Chapter 40
The Nest - Part One
I let myself stay on the stone a while longer.
Freezing rain hit my face in sharp, stinging bursts, and I didn't bother wiping it away.
My hands were too raw for that. The climb had stripped the skin off both palms, and even with the worms knitting the tissue back together, I could still feel every torn edge. I turned my head.
Zo sat a few feet away with her back against the rock wall, her chest rising and falling in slow breaths. Sadie was next to her, closer than usual, her shoulder pressed against Zo's for heat.
I closed my eyes. The worms were restless, a constant low pull running under my skin like a dog straining at the end of a chain, trying to drag me away.
What?
No answer. Just more pulling.
I groaned and got up.
Zo's head turned. Even in the dark—and it was dark—I could read the question on her face.
"You good?" she asked.
"Something's off," I said.
Sadie's hand moved to her weapon; she didn't ask what. She just got ready.
I stood there, trying to read what the worms were giving me. Wind. Rain. Darkness. Nothing I could see.
But the worms didn't care about what I could see.
Zo stood up, slow and controlled, and moved to my side. Her eyes scanned the ledge, the rock face above us, the drop below.
"Fish." Her voice was low. "What's going on?"
"I don't know yet… something here. Something dangerous."
I pushed the worms further. They slipped through cracks in the stone, crawled along the ledge in both directions, and tasted the air, the rock, and the ice. And they came back with information I did not want.
I turned my head and looked at the ledge again.
Half-buried under snow and ice, scattered across the rocky shelf we'd chosen for shelter. I'd thought they were boulders when we'd crawled up here. But they weren't boulders.
"Shit," I said.
Zo followed my eyes. "What are those?"
I sent the worms closer, let them crawl up the surface of the nearest mound, and press themselves flat against it. The report came back in sensation rather than words—warm under the surface, the texture of leather, and something inside it pulsing with a slow, heavy rhythm.
"Their god damn eggs," I said.
I let the worms fan out wider to map the ledge. Rough shapes in the dark, some small enough to step over, some bigger than my torso. Each one warm at its center. Each one alive.
"Ten at least," I said. "Maybe more. Can't get an exact count… some are buried too deep in the snow."
Zo swore under her breath, something short and raw that the wind pulled apart.
The eggs just sat there. They blended with the stone so well that we'd climbed into the middle of them and planted ourselves down without a damn clue. We'd sat right next to them.
I looked at Zo. She looked at me.
"We need to leave," she said.
"Can't. Not in this." I jerked my chin toward the wall of screaming darkness beyond the ledge's edge. The storm hadn't let up. If anything it had gotten worse since we'd climbed.
"Then what the hell do we do?"
The eggs were dormant, or they looked that way. But if they hatched, we died on this ledge. Simple as that.
"Stay still," I said. "Don't make noise. Don't move unless you have to."
Sadie nodded. Zo looked like she wanted to punch something, but she sat back down.
If these were dragon eggs—and I couldn't think of a damn thing else they'd be, not up here, not at this altitude—then the cold might actually be keeping them dormant.
The temperature drop, the wind, the pressure.
It made a kind of sense. Shut down, conserve energy, wait for conditions to improve.
Which meant they might not wake up at all. Not tonight.
Or it meant we were squatting in a nest, and the second the storm passed, and the temperature climbed, we'd have company. Company with teeth and fire and very strong feelings about strangers touching their young.
I glanced at Zo. She was watching me, waiting for a plan.
"Mabel. You seeing this?"
"Of course I'm seeing it, you absolute walnut." Her voice was tight inside my mind. "We're surrounded by baby death lizards. Your talent for finding the worst possible place to rest is genuinely without peer."
"I think they're hibernating, maybe."
"How comforting. Let's just assume they won't wake up and eat us. That strategy has served you so brilliantly in the past."
"Fish." Zo's voice was barely above a breath. "Are they—"
"Dragon eggs. Yeah."
Sadie shifted against the wall, and I held up a hand. She froze mid-motion. The eggs didn't react. The storm kept tearing at us. We sat there in the freezing rain, surrounded by things that could kill us the second they hatched.
I tried the count again. Ten for certain. Probably twelve. The worms couldn't nail it down because the deepest ones were packed under too much snow and ice, and I didn't want to push harder and risk disturbing something.
We'd climbed right into the middle of them.
"Here's the thing," I said, keeping my voice below the wind. "They're cold. Deep cold, like they've been sitting here through more than one storm."
"That supposed to make me feel better?" Zo asked.
"No. But it means they won't be hatching tonight. The cold's keeping them down… they’re in some kind of stasis."
Sadie leaned forward an inch. "How long can they stay dormant?"
Cedric's memories were in there somewhere—broken fragments about dragon breeding cycles, scattered across a dead man's recollections like torn pages from a book. I dug through them and found what I was looking for.
"Months," I said. "Sometimes years. They wait for the right conditions. Heat, food, safety."
I let the air out slowly. "We need a plan."
"The plan is don't die," Zo said.
"Very detailed," Mabel said. "I'm sure the eggs will respect your wishes."
"Can we kill them?" Sadie asked.
I looked at the nearest egg. Four feet tall, covered in a thick shell that the worms told me was denser than the rock it sat on. The worms could probably get through it. But quiet? Fast? That was another question.
"Maybe. One at a time."
"And if they're not as dormant as you think?" Zo asked.
Then we'd die. That was the honest answer. If even one of those things cracked open while I was working on the others, we'd have a very short conversation about poor decision-making before the fire hit.
But doing nothing was its own kind of stupid. We'd still be sitting in a nest when the storm passed. Maybe the eggs stayed asleep. Maybe the mother came back. Maybe we got lucky.
"I'll start with the one closest to the edge," I said. "Furthest from us. If it goes bad—"
"It won't," Sadie said.
I looked at her. She was watching me with those silver-grey eyes, cold and certain and empty of doubt. The same expression that still reminded me of Mikkel, even now. But she'd bled for us on this mountain. She wasn't him. I knew that.
"If it does," I said, "you run. Both of you. Get off this ledge and keep moving."
"No," Zo said. Flat. Final.
"Zo—"
"I said no." She crossed her arms. "We didn't climb all this way so you could play martyr on a mountain."
"I'm not playing anything. I'm trying to keep you alive."
"Then don't get yourself killed." She held my eyes. "Problem solved."
"Fine," I said. "Stay quiet. Stay still. And if I give you a signal to move, you move. No arguments."
Sadie nodded. Zo just stared at me with that look that said try me.
"Mabel. Ready?"
"Oh, absolutely. This is my favorite kind of plan. The suicidal kind, where everything depends on you not sneezing."
I moved toward the furthest egg, the one closest to the drop. It sat half-buried in packed snow, glazed with a shell of ice.
I formed a gauntlet around my right hand. The worms hardened, locking down over my fingers and forearm until the whole thing was solid and heavy. Then I let the sword grow. I raised the blade above the egg, aiming for the center where the shell looked thinnest.
"One shot," Mabel said. "Make it count."
I drove the blade down.