by Zoe Chant
She said as much to Theo.
Then he said, “Wait, wait, wait,” and his lips wrinkled up like he was about to sneeze. “Keep one hand on me.”
A kind of shimmering silver veil fell around her.
Jillian only barely held back a hysteria-tinged laugh. “Right. Your stealth capabilities. Is this taking anything out of you?”
“A little.”
She was guessing that meant a lot. His jaw was tight and his skin was even paler than before. There was a sheen of sweat on his brow. She ached to help him in some way more significant than holding him around the waist as he limped towards the stable. It wasn’t until they were in that huge cavern of a space—alone with nothing but the cars and the smells of metal and concrete—that she was able to.
Jillian found a car for them within seconds, picking it solely because of its color. At a sensible dark gray, it would blend in better with the darkness and not stand out much in traffic. She found its keys in the stable lockbox and helped Theo into the passenger seat, carefully unbuttoning his jacket and laying it over him like a blanket. She kissed his cheek, trying not to think about how cool his skin felt beneath her lips.
He gave her one or two instructions for the route she needed to take, but she cut him off after he told her which interstate to stay on for an hour. “For right now, that’s enough. Just rest. –Shit. Text somebody that you’re okay and that you’re headed off to a dragon doc. Then rest. Your friends will be going out of their minds if they get here and see this and you’re nowhere to be found. They’ll make some excuse for us, right?”
“Shifters are good at cover-ups,” Theo said, his eyes half-closed. “If we weren’t, none of us would be alive. I’ll call. Just start driving.”
She did.
Luckily for them both, the Marcus house was big enough and gaudy enough to have not only a converted stable but a service entrance, a separate gate in the back of the property. Jillian drove out that way. Someone might see them connect up with the main road eventually, but they’d be far enough from the house at that point that no one would know where they were coming from.
“This is wonderful,” Theo said. A kind of professional interest shone through the exhaustion in his voice. “You’d be a very skilled fugitive. It would take months for even Colby to track you down.”
He put the call on speakerphone.
“Theo, are you all right? What happened?”
Jillian recognized that as Martin. Even with the situation as serious as it was, she hoped Theo was clearheaded enough to realize that Martin had asked how he was before he had asked anything else.
“I’m fine,” Theo said.
Jillian intercepted that one: “This is Jillian. Theo shifted to shield me from the explosion, but he got hurt—cuts everywhere, but especially on his wings. It doesn’t look good, so I’m driving him to his hometown so he can get himself checked out.”
“I really am fine,” Theo said, his tone faintly apologetic. “But obviously we had to leave in a hurry and I wanted to give you advance notice that someone might have seen us going.”
“We’ll handle that,” Martin said. “Jillian, thank you for the more honest assessment of him. I wish he’d met you years ago.”
She knew it was silly, but she blushed anyway. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Theo’s frankly dopey grin. He was so pleased with himself.
When he spoke up again, though, he was all business. “I don’t know who was responsible for this, but I can’t rule out that it was meant for Jillian. Could you put someone on Tiffani Marcus?”
“Done. Gretchen’s already on her way. I thought a familiar face would be the right approach. I’ll let her know Jillian is safe, too.”
“Thank you,” Jillian said. “Tell her not to worry.”
She would worry, of course—Jillian was already worried about her—but it was worth saying anyway.
Theo paused and then awkwardly said, “Don’t you worry about us, either, sir. Tell everyone I’m fine.”
“Roger that, son.” Martin’s voice was warm. “Take care of him, Jillian.”
*
When they were several miles outside the city, Jillian pulled off at a rest stop and chose the parking spot furthest from the other cars.
She tried to wipe the blood off his face and realized it was even worse than she could have guessed. His skin was cold. It hadn’t just been the hard armor of his dragon’s belly after all. His normally burning-hot body was clammy.
“You’re cold,” she said, rubbing little circles into his back, her hands careful wherever she could feel torn shirt or wet blood. “Are you burned? Can you get burnt?”
“No burns. When I’m shifted, I’m fireproof. Even when I’m human, I’m a little more resistant than most people. This is all from flying debris and—the sound, it hurt my head. My ears are more sensitive as a dragon, my eyes are more sensitive to light. My wings were torn. The damage doesn’t go away just because the biology changed. It’s all somewhere.”
She thought of him like some kind of red-and-gold piece of embossed origami, folded into a dragon shape and then brutally snipped with scissors. The cuts would stay even if the paper was folded in a way that hid them.
“You’re not invulnerable but you wrapped yourself around me? Why would you do that?”
“I can’t let anything happen to you,” Theo said. He didn’t say he meant to be romantic, only like it was a statement of fact, like “I can’t live without air.” He slumped against her, burying his face in her hair. Every breath he took against her ear felt like the most reassuring kind of miracle.
All she could do was hold him.
He said, “I’m sorry we couldn’t get your token.”
“Never mind my token! I don’t need it. I can’t believe you got hurt because I was worried I’d turn into my dad. It’s all my fault.”
He touched his hand to her cheek. Some of the fuzziness was leaving him, at least. “It’s the fault of whoever left the bomb. No one else’s. I want you to have what you need.”
“You’ll have scars,” Jillian said. “That’ll be enough of a consequence of greed, trust me. Whoever did this was after my dad—this is what that gets you.”
“Red and gold,” Theo said.
Jillian stroked his hair. In the dark, she couldn’t see the red and gold there, and suddenly, that was the only way she wanted to see the colors at all. She consoled herself by unbuttoning his shirt a little so she could see the swirl of his tattoo. His skin was still warm there, at least. She didn’t know why.
She started to ask him, but then she stopped herself. She wanted to believe that it wouldn’t matter if she held back a question or two. They would have their whole lives to ask each other things and answer them.
Instead, she just kissed him again. Then she got them back on the road. All she could really do for him was break a few speed limits on her way to his hometown.
*
Theo had finally fallen asleep. That left Jillian with nothing to do but think about what he’d said about not knowing if the attack had been meant for her. Somehow she didn’t think so. If someone hated her—and she could understand why they would, as much as she wanted to argue with it—they could have just taken a shot at her on the street. Why damage the house? The house was the best chance her dad’s victims had for getting back even a percentage of their life savings.
Maybe whoever had planted the bomb didn’t know that. Maybe when the news had been explaining that particular detail of asset forfeiture, they’d zoned out. It could happen.
But something was needling at her.
The nutcrackers.
Maybe the bomber hadn’t been driven by anger or the desire for justice. Maybe the bomber didn’t want to hurt the Marcuses.
They didn’t want to kill anyone, but they didn’t have a problem making sure poor, swindled people wouldn’t recover what they’d lost.
Maybe the bomber was someone who would rather destroy his hoard than lose it.
“Oh, Dad,” she said. She blinked tears out of her eyes. “All this just so I’d finally take one of your cars?”
10
Jillian
Theo’s final instructions on how to get into Riell had been a little foggy. Jillian couldn’t blame him, not with him rapidly losing blood and consciousness, but all the same, here she was, stuck on the side of the road with no obvious magical portal.
Drive until the GPS says it’s recalculating, Theo had said, and then stop by the white tree.
Done and done. But he’d left her with the impression that someone would materialize to fetch her into Dragon Valley, and so far, no one had. And they were going on half an hour now in the same spot.
Under other circumstances, this could have been romantic. There was no traffic. No light pollution to stifle the starriness of the night sky. The weather was warm, the breeze cool. Jillian could smell the heady sweet perfume of wildflowers, zinnias and poppies and black-eyed susans. Occasionally an owl would give a soft and lonesome call. It would have been a perfect place to sit and think. To sit and hold Theo’s hand. But there was the problem.
It wasn’t that she was running out of patience. It was that Theo was running out of time.
She couldn’t wake him up. She’d tried three times already, her blood running colder at each attempt, but she hadn’t gotten anywhere.
If it was not good asking him what to do next, she still had to do something. Doing something was what she did, wasn’t it? It didn’t matter if the newfound love of her life was out frighteningly cold in the blood-soaked passenger seat, it didn’t matter if she suspected her dad had been the one to put him there. She needed to be the person she’d spent her whole life becoming. Needed to do instead of be done to and done for.
No one was coming to rescue her. So she would have to buckle down.
What did she know about dragons? If she were a whole community of dragons and she had to hide her valley from a bunch of violent, know-nothing humans, what would she do? And what would be the way around whatever she did?
Dragons could hide themselves if they wanted to. But Theo had said they could hide themselves from humans—he hadn’t mentioned anything about them hiding from other shifters. So maybe Colby or Martin could see Riell? She put that thought in her back pocket for now. The drive from Sterling was such that she didn’t know that she could afford to wait.
Besides, dragons might or might not trust other shifters. The only people she knew for sure they trusted were other dragons.
So maybe only a dragon could help her see Dragon Valley.
She’d been standing on Theo’s side of the car with the door open, keeping an eye on him at the same time as she kept an eye on the horizon, and now, her heart in her throat, she reached down and clasped his hand in hers, bare skin against bare skin.
No magical vista revealed itself.
Right. Of course, she’d touched him before she’d even gotten out of the car. Stupid. Besides, that was no way to protect against hostiles. Anybody, maybe, could grab a passed-out dragon and make skin-to-skin contact.
If it were her, she would make the password into Riell something no dragon would give up without a fight. Something personal.
Gold.
She could feel Theo’s rings against her fingers. In the pale glow of the dome light, she found which ones were gold and tried to work one off him.
After everything, that was what made him stir. That gave her some hope. All he did was pull back, curling his hands into fists, and it didn’t last long, but still, his instinctive response to protect his hoard had been so powerful it had snapped him out of what was almost a coma.
“I’m sorry,” Jillian said. She wrested one gold band free. It had looked like plain gold, but it seemed heavier than that. She could feel the finest, thinnest engravings in it under the pad of her fingers. “I wouldn’t be robbing you if I didn’t think I needed to. Some second date, right?”
She slid the ring on. Nothing happened.
Fuck.
Then, bizarre as it was, she thought about Theo’s slightly antiquated way of talking, the habit he couldn’t quite shake. Whatever culture had taught him to intermittently sound like a nineteenth-century gentleman was one that would value pronouncements. And then if this didn’t work, she would call Martin back. Or even drive Theo to the nearest hospital and take her chances.
Tears stung her eyes. She held her hand up towards the silvery-white tree. Even in the moonlight, it had a kind of ethereal gleam to it.
“This ring is from the hoard of Theo St. Vincent. He’s a citizen of Riell and he’s hurt. I am his mate, wearing his gold, and I ask for entry.”
There was a faint creaking sound. At first she thought it was just the wind blowing the tree branches around. But then she saw it.
The white tree was splitting apart from its highest branches down to its roots, its bark and wood peeling away to both sides like leaves coming off a stem. In between was a light so bright it almost blinded her. It fell on her and Theo and bleached them out, making them look like they were caught in some kind of nuclear blast, and then she saw that it was caught particularly on the ring—on Theo’s ring on her finger. It looked like she was wearing a band of starlight.
Then all at once, the light went out. She was just standing beside the road, beside her own parked car, on a peaceful summer night.
Only now there was another road. This one led straight into the woods and seemed to be dipping downwards. The valley. Riell.
She didn’t have time to be thankful. She got back in the car and gunned it.
Riell came into view slowly. Even as distracted as she was, it was breathtaking.
The architecture was a seamless blend of every style she had ever admired. Somehow each building had the delicacy and grace of a Grecian temple, the deeply-felt beauty of a Gothic cathedral, the overwhelming sprawl of a castle, and the picturesque order of an English manor. The only thing the houses lacked was hominess. She couldn’t imagine any block parties in Riell. No backyard barbecues, no kids with lemonade stands, no sidewalk chalk hopscotch courts. It looked like velvet ropes should have been strung up warning her not to touch.
Even though she wanted to, they didn’t have to worry about her right now. Right now, all that mattered to her was finding that doctor Theo had mentioned, the one who had taught him to drive.
If only she could find something resembling a hospital!
She was driving over cobblestones and the car kept jostling them and making Theo’s hair drop over his forehead. She was worried that all the bouncing around might be bad for his concussion, and thinking that sealed the deal. If she couldn’t go get help, she’d make help come get her.
She parked and laid on the horn.
Birds took flight from every tree and housetop. They didn’t look like any she was familiar with: mostly these were a rich violet and bottle-green, like starling-sized peacocks.
The sound of the horn was like a hammer smacking into her head. If she’d needed more reason to be worried, and she didn’t, the fact that Theo was sleeping through it would have done the trick.
Doors opened up on both sides of the street and suddenly Jillian had half-a-dozen sleepy dragons on her hands.
Correction: angry dragons.
“What on earth or heaven has brought a human to our door?” This was from an elderly man who eyed her like she was something form out of a zoo. “You’re neither wanted nor welcome.”
“How did she even get in?”
Jillian stepped out of the car. “I’m Theo St. Vincent’s mate. I’m human, yeah, but he’s one of you, and he’s hurt. His wings were hurt, so he said it wouldn’t do any good to take him anywhere else.”
There was a general hum of chatter:
“The St. Vincent boy?”
“Cousin Theo?”<
br />
“I thought he died.”
“No, his parents died. He left.”
“He left,” Jillian said, her voice steely, “and now he’s back. If he were you and you were him, he wouldn’t let you die. Theo has honor. Find your own.”
“Well-said, honored mate of Theo St. Vincent.”
This was a woman’s voice, so calm that it sounded as if she’d never been ruffled or upset a day in her life. Jillian picked her out from the crowd: a Latina woman in her mid-fifties. She wore a stunning ivory silk robe beaded with pearls, but her long hair—lustrous black except for a single white streak—was slightly disheveled, as if she’d been woken up by the horn. Was that her bathrobe? She wore it as though it was nothing remarkable.
The crowd parted around her, its low hum of aggression not quite fading. The girl Jillian thought had called Theo her cousin, a girl with Rapunzel-long hair, was the only one who had her mouth shut. She was watching silently, her eyes huge.
The woman in white walked through the mob like a queen. With no more ado than that, she opened up the passenger side door and reached in to check Theo’s pulse. Her eyes met Jillian’s over the hood of the car.
“How long has he been unconscious?”
“About two hours.”
“His skin is clammy. This won’t make sense to you, but for a dragon, that essentially means he’s feverish. Does he have an infection? The cuts and bruises I’m seeing wouldn’t account for this.”
“His wings. They were badly torn. I’m sure they wound up getting irritated by the debris, but I didn’t think that would work this fast—”
“It wouldn’t have, if he had stayed a dragon. But the poor sweet fool took dirty, bloody gashes and brought them into his body to go who knows where when he took on this form.”