Page 24 of Dragon's Flame
Whatever was going on here, she resolved to be incurious.
She hadgoals.Andambitions.And while she acknowledged that none of this made sense, she wasn’t about to let her straight-A status get endangered because she couldn’t cope with it. This wasn’t going to torment her at night, or when she got drunk, or matter in the least.
She’d come too far in life to be derailed by weird shit now.
Kenna leaned forward and started hiking up the path she’d crashed through to get here, only looking back at the dog once.
“Well? Are you coming?” she asked him, and he immediately caught up.
She decidedto head parallel to the decrepit lodge, a few hundred feet back from where she thought it was, hopefully to make it harder for Tarian to find her—with pants, or without. And the dog followed, sniffing out ahead of her, then sometimes running back behind, scaring off squirrels and hopefully not getting into the poison ivy she could see occasionally peeking through the ferns and redwood needles that scattered across the ground.
It was rougher going, but she’d been on harder hikes around UCSC—and then she heard a masculine shout of surprise.
She opened her mouth to shout back, before catching herself, realizing it might be Tarian, finding the lodge abandoned.
Then she looked down, and saw his dog standing stiff, lips pulled back, teeth out, like he was biting back a growl.
The dog...could just be hating strangers, and who was she to listen to it?
But then again, if she’d learned one thing babysitting half a neighborhood in her youth, was that if you ever heard a strange noise in an unfamiliar house, you looked to whatever their pets did for the truth. Pets would ignore strange thumpings in attics that might’ve been ghosts, burglars, or raccoons. But if a pet ever seemed concerned, you’d better be calling nine-one-one—which reminded her that she still had Tarian’s cell phone, in his jacket pocket.
She pulled it out and found one bar.
“Holy shit,” she whispered—at the same time as a voice she didn’t recognize shouted, “She’s not here!” in the distance.
“Fuck!” shouted someone else, back at the discovery. “Spread out! Find her!”
She held the phone up to the sky like she was worshiping a god, and was about to hit the Emergency Call button, when strong arms enveloped her, one around her chest, slamming a palm against her mouth, and another swiped the phone from her hand.
“Don’t,” a voice whispered in her ear.
She knew who it was at once, and she struggled against him.
“I swore not to silence you again. Do not make me regret it,” Tarian said, moving his hand away from her face slowly.
“I fucking hate you,” she hissed, the second she could, just to prove it was possible—and she tasted salt, like the sea, on her lips. “You had better have pants on.”
“I do. But not shoes,” he said, and she quickly glanced down, confirming both these facts—so she picked up her right foot,with its boot, and stomped down on his foot, hard. He grunted softly behind her, and the arm around her loosened enough for her to get free—she bolted toward the sound of other voices at once.
It didn’t matter. She only got three steps before Tarian tackled her, sending them both to the ground. He caught himself before he landed on her though, so she wasn’t crushed—she was just lightly pressed beneath him.
“Please,” he whispered. “Ser—I mean Kenna,” he breathed into her ear. “Shhh.”
She felt the dog huddling beside her, trembling as if with fear, as she heard men coming through the woods.
“Look at them closely,” Tarian went on, as two of them came into view. “Are they the protectors of your people?”
Neither of them men she could see were in uniforms, or orange-colored safety gear.
They were in camouflage.
Like hunters.
“I swear I fucking heard something!” one of them shouted to another.
“Probably a deer,” another complained.
“But they were here!” said a third.
