Closing his eyes, he exhales and once again the fog lifts off his body, swirling, intensifying. Almost like a living thing, the milky mist wraps around me, snaking between my ankles, curling over me. It builds and builds, reaching my face, tickling my nose. I bat the misty tendrils away.
Tage watches me closely, almost desperately. He wantssomethingfrom me, and I don’t know what it is, but he wills it—whateveritis—to happen. His body vibrates with the demand for it. I wish I could give it to him, and then maybe they would go.
“Wh-what?” I whisper, and give a helpless little lift of my shoulders.
Arvos opens his silvery gaze and exhales loudly. “It’s no good. It doesn’t work on her.”
“She still remembers us,” Danhy erupts.
Rememberthem?
Of course I remember them. They make an impression. Theywould haunt me for as long as I lived...which might only be a few moments longer.
“It’sher.” Arvos waves a hand at me accusingly, fog curling off the tips of his fingers. “She can’t be shaded.”
And then I realize, incredibly, what the fog—theshading—does. What it’ssupposedto do. It scrubs one’s memory. Erases it. But it doesn’t work on me. If it worked on me, it would erasethemfrom my recollection.
Perhaps I should not so readily believe in such a thing, but after everything, after this day...my disbelief is suspended for all things that shouldnot be.Anythingis possible. I know that firsthand.
Tage still hasn’t replied, and I feel my fate tremble precariously in his hands, in his decree, in the words yet to emerge from him.
At his continued silence, I shake my head and appeal to him. “Please. Let me go. I won’t tell anyone about you and what I saw this day.”
I don’t even know if Icouldtell anyone. Assumably I’m still invisible to human eyes.
My gaze flicks to the others and back to him. Always, my attention returns to him. He is the obvious leader, their proclaimedalpha...and there is a quality to him. This man—dragon—bows to no one. Among them, his word is absolute. I live or die by his command.
“If she could be shaded then she would have succumbed by now,” Arvos presses. “We cannot trust her to keep our secret. We can trust no human, but this one...something is especially foul about her.” He’s grim as he pauses before adding, “Alpha, you know what we have to do.”
Tage blinks long and slow, his lashes a dark crescent coming down over the terrible beauty of his eyes.
“What...do you have to do?” My voice falls as brittle as a leaf.
I feel like that...a brittle leaf, shaken and fragile, vulnerable in the hands of these monsters.
I hang on to his gaze, challenging him to admit the thing they all seem to be talking about and yet not putting into words.
I moisten my dry lips. “You mean kill me? Like you killed everyone else in my village?”
I don’t look away from him.
He looks right back at me. His gaze whips through me like a cold blast of wind. It’s such a strange sensation...to be seen, even now, in this, my inevitable end.
“Why don’t you just say it?” I demand.Ihave nothing to lose, after all. Of course I would not be spared. From the moment I saw them, from the moment they saw me, I have been careening toward this fate. “You kill. That is what you do.” My lip twitches, curling in a sneer of loathing. “Cowards, the lot of you. You should be able to name it for what it is.”
He blinks as though struck and his fingers flex around me, reminding me of his terrible strength. He’s a dragon. Staring into his face, it’s easy to forget the monster that crawls beneath his human skin.
“You think I did this?” He gestures around us with a disgusted flick of his fingers. “Idid not dothis,” he growls. “We are not about destroying life. That is something your kind does only too well.”
His scathing denial fuels my outrage. “Mykind?” I wave a hand. “And what do you call what was donehere? Tomykind, to innocents...children, women, the elderly. What did those poor souls ever do to you? I saw the might of dragonkind done this day and you cannot tell me it was not about the destruction of life.”
He says nothing at first, and I resist the urge to squirm beneath his narrow-eyed regard. Finally, in a voice no less severe for all its softness, he says, “You know nothing of us...human.”
Human.Such a dirty word to him. Just as dragon is a foul word to me.
Danhy glances back and forth between us, her expression one I cannot quite decipher. “Kill her, Tage,” she urges, “so we don’t have to hear another senseless word fall from her lips.”
A long silence falls, heavy as the fog-laden air.
