Chapter Three – Kris

 

“Enjoy your vacation?”

Hunter strolled down the hall towards me, his dark beard full and wild. Before he’d gone in, he’d been lean and athletic, but he’d managed to pack on some mass, his chest widening and his arms thickening. The arctic clothes, puffy and full of padded insulation, seemed to strain around his biceps and pecs more than before, and his legs now looked more powerful. Sure, he was a little pasty from the lack of sun, but that was nothing a good day out by the pool wouldn’t fix.

The sight seemed to buoy me, to raise my spirits like the jet stream beneath my leathery wings. Besides Harrington, he was the first friendly face I’d seen in months, and I had to restrain myself from running and throwing my arms around his shoulders.

“Three months in Club Tundra,” he said, smiling that little half-smile of his as he came to a stop in front of me and hitched his pack higher on his shoulder. “What wasn’t to love? You come through all right?”

I smiled and nodded as the assembled half-dozen soldiers and Col. Harrington looked on. “Can’t complain. Glad to be leaving, of course.”

“Without a doubt.” His eyes glanced down to my shoulder, and, as if on reflex, he stepped forward with his hand out. “Here, let me get this. I’m a professional.”

Before I realized what he was doing, Hunter straightened out my backpack’s strap, his body close enough that I could smell his faint, manly musk. I glanced up as he reached down, tightening the strap a little.

“It was a little loose,” he explained as my eyes drifted up to his. The corner of his lips turned up slightly. “Wouldn’t want it to slip while we were going up the ladder.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

The colonel cleared his throat, getting both of our attention. “We have a plane warming its engines already up on the river,” the colonel said, stepping forward. His eyes traveled up the shaft Hunter and I had used three months prior to descend into the depths of the bunker we’d still never fully explored. “I trust the pilot, and he’ll get you back to Anchorage before nightfall.”

“Same way we came in?” I asked.

Col. Harrington nodded.

“Thank you,” Hunter said, stepping forward, a smile creasing his lips beneath the thick whiskers of his mustache, “but, if it’s all the same to you, Harrington, no thank you.” The colonel’s eyes widened the barest fraction of an inch before Hunter continued. “I’ve spent three months in a cell. I like to believe I was given wings for a reason, and I’m of the mind to use them.”

The colonel went to open his mouth, but shut it as Hunter continued.

“You said so yourself, Harrington, we’re not part of the PDB, or the PRB. As much as I’m loath to point it out, we can do as we please.”

A tight, almost pained smile grew on Col. Harrington’s face as I looked back and forth between the two men. Over the months we’d worked together to find the colonel, I’d come to realize the amount of animosity between the two men. It was baffling to finally see it with my own eyes. Whatever magic Col. Harrington had used to make us completely unaware of it in the past was clearly faded.

“Isn’t that right, Kris?” Hunter asked, turning to me, eyebrow raised. “We’re our own dragons now.”

I bit my lip as I considered the file I had tucked away in my rucksack, swaddled protectively in a long underwear top. I could practically feel the colonel’s eyes boring into me like an oil company going after black gold. But something about Hunter’s tone clicked with what I’d been feeling.

Three months locked up inside one room. No chance to spread my wings, no chance to even go for a run. I was a dragon, damn it, not a mole person. Even if I did have a file on Hunter hidden in my bag, he was still right. We were our own dragons. At least for the time being.

“You know what?” I smiled a little. “You’re right, Hunter.”

“Kris,” Col. Harrington said, a note of warning to his voice, “are you sure about this?”

I turned to him. “I may or may not be your soldier again in a week. But in the meantime, I’m still just a civilian. We’re flying out of here under our own power.”

Hunter’s smile broadened. “Hear that, Harrington? She’s getting away from you.”

Harrington frowned. “I don’t like this.” Behind him, his fatigues-clad, black-masked soldiers didn’t betray any emotion.

“Well, we didn’t particularly like being cooped up for three months, either,” Hunter snapped. He lifted his eyes, gazing longingly up the shaft at the giant sealed door we’d last seen months ago. “But we all play with what we’re dealt. Don’t we, Harrington?”

Col. Harrington winced a bit at Hunter’s words. His nostrils flared as he sighed. “Fine. Just, stay beneath the radar, please? I’d hate to have to figure out how to cover up not just one, but two dragons getting spotted in US airspace.”

“Don’t worry, Colonel,” I said. “I’m the best operative you’ve seen. Remember?”

“Well, don’t make me eat my words,” Col. Harrington said as Hunter grabbed one of the ladder rungs and began to pull himself up to the surface. My former CO offered his hand. “One week?”

“One week,” I replied as we shook hands. “Count on it.”

The colonel stayed at the bottom of the tunnel shaft, hands clasped tightly behind his back as he watched both Hunter and me climb up towards the giant vault door we’d descended through nearly three months prior. When we were halfway to the top, he finally spoke to one of his subordinates.

“Agent Ramirez.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Get that hatch open for them. I’d appreciate not having any more claw marks on my front door than necessary.”

“Yes, sir.”

Moments later, electric motors whined and began to spin up, as red lights set into the bunker walls all around us began to flash, and a claxon sounded. Up above, metal and concrete ground on each other as the nearly ten-foot-in-diameter vault door slowly began to swing out from its housing. Daylight shone blindingly around the edges as fresh, freezing air came rushing in, sending snowflakes swirling past Hunter and me like desperate infiltrators flittering into the base.

The temperature in the shaft dropped fifty degrees within seconds, sending an involuntary chill through me and setting my teeth to chattering.

Hunter growled loudly, his exclamation nearly sending a vibration down the ladder that seemed to reverberate through my gloved hands and the soles of my boots. “Smell that? Fresh fucking air!”

I grinned as I paused, watching him pull himself up over the ledge and roll over into the snow. When he was clear of the hatch, I followed after him, my lips still stretched with glee as the tundra winds blasted me full on in the face. As my hand reached for the last rung before the top, Hunter appeared over me, hand offered.

If it had been any of the shifters back at Full Moon, or even Col. Harrington, I probably would have declined. But, for whatever reason, I took Hunter’s strong hand and let him pull me up and into the Alaska air. And, despite the cold air rushing in, that smell of his still lingered. How in the hell he’d managed to smell that good after three months in a goddamn cell was beyond me, but he had.

“Thanks,” I said, climbing to my feet, eyes squinted against the all-enveloping white that now surrounded us.

He stood there, snow and ice already frosting over his beard like his first name should be Jack. Behind me, the engines and gears reversed, and I turned around as the giant vault door began to swing back into place like the world’s largest pot lid covering a vast cauldron, complete with steam rising into the winter air.

The door settled into place with a metallic finality, the chunk of vast steel finally coming to rest. I turned back to my partner in crime, sucked in a deep breath of cold, but impossibly real and fresh, air. So cold, in fact, it burned like I’d somehow inhaled my own dragon fire as it filled my lungs. I dug into the pocket of my parka, found my compass. I pulled it out, holding it steady as the arrow swung round and pointed northwards.

Before I could say anything, though, Hunter turned around like a spinning magnet and pointed in the exact direction with one outstretched finger. “The lodestone in my nose says that’s north.”

Hands on my hips, I nodded the opposite direction. “How the hell’d you do that?”

Grinning, he turned back to me. “Practice.”

I rolled my eyes as I turned to face south, to the sparsely forested stretch of deep and powdery snow. Heavy winds rose up, blowing like sandpaper over my rosy cheeks. “Guess that means we’re headed that direction.”

He ran a gloved hand down over his lean cheeks and defined chin, knocking the frost and snow from his beard. “A bit colder than I remember.”

I bit my already chapped lips as I looked at him. “Sure you don’t want to catch that flight? Save us a lot of trouble?”

Another half-smile appeared on Hunter’s lips as he unslung his pack from his back and dropped it to his feet. “And give Harrington a chance to think he was right? Thank you, but I believe I’ll pass.” His fingers found his coat’s zipper and pulled it down as he turned his back to me.

Chuckling, I did the same. With each article of clothing I stripped off, the cold felt more intense on my skin. Each piece I stuffed away in my pack.

“Nervous?” I asked through chattering teeth as I stuffed my bra away in the pack, gooseflesh covering my body as freezingly cold wind abraded me. Even with such a deep sack, I was still struggling to shove everything into place.

“About what?” Hunter asked.

“Going home.”

He snorted. “I’m more concerned about my houseplants than anything else. This trip was supposed to be just over a week, remember?”

I winced a little, despite not detecting any accusation in his tone. He was right, after all. I had been the one to push for this. I had been the one to drag him up here. I’d been the one to get us both captured and imprisoned for three months, falsely or otherwise.

And look what I’d found.

The last couple hours, I’d been struggling to come to terms with this new opportunity in my life. Because that’s what I thought of it as. Had to think of it as. An opportunity.

But, as I folded my simple cotton panties and stuffed them away, the snow almost up to my knees, my eyes focused on the file folder Col. Harrington had given me. I’d barely had any time to go through it properly before we left, but I was almost surprised a rap sheet as big as his fit into the bag.

Maybe Hunter had changed, though? Maybe he wasn’t such a craven criminal anymore?

“Kris,” he said from behind me, “you ready?”

I glanced back over my shoulder, immediately blushing.

He was standing there, turned away from me, his shoulders pushed back and almost defiant in the face of the north. Lean, corded muscles, his legs perfectly sculpted, his glutes amazing. Like Michelangelo’s David carved from marble and given life in this frozen wasteland.

I turned back around. “Almost.”

“Good. My mother-in-law’s tongue won’t water itself, you know.”

Arms wrapped around my body, I went to stand. With our backs still to each other, we began our shift.

Dragons.

We’re not like normal shifters. Which is kind of an ironic, counterintuitive statement. What is normal, exactly? Especially when you’re dealing with the supernatural?

Our bodies don’t contort or lengthen, our muscles don’t bulge, and we don’t sprout hair or scales. Our bodies are just there one moment, and the next we are in our draconic form. Whereas a wolf or a panther or a lion or a bear shifts its body, and what it’s capable of, we almost seem to incomprehensibly shift reality around us.

One second, we’re human.

The next second, we’re not.

I raised my face to the heavens and closed my glowing green eyes as the wind rushed over my scaled body. Thirty feet long from snout to tail, and a wingspan to match, I sighed deeply as I fell back into my true existence as Coal, the last warden of my father’s bloodline, and one of the last dragons in the world.

Maybe I’d be the final dragon with the name Coal? Maybe I wouldn’t. After all, I still had five or six centuries to decide if I wanted children. Maybe I’d have them late in life like my rabble-rousing father had.

But, regardless, I was the last one still standing. Mother gone, father gone.

Samuel Fitzgerald and I once talked over a bottle of scotch about what it meant to be a shifter for him. Was he a human who became a wolf, or a wolf that became human? Where was that line? He wasn’t sure. Sometimes he would embrace his bloodthirsty side. Other times, he would force it down and be nothing more than a soldier.

For me and Hunter, though, there was no line. We were both dragons down to our sinews and bones. Our human shapes were like the clothes I’d just stuffed away in my backpack. Necessary at times, but still just an outer layer.

I lowered my head and shifted around in the snow to face the dragon behind me.

Harrow had returned to his true form. A sleek black dragon, larger than I was by a third, and heavier by ten or fifteen tons, his scales a glistening contrast to the crystalline white powder already melting all around us. It boggled the mind to consider that his human existence was built around being a cat burglar, a lithe and dexterous pursuit.

He was a sight to behold, and I had to tear my eyes away from his lustrous scales, his burning red eyes.

“Ready?” he growled, his dragon lips stretching back in a toothy, predatory grin.

Returning his fang-filled smile, I gave him a nod. I shifted in the snow, hooked one claw delicately through the strap of my pack. Flicked it in the air, caught it with ease in one giant foot. Settling back on our haunches, together we turned south, pointing our snouts toward Anchorage.

“Stop in a town a couple hours north of there, travel back as humans?” Harrow asked.

“Agreed.” I primed my legs, spread and flexed my wings. Below us, the shadows spread wide like an oil spill. I launched myself nearly a hundred feet into the air, beat my wings twice in the cold winds, and propelled myself forward like a bullet.

Unable to hold myself back, I let loose a violent roar of domination, which echoed over the land. Tree branches shuddered as piled snow went tumbling down to the tundra floor, and eddies of drift swept out away from us with every beat of my wings.

Beside me, Harrow rose on the winds, his great black wings casting their own deep shadows as we seemed to race against each other, and time itself. Each stroke of his powerful wings buffeted me, just as mine buffeted him, and we flew south in tandem towards Anchorage, our bodies practically scraping the treetops as we stayed below radar.

When was the last time I’d even flown under my own power, let alone with another dragon beside me?

God, I was free from that place! Three achingly long months of uncertainty and confusion. Who cared if all I had was more confusion and decisions to make in the coming week? What did it matter that I was being asked to sign up for another tour of duty with an organization I didn’t know anything about, and barely trusted?

The Arctic sun above was shining, the world below was glaring, but I was here with my wings outstretched and my snout pointed home!

Today was a good day to be a dragon!