Page 11 of Alan

Even so, I didn’t wish to make things any worse for the girl. No, I was not a beast, nor a demon, no matter the fact that I was a dragon. I would not purposefully hurt her.

“Well? What are we going to do?” she asked. “What are you going to do?”

“What am I going to do?” I repeated over the sound of my dragon’s roar. How the others did not hear it, I was uncertain, as it seemed to split my head in two. I would need to shift and take flight once this was over, most likely, or else risk bursting free of my human form and destroying everything around me with a snap of my tail.

I looked around, from one of my kin to another, searching for support. For at least one of them to tell Keira it would be madness to go out there and look for someone who meant nothing to us, who had nothing to do with us. We had already come close enough to danger too many times.

None of them spoke up, even if they agreed with me.

Betrayal!my dragon insisted, ready to dispense swift justice.

“I do not understand a single one of you,” I growled, my eyes still traveling over the faces I had known the entirety of my long life. “How can you stand there and say nothing to defend the protection of your clan? Do you all truly believe it would be a wise decision on my part to allow for such flagrant disregard for our safety? Why should I lead us down this path, when we all know what the certain outcome will be?”

“We do not know what the outcome will be. There is nothing certain about it,” my twin sister traitorously replied.

“It is my job, my entire mission in life to maintain the safety of this clan, in case any of you need reminding,” I called out. “It seems that safety has been the last thing on anyone’s mind. It’s as though you’ve all gone crazy! What happened to you? Why do you no longer care what happens here?”

“Perhaps we’ve seen how little it matters whether we’re cautious or no,” Tamhas muttered, folding his arms. “We were careful before, or we thought we were. We went along as ever, going through the same motions as we had for hundreds of years. Where did it lead us?”

“That was no fault of Gavin’s,” I was quick to remind him, shooting a brief glance of apology to his widow. Bonnie looked unfazed by everything swirling around her, as though nothing any of us said could touch the serenity which surrounded her being. She was by far the eldest member of the clan and, frankly, I could have used her support just then. But I would not go so far as to ask for it.

“As it would be no fault of yours if anything were to bring harm to us now,” Ainsley replied in a softer voice than the one she’d used previously. “We cannot keep the outside world outside forever. Perhaps we’ve opened the floodgates, and there is no way to hold back the rush of water now. What’s done has been done.”

Against my wishes. Not that it mattered. Nothing seemed to matter anymore. Rather than leaving me with a sense of resignation, the knowledge merely infuriated me all the more.

It was time to bring an end to the conversation. I wanted nothing more to do with any of it. To think, the day had begun so well.

I cleared my throat, quelling my rising anger and that of my dragon, who was all but prepared to resort to violence. But then he was always prepared to make himself known violently if words did not work. “This is all very pretty, this wordplay we seem to have gotten ourselves caught up in, but it does not change my mind. We will not entangle ourselves with the Blood Moon Priestesses, as such involvement would surely come to no good end. My decision is final.”

I looked to Tamhas then, hoping to catch his eye, as well as Keira’s.

His was the only face I saw of the two.

“Where is she?” I asked.

His eyes widened when he looked about himself. “I don’t know. She was beside me a moment ago.” Everyone standing near him muttered and shrugged as though they had no better idea than he as to where his mate had gone.

As a handful of them left to look for her in the room she shared with Tamhas, in the communication center and the kitchen, I looked down the tunnel toward the cave entrance.

She hadn’t gone to her room. She’d gone out there, into the world, to find her friend.

If it weren’t for Tamhas’s stubbornness and the fact that Ainsley would certainly take his side, I would’ve bid Keira farewell without a moment’s hesitation. As it was, she had only served to complicate things even further.

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