by Milana Jacks
“From the flowers?”
“Right.”
“Which Arthur provides. Please don’t lie. Even I know nothing grows out of frozen ground. Where is he?”
Knight had followed me to the meadow. Great. “I don’t know.”
He looked around the tent. “Where is the merchandise?”
“Sold.” I beamed. “Every last one.”
“Good.” Knight leapt up and went for the exit. He paused with his back to me. “You’re closed for the day, or a week, if need be. You’re closed until you take me to him.”
“You can’t order me around. I’m Arthur’s bird.”
Knight spun around. His pupils shrank into vertical slits, and his irises turned silver.
I froze in fear, clenched my fists.
He opened his mouth as if to say something, but seemed to struggle with what to say. He swallowed hard and snarled, then his eyes turned back to human and warm brown.
Wow, I’d really pissed him off or his dragon wouldn’t have surfaced like this. “I’m gonna go get your jacket.” I got my purse, his bag with the handcuffs and flogger, and handed him his jacket.
Outside, he stared at the sky, so I followed his gaze.
“We gonna fly somewhere?” I asked.
“No.”
“Okay, what are we doing?”
“Finding Arthur.”
Fuck. Shit. Fuck. I couldn’t lose a week. “It’s the holiday season, and my best season ever.”
Knight smirked. “Then you will tell me where I can find him and be back to work in no time.”
I bit my lip. “I haven’t seen him in a while. I’m not lying.”
“I know.”
“But I may know where to find him.”
“I know that too. Take me there.
4
Knight
As an air elemental dragon, my nose was sensitive, more sensitive than wolves’, in my human form. Usually, the scent booster was a perk. I could smell lies by smelling the changes in people’s bodies. They perspired slightly differently when they lied. Clementine lied with the best of them. Seeing as my bird would lie for me, I expected lies from Clementine, but the damn orchid scent she wore made it even harder to tell when she was lying. No, not lying straight out as much as omitting the truth and evading.
As we made our way through the habitat, the stench gave me a headache, the Cy tech around me made me itchy, and the cyborgs bumping into me as I walked the main street made me want to extract air out of their lungs. The fact my dragon surfaced minutes ago confirmed my annoyance with being inside the habitat. My utter lack of self-restraint while around Arthur’s bird also annoyed me. The mere thought of Clementine as Arthur’s bird made me snarl.
Next to me, Clementine wove her hand under my elbow and patted my arm. “We’re almost there,” she said.
I stared at the pale, fragile hand on my jacket’s sleeve. I wanted to shake it off, and I didn’t want to shake it off. There was something about this bird. I couldn’t quite point my finger at what, but there was something. For one, she made me wish I had worn sweatpants, because my jeans constricted my hard dicks in a painful way.
We wended through the streets, walking deeper into the heart of the habitat. The air around us grew more desperate. Homeless lined the streets. Men, women, and children, entire families, elderly, their pets. I grew angrier and angrier. I couldn’t help these people, not this many of them, in any case. While Lance and Nentres tried to build housing for humans in their territories, they didn’t have to deal with the bitter cold of the real Ice Age we had up here in the eastern and northern parts of our country. If I couldn’t help them all, I damn well wasn’t gonna help a few.
Several places the wolves had found could take up to a thousand people and feed them for a while, but what would I do with ten thousand more who came and asked for shelter? Refuse them entry and send them away? Have them camp out in front of the shelter, begging entrance? Have them freeze outside as they waited for me to open the doors and hand-pick people based on something I found adequate?
Long ago, I’d directed them to the habitat. It was warm, the temperature regulated under the plasma dome. I glanced up as we rounded a corner into a narrow dark alley, thinking about the damn Cy crawling the streets. Nentres and Lance reported Cy sightings in the habitats inside their territory. The Cy ships were a rare sight up here, and I presumed Cy didn’t rub shoulders with me as I walked. Just having to come to the habitat to look for Clementine made me uncomfortable. I fucking hated the Cy. I disliked the idea of not having control of my element and giving away all my power to a spirit, who I didn’t even know existed until a few months ago.
Arthur, who’d inherited the beast previously known to have caused the apocalypse, needed his spirit. It scared me that he appeared to have found her and yet hadn’t shared the good news with me. It scared me that he refused to leave my territory, that he had caused a minor earthquake, and that his little bird was hiding something from me.
Clementine led me to a tavern no sane man would dare enter.
Putting my hand over hers, I paused at the door. “This was the last place you saw Arthur?”
“Yes. Oh God, he’s gonna hate me.”
“Nah. He knows I can be extremely persuasive. Are you sure this is the place?”
“Mm-hm. My sister and I come here sometimes.”
I snapped my head down and glared at her. “You fucking walk here by yourselves?”
“Yeah.”
I clamped my jaw shut. I’d snarled enough today. Thinking the door would swing open, I kicked it, made a dent in it, and, seeing as this was tech, it tried to slide open, not swing. The dent jammed it. I gripped the damn thing and pushed. It squealed but slid inside its narrow opening.
“The doors have sensors,” Clementine said.
“It didn’t open, and we’ve been standing here for a while.”
“That’s because the tavern opens at six.”
“So why’re we here at one?”
“Because you said to take you here. It seemed urgent.”
I sighed and walked inside. Clementine followed. A brick wall in front of me was not what I expected. I searched for an opening and couldn’t find one.
“To your left,” she said.
We walked the narrow passage between the wall and grapevines. I paused to pluck a black grape and ate it. A flavor unlike any I remembered burst on my tongue. I took the bunch of grapes and ate as I walked. Arthur was here. I was certain of it. Perhaps I would meet his spirit.
The tavern amounted to a short bar against the back wall and ten tables scattered across the floor. It reminded me of a place Arthur and I had frequented in New York while waiting for our mob boss’s goonies to tell us who we’d fuck up next. Yeah, like that. Prison had served us well. We’d come out corrected, all right, especially after days upon days in isolation. Sitting alone in the dark had driven me mad. I would have done anything to get out. So after a few times we’d served inside holes, we learned how to play nice with everyone. If it hadn’t been for the good Officer Smith who opened up the prison cells as lava threatened to burn us all, we’d be dead.
I pulled out a chair for Clementine and sat next to her, then raised an eyebrow when she didn’t sit down.
“You forgot to order me to sit.”
I chuckled and patted the chair. I sniffed the place, sorted out the smells, but couldn’t sniff out Arthur. “Are you sure this is the place?”
Clementine sat down. “Mm-hm. Maybe he went out for lunch.”
“Maybe.” We waited for over an hour. If we lingered any longer, I’d start drinking the fine whiskey behind the bar.
Footsteps sounded, and I turned in my chair. Sure enough, my brother Arthur walked into the room, rolling up his sleeves as he strolled. “Knight.”
“Mm-hm.”
He winked at me and sat at the table while Clementine excused herself and left for the bar, probably because Arthur hadn’t greeted her.
“It
’s not her fault,” I said. “You know I’d have found you anyway.”
Green eyes on me, Arthur said, “I know, but she didn’t have to tattletale. We made a deal, didn’t we, Clementine?”
“I’m sorry. You’re never here during the day, so I hoped you wouldn’t come and this one would give up and go away.”
This one? She must mean me. I cracked my neck, resolved to deal with the bird later. Arthur tucked his dirty-blond hair behind his ear, then pointed at the princess-cut diamond studs in his ears. “What do you think?”
I leaned in to see better. “Nice. Where did you get those?”
“Swiped it from my host.”
I snorted. “Stealing will get you in trouble.”
“It always does.”
But he’d do it anyway. Dragons hoarded jewels, and Arthur couldn’t help himself. We had to have jewels by any means necessary. “Who’s your host?”
“Cyborg named Homer Reyres.”
Both my eyebrows shot up. “That’s a cyborg surgeon and my sister’s neighbor.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“What the fuck are you doing partying with him?”
“It was just a brunch. Had what Cy believe tasted like salmon and caviar.” He glanced behind me. “Oh, I’ll take one too.”
I snapped my head back to see Clementine behind the bar, tea leaves in her hand. She sniffed one, and her eyes widened. “Mint. I can’t remember the last time I had real mint tea.”
“Only the best for my bird,” Arthur said.
A tremor ran through me, and my beast came alive in my chest, putting pressure on it. I exhaled a breath to calm him down so he didn’t tear this place up, while wondering what set him off. My beast didn’t impose himself on me. I made the decisions on when to change into dragon and when to be a man. I focused on the problem at hand. “Brunch or no brunch, what are you doing here?”
“I come here to have tea and get some shut-eye upstairs, since my brother won’t let me sleep at his house.”
I rolled my eyes. “I thought we agreed you won’t go on with your crazy cyborg infiltration plan.”
“We agreed.”
“So what happened?”
“I changed my mind.”
“When?”
“As soon as I left your house.”
I shook my head when Clementine asked if I wanted tea. I didn’t want to chat over tea, I wanted Arthur to come clean about what the fuck he was doing hanging out with the cyborg surgeon. A few days after Thanksgiving, when we’d found out that the military cyborg force in the habitat had doubled in the past few months, Arthur came to me with an idea to pose as a rich and powerful descendent of our former New York mob boss and tell them he wanted to invest in habitat expansion. Since the most powerful cyborgs around here knew what I looked like, Arthur thought he’d be perfect for the job. Citing a million reasons, I rejected the idea. The day after he should’ve been in Cleveland, my bird, Theresa, spotted him strolling the habitat’s shops. “What do you hope to gain by befriending him?”
“Information, of course. If anyone knows what cyborgs are planning, it will be him.”
“I don’t like you hanging out with them. It’s too dangerous.” Arthur was important, too important to go around and risk his life by working undercover.
Clementine set the steaming-hot tea before him and sat beside him, her gaze on the table. “I’m sorry I brought him here, my lord,” she said.
Arthur threw an arm over her shoulders and kissed the top of her head.
Something drummed in my ears, my chest inflated with pressure, my beast crawled under my skin, my eyes began itching, and when my vision grew sharper, I believed my dragon eyes stared back at the two of them.
Clementine stared back, her lips parted. “You can’t change in here,” she said. “You’ll tear this place down. It will be chaos in the habitat.”
Arthur patted her shoulder and chuckled. “You brought him here.”
“Ha-ha,” she said, but angled her body toward him.
The tension in the room grew. I could’ve sworn I saw the air around us, still and awaiting my command.
Arthur must’ve felt something, because he said, “Walk away, Clementine.”
“No problem.” In seconds, she walked away but didn’t leave.
When I spoke, I didn’t recognize my voice. “Mine.”
Arthur smirked. “No, she is my bird as was the one before her.”
“My territory.”
Arthur sipped his tea. “Please don’t tell me you’re getting all bent out of shape about the turf.”
I fought to clear out the rage and rein in my beast. I sucked in a breath. When I did that, air whooshed out of my brother, and he gripped his throat. “Rein it in, Knight,” Arthur choked out. I didn’t believe he could breathe. I slammed a fist on the table. Goddammit, I’d ripped the air from Arthur’s lungs and held it back from him, my dragon strong, my element coming to me. I couldn’t stop it. I’d kill him.
Arthur launched to his feet. The table flipped and landed on me. Clementine’s scream pierced my ears. My dragon crawled over my skin, and as I struggled to hold him back so I wouldn’t change in this place and destroy everything, Arthur punched my face. One, two, three. My skull rattled; my vision blurred. Gonna have a concussion.
Clementine kept screaming for him to stop.
Arthur’s eyes glowed bright green, his dragon on the surface of his mind.
“Mine,” I told him.
He punched my temple.
Stars played over my eyes, and I heard Arthur inhale a breath. He loomed over me, his eyes those of his dragon with a hazel iris glowing around his vertical pupil, his voice no longer his own, his mind no longer his own. “My spirit lives here. I belong here,” he said.
I wiped the blood from my mouth. Arthur’s great beast had destroyed our planet over a girl. All the dragons feared his beast’s instability. If Arthur went mad again, Mother Nature would rip the beast from him, and Arthur would die. I couldn’t and wouldn't let that happen.
He fisted his hand and raised it.
A dove landed on his knuckles and shrieked.
That seemed to stop him.
“Thank you, Clementine,” he said and let me up. He brought his fist to his cheek where she pecked him with her beak. I could’ve let them walk away. I should’ve let them walk. But I couldn’t. If anything, the image of Arthur and his bird made me see red. I leapt up and tackled him. In the back of my mind, my dragon shouted mine, mine, mine. Arthur and I wrestled until my wolves came in and separated us.
Arthur had been twelve when I caught him trying to steal my coat. I’d always felt he was my little brother, and I took care of him. I had never laid a hand on Arthur in my life. Not even that one time when I caught him kissing my baby sister. I couldn’t hit him back now, and he had every right to fight for his breath. Something was wrong. Very wrong. And if we didn’t fix it, Mother Nature would. She’d show us no mercy.
5
Clementine
Poor dragons with bad tempers. I wouldn’t have thought Knight could have a hissy fit. He always seemed measured and in control of his mighty beast, but lo and behold, he’d attacked Arthur for no good reason. Arthur stayed at the tavern and asked that I keep an eye on his brother. Arthur had probably meant to get something out of Knight like why in the world would he go berserk. So Knight and his wolf pack followed me home. Seven took the wolves out for a drink while I stayed with Knight.
We sat in my kitchen, our chairs facing each other, a bowl of water on the table to my right. I soaked a clean towel in warm water and leaned in. I wiped the blood off Knight’s eye. “You and Arthur behaved like children today.”
Knight grunted, glanced at me, then glanced away. I believed he was embarrassed. He should be. “Brenda, the girl who owns the tavern, is gonna come after Arthur for the repair costs.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Why did you provoke him?”
Knight leaned back.
“I did no such thing. Did you miss the part where he was beating my face?”
“I didn’t miss it, but he didn’t just launch at you for no reason. And after, when we were leaving, you tackled him.”
Knight said nothing in reply, so I assumed he’d taken the high road and abandoned the argument. He agreed he’d had a hissy fit, though he wouldn't admit to having behaved badly. Silently, I celebrated catching the mighty dragon Knight in the wrong. I put the bloody towel in the bowl of hot water and patted his shoulder. He winced.
“Are you hurt here?”
“I’m fine,” he bit out, one eye swollen shut. “Gotta go.”
“Should I walk you through the neighborhood, or do you know the way back?”
His lips tipped up. “I know the way back.”
I carried the bowl to the sink and got the herbal anti-inflammation salve from the cupboard. I peered inside the cup. Clear salve filled the bottom. Eh, it would be enough for his face. I’d try to get more next season when our self-proclaimed doctor and neighbor made more.
I limped back, the pain in my ankle throbbing.
Knight tilted his head, then pulled up my pant leg. He bent, squinting his one good eye. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
“My ankle is swelling again.”
He glared at me. I think he meant it to be threatening, but it was more comical with his beat-up face. “Sit, Clementine.”
I sat down, rolling my eyes. “You really should get a dog.”
“I have a good bird instead.” He winked his good eye.
“Jerk.”
He picked up my foot, removed my shoe and sock, then snatched the container with the anti-inflammatory out of my hand. He peered inside and sniffed. A grunt. “Jesus, what’s this?”
“Anti-inflammatory medicine.”
“Where did you get it?”
“From a…doctor.”
“And you were gonna put it on my face?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have more of it?”
“No.”
“What about your ankle?”
“It’ll heal.”