Elaina zipped the ski jacket up to her chin. Bitter wind swept down her neck anyway. Snowflakes stung her cheeks as she searched store windows in the fading light for a Wi-Fi sign.
Somewhere in this one-main-street village, there had to be one. Finally, a little pub claimed to have an internet signal.
The deep red walls and low ceiling made the small room look cozier than the reality of the cool indoor temperature, but being inside was better than being out in the blizzard. Fate was a twisted mistress, forcing a weak, immature dragon to explore mountainous territory in the dead of winter.
She missed Alex’s heat—his everything. At this point, she had a better chance of freezing to death than dying by her father’s hand.
She fumbled through ordering a coffee with her limited command of Hungarian. Most places didn’t mind giving her the Wi-Fi password as long as she ordered something. Coffee was usually cheap, and more importantly, hot. She couldn’t drink the stuff, but the mug warmed her hands.
Her laptop screen glowed to life with a map of the Carpathian Mountain range, and she marked off the regions she’d checked during the day.
Normally, that activity would give her a sense of accomplishment. Not today.
Today, the unchecked sections seemed larger than the checked areas. No, not seemed. They were larger.
And she had no resources left to continue. The situation was hopeless.
For the thousandth time, she debated her options. She could sell the car and hope to get a fraction of her money back—and save on gas too—but buses didn’t go into the mountainous depths where undiscovered caves hid.
What was she supposed to do? Walk everywhere? That’d add months to her efforts.
Then for each extra day, she’d have to pay for a bed at a hostel or rooming house. Sleeping in a cold car would kill her, and sleeping in the open would do the same twice as fast.
Jobs required documents, which she’d have to buy to fake her legal right to work, and any time on a job would seriously cut into her time left to search. And with her traveling to different locations every few days to clear areas, she’d spend more time searching for short-term jobs than searching for caves.
The only option left was stealing, and that path led to a dead end if she was ever going to have a chance at earning Alex’s forgiveness.
Before despair could drive her insane, she pulled out the European mobile phone she’d purchased and dialed the one person with whom she was still on speaking terms.
He answered on the first ring. “You’re alive. Glad to hear that.”
“So am I, George. So am I.” If only he knew how uncertain that was.
“That bad, huh?”
“Remind me again what I’m doing here.”
“I don’t know. You refuse to tell me.”
Even their standard opening banter didn’t lighten her depression. She sagged into the bench and traced the red-and-white-checked pattern on the seat.
“Elaina, what are you doing there?” His words rushed from the phone. “I know you can’t tell me what’s going on, and that’s okay, but if you don’t have a plan for how to resolve things...” The speaker crackled with his sigh. “Well, maybe you should come home.”
Home. How could one little word have so much power? Her fingertip turned the square pattern into endless circles. Swirling, swirling, never getting anywhere. Stuck with no way out.
“Has the FBI captured everyone behind the explosion?” She knew the answer already, as George would have told her if they had. “As much as I’d love nothing more than to come back, I can’t. We’d be in the same situation as when I left.”
“Isn’t there anything I can do to help? I promise I won’t press you for details beyond what you’re able to tell me.”
“I—” She cut off her automatic response.
The last of her money sat too lightly in her pocket, but the memory of her last pawnshop visit burned her cheeks.
“I don’t deserve your help.”
“What? You’re doing God-knows-what in God-knows-where all to protect Alex. How could you not deserve my help?”
“Because I sold my diamond tennis bracelet, the first gift Alex bought for me.” Her throat thickened, straining her voice. “I’d brought it with me to remind myself of everything he’d done for me, not to sell it like a meaningless trinket.”
“And you sold it because...” He trailed off, prompting.
Her pent-up frustration exploded in an aggravated burst.
“I didn’t have a choice. I’ve maxed out my credit cards and sold off everything else I brought with me. Unless I started stealing things, I had to sell the bracelet or give up. This whole trip has turned out to be a bigger wild goose chase than I thought. I mean, who would have thought it’d be so damn hard to find an occupied cave in Europe? But no, they have to be all secretive and not put up ‘Treasure for the Taking Here’ signs. Stupid, paranoid dra—”
She coughed, covering up her words before she said too much. Idiot.
A guy watching hockey on the TV over the bar shushed her.
George didn’t comment on her coughing fit. “Okay, I have no idea about half of what you just said—and I don’t think I want to know—but I gathered that you’re short of money. I can help with that.”
“Didn’t you hear me? I don’t deserve it. I took something Alex gave me out of love or whatever, and I used it to pay for gas money and five-dollar-a-night beds so I wouldn’t freeze.”
“Uh-huh. You sold a bracelet that he can easily replace so you could survive another day. Sorry, not going to let you blame yourself for that.”
She groaned. “Sometimes you’re as stubborn as he is.”
“Thank you.” The smile in his voice carried over the mobile signal.
She didn’t bother granting him a reply.
“So how can I get more money to you? Should I wire some to you? Should I pay off these credit cards for you? Tell me.”
A quiet whisper fell from her lips. “Why do you want to help me?”
“Because, Elaina”—his tone turned her name into a sigh—“I want you to succeed with whatever you’re doing so you can come home.”
“Why?”
“Because...” He paused, seriousness coloring his answer. “Alex will never recover until you do.”
She’d avoided asking how Alex was doing during these occasional phone calls. The last thing she needed was more guilt. But now, she couldn’t help her question.
“Is it that bad?”
“It’s worse. He’s just going through the motions of living. Zombies are more alive than he is.”
So she hadn’t imagined his abandonment issues. Her insight into how to hurt him the most had served its purpose.
He had too many resources at his disposal to believe that she could ever cover her tracks well enough, so the only way to protect him was to ensure he didn’t want to follow her. Even though that emotional pain was what she’d been counting on for keeping him safe at home, she still hated herself.
The diamond on her left ring finger chose that moment to catch her eye, and her chest seized as though she’d been stabbed. Several of the pawnshops she’d visited over the last couple of months had tried to get her to sell the ring from Alex’s mother. She’d die first.
“I didn’t want to break him, but I had to convince him to give up on us so he wouldn’t follow me into a dangerous situation. I did it to protect him. I swear I never wanted to hurt him.”
“I know you didn’t mean it, but that’s the reality. And that’s why I want to do what I can to help bring you home faster.”
“Do you think—?” She stopped, unsure if she wanted to know whether Alex would ever forgive her.
Instead, she asked the question that had haunted many of her internet searches. “Is Dakon Industries doing okay?”
“Around the office, we had a long-running joke that Alex could run ten companies in his sleep. We’re learning how true that is. From a business perspective, he’s better than fine.”
Lightness in her chest released the air from her lungs. “That’s good. Really good to hear.”
At least her leaving to prevent one corporate crisis hadn’t caused another.
“Listen, I haven’t called or bothered you, and I haven’t asked for anything from you because I know how much you’ve already sacrificed, but I’m going to insist on this. You have to let me help you.”
“Would you really be able to keep it from Alex?”
He tsk’ed. “Such little faith you have.”
The whirr of a drawer opening and the click of a pen carried through the phone.
His throat cleared, making his tone sound even more stubborn. “All right, give me those credit card numbers.”
After she dug through her bag and rattled off the numbers from her various fake-name cards, he tapped on his keyboard. “Just in case they give me trouble paying those off for you, tell me where you’re going to be tomorrow so I can send money directly.”
She almost scoffed at his deceit. More likely, he’d try to do both the credit cards and a money transfer.
When she didn’t answer, he made a sad oh noise. “You don’t trust me enough to tell me where you are, do you?”
“That’s not it. I—”
“So you’ll tell me where you’ll be tomorrow?”
She groaned at his double-layered trickery. “I don’t even know where I am, to be honest. Some little town in Hungary with, like, twenty letters in the name.”
“Hungary?”
“Yeah, I’m in the Bükk Mountains.”
His keyboard clicked for a moment. “It looks as though the post offices there accept money transfers. Find out where you are, and I’ll have some cash waiting for you when they open tomorrow morning.”
“There’s a fine line between stubbornness and being annoying.”
“You should know. You can thank me by bringing back a hot European guy for me.”
She snorted in laughter.
“According to Google Translate, you should ask ‘Mi ez a város?’ ”
“And I’m supposed to believe you? You’re probably having me tell them to put me in jail until you get here.”
“Good idea. Let me look that up.” He chuckled. “No, my dear girl, that’s ‘what is this town?’ ”
She groaned. “Fine. Hang on while I ask someone.”
The bartender’s answer didn’t help, as it sounded like a long, consonant-heavy word, but he rewarded her attempt to speak their language by writing down the name for her.
After she spelled it three times for George, he took control of the conversation. “Feel better now?”
“Yes, I do. Thank you.” It would be nice not to worry about money for a while.
“Do you have a plan for what you’re going to do next?”
Her other worries returned. The banter with George had been a fun diversion, but the truth was that she didn’t have a clue how to make her searching more efficient.
“Not really. All I can do is keep exploring. Eventually, I’ll find what I’m searching for.”
“Yeah, a cave or something, whatever. Can’t someone there help you find it?”
Not likely. If humans had seen any dragons in their serpent form, her internet searches would have discovered it. No, the only ones who knew where to find the dragons were the dragons themsel—
Of course.
She did know where one dragon other than her father lived. She’d never steal treasure from her old teacher, Nastav, but maybe she could convince him to point her toward another dragon.
In fact, that might have been her subconscious’s plan all along, explaining why she’d chosen to start in his home turf of the Carpathian Mountain range, rather than the Alps or somewhere else.
“Elaina? You there?”
“Yeah, and you gave me an idea. Thanks.” Maybe she could figure this out after all.
“Excellent. Now remember that I like my men tall.”
Her giddy laugh came easily now. “Tall. Got it.”
“Okay, I’ll let you go work on your cave project, but remember to pick up your money tomorr—oh.” Click.
Odd. She stared at her phone, but the line was dead.
She debated calling him back. That was silly to do just so she could say goodbye, though. Instead, she brought up her map of the Carpathian Mountains.
Now she had a plan. Step one: Remember where she’d had her lessons with Nastav. Step two: Ask Nastav for help in finding another elderly dragon. Step three: Steal the treasure of said elderly dragon. Step four...
A charred taste rose up her throat. She hoped her father would leave her alone once she was stronger, the same way Alex’s father had left him alone once it was a fair fight between them. But she couldn’t count on the same psychology working. After all, her mother had been a full-dragon, and that hadn’t prevented her death.
What would she do if her father wouldn’t stop threatening her simply because she became a full-dragon? Or if she couldn’t convince him to stop hurting Alex through proxy thugs?
She had to be prepared for the worst. If he didn’t relent, the only way to protect Alex, the only way she could ever feel safe in returning to him, would be to give up her vow of non-violence long enough to get rid of the threat for good. Or die trying.
Her chest sank under the cold weight of facts, and she wrapped her arms around her ribs. But there was no escape from the truth of what she had to do.
Step four. Be prepared to kill her father.