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  I scramble backward, unwilling to turn my back on Ion, though I can’t move as quickly as he can when he can see where he’s going and I have no idea what I might bump into behind me. The unearthly wail of yagi has died down, at least. I think we’ve killed most of them.

  Ion sidesteps another tree. He swings his sword at my neck. I sprint for the lake, splashing into the shallows in my stocking feet. Ion follows me, laughing, swelling, growing.

  He’s going to turn into a dragon, isn’t he?

  Ram charges toward us, breathing fire at Ion as I wade deeper into the lake to escape the flames. As I watch, Ram leaps forward, morphing into a dragon as he lunges through the air, still breathing fire, extending his talons toward Ion as though to shred him on impact.

  But just as quickly, Ion changes, too. Talons meet talons with the sound of a score of swordsmen, blade on blade, piercing the night as fire billows from their mouths.

  I’m rib-deep in the lake now and duck to avoid the flames. When I come up for air a moment later, the two dragons are in the sky, screaming and clashing and tearing at one another. Ram slashes at Ion, who brings his spiked tail around like a club to block the blow. But just as quickly, Ram pivots in the air, coming up under Ion headfirst, aiming the two pointed horns on his head at Ion’s belly.

  Ion doesn’t have time to move out of the way.

  Ram’s horns make contact and rip through Ion’s underbelly.

  Blood drips from the monster as Ion turns his back on Ram and flies away through the night, clutching his injuries with both hands.

  Ram slashes after him only briefly before swooping around, lowering himself down from the sky with his mighty wings even as he returns to human form, his wings the last to go. He lands in the shallows facing me, wearing a pair of boxer shorts and his swords. He’s panting.

  I wade through the water toward him. “Where’s Ozzie? Is she okay?” I’m about to step past him when he stretches his arm out, catches me, and pulls me against his shoulder.

  I instinctively tense—this is too similar to the way Ion caught me, held me, and threatened me mere moments ago. But Ram’s hold is not tight.

  “Don’t look.” His words are heavy, almost choking.

  The moonlight reflects off the water and I can see more clearly here than I have all night. I look into Ram’s face. More than sweat is dripping down his face.

  Is he crying?

  I can see clearly that he is. I just can’t quite accept that it’s true. Ram doesn’t strike me as the crying type. Invincible guys don’t cry, do they?

  “She wanted it this way. She wanted to go down fighting, not wasting away.”

  “No.” I shake my head and stumble past Ram, splashing in the shallows. “No!”

  I reach the campsite. The twitching yagi have nearly stilled, a vaporous mist rising from their bodies, stinging my eyes. I can see Ozzie’s still form among them, completely motionless, Ion’s sword jutting up through her chest.

  I start to pick my way past the yagi toward her.

  “There’s nothing you can do for her. She’s dead.” Ram’s hand falls on my shoulder.

  Torn between struggling forward to Ozzie and turning away, I stop still, stare a moment longer, and then let Ram pull me backward, away from the fallen yagi and the stinging vapor that’s rising from their dissipating bodies.

  “No,” I whisper, even though I know it’s true, even though I know she’s gone, there’s nothing I can do, and she probably wasn’t going to make it home, anyway. “She was protecting me. That sword was meant for me. I’m alive because—” grief chokes off my words and I can only point feebly toward the dog who was a friend to me when I had no other friends.

  “She wanted it this way,” Ram whispers.

  I look him full in the face, wanting to protest, to insist that a guy who can transform into a dragon should have been able to save my dog, but I know that’s not true. Theoretically, I can transform into a dragon, too, but that didn’t help Ozzie.

  So instead of saying anything I just stare at Ram that much longer, watching the tears overflow his eyes until I don’t think I can stand any longer and I reach my hand toward him to steady myself.

  Ram’s hand is still on my shoulder. As I lean in toward him, he wraps his arm around me and settles my head against his chest. I can feel the grief choking inside him helplessly, and I bawl alongside him, ugly sobs that wrack my body with lurching spasms of hurt.

  I’m crying harder than I ever cried into Ozzie’s shoulder, and on top of loss I feel guilt, that Ozzie died to protect me, that Ram lost his dog because of me, that Ram gave me his dog and I got her killed.

  On the tail of my guilt comes resentment that I am a hunted thing. I didn’t ask to be a dragon. I don’t want to be a dragon. For so long I wanted to know who I am, but now that I know, I almost wish I could un-know it. Or better yet, be something else.

  But didn’t Ion offer me that already?

  Temptation and grief war inside me, fueled by guilt that somehow I did this, that if I was other than what I am, Ozzie would still be alive.

  I place my hands against Ram’s collarbones and peel my face away from his chest. I can see his eyes again. They’re lovely, glowing like starlight, twinkling like sapphires. But Ion’s eyes are lovely, too.

  “Ion said they could make me human.”

  Ram freezes, his stare suddenly turned to ice.

  “Just human,” I continue. “Not a dragon anymore.”

  Ram shakes his head slowly. “No. It doesn’t work like that.”

  “How do you know? Maybe it can. Ion said it can.”

  Ram narrows his eyes slightly—not angry, but just like he’s trying to understand. “Is that what you really want?”

  The answer is so obvious, I almost choke on it. “Ozzie is dead because I’m a dragon.”

  “Ozzie is dead because of Ion.”

  “Because I’m a dragon.” I don’t want to fight with him. “Ion understood. I didn’t even have to tell him how I felt. He knew. He came to me and offered that they could make me human—only human.”

  Ram’s jaw clenches so tight I can see it under his eyes, in spite of his beard. “Do you know how he knew?”

  “Because he understands me.”

  “No. No.” Ram draws a deep breath, shaking his head slowly, and once again, apology fills his eyes. I am so sick of seeing apology in his eyes. He sucks in another breath, kind of ragged this time, like he’s fighting to tell me something he desperately doesn’t want to say.

  “What?” I prompt him.

  “That’s how your mother died.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “What?” I choke on the question.

  “Eudora told your mother she could make her only human. After her victory making the yagi, people believed her. Your mother went to her. Until that moment, no one realized your mother was a dragon, or that there even was another female dragon besides Eudora.”

  “I thought your mother—”

  “My mother had died by then.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  Ram dips his head in acknowledgement. His beard twitches and he finds his words. “Your mother’s name was Faye. Faye Goodwin. She went to Eudora, but it was a trap. Faye realized it too late and tried to get away. But your father had someone working near Eudora, keeping an eye on her—”

  “A spy?”

  “Yes. Your father had a spy watching Eudora. He got word of what was happening and flew to your mother’s rescue. That’s how they met—when he arrived to free her. Unfortunately, she was gravely injured by this time. He took her as far as he could and tried to nurse her back to health. In the process they fell in love.

  “The yagi tracked them down and attacked. Your father tried to defend her, but Eudora fought him. The yagi killed your mother.”

  It’s a long time before either of us speak. Somehow, even though I’ve always known my mother was dead, hearing how she died makes it more real. And terrible. “Didn’t you say before that
you were there—that you helped my father escape?”

  Ram hangs his head as though ashamed. “I did what I could. Your mother was badly injured already, and we were vastly outnumbered. To be honest, my biggest concern was getting the egg to safety without anyone knowing it ever existed, before the yagi destroyed it, too.”

  “The egg?”

  “Your egg. You.” Ram’s eyes twinkle for the first time since he landed in the lake and saw I was okay.

  “She died before I was born.” I repeat the words I’d heard before but never understood.

  “Technically, before you were hatched. Your father took the egg back to Azerbaijan and hid you in the village—we were, at least, successful in keeping the egg hidden, and keeping your existence a secret for several years. I don’t know how or when Eudora learned about you. I’m sure she has spies. Ion is one of them.”

  I clench my eyes shut at this news. I don’t want Ion to be a spy. I want to be able to trust him. Ion offered to make me human, and I really want that to be an honest, valid option.

  But no amount of wanting can make it so. Ion killed Ozzie. He would have killed me.

  Ram’s words cut through my thoughts. “I don’t want to rush you, but we should probably get going.”

  “Right.” I suck in a shaky breath. I’m rather glad we have practical, tangible things to think about. Steps to take. Stuff to do, rather than wallow in grief and confusion. “What happened to your clothes?”

  Ram looks down at his boxer shorts—a striped blue pair that look right fit on him, but don’t tell anyone at Saint Evangeline’s I said so. He shrugs. “Clothes don’t survive the switch. My swords stay on—even my backpack would have stayed on if I’d been wearing it—because my wings come out from my shoulders. They don’t tear the straps away. But my chest and arms get too big for my shirt, and my legs get too big for my pants. The only reason my boxer shorts survive is because they have an elastic waist. To be honest, they don’t always make it.”

  He’s blushing slightly, and I laugh. I’m not sure why I’m laughing, I guess just because he looks embarrassed, which is a huge improvement over apologetic.

  At the same time, I know enough of what he looks like as a dragon to imagine how the boxer shorts survived. Even though he grows enormously, his dragon waist is relatively tiny, like on a greyhound, a narrow band between his barrel chest and strong legs.

  Also, I might be laughing because he’s cute, and the thought of him as a dragon makes my stomach flutter in a way that’s completely unfamiliar and somewhat unsettling.

  Ram picks his way past the yagi corpses to our campsite, finds his backpack, and shuffles off a safe distance from their stinking vapor to put on more clothes. I, too find something dry to wear, and duck behind some bushes to change. When I step back around the bushes, Ram has removed Ozzie’s body from among the yagi, and is using his cutlass to dig a hole a safe distance from their potentially-hallucinogenic stink.

  I join him, and we dig in silence, stopping only to decide if the hole is deep enough yet. We unearth several large stones as we dig, and I set these aside. Once Ram has placed Ozzie in the hole and covered her with dirt, I put the stones on top to keep animals from disturbing her body. Ram pulls several more rocks from the lake, settling a large stone on its end near her head as a marker.

  With the tip of his dagger, he carves letters into the rock.

  Azi.

  “Azi.” I have to say the name out loud to make the connection. Ozzie is Azi. I’ve never seen it written before—I just assumed, when Ram told me the dog’s name, that it was Ozzie.

  “I named her after a friend who saved my life in the war.”

  “Which war?” I ask partly out of curiosity, partly to make polite conversation instead of this heavy silence, but I realize as soon as I’ve asked the question that I probably won’t know the war, if it’s a dragon skirmish or something out of Azeri history, which I know nothing about.

  But Ram surprises me. “World War Two. My friend Azi was a soldier who saved my life. It’s a good name, a heroic name.”

  Ram is staring at the name on the rock, lost in thought, and I’m frantically doing math.

  World War Two ended almost fifty years ago.

  If Ram fought in World War Two, he would have to be, like, seventy years old. Elderly.

  I look him up and down. He’s not elderly.

  “World War Two?” I repeat incredulously. “Which World War Two?” All I can think is maybe the Azeris have their own accounting of the world wars. Maybe their World War Two happened more recently. Maybe that’s how they refer to the breakup of the Soviet Union, or something. Yeah, that would make sense. Not a lot of sense, but a blooming bit more sense than the idea that Ram is elderly.

  Maybe I breathed in too much of the yagi vapor after all.

  Ram chuckles. “The only one.” He tucks his dagger back into the scabbard on his thigh and looks around, as though checking to make sure we’ve got everything we need.

  Faint light colors the eastern horizon. The sun will be rising soon.

  “The one that ended in 1945?” I clarify.

  “Yes.” He’s walking back toward the lake, circling the bank.

  I hurry to keep up. “And what year is it now?” This may seem like a stupid question, but it’s occurred to me that maybe this whole dragon-changing stuff might have plunged us into a completely different decade, or something. Far-fetched, yes, but what other explanation is there? And that wouldn’t be the weirdest revelation he’s made in the last few days.

  “It’s 1993.”

  “That’s what I thought. So World War Two ended, what, forty-eight years ago?”

  “Yes.” Ram pauses. “When I was in the air, I saw another stream feeding into the lake from the east. It probably originates in the mountains. We should be able to follow it into the mountains, then find another stream on the other side to follow to the Danube.”

  “The Danube?” I repeat, not because I’ve never heard of the longest river in Europe, but because most of my intellectual faculties are still trying to harmonize Ram’s age with the date of the war he claims to have fought in.

  Ram explains, “The Danube swings sharply north from the Bulgarian border to the southern tip of Moldova. We won’t be able to reach the Black Sea—or get you home—without crossing it. We can fly over it, of course, but for now we’ll have to walk. Sun’s coming up.”

  I nod, understanding the geography well enough, still focused on what he said about fighting in World War Two. But at the same time, something else has caught my attention. Steam is rising from the heap of dead yagi. And they’re making a rustling sound, almost as though they’re coming back to life. “What’s up with the yagi?” I point to the nearest corpses just visible in the woods beyond us.

  “They’re diffusing.” Ram must see the questions on my face, because he explains, “They’re not stable. It’s only the dark magic that makes them live at all. By the time they get to this stage most of the neurotoxin in their vapor has dissipated—unless they’re in an enclosed room. Their insides evaporate quickly once they die, and their exoskeletons wither to nothing.”

  “To nothing?”

  “Kind of like when you burn paper in a fireplace.” He leads me past the pile in a wide circle, towards the stream he talked about following. “If it burns under the right conditions, you can still see the charred form of the paper, even read the print from the page, but if you touch it, it turns to dust. Same thing with the yagi. They’ve never been scientifically classified because no one has ever been able to study a dead one.”

  I can see the exoskeletons curling and shriveling as we move past the dead yagi. Interesting as Ram’s explanation may be, it doesn’t distract me from what we were talking about moments before—something I want to know more about, even if I’m a bit scared to hear the answer.

  “How old are you?”

  “I’m mature.” Ram reaches the stream and begins to follow it.

  “A number.” I t
romp along beside him. “Mature is not a number. For example, I’m eighteen.”

  “How old do I look?”

  “Twenty-ish.”

  Ram nods. “Let’s go with that, then.”

  “But you said you fought in World War Two?”

  “I’ve fought in many wars. Not all of them have names.”

  He is obviously trying to evade my real question, which is irritating, and only makes me more determined to learn the real answer.

  I deliberately over-enunciate. “What year were you born?”

  Ram makes a face. “Dragons don’t age like humans. We don’t grow old and weak and die. Dragons live forever—unless they’re killed. Do you know what year your father was born?”

  I try to recall if I’ve ever heard anything that would give me a clue about my dad’s age. He looks pretty young, for a dad. Dark hair. No gray that I’ve ever noticed. Nor have I ever spotted any wrinkles, though much of his face is hidden by his neatly-trimmed beard. I remember once when I was a little girl, somebody wishing my father a happy birthday, but he waved it off and said he’d had too many birthdays to bother celebrating anymore. At the time, I’d figured too many birthdays was thirty or forty.

  Now I’m not so sure. “What year?”

  “Let’s see—was it 1784, or 1786? I can never quite remember.”

  “That’s over two hundred years ago.”

  “He’s still young. Your mother was older than your father, you know. She was born in the sixteen hundreds, I don’t know exactly when. I don’t even know if she knew.”

  “But she was still young enough to…lay an egg?”

  “Female dragons lay one or more eggs every year or so until they’re about six or seven hundred years old.”

  “Seriously?”

  Ram shrugs, still walking at a fairly brisk pace, but not so fast I can’t keep up. “That’s what I’ve been told, at least. I haven’t known any egg-laying females personally. But I’ve heard Eudora is past egg-laying age.”

  “What year were you born?” I’m not going to lie, my pulse is kind of pounding by this point. I’m not even sure why—I guess just because the things we’re talking about are so beyond my experience, and yet so intricately bound to me.