by Chant, Zoe
He admired her ability to continue enjoying herself even in a crisis.
“Which means he probably won’t name any more names until Mullen comes back to him.”
“Then right now, Henry and Ursula and their people are all safe.”
Boone nodded. “He’s just a coward using her as a weapon. He won’t hurt them on his own, which at least buys us some time. Mullen’s what we really have to be worried about.”
“It found info on me at my apartment,” Lindsay said slowly. “It’ll wind up finding more about you at your house. And—oh, Boone, your paintings! It’ll ruin them.”
He shook his head firmly. He was surprised to find there wasn’t even the tiniest part of him that was worried about that, even though he had no doubt that Mullen would be as vindictively destructive with him as it had been with Lindsay. His digital studio was all backed up on the cloud. And the paper originals of his old book covers and illustrations and ads, the framed mementos of his years of work... even if they weren’t replaceable, their loss was survivable. He could rebuild as long as he had Lindsay.
Thank God he’d held on to that one arrow.
“You were all I had there that I couldn’t live without,” Boone said. “And now you’re here. We’re not splitting up again.”
*
Lindsay had offered to book them into a hotel for a few hours so Boone could get some rest, but he knew he’d never be able to sleep. His head was clear enough. The only thing that would get him out of the fight now was knowing that it was finished. He’d chew half a dozen caffeine tablets again, the way he’d done in Iraq, before he gave up and lay down.
“You’re rested,” he said. “And I’m surviving.” He rubbed his eyes. “Well, if we can’t call the dragon clan to warn them, then I guess we have to go there.”
“What if Mullen follows us?”
Boone did a quick scan of their surroundings. He didn’t see anyone who had Mullen’s vibe of enraged, ugly stillness, but he was so on edge that he wasn’t sure he trusted his judgment there. Maybe it was better at hiding than he’d thought.
“You think it’s here?”
“It broke your door down about two seconds after I hung up with you. It could have heard me say that we were coming here.”
True, and he didn’t like that one bit. “Then we go in stealth mode. That’ll be easiest anyway, it’s not like we can drive.”
Lindsay frowned. “Why couldn’t we drive? Are you out of gas?”
He wondered if there was any way to steer this conversation so he didn’t have to explain exactly what he’d done.
Of course the one time he needed a crisis to suddenly interrupt them, the only thing going on in the vicinity was a possible churro shortage.
“I may have left my car on the freeway,” he said. “In the traffic jam.”
Lindsay stared at him. “You may have,” she repeated.
“There was no way of knowing when we’d be able to start moving again! You needed me! I left the keys in the ignition so somebody would be able to drive it off if things finally cleared up.”
“You abandoned your car in the middle of freeway traffic because I needed you,” Lindsay said. Now she sounded soft and lovestruck. “No one’s ever become the most hated man in California for me before. You’re public enemy number one right now. Forget about Mullen, everybody stuck behind your car is going to want to kill you.”
“Yeah. I’d want to kill me too. But I had to get to you.”
She leaned forward and kissed him over the table. He could taste the cinnamon and sugar on her lips.
“Here’s an idea,” Lindsay said as she leaned back, grinning like she hadn’t just given him one of those kisses that turned a guy’s world upside-down. “Maybe we could do some sleuthing. Mullen’s been tailing us, why don’t we try tailing it? If we could know a little more about it, maybe we’d be able to come up with some kind of weak point in its armor. There has to be some kind of Unchangeable equivalent to handcuffs that would make it easy to arrest it... or bring it to Henry and Ursula, I guess. They have to know if there’s some kind of magical jail cell Mullen belongs in.”
“I do like the idea of making the first move with her for once,” he admitted.
“Yeah, that was my dragon’s idea,” Lindsay said proudly. “If we let the Unchangeable stick to their routines, they win. We have to shake things up.”
*
They flew back to his house and roosted on the roof, trying to use their dragon-heightened senses to hear if there was anyone still moving around inside. The joke was on them if there wasn’t. Then they wouldn’t be following anybody.
Which would be just our luck. Now watch, we’ll fall through the roof.
But he could hear something. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought Mullen was still there. He looked at Lindsay and saw her nod her agreement.
I wish I could talk to her. I wish I could hear her voice.
But instead of having a conversation, they just had to wait in silence for Mullen to emerge. As they crouched there on the roof, their claws hooked into the shingles and beam, Boone thought he could feel something strange and new.
Of course he could. What wasn’t strange and new this week?
It was a kind of tie between him and Lindsay, like some kind of mental handholding. And just as he would have been able to squeeze her hand or caress it or feel the prickle of tension in her palm, he could do some version of all that now. Something was happening here that was as intimate as anything he’d ever experienced.
He saw in her eyes—and felt in her heart—that she was feeling it too.
Someday—someday soon, if he was lucky—he’d slide a wedding ring on her finger. If the connection between them was as intense on her end, maybe she even knew what he was thinking. She did rub her head against his in an affectionate caress.
Maybe she was promising that if he asked, she’d say yes.
Beneath them, the front door swung open, and Mullen came out of the house.
That killed the mood, Boone thought with resignation.
Mullen looked all around, even looking up at the sky, but Boone knew they were thoroughly shielded. He trusted the armor of invisibility... or he did until the creature’s gaze seemed to linger on the roof for just a moment too long. Its eyes narrowed, and its nostrils flared.
All armor had its weak spots.
But Mullen looked away again, scanning the treetops now. He was just imagining things. Stress and sleeplessness had him jumpy.
Once Mullen was on the move, Boone and Lindsay took flight and followed it. The same invisibility that cloaked them from sight seemed to muffle the sound of their wings beating in the air, too, allowing them to fly low and tail Mullen closely.
Where was it going? It walked for a few blocks, passing several parked cars and not stopping until it found one in a side alley. It looked around briefly and then, without any hesitation or even any change of expression, it shoved its bare hand through the driver’s side window. The tempered glass shattered around it into small shards that looked almost like rock salt. Mullen reached through the window into the car and unlocked it. The whole thing had taken maybe five seconds.
Lindsay had said the creature hadn’t bled from the arrow, and it didn’t bleed from this, either. It’d never even flinched.
Mullen opened the door and slid inside, casually pushing the last few loose fragments of glass out the window. It must have hot-wired the car, because soon it had pulled out of the alley and was on the road.
Boone doubted it’d given even a millisecond of thought to the person who would come out and find their car missing. It had stolen it without a flicker of conscience, just like it’d stolen Lindsay’s laptop and ID. When it had needed an easy way to interrogate and intimidate them, it had done a bad impression of a police officer. Everything it had, everything it was, it borrowed or stole or mimicked.
He’d already known its different forms had nothing to do with what she really looked like. Now he sus
pected that it lacked the creativity to even design them. Maybe that was why none of its faces ever looked right: it was like a bad photocopy of someone else’s original. It just lifted people’s appearances—and maybe even their lives. For all they knew, there had been a real Ann Mullen once.
It was utterly ruthless. It might be unstoppable.
They just had to hope today would show it she wasn’t.
Under other circumstances, this would have been a beautiful evening. Perfect for a flight along the coast. He wished he could have appreciated the strange thrill of flying low over the highways, flanking Lindsay wingtip-to-wingtip. Some part of him was worrying he’d never get to feel this again.
This is just a recon mission, he reminded himself. Nothing’s going to happen.
The traffic gradually thinned out as they left the exits for the public beaches behind. They were headed north, where the land grew rockier and more mountainous.
Then he realized where Mullen was going.
The cove.
It was the exact place Eleanor had warned them to stay away from, though she hadn’t said why. Now Mullen was leading them directly there.
What was there for her? This was where Zeke’s dragon had been attacked—it was an isolated, out-of-the-way spot. Could this be Mullen’s home base?
Despite his unsettling feeling that this wasn’t going the way it was supposed to, that thought drove him to fly faster, staying close to Mullen so he couldn’t possibly lose it. Finding out where the Unchangeable hunter made its home had to be significant. If they could get enough shifters together, surely they could manage to somehow intervene and disarm them. This might be the peace they were destined to make.
Unless Eleanor had been right. Unless they were winging their way towards an unhappy ending.
But Lindsay had an undeniable point. They’d never win if they kept playing the game on the Unchangeable’s terms. They had to try something new.
He looked at Lindsay, knowing she’d be able to tell their destination just as he could. She nodded back at him as if to say, Let’s keep going.
Stay invisible, Boone thought, picturing the instructions as one of Lindsay’s checklists. Follow it closely. Read your surroundings. Look for anything that suggests how the dragon clan could possibly restrain one of these things.
Mullen left its car at the edge of the road, got out, and walked to where the ground beneath it dropped away at almost a ninety-degree angle, plunging straight to the water. It looked down at the spars of rock and the lashing waves. The ocean always seemed to look angrier here, like the shape of the cove stirred it up and made it restless.
He wished he knew what Mullen was thinking. He didn’t even know what it was capable of thinking. What did you idly reminisce about when you were the kind of thing who lived for hate and vicious, brutal murder? Was it thinking of Eleanor? Was it satisfied to have eliminated one more dragon? Infuriated by the two who had eluded it?
For all he knew, the Unchangeable didn’t sleep, and staying motionless and looking brooding was how Mullen refreshed itself.
He just needed it to show some weakness. Something that they could use if it came after them again.
He didn’t know what he would do if it kept coming after Lindsay.
Lindsay. He felt like his heart was expanding, filling his whole chest. All those years of loneliness gone now. He turned away from Mullen long enough to study Lindsay, soaking up the exact honey shade of her amber-and-gold dragon eyes. She was all the motivation he needed.
I love you, he thought. Whatever happens, I want you to know that.
He knew—that strange mental touch let him know—that she was thinking the same thing.
Then, faintly at first and then louder and louder, he actually heard her:
I love you too.
I can hear you, he said, startled. It was like he was throwing the words to her mind so she could catch them.
I can hear you too! She sounded exuberant, not terrified. This was at least something useful that they’d wrung out of this long, horrible day.
This is great for morale, Boone said.
He heard her laughter in his head. The telepathy will continue until morale improves. Is she ever going to budge? I’m getting tired of hovering.
We can land, Boone decided. Just do it softly.
They settled down. He saw a tiny bit of dust stir in the air as their feet gently touched the ground.
Mullen exhaled. The breath went on way longer than Boone would have thought anyone’s could, and then—
Mullen’s skin was falling down. It was shedding its human shape like a snake.
It was nothing like their own transformations, even at their most wrenching and painful. This was more like Mullen was peeling its true self out of a costume. It had never been human; it had only looked human. And what was underneath—
Boone had never even imagined such a thing.
The real Mullen was not Mullen at all.
The thing standing in front of them was tall and broad and perfectly smooth. Hairless. Its skin was an awful slug-like gray. It had no nose, no lips, and no ears, not that Boone could see. Its hands were lumps, wedges of four fused fingers and a thumb. Its eyes glowed a sickly, jaundiced yellow.
And it looked strong. Its haunches were thick and wide with cords of muscles; its biceps were bigger than Boone’s own legs. Those spade-like hands were tipped with sturdy, razor-sharp claws. Boone remembered the gashes on Eleanor’s hide, the ones that had cut through thick, armored dragon-scale. Now he knew exactly how she’d gotten them.
They’d been hoping to see something that showed Mullen was vulnerable. This made it look more terrifying and invincible than ever.
The thing that had been Mullen looked at them with its unblinking yellow eyes.
“I can see you.”
Then it lunged.
*
Time, for Boone, slowed down. It had always been like this for him in the most frantic, most intense moments of combat. He hit this strange place of clarity where he could focus in on individual raindrops or grains of sand and where he could coldly assess what was happening in front of him. Everything was happening faster than it had been before, but not to him. To him, he had all the time in the world. Every engagement with the enemy felt like it lasted a hundred years.
He was prepared to spend a hundred years in this moment, if that was what it would take to make sure that he could keep Lindsay safe.
The Mullen-thing surged towards them, moving with the speed and force of a locomotive.
Boone opened his jaws wide and unleashed a torrent of wildfire.
It rushed out of him, as unstoppable as a tornado, and blasted into Mullen. The cold blue color of the fire seemed to frost the creature’s gray skin, making it chip and crack.
That fire should have turned any living thing to ash. How was Mullen still standing?
Their finest weapon, and it had barely left a scratch. There was a single dark scorch-mark on the creature’s brow—that was the worst of the damage. It was like it was made of stone.
But that was the problem, wasn’t it? It almost was stone. Henry and Ursula had told them: the Unchangeable weren’t truly alive. They resisted life and growth and the forces of time—and even the power of dragonfire. He just hadn’t expected Mullen to be this resistant.
It had taken all his effort just to leave a mark on this creature, to make even that tiny change. He didn’t know what it would cost to kill it.
Guess I’ll die trying to find out, then. I’m not giving up.
Lindsay breathed out her fire, too. The white flames added another scorch mark, but little else.
The Mullen-thing raised one hand and lashed out at Boone. Its claws went through his scales with horrible ease, leaving him dripping blood. The pain blacked out his brain for a second, forcing him back into the real world and real time. Into chaos.
Lindsay was shouting for him in her head, but she had rushed Mullen, too, and was battling the creature ba
ck as best as she could, trying to keep it away from him. She sent out endless blasts of fire. The Mullen-thing slashed at her again and again, never quite making contact.
Good, Lindsay.
But she was tiring. He could see that.
God, he’d been stupid. They hadn’t planned this out nearly as well as they had needed to. They’d taken it for granted that their invisibility would keep them safe. They’d let themselves be sabotaged by Octavian. And now they were in a fight for their lives, and Lindsay was already running out of the only kind of ammunition that seemed to have any effect. He was the one who was supposed to know about battle, and he’d led them into this one unprepared.
There was no good time for this fight, his dragon said, startling him with the clarity of the thought. It felt as deep and serene as a lake. Sometimes fate comes for you whether you like it or not. And ours is here. So we fight.
Boone forgot about the pain. Forgot about the hot drip of blood. He had things to do.
He barreled forward, breathing an enormous gust of fire right into the Mullen-thing’s face. Maybe he could damage its eyes a little. He did his best to shield Lindsay. Judging by the way she immediately worked around him to keep on attacking Mullen, she didn’t want to be shielded.
You’re exhausting yourself, Boone shouted to her. You’ll run out of fire.
He couldn’t explain how he knew that. Some sort of buried dragon combat instinct, maybe.
Don’t worry about me, Lindsay said. I’ll be fine.
But her next burst of flame was noticeably weaker than the earlier ones, and it fell a little short of the Mullen-thing.
The Unchangeable creature made a horrible barking sound that Boone slowly realized was a laugh. It sounded like someone hitting a tree with an axe. Solid, brutal, and destructive.
“I have you now,” it said. “By the end of the day, I’ll have three dragon scales on my wall.” No matter how many flames it had taken directly to the face, its eyes were undamaged, as yellow and lidless as ever. “My last prey fought so much harder than you. She was a worthier opponent.”
Yeah, well, we’re new, Boone said. Then he realized it couldn’t hear him.