Chapter 4
Fallout
Pain didn’t come back all at once.
It seeped in slow, like water through cracks, until she realized the cracks were her.
First was the ache — a deep, heavy throb in her ribs, like someone had replaced them with concrete and then taken a bat to it. Then the sharper edges: a hot, stabbing line down her side, a dull pulse in her shoulder, her leg humming like it had its own bad heartbeat.
Then sound.
Not rain. Not engines. A buzzing fluorescent light overhead, the low murmur of voices through a wall. Somewhere, a TV played with the volume too low to understand, just that constant tiny murmur of people arguing about nothing.
Under all of it, there was another sound.
A slow, steady rumble, not outside her body but under her skin.
“You’re late,” the dragon said.
She breathed in. Air scraped her throat like gravel. The smell hit her next — rubbing alcohol that never quite covered up old cigarette smoke, stale whiskey sunk into wood, that faint undercurrent of leather and oil.
The med room.
Not dead, then.
“Damn it,” she croaked.
Ren’s voice sounded wrecked. Dry. Like nobody had thought to give her water or she’d refused it. Both seemed likely.
She blinked against the bright light. The ceiling was the same stained off-white it’d always been, with a brown water mark spreading in one corner like a map no one would follow. Someone had taped a faded poster of a rock band next to the vent. One of the corners drooped.
Ren’s body felt heavy. Constricted.
She turned her head slightly. It hurt. Everything hurt. But she could see the bandages wrapped tight around her chest, the edge of gauze taped to her side. Her right leg was wrapped from mid-thigh to calf. Her left arm had an IV line in it, taped down with shaky care.
Under the bandages, faint threads of gold glowed beneath her skin — little veins of dragon light weaving through the damage.
“You burned hot,” the dragon said, tone somewhere between impressed and scolding.
“Yeah,” she rasped. “That happens when assholes shoot me.”
She tried to shift her left hand. It answered, sluggish but there. She flexed her fingers. It hurt, but the good kind of hurt— the kind that meant nerves still worked.
Voices filtered in from the other side of the door.
“…I’m telling you, he hasn’t slept,” a rough voice muttered. Mouse. “He’s just sitting in there watching her breathe.”
“That’s what Presidents do,” Eagle replied. His tone was flat, edged. “They sit with the ones who bleed for them.”
“Yeah, but this is different,” Mouse said. “This is Ren.”
Something like pride twisted in her chest. Something like guilt too.
The dragon rumbled. “He stayed.”
“Of course he did,” she whispered.
The words must have come out louder than Ren thought, because there was movement in the corner of the room. A chair scraped. A boot shifted.
“Ren?”
That voice cut straight through her skull, past the pain, past the dragon.
Tater.
She turned her head toward the sound, slow enough that it felt like pushing through mud.
Tater was slumped in the chair beside my bed, elbows on his knees, eyes bloodshot and shadowed like he’d been awake for days.
His cut was off and hanging on the back of the chair, leaving him in a black T-shirt that clung to every line of tension in his shoulders.
There was a dark smudge along his jaw — dirt, blood, maybe Both.
He must’ve heard her because he straightened fast, hands going to the edge of the mattress like he expected me to disappear.
“Hey,” she rasped. “You look like shit.”
His mouth did this half-twitch, half-sigh thing. “Good. We match.”
Up close, he looked worse. There was a cut on his cheekbone, a bruise blooming along his neck. His knuckles were split. His hair was a mess, like he’d raked his hands through it a hundred times and didn’t remember doing it.
He reached out, hesitated, then laid his palm carefully against the side of her face, fingers sliding back into her hair.
“Welcome back,” he said, voice low.
“You sound disappointed.”
“Give me time,” he said. “I haven’t yelled yet.”
She snorted, then hissed. My ribs lit up in protest.
“Don’t make me laugh,” She muttered. “Hurts.”
“Don’t make jokes then.”
“Don’t be easy to make fun of.”
He huffed out a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh, then sat back a little, eyes traveling over the bandages like he was memorizing everyone.
“How bad?” she asked.
His jaw twitched. “Bad enough.”
“Specific, Prez. You know I hate vague.”
“Rib’s cracked. Bullet grazed your side — missed anything vital by an inch and a miracle. Leg took a nasty slice from the wire on the trail. Shoulder’s bruised to hell. You banged your head hard enough we had to check if you remembered your own name twice.”
“Do I?”
“Let’s find out,” he said. “Name?”
“Traffic cone,” she said.
He gave me a look.
“Fine. Ren.”
His shoulders eased by a millimeter.
The dragon hummed under her skin. “He was worried.”
“I can see that,” she thought back.
There was a knock at the door. Eagle didn’t wait for an answer — he pushed it open with his shoulder, a coffee mug in one hand, something that looked like a stack of bills or receipts tucked under his arm.
“She awake?” he asked, like she wasn’t right there.
“No,” she said. “I’m haunting you.”
“Could be worse,” Eagle said. “I’ve had worse ghosts.”
He came closer, looking me over with that sharp, assessing gaze. His dark hair was pulled back, his own cuts and bruises cleaner than Tater’s but there. No one had gotten out last night unmarked.
“You look like shit too,” she told him.
“Yeah, well,” he said. “This is my pretty side.”
He set the coffee on the rolling tray by my bed and crossed his arms.
“How you feeling?” he asked.
“Like I got hit by a truck,” she said. “Then the truck backed up to check on me and ran me over again.”
He nodded. “So, normal.”
Tater shot him a look. Eagle ignored it.
“You remember what happened?” Eagle asked me.
“Most of it,” she said slowly. “Heard you and Tater fighting. Left. Rode out. Hades Hellhounds came. They brought friends and a van. Set a trap. I sprung it. Things caught fire. People died. I passed out. Woke up here. Ten out of ten, would not recommend.”
The dragon pulsed, flickering images through my mind — fire on wet bark, the smell of burning rubber, the taste of blood, Tater’s face swimming into view through rain.
“Also, there was that part where I turned somebody’s face into charcoal,” she added. “Don’t know if we’re counting that as a highlight.”
Eagle’s mouth tightened. “We saw.”
“You see the part where they shot me?” she asked.
“Seen that too,” he said. “Trying to decide which of us gets to lose more sleep over it.”
“Too late,” Tater said under his breath.
She looked between them.
“Where are they?” she asked. “The ones who lived.”
Tater shook his head. “None of them did.”
She frowned. “I left a few breathing. Shot, cut, burnt, but they were alive when I blacked out.”
“Yeah,” Eagle said. They wasn’t when we got there.”
“That you or the boys?” she asked.
Eagle shrugged. “Storm, mud, fire, bullets. Lots of ways to die.”
The dragon hummed, displeased. It didn’t like unfinished business it hadn’t tended itself.
“Patches?” she asked. “You bring me souvenirs?”
Tater’s eyes darkened. “No patches.”
Ren blinked. “What?”
Eagle answered. “Every Hellhound we found in your burn radius had their colors burned clean off. Leather was scorched where the patch was. Skin underneath? Not as bad.”
The dragon purred, smug.
“So, I got creative,” she said. “They came to take mine. Felt fair.”
“Fair’s not the word they’re gonna use,” Eagle said. “You didn’t just kill their boys, Ren. You humiliated ‘em. Took their identity right off their backs. That’s gonna piss them off more than the bodies.”
“Good,” she said. “They started it.”
Tater scrubbed his hand over his face. “You didn’t do anything wrong. But we’d be idiots not to expect blowback.”
“Blowback how?” she asked. “More ambushes? Bigger vans? Grappling hooks?”
“Ren,” Tater said.
Ren looked at him. “What? You’re President. If they’re coming, we should talk about how. Sitting here pretending they’re just gonna go sulk in their clubhouse doesn’t change the math.”
Eagle sighed. “We don’t think they’re sulking.”
“Then what?” she said.
He nodded toward the hall. “You wanna tell her or you want me to?”
Tater’s jaw flexed. “I’ll do it.”
He looked at me. Really looked. The gray of his eyes had that storm warning in them again.
“Somebody filmed you,” he said. “Out there. In the clearing.”
The dragon went very still.
“Filmed me doing what? “She asked, like she didn’t already know.
“What do you think?” Eagle said. “Dragon girl lit up, Hades Hellhounds screaming, rain turning to steam. It’s not long, but it’s clear.”
Her mouth went dry. “And?”
“And about an hour after we got you back here,” Tater said, “a file came through the burner line we use when we don’t want cops listening. No message. Just the video. Hades Hellhounds watermark in the corner.”
“That’s not possible,” she snapped. “I burned everything within reach.”
“Not everything,” Eagle said. “You were busy bleeding, so I’ll give you a pass on missing the guy tucked back in the trees with his camera out.”
The dragon snarled, pissed at itself.
“Sloppy,” it hissed.
“Yeah,” she thought back. “We got shot. Cut us some slack.”
“What did they do with it?” she asked aloud. “Post it to YouTube? ‘Watch crazy bitch LARP as dragon’?”
“Not yet,” Eagle said. “Far as we know, it’s just their little trophy for now. A reminder they saw under your skin.”
“And a reminder they know what you are,” Tater added.
She let that sink in.
It wasn’t like her being a dragon was a secret exactly — not anymore. Rumors had been moving down highways for months. But rumors were one thing. Footage was another. Rumors made you a myth. Footage made you a target.
“Could be worse,” she said finally. “They could’ve caught me on camera crying. That’d really ruin my rep.”