Chapter 2 #2
“You came for the Executioner’s blade.” The enormity of what he was seeing hit him like a freight train. “You knew they had it. You tracked it here. How?”
"A better question is how it came to be in this man's possession in the first place," Benedikte said softly.
"Then ask yourself how many others like it walk the world tonight.
Who made them? Who paid for them? Who taught a human the sigil?
" He paused, and his next words struck like a fist. "And then ask who the council claimed was responsible for killing my mate. My child."
The breath went out of Demetri's lungs. In his head, the dragon went utterly still. A mere moment passed, but in that time, his world tilted. “You are not crazy. You spoke true. From the very beginning. We must inform the king.”
Benedikte held his gaze a long moment, then gave a slight shake of his head. "That time will come, but not yet. Right now I need your help. I will look deeper into these humans." His voice came quieter still. "And you will look into a name for me. Elias Crowe.”
Demetri's hand curled into a fist. He knew that name. "Elias Crowe? The antiquities dealer?"
“There's an estate liquidation happening here, in your own city — hunters right under your nose, Demetri, because you didn’t know what to look for. Now you do, whether you want to or not."
“What does he have to do with this blade?”
"Nothing now." Benedikte smiled. "I killed him two months ago.
He was a hunter. His heir is a fool with no idea what he's inherited, and he's auctioning off Elias's belongings as we speak.
The auction house posted a video to the human internet two days ago.
Find it. The woman in it read an ancient book of dragon lore aloud.
I do not know who taught her, but she knows your mother tongue.
She taunts every one of us with knowledge of our existence. "
Demetri’s expression hardened. "This is my territory. It is my duty to eliminate any threat, but I will not murder an innocent female.”
“The others will come for her. Find her first, and she'll lead you to the rest. Then you must destroy them all."
Damn it all to hell. If some human woman had truly posted a video of herself reading an ancient Draquonir text, then Benedikte was right. Every power-hungry creature in the world was already on its way to his city — for the book, and for her. “And if this woman is guilty of no crime?”
Benedikte scowled. "She is not innocent, Demetri. She is one of them. She has forbidden knowledge of our kind. That is enough."
He hated to admit it, but if the blue dragon was correct, then the most sacred Draquonir law had been broken, and the penalty was death. In all his centuries, he’d never had to kill a female. The mere thought turned his stomach. “And the heir?”
Benedikte walked past without another glance, crossed the buckled deck, and knelt at the body of the man who'd drawn the broken knife.
He lifted the snapped hilt from the pool of blood with a care that had no place on a deck full of the dead and turned it in his fingers, studied the mark, and closed his hand around it.
“He might be as ignorant as he appears, but I doubt it.”
He is taking it, the dragon snarled. He is taking the cursed blade with him.
I’d rather not have it anywhere near us, old one. He is not what we were led to believe. He tracked the blade this far. Let him take it.
Blue scales bloomed along Benedikte's arms. Wings unfurled from his back.
The man became, once more, the great glacier-blue dragon who'd nearly killed him, and a single beat of those vast wings lifted him into the air.
He vanished into the fog before Demetri could argue or ask a single one of the questions crowding his throat.
Demetri looked at the bodies one last time. What a mess.
Within minutes he'd seared the ship's manifest and every document the fire hadn't taken into his memory — serial numbers, names, ports of call, passenger lists. And their faces. Sometimes his gift for memory was nothing but a curse.
"Forgive me," he said in ancient Cyrillic, the language he kept for moments when no one living was left to hear and only the dead could listen. "I did not know you. I did not bring you here. I'm sorry the sea is the only grave I can give you tonight."
He stepped back from the bodies and shifted, the change dragging half-healed flesh over broken bone until he bared his teeth against the pain.
He set his claws into the deck, launched himself into the dark, and opened his throat.
Fire poured out of him in a great red column — the deep-belly fire a dragon called up only when he meant to incinerate everything in his path — and set the entire length of the yacht afire.
Teak caught. Steel glowed orange and collapsed.
He swept his head slowly across the deck, bathing every inch with dragon fire, and did not stop until the yacht was a single roaring torch on the black water.
Then he climbed — forty meters, eighty, a hundred — turned and looked down.
The wreck burned beneath him like a spark on black silk.
The hull cracked, the yacht broke at the middle, and the sea rushed in.
Steam rose in a white column the fog swallowed at once.
The last flame guttered against the dark and went out, and the sea closed over the wreck until nothing of it remained.
Demetri turned toward the city. Toward home. Tonight he'd comb the internet for this woman Benedikte had warned him about — the human reading forbidden books aloud — and tomorrow he'd find her. He'd track her down and do what had to be done to protect his people.