Fireborn (The Dark Dragon Chronicles Book 2)

by Ripley Harper

  Oh God.

  “Obviously I don’t mean moron in that sense, I mean –”

  “Dude. Let it go.”

  “I am sorry, my Queen. We do not understand.”

  “Please call me Jess. What I meant to say was –”

  “Just relax, would you?” Daniel rolls his eyes at me. “This isn’t the internet, okay? Nobody is trying to score any points. You’re between friends; we know what you mean.”

  “I am not her friend,” Zig hisses from the doorway.

  For the first time since I opened that laptop, I can’t help smiling. “I know,” I tell him reassuringly. “You don’t have to worry about it.”

  He glares at me, makes his strange sign, starts mumbling his poem.

  “Truth be told, I’m kind of starting to enjoy him,” I tell Daniel, tilting my head in Zig’s direction. “In a world where nothing is certain, this guy’s as predictable as death and taxes.”

  Daniel turns his back on Zig to make a quick, discrete motion, widening his eyes at me and slicing his throat. Quit it. Then he turns back and gives Zig a stiff, polite little smile before clumsily changing the subject.

  “Dasha and Iryna might have a point. It’s only the, um, less mentally gifted people who were at school with us who are telling lies about you on the internet. All the rest of them are silent. And apparently it’s much easier to Enthrall someone into silence than to make them lie.”

  I nod slowly, liking the idea more and more. Now that I’ve had a moment to process it, it’s actually a huge relief to blame all the hatred online on the White Lady.

  “So what do we do now?” I ask.

  Daniel shrugs. “Pretty much the stuff they argued about at dinner. Ingrid and Jack Pendragon want you to ignore all this and start mastering another form of magic as soon as you can. He sees the normal human world as nothing but a distraction; she believes the whole thing will blow over soon anyway. Gunn and my mom want you to sort this mess out first. They think a lot of the interest probably has to do with the fact that you’re such a mystery, so they’ve been playing with the idea of a high-profile television interview.”

  “A what? Are you serious?”

  He smiles at my horrified expression. “Look, they might have a point. Someone, somewhere is keeping this story alive, and they know exactly what they’re doing. I suspect there’s going to be a lot more of the kind of crap Amanda came up with, which makes me think an interview might not be such a bad idea. Once people see who you really are, it will be a lot more difficult to believe the lies they’re spreading about you.”

  I gape at him. “Me? On TV? Can you imagine?”

  “You’ll be fine.”

  “Have you even met me?”

  He gives a little bark of laughter. “Okay, so maybe you’ll need some media training first. But that can be arranged. What would be really cool is if we can get people like Amanda and Taylor in the same room so we can lift the Enthrallment from their minds and get the truth –”

  “Stop talking, you fool.” Zig isn’t leaning in the doorway any longer. He’s standing right in front of us with murder in his eyes.

  Daniel visibly swallows, then raises both hands in surrender. “Hey. She asked my opinion.”

  “Don’t you understand what she is?” Zig hisses. “How can you even consider exposing innocents to her

  the last time a

  slaughter rivers of blood

  “Stop!” I cry, clutching my head. But everyone is arguing now: my Skykeepers, Daniel, Zig…

  unending slavery

  millions of people

  ultimate destruction

  your prophecies are nothing but

  disaster

  “ENOUGH!”

  My true voice comes to me instantly. It is not necessary to call on it.

  It is part of me, a beautiful part.

  Everyone must listen when I speak.

  Immediately, the room is as quiet as the grave.

  And then the boy falls to the floor, his hands clutched to his face.

  “My Queen.” One of my Skykeepers addresses me, head bowed. “Daniel needs time to block your shine. His magic hasn’t been sparked yet and he cannot remain constantly protected.”

  They always want me to dim my shine, these men.

  I remember that well.

  Why would they always rob me of my splendor?

  “Please, my Queen. He will be hurt to see you like this.”

  I look at the boy on the floor, unwilling to relinquish my power.

  But then I see that it is Daniel.

  The boy is Daniel.

  With a deep sigh of reluctance, I let go of what is mine.

  *

  When the room comes into focus again, its colors now dim and muted, I feel sick with what I’ve done.

  “Is he okay?”

  “Daniel will soon recover,” Dasha says soothingly. “Michael took him to the care of his mother. She has much experience to deal with the shine-sickness.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt anybody. It happened so quickly… I’m not even sure why I did it.”

  “You did it because it’s your nature to destroy,” Zig sneers. “You have power, and you use it to cause misery and enslavement. This is simply what you do. What your kind has always done.”

  “That’s not true! My head hurt and I just wanted –”

  “Yes. And soon there will be other reasons, many, many other reasons. You’re beginning to like the taste of it, aren’t you? It’s already getting harder to let go of the rush.”

  “That’s not true.” But even I can hear the uncertainty in my voice.

  Zig’s laugh is cruel and without a trace of humor. “You knew Rodriguez would be hurt, and you still didn’t want to give it up. The power is starting to swallow you whole.”

  “No.”

  “You cannot lie to me, monster.”

  “Do not address our queen in such disrespectful manner!” Iryna tells him angrily.

  “You know what she is as well as I do.”

  “Yes. And I trust her with my life.”

  He gives her a pitying look. “Then you are doomed. If she’d hurt her best friend merely to silence a conversation, what do you think she’ll do to you when there’s more at stake?”

  “I didn’t realize he would be hurt,” I tell the sisters. “It happened so fast; I didn’t think. Please. You must believe me.”

  “Of course we believe you,” Dasha sends Zig a poisonous look. “Do not listen to the zealot—it is he who is liar. You surrendered your shine the second when you realized Daniel was injured. No other keeper has ever relinquished it so quickly, never mind a –” She stops herself, no doubt remembering the spell I’m under.

  And suddenly I understand, with perfect clarity, what my next move should be.

  Forget the magic. Forget the media. Forget the haters on the internet and the lies told about me. Forget the assassins trying to kill me. Forget the White Lady.

  The first thing I need to do is to get rid of this spell.

  It’s time to find out what the hell I really am.

  Chapter 26

  Real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only from experiencing them to the full.

  From The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, by Carl Gustav Jung (1959),

  translated by RFC Hull

  It’s not difficult to organize. There’s a bit of resistance from Jack Pendragon at first, but he soon gives in. Everybody knows it must be done.

  And so, a couple of hours later, they lead me through yet another wing of the Pendragon mansion, where they show me into a dark room at least as big as our old school hall. The room is completely empty save for a lone leather couch in one corner. As we walk towards it, our footsteps echo loudly.

  I’m asked to make myself comfortable and sit down gingerly. Ingrid seats herself on my left, Gunn on my right. My Skykeepers fan out around us. Jonathan and Jack Pendragon stand in front
of the couch, facing us. There’s no sign of Zig.

  “I think it would be best if she wears a blindfold,” Jack Pendragon tells Ingrid.

  “Why?” I ask nervously. “I don’t want to.”

  “He’s right, little one,” Ingrid says. “It will make it easier for you.”

  “If she says no, it’s no.” Gunn clenches his jaw into a stubborn line.

  “You don’t understand, Gunnar.”

  “I understand enough.”

  “No, you don’t. You’re Enthralled too, even though you don’t realize it.”

  “Red cannot enthrall Black.”

  “But you’re not truly Black yet, are you?” Ingrid’s voice is less sharp than usual. Almost gentle.

  “Are you sure it’s necessary?” Gunn asks.

  “It will physically hurt her to see what happens next. At least until the spell is lifted.”

  “You okay with this?” he asks me.

  I don’t know. Am I okay with this?

  Do I trust Ingrid? Do I trust the Pendragons? Do I trust anybody? Suddenly I really wish Daniel was here, but he’s not allowed to see me until he’s recovered from his shine-sickness.

  “Will you stay with me no matter what?” I ask Gunn.

  “No matter what. I promise.”

  I look up into his beautiful dark blue eyes, not sure what I’m hoping to find.

  “We’ll be here too, my queen,” Michael says. “We won’t let anyone hurt you.”

  I turn my head to smile my thanks at my Skykeepers.

  “Okay,” I say. “Then do it.”

  Jonathan walks over with a piece of black cloth and ties it around my head. I notice that his hands are shaking and that he looks pale and sick with nerves.

  It makes me feel sick too. What on earth could make Jonathan Pendragon nervous?

  Once I’m blindfolded, I can hear my heart beating loudly in my ears as my nerves start to fray. What am I doing? This can’t be good, can it? I feel my breathing getting shallower and try to swallow my panic. But I can’t.

  This is wrong. Something is wrong.

  I shouldn’t be here.

  I’m about to jump up when I feel Gunn’s big hand on mine. He gives me a gentle, reassuring squeeze, silently telling me that everything’s okay.

  It must be okay.

  Gunn thinks it’s okay and I trust him.

  I trust him. I trust him. I do. I trust him.

  I silently say the words, over and over, trying to convince myself. But as soon as the door creaks open, the sense of wrongness is back. There are voices, footsteps, and something… horrible. A strange, metallic clanging sound that makes me dizzy with dread. Behind me, I hear my Skykeepers gasp. Gunn’s hand clenches mine.

  “Jesus.” He says the word so it sounds more like a prayer than a curse.

  Suddenly, the fear in the room is so thick I can taste it. But there’s something else too.

  Something familiar and strangely comforting.

  A smell.

  One that is dear to me, for some reason. One I know so well…

  The pain in my head feels like a bomb exploding.

  “Please! It hurts!”

  “She can feel them even if she can’t see them,” Ingrid says. “Do it now. Before something snaps and you do real damage to her mind.”

  “These things can’t be rushed, keeper,” Jack Channing says.

  But I hear him walking closer. I feel him putting his hands on my head. They are large and icy cold.

  “Remember!” he says.

  *

  I’m taken back to that evening when Ingrid first brought me to the Pendragon compound.

  Jonathan and I were following a woman in a black-and-white uniform. She was showing us to the upstairs library. As we walked through the house, I couldn’t suppress a faint shiver of revulsion.

  Everything about the place felt wrong.

  It was in the eyes of the women staring down at me from the portraits in the hall. It was in the eerie silence of the house, a quiet so absolute it almost became a presence. It was in the smell of the place, a disturbing scent I couldn’t quite name. It was in the strange shift in perspective when we walked up the stairs, a terrifying illusion which made the ground floor appear miles away.

  And then there was that enormous framed photograph on the landing to the second floor. I must’ve made a shocked sound because Jonathan turned to look at me. On the photo, he and his father were sitting with their arms around a woman I had never seen before. She was so beautiful that it was difficult to stop looking at her face. Her beauty was unearthly and extreme, hypnotic. In the end Jonathan had to gently take me by the arm and pull me away. His touch made my whole body sing.

  I wanted to know if the woman in the photo was Jonathan’s mother, but the closed look on his face made me afraid to ask. I remember realizing how strange it was that I’d never thought about Jonathan’s mother before. Nobody ever talked or wondered about her, despite the fact that Jonathan’s dad basically owned the town we lived in.

  But the thought soon disappeared from my head.

  When I walked into the library, the first thing I noticed was all the books. Thousands upon thousands of them. The next thing I noticed was the size of the room, and then Ingrid’s face, pale and old and exhausted.

  She was sitting at a big round table with two men: Jack Pendragon and someone who looked like a meaner, older version of him. Ingrid introduced him as George Pendragon, Jonathan’s grandfather.

  He laughed when she said this. “Such a polite introduction from an old enemy. You must really believe my time to be over.” Then he ran his eyes over me and stopped laughing abruptly. “But you’re wrong, keeper. I am not dead yet.”

  I remember how desperately I wanted to sit down. I felt tired all the time then. My body was weak and half-starved after the drills, my leg was hurting, and my heart was broken. Gunn had left me. Daniel had left me. Ingrid had become my enemy. My mother was dead. I was alone and I trusted nobody, and the only thing I really wanted to do was to curl myself up into a little ball and cry.

  But I couldn’t. My mom had died to give me this life, and I had to live it.

  Jonathan pulled out a chair for me and I remember being strangely touched by that small act of courtesy. I sat down and tried not to let them see how nervous I was. “So what happens now?” I asked.

  “Now you meet your fate,” the old man said, laughing again. His laugh soon changed into a cough. He did not sound healthy.

  I sneaked a quick glimpse at Jonathan. He looked pale and so sad that I knew something terrible was about to happen.

  “What are you going to do to me?”

  It was Ingrid who answered. “Don’t worry, little one. This is merely an introduction, nothing more.” But her eyes were sad too, so I knew she was lying.

  The door to the room opened and Zig walked in with two other men. Just by looking at them, I could tell they were his father and grandfather. Both men had the same silver eyes and the same sense of menace that always clung to Zig, only amplified. They were terrifying.

  Killers.

  The word came to me from nowhere, but I immediately recognized its truth. The whole bodyguard story was a lie: Zig and his family weren’t protectors.

  They were murderers.

  “Are they ready?” Jonathan’s father asked Zig’s father.

  “Yes. Are you?”

  “Bring them in.”

  I was thinking what a strange, dynastic little gathering this was as the three Zigs marched to the other side of the huge library. Zig’s father pushed against a shelf of books, and it swung open like a secret door in a cheesy spy movie. At any other time, I might’ve found this amusing, but it didn’t seem so then. It didn’t seem funny at all.

  We waited in complete silence. I was so nervous I thought I might throw up. It took a long time for them to return, and when they finally appeared, I actually rubbed my eyes.

  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

  Each
of the three men was leading two women by chains fastened to iron collars around their necks. The women had thick, iron manacles around their wrists and their legs were encased by iron shackles, like prisoners in Victorian England. They could only move by taking the smallest of steps, and they did this reluctantly. Every now and then one of the men would poke at them with a small black instrument, which made a low buzzing sound, and afterward the women’s bodies would flail wildly for a second or two.

  The moment I realized they were using cattle prodders, I cried out and jumped up from my chair.

  “Sit down and be quiet.”

  The bloodmagic in Jack Pendragon’s voice forced me to obey. I immediately sat down, staring in horrified silence as the women crossed the length of the room towards us. It was the most disturbing thing I’d seen in my life, and by then I’d seen some pretty awful things. Nobody else said anything during that long, terrible walk, but I noticed that Jonathan flinched every time they used the cattle prod on the woman in the photograph. In a perverse way I was almost grateful for his reaction, in spite of what I realized it must mean.

  It was the only sign that I wasn’t going crazy.

  What made the whole thing even more absurd was that the women in chains were all elegantly dressed in silks and satins. Their hair was beautifully done, their make-up was perfect, their nails manicured. This was no S&M dungeon-y procession: all six women looked like rich society ladies about to have tea with the mayor. The oldest seemed to be about seventy, the youngest about twenty. They were all extraordinary beautiful but their faces were completely expressionless, and they all had the same dead, doll-like eyes. Even from across the room, I could sense that none of them were fully present.

  When that long, shuffling walk was finally over, the three Zigs forced them to sit down at the table with us. They took their seats like puppets, after the cattle prod was used a few more times. The men never let go of the chains around their necks.

  It was only when everyone was seated that Jack Pendragon finally spoke. “Jess. I would like you to meet the rest of the Pendragon family.”

  I opened my mouth but no sound came out. I didn’t know if this was because I was still Enthralled or because I was too shocked to speak.