Page 15 of To Match A Dragon's Fire

“Earth is older than even our kind and it isn’t the first time She’s reinvented herself,” I told them. “This is it. We’re done. Go home. Tend to your flock. And pray that the ones you love will be able to survive whatever happens next.”

5

Ember

Locked Gates and Pistols

Damn it. Not again.

I eased off the gas. A long line of cars had stopped on the highway. And I was pretty sure those were military tanks blocking the road. What the military was doing out here, I didn’t know.

Nor did I care to find out.

My heart was thumping hard and it wasn’t only from the coffee I’d been sipping all morning.

It’d taken hours longer than it should’ve to get away from Portland on the backroads. Traffic was awful. Cars stalled and sat idling on all the major freeways—the ones that were still drivable anyway.

Thankfully, the Bronco could handle some rougher terrain because I’d gone off-road a few times to get to the state highways beyond the more populated areas.

I wanted to avoid Mt. Hood and the ghastly dark clouds that blotted out the mountainous horizon above it. Another eruption was coming soon.

The sky was as apocalyptic as ever today. I breathed a sigh of relief when we crossed theCascade Mountains and descended toward even ground.

But the highway took us through Bend, which was the last major city before our destination. The blockade up ahead looked like it’d been placed there strategically with those big tanks keeping people in line.

I’d seen enough empty and raided cars on the drive so far to know I wasn’t stopping for anyone’s checkpoint.

I threw the Bronco in reverse, looking over my shoulder as I eased onto a residential road.

With my worn atlas pressed against the steering wheel, I traced the side roads, looking for a way around as I drove by houses with the window shades drawn tight.

“Are we there?” Harper’s little voice came from the back seat.

“Not yet.” I looked at her reflection in the rearview mirror. “Go back to sleep.”

Harper closed her green eyes. They were the same shade as her mom’s and she also had Willow’s golden blonde hair. There wasn’t much of her biological dad Sam in there anywhere—thank goodness.

She was her mother’s daughter, even if Willow had no clue where the sass came from. I remembered how Willow used to be, though, back before life showed us what we were really made of.

The six-year-old was cramped into a four-point harness car seat with her bony knees and elbows sticking out.

Willow slept with her head leaning against the headrest and her hand protectively over Harper’s stomach.

I thought the girl was a little too big for the car seat, but I wasn’t her mom. Willow made the big decisions when it came to safety.

And she erred on the side of caution now.

Riley was snoring softly. Dobby had stopped meowing in his cat carrier, but he still watched me through the bars with a menacing expression as if worried I’d let them down.

Everything is going to be fine.

I dropped the atlas back to the bench seat and, with a shaking hand, reached for the oversized thermos of black coffee.

∞

The tension in my shoulders eased as I pulled off the state highway onto the county road, but the knot in my stomach tightened. I hadn’t been on these roads in twelve years.

Familiar landmarks came into view—the stoic jut of rock wall in the middle of the desert, Mason’s dairy farm and the accompanying smell, the only motel for a hundred miles in either direction that always had vacancies and no cars parked in the dirt lot, and the old closed-down traveler station with the same sign on the same two rusted hinges it’d hung from since I was a kid.

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