Chapter Four
Ella
I cut the engine on my motorcycle and with a well practiced ease, coasted down the long driveway that led to the small house where I lived. It was set far back from the road – Jacob always wanted to be aware when somebody was coming. But it also made it easier for me to sneak in and out.
I got off and pushed my bike into the barn and put the kickstand down in the former horse stall I parked in. Poking my head out of the side door, I breathed a small sigh of relief when I saw that all of the lights in the house were still off. Jacob was asleep.
Stepping outside, I gently closed the door and quietly moved across the packed dirt yard to the back door. Avoiding the steps that squeaked, I stepped up onto the porch and grasped the doorknob, quietly turning it – congratulating myself once again for being genius enough to oil all the hinges, making exit and entry a lot quieter.
But the moment I stepped into the kitchen, I knew I was screwed. I felt him the moment I stepped inside. His presence had an almost physical weight to it –one that was unmistakeable.
“Turn on the lights, Ella,” his voice came from the darkness.
I sighed and reached out, flipping the light switch and bathing the kitchen in fluorescent light. Sitting at the table was Jacob and he looked none too pleased.
“Little late for a ride, isn't it?” he asked.
“Look, Jacob, I –”
“How many times have I told you that you're not ready to fly solo yet, kid?” Jacob asked. “You're still green. You still have a lot to learn.”
“I'm always going to have a lot to learn!” I shouted. “One of the first things you said when you started training me was that I'd never know everything and I needed to get over that fact right then and there. Do you remember that? Because I sure do.”
“That doesn't mean you should be running off in the middle of the night, doing God knows what,” he said. “You're going to get yourself killed like that. You're not ready, Ella.”
“No? And when exactly will I be ready?”
Jacob sighed and clasped his hands together on the table in front of him, looking at me with an intensity that was unnerving. I did my best to keep my face neutral, to not let him see that I was fearful or intimidated by him. I was a trained fighter. A warrior.
“You'll be ready when I say you're ready,” he snapped. “When I feel confident enough to present you to the Council.”
“And when is that going to be?” I snapped back. “You've said it a million times, I'm the best fighter you've ever trained –”
“You are,” he replied, forcing himself to stay calm. “But you still let your emotions cloud your judgment out there in the field. You're still fighting a fight that's sixteen years old, Ella.”
The reference to the death of my parents still stung as badly in that moment as it had the night they'd been killed. There wasn't a day that went by that I didn't still think of them. Miss them. I took up the cause, and joined the Order, to avenge their deaths. I fought for them every bit as much as I fought for the people of the city. It was for their memory that I'd become a warrior.
“Jacob, I've told you before that my emotion is what gives me an edge,” I said. “It doesn't cloud my thinking. It fuels me. Sustains me. Keeps me going in this fight.”
“Yeah, and it will until it doesn't,” he said. “And gets you killed.”
“Well, then I guess you wouldn't have to put up with me anymore if it did, would you?”
He looked at me evenly, but I could see something in his eyes I couldn't place. Hurt? Anger? Something.
“Ella,” he said. “I've been caring for you like my own since that night I found you. I only want to keep you safe and do what's best for you.”
I knew what he was saying was true. Knew he only wanted to protect me. But I was already in a rage. I was angry that he wouldn't cut me loose to run my own missions. Angry that I felt he was holding me back. Angry and feeling smothered. Chained up and shackled.
“You're not going to be able to keep me safe forever, Jacob,” I snapped. “I'm not Patty. Not that you kept her safe.”
The look of pure hurt in his eyes hit me like a punch to the gut. My cruelty drove the breath from my lungs and all I wanted to do in that moment was rush over to Jacob, throw my arms around him, and tell him how sorry I was for crossing that line. A line I should have known better than to get anywhere near, let alone cross.
Jacob stood up, not meeting my eyes and I felt that stab of guilt straight through my heart once more. The sadness I saw etched into his face was tearing me to pieces. Finally, he looked up at me.
“No, you're not Patty,” was all he said before he turned and walked out of the kitchen, leaving me alone with my thoughts and my guilt.
I got a bottle of water out of the refrigerator and headed up to my room. Getting to the top of the stairs, I saw the light on underneath Jacob's door and gave brief thought to going and talking to him. Apologizing. But then the light went off, so I scrapped the thought.
I stepped into my room and shut the door softly behind me, kicking myself the whole time. I dropped down into the seat at my desk and fired up the computer. I was still wired from my adventure and not ready to sleep just yet. Besides, I had a few things I wanted to research.
As I waited for it to boot up, I took a drink from the bottle and then put the cap back on. I was so far out of line with my remark about Patty and I knew it. The weight of the guilt pressing down on me was oppressive and hurt to even think about.
Patty is what had led Jacob to the Order in the first place. She had been his daughter and like my parents, she'd been killed by some dark creature. It wasn't the Scales, but something else. To this day, he couldn't quite describe what it was, but from everything he'd said, it sounded to me, like a werewolf. But who knew exactly?
Watching his daughter get ripped to pieces by something he couldn't understand, let alone identify, was going to make his memory hazy. It wasn't surprising that he couldn't say exactly what it had been that had killed Patty. If I'd been left to my own devices, I probably wouldn't have been able to describe the creatures that had killed my parents. Not in any way believable to the cops. They probably would have assumed that my coping mechanism to seeing such a horror was to make up some fantastical creature. A monster that didn't exist.
After Patty's death, Jacob said he'd been lost. Adrift. A ship without a rudder. Until the Order had found him. They'd given him a sense of purpose. Renewal. A focus and discipline he'd lost after seeing his daughter brutally killed.
Our paths were very similar. Of course, most of the people who made up the Order had a similar tale of loss and tragedy. I only wish that Jacob could see that we used our emotions differently and no one way was inherently better than the other. I wasn't careless or reckless. My emotion made me much more ruthless and effective.
I sighed. Jacob would never understand that though. Even though he'd trained me to be an efficient killer, he wanted to protect me. Keep me safe. Do what he couldn't do with Patty. And it led him to be a little overbearing. I wished he could see that.
But Jacob had taken me in. Had given me a home and a life. He'd treated me like his own, he hadn't been lying over overstating things. And for my part, I'd come to think of him as a father figure. No, he'd never replace the father I'd lost, but Jacob had done his best to fill that void. He'd given me a sense of purpose and direction. Without him, who knows where I'd be.
I was in the wrong for saying what I'd said. I needed to make amends for that. And I would make sure to do that first thing in the morning.
Sitting up in my chair, I logged into my computer and pulled up a search engine. I shifted my focus from what had happened with Jacob to what I'd seen earlier – something I would need to share with him in the morning after hopefully, patching things up with him.
My mind was consumed with the man in the lot – the man I'd followed down into the sewers, and the man I'd tried to kill. He obviously wasn't a man. Not a human man, at any rate. I'd seen him spit fire onto that Scale – a fire that had consumed it. To the best of my knowledge, fire couldn't touch the Scales. Only a bronze blade could kill them.
Which meant that we were dealing with something unknown to us. Something dangerous.
I plugged in as many keywords as I could, searching for information on what I'd seen. I found blog post after blog post about a variety of paranormal creatures who could spit fire. But none of them fit. None of them looked – human. And the creature I saw had most definitely looked human. He was bipedal, fought with two blades, and most importantly – bled. If it bled, it could be killed.
I read more posts than I could count and still came up empty. Whatever it was, remained a mystery. It was something I was obviously going to have to share with Jacob. Perhaps, he had information or an idea about what I'd seen.
I was just about to shut down for the night and get some sleep when a blog post caught my attention. It was just some random kid's blog and looked like it hadn't been updated in some time. It also wasn't very highly viewed, garnering just a pair of comments – one by the writer himself.
What caught my attention though, was a supposed eyewitness account of a man – whose description sounded very much like the man I'd wounded earlier – battling some unknown creature with a pair of long, curved daggers. It sounded very familiar, but could have been coincidental. Perhaps there were other hunters around the city.
No, what made this account different was the claim that the man wielding the curved daggers had spouted fire from his mouth before turning into a dragon. The account goes on to state that the dragon was roughly eight feet tall, had a wide wingspan, dark green scales all over its body, and eyes that glowed red, as with an inner fire.
“Dragons?” I asked myself. “Seriously?”
I leaned back in my seat and took another drink of water. Given what I did, what I saw, and what I fought on a regular basis, I shouldn't let myself be surprised by anything. But for some reason, dragons – or rather, men who could transform into dragons – seemed a bridge too far.
I honestly didn't know how much credence to give that posting. The similarities between what was described and what I'd seen though, were striking. It was almost uncanny. But dragons? If nothing else, it gave me a place to start. Something to use as I dug into it a little more.
The one thing that gave me pause though, and the thing I couldn't quite figure out, was that the man – or dragon – or whatever it really was, had been fighting the Scales. It had killed one of them and was chasing the second – presumably to kill it too. But why?
All my life, I'd been trained and taught to kill all those things that were not human. It was deeply ingrained in me. And over the course of my time with the Order, I'd seen no reason to believe that those things we hunted weren't evil. That they weren't a threat to humanity.
These creatures sometimes fought one another over territory or whatever. This was probably one of those cases. I'd been right to try to kill that thing in the sewer. My only failing was in not actually killing it.
I had more questions than answers at the moment. But my eyes were getting heavy as exhaustion set in. Finding answers to those questions could wait for now. I'd be better able to think them over in the morning after I'd gotten some rest.
And of course, after I'd made amends with Jacob.