Embers (The Slayer Chronicles Book 2)

by Val St. Crowe

  Doyle shook his head slowly. “Well, it’s not as if I can stop you, is it? I tried to stop you earlier, and you killed two dragons without even blinking.”

  “One sort of killed itself,” I said. “But, yeah, I did. I had to do that. I was trying to protect people. That’s the whole reason I’m here.”

  “We have other dragons,” said Emma, patting him on the shoulder.

  He grimaced, but he didn’t say anything else.

  I sighed, watching as the two of them walked off together. I shot a glance at Naelen. “Convincing them to kill all the dragons is going to be next to impossible, isn’t it?”

  Naelen rubbed his chin. “What he’s saying about the fact that we can’t know about the rogues being able to shift, that kind of made sense to me.”

  I glared at him. “Are you kidding me? I thought you were backing me up here.”

  “I am. I was.”

  “You were? As in, ‘in the past’?”

  He made a face. “It’s only that scientifically—”

  “Naelen, the dragons are not scientific. They’re magic. It’s different. And besides, it’s all well and good to be experimental and try things out if you aren’t experimenting with something that wants to burn your face off.”

  “Good point,” he said.

  * * *

  A tall, rail-thin woman of Asian descent flung open the door to the rec room. “Dinner’s on!” she called.

  Everyone in the room stood up and started flocking for the door.

  “Hold it!” I yelled, racing across the room. I grabbed the tall woman by the collar. “You. Why weren’t you inside the room with all of us?”

  She yanked my hand away from her clothes and stepped back. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Clarke Gannon, the dragon slayer,” I said. “I’m trying to catch the damned dragon that’s loose and killing people, and everyone is supposed to stay in one place, so that no one else dies. Who are you?”

  “I’m Shay Ramirez,” she said. “I’m the cook.”

  Ramirez, huh? I wouldn’t have guessed that would be her last name. I thought about asking about her ancestry, but then I couldn’t figure out a way to put it that didn’t seem rude, so I didn’t say anything. “Well, Shay,” I said. “You need to be in here with everyone else.”

  “But how am I supposed to cook in there?” She gestured around at the rec room.

  “Cooking is not important right now,” I said. “Staying alive is.”

  “I think cooking’s important,” said Tate.

  “Me too,” said Rose.

  Doyle sized me up. “We’re going to the dining hall now, Clarke. You can come along or you can stay here, but we aren’t going to stop eating simply because there’s a dragon on the loose.”

  At that, everyone trooped out of the doorway, leaving me alone in their wake. Well, alone, except for Naelen.

  “I’m, um, feeling a bit peckish myself,” he said to me.

  I sighed. “Damn it.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Clarke, you really can’t mean for us all to sleep in that rec room tonight,” Rose was saying.

  The dining hall was a smallish room with one long rectangular table in it. We were all siting together, and there were several big pots of chili that were being passed around.

  Everyone was digging in, except the Celia person, who said she didn’t feel well. She was only eating saltine crackers.

  “I do mean that,” I said. “If you go back to your dorms, you’re in danger. The dragon can get in through any of the closets that are attached to the tunnels.”

  “But what if our room doesn’t have a closet?” said one of the older women.

  “You are?” I said.

  “I’m Nicole Harris,” she said. “Ezra, the man who ran this place, was my husband.”

  “The man who was killed?” I said. “And you want back in those rooms even after what happened to him?”

  She ran her spoon through her chili. “I suppose sleeping in our bed makes me feel close to him.”

  I felt a twinge. “I’m very sorry for your loss, Nicole,” I said. “But I don’t think you’ll be safe in those rooms, even if there’s no tunnel access. The dragon can get into any of the rooms. The doors up there aren’t strong, and the dragon could easily take one down if it needed to.”

  “But we can’t sleep in the rec room,” said Rose.

  “Why not?” I said. “Isn’t that why you were all up in your rooms when Annika was killed?” I looked around for Kinsie. I pointed at her. “That’s what you told me, right? Everyone was getting all the things that you needed to hole up in the rec room.”

  Kinsie nodded. “Yeah, we all brought down pillows and stuff. For what it’s worth, I think you’re right. It only makes sense for us all to stick together.”

  “Thank you,” I said. At least someone here had some sense.

  “But,” said Rose, “we have the prods, and I think we should all split up and go looking for the dragon.”

  This was the second time I’d heard about prods. “What are you talking about?”

  “Well,” said Tate, “you didn’t think that we’d be here with a bunch of dragons with no way to keep them in line, right? We have these cattle prods. We can use them to poke the dragons if we need to, give them a jolt of electricity. It works pretty well most of the time.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “It does?”

  “Well, when they’re restrained already and in a cage,” said Tate.

  “It would be better than killing the dragon, right?” said Rose, looking to Doyle for support.

  “We’re killing it,” I said.

  “Why don’t you let us try it our way?” said Rose. “Because then we’d have that last dragon rounded up and back in its cage and we could all go sleep in our own beds tonight.”

  A majority of the people at the table nodded, as if they thought this was a really great plan.

  “You had lots of chances to try it your own way,” I said. “But you called me in.”

  “To be fair, we called Naelen,” said Doyle.

  “And I called Clarke,” said Naelen. “She knows what she’s talking about. And I happen to agree with her. It’s simply too dangerous for cattle prods.”

  “But how are you going to find the dragon all by yourself?” said Rose. “There’s only one of you, and the facility is kind of big.”

  I wasn’t actually sure about that, to tell the truth. “You let me worry about that,” I said.

  Rose rolled her eyes. “Oh my God, I don’t want to spend the night on a sleeping bag in the rec room with everyone in the facility. We see each other all the time. The only time I get any privacy is at night, and if I don’t get a chance to be by myself, I may go positively insane.”

  I considered. It probably was hell being trapped in this lab with all these people, never having a second to yourself. But it was too dangerous to worry about Rose’s privacy. “Better insane than dead,” I said. “Sorry. No one else is dying on my watch.”

  * * *

  “All right, well, we have to figure something out,” I said to Naelen. We were standing outside the door to the rec room. Everyone else was inside, but most of them weren’t particularly happy about it.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I think those people are all on the verge of some kind of violent outburst. Cabin fever or whatever they call it. Hell, I wonder if someone let those dragons out on purpose. Maybe they really have gone insane.”

  “Doesn’t matter if they did,” I said.

  “I’d bet that living in such close proximity to other people, you’d start developing lots of little grudges,” he mused.

  “Seriously, Naelen, that’s not what we need to be thinking about.”

  He turned to me. “Oh. Sorry about that. I’ll focus.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So, we need to find that last dragon and kill it.”

  “Yes,” I said. “How are we going to do that? Should we split up?”

  “I
could shift into a dragon,” he said.

  “No, that doesn’t make any sense,” I said.

  “Oh, come on. You know you’d like to watch me shift.” He waggled his eyebrows at me. “They have a pool on this floor. It’s right down the hall, next to the gym.”

  “No,” I said. “No, to all of it. And I don’t want to see you naked either.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “Naelen, can you not do this right now?”

  “Not do what?”

  “You know what. Be an asshole.”

  He chuckled.

  “You know what? Never mind. I will figure this all out myself.” I started to walk away from him.

  He caught me by the shoulder. “Oh, come on, now, Clarke. Calm down.”

  I put a finger in his face. “No more. Promise to be good.”

  “I’m always good.” But he snickered a little, making it a double entendre.

  I was going to punch him. I was going to shoot him with a damned arrow.

  “Seriously,” he said. “Why doesn’t it make sense for me to shift? Then I can meet the dragon on even footing.”

  “Because we’re stuck inside this lab, and the ceilings are low,” I said. “The only advantage in being a dragon is flying. You can breathe fire in human form.”

  “Well, I can, but I don’t really like to. It kind of hurts in here.” He gestured to his chest.

  “Really?”

  “It’s like heartburn,” he said.

  “Well, that sounds terrible,” I said. “Here you are complaining about possible heartburn, and my whole face is tender from being too close to that explosion upstairs. It feels like I have a god damned sunburn.”

  “Your skin is a little red.”

  “Anyway,” I said, “if it’s something you can’t handle—”

  “I can handle it,” he said. “So, I’ll go in human form, then. And breathe fire if I need to.”

  “Don’t put yourself out,” I said.

  “No, no,” he said. “I’m committed to this. You’ll see.”

  “Should we split up? Cover more ground?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe we should go together so that we’ll be more powerful.”

  “We need to corner it,” I said. “Get it where it can’t get out.”

  “How do we do that? Can we lure it with something? Like food?”

  “No, they don’t like anything,” I said. “This is what I’ve been trying to say. They’re not even animals. All they are is aggressive.”

  “They don’t like… I don’t know… fresh meat or something?”

  “They’re not drakes,” I said.

  He nodded. “Right.”

  We were quiet.

  “Well, maybe if you start at one end of one tunnel, and I start at the other end,” he said.

  “That won’t work,” I said.

  “I haven’t even finished my idea,” he said.

  “Well, it can get out of any of the doorways that lead to the tunnels. Which reminds me. Who designed this place, anyway? You had this thing built, so you hired the designer, right?”

  “I don’t remember who did it.”

  “You should find out and never hire him for anything ever again. Those tunnels are the worst idea ever.”

  “I think they’re meant to be a safety feature.”

  “Well, they aren’t,” I said. “They’re making everything more dangerous.”

  He considered, then shrugged. “I suppose you’re right.”

  The doors to the rec room opened.

  We turned to see a man standing there.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “I’m the maintenance director,” he said. “My name’s Jameson Green. And I’d respectfully like to say that I don’t want to be locked up with these people.”

  “No one wants that,” I said. “But it’s for your own safety. We’re going to find the last remaining dragon as quickly as we possibly can, so rest assured, it won’t be too much longer.”

  “I don’t think I’m safe in there,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Well,” he said, “I don’t know if you’re aware, but those dragons didn’t get out on their own. Someone let them out. You might have noticed that the cage hasn’t been tampered with, right? So, that means that someone went down there and let those dragons out on purpose.” With every word, Jameson’s voice was getting louder.

  I tried to shush him. “Doyle said that it’s possible that Ezra did that himself. That maybe he was careless and left the cage open. Might have been preoccupied with his experiment or something.”

  “Doyle probably said that because he’s the one who did it,” said Jameson, who was practically yelling now. “Everyone knows Doyle wanted Ezra dead.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “What are you saying?” said someone from inside the rec room. It was another student. He was African American and wearing wire rim glasses.

  “How can I be more clear, Foster?” said Jameson. “Doyle killed Ezra.”

  “What?” said Doyle from the other side of the room. He had been sitting on a couch near the pool table, but now he shot to his feet. “Ezra and I were friends.”

  “Who argued about everything,” said Jameson. “I’d be cleaning up after your interns in the lab, and I’d hear you and Ezra going at each other. And it’s no secret that you thought you’d do a better job running this facility. And look what’s happened? He’s dead, and you’re in charge.”

  “That’s insane,” said Doyle. “You can’t really be suggesting I’d kill for this job? Because you must know that the pay is not actually that great. I’m only here, doing what I do, because I’m devoted to this cause. I want to find a cure for these rogues. It’s important work.”

  “Sure,” sneered Jameson.

  “Well, what about you, Jameson?” said Doyle. “It’s not as if you didn’t have your share of arguments with Ezra.”

  “Me?” Jameson was aghast.

  “You two were at each other’s throats a lot,” said Foster quietly.

  “We were not,” said Jameson. He turned to look at me. “That’s a lie.”

  “I don’t know,” said Foster, shrugging. “I remember that you didn’t like the schedule he put you on. He made you wait to do your cleaning and repairs until after everyone was done in the lab. You had to work through the night, and you were isolated from everyone else, especially Shay, and the two of you are sort of together, right?”

  “That doesn’t mean I killed him,” said Jameson. “Hell, I’d just quit if I hated working here that bad.”

  “Would you?” said Doyle. “It’s not that simple, is it? You can’t just up and leave this place, not when there’s a snow storm every week or two, blocking you in. And even if you could go, you’d be leaving Shay behind.”

  “I didn’t kill him,” said Jameson.

  “You’ve got the keys to all the cages,” said Foster.

  “Oh, big deal,” said Jameson. “Anyone can get a key to the cages. They’re hanging on the wall down there in the bottom floor. Anyone here could have done it, even you, Foster.”

  “Me?” said Foster. “Why would I do it?”

  “Look,” I said. “Maybe we should just—”

  “I want to hear what he has to say,” said Celia. “If someone killed Ezra, I think we all have the right to know.”

  There was a rustle of affirmatives throughout the room.

  “We could be in danger here,” said Nicole, shaking her head. “My husband is gone, and so are two students, and we don’t know who might be next.”

  “I don’t want to be cooped up with these people!” said Rose. “Especially if one of them is a murderer.”

  And then everyone started talking at once at a loud volume. Lots of hand gesturing and yelling and agitation.

  “Quiet!” I bellowed.

  Everyone got quiet. They gaped at me.

  I took a deep breath. “Look, it doesn’t matter if Ezra was
killed on purpose or not. It doesn’t matter if one of you is a murderer.”

  “It does,” said Jameson. “We’re locked in with one.”

  “Look, even if there is a murderer, he or she isn’t going to take you all on at once,” I said. “No, I think you’ll be safer all together, regardless of whether Ezra was murdered or not.”

  Jameson furrowed his brow. “Maybe you’re right.”

  “Of course I am,” I said. “Now, Naelen and I are going to find that dragon and kill it. And then you can report Ezra’s death to the police or something, and they can do an investigation.”

  * * *

  “So, are we splitting up?” said Naelen as we got on the elevator together.

  “I guess not,” I said. “You’re here with me, aren’t you?”

  “Well, I could get out,” he said. “I can take the stairs down to the bottom level.”

  “No, it’s fine,” I said. “We’ll go down and check the levels together.”

  “You sure?” he said.

  The elevator door closed.

  “I’m sure.”

  “Because—”

  “The elevator is moving, Naelen,” I said.

  “All right, then,” he said.

  We were quiet.

  “Listen, Clarke, I was thinking maybe we should talk at some point.”

  “Talk?” I said. “About what?”

  “Well, are you serious that you didn’t sleep with Logan?”

  “You want to talk about that?”

  “Not right at this second. Obviously, we’re busy, but… You’re telling me the truth about that?”

  “Yes, I’m telling you the truth,” I said through clenched teeth.

  “It doesn’t matter, of course,” he said. “I had no right to be angry with you. I had no right to feel possessive of you. Frankly, I’m not used to feeling possessive about a woman. It’s all very new to me. I’m not good at it. I don’t know what to do with the feeling.”

  “Naelen,” I sighed. “Can we talk about this later?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  We were quiet.

  The elevator stopped moving.

  “What if we die?” said Naelen.

  The elevator door opened.

  I turned to him. “What?”