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  Firebrand?

  That same voice, low and husky, drifted from one of the aisles. Ember, it said again, its tone laced with worry. You’ve been sitting here for eight hours. Go to sleep. Let me or Wes take watch—he’s not going anywhere.

  No, said the voice that made my heart leap in my chest. I want to be here. When he wakes up, I should be here. He was almost lucid a little while ago. I think... I think he was calling for me.

  I started toward the voice, ducking a burning beam, feeling the heat against my back and neck as I hurried forward. The voices continued, but they were fainter now, swallowed by the roar of the inferno. Overhead, a skylight exploded into shards of razor glass and rained down, pinging off the cement. Impatient, I shielded my face with a hand and jogged forward.

  The Patriarch emerged from the darkness of the aisle, dressed in white and red, a sword hanging loosely at his side. Flames engulfed him, burning his uniform, clawing at his beard and leaping from his hair. His face was blackened, the skin cracked and oozing, but his blue eyes glowed in the haze and smoke, and he pointed a fire-wreathed hand in my direction.

  “Traitor,” he whispered. “Dragonlover. Like your parents before you. You are damned, Sebastian. Your soul has been tainted beyond all redemption, and you must be put down like the demon you are.”

  He took a step toward me. I raised my gun and fired point-blank at his center, and the Patriarch exploded into a cloud of swirling ashes and scattered into the smoke. But his voice continued to echo through the warehouse.

  You cannot escape your destiny. Evil is in your blood, Sebastian. You will fall, and you will burn in the flames of your own making, as your parents did before you.

  Lowering my arm, I strode through the ash cloud into the blackness beyond.

  * * *

  Sunlight blinded me. Wincing, I raised my arm, trying to see past the sudden glare. The scent of salt and sand filled my nostrils, and I heard the sound of waves, crying gulls and distant laughter. Blinking rapidly, I lowered my arm to find myself on the edge of a beach, a strip of white sand stretching out to either side and the brilliant, sparkling ocean before me.

  Recognition sparked. This place felt familiar, though I couldn’t remember why. Hadn’t I been here before? If I had, why did the sight of the ocean fill me with both excitement and dread?

  “Garret,” Tristan said at my back. His voice was impatient, and I turned to face the other soldier. He wore shorts, a tank top and a slight frown as he gazed down at me. “You okay?” my partner asked. “You went all glassy-eyed for few seconds. Did you hear what I just said?”

  “No,” I muttered as memory came back in a rush, reminding me why we were here. Find a dragon, kill a dragon. Like we had done all those times before. So, why did this seem so different? I felt like I was missing something important. “Sorry,” I told Tristan, rubbing my eyes. “What was that again?”

  He sighed. “I was saying the dragon is hiding right over there, and that maybe you should go talk to it before it disappears.”

  He pointed. I turned, squinting against the light and the glimmer coming off the ocean. Farther down the sand, a group of teenagers clustered by the water’s edge, laughing and occasionally splashing each other. Between the sunlight and the blinding glare, I couldn’t see their features, just moving silhouettes against the water, sand and sky.

  “I don’t see a dragon,” I murmured, walking forward a few steps.

  “Really?” Tristan followed, his footsteps shushing quietly through the sand. “It’s standing right there, plain as day. Maybe if you weren’t so blinded by love, you’d see it for what it really is. And then, I wouldn’t have to kill you.”

  I turned. Tristan stood behind me, a gun held level with my chest. His eyes were hard as they met mine and he pulled the trigger.

  There was no sound. The flash of the gun filled my vision, and I felt myself falling.

  * * *

  I opened my eyes.

  The sky overhead was gray and dim. There were no clouds, no glimmers of blue or sunlight through the haze. Just a flat gray sky that seemed much closer than it should be. I blinked a few times, and it resolved itself into a concrete ceiling with cracks running across the surface. I lay on my back in a small, empty room, a sheet pulled up to my chest and my hands draped over my stomach. My body felt numb and heavy, and my head felt like it was full of cotton, which made it very hard to think. Where was I? How did I get here? The last thing I remembered...

  My mind stirred sluggishly, trying to sift through what was real and what was nightmare. What had happened to me? Memories rose up, familiar faces and voices, but it was difficult to separate reality from hallucination. Had I been injured? Or had I been chasing something?

  Slowly, I turned my head, trying to take in my surroundings, and my pulse stuttered.

  A girl slumped next to my bed, seated in a metal chair pulled close to the mattress. Her arms were folded against the sheets with her head cradled atop them, bright red hair mussed and sticking out at odd angles. Her eyes were closed, and her slim bare shoulders rose and fell with the rhythm of her breathing.

  Ember. I drew in a breath, feeling the strangeness of the dreamworld dissolve as reality took its place. Suddenly, all those things—where I was, what had happened to me, how much time had passed—didn’t seem important anymore. Just that she was here.

  I stretched out my hand, not trusting my voice, and touched the back of her arm.

  She jerked away and looked up, green eyes wide and startled. For half a heartbeat, she stared at me in confusion as her mind caught up to the present. I saw my reflection in her gaze and wanted to say something, but my voice hadn’t returned quite yet.

  “Garret,” she breathed, her voice barely above a whisper. And then she threw herself forward, wrapping her arms around my neck in an almost painful embrace. I slid my arms around her, feeling her heartbeat against mine, her warm cheek pressed against my throat and jaw. I closed my eyes and held her, trembling, in my arms.

  “Hey you,” I whispered. My voice came out raspy and weak, and I swallowed some of the scratchy dryness in my throat. I became aware that I was very hot, my skin burning with fever. I could practically feel the heat radiating off me, and was thankful that only a thin sheet covered my body. “What happened?” I husked out as Ember pulled back, regarding me with shining green eyes. “Where are we?”

  She gave me a solemn look. “We’re in one of Riley’s safe houses, an old bomb shelter he renovated from the Cold War era. We are literally underground right now. Hang on.” She turned, sliding off the mattress, and reached toward a small end table beside the bed. A bowl and a wet cloth sat on one corner, a glass and a pitcher on the other. She poured the last of the pitcher’s contents into the cup and turned back, cocking her head. “Can you sit up?”

  Carefully, I struggled to a sitting position, feeling weak and unstable as I leaned forward, and Ember adjusted the pillows at my back. When we were done, she handed me the cup, and I forced myself to drink slowly, though the burning in my throat and deep in my chest made me want to down it in two gulps.

  Putting the empty glass on the bedside table, I looked at Ember again. She ran her fingers over my forehead, brushing back my hair. Her fingers were cool and soft and left a soothing trail over my heated skin. “What do you remember?”

  “I... I don’t know.” Everything was still fuzzy, and now the heat in my veins had become even more pronounced. I pressed a palm to my face, trying to clear my thoughts and to ease the pressure behind my eyes. “I was...fighting the Patriarch, I think,” I said. “He challenged me to a duel, and I agreed to fight him. That’s all I can remember.”

  Ember nodded. “You won,” she said quietly. “You beat the Patriarch, but when the fight was over, he shot you. In the back.” A feral gleam entered her eyes, and I wondered if the Patriarch was still alive. If he h
ad survived the vengeance of an enraged red dragon. “You nearly died,” Ember went on, the murderous look fading to one of anguish. “You were bleeding out, and the only way to save your life was to perform a blood transfusion right there. There was no time to take you to a hospital. And no one else had the right blood type. So... Riley became the donor.” She paused. “Riley saved your life, Garret.”

  For a few seconds, I didn’t understand the significance, why she looked so distraught. Was she afraid that I would resent the fact that a former enemy had saved my life? Given our past, I was shocked that the rogue dragon had offered his own blood to save a soldier of St. George. Did Riley himself wish that he’d let me die? I didn’t think he was that vindictive, but I was a rival. No longer an enemy, but a challenger in the worst way—competition for the girl beside me. If I was out of the picture, Riley would have Ember all to himself.

  Then it hit me. The heat in my veins, the feeling of molten fire crawling beneath my skin. I let out a long breath.

  “I have...dragon blood in me.”

  Ember winced. “It’s been causing some complications,” she said in a near whisper. “Some of it has been good—your wounds have been healing at a much faster rate than normal. But you’ve been delirious for the past week and a half. Until today, we didn’t know if you would pull out of it.” At my incredulous look, she dropped her gaze. “Wes thinks it’s your body trying to compensate for the infusion of new blood, and that it should eventually adjust, but he’s not certain. This has never been done before. We don’t know...what the effects will be. Long term or otherwise.”

  Dazed, I sank back against the pillow. Riley had saved my life, and he’d done it by injecting me with dragon blood. Was that why my heart was pumping like I’d run a marathon, even lying here on my back? My mind, already wandering and confused, began spinning in strange directions. What would this infusion do to me, inside and out? Was I in danger of dying, as the dragon blood cooked my organs from the inside? Or could it do even more outlandish things? Dragons were magical creatures; a tiny bit of ancient, supernatural power flowed through their veins. Even the Order of St. George acknowledged this. What would that do to the human body? Would I come out of this completely normal?

  For a moment, I had bizarre, delirious thoughts of waking up covered in scales, or getting out of bed to find a tail coiling behind me, before I shoved them aside. That wasn’t possible, I told myself, struggling to hold on to logic as it twisted and squirmed away from me. Blood couldn’t do that to a person; I was in no danger of morphing into some sort of strange half dragon. The most it could do was kill me, if my body rejected the new blood and shut down organs, one by one.

  Ember, I realized, was watching me carefully, waiting for my reaction. I reached for the hand lying on the mattress, and she curled her fingers around mine and held on tight, like she 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.

  EMBER

  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 ou
t. 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.