by Jadyn Chase
Louise scanned the ledge and frowned. “We’re not talking about human campers. We’re talking about dragons. They wouldn’t camp here. Besides, look at the sign. It says, ‘Hawkwatch.’ This isn’t Parrot’s Perch.”
She took out her phone and started tapping the screen. I watched her with my heart in my mouth. “What are you doing?”
“I’m checking the GPS. You led me on a wild goose chase, Luka Kelly. I don’t know why, but I suppose I should have suspected this all along. Whatever these reports have to do with the Ridge, you’re trying to hide it from me.”
“Look, Louise…..,” I began.
“Don’t you look Louise me, Mister,” she snapped. “I trusted you to show me the places I needed to go to. Now we have to trek all the way back down to the bottom of the Gorge and all the way up the other side to find the real Parrot’s Perch. Did you really think you could trick me with such a lame ploy as that?”
I hung my head. I should have known this stunt would come back to bite me in the backside. “I’m sorry. I only want what’s best for you.”
“You want what’s best for your family,” she retorted. “Isn’t that what you really mean? You’re trying to stop me from finding out what your family really is. Don’t you think pulling the wool over my eyes only makes you look more guilty? If your family is into something illegal, just tell me. Then I can continue my investigation.”
I swallowed hard. I had to get this situation under control now before things really spun out of hand. “My family is not into anything illegal, Louise.”
“What is it, then? What are you so intent on hiding from me?”
I didn’t answer. If only I could tell her, this cloud of tension between us would evaporate. I would give anything to tell her the truth, but I couldn’t.
She waited, but when I didn’t say anything, she turned away. I saw my last hope slipping through my fingers. In a heartbeat, I dodged in front of her. “Where are you going, Louise?”
“I’m going to Parrot’s Perch with you or without you, Luka.” She held up her phone. “It shows right here on the GPS where it is. It’s on the other side of the Gorge, right where I said it was. I don’t need you to find it, so if you don’t want to come, I’ll see you back at the Jeep. I can find that without any help from you, either.”
She marched around me and set off up the path toward the main track. A lump stuck in my throat. This stacked up to the worst catastrophe of my life. How could I ever explain this to my Pop or the rest of the Clan? Holy shit! The Hodges! If they found out about this, they would have my hide.
I looked right and left for some answer. Should I go with her? Should I leave her on her own and meet her back at the Jeep? Then I could plausibly deny whatever she found there. I could laugh in her face and say it was hokum.
I would have liked to run for cover. I would have liked to skedaddle back to the Ridge and hide under the bedcovers, but that wasn’t going to happen.
I couldn’t leave her out here unattended. For one thing, the Lynches might still be hanging around. We killed all the scum we could find last night, but we might have missed a few. If any of them discovered Louise poking around the battle scene, she could be in real danger.
I got myself into this, and I got her into this, too. It was my responsibility to make sure she got out of it in one piece. I put my balls back in their sack and headed after her. At the river, she glanced over her shoulder. She raised one eyebrow at me, but she didn’t say anything. She continued on her way using her phone as a guide.
I hung back to give her plenty of space. I could hope all day that she would get lost and never find Parrot’s Perch, but I could never get as lucky as that. For once, GPS steered her without a glitch.
She halted at the edge of the clearing. Parrot’s Perch used to be a nice campsite surrounded by lush forest. Now the blackened trunks pointed their jagged, needleless fingernails at the sky like so many cadavers. The charred soil still smoldered with rotten, sulfurous plumes of smoke billowing from clumps of debris.
Scattered around the clearing, the destroyed hulks of dragon skeletons loomed over Louise’s head. Their ribs teetered at odd angles, and their enormous skulls lay in various attitudes of agony and death. The vertebrae of their long tails and necks formed gentle curves over the poisoned ground.
Louise stared at them with boggle eyes. Then she gulped. “It’s real!” she whispered. “It’s all real!”
I cast one glance at the scene and averted my gaze. I couldn’t look without seeing the dragon I killed and the Hodges tearing him to bloody ribbons before my eyes. He put up a good fight. He didn’t deserve to die like that. My skin crawled at the memory.
Louise walked to the nearest skeleton. She put out her hand to touch one of the ribs. It burst at the slightest pressure, and the whole structure collapsed in a pile of dust at her feet. She jumped back in surprise, but she couldn’t mistake the significance of the sight.
Now she knew. She couldn’t unsee this. I did my best to hide it from her, and I failed. What was I supposed to do—kill her to stop her breaking the story to the world? I didn’t think so.
She took a few more steps toward another skeleton and stopped. Then she wheeled another direction, only to halt after a few paces. She blinked in wonder at everything. “What happened here?”
I said nothing. What could I say—that I was one of them and helped kill these people? She knew now that the dragons existed. At least she didn’t know about me—not yet. That was my saving grace. If I could stop her finding out anything more than this, I just might be able to salvage the situation.
Louise took a container out of her handbag and scooped up a sample of the soil. Great. Just f-ing great. I almost lost my lunch when she took out her phone and took pictures of everything.
I had to keep my head on straight. I couldn’t let desperation and despair rob me of the ability to think. So she got a few pictures. As long as she didn’t find anything else, her story would molder away in a file somewhere along with pictures of UFOs and the Loch Ness Monster. I should be so lucky.
She finished messing with her notes and put everything back in her bag before coming toward me. She stopped in front of me, and her features stiffened into a solid wall of determination. Her eyes flashed, and her lips—those lips! —set in a firm, straight line. “You knew about this, didn’t you? That’s why you tried to stop me from coming here.”
I shrugged and looked away. “Yeah. I knew about it.”
“Why did you lie? You knew I would want to see this. You deliberately thwarted my investigation. You hid vital evidence that proves the existence of these dragons. I just don’t get it.”
“You wouldn’t understand.” That was the understatement of the century.
“Try me.” She squared her shoulders to confront me. “I’m not leaving without some explanation. You knew all about these dragons. You must know them personally.”
I thought fast. She was right about one thing. She deserved some explanation. She wouldn’t back down without one. I could see that in her face. “Look, Louise, you don’t understand these people. They protect their own. Why do you think they live in this isolated Gorge? They live here because it’s easy to defend. They work hard to keep their true nature a secret from the outside world. If they found out that you saw this, they would come after you. They would try to silence you to stop you telling what you know. They wouldn’t even stop at killing you if necessary.”
“What about Smokey Ridge?” she asked. “Do they live up there because it’s easy to defend, too?”
My throat constricted in agony. What could I say to her? I could only shake my head and stare down at the ground. I could only hope and pray to God Almighty that she stopped asking questions.
Her shoulders relaxed, and her features softened. “All right, Luka. I can accept that. Let’s get out of here.”
9
Louise
Luka parked the Jeep in front of the Watering Hole. He cast a sidelong glance to
ward me and lowered his eyes. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I nodded but I didn’t answer. The vision of those dragon skeletons among the smoking ruins haunted my sight. I couldn’t erase what I saw. The dragons really did exist. The only question was where were they?
Luka implied that they lived in Granite Gorge. I could believe that about the dragons that died at Parrot’s Perch, but all the other reports centered on Smokey Ridge and its surrounding environs.
Whatever happened at Parrot’s Perch happened recently. I would say it happened in the last twenty-four hours at the most for the ground to still be smoking like that. The whole place reeked of sulfur.
Just then, Luka’s hand came to rest on mine. His skin infused warmth up my arm. That heat crept up my flesh into my insides. It reminded me of the kiss we shared. When I looked up, his eyes drilled into mine. His countenance swallowed me into a zone of mindless fascination so I couldn’t look away.
“Are you going to be all right?” he murmured.
I nodded again, more stupefied than before. “I’m all right. I just need to think about everything for a while to make sense of it all.”
He jerked his head toward the Watering Hole. “Will you eat at the bar tonight?”
“I don’t know what I’ll do,” I told him. “I think I’ll go up to my room now and go over my notes.”
“All right.” He withdrew his hand.
“What about you?” I asked. “Are you going home now?”
He shook his head. “I have to meet somebody.”
I sensed him vanishing on me again, and the thought made my heart cringe. Did that kiss at the Falls mean nothing at all to him? Would it all come to nothing in the end like so many other meaningless kisses?
He refused to look at me. He gazed through the windshield at nothing and waited for me to leave. My soul rebelled against it. It couldn’t mean nothing. I wouldn’t let it just disappear into vapor. “Luka?”
He finally turned and met my gaze. “Yeah?”
Now that I got his attention, I couldn’t think of anything to say. His eyes drove a knife of quivering longing into my middle. Something between a scream and a sob echoed through my heart, but I couldn’t put it into words. It existed beyond anything I could articulate.
He sat there, questioning me with his eyes for what seemed like ages. Then, without warning, he put out his hand, cupped my chin in his fingers, and lifted my lips to his mouth. His delirious kiss closed off everything else, and I succumbed to the intoxicating wine of silken softness.
All too soon, it ended. With a succulent flick of his tongue, he eased back, but he didn’t break it off to nothing. He hovered there near my face. His big, warm hands caressed my cheeks and stroked my hair back.
I covered his hands with my own. I pressed his palms into my head in the hopes of holding him there just a little longer. My heart ached for the impossible bliss of that moment to never end, but it couldn’t last forever.
He took hold of my head and kissed my brow before he let me go. He settled back in his seat. “I guess you better go, then.”
I nodded, too bereft to say anything. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to be anywhere but with him even if he did keep secrets from me. Now I had no choice but to get out of that Jeep. Sinking regret worried me that if I left him now, I would never see him again. Something would happen, and he would vanish out of my life forever.
I couldn’t bear the thought. All the vacuous semi-romances I indulged in back home drifted before my eyes. When had I met a man that meant as much to me as Luka did? I never craved a man’s presence as much before.
He squeezed my hand. “Go on, Louise. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I bowed my head in surrender to that command. It had to happen. I couldn’t do it if he didn’t tell me to. I got out of the Jeep and slung my handbag over my shoulder. I stood on the sidewalk while he put the Jeep into gear and drove away. I kept standing there with my heart in my shoes long after he left.
What in the world was happening to me? How could I feel this way about a man I just met? Something about him sparked an all-encompassing reaction in me. I couldn’t explain it even to myself, but I had to be near him. I needed his hands and lips on me. I couldn’t be complete without them.
At last, the unmistakable reality sank home. I was alone. Luka wasn’t coming back today. I would see him tomorrow. I had to persist until then. Even then, he might not feel the same way about me. He might just enjoy kissing a girl for the fun of it.
I slunk upstairs to my room and shut the door. I sat down on the bed and spread out my notes in front of me. I unfolded the map and studied all the locations from the reports. That incident at Granite Gorge provided the most irrefutable evidence yet of the dragon’s existence, but it still didn’t negate all the other indicators pointing to the Ridge.
If I ignored Granite Gorge, the other reports all centered on the Ridge. They acted as a beacon aiming toward the one location from whence all the others stemmed. Luka mentioned Clans, plural. That meant more than one of these dragon groups lived around the area. Maybe one of them lived in Granite Gorge while another occupied Smokey Ridge. At this point, anything was possible.
While I considered everything, my phone rang. The screen read, MacPherson Wallace, my editor. I answered it. “Hey, Mac. What’s going on?”
“I should ask you that,” he fired back. “What did you find up there? I’m not paying expenses for you to enjoy a vacation in the country.”
“I know you’re not. I’m just researching the story. That’s all.”
“What did you find so far?” he asked. “Can you send me any copy to run a teaser?”
For a fleeting second, the images of the dragon skeletons twinkled into my head. That would make one hell of a teaser. Modern Dragons Found in the Mountains of Rural Georgia!
Mac always hounded me to prove myself worthy of his travel expenses. This story would be a big feather in my cap. It might just earn me a promotion to the Features Department.
For some reason, I didn’t say anything. Luka’s comments rang in my ear. These dragon Clans would protect their secret. They would stop at nothing to keep it from the world. As long as the story remained confined to the Photos app on my phone, it couldn’t hurt anybody, including me.
“I found something, Mac,” I told him, “but I haven’t had time to write any copy yet. I’ll send it to you as soon as I do.”
“I keep telling you, Devereux,” he barked. “You should be writing copy all the time. Forget the details. Just write something up so I can print it.”
“I don’t want to send you something that isn’t my best work.” Now I was just making things up to get off the phone with him. “I have some solid leads. I’ll follow them up in the next few days. Then I’ll have something serious to send you.”
“The next few days!” he thundered. “What am I supposed to do in the next few days?”
“See you later, Mac,” I called down the phone. “Thanks for calling.”
Quick as a wink, I hung up. That was a close one. After I put the phone down, I went back to studying the evidence. Why didn’t I tell him the truth? Was it that I kissed Luka? Did that make me second guess my job?
I couldn’t believe that. Neither could I believe that I kept the secret out of some notion of self-preservation. I hadn’t written the story yet, so I posed no threat to anyone. Even so, I wasn’t afraid for my safety. What could they really do to me? If dragons attacked me, that would only prove even further that they existed.
I didn’t understand my own actions. My job as a reporter should have inspired me to reveal what I found. Something more important took precedence over that. Insatiable curiosity drove me to uncover the secret, but beyond that, I felt no loyalty to the rest of the world.
What was this strange detachment that took over my thinking, now of all times? I just didn’t care if the wider world found out about the dragons. I cared only about myself. Didn’t the America public deserve to k
now if dragons lived in Appalachian Georgia?
Luka. Luka mattered, and it wasn’t just the kiss that made me think of him. Luka wanted to keep this a secret from the world, and I trusted him. He didn’t tell me why, but he must have a good reason, whatever it was. I could go along with that.
Why I should care so much about him, I couldn’t fathom. I did, though. Whatever he was hiding, I wanted to protect him. If and when he told me I could break the story, I would do it. Otherwise, I would sit on it for the time being.
10
Luka
I parked the Jeep behind the grocery store and stole a peek out into the street. No one was around, so I trotted over to the Watering Hole. I looked inside. Louise wasn’t there, so I walked in.
I found Jackson sitting alone at a table in the back. He sipped his beer and sucked the foam off his lip. “What’s up?”
I sat down next to him and leaned in close to whisper under my breath. “We’ve got a big problem, man.”
“What is it?”
“That reporter,” I told him. “She found the fight scene up at Parrot’s Perch. She saw everything, and she took pictures on her phone.”
His eyes sprang open. “Why didn’t you stop her?”
“I tried!” I hissed. “She found it on her own. I’m telling you, man, she’s a hell of a lot more determined than I realized. She won’t quit.”
He set his beer aside. “Then we have to stop her. We have to steal her phone and destroy the evidence. We have to stop her running the story.”
“No!” I blurted out.
He drew close to my nose. “Do you realize what this means? She might have already told someone about it. She could have emailed the pictures to every news agency in the world by now. We have to stop her. Where is she?”