Soren goes to sit next to her on the couch. “That’s why we left Omisha to come here; we were told this country was better, and it is. They tried to forcibly recruit the entire country to serve in their military, led by a man that is convinced that if he can get his hands on enough female dragon blood, he can develop a way for human females to bear dragon-blooded children.”
Her eyes narrow. “My brothers mentioned that they didn’t think all of the humans were wiped out like they were told.”
I nod. “A good chunk of them, yeah, but not complete extermination. The ones they let live to experiment on, they keep locked up. But there’s no way to ever completely get every last person and I imagine a good chunk are in hiding, biding their time and figuring out how to retaliate.”
Soren rips off the band aid and I hope she won’t send us away as soon as she hears. “Caius, Vyrian, and I are marked as traitors and deserters because of our refusal. If they find us, they’ll kill us on the spot, but we weren’t going to be involved in something like that. So it’s entirely possible there’s a bounty out on our heads now as well.”
She grins.Fucking grins,instead of balking. This girl is something else.
“So you’re damsels in distress and came here so I could save you? I mean, not that I blame you, it’s a flawless plan,” she jokes, adjusting the icepack on her side with a sigh of relief.
I nod sagely. “You saw right through our plan.”
She leans back on the couch and closes her eyes, her tone subdued now. “I see why they push me as much as they do, but I don’t get why they wouldn’t just fill me in so I could prepare better.”
Soren looks like he wants to reach out and console her, but knows it isn’t his place. He clenches his hand to keep from giving into the impulse.
“The world is going to hell, Ezra,” he says. “They likely wanted to offer you as much happiness and innocence as they could before the world barged in and snuffed it out. Once you know, you can’t forget and you’ll be constantly looking over your shoulder, worried someone’s going to abduct or hurt you. It’ll be a constant existence of stress, and they just wanted to let you live without that burden for as long as you could.”
She groans, but doesn’t argue. “This sucks.”
I huff out a humorless laugh. “That about sums it up, yeah.”
“But if I pick my mates and can shift, I can just bite the face off of any motherfucker that tries something. Wouldn’t they be excited about that?” she muses aloud.
Soren snorts. “I doubt they’d be excited at the prospect of their sister getting laid. Besides, you still need to get to a sanctuary for that to happen, and it’s a pretty decent journey to the nearest one from here.” Her eyes fly open and she whips her head toward him. He raises his hand in surrender. “What did I say?”
“Sanctuary,” she says through gritted teeth.
My eyes widen. Fuck, they didn’t tell her anything.
“Before the human uprising that started all of this, whenever it was time for a woman to take her mates, they needed to head over to the ritual site to complete the ceremony. An elder walked them through the process; it isn’t just sex. Even if you slept with someone right now, neither of you would be able to shift, it just puts you in a sort of...holding point, for lack of a better term, until you can complete the process.
“But now that so many women and elders have died out, there isn’t a need to have one in every town. There are a few sanctuaries across the country where the remaining elders have gathered. So after you select your mates, you’re going to need to head to one before you can start chomping faces.”
She rises to her feet with a curse, grabbing her blades off of the table as she starts storming towards the door. Soren and I are up in an instant following her, trading a curious look behind her back.
“What, ah, where you going?”
She pins me with a look over her shoulder, her emerald eyes hard enough to cut glass. “To find an outlet for my rage before I accidentally burn your house down. You guys coming?”
I don’t even have to think about it. “Definitely. “
