Page 18

Chapter 18

A BUTTER KNIFE.

I’m going into battle with a fae-damned butter knife.

Two, to be exact, not that it makes me feel any better about just how fucked I am. And what’s worse, I’m in a dress. One I can barely move in, which feels strategic on The Horde’s part, but I couldn’t insist on leaving my room in nothing but that silk robe without drawing some serious questions. I can’t afford questions from the Wing members right now. I need them to think I’m oblivious, that I haven’t put two and two together and tucked the answer into each one of the boots I’m wearing.

At least the boots fit and they’re relatively comfy. I suppose I have that going for me, because running is probably the only way I’m going to make it out of this assassination attempt alive. The butter knives sure as fuck aren’t going to cut it, quite literally, but maybe they can buy me a bit of a head start.

I’m so screwed.

“Nervous?” Farrow asks, his black eyes studying my face for a beat before dropping to where my hands are clenched in my lap.

I look down and take in the white-knuckled knot of fists I’m making in my lap and force my hands to relax.

“I don’t like…” I hesitate for a beat, trying to figure out what to say. “Flying,” I finally supply.

The lirocar we’re in banks right, and I grab the seat to keep from tilting over. The interior configuration of this lirocar is different from the one I rode in before. The two captain’s chairs that were in the middle of the previous airboat are noticeably missing in this one, leaving only the front and back rows of seats.

I’m currently sandwiched between Farrow and Karis, who Ogdan insisted should join us for this happy little adventure. Jori is up front in the passenger seat, and Tove, Ogdan, and Chastain are all sitting across from me, doing an admirable job of pretending like they’re not plotting my imminent demise.

I’m not fooled.

Tove smirks and shakes her head. “You don’t like flying? Interesting fear for a dragon ,” she gibes.

My answering smile is mocking. “Try doing it without wings. Let’s see how you feel about it then.”

I can feel Karis laugh next to me, but no sound actually comes out of him, which is slightly unnerving, not that there’s much about the colossal drake that isn’t. My entire left side is pressed against his dark brown scale armor, which would be great if he had any weapons I could try to lift. Of course, he doesn’t, so I just get to sit here, uncomfortable and awkward instead.

I sigh and toss a few elbows into the sides of the drakes pressing in on me, demanding more room. Neither of them moves, but I swear I feel Karis chuckle again.

Paragon City flashes by outside the lirocar’s windows, but I can’t get out of my head long enough to appreciate the view. The sights are probably something to marvel over when you’re not plummeting to your death. However, I’m pretty sure I’m driving to mine right now and therefore can’t muster the appropriate amount of appreciation.

“Why are you all broody? I thought you’d be fine dealing with wyverns since they brainwashed—oops, I mean raised—you?”

“Tove,” Ogdan admonishes.

“I’m not being broody,” I defend, internally chastising my lack of awareness over what my body language and silence might be broadcasting. “And you don’t know me well enough to say otherwise, so go lick a leaf.”

Chastain whistles and makes a face like I’ve gone and done it now. He leans away from Tove, who’s sitting next to him, like he’s hoping to stay out of the line of fire.

“No, I’m not buying it,” Tove counters, wagging a finger at me. “Something happened back at the keep with the human. You’ve been squirrely ever since.”

“I have not been squirrely,” I argue.

“Totally squirrely,” Farrow interjects, an easygoing smile stretching wide across his handsome face. His red scale armor looks brighter in the light of day. His dark skin is flawless, and his black eyes glitter with a touch of delight and a dash of defiance.

I toss a glare his way, which only serves to make the teasing twinkle in his eyes brighten.

“So, what is it? Is it the wyverns? The mate thing? Or did something else happen?” Tove inquires, like she actually gives a shit.

She’s good. I’ll give her that.

I stare at the Seeder for a moment, studying her. She’s pretty, but it’s almost as though the shaved black hair and the ever present get fucked look in her brown eyes are an effort to downplay or diminish her allure. Anyone observing her and the others from afar would take one look at the dark green scale armor and the black vines of her dragon mark that wrap around her fingers and hands, and dismiss her as a threat. Karis or Ogdan would be the obvious choices based on size and kith alone, but Tove sees entirely too much, and in my opinion, that’s infinitely more dangerous.

I quickly sort through and dismiss a handful of things to say in response, but with the two Thrashers next to me, I need to be careful how I traverse this. I can’t tell the full truth, but it needs to be enough of the truth not to flag me as a liar or spark any more of their suspicion.

I drop all pretenses and lean forward, using all of my dulled drake senses to read everyone around me just in case they try to pull something. I don’t know what I could do to stop them, but I’ll at least sense it coming.

Tove’s relaxed but antagonistic mien falls away, and she mirrors my movement, her body suddenly primed and tense.

Good. We’re taking each other seriously now.

“I want weapons,” I tell the Seeder, hoping it will throw her off just enough to keep her from sniffing around anything else.

A flicker of satisfaction moves through me when surprise alights across her face.

“Why?” she asks, confused, like the thought has never crossed her mind. As a fully revealed dragon, it probably never has.

“What weapons?” Karis interjects, which throws me off because I kind of had a theory that he might be mute.

I stare at the Thrasher, his voice more melodic than it has any right to be. The sudden urge to ask him to tell me a bedtime story or to read aloud one of the dirty books Boshle, my Flight’s medic, is always reading, trickles into my mind. I smother the thought with a heavy helping of good sense. No wonder the Thrasher is so quiet. If the male was a chatterbox, he’d probably have a flock of groupies dogging his every step, hanging on every word and grunt.

He looks at me expectantly like he’s genuinely curious about what I’d arm myself with if given the choice. Craith would like this drake. He always said you could tell a lot about a person based on their weapon of choice.

I start ticking off a list on my fingers. “Bone blades, Zurki made, if I can get them, but anything from the Bone Isles will do. A pulse bow and two XD pistols, fourth gen preferably with thigh holsters. A belt of PHaSR grenades. Half a dozen batiirien spikes. A grappling gauntlet. A few fang breakers, you know, the ones that look like necklaces,” I tell them, circling my throat with my pointer finger.

“Fuck the fae, are you robbing a blood bank with all that?” Farrow asks, his dark eyes wide with shock.

I shrug. “I’m game if you are.”

Ogdan laughs and shakes his head. “What’s the point of all that when we’re with you?” he asks dismissively.

I swallow down my irritation. That was only a third of my list. I hadn’t even started on any of the illegal mods I favor or the discreet weaponry I was hoping to get fabricated if I asked really nicely.

Because you might be the threat that I need a weapon for, I think to myself, but I don’t say that.

“You won’t always be with me,” I argue instead. “And you act like this small contingent can’t be overrun. I need to be able to defend myself no matter what.”

Ogdan rolls his eyes, and both Chastain and Tove make annoyed little huffs.

“You’re not in The Scorch anymore, Frills,” Chastain counters. “All the bone blades in the world aren’t going to stop a dragon that wants to get to you.”

“Maybe not stop altogether,” I assert, “but they would slow them down, buy me some time to come up with a plan.”

“A plan to what? Die slower?” Tove argues. “Sorry, Syphon, like it or not, we’re infinitely better than a bunch of weapons that can’t do shit against anyone with scales. A weapon will fail you.” She looks around at the others, a wicked smile slipping across her face. “We…well, we’re foolproof.”

I shake my head as prideful grunts of approval sound off all around me. I swear if they start high-fiving each other, I will throw myself out the window.

I disengage from this pointless conversation. I’ve known far too many people who thought they were foolproof.

They’re all dead now.

The drakes tease each other back and forth, but I ignore it, my focus once again fixed outside the car’s window as my mind wanders elsewhere. An older sky craft drifts closer on the right, the movement catching my attention. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch it keeping pace with the lirocar, yet it seems careful not to pull up directly next to us as though it’s trying to stay on the edge of our periphery, unnoticed.

Curious, I look back at the vehicle. I can make out a male with floppy brown hair and a face of sharp angles in the passenger seat, but the sun’s glare hides the driver. I squint in an effort to discern more details about the male or the other shadows of bodies I can just make out behind him, but the sky craft suddenly veers into a far lane of traffic and slows like it’s getting ready to exit.

“What are you looking at?” Farrow asks, twisting in his seat to try to see what’s caught my attention.

“Nothing,” I dismiss, turning back around.

Eventually our lirocar leaves the airway, and I force myself to pay attention to the path we’re traveling and the buildings and landmarks around me. Mentally, I take note of things that should be recognizable from different levels of the city and at various distances. Like a sailor uses the stars to navigate, I’ll need to use buildings, sculptures, and unusual looking plants and trees to try to find my way through the maze of this cityscape if it comes to that.

Tension once again tightens my muscles and sharpens my senses. We drift down through the various stacked blocks of the borough, and with each descending tier, the city grows darker, dirtier, and more packed with people. The carefree chatter in the lirocar draws to a halt, and it’s clear I’m not the only one picking up on the distinct proceed with caution vibe that grows stronger as we continue to dip into Paragon City’s depths.

Bright neon lights cut through the gloom of the lower tiers, advertising various businesses and entertainment establishments. The shops draped in flowers and the street markets of the city’s upper levels disappear to be replaced by packed, uninviting store stalls with windows and doors covered in a mass of crisscrossed voltage bars. Signs are posted on each threshold, singling out which Arcs they refuse to serve and warning any others what will happen if they steal or cause trouble within.

I’m all too familiar with being desolate and poor, but there’s a frenzied desperation and naked ruthlessness seeping through the cracks of these lower levels. It puts me even more on edge. The airways grow unsettlingly narrow the further in we travel, and my dragon stirs with discomfort. I don’t know how the wyverns are surviving here with no access to the sky. There’s not even enough room to shift or stretch their wings. Logically, I know it’s designed as punishment for their part in the rebellion, but it doesn’t make it feel any less wrong.

Wyverns rival dragons in size and ferocity. Few differences separate our kinds, which is why, in the past, we’ve often nested and prospered together. Anatomically we’re different: dragons have legs, arms, and wings, whereas wyverns only possess legs and wings. We’re compatible when it comes to breeding, but any offspring produced by a coupling always results in a wyvern birth, never a dragon.

However, the primary difference between us, the one that’s inspired the greatest conflicts between our kinds, is that dragons have been blessed by the Source with various gifts of magic, while wyverns have not.

Head to head, a dragon’s extra limbs offer some small advantage, but nothing that a skilled wyvern warrior couldn’t overcome. But going up against the gifts of a Burner, Channeler, Thrasher, or even Render when you have nothing but scales, teeth, and speed is a death sentence nine times out of ten.

A fact that’s always confused me when I’ve spent any amount of time thinking about the wyvern rebellion and how they targeted the Syphons. My kith was the only one with the ability to strip other dragons of their gifts. We could, in a sense, create a level playing field amongst our kinds, and yet, instead of using that ability to help advance the wyvern position, they tried to eradicate it.

Craith, Ren, Pier and the other wyverns that raised me always said that our kith was targeted simply because my father was king and the rest of us were the top link in the chain of hierarchy, but I always felt like there was something missing in that explanation, something that would glue together all the confusing, broken, senseless shards of that day.

We could find the logic in why the wyverns and sorcai teamed up. Each had what the other lacked—the wyverns needed magic, and the sorcai needed muscle. But strategically, attacking the Syphons and not the other kiths was tantamount to attacking a dragon’s head and ignoring its sharp claws, vicious tail, and formidable wings. To take on a beast and hope to win, you have to account for all of its lethal parts.

Ren always argued that the wyverns and sorcai couldn’t garner enough support to take on the whole monster. They hoped that removing the head would bring down the rest of The Horde. But that theory, like so many others us survivors tossed around under the stars of a scorched sky, had so many cracks in it. Cracks that the rest of us filled with the mortar of our own theories.

Because once the dust settled and the blood was washed away, it wasn’t The Dragon Horde that was brought low. After the rebellion, the wyverns were hunted almost to extinction and then banished to the deep dark recesses of society. The sorcai covens were pruned and brought to heel. And the remaining dragon kiths not only survived with barely a scratch, but they thrived, while any thought of challenging their rule was crushed under the weight of their might and then promptly burned to ash by the new Burner king.

It made the rebellion look like a front for a larger, more sinister plan. One hatched by none other than the dragons themselves and executed perfectly. Not unlike this plan to have me eliminated by a wyvern in the Wyvern Den. I should have known this is how King Noctis was going to play it. It worked so well for him the first time, why not go for it a second time?

“We’re here,” Ogdan announces as the lirocar settles against a sky dock that leads into a slate gray, windowless building that’s nestled between a row of other dark, sinister-looking buildings.

“I’ve seen prisons nicer than this place,” I observe flatly, taking in the corner shop across the way, the thin alleys between the tightly packed structures, and what looks like a lane of food stalls just down the way.

“Spoken like a true snobby dragoness,” Tove taunts.

“No. Spoken like someone who doesn’t agree that all wyverns should be punished for the actions of some ,” I snap back.

“Well of course you don’t agree,” Tove coos acerbically. “You’ve practically been held hostage by them and fed a steady diet of excuses and poor me bullshit. You can buy the not all wyverns claim all you want, but the rest of us know better, Frills. We were there for the investigation and the subsequent interrogations. Not every wyvern clan participated, but they knew or suspected something and didn’t offer so much as a sniffle of warning. There’s no coming back from that kind of fracture in trust, and you know it. Which is why you’re so jumpy just being here.”

Tove’s smile is smug, and I fight the growing urge to jab a fist right through the center of it.

“I really don’t like you,” I declare in a tone dripping with caustic honey.

“I really don’t care,” she lobs back, and then the doors to the lirocar open, and the Royal Wing starts to file out.

Karis takes point, Tove and Ogdan flank each side of me, and Farrow brings up the rear. Chastain drifts to the periphery, his gaze sweeping and sharp as he puts himself in a support position. It’s a protective configuration I know well, only it’s typically Enslee at the center and me guarding her back.

Jori also takes up position somewhere behind me, but I don’t lock in on where before the stone wall in front of us starts to shift and a hidden door slides open. Azo, the human from King’s Keep, steps out to greet us. But it isn’t the human that makes the blood drain from my face and my heart lurch. It’s the wyvern next to him.

Her hair is a riot of short espresso corkscrew curls that float around her head as she draws closer. Her dress is the color of the blood that dripped down the cell walls the night I escaped the blood brokers. Her olive complexion is flawless, but it’s her eyes, Ren’s eyes, a unique blue-hazel hue that’s burned into my very soul, that tells me I’ve read this situation all wrong. It wasn’t King Noctis setting me up to be cut down by the wyverns.

This wyvern isn’t an enemy, she’s an ally…or at least she used to be.

She’s Ren’s little sister.

Relief should be flooding me at the sight of her, but I feel the exact opposite because I don’t know how I’m going to face her.

How do I tell her what happened to her kindred?

How do I tell her it was all my fault?