Talon. Julie Kagawa
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seemed unnaturally interested in our past. St. George was ruthless and cunning and unmerciful, the enemy of all our kind. Every dragon knew that.
“No. That is incorrect.”
I blinked in shock. The woman across from me leaned forward, her eyes intense. “We nearly went extinct,” she said slowly, “because we couldn’t trust one another. We were more concerned about our possessions and defending our territories than our survival as a race. And so, the humans hunted us down, one by one, and nearly destroyed us. Only near the end, when our numbers had dwindled to almost nothing, did one dragon—the Elder Wyrm—gather us all together and force us to cooperate. We learned to become human, to hide in plain sight, to disappear into the throngs of humanity. But most important, we learned that we must work together for our survival. A single dragon, powerful as he or she may be, cannot stand against this human-infested world. If we are to thrive, if we are to have any hope for a future, we must all accept our place in the organization. Alone, we fall. As one, we rise.” Scary Talon Lady narrowed her eyes, her acidic gaze cutting right through me. “Everything we do, everything I teach you, will be for the good of us all. Can you remember that, hatchling?”
I nodded.
“Good.” My trainer sat back once more, her lips curling in a small, evil smile. “Because it’s not going to get any easier from here.”
* * *
She was right. From that day forth, starting at 6:00 a.m. every morning, I’d wake up to the sound of my alarm beeping in my ear. I’d change, stagger downstairs to grab a bagel or a doughnut, and then Dante and I would meet our drivers at the end of the secret tunnel and separate. Once I reached the office building, I’d walk into that same room, and Scary Talon Lady—she never told me her name, ever—would be waiting behind her large wooden desk.
“Report,” she would bark at me, every morning. And I’d have to go over what I’d done the previous day. Who I’d met. Where we’d gone. What we’d done. She’d ask me specific questions about my friends, demanding I explain why they’d said a particular thing, or reacted a particular way. I hated it, but that wasn’t the worst part of the morning.
No, the worst part was after the “debriefing.” She’d order me to the storage room of the building, which was huge and vast and mostly empty, with hard cement floors and iron beams crisscrossing the ceiling. And then the real fun would begin.
“Break down these boxes,” she would snap, pointing to a huge pile of crates, “and stack them in the opposite corner.”
“Drag these pallets to the other end of the room. And when you are done, bring them back. Be quick about it.”
“Carry these buckets of water around the building ten times. When you are finished, go ten times the other way.”
“Stack these tires into pillars of eight, one in every corner of the room, as fast as you can. No, you cannot roll them, you must carry them.”
Every day. For two hours straight. No questions. No talking back or complaining. Just stupid, monotonous, pointless tasks. All the while, Scary Talon Lady would watch my progress, offering no explanation, never saying anything except to snap at me to move faster, to work harder. Nothing I did was good enough, no matter how hard I worked or how quickly I completed the task. I was always too slow, too weak, too lacking in everything, despite her absolute, number-one rule: no Shifting into my true form while I did any of it.
This morning, I’d finally snapped.
“Why?” I snarled, my voice echoing into the vastness of the room, breaking two of her rules at once. No talking back, and no questions. I didn’t care anymore. The brick I’d dropped had landed on my foot, sparking a curse and a flare of temper. And Scary Talon Lady, always there, always watching, had barked some kind of pithy insult before telling me to keep moving, faster this time. I was sore, my arms were burning, sweat was running into my eyes and now my toe was throbbing. I’d had enough.
“This is pointless!” I exclaimed, shouting across the room. “You’re always telling me to go faster, to be stronger, but I’m not allowed to change?” I gestured wildly to the mountains of bricks on both sides of the room, imagining how easy this would be if I could fly. “I could get this done ten times as fast in my real form. Why can’t I do this as me?”
“Because that is not the point of the exercise,” was the cool, infuriating reply. “And you just earned yourself another hour of carting bricks back and forth, only now I want you to count them. I will be keeping track, as well, and if you lose count, you will start all over again from the top. Is that understood?”
I seethed, wishing I could Shift into my real form and blast through one of the skylights in the ceiling. Leave my sadistic trainer and her pointless exercises behind for good. Of course, I could never get away with something so crazy, especially in broad daylight. If even one human saw me, there would be chaos and panic and bedlam and doom. Even if no one believed what they’d seen, Talon would have to step in and try to mitigate the damage, which was generally expensive and something they didn’t care to do. The Order of St. George might show up, as they always seemed to appear when the unexplainable occurred, and then someone would have to be called in to deal with that mess. Bottom line, I’d be in a world of trouble.
Setting my jaw, I bent down and grabbed the brick, then hefted it to my shoulder as I’d been ordered. One more hour. One more hour of this torture, and then the day was mine.
“I don’t hear you counting,” Scary Talon Lady sang from across the room. I gritted my teeth, swallowing the flames that wanted to burst free, and snarled back.
“One!”
* * *
I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. When the torture finally ended and I came out of the secret tunnel, I raced to my room, grabbed my board and instantly headed down to the water. I needed something to clear my head, and riding the waves was the perfect distraction.
Only, the ocean was being obnoxious today, too. It was a conspiracy.
The surfboard bobbed gently on the water as I continued to stare at the sky. A lone cloud, a tiny cotton ball far overhead, hung in the endless blue, far, far away. Closing one eye, I raised my hand and imagined cupping my claws around it as I soared by on the wind. I remembered the sun warming my back and wings, the rush that filled me when I dove and swooped and soared on the currents. Surfing was the closest I’d come to that thrill, and it was a pale comparison. I wanted to fly.
I bet that rogue dragon can go flying whenever he wants.
I folded my hands on my stomach, thinking of him. It had been nearly a month since that brief glance in the parking lot, and since then, I’d seen neither hide nor hair of the rogue dragon or his motorcycle. Not that I hadn’t looked for him. I’d kept my eyes open, scanning the beach crowds, the parking lots, even the dark corners of the Crescent Beach mall. Nothing. Dante never spoke about the incident, either, becoming evasive and busy when I asked about it. He wouldn’t tell me what he’d done, or if he’d even done anything, and it annoyed me that he was being so secretive. If it wasn’t for Lexi’s confirmation that G double B had, in fact, existed, I might have thought the whole incident some kind of lucid dream.
I frowned. Dante was being cagey about a lot of things, lately. Not only with the rogue dragon, but he didn’t like talking about his own training sessions, either. I’d asked him, several times, what he and his trainer did all morning, and his answers were pretty vague. Politics and Human Sciences, learning the different governments and names of world leaders and such. I suspected he was keeping his answers deliberately boring so I would lose interest and not want to discuss it. I didn’t know why; I’d told him everything Scary Talon Lady made me do, and he was appropriately sympathetic, but he rarely spoke of his own sessions.
Something moved past me in the water, and I sat up, my nerves prickling for a different reason. The sea was calm, nothing had changed, but I could have sworn I’d felt movement off to the right....
A dark, triangular fin broke the surface