“Not bad. But dangerous? Yes, I can say it would be that at least. To be fair, everything we do outside of Ish’s home is dangerous. And Lila obviously knows what she’s doing and she knows this place far better than either you or I,” I pointed out. “So, we trust her and keep going.”
“You’re trusting a dragon you’ve known for hours. Hours. That’s freaking ridiculous. Stupid, reckless . . . just . . . I can’t even begin to understand how you can’t see just how bad of an idea this is.”
My jaw ticked because what he was saying was true and I knew it. But he was a human and that meant there were things he just didn’t grasp in his little pea brain. I whipped around to face him. “You don’t understand this world, human. Saving someone’s life here is no small thing. You don’t turn on them, no matter what, until at the very least that debt is repaid. No matter if it costs you your life or the life of someone you love, if it costs you your marriage, or your brother’s respect, your values or anything else you might hold dear. You do not turn on them. You just don’t. You repay the debt, and that’s all there is to that, Maks.”
His eyes widened. I pulled back, and yanked my hood over my face. I had not meant to say that much to him, but once the words started they didn’t want to stop.
He was silent after that which was a blessing in and of itself. Minutes later, we crossed the tree line and walked into Dragon’s Ground. Yes, we were farther north, but we were still at least fifty miles from the boundary line we needed to cross before we would be on the Witch’s Reign. And that’s when things would get interesting. That’s when we needed to be especially careful.
As if facing the dragons we’d seen already wasn’t interesting enough.
I sighed, feeling the weight of this journey on my shoulders like a living creature, one that wanted to strangle me if I let it have its way.
We had a long way to go, and a long way back, and a time crunch on top of all that, and a lot of lives at stake. I sighed again as I let Balder pick his path through the trees, but it wasn’t long before we were forced to stop.
In front of us was a high fence made of . . . spears, it looked like, if I was seeing things right. They were old and rusted, shattered in places, and pieced back together in others as if they’d been there a very long time. I frowned and slid off Balder’s back. Lila lighted on the top of one of the spears, balancing carefully on her two clawed back feet. “Here, we can camp in here, against that building back there I think is best.”
I looked past her at the stones in the ground, the markings on them, the stone building she pointed at with the tip of one wing. “Lila, is this a . . . graveyard?”
“Yeah, but not for dragons; for the supes that used to live in this forest before the dragons. It’s way older than the wall and hasn’t been used in hundreds of years.” She flicked her wings behind her and hopped off the spear and to the ground. She trotted forward on her four limbs like a tiny dragon horse. “Come on, there’s a shelter not far from here, that building, like I said, I think is best.”
I looked at Maks who just shook his head. “It’s a good thing I . . . care for . . . her. I wouldn’t do this for anyone else.”
“You mean Darcy?” I tipped my head to one side. It was almost like he’d forgotten her name.
“Of course, I mean Darcy,” he snapped, his eyes unable to meet mine.
Funny, but his words seemed stilted, like he knew he should say something about her. Like he hadn’t really been thinking about her at all.
Easy on the suspicious aloysius, Zam, I told myself.
“Me either. Hanging out in graveyards isn’t my idea of a nice night out,” I muttered and stepped Balder through the opening that led into the graveyard. Fingers crossed it was a dead graveyard. Like really, really dead.
A chill flickered over me as I crossed an invisible barrier that had nothing to do with the cold weather around us. Like I’d inadvertently set off an unseen alarm for the spirits of the dead. The hair on my arms rose the farther in we went. Safe from dragons, but what else was here that wasn’t so safe for us?
Ghouls were known to haunt graveyards, spirits of the dead, of course, and then there were worse creatures. Vamps for one, and even werewolves were known to stick close to the dead. I grimaced and reminded myself that, at least, a vamp would go for Maks first. The wolf would come for me, smelling what I was. Cats versus dogs and all that.
My lips twitched and Maks must have caught the edge of my smile because he frowned at me which made the twitch bigger. Of course, the smile was more nerves than anything else. Within seconds, I could feel my sixth sense dropping into overdrive, picking up on every noise, every smell, every creak that was anything but natural. The dead were restless, and they knew I could sense them.
Double damn.
Lila ducked behind a couple of bigger tombstones and then stopped in front of the old blocky house she’d pointed at from the fence. Twelve feet in height and about the same distance across, the carved stones were huge and would have been a monumental task to move. The front of it was peaked and drawn forward a solid six feet into an overhang that was covered in tiny figures. The more I looked, the more the figures looked as though they were writhing in pain, skeletal, and in some state of decomposition across the board.
Awesome.
“A crypt? Are you serious?” Maks snorted. “You can’t be serious. Tell me you’re joking, little dragon. That this is just a very bad sense of humor.”
“The dragons don’t like it here. I never knew why. They won’t even talk about it. Certainly, not to anyone who isn’t an elder, so it’s really the best place. Unless you want to make camp somewhere they could easily find us?” Lila sat on her haunches like a well-trained dog, her wing tips trembling. The cold must be getting to her. We needed a fire for all of us.
He glared at her. “This is a bad, bad idea. If dragons don’t like this place, then we are fucking stupid to be here,” Maks muttered even as he dismounted and loosened Batman’s cinch, giving the horse a scratch on his neck and slipping him another mint.
I wanted to disagree with him, but the sensation of being watched, of not being welcome on this land, grew inside me with each passing second. I didn’t dismount.
Balder stomped his front foot and there was a resounding crack. I looked over his shoulder to the ground at his feet. He’d snapped a bone that lay on the ground, as if it had been placed there. Not a speck of dirt marred the creamy white bone. My lips curled into a silent snarl and my body tensed. I forced myself to breathe through the sensation. “Maks, do you feel anything . . . out of the ordinary?”
“Cold and hungry and fucking irritated that no one listens to me because I’m just a human. You wouldn’t treat me like this if I were a supe. I’ve had no say in all of this, and my life is on the line too,” he grumbled. I ignored him and his complaint when another time his grumbling would have made me laugh.
“Lila, you feel anything?” I looked at the little dragon.
She shook her head. “I hate to agree with him but cold and hungry are about all I’ve got going on.” Except that her wings still shook even though the wind had subsided and, while I wanted to believe it was just the cold, I wasn’t so sure. Her jeweled eyes locked with mine and she shook her head ever so slightly. She did feel something but didn’t want Maks to know. And if I was right, she was as frozen in place as me. Why was she hiding it from Maks? An ego thing? Possibly, dragons didn’t like to be known as weak, and that would be a struggle for one so small as Lila who was already fighting an uphill battle. Or maybe like me, she knew he’d make good cannon fodder if the situation demanded it.
If the spirits turned out to be more than just restless.
The two horses shifted their feet in tandem. I forced myself off Balder’s back and slid to the ground, still holding onto him in case I needed to leap back into the saddle. As soon as my feet touched the earth, the sensation of being watched intensified. As if someone stood right behind me, breathing down the side of my neck, which was impossible, seeing as I still had my hood up. Sweat broke out along my hairline and trickled down my back. I stood there and did my best to breathe through it, knowing it for what it was.