Rogue (16 page)

“You love it. Just think how boring life would be without me.”

A grin tugged at one corner of his mouth. “My old trainer gave me a bit of advice once,” he said. “Not that I listened to his ramblings most of the time, but this one stuck out. He said, ‘A flame that burns twice as bright lasts half as long.’ Any idea what that means?”

“Um. That you’re a secret philosopher who writes poetry between car heists and jailbreaks?” I guessed.

He snorted. “Normally I don’t break out the metaphorical crap, but I thought I’d make an exception.” One hand rose, knuckles very lightly brushing my cheek, searing and tingly. My heart leaped, and warmth bloomed through my stomach. “You remind me of that flame, Firebrand,” Riley murmured. “You burn so hot, and so bright, you set everything around you on fire. And you don’t even realize what you’re doing.”

“I’m a dragon,” I said, trying to catch my breath. He was so close; part of me wanted to pull away, though my back was still against the door and there was nowhere to go except through Riley. The other half wanted to step closer, to press my body against his until our combined heat became an inferno. “I’m supposed to set things on fire. What’s the point in lighting a candle if you’re going to hide it away so it doesn’t help anything?” His brows arched, and I grinned. “Ha, see? I can be philosophical, too.”

Riley’s smile turned grim. “Just be careful that the people around you don’t get singed,” he said in a low voice. “Or that you don’t burn too hot, too quickly. The brightest flames are usually the ones that are extinguished first.” His eyes went dark for a moment. “I know what I’m talking about, Ember. I’ve seen it before. I don’t want that to happen to you.”

“It won’t,” I promised.

He paused, as if he wanted to say something more but thought better of it. For a moment, we stared at each other, both our dragons very close to the surface. Riley’s fingers still gripped my arms; I could feel the heat of his body as he stood there, gazing down at me.

Wes cleared his throat, very loudly, from the corner.

Riley blinked, as if just realizing where he was, what he was doing, and let me go. Disappointment rose up, but what surprised me was the fact that I didn’t know whose it was, mine or the dragon’s.

“It’s been a long day. Get some rest.” Riley didn’t look at me again as he turned and walked toward Wes. For a second, I had the crazy urge to grab him and pull him back, but he stepped out of my reach and the moment was lost. “Go watch TV, or download a movie or something. Order room service if you want. We’re not going to be doing anything tonight.”

I wrinkled my nose at his back. “How long are we going to be staying here?”

“Until I figure out what’s going on with the Order.” Riley reached the back of Wes’s seat and peered at the screen over his shoulder. “And when I decide that it’s safe to move out,” he added. “Until then, we sit tight. Stay in your room. Don’t go down to the casino floor. There are cameras everywhere and according to my contact, St. George is on the warpath and Talon is pretty pissed, too. It’s a good idea to lie as low as we can right now. Think you can do that, Firebrand?”

“I’ll try not to set the room on fire,” I promised, and walked out of the room. But as the door clicked behind me, I paused. Going back to my silent, empty room with only the television for company sounded depressing. I could stay in Wes’s room, but the human didn’t want me there, and besides, I wasn’t sure I could face Riley again. My dragon was still writhing and coiling beneath my skin, frustrated at being contained. If I went back in there, I might really break my promise about not setting things on fire.

Spinning around, I crossed the carpet to the door right beside Wes’s. Garret’s room. Putting my ear to the wood, I listened for movement, voices from the television, anything to tell me he was awake, but there was only silence. I hesitated a moment, then tapped softly on the wood.

“Garret? Are you in there?”

Nothing happened. No footsteps shuffled toward me, no movement, sound, or voice came from the other side. The door stayed firmly closed. I hovered in the frame a moment, debating whether or not I should try again, louder this time. But if he was asleep, or worse, ignoring me on purpose, I really didn’t want to disturb him.

Finally, I turned around and padded back to my door, feeling restless, lonely and slightly depressed. My room was quiet, and though the city twinkled and bustled outside the window, never still, the silence on this side of the glass made me feel very alone. I showered, turned up the television for noise and spent a good ten minutes figuring out how to order room service from the kitchen downstairs. When the food came I scarfed down the slightly overcooked burger in less than a minute, not having realized how ravenous I was until the first bite.

I guess gun battles and car chases work up quite the appetite. Not to mention nearly being shot to death.

My stomach turned, and my appetite vanished as quickly as it had come. Shivering, I left the fries to harden on the tray and crawled beneath the covers of the huge bed, pulling the quilt over my face. Curling into myself, I listened to the babble of the television filling the suffocating quiet, wishing I could just turn off my brain for a few hours. Garret, Dante and Riley all crowded my mind, each pulling at different emotions until I was a tangled knot of feeling inside. I finally drifted off, but kept jerking awake throughout the night as their faces, and the face of the man I’d killed, continued to chase me through my dreams.

Riley

“You’ve gone mad for the girl, haven’t you?” Wes remarked.

I glared at him from across the room. He sat on the bed with his computer in his lap, finishing off his bottle of soda. Lowering his arm, he raised a shaggy eyebrow at my expression.

“Don’t try to deny it, mate.” He gestured at me with the bottle, sending a spatter of Mountain Dew across the white bedcover. “I saw the two of you in the doorway, and you were a half second away from a full-on snog fest.”

“Dragons don’t ‘snog,’ idiot.”

“Oh, sod off. You know what I mean.” Wes shook his head, half closing his laptop to stare at me over the lid. “You’re losing it, Riley,” he said. “Ever since that bloody hatchling crashed into our affairs, your priorities have been screwed to hell and back. For Christ’s sake, we have a bloody soldier of St. George following us around! I still don’t know why you haven’t told the blighter to shove off.”

“He’s useful,” I argued. “Since he’s here, I figured we might as well take advantage of having the enemy with us. If we can get him to give up secrets about the Order—”

“Bull. Crap.” Wes glared at me. “That’s not the reason and you bloody well know it’s not. Don’t lie to me, Riley. I’ve known you too long for that.” He narrowed his eyes, his scruffy jaw tightening in anger. “It’s because of
her
. Everything we’ve done, everything that’s happened to us since Crescent Beach, is because of her. And now we’re holed up here, with Talon
and
St. George on our tail, and you’re making promises you have no way of keeping. Dangerous promises. Promises that will get us all killed. If anyone else suggested we contact someone in the organization, you would’ve either laughed in their face and told them to sod off, or punched their bloody lights out.”

“I have no intention of sending Ember’s traitor brother any kind of message,” I said, rolling my eyes. “So you can relax. I didn’t promise her anything, and I’m sure as hell not giving that Talon clone another chance to turn us in. Once was enough.”

“You’re missing the point, mate.” Wes rubbed the bridge of his nose, sounding tired. “Listen to what you just said. Once was enough?” He shook his head. “It should never have come to that. You
knew
that brother of hers was bad news. You knew he would sell us out to Talon, and you still let her go back for him. And what happened? Fucking Lilith, the organization’s best Viper assassin, tracked you down and nearly killed you both. Because that hatchling has you so twisted around her little claw, you don’t know which way is up anymore.”

I took a breath to cool the sudden rise of heat in my lungs. “How about I worry about running this circus, and you worry about keeping enemy forces from sneaking in the back door?” I suggested in a flat voice. “What I do with Ember is none of your business.”

“It’s my sodding business if it gets us all killed!”

“I’ve protected this underground for years!” I snapped in return. “Before Ember even knew what a human was, I’ve been fighting to get my kind out of Talon. I’ve worked for it, bled for it, nearly died for it more times than I can count. I’m not going to throw that away, and I’m certainly not going to lose it now. You should know me better than that.”

Wes slumped against the pillow. “I know,” he murmured. “I know you’d do anything to keep those kids safe, just like I’d do anything to screw with Talon and throw a wrench into their plans for world domination, or whatever it is they’re planning. But I’ve never seen you like this, mate. We’ve worked too hard to build this underground, to get dragons out of the organization, to weaken Talon however we can. I just want to be certain your priorities are still the same.”

“No,” I said, making him frown. “Weakening Talon, screwing with their plans, plotting to overthrow the evil empire, that’s always been
your
objective. One more hatchling that I get out of Talon is one less dragon they can use in the future.
I
go after hatchlings because I want my kind to be free.
You
go after them because you have this crazy notion that someday Talon will fall because of us. Because of what we’re doing right now.”

“Everyone has their dreams, mate.” Wes’s voice was low, his eyes hard. “I know you don’t believe it will happen, that Talon is too big, but I’ve seen giants crumble and empires brought down. It has to start somewhere. And if you don’t think that what we’re doing now will matter, even if it’s beyond our lifetimes, then what is the bloody point of all this?”

An ominous beep from his laptop interrupted us. Wes jumped and pushed the lid back, bending low. His fingers flew across the keyboard as he hunched forward, his nose only a few inches from the screen, brow furrowed in concentration. I moved up beside him, feeling tense and slightly sick, hoping that alarm didn’t mean what I feared it would.

“What happened?”

Wes’s fingers froze. His face blanched, and he slumped back against the headboard with a hollow thump. His face was blank with resignation as he looked up, and I knew what he would say before he opened his mouth.

“We’ve lost another nest. St. George is moving in.”

Garret

Why am I still here?

I tilted my face to the hot stream of water, letting it pound my forehead and sluice around me, trying to drown the question that had been plaguing my mind for the past three days. The water ran into my ears, muffling all sound, to no avail. I was used to long periods of inactivity, waiting for orders or for missions to begin, but I couldn’t escape my own thoughts.

This afternoon had passed in silence; television had no appeal, and since I wasn’t allowed to leave the floor, I’d leafed through random travel magazines or just lain on my bed, staring at the ceiling. Finally, needing to do
something
, I’d spent the rest of the afternoon working out in my room, pushing my body to the limits of its endurance, hoping that fatigue, at least, would provide a much-needed distraction. But the second I’d walked into the shower, it returned. The whisper that still haunted me, that nagging sensation of uncertainty and doubt, when before I’d always been so confident. Why was I still here? Why was I, a former soldier of St. George, choosing to remain in the company of dragons? I wasn’t a prisoner; though the rogue dragon hated me—with good reason—he wouldn’t try to stop me if I walked out the hotel door and vanished into the night. On more than one occasion, he’d encouraged me to do just that.

So why hadn’t I?

The obvious answer—because the Order was hunting me—was a stall at best. I was resourceful enough to evade their notice for a while. And while St. George paid their soldiers only a small stipend each month, they also provided us with everything we needed, so I had a sizable amount sitting in an account I rarely touched. It wouldn’t last forever, but it was enough to start over, to begin a new life.

The real question was: Could I pass for normal? I’d lived my whole life within Order walls, only venturing out when there were dragons to be slain. I had little experience of the real world beyond that brief summer in Crescent Beach and, truthfully, with no one giving me commands, telling me where to go, I felt slightly lost. My existence until now had been habit and structure and routine—the life of a soldier—and I’d welcomed that order, knowing exactly who I was. Left to my own devices, I felt I was wandering aimlessly, waiting for something to happen.

But fear, even fear of the unknown, had never stopped me before. I didn’t need a command to walk away, to leave my strange new companions behind, to fade into anonymity. I was a trained soldier, and survival was one of my strong suits; even with a price on my head, I could manage the real world if I had to. What was stopping me?

With a sigh, I placed my palms against the tile wall and bowed my head, letting the water beat my shoulders and run down my skin. I knew the answer, of course, why I hadn’t left. It wasn’t because of St. George, or Talon. It wasn’t because I owed these dragons my life, or that I felt I could fight the Order that raised me. It wasn’t even the guilt, the memories of blood and death that kept me up at night now. It wasn’t any of those reasons.

It was Ember.

I shut off the water, toweled briefly and pulled on my last pair of semiclean jeans, one of two pairs to my name. I’d need new clothes soon. Wes had gotten me the essentials while we were holed up in the abandoned house, waiting for Ember to recover, but I couldn’t count on him or Riley now. Especially since I suspected something had gone down with the rogue’s network; last night, he and Wes had been talking in low, angry voices, and this morning, when I’d ventured out for a soda, Riley had stalked past me down the hall, his face like a thundercloud. He hadn’t looked like he was inclined to share what had happened, and I’d known better than to ask.

Shirtless, I wandered to the window and stared at the glittering sea below. The sun was setting behind the distant mountains, and a haze had settled over the urban sprawl of Las Vegas. Where was St. George? I wondered. What was happening in the Order? Were they still out there, hunting for me?

And what am I supposed to do now?

A sharp rap on my door had me automatically reaching for a gun that wasn’t there. With a grimace, I snatched a
T-shirt from the bed and pulled it on while walking across the room. Peering through the eyehole, I felt a strange flood of both tension and relief wash over me, before I pulled back the lock and opened the door.

“Ha. There you are.” Ember grinned at me, making my stomach knot. She wore shorts and a loose tank top, and looked perfectly normal standing there in my door frame. Like any other human girl. “I was afraid you might’ve snuck out the window or something. Didn’t you hear me knocking last night, or were you already asleep?”

My heart beat faster as I faced that familiar smile. She was a dragon, I reminded myself. Not evil or soulless as I’d once believed, but an alien creature nonetheless. Not human. I stifled the urge to touch her, to reach out and ease the worry in her eyes, the exhaustion she was trying to mask. A memory of another room, another time when it had been just the two of us, rose up to taunt me. I ruthlessly shoved it back.

I shook my head. “No, I didn’t hear you. But I might’ve been in the bathroom.” Truth was, I hadn’t slept at all the night we’d arrived, and only a couple hours since. Not that I’d expected to. I’d been trained to survive on very little sleep, but more important, it was difficult to relax when there was a price on your head. And since the rogue dragon had all the weapons and I was currently unarmed, sleep was out of the question.

Ember looked at me expectantly, green eyes shining beneath her bangs. I sighed and took a step back. “Do you want to come in?”

She beamed and scurried across the threshold, gazing eagerly around as I closed the door and locked it out of habit. I heard a snort, imagined her shaking her head.

“Jeez, Garret. Two days, and your room doesn’t look like it’s been touched. Are you making
your own
hotel bed? You do know there’s a maid service here, right?”

I managed a tired smile as I turned around. “Where I come from,” I told her, “if they ever discovered you let an old lady clean up your mess, you’d never live it down.”

“Whatever. I’ll take any excuse not to clean my room.” She hopped onto one of the neatly made beds, rumpling it nicely. “If I can see my floor through all the clothes, I consider that a win. Besides, didn’t you know, Garret? A messy room is a sign of genius.”

“I’ve never been inside your house,” I reminded her in a grave voice, “but if that’s true, I have the feeling I’m talking with the smartest person on the planet.”

She reached back and threw a pillow at me. I dodged, hearing her laughter ripple up, wicked and bright and cheerful. A strange lightness filled my chest, and I found myself smiling, too. Snatching the pillow from the floor, I prepared to hurl it back.

And caught myself, a cold chill driving away the amusement.

Too easy
, I realized. Too easy to relax around her, to slip back into that role I’d adopted over the summer. A normal civilian, unguarded and carefree. Which was extremely dangerous, because this situation was anything but normal. I could not afford to drop my guard, even for her. Perhaps she’d come here to escape, to forget the reality of our situation. Maybe she wanted to pretend everything was normal for a while. But I couldn’t be that person she wanted, that ordinary boy from Crescent Beach. I was a soldier of St. George; I’d killed too many, hunted her kind with the sole intention of driving them to extinction. My hands were stained with the blood of countless dragons. No matter what my feelings, I could never escape that.

Stone-faced, I replaced the pillow, not looking at her. “Why are you here, Ember?” I asked. “Did you need something?”

“Actually, yes.” I looked up and found her watching me with a certain maniacal glee in her eyes. “You can come downstairs with me,” she announced. “Right now. I swear, if I have to watch one more pay-per-view, I’m going to set something on fire.”

“Downstairs?” I repeated, and she nodded eagerly. “To the casino? Why?”

“Because it’s Vegas!” Ember exclaimed, throwing up her hands. “Because we’re here. Because I’m literally going to start climbing the walls if I don’t get out and
do
something.” She raised her chin, and her eyes glinted. “And because I went to Riley’s room to see if he has any new information on Talon and St. George, and he had already left.”

I straightened quickly. “He’s gone? Where?”

“No idea. I tried asking Wes, but he just said Riley had ‘important things to do’—” she put air quotes around the phrase, rolling her eyes “—and wouldn’t tell me what. Of course, he left without telling us, or leaving any hint as to where he went or when he’ll be back. So much for trusting me, I guess.”

With a sniff, she hopped off the bed, grinning up at me. “So, come on, Garret. We’re in Vegas, the night is young and we have fake IDs. Even you must realize what we could do with those.”

“We aren’t supposed to leave the floor.”

She actually growled at me. “If you want to stay here and mope and be boring, I can’t force you to come,” she said. “But
I
am going downstairs. The hotel is safe enough. Riley said so himself. Talon and St. George don’t know where we are, and even if they see me, they’re not going to shoot me in the middle of a crowded casino with guards and cameras and people everywhere.” She bounced past me, heading toward the door. “I won’t be long. I just need a change of scenery before I go completely nuts. If you see Wes, tell him I’m looking for Riley.”

I grimaced. “Wait,” I said, and caught up to her in the doorway. This was not a good idea, and I knew this wasn’t a good idea, but I didn’t want Ember to be alone down there. If something went terribly wrong, at least I would be there to help.

She grinned as I exited the room, and I shook my head. “Just for the record,” I told her as the door clicked shut, “this is the exact opposite of the term ‘lying low.’” She shrugged, waving it off, and I followed her down the hall. “Doesn’t gambling cost money?” I asked as we neared the elevators. “How are you going to pay for anything?”

“I have a little cash,” Ember replied. “Enough for penny slots, anyway. It’s not like I’ll be playing roulette or poker with the professionals, not unless I score really, really well. But who knows?” Her eyes sparkled as the elevator doors opened and we stepped inside. “Maybe I’ll get lucky.”