Page 29 of Dark Dragon’s Wolf

“You saw that, right?” she said. “The ravening hordes, reaching out and calling for me to save them, like spirits in Hell begging for redemption?”

“I heard them calling,” he said. “Mostly I saw my own nightmares.” He tilted his head back against the hut’s wall, the t-shirt pressed to his nose to stop the bleeding.

Yikes. That had to suck. “It’s okay,” she said. “They’re not real. I think we just had an unfortunate mind-meld.”

her dragon said.

Mayah felt like her heart stopped. They can’t be.

But they’re ghosts, Mayah said. They’re—you know. Dead.

Fuck.

“Mayah?” Tristan said. “Is everything okay?”

“Sorry. My dragon and I were just having a very bizarre, very disturbing conversation.”

“About?”

“About the ghosts being alive. Somewhere. And her wanting me to rescue them.”

Ah, hell. She amended her statement. “Correction. And I quote. ‘Both of you must rescue them.’”

Tristan said nothing for probably two full minutes. Then he said—surprisingly mildly considering the circumstances—“I see. Did she give any clues as to how we should go about that?”

Mayah put the question to her dragon. No answer was forthcoming.

“She’s got nothin’.”

“Awesome.”

“You don’t sound as upset as I thought you’d be.”

“Well, it did occur to me that Kira used to have visions of you and Emon calling out for help. She heard you.”

“Yeah, but we were alive.”

Tristan let that sit there until she followed it to the obvious conclusion. “You think there may be some other Al-Maddeiri dragons still alive somewhere? And I can hear them?”

“It’s a decent theory to start with. And if we could find them, and rescue them, then you wouldn’t be haunted anymore.” He paused. “And we could possibly annihilate one more group of motherfuckers who think keeping shifters in captivity is a good thing.”

There was that.

“Yeah but… how do we find them?”

He put his hand on her knee. “We’ll figure it out. The first thing we need to do is go through Markus’s library and find out if there’s any record—even a rumor—of any other Al-Maddeiri surviving the clan’s destruction.”

Markus Dobari had been Kira’s guardian, and had saved all he could out of the ruins of the Al-Maddeiri records and histories. Kira had given his whole library to Emon for safekeeping.

Mayah nodded. “Then I think we should talk to Kira,” she said. “She can walk through worlds, and she has that built-in interdimensional GPS thing going on. If we can figure out a way for her to come with me when I visit them in my dreams, maybe she can figure out where we are.”

“And then we hope it’s a place we can get to. And not some fort somewhere in the Dragonlands, guarded by an entire Draken clan.”