Chapter 187 187

Chapter 187 187
Emma's POV:
The rabbit was on the pillow. Ears up, face out. Lucian had put it there before he ran, which was the kind of thing that should have broken me right then but didn't because my body hadn't caught up yet. My body was still standing in the middle of Evie's room with the cold air coming through the open window and the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling and the dragon wall above the bed and the crayons on the floor where she'd been coloring when they took her.
I closed the window. Tried to. My hands were doing something I couldn't control, this full-body vibration that started in my chest and went out through my fingers, and I grabbed the latch and pushed down and it slipped and I grabbed it again and pushed and it slipped again and on the third try I got it locked and I stood there with both hands flat on the glass and I could hear myself breathing too fast and I thought I might pass out.
I didn't pass out. I looked at my phone instead.
Lucian had forwarded me Kaelen's contact and the message from the Order. I opened it because I had to, because the coordinates were in there and Kaelen needed them, and the photo loaded and I saw Evie sitting on a concrete floor in her purple dinosaur shirt with zip ties on her wrists and her face blotchy and streaked and I made it to the bathroom across the hall before I threw up. Barely.
My knees hit the tile and I threw up the mac and cheese I'd been making twenty minutes ago when the world was still normal and then I spit and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and I sat on the bathroom floor for maybe ten seconds. Maybe less. I don't know.
I got up.
I texted Mom first because Lucian told me to. "Picked up Evie, going to Lucian's family for the afternoon, back by dinner." My hands were shaking so bad the autocorrect was doing half the work and I almost sent "going to Lucians family for the afterthought" but I caught it. I think I caught it. I hit send and didn't check.
Then I called Kaelen.
It rang three times. He picked up and his voice was sharp, the way you answer an unknown number when you're already expecting bad news.
"Who is this?"
"It's Emma." My voice came out wrong, too high, cracking. "Lucian's, I'm Lucian's, they took Evie, they took my sister, she's five, there was a photo and coordinates and Lucian went ALONE, he told me to call you and give you the coordinates but he left, he ran, he's going there by himself and they have her in some building and they said one hour and they said if he doesn't come alone they'll, they said they'd start with—"
"Emma." Kaelen's voice cut through. "Breathe. The coordinates. Send them to me right now."
I forwarded the message. My thumb missed the button twice.
"Got it," he said after a few seconds. Quiet. Then: "That's the old maintenance yard. Past the lumber yard." A pause. Something moved on his end, a door, voices. "How long ago did he leave?"
"I don't know. Five minutes, maybe more, I don't, I was in Evie's room and I couldn't—"
"Stay in the house. Don't go anywhere. Do you understand me, Emma?"
"Yes."
"Stay there."
He hung up. And I stood in the hallway of my house with the pot of half-cooked noodles on the stove and the colander in the sink and the TV still on in the living room from when Evie had been watching cartoons before I brought her upstairs for a nap and I was supposed to stay. Lucian told me to stay. Kaelen told me to stay.
But I lasted about forty-five seconds.
Because here's the thing. Here's the thing that nobody who hasn't been in this situation can understand, and I hope nobody ever has to understand it. My sister was on a concrete floor with zip ties on her wrists and the boy I loved was running toward armed men who wanted his blood and I was standing in a hallway being told to stay and I couldn't. I physically could not stand in that hallway for one more second.
Mom had gotten a ride to the conferences with a coworker this morning. The car was in the driveway. I grabbed the keys from the hook by the door, and I went outside and got in the car and backed out of the driveway and I almost hit the neighbor's recycling bin and I didn't care.
The coordinates on my phone said 2.4 miles southeast. Past the industrial park. Past the lumber yard. The road got worse the further I went, pavement to gravel, streetlights to nothing. My hands were still shaking on the wheel and the gas pedal felt wrong under my foot and I was going too fast for gravel and the car fishtailed once, twice, and I just kept going because stopping meant thinking and thinking meant the photo of Evie on the concrete floor and I could not think about that and drive at the same time.
I found the building by the van. White, no plates, parked behind a chain-link fence with a gap in it. Two other cars in the lot. The building behind them, one story, concrete and brick, and from outside, nothing. Quiet. I killed the engine and got out and the gravel was loud under my shoes and I could hear something from inside, muffled, voices, and then nothing for a beat, and then a sound.
I don't know how to describe it. It came through the walls and the ground and the air, this roar that wasn't a human sound and wasn't an animal sound and was something that went through my ribs and my teeth and made my vision blur. The windows on the east side of the building blew out. All of them. Glass and heat in a single wave and I ducked behind the car and covered my head and felt the heat pass over me.
I went to the windows.
Then I saw the dragon...
I'd spent two years writing about dragons. I'd researched wing structure and fire dynamics and scale patterns and jaw mechanics and I'd read forty books and watched sixty YouTube videos and I'd built an entire fictional world around a creature I thought I understood.
But, actually, I didn't understand anything.
He was gold. The whole room was gold, gold scales, gold fire, gold light bouncing off the steel beams and the concrete and the walls. His wings were pressed against the ceiling and they'd bent the steel beams where they touched and his tail was on the floor and the concrete underneath was cracked.
The heat coming through the empty window frames was, I don't know, like standing too close to an open oven but worse, drier, more alive. And his eyes were gold, solid gold, the same eyes I'd seen in the forest, the same eyes that went soft when he looked at me, but enormous and set in a face that wasn't his face anymore. A dragon's face. A dragon that used to be the boy who wrote me a terrible poem and tripped over his own feet.
I watched him kill three men.
I should say I looked away. I should say I closed my eyes or turned my head or couldn't bear to watch. But I didn't. I watched all of it, the fire that caught the first man and threw him into the door, and the second man firing his gun, six, seven times, each bullet bouncing off the scales, and then the tail catching his legs and launching him across the room into the work bench, and then the third man, the one near Evie, who reached for her and the sound his body made when the claw hit him and he went into the wall. That sound... I'm never going to forget that sound.
Evie was curled in the corner with her hands over her head, screaming. The same scream she made during thunderstorms when the lightning was too close, but worse, thinner, like her voice had given up somewhere in the middle and was running on nothing.
The dragon started changing. Shrinking. The bones cracking in reverse, a wet, wrong sound, and the scales pulling into skin, and it took maybe twenty seconds but it felt longer and then it was Lucian. On the concrete floor. Naked. Shaking. Blood on his hands that wasn't his.
He found a canvas drop cloth in the corner and pulled it around his waist. And he looked at his hands. I can't explain how he looked at his hands.
Like they were evidence. Like they belonged to a crime scene.
I climbed through the window. The broken glass caught my arm, right through my jacket sleeve, and I felt it cut and I didn't care. I went along the wall, around the mess, and I got to Evie. She was on the floor and her zip-tied hands were over her head and she was still screaming but quieter now, that exhausted sound that kids make when they've been crying so long their body starts giving up.
I pulled her into my chest. One hand on the back of her head. Her face went into my neck and her body went slack, this total surrender, all her weight on me.
I had Evie back. I had her back.