“If she wants to remain a resident of Fort Dallas,” the mayor interjects, a sour note in his voice. “She’ll obey our rules. Just like you will. I’d be more than happy to send both of you out into the Scavenge Lands and bar you from re-entering Fort Dallas for good. Is that what you want?”
It’s awful, but a teeny, tiny part of me does want that. I liked being with Kael. I liked spending time with him, right up until the sex part. I’m still frustrated and hurting over how that turned out, and it feels weirdly like I lost a friend. Even so, I could probably survive for a while in the Scavenge Lands. I know how to hide and how to look for food and drink.
But Amy? She’s not strong enough. And without my help to bring in trade goods, Sasha will have to sell herself just to eat.
I can’t do that to them.
So I grit my teeth and say nothing.
“Good. Now sit down. As I said, we want to ask you some questions.”
I sit, feeling helpless and angry.
“Tell us about the situation with the dragon,” the captain says, his eyes glittering. “We left you chained. Yet you’ve returned here unharmed. I want to know how that happened.”
Unharmed?
Are they for real?
I want to laugh. Since they left me for dead, I nearly fell off a building when a dragon snatched me out of a stairwell. I was kidnapped by another dragon, rescued, bitten, and now I’m back in Fort Dallas. I feel like a ping-pong ball that’s been bounced around. A battered, bruised, feverish, sore and heartsick ping-pong ball.
Unharmed, my ass.
Of course, saying that won’t get me anywhere. So I tell a little lie. “The dragon let me go.”
“Why did he let you go?”
I shrug, uneasy at the thought of telling them much about Kael. For all his intensity, he had tried to be kind to me in his own way. It’s not his fault that I can’t handle dragon sex. “He saw me hurting myself, so he broke the chains.”
“Did you tame the dragon?”
My mouth twitches. “There is no taming that dragon.”
“Yet you are here and whole and unharmed. How did that happen? How did you get away?”
He’s vulnerable when he’s fucking you isn’t an answer I feel like sharing. “Where is my sister?”
“We’re holding her,” the mayor says bluntly. “We figured if you returned to the city, you’d want to see her, and we wanted to see you. Clearly we have questions. You’re not getting her back until you answer them, either.”
My stomach drops. “My sister hasn’t done anything wrong.”
The mayor is implacable. “No, she hasn’t. But this is about more than your sister. We’re trying to save an entire city of people here, and any information you can give us is key. Tell us what happened.”
I glare at the men, hating that they’re going to make me give them information, and hating that I’ll do it, because I need to free Amy. I’m weak, I know, but I can’t let my sister suffer. “Where do you want me to start?”
“At the beginning, of course.”
Irritated, I begin. I tell them about Kael landing and his transformation into human form. That gets their attention, and they quiz me repeatedly. I’m not entirely sure they believe me, except when I mention his appearance as a human—eyes swirling to black, dappled skin, and finger-claws—they exchange looks.
Bastards. So they’d known all along he could turn human? And no one bothered to say a peep to me, the human sacrifice? I’m filled with even more helpless rage.
They ask me more pointed questions. Did he speak in human form? Could he converse in English? Did I try Spanish or French? What words did he know?
I mention that he understands the word ‘no’ but leave out his name—it’s not mine to give, after all. I also leave out a great deal of the sexual tension that crackled between us and had a rather bad ending. That all seems too…personal.
I tell them instead that he was simply fascinated with me and had tried to feed me and protect me.
The questions begin again. How often did the dragon change into his human form? Did he have any particular vulnerabilities in human form? Did I think bullets would pierce his hide while in human form? The questions make me hugely uncomfortable, so I lie to them. No vulnerabilities. No, bullets won’t hurt him in human form. “He’s still covered in scales,” I lie. “Skin’s hard as a rock.”
The captain frowns and writes that down. “I thought you said his skin was human-like except for a pattern?”
“It is,” I tell them, and put on my blankest smile. “A pattern and the scaliness, of course.”
They exchange a look that clearly questions my intelligence. Yeah, put that in your report, asshole.
I do mention the other dragon that Kael had attacked, though, and they make me go over in great detail how Kael attacked him. How he’d moved, how long it had taken for his teeth to tear out the throat of the other. How long had it taken for the other dragon to bleed out? Had the other dragon tried to communicate with her?
The questions make me uncomfortable, and I give them as little information as possible. This isn’t learning how to live alongside the dragons or stop the attacks. This is a ‘how do we defeat the enemy’ sort of questioning talk, and I don’t like it. Maybe a few weeks ago I’d have been all for it, but that was before I knew Kael.
I don’t like the thought of these assholes attacking him. I don’t like the thought of them waiting for him to get into his human form and then hurting him. Because when I think of him in his human form, I don’t think of the dragon-man that bit me. I think of the flirty, playful Kael that says my name in that adorably mangled way of his. “He’s not a monster,” I point out to them. “I think he’s just confused most of the time. All he wanted to do was protect me and take care of me. He didn’t hurt me.”
The captain writes down a few more notes, then flips through his papers. “Let’s go over it again. You mentioned that he ripped out the throat of the other dragon. Did he struggle to do so at all? Do you think his throat is a vulnerability in dragon form? Were you able to tell the amount of scales there versus the rest of his hide?”
I hate this. “Why do you care? It’s clear they can learn English. We can teach him to speak with us and get him to leave the city alone. I’m sure he would do it if we talked to him and the other dragons. We just need to communicate with them somehow.”
The captain stares at me for a moment. Then he looks down at his notes again. “Tell me about the scales on the throat again.”
No one’s listening to me. No one at all.
KAEL
My head aches.
My body is curiously tired, but the throb in my head is the worst of it. I tense, waiting to see if this is another form of the creeping madness that always waits at the fringes…but there is nothing. I feel…normal.
I open my eyes, gazing up. Through the broken ceiling, I can see the skies overhead. They are dark, twinkling with light from the stars. Far in the distance, I can see the greenish, smoky outline of the rip in the skies that my people originally came from. The sight of it doesn’t send me spiraling. Instead, it just makes me feel a little sad. It’s a place I can never get back to, and I suppose a little part of me will always miss it.