Bethany would have been dragon bait.
And I would probably have been dead.
9
If I had a nickel for every time I almost died, I would have been driving to school in a Ferrari and flying off to Bora-Bora on the weekends. One of these days, I’d cut it too close to dawn or run into a monster that was too strong. With the way I lived, the things I hunted, death was only a matter of time.
One more brush with oblivion shouldn’t have bothered me.
I shouldn’t have been dwelling on the fact that the parasite that had saved my life was killing me now.
But I was.
Our standoff with Puff the Man-Eating, Fire-Breathing Creature of Doom had lasted minutes, but the police—not to mention a Preternatural Control team—had shown up before we could make ourselves scarce, and the resulting inquisition had been dragging on for over an hour. If Bethany and I had been adults, if the kids working at Skate Haven had been adults, then maybe we wouldn’t have had to answer the same questions sixteen times apiece.
But we weren’t adults.
We were teenagers who claimed to have had a run-in with some subspecies of dragon that could disappear into ice like a kelpie into water. And, oh yeah, it breathed fire and ate people, and its scales were the color of ice.
“So let me get this straight,” the policewoman interviewing me said for maybe the fiftieth time. “It was some kind of … ice dragon.”
I may as well have been telling her it belched gumdrops and had a weakness for Saturday morning cartoons. Forget the fact that there was obvious damage to the rink—not to mention the remains of the boy who’d actually placed the 911 call in the first place. It didn’t matter that our stories were consistent both with the damage and with one another’s accounts of what had gone down. Dragons stayed away from cities. They didn’t just hang out at local hot spots. And they didn’t have any kind of affinity for ice.
So obviously, the teenagers were lying. Or on drugs. Or both.
This is why you don’t call the police. Or Preternatural Control. No matter what. Ever.
If I’d doubted the rule—and I was fairly sure I never had—I certainly never would again. My skin itched just talking to the authorities, and it was all I could do to meet my interrogator’s eyes, when what I really wanted to do was to get out of there, stat.
The police department had more than a few open cases with my name on them—figuratively, and I had no desire to make that literal. The chances that anyone would think to connect a witness in a horrific dragon mauling with the vigilante responsible for dozens of area beastie slayings was slim. It wasn’t like my usual MO involved laser light shows, but still—the sooner I got out of there, the better.
“Ice dragon,” I said, repeating the police officer’s incredulous words.
For some reason, my voice sounded very far away: slow and gummy and like I wasn’t quite speaking English. As I turned this thought over in my head, I noticed that my interrogator’s face was looking less like a face and more like a sea of unrelated features, each blurring into the next.
Weird.
I blinked, and when that did me no good, I reached out for the railing to steady myself.
“Miss, are you feeling all right?” the officer asked.
Her voice sounded even farther away than mine.
“I’m fine,” I said—or at least, that’s what I think I said. The details are, to this day, a little unclear. “Just give me a minute.”
“Ohmigosh!”
It took me a few seconds to realize that the exclamation in question had come from Skylar, who, up until that point, had wisely stayed out of the fray. I’d entertained the notion that she’d had the common sense to go home and leave Bethany and me to sort this out on our own.
Apparently not.
“You look, like, so pale. Did you forget to eat lunch? Please tell me you didn’t forget to eat lunch!” Skylar shook her head morosely, laying on the teenage ingénue vibe so thick that I doubted that anyone—let alone Officer So What You’re Telling Me Is—would buy it.
I wasn’t suffering from low blood sugar.
I was—I was—it took me a minute to put the sensation into words.
Dying.
“She’s hypoglycemic,” Skylar said, rattling off the word like she’d cut her teeth working in emergency rooms. “Are you guys done here? Because it’s almost six o’clock, and if we don’t get some food in her soon, her blood sugar is going to get dangerously low.”
The police officer blinked. Or maybe I did. Either way, words were exchanged and Skylar’s effervescence must have won the day, because a few minutes after she’d appeared on the scene, Bethany and I were free to go.
“In retrospect,” Skylar said, once we’d made it out the front door, “I’m not sure ice-skating was a good idea.”
“You think?” Bethany snorted. “Maybe if you were actually psychic, you could tell us why, in the name of all that is good and holy in this world, your little instincts led us here.”
I felt foggy and disconnected. I could barely keep up with the back and forth between the two of them, but the moment the question was out of Bethany’s mouth, a second Preternatural Control team shuffled by us, a dark-haired woman leading the way.
Click. Click. Click.
The sound of heels against concrete penetrated the fog in my brain, and I froze. For a moment, I thought that the woman in heels—the one from the school, the one coming toward us now—was here for me, but she brushed past us on her way into the rink.
She never even turned around.
Click. Click. Click.
Even after she was gone, I could still hear the sound of her heels echoing through the recesses of my brain.
Who is she? Why is she here? So tired …
My thoughts were a jumbled mess. I could barely move. And as Bethany and Skylar practically poured me into the backseat of the BMW, I thought about what had just happened—everything that had happened—and I managed to stave off the dizziness and nausea coursing through my entire body just long enough to spare a few words for the BMW’s belly-dancing owner.
“I can’t believe you did that,” I told Bethany, my words slurred and packing next to no heat. “You should have run.”
“I was providing a distraction so you could run,” Bethany retorted. “And that dragon was, I might add, totally distracted.”
I tried to tell Bethany exactly what I thought of her “distraction,” but somewhere between my brain and my mouth, the words got lost, and they came out in a jumble.