Page 11 of Firedrake Betrayal
“Maybe notthatdevastated given he left her locked in an attic for years,” Patten mutters, starting the engine.
“She loves him. Yes, he abandoned her, but she doesn’t want him dead. If we can help him, we have to try, and we’ll keep all our eyes open. Any sign of trouble and we leave,” Shep says.
“And Jade?” I ask.
Shep’s eyes find mine in the rearview mirror. “We’ll deal with that issue as and when needed.” His gaze darts to Brennan. “We have enough to worry about now.”
I’d expected people would have lined the streets to gossip about dragons flying in the sky, but the streets are quiet. Only a handful of people around. They move with purpose from the bar, the grocery store, or from their homes to their vehicles.
They couldn’t have missed Brennan breathe fire over the collector’s compound.
So why is everyone acting like today is like any other day?
Back at our rented townhouse, down one of Wilkerson’s quiet suburban streets, Patten parks at the doors of the garage, and Shep carries Brennan up the short townhouse steps.
I fish the front door keys out of my pocket, unlock the door, and hold it open. There’s no sign anyone has been in theapartment in our absence. It’s the same beige apartment, devoid of personality.
My bag is still where I left it.
Thankfully.
I need to change out of this ruined suit.
After someone stole my cooler of bagged blood from our motel room, they must not have had any interest in our clothing.
Shep puts Brennan down on one of the apartment’s spare beds and draws a blue patterned comforter over him.
His skin is white, lips turning blue, and his breathing is dangerously shallow.
“He’s worse than before,” I say.
“Whatever poison that bolt contained is potent,” Patten mutters. “Those silver veins are spreading.”
They’re creeping up his neck, almost to his shoulders. The poison must be in his bloodstream to be spreading that fast.
“You think it’s gonna kill him?” Patten asks.
Yes.
Shep, who briefly left the room, returns wearing a black T-shirt, though his feet are still bare. He rests his palm on Brennan’s brow for a couple of seconds before pulling it away, frowning. “He’s cold. That doesn’t seem like a good thing for a guy who was breathing fire not that long ago.”
We fall silent as Shep retreats to where Patten and I are standing at the foot of the bed.
I don’t like the man for what he did. He took Jade from Chicago, tried to make her fear us, and if she’d believed him, we would have never seen her again.
I don’t know what we would have done in Chicago, if we’d have accepted she’d gone forever, or reached a point where we went after her.
Considering in mere days Shep was insistent we go after her and Patten had been determined to drink his bodyweight in whisky, I can’t imagine we’d have done nothing.
I missed her, and it was clear Shep and Patten missed her too.
But Shep is right. Jade loves him. They spoke for several minutes in my car before we went into Atticus’s compound to save Dominik. If he dies, it will devastate Jade.
“Did he say anything to you back at the compound?” Shep asks, folding his arms as we stand at the foot of the bed, studying the dying man.
We split up before Dominik’s rescue. I regret it now. Maybe if we’d all been together, Dominik wouldn’t have had a chance to grab Jade and Brennen wouldn’t be being poisoned to death.
But at the time, it made sense. Shep, Jade, and Patten had gone to look for Dominik. I went with Brennan to find Atticus and kill him.
