“I…I don’t know, Riley.”
“All right.” Abruptly, Riley stood, rising from the couch with easy grace, holding a hand to me. “If I can’t convince you, then maybe you should hear it from someone else. Get a different perspective on Talon, and what they’re really about. Come on.”
I put my hand in his, letting him pull me to my feet. My dragon buzzed at his touch, but I ignored it. “Where are we going?”
“Downstairs. I have some people I want you to meet.”
Garret
I rode in the back of the truck, pressed between two soldiers, feeling every bump and jolt through the metal bench welded to the sides.
This vehicle was not designed for human transport, and the interior was hot and uncomfortable, though not the worst I’d endured.
Around and across from me, fellow soldiers, my brothers-in-arms, waited with the same quiet anticipation. Some joked and laughed in low murmurs, some dozed with their arms crossed and their heads resting on their chest, some, like me, just waited, lost in their own thoughts.
Beside me, a fellow soldier nudged my arm. He was a few years my senior, with cropped black hair and a nose that had been broken repeatedly. I recognized him as Thomas Christopher, one of the few surviving soldiers of Alpha, the squad that was decimated in the South American raid a couple months back. “Hey, Sebastian, you’ve been here over a month, right?” he murmured, smiling like a wolf as he leaned in. “Where’s the action at? What do you do around here for fun?”
“I wasn’t here on vacation,” I replied simply.
“Oh, that’s right.” Christopher leaned back, smirking at me but speaking for the rest of the group. “Our Sebastian is the prodigy, the perfect soldier. Nothing ever enters his faultless little head but the mission. Give him a hooker and he’d use her for target practice.”
“Shut up, Christopher,” Tristan said, sitting across from me with his rifle against his shoulder. “At least he’d have a chance with a woman. She’d take one look at your ugly mug and wonder why there was a bulldog’s ass sewed to it.”
The other soldiers hooted and ribbed Christopher, who flushed angrily but laughed along with them. More taunts and good-natured insults were thrown back and forth, with Tristan never missing a beat, but I didn’t join in. Normally at this time I would be silencing my thoughts, mentally preparing myself for the battle ahead. Turn off your mind, turn off your emotions, become a blank vessel that acts solely on instinct with no fear to slow you down. That’s what I’d been taught. What I trained myself to do.
Today, that calm, empty silence eluded me. I was filled with a sense of foreboding, a nagging uncertainty that haunted my thoughts the closer we drew to our objective. I’d always been so certain of the Order; what we did, what we protected. Dragons were the enemy and we were meant to kill them. That’s what I’d believed, unwaveringly, my whole life.
Until her.
She might not be one of them. We hadn’t proven anything. There’d been suspicious happenstance; there’d been strong implications, but there’d been no real proof. Ember might not be a dragon. She could be a normal girl with a normal family, who loved surfing and arcade games and hanging out with her friends. She could be a perfectly ordinary human.
But, if she wasn’t. If Ember was our target, the sleeper we’d been sent to kill, then the Order hadn’t told me everything. They never told me that dragons could be kind, that they could be daring, and funny, and beautiful. That they loved surfing and arcade games and hanging out with their friends. None of that had been counterfeit.
The Order taught that dragons could only imitate emotions, that they had no real concept of humanity. If Ember was the sleeper, then she had proven them wrong at every turn.
What else had we been wrong about?
“Garret.”
I flicked my gaze to Tristan, who regarded me through the press of bodies and laughing soldiers, his dark eyes appraising. “You okay?
You’ve been even broodier than normal lately.” His tone was light, but his expression was hard and suspicious. “Don’t tell me the perfect soldier has a sudden case of nerves.”
Thankfully, before I could answer, the truck pulled to a stop and the driver craned his neck to look back at us through a small mesh window. “We’re two hundred yards out,” he told Tristan, who nodded and rose to his feet, clutching his rifle.
“That’s my cue.” Glancing at me, he offered a devil-may-care grin.
“Good luck in there. See you on the flip side, partner.”
I nodded. Maneuvering through soldiers, he edged to the back of the truck, opened the doors, and hopped out. I knew he would quickly find himself a good vantage point and be watching the house through the scope of his rifle when the raid began. If any of our targets slipped past us and tried to run, they wouldn’t get past the driveway. Not with Tristan guarding the front.
The truck rumbled and began to move again, and I took a deep breath, trying to calm my mind. Two hundred yards out. Two hundred yards from the enemy nest. I couldn’t have any doubts, not at this stage in the mission. Uncertainties would get me and my brothers killed. I was a soldier of St. George; when the time came and we faced our enemies again, I would do what I’d been trained to do, what I knew I must.
Kill every dragon in sight.
Riley
Ember followed me down the stairs, where the crack of billiard balls told me exactly how the two hatchlings were getting ready to leave, which was not at all.
“I’m so glad you two are taking this threat seriously,” I stated as I swept into the game room. At the head of the table, Remy jerked up with a guilty expression, raking sandy hair out of his eyes. Nettle quickly put her pool stick on the table, trying to look innocent and failing. I shook my head.
“I thought Wes told you we were leaving tonight. You’re supposed to be getting ready to go. Call me crazy, but I don’t think this qualifies.”
“We are ready!” Nettle protested. Her dreadlocks bounced as she did, vehemently stating her case. “We came here with nothing, remember? We don’t have anything to pack. We are ready to go.”
“Really?” I crossed my arms. “And what about the whole ‘leaving the house as we found it’ bit? Are the rooms clean, or do they look like a hurricane went through?” They both dropped their gaze, and I nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. You’re both going to take care of that, but right now, I want you to meet someone.”