Chapter 23: Kiara

Chapter 23: Kiara

I thought we’d be going straight to the city of Gunnison from Everett’s place, but instead, Sebastian took me into Grandbay, to the hotel where the surviving operatives in his team were staying. There was still police tape strung up in front of the hotel room that David and his dragons burst into a few weeks ago, the night they kidnapped my mother and killed Aislin’s father. The stench of blood and burning oil permeated the walls even though the hotel staff vigorously tried to wash it away.

In the hotel room, I hovered uncomfortably while Sebastian and his colleagues packed up their things. “You can take a shower while you wait,” he suggested. “In fact, I recommend you do.”

“Why do I stink?” I drawled.

Sebastian hesitated, implying to me that I did, although my unicorn lineage tended to remove the worst of my body odor. “We have special soap and shampoo that dilutes your scent. It might help you avoid getting tracked.”

I shrugged and did as he suggested, removing my clothes in the bathroom and indulging in a steamy shower. Actually, I couldn’t remember the last time I had a nice hot shower. Usually, I bathed in rivers or lakes outside without soap. Even at Everett’s place, I wasn’t comfortable enough to shower. I closed my eyes and relished the steam coiling around my body, scrubbing shampoo and conditioner through my long, silver hair. After, I wrapped up in a towel in front of the sink, the bathroom fan working tediously to remove the fog on the mirror. As I dried my hair, I noticed brown streaks coming through alongside the silver, my wolf lineage contending to make itself known.

It was dark outside by the time I was clean and dressed again. The operatives had finished packing up, so I followed Sebastian back outside and climbed into the back of one of the SUVs. “Where in Gunnison are we going?”

“We’ll be going to another hotel,” said Sebastian in the passenger seat. “It’s a fairly busy hotel, so your scent should be masked by the large number of people there.”

“Are there shifters? Another wolf pack?”

“We’ve already contacted them to warn them about a shifter we’re hiding there. They won’t bother us.”

Good, I thought. The last thing we needed was another wolf pack sticking their noses into our business. I couldn’t help but wonder how much outside packs knew about what was going on here in these three towns, but clearly, whatever they knew, it wasn’t enough to send them in to help us. Not that I expected strangers to risk their lives coming to our aid.

The caravan of Mythguard vehicles pulled out of Grandbay, hurtling southwest out of the Gunnison National Forest.

I leaned back and got comfortable for the drive, searching within myself for the emotions and sensations that might belong to Colt. We still shared those feelings mirrored through our fated bond. It might have given me more security to have the telepathic connection of being marked—we both would have become stronger, reaching our maximum potential—but it was too much of a leap of faith to do that with Colt right now. I still wanted to know how he felt, so I focused on interpreting the rises and falls of emotion that didn’t belong to me, empathizing with whatever he might have been experiencing. The feeling of displacement among people that rejected him. The small victory of some kind of revelation, I didn’t know what, but there was hope and satisfaction that gave me confidence in Colt.

The other human occupants of the SUV suddenly shouted, the urgency in their voices ripping me out of my reverie. I sat up just in time for the SUV to jostle sideways by a vehicle coming up beside us in oncoming traffic. I bristled with alarm, looking wide-eyed at the Mythguard operatives. “What’s happening?”

“This asshole is trying to run us off the road,” said Sebastian, reaching for a handgun at his side.

“They’re dragons,” said another operative.

I craned my neck to get a glimpse of the occupants of the other vehicle, a black truck smeared with dried mud. “There’s only one of them. We’ll be fine, right?”

Sebastian twisted around to look through the rear windshield. “There’s more coming up behind us.”

“How did they know we were driving out?”

“I don’t know, but they probably had eyes on the hotel. Our caravan makes it kind of obvious.”

“I thought you said the soap would hide my scent.”

“Well, it doesn’t make you invisible.”

The truck swerved against us, scraping metal, wrenching my heart up into my throat. I clutched the back of the seat in front of me, feeling useless as we endured attacks from the truck. If I was on my feet, at least I could run, but there was nothing I could do except just sit here! A flurry of car horns surrounded us on the highway. Sebastian rolled down his window, standing up in his seat and leaning out into the night air. He aimed the handgun, but before he could fire, he retracted into the seat and shouted, “Everyone hold on!” barely a second before I saw an oncoming car veer toward us.

This was a calculated attack from the dragons. They knew what they were doing.

The truck beside us and the oncoming car forced us into the ditch. The SUV was flung off the shoulder and into the wet trench beside the road, its trajectory launching it back up until the front end crunched viciously into a tree. It all happened in the blink of an eye. I barely had time to brace myself for the crash before my body was rocked, my neck jerked, and my head slammed against the window, which cracked the glass and smeared it with my blood. My ears were ringing—I didn’t even register when we had stopped moving, only that when I ebbed back into awareness, the SUV was still and smoking, and everyone else in the vehicle was silent except for light groans and an errant cough.

At least the SUV was still upright. I sat up, dizzily clutching my head and wincing into the night, turning to look at the people beside me. The operative in the seat next to me was still alive and groggily trying to blink himself awake. In front of me, the driver was slumped forward and peppered in glass shards. Sebastian hadn’t made it completely back into the car. His body leaned limply toward the window, his head, shoulder, and arm outside and twisted unnaturally. Immediately, the stench of blood flooded the air. I didn’t want to get a better look at Sebastian—I already knew from the grotesque contortion of his body that the impact with the tree had killed him.

Numbness took over. I sat there for a moment, wondering what to do next. My first instinct was to wait for some outside source to rescue me before remembering what had caused the accident in the first place. The dragons. No doubt they would be approaching the SUV any minute. I had to get out of there. Blinking back to reality, I unbuckled my seatbelt and reached for the door, yanking hard to slide it open. The metal screeched as I forced open the door, then fumbled into the grass, wincing as I hit sharp wedges of glass that had fallen from the windows. Pain sparked through me as I sat up on my knees, looking at the shards embedded in my palms.

Then a pair of feet stepped in front of me. I looked up at a dragon, recognizing the cut across his eyebrow and the fanged tattoo on his arm. It was the guard I had attacked. He sneered down at me but didn’t look pleased to be doing this. In fact, he looked more like this whole operation was an annoyance to him. Like he’d rather be doing something else.

“Please just let me go,” I slurred through my agony.

“I can’t,” he said.

The crash rattled my body. I wanted so badly to just lay there and let them take me, but the last vestige of my strength and willpower urged me to resist. As he grabbed my shoulder and pulled me to my feet, I pushed him away, only to cry out as the glass in my hands cut deeper and poisoned me with my own blood.

The dragon deftly avoided my attack. As others gathered around us, he grabbed my wrists and mercilessly plucked all the glass from my hands, leaving me bleeding profusely. I blearily watched another shifter step up beside us, firing into the SUV. Whoever was still alive after the crash was dead now. They’d make sure there were no survivors to come crawling after us.

“The Inkscales won’t get away with this,” I warned them, my voice hoarse with pain.

They dragged me alongside them, out of the ditch and into the bed of the black truck. The tattooed dragon sat beside me, avoiding my eyes but keeping a firm grip on my wrist. “They don’t care what happens to the Inkscales. In the end, what matters is that dragons are made known to the world. What matters is that we won’t have to hide anymore.”

That would fundamentally change everything in the world. Humans weren’t equipped to handle the realization of dangerous shifters among them. It would cause mayhem. “You can’t…”

“We can.” The dragon met my eyes, expression hard. “Be grateful that you won’t be alive to see it.”

My head and heart both thundered. More than ever before, I felt useless. There was nothing I could do but sit here as they drove me to my fate.