Page 75 of Dragon 7

I looked at my dragon-shadow.

Do you know what the sacrifice was? Or why she is so sad?

His eyes glowed. War. That is the only answer right now.

He was right. My only focus should be protecting her, my family, and my empire. But. . .this ritual had changed me and was still changing me.

I was not the same man who had entered this forest. New emotions had realigned themselves within my soul. The bond had cracked me wider than I knew a man could open, and the city came in through the crack. I had not let myself think of the Lion’s bombing of Tokyo since the screens went black in the war room. I had buried it away. I could not afford to feel too much emotion during war.

But the ritual had unburied things. The boy who would not wake up in his father's arms arrived first. Then the woman with the blood streaking her cheek. Then the wedding hall with its face blown out, and the bodies under it, and the crosswalk, and the car alarm.

I had done that.

Not the Lion.

Me.

The Lion was the weapon. I had picked him up, aimed him at my father, and fired him through a city full of innocent people whose only mistake was being near the wrong old hotel.

I gazed at the black lines on my hands.

We all will be different after tonight.

I looked up at my dragon-shadow.

He hovered above the clearing in churning black smoke. His massive serpentine body coiled up through the canopy. His great horned skull cut across the face of the moon before the branches swallowed him again. Those gold-fire eyes remained on me. And then he opened his large mouth and roared again, “WAR!”

“Yes.” I made sure my guns were in their holsters. "We have to get to my men."

I know where they are.

"Then let's go. Can you carry me?”

He gave me the oddest look. No.

“It would have been nice if I could ride you.”

One enormous eye slid sideways to regard me the way a person might regard shit tracked in on a boot heel. Then, the smoke around him thickened briefly, curling inward as if even his own shadow found the suggestion offensive. “Ride. . .me?”

“Sorry.” I ran forward. My legs were a bit unsteady, but after several feet I found my balance.

Thankfully, the golf cart remained with my mask on the seat right where Yoichi had abandoned it earlier. I threw myself into the seat, turned the engine over, pulled the wheel hard, and got back onto the path.

Above the tree line, my dragon-shadow moved. This way.

I caught him in pieces through the canopy—a ridge of his spine crossing a gap in the leaves, the trailing edge of a wing cutting through the dark above the highest branches, the brief bloom of gold where his eyes turned back toward me.

He was faster than the cart. A few times, he soared ahead and waited, then soared again. He threaded through trees wider around than both my arms could reach and left no mark on anything he passed through.

One of Akiro’s planes screamed low over the forest. The canopy shook. Leaves tore loose and rained across the windshield.

“Goddamn it.” I leaned forward over the wheel and drove harder.

The tires bit into the dirt and threw it up behind me.

"Should I give you a name?"

He turned his great head toward me from above the trees. The gold eyes caught the moonlight. I have one.