was afraid to let go. “It’s okay,” I told her, smiling as I met her gaze. “I’ll deal with the complications as they come, but right now, I’ll settle for still being here.”
She let out a breath that was half laugh, half growl, and leaned forward, pressing her forehead to my cheek. “Dammit, Garret,” she breathed in my ear. “I thought I’d lost you. Don’t do that again.”
“I’ll try not to,” I whispered back. Her skin was cool against mine, and I slid my fingers up her arms. “But will you still feel the same if I sprout wings and a tail?”
I felt her silent laughter. “Actually, that would be pretty awesome,” she admitted. “Though you’d never be able to wear shorts in a public place again, so there’d be some kinks to work out.”
I wanted to drag her closer, to pull her against me and listen to our hearts beat together. But my eyelids were suddenly heavy, and sleep was clawing at me, even as I struggled to stay awake. “What happened with the Order?” I asked, determined to get some sort of answer before I succumbed to exhaustion.
“We don’t know,” Ember said, drawing back. “After the duel, they took the Patriarch’s body and left. We came straight here from Salt Lake City and haven’t been up top since.”
I nodded. That was smart. The Patriarch was dead. The revered leader of the Order of St. George had been slain by the enemy. Even if there was no immediate reprisal, staying off the Order’s radar right now was a good idea. Still, the lack of information was worrisome. What was happening, in both St. George and Talon? We had thrown a huge wrench into the works of both organizations, and something had to come of it. Sooner or later, they were going to respond. We had to be ready when they did.
But not right now. At least, not for me. Staying conscious was becoming increasingly difficult, even though I had about a dozen more questions I wanted to ask. And something else hovered at the back of my mind, a feeling that I was forgetting something important. Something about the Order...and me. Ember must have noticed, for her cool fingers brushed my forehead again, and her lips briefly touched my temple.
“Get some sleep, soldier boy,” she whispered, the relief in her voice washing over me like a wave. “You’re safe here. I’ll see you again when you wake up.”
Lulled by that promise, I obeyed.
I watched Garret fall asleep, relaxing into the pillows, his breaths even and slow. It was a sound, peaceful sleep this time—no jerking, mumbling or fluttering eyelids. No thrashing around in nightmare. Hopefully, the fever had broken and he was on his way to recovery, though his skin remained disturbingly hot. Hotter than any human’s should have been.
But he was finally awake, and lucid, and that itself was a massive relief. Watching while he’d jerked and muttered nonsense in his sleep had been horrible. One night he’d thrashed about so violently we’d considered tying him down. I knew it was the dragon blood working its way through his system, causing fever and sickness as his body tried to adapt to or reject the infusion. I knew that without it Garret would most certainly be dead, and that Riley had saved his life with his quick thinking. But, watching him moan and thrash trying to ward away phantom enemies, hearing what was almost a snarl erupt from his throat one night, I couldn’t help but wonder what he would be like when he finally came out of it. If he came out of it at all.
Thankfully, he had. And it didn’t appear to have changed him. At least, not on the outside. What was happening inside him was anyone’s guess; as far as any of us knew, no human had ever received a transfusion of dragon blood, so there was nothing to compare it to. I doubted Garret would sprout wings and a tail, as cool and disturbing as that might be, but I also doubted any human could get injected with the blood of a dragon and not experience side effects.
Right now, watching him sleeping peacefully for the first time in over a week was all that seemed important. He was alive, not delirious, and now I could rejoin the rest of the world. Riley, I knew, would be relieved. I’d barely seen him and Wes since our arrival, and the only times I’d left this room were the instances when I’d fallen asleep at Garret’s side and Riley had carried me to my own bed. I knew he’d want to hear that Garret was awake, if for no other reason than I would stop worrying about him.
With one final look at the unconscious soldier, I tiptoed out of the room and slipped into the hallway beyond.
I nearly scraped my skull on the low, curved ceiling—again—and ducked my head with a stifled growl. The corridor was actually an enormous corrugated steel tube with rooms branching from it. A steel ladder at the far end of the tube led up to a tiny concrete hatch in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming. As fallout shelters went, it was pretty typical. Riley said he’d “stumbled onto it” many years ago and had modified it into an emergency fallback center. It was dark, it was claustrophobic, but it was, according to Riley and Wes, the most secure place we could hope for, a refuge where we could wait out the craziness up top and know that St. George wouldn’t come for us all in the night.
I didn’t know how much I liked the idea of waiting things out. Now that I knew Garret would be all right, sitting here doing nothing, just hoping Talon and the Order would forget about us, was sounding less like a plan and more like a stall tactic. Neither was going to forget about us. And we had worked so hard to strike a decisive blow against both organizations; breaking up the alliance between Talon and the Patriarch was a huge victory, even if it had almost cost one of us his life. To pull back and hide seemed the opposite of what we should do right now, but good luck convincing Riley of that.
The room beside Garret’s, where Riley and Wes shared a bunk, was empty. So I headed to the one other place they would be, the “command room” at the other end of the tube.
Like everything in this underground facility, the command room had low ceilings, concrete walls and just enough room to move around. A square table sat in the middle of the floor, with maps and files and other documents scattered over it, and a desk with an old computer was shoved into the corner with a couple shelves. Amazingly, Wes had been able to get power running to this place. The opposite corner held a very old, yet working, television, and it was on at the moment, an overly cheerful weather reporter announcing that we were in for a soggy weekend.
As I walked into the room, I blinked in shock. Wes, unsurprisingly, sat at the computer, both his laptop and the other screen open and active. Riley stood at one end of the table with both hands on the surface, gazing down at the map spread out beneath him. He was dressed in black—black jeans, boots and shirt—and his dark hair was unkempt. I felt a stirring of heat inside me, my dragon coming to life as she always did when he was around.
But it was the third person in the room that caught my attention. She stood on the other side of the table, arms crossed, straight black hair falling to the center of her back.
“Jade?”
The slight Chinese woman, in reality a forty-foot-long Adult Eastern dragon, turned and gave me a faint smile as I stepped into the room. “Hello, Ember,” she greeted me. “It’s good to see you again. From what Riley has told me, I was expecting not to catch a glimpse of you for days.”
“What are you doing here?”
One slender eyebrow arched. “I said I would return, did I not? When I made certain the monks were safe and had found a new temple, I promised to come back. And there is still a war to be fought.” She lifted her hands slightly. “So, here I am. Though it seems I have come at a, if not bad, rather uncertain
