Page 119 of Silent Jay

Fear. Fear I had no way to express crawled into my brain and crashed against itself. With my body incapacitated, I couldn’t blink. He was making sure my eyes didn’t dry out.

Oh god, he’s going to harvest my eyes.

Stop jumping to conclusions.

But then I won’t be able to see or talk.

Darkness. Nothing. I panicked with no result. Which only made me panic more. The box trapping my mind closed on me. Until this moment, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever experienced trueisolation. Even while trapped in that diamond, I’d at least been able to look out at the world.

But this was nothing.

You’re not nothing, just think happy thoughts! Like in Peter Pan.

No song played in my head. If Peter Pan even had music, in my panic, I couldn’t recall it. I was nothing. I felt nothing. More footsteps came into the room, and I focused. If I could hear, I still existed. The table squeaked above me, and Doctor Raba’s too-smooth voice eased another kid's pain, promising them a better future.

Unlike Peter Pan, no degree of positivity would return control of my body or fly my ass out of here.

Trapped in my mind, I’d truly found purgatory.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

TYSON

Isat across from my sire in his office of dark wood and leather, which reminded me too much of my apartment. Although he lectured me, his words didn’t register. All I could see was myself in Ogden’s cave, scrolling through my contacts and realizing I didn’t have a single friend who was my own. I rubbed my knuckles against the plush hide of the chair, suddenly unsure if I even liked leather.

“I will take away your privileges.” I brought my attention back to my sire, the red-faced dragon shifter, speaking to me like I was still a child. “You’ve been needlessly reckless and impulsive ever since The Hunt. You’re on your last leg with me.”

I bit my lips together and bowed my head. He wasn’t wrong, I had been, but he also wasn’t right. ‘Needlessly’ was his opinion. Nothing I did for my mate was ‘needless.’ Impulsive, maybe, brash, overconfident, I could keep coming up with adjectives to describe my actions, but ‘needless’ wouldn’t even make my list.

“Do you have anything to add?” My sire asked, his familiar gaze meeting my own.

I did, but I couldn’t get my lips to form anything other than what he expected. “I don’t. I will do better.”

He gave me an approving smile, and my heart lifted. Instead of enjoying the moment, I studied it. I’d spent so much of my life wanting that smile, needing it to feel normal. I’d ruthlessly buried bits of myself until only the man he wanted to see remained.

But did I need his approval?

“Then get out of my sight and stay out of my sight.” Smoke curled out of my sire’s mouth, and he pointed at the door. “Your obsession with this woman must end. The EM is in two days. I’ve sent you and your brothers the reports on the object we pulled down from the Ley Line… they are unique.”

Despite my dismissal, the change in topic kept me rooted in my seat. Ogden had said something about Wiggles and the Ley Lines, but I hadn’t listened. “We got it then?”

My sire scowled. “Of course we did. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions, and we’ll discuss them at the meeting. I told you to get out of my sight.”

“Of course, sir.” I shot to my feet and walked out with my shoulders back and head high despite feeling like a whipped fourteen-year-old boy.

‘Draw my own conclusions’ was yet another test to see if I could find the same information as the rest of the family and come to the same plan of action. I pulled up the report on my tablet. Transparent streaks from Wiggle's writing still covered the glass surface. I couldn’t bring myself to clean it.

The object and our intensive report appeared on my screen. X-rays showed a ball of human-looking bones curled up in the fetal position inside of them. Traces of magic clung to the outside, but our scans couldn’t penetrate the dark shell. A cowled shifter drove a single dark dragon claw into the top. Lime-green fluid oozed out. Where it touched the shifter’s claw, the bone smoked and melted. The shifter jerked back, and a blast of water instantly washed the ooze off.

Cold fear ran down my spine. The suspiciously fast appearance of water vanished into my new reality, literally hanging above my head. There were hundreds of these floating in our shield… and I didn’t know anything. This report gave us more questions then it answered.

I pictured Wiggles perched on top of Og’s table, lording over the water and earth dragons while they discussed her situation. Instead of joining them, I’d looked for my answers, and once I decided, I forced the group to do what I wanted. I’d done what my sire trained me to do. My stomach twisted painfully.

I trudged to my apartment and poured myself a dram of Duntocher Single Malt. Duntocher—don’t touch her. It was like my dad planted this bottle at the front of my collection, feck for all I knew he did. My crap filled every inch of this room. As my gaze moved from my scotch, video games, and even my piles of colorful shirts, I realized I wasn’t sure if I liked any of it, my video games excluded.

But everything else had started as someone else’s idea. My sire gave me my first bottle. A fourteen-year-old Highland Park because it was just after my fourteenth birthday when my dragon finally emerged, and I joined the family.

Before then, I’d been useless. Just a human. A burden. Someone else’s problem.

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