy.”

  None of it makes me feel any better.

  After about fifteen minutes of watching the news, I begin to feel nauseous and light-headed. After another fifteen minutes the room starts to spin and everything feels different, unreal and distant, as if I’m watching it from the other side of a long, dark tunnel.

  I killed Jeffrey because I had to, and I’m not sorry I did it. Don’t get me wrong.

  But Jeffrey wasn’t a monster. He was damaged and young and stupid and confused by sick theories and propaganda. He was bullied and neglected and almost crazy with unhappiness and loneliness and fear. He was a person, just a boy, and I hated him and I killed him and I’m not sorry.

  Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I remember what it felt like to be tied to that chair, knowing I was going to die. I can’t really think about Miss Anderson; it hurts too much. But when I do think of her, sometimes, I’m glad I killed him. I never liked him anyway; he was always staring at me with his sad, creepy eyes. I hated him from the start, really. He was a horrible person. I know he suffered a lot, you could see it in his eyes, but that’s no excuse. I don’t even know why I feel so bad for doing what I did. Even the police said it was fine, and they saw this footage ages ago. They knew I stuck my fingers into his eyes and hit his head over and over and over…

  Afterward they said I did the right thing. I did what I had to do, everyone gets that. That’s what people on TV are saying too. And I’m a hero on the internet; it’s crazy. Everyone loves me. I don’t know why I keep thinking about his eyes. He had such sad eyes but he was an evil person and I had to kill him and I know he was bullied but we all would’ve died if I hadn’t and I’m not ashamed of what I did not for a moment and I’ll never forget how scared I was that night how sure I was going to die –

  “Sweetheart.” Gunn’s hand is warm against my back. “I need you to breathe, okay?”

  I take a deep, shuddering breath.

  “It’s not so bad,” he says. “We can use this; it might be the best chance we have. A real stroke of luck.”

  My heart is pounding loudly in my ears. My throat is tight with panic, my eyes filling with tears.

  “No,” Zig says. “All our efforts must go into hiding her now. If we expose her any further to the gaze of the uninitiated, we risk the destruction of everything the Order has built over centuries.”

  “I’d rather risk that than risk her,” Gunn says.

  “You’ll be risking her too,” Ingrid says.

  “Don’t you see? That’s exactly where you’re wrong!” Gunn’s eyes are blazing with enthusiasm. “If we play this right, we’ll buy some time, at the very least. The White Lady has always operated in the dark, far away from human society. If Jess does some interviews with the biggest…”

  He stops talking when he sees my face. “What’s wrong?”

  I try to answer him, but I can’t. I’m afraid I’ll start crying as soon as I open my mouth.

  “Jess. Please, talk to me.”

  “It’s… I killed him. Jeffrey. And I can’t…” My words are swallowed up by deep, raw sobs. It’s as if a dirty pipe inside me has burst and my tears are flowing out in toxic, painful streams. I’m making weird sounds too, loud and hoarse, a kind of moaning, and I’m swaying from side to side, hugging myself tightly.

  “Now look what you’ve done,” Ingrid tells Gunn crossly before sitting down next to me.

  “Little one. Are you okay?”

  I shake my head, cry harder.

  “Please tell me what’s going on.” She puts a hand on my shoulder for a brief second, then thinks better of it. Her touch makes me shudder.

  Gunn gets up and paces the room. Nobody says anything until I finally get my tears under control.

  “I can’t do it,” I say. “I can’t talk about what happened that night.”

  “That’s what’s upsetting you?” Gunn sounds surprised.

  “You don’t understand. I clawed my hands into his face and… I saw his eyes but... I didn’t care about…” I hug myself as my body begins shaking again. “Please don’t make me do it, Gunn. Please. You can ask me anything else. I just can’t. What happened… I can’t talk about it. It’s private and I just can’t…” My words are lost in a flood of tears, my sobs so loud I sound almost inhuman.

  “I know these symptoms,” Zig says quietly, once the worst of my hysterics has died down. “We call it the killing shame. I never suspected her kind could suffer from it.”

  “The killing shame?” Gunn asks.

  “A healthy soul is damaged with every kill,” Zig says. “But the first kill does the most damage. If the soul is not purified afterward, such damage can cause feelings of hopelessness as well as overwhelming guilt.” He looks at Ingrid. “Was she not put through the purification rituals after she killed the boy?”

  “As far as I know, the Black Clan has no such rituals.”

  “A serious oversight.”

  “I suspect your people needed purifying rituals more than our wards ever did.”

  He gives her a cold look, but he does not disagree. “That boy was purely human,” he says. “And she killed him without using any magic, which means that the damage to her spirit would have been extensive. How did you address this, if not through the rituals?”

  Ingrid sighs. “I probably should’ve taken her to see some kind of therapist; I see that now. But we were trying to get past the whole thing, and I hoped that the Pendragons’ bloodmagic would be enough to help her forget.” She leans back, rubs her eyes. “At the time I thought we didn’t have the luxury of dealing with her feelings. That it made more sense to focus on bringing her into her powers.”

  Gunn swears viciously, his face livid. “You’re talking about the drills, aren’t you?”

  She gives a reluctant nod.

  “So instead of helping her deal with her trauma, you fucking torture her.”

  “Given the circumstances –”

  “And then you make the executive decision not to tell me anything about it!”

  “How could I have told you? You’d have been back here in a second; you know that.”

  “Please stop.” My voice is low and thick from crying. “I’m okay. It’s all going to be okay.” Even as I say it, I know I don’t believe it. But at least they’ve stopped yelling.

  I look at Gunn. “Please. Don’t make me talk to people about… I can’t do it. It will be worse than any torture I’ve been through. I beg you.”

  “Of course.” He doesn’t hesitate for a second. “I would never have suggested it if I’d known how you felt. We can handle this in any way you want.”

  “You will need to deal with her condition first,” Zig says coldly. “It will just get worse if you ignore it.”

  “Would your rituals help?” Gunn asks.

  “The rituals are decreed by the Old Words. They are sacred and holy and not to be defiled by the monster.” But in spite of his harsh words, something about him seems a little less certain than usual. He makes that strange sign, starts mumbling his poem.

  “We’re not going to get any help from him,” Ingrid tells Gunn. “But he might have a point; we need to do something. She’s clearly suffering from some kind of trauma—we’ll need to sort this out before we start her training.”

  Gunn goes dangerously quiet
. “I hope to God you’re not talking about the drills,” he says, “because if you ever touch her again, I will kill you. I swear it. I don’t care what you believe

  sickening

  transformation

  I grab my temples against the sudden, blinding headache. “Stop!” I cry.

  They all turn to look at me.

  “It’s the Enthrallment spell. It hurts my head.”

  “We’ll have to get that sorted too,” Gunn says tersely. He glares at Ingrid. “How could you have allowed them to do that in the first place? What were you thinking?”

  “I wasn’t really in any position to argue.” Ingrid’s voice is dry, her face perfectly expressionless.

  “Well, I don’t know how we’re going to fix that now that Jack Pendragon’s down.”

  “What’s wrong with Jack Pendragon?” I ask.

  “He was shot by the sniper on the rooftop.”

  “Is it serious?”

  “He might not make it.”

  I put a hand to my mouth. Heaven knows I’ve never liked the man, but despite how it might have seemed the other night, I don’t actually want him dead. “This is bad, right?”

  Gunn nods. “It’s bad. He would’ve been very useful in dealing with the media. And I have no idea how we’re going to lift that Enthrallment spell without him.”

  I remember something. “Can’t the Earthkeeper help him? The healer that cured you and Ingrid?”

  “No keeper in the world will touch a Pendragon,” Ingrid says. “They are Outcast and unclean.”

  “But what if he dies? Can’t they make this one exception?”

  “I asked,” she says. “He wouldn’t budge.”

  Zig steps forward. “She’s the one who should ask,” he says, nodding in my direction. “She owes him that much, at least.”

  “She doesn’t owe that man a thing,” Ingrid says.

  “Those bullets were meant for her,” Zig says. “She’d be dead if it wasn’t for him.”