by Chant, Zoe
Chapter Twenty-Two
The jet of fire Lindsay exhaled was so scorching hot that Boone felt the crackle of it even through the thick, flame-proof dragon scales. And that was without getting a direct blast.
So dragonfire would hurt even other dragons, he was guessing. They’d have to make sure to stay out of each other’s way during a fight. The last thing any of them needed was literal friendly fire.
But while that tactical part of his brain ticked on in the background, working out what a battle between them and the Unchangeable’s imagined forces might look like, the rest of him was marveling at what Lindsay had done. Her fire was as breathtaking as she was.
It came in the same colors, too: a mix of silver, gold, and white, bright as spangles and mysterious as starlight.
Lindsay was human again in the blink of an eye.
“Wow,” she said. She sounded breathless. “I mean, wow.”
Boone agreed. Definitely wow. He nodded enthusiastically.
Lindsay leaned back against his broad, armored chest and tilted her head towards Henry and Ursula. “What kind of temperatures does that stuff get up to? And does it usually work like regular fire?”
Ursula frowned. “You mean does it burn? Yes, certainly.”
“But do the colors mean anything? Is blue fire hotter than red fire?” She made a popping motion with her thumb and said, “Like when you light a match, it’s blue at the heart where it’s hottest and then orange and then yellow.”
“Ah,” Henry said. “No. Dragonfire burns hotter than any fire that can be set by man.”
“Or woman,” Ursula said testily.
“Any human,” Henry clarified. “Of any gender. Some dragons do have more powerful, devastating flames, but unfortunately, you can’t tell it from the color. You can’t guess it at all. The intensity of a dragon’s fire comes from the strength of their soul—and that is a hard thing to know.”
Hard? More like impossible. Boone didn’t even know the strength of his own soul—though he was willing to bet that Lindsay’s was a force to be reckoned with. He’d known that even before he’d felt the scorching impact of her dragonfire.
But he didn’t want to plan any kind of field engagement with the Unchangeable just based off guesswork and magic, no matter how real he knew that magic was. He was a soldier, not a sorcerer.
Still, “hotter than any fire that can be set by any human of any gender” still boded well for them, if it did come down to a fight. And if he could get it to happen for him at all. Enough blasts had to take Mullen down if they needed to, right? No invulnerability lasted forever.
He edged away from the others so he wouldn’t have to worry about any accidental, well, misfires, and looked out at the ocean, the way Lindsay had. He thought about change.
Or, more accurately, he tried to think about change and wound up thinking only about Lindsay.
But that was fine. Lindsay was a huge change in his life. Every cell of his body was different now, but it almost felt like that would have been true anyway, just from meeting her—and falling in love with her. Being loved by her. He’d been stitched back together into one person.
The world could throw all the mystical shit it had at him, could stick a voice in his head and a second body on his soul, and he would be fine because he had her.
She was the change that had made him able to deal with whatever other changes were coming.
The hearth where you started the fire. Boone pictured that—pictured the two of them in bed together as the still center of his world, with chaos swimming around it—and felt flames kindle inside him, racing up his chest and then along his throat. Breathing them out felt like the most natural thing in the world.
The sea boiled up in a white froth, a line of steam racing towards the horizon.
“Whoa,” Lindsay said quietly. “Boone, damn. Still waters run deep and burn hot... not that I didn’t already know that.”
Boone breathed in and out, turning human again. Ordinary air felt almost ice-cold to him now after having had the heat of that fire run through his lungs. His mouth was dry.
He said, “I was thinking about you. The way you burn me up and leave me standing at the same time.”
Henry said, “I think the two of you are ready.” He’d taken his glasses off and was cleaning them on his shirt. He looked hopeful, but almost like it had been so long since he’d had any hope that his face had forgotten how to arrange itself. Hopeful... but uncertain.
“For whatever comes your way,” Ursula said.
Silence settled along the beach as the four of them watched the last of the steam evaporate into the sky.
Then, less reassuringly, Ursula added, “As much as any of us are, anyway.”
*
He and Lindsay took to the skies again. It was coming up on morning now, and dawn had just started to turn everything around them gray and pastel pink. The stars were dimming as the sun came in.
More change. He wondered if the Unchangeable wanted to eventually stop the Earth from spinning on its axis, too, and stop it from revolving around the sun. Death was the only way to be safe from change... and even then, things decayed. Even the Unchangeable weren’t safe from change, if what Henry and Ursula said about them becoming more skilled lately could be believed—and Boone had no reason to doubt them, right?
Maybe they could convince Mullen that its whole cause was a mistake. Maybe. But zealots were hard to reason with, and if this thing had based its entire identity around being opposed to change, it would be even harder to convince it that it was capable of going in a new direction. And even harder than that to convince it that it would be a good idea.
No, as much as he had thought he’d walked away from war, he was in one again. He had to be on alert.
They veered east, towards Boone’s house. It had to be harder for Mullen to track them when they were flying, he figured; the invisibility had to complicate things. That would buy them some time.
But not much. Henry and Ursula had said Mullen might be able to sniff out that they’d been to the club. If that were true, the moment they landed and took on human form again, she’d be headed for them. Then she would know they were dragons.
As they got closer to his house, they dropped down low between the buildings, flying with barely a foot between their wingtips and the stucco walls they were passing. It was weirdly exhilarating to come so close to crashing. He would have to be careful of that. He didn’t want his adrenaline to take the wheel completely.
Finally, they set down right by his porch and, in a shimmer of light, became human again.
“This is a nice neighborhood,” Lindsay said, looking up. They were standing in the shade, and leaf-shaped shadows fell across her face. “I always wanted to get a house here.”
“We could look for a house,” Boone said absently. He dug his keys out of his pocket. “If you don’t like this one.”
Lindsay didn’t seem to think it was too soon to think about that. “Maybe. My own apartment is kind of ruined for me—and it really was a little too small, probably. But I like your house. Besides, we might not be alive to move anywhere anyway. That could be a bright side. Moving’s always a huge hassle.”
“We’ll still be alive.” Or she would, anyway. He wasn’t going to let anything bad happen to her. He wasn’t even going to joke about it.
More than anything else, they both needed some sleep. They’d been awake all night, and even though the flying hadn’t been too strenuous, it had still worked out of a lot of muscles Boone literally hadn’t had a week ago, and even in his human body, he could feel an incredible soreness. All he wanted was his bed and maybe a hot shower.
But there were a couple of things he had to take care of first. He was possibly going into battle with dragonfire, and he knew that could be effective, but he still wasn’t entirely comfortable with it. He wanted a weapon he knew—and one that would work the same no matter what was in his heart or mind when he pulled the trigger on it. Call him old-fa
shioned.
He let Lindsay collapse on the broken sofa while he went into the bedroom and got his sidearm out of the locked bedside table drawer. It had been years since he’d handled it with killing on his mind; years since he’d pulled the trigger anywhere but on the shooting range. But he hadn’t forgotten what it was like to know you had to fire. He didn’t think he’d hesitate, and he knew he wouldn’t miss. He clipped the holster on.
He didn’t want Lindsay to be stuck unarmed, but he didn’t have a second weapon.
Or at least not a second normal weapon—
He emerged from the bedroom with an antique hand-carved hunting bow. He’d inherited it from his grandfather. He hadn’t hunted since he was a kid, when he’d visited the old man in his snug little cabin out in the mountains, but he’d kept the bow for sentimental reasons. Holding it made him think of his grandfather’s hands back before the knuckles had swollen up with arthritis, back when it had seemed like there wasn’t anything his grandfather couldn’t teach him how to do. Hunt, fish, fix a car, build a house. Like he’d told Lindsay, his grandfather had been the one to teach him how big and interesting the world could be even outside of the family occupation. His grandfather had been the one to say that if Boone wanted to draw, he should draw; he’d bought Boone charcoal and paper and sent him out to the woods to sketch whatever had seemed worth sketching.
His grandfather would have liked Lindsay. He had no doubt of that. He wished they could have met each other.
“Hey,” Lindsay said. She smiled when she saw the bow. “Are we competing in the Hunger Games?”
“If you’re comparing me to Katniss Everdeen, I’m taking it as a compliment.” He shrugged the bow off his shoulder and held it out to her. “You said you took an archery class, right? Can you shoot this? Or I could take it and give you the gun, if you’d feel more comfortable with that.”
Lindsay tentatively took the bow. She aimed it at nothing and drew back the bow string, feeling the tension of it.
“It was only one class,” she said. “Freshman year. We had a phys ed requirement and I was feeling really, really lazy. Archery didn’t involve running.”
“Were you good?”
“I was.” He liked that she could just say it—no hemming and hawing about what counted as good, no worrying that she was bragging just by admitting she knew how to do something. “I kept it up as a hobby for a while—but that was a long time ago, Boone. I haven’t even gone target-shooting in... three years, I think.”
“It’s like riding a bike.”
Lindsay raised her eyebrows. “Is it?”
“Okay, I have no idea if it’s like riding a bike or not, but you’ve still practiced more recently than I have. I haven’t even used it since I was a kid. But you can have the gun if you want. Guns are easier.”
She shook her head. “At least this way we have the person who’s best with the gun handling the gun and the person who’s best with the bow handling the bow. Even if I’d be better with the gun than with the bow, I still wouldn’t be as good as you. Even if I don’t wind up shooting anything, you will, and that’s good enough for me. The last thing I want is to sabotage you so I can fire a gun and miss.” She gently released the string and then slung the bow over her shoulder. “Plus, I feel like a total badass like this. Dragon woman with a bow. Do you have a quiver?”
“No, but technically, right now we only have one arrow, so the quiver would be kind of a joke anyway. We’ll have to swing by a sporting goods store before...” He laughed suddenly, the whole weight of everything pressing in on him. It was like a slab of concrete resting against his chest. “Before it’s officially polite for someone to try to kill us. Are you sure you’re ready for this?”
“No. I’m not sure at all.” Lindsay stepped close to him and touched his chest, like she knew about the weight of the concrete slab and wanted to lift it off him. It was better: all he could feel was the gentle pressure of her fingers against him. “But I’m sure that if I’m going to do this, you’re the person I want to be doing it with. Is it bringing back some bad memories?”
“Just tense ones. It’s hard to step back into all this.”
“I trust you. Completely. I don’t think Henry and Ursula could ask for a better hero.”
He smiled. “Excuse me. A better hero and heroine. You’re a total badass, remember?”
“Of course. You’ve seen my Googling skills. But somehow I don’t think you’re really feeling better.”
“I just have a hard time separating fighting from time spent watching people die,” Boone said. “I feel like I’m getting ready for things to go wrong.” He heaved a deep breath. “I don’t like you going into a fight without a better weapon than a bow, either, no matter how cool you look.”
“I’ve got fire,” Lindsay said. “And I’ve got you.” She pushed her hands back through his hair, gently running her fingernails over his scalp. “And we both need sleep. We wouldn’t win a fight against a paper doll if we went up against it right now.”
He knew she was right. It had even been his own plan from the start. But he still felt like there were sparks flying around inside him, like his eyelids were wired open from caffeine. He was exhausted, but he wasn’t sleepy at all. He didn’t think he could sleep until he had their position as well-fortified as possible. He leaned down and kissed her softly.
“You go ahead and go to bed. I’m just going to go get us those arrows.”
And more bullets. Maybe then he’d feel better.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Wake up.
The words intruded on Lindsay’s dreams. Without Boone on the other side of the bed, those dreams had mostly been bad ones, so her subconscious welcomed the interruption.
Wake up.
Her sleep had been thin and patchy, and sometimes she only knew she’d slept because she’d looked at the clock, blinked, and looked again to find it forty-five minutes later. Almost drunk with exhaustion, she’d stumbled up at one point to text Boone to see if he was on his way home, and had—thank God—gotten an immediate response that he was, he was just stuck in traffic. Poor guy. He had to be even more drained by now than she was.
She sat up in bed, rubbing the grainy feeling out of her eyes. It had only been ten minutes since that text from Boone. No reason to worry yet. He’d said there was an accident up ahead, and that sometimes meant total gridlock for hours.
She shuffled to the fridge and got a Coke, trying to perk herself up with some instant energy and some sugar to cut through the fuzziness in her head.
What had woken her up? She was trying to pay attention to her instincts now, but it was hard when they wouldn’t explain themselves. She prodded again at the idea of Boone out there, a sitting duck in stopped traffic, but her dragon didn’t even stir. She was no more worried about him than she had been before she’d tried to get a few hours of sleep. No, this was something else.
Zeke?
Henry and Ursula?
At their names, her dragon raised its head, coming to a kind of primitive attention. Lindsay had the crazy feeling that she could see it, down to its intrigued, liquid gold eyes.
It said, Not them. Not that.
But you think there’s some reason to be worried.
You think that, her dragon corrected. Its tail swished from side to side, the movement slow and thoughtful. Thinking is your business. Perception is mine.
Its long forked tongue tasted the air.
I smell it, the dragon said.
It? But then, with a feeling like she was sinking down into cold water, Lindsay realized she didn’t need to ask. She knew exactly what her dragon meant.
The Unchangeable.
Mullen.
She tore into the bedroom and started throwing on her clothes, dressing as quickly as she could. If Mullen had somehow sniffed them out and was on its way, there was the chance that Boone would wind up running smack into it. With no sleep and no backup.
But how had Mullen tracked them down? Had it
just been pulled their way by instinct or—
Then she remembered what her dragon—her wary, animal subconscious—had said when she’d been worried about Henry and Ursula. Not them. Not that.
For whatever reason, the underbelly of her mind felt sure that Henry and Ursula were safe. But the rephrasing was weird, almost like her dragon was clarifying that those two weren’t the problem and then saying... that her idea of the problem was completely wrong.
It was like it was saying that there was a reason to look more closely at the evening they’d spent with Eleanor’s old dragon clan, but the reason wasn’t that someone in it was in trouble.
Of course, she couldn’t know that Henry and Ursula were safe. She was just guessing, based on some wisp of draconian instinct or maybe even based on magic. But she thought she was right. She thought the same sensory prickle that had woken her up when Mullen had come within her orbit would tell her the truth about whether or not her own kind were in trouble.
Whatever her dragon had been trying to get at, she didn’t have time to stand here trying to figure it out.
She grabbed her phone and called Boone.
“If I’m in this car any longer, I’m going to resort to cannibalism,” he said. “And since I’m the only person in here, it’s not going to be pretty.”
“Mullen’s coming,” Lindsay said.
She could almost hear him jerk upright. “What? Are you sure?”
“No,” she said honestly. “But my dragon thinks that it can feel it. Smell it.”
“Get out of the house,” Boone said. She heard a thud as a car door slammed on his end of the call. “Right now. Go to a hotel—goddammit, you don’t have your car. Can you ride a motorcycle?”
Even in a crisis, Lindsay couldn’t help seizing on the wrong end of this question. “Wait, you have a motorcycle?”
He had all the sweet seductiveness and warm creativity of a man who was good with a paintbrush, all the bedroom skills of a man who was good with his hands, all the protective impulses of a man who’d been to war, and a motorcycle. He wasn’t just her perfect match, her mate, he was also everything her sixteen-year-old self had ever wanted—upgraded, of course, to feature things her teenaged self wouldn’t have thought of, like “stable job” and “wants kids.”