20. In the Ashes #2
“The skelm left a survivor?” The former green dragon sounds partly amazed, partly impressed as he surveys me with his avid emerald stare that feels like a blade scraping over me. “That’s a first. They never leave anyone alive.”
“A survivor? Wonderful.” Danhy props her hands on curvy hips, her glare on me growing more blistering. As though I am to blame for not being dead. “Just what we need.”
Arvos frowns. “This is a . . . situation. She has seen us.” He nods to Tage, prompting him to act. “We need to . . . take care of her.”
Take care of her?
Those ominous words shiver through me, and I swallow tightly, not missing their meaning, understanding at once that by care they mean kill.
As the others bicker, I search for a hint of mercy in the brutally handsome face staring down at me . . . and find only unremitting coldness, as unyielding as the Crags in the distance. I lose myself in that intense gaze flashing from black to violet to black again.
I’m helpless. Trapped in the hands of a man who is no man. No savior. No friend. A monster.
He sighs as though reaching a decision. Keeping one hand on my arm, he turns to face the others. The others who are like him. Dragon but not. Human but not. My enemies, all.
“Try again,” he commands tightly. “Shade her.”
Arvos studies Tage for a long moment before nodding and facing me with a resigned air. “Very well, Alpha.”
Closing his eyes, he exhales and once again the fog lifts off his body, swirling, intensifying. Almost like a living thing, the milky mist wraps around me, snaking between my ankles, curling over me. It builds and builds, reaching my face, tickling my nose. I bat the misty tendrils away.
Tage watches me closely, almost desperately. He wants something from me, and I don’t know what it is, but he wills it—whatever it is—to happen. His body vibrates with the demand for it. I wish I could give it to him, and then maybe they would go.
“Wh-what?” I whisper, and give a helpless little lift of my shoulders.
Arvos opens his silvery gaze and exhales loudly. “It’s no good. It doesn’t work on her.”
“She still remembers us,” Danhy erupts.
Remember them?
Of course I remember them. They make an impression. They would haunt me for as long as I lived . . . which might only be a few moments longer.
“It’s her.” Arvos waves a hand at me accusingly, fog curling off the tips of his fingers. “She can’t be shaded.”
And then I realize, incredibly, what the fog—the shading—does. What it’s supposed to do. It scrubs one’s memory. Erases it. But it doesn’t work on me. If it worked on me, it would erase them from my recollection.
Perhaps I should not so readily believe in such a thing, but after everything, after this day . . . my disbelief is suspended for all things that should not be. Anything is possible. I know that firsthand.
Tage still hasn’t replied, and I feel my fate tremble precariously in his hands, in his decree, in the words yet to emerge from him.
At his continued silence, I shake my head and appeal to him. “Please. Let me go. I won’t tell anyone about you and what I saw this day.”
I don’t even know if I could tell anyone. Assumably I’m still invisible to human eyes.
My gaze flicks to the others and back to him. Always, my attention returns to him. He is the obvious leader, their proclaimed alpha . . . and there is a quality to him. This man—dragon—bows to no one. Among them, his word is absolute. I live or die by his command.
“If she could be shaded then she would have succumbed by now,” Arvos presses. “We cannot trust her to keep our secret. We can trust no human, but this one . . . something is especially foul about her.” He’s grim as he pauses before adding, “Alpha, you know what we have to do.”
Tage blinks long and slow, his lashes a dark crescent coming down over the terrible beauty of his eyes.
“What . . . do you have to do?” My voice falls as brittle as a leaf.
I feel like that . . . a brittle leaf, shaken and fragile, vulnerable in the hands of these monsters.
I hang on to his gaze, challenging him to admit the thing they all seem to be talking about and yet not putting into words.
I moisten my dry lips. “You mean kill me? Like you killed everyone else in my village?”
I don’t look away from him.
He looks right back at me. His gaze whips through me like a cold blast of wind. It’s such a strange sensation . . . to be seen, even now, in this, my inevitable end.
“Why don’t you just say it?” I demand. I have nothing to lose, after all.
Of course I would not be spared. From the moment I saw them, from the moment they saw me, I have been careening toward this fate.
“You kill. That is what you do.” My lip twitches, curling in a sneer of loathing.
“Cowards, the lot of you. You should be able to name it for what it is.”
He blinks as though struck and his fingers flex around me, reminding me of his terrible strength. He’s a dragon. Staring into his face, it’s easy to forget the monster that crawls beneath his human skin.
“You think I did this?” He gestures around us with a disgusted flick of his fingers. “I did not do this,” he growls. “We are not about destroying life. That is something your kind does only too well.”
His scathing denial fuels my outrage. “My kind?” I wave a hand.
“And what do you call what was done here? To my kind, to innocents . . . children, women, the elderly. What did those poor souls ever do to you? I saw the might of dragonkind done this day and you cannot tell me it was not about the destruction of life.”