“Get inside the school, now,” Camille ordered. Prescott Gregory and Clarence Vaughan took off, but Covington was just coming up the trail. “Inside. Wild dragon spotted!” Camille barked, waving him on toward the main building.
“What about the others?” I glanced at the faces around me. Scarlett and Mabel were still on the trail in the woods.
“They’ll just have to be informed when they get here,” Camille said with a worried shrug, finally catching up to us.
“They like to walk on the trail when no one else can see them,” I said, matter-of-factly rather than in a tattling way, but Vanya lifted her brows at me. Before anyone could say anything, I turned and sprinted back down the way we’d come, hoping to catch them faster this way. Rain had started to fall again.
“Wait,” said a voice behind me. In a matter of seconds, Rushland Covington had caught up to me. “I can get to them faster.”
He was right, but for a few steps, I kept pace with him, not sure if I trusted him to actually warn the others.
“I’ve got this, Miro. Get inside.”
I slowed, my breaths heaving from the sprint, and hurried back up the gravel path toward the school.
Every first year from House Ruby and Emerald, who were training outside, raced toward the back entrance to the school. Hurling ourselves up two steps at a time, we reached the back terrace, clattered across the stones, and hurled ourselves through the door that led into the back atrium, less grand than the main foyer but still floored with marble and topped with a chandelier far overhead. We spilled inside, splattering the floors with rainwater.
Clarence walked after Camille. “Where was the dragon?” he asked.
“About a mile from here, over the forest,” she replied, counting heads in the atrium.
The members of House Emerald drifted away when all of them were accounted for, but not a single member of House Ruby left the atrium, our attention fixed out the windows.
“There!” shouted Prescott, pointing.
Covington jogged alongside Scarlett and Mabel as they ran up the path from the lair. A minute later, they burst through the door. Camille exhaled with relief.
Once inside, Prescott slapped Covington on the shoulder. His hair was soaked, and he flung it from his face. Scarlett and Mabel collapsed onto a bench in the atrium, as if they’d just been taxed with climbing the world’s highest peak.
Covington briefly made eye contact with me as he strolled by with Prescott and Clarence. He offered me the slightest nod.
Eager to know if my dragon was the reason we’d been sent inside, I moved toward Camille, who was walking down the hall toward the library. “What did the dragon look like?” I asked.
Camille shrugged. “They didn’t exactly give us details.”
At that, I spun back toward our dormitory, where dry clothes waited. If Myth was in trouble, I wondered if I would know, somehow. If I would feel his fear, or if I could lose him without ever knowing it.
“They got him!”Shep shouted in the common room later that night.
My heart jumped into my throat and my hands shook as I tried to hold the cards Vanya had dealt me. I was losing miserably in the game of hearts, my mind too worried about Myth to be thinking about tricks.
When all eyes turned to Shep, he added, “The wild dragon was killed. You’re safe to go outside again.”
“You okay, Ari?” asked Vanya as my cards fell from my hands to the table.
I nodded. “I’m tired; that’s all.” It was late, after all, and I hadn’t slept well after Luther’s rude intrusion. “See you in the morning,” I said, ignoring Prescott’s outcry that I couldn’t quit mid-game. He’d only invited me to play because Vanya insisted. I doubted he cared if I left the room or the school.
The halls were quiet, everyone inside their common rooms waiting to hear the news about the wild dragon. We’d been confined to the school, no one even allowed to go to the lair to check on their dragons. The professors assured the students the dragons would be kept in the lair and safe from the flames of the wild dragon.
Who was now dead.
I rubbed my chest, wondering if the ache there was a sign that Myth was really dead. He’d followed me to West Haven, so it was not impossible that he’d followed me here, even though I doubted Fairfax would have let him come before the first years’ dragons were scheduled to arrive.
In a near trance, I walked aimlessly through the halls. I wound up in a corridor I hadn’t yet visited, down a flight of steps from the library. This hall was stark and cold, with a tile floor rather than the warm wooden floors in the halls above. Footsteps clacked on the tile, and I instinctively edged to the side, assuming it would be an upperclassman passing.
Instead, it was Covington who peeled around the far corner and stopped short at the sight of me. In his arm was a wrapped brown package. He shifted it behind his back.
“What are you doing down here?” I snapped, a little surprised at how violent my words sounded.
