Chapter 45
Forty-Five
Ella
“Where can we get records older than the Unification Wars?” I asked as Milly and I left the library. My stomach was rumbling, a reminder it had been far too long since I’d eaten.
“I don’t know.” Milly echoed my frustration.
Through our research, we had established that Clippys went as far back as the wars, but finding anything from before was proving difficult, at least in Caz’s private library.
I intended to ask him if there were older records anywhere, but we had to wait for Anna’s heat to be over before that happened.
“Maybe we can ask Caz when he comes back.”
I laughed gently. “I was just thinking the same thing. We must be friends.”
“So does that mean you were also thinking that soon you will be going into heat?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head as we exited the tyrant wing and headed for the kitchen. Durion and Kolar fell in behind us. It was nice to have a pair of friendly faces on guard duty. “I wasn’t.”
Would I still go into heat since I could not get pregnant? I had no idea if the two were interlinked in any way. The physiology of mated dragons had never been important since, until recently, I hadn’t needed to care. Now all sorts of questions were popping up, and I didn’t like not knowing.
If only we could find some answers.
A subtle flow of satisfaction trickled through me. It took a moment to identify that it did belong to me. Dirk, then? What was that all about? I’d not felt much from him since we parted, stating he had to see to running the kingdom.
Regardless, I was glad he was feeling good. I knew Mirko was giving him a hard time, constantly demanding for things to proceed, even though law stated it would not until Anna’s heat was finished. He was just being a dick to frustrate Dirk.
Up ahead, a quartet of palace guards rushed through the intersection, one of them barking at the others to hurry up.
Kolar slipped past us, immediately on high alert at the unexpected commotion.
“What’s going on?” I asked, glancing back at Durion, who was watching our rear.
“I don’t know,” Kolar replied. “Could be nothing. But wherever they were going, they were in a hurry.”
Before we reached the meeting of hallways, two more dragon shifters followed in the paths of the soldiers, though they weren’t at a run.
Kolar peered around the corner. “Something going on near the gates. I can see a crowd gathering.”
“Can we go see what it is?” Milly asked. “Must be important to have people rushing that way.”
“I’d rather not,” Kolar said, a bit unhappily, “but I don’t have a good reason not to. There’s no sounds of fighting or screams. Just talking and pointing.”
Milly looked over at me questioningly.
“Sure, let’s go see what all the fuss is about.” I pointed, and Kolar led the way, prowling forward alertly.
By the time we arrived, the crowd had grown too thick for us to see what was going on. Kolar, however, at my urging, pushed through to get a better look. When he returned, his face was tight.
“You don’t need to see it,” he said, gesturing for us to go.
“What do you think it means? A reckoning? For whom?” another Elite was saying as she passed.
“I don’t know. Probably for some bad people,” the woman’s companion replied, tugging at her dress.
“Reckoning?” I looked at Kolar, but the crowd shifted enough for me to get a glimpse of the main gates. Something was attached to the middle with writing below it.
“Ella, you don’t need to see that,” Kolar grunted, but he accompanied me forward anyway with Milly right behind me and Durion at the rear.
I pushed my way through until I could see clearly, at which point I stopped. There was no point in going closer. I could see enough.
Nailed to the front gates with a long slender spear of ice was a decapitated head. Below it, scrawled in blood I assumed belonged to the headless wall art, was a message:
A Reckoning Is Coming for Those Who Abuse Our Own
“What the hell?” Milly yelped, covering her mouth. “That’s disgusting.”
“I tried to tell you,” Kolar said helplessly.
His frustration wasn’t my focus. Neither was the message. I knew what it meant. Judgment for those who treated Grounded like slaves. Or sold them to humans.
I knew because I recognized the face and its single eye. Only one person could have put that head there with that message.
Dirk.