Page 2 of Fierce Highland Guardian

Heat rolled off it in a wave I felt on my face across thirty feet of storm, actual warmth, furnace-warmth, steam boiling where the spray struck its flank and hissed away to nothing.

A wing unfolded—unfolded andkeptunfolding, farther than a thing that size had any right to reach—and the downdraft of it flattened the grass on the ledge. Lightning went off out over the water, and for one whole second the shape of it hung there, silver-edged against the sky, and every system I owned quit at once.

Dragon,said the four-year-old in the back of my head. The one who used to draw them on the backs of church bulletins. The one who’d been told, kindly and often, to grow up.

Dragon,she said, not afraid at all.I told you. I told you, and nobody believed me, and here it is.

My hand was already moving for the bag. For the camera. For proof, because proof is safe and proof means you don’t have to believe anything, you can measure it instead.

My hand stopped halfway.

And stayed there. Me—the woman who photographs her own breakfast for the field log—and I’d walk away from this without one pixel of it. Just my word. And I’d spent twenty years learning exactly what my word was worth the second I said a thing nobody wanted to hear. If I photographed it, it went in a file, and the file went to people who’d already decided what I was, and they would take this—the only genuinely impossible thing that would ever happen to me—and they would use it to finish the job my marriage started. So I didn’t reach. For once in my careful, backed-up, triple-stamped life, I chose the thing I couldn’t prove.

It came down on the rocks below with an impact I took in my boots, my knees, my fillings.

Then it came apart. Changed. Bone moving in directions bone doesn’t move, a shimmer rolling over the whole of it, heat-haze, oil on water. The wings folding down into nothing. The mass crushing inward, smaller, smaller—

—and then there was a man on his knees on the black rock. Bare, soaked, steaming faintly where the spray broke over him and hissed off into nothing. Breathing like he'd fought his way up from somewhere very deep.

The scientist in me kept gamely narrating. Refraction. Cold-water hallucination. Ball lightning, that’s real, that’s documented, sensible people don’t believe in—

The narration ran out of road.

He lifted his head. He found me up on the wall like he’d had the coordinates the whole time, and his eyes caught the last of the light and threw it back wrong—a pale, melted silver that didn’t belong in any human face I'd ever cataloged. He went still. All of him, at once, a wolf working out that the clearing isn’t empty. Whatever he’d braced for, hauling himself out of that water, it hadn’t been me.

Run.

CHAPTER TWO

Should Have Killed Her - Craig

Theseaclosedovermy head and the change took me the way it always does when I run to it. Cruel. Backward. Bone folding into bone, the wings pulling in through muscle screaming the whole way down, the great shape of me crushing into a small one while the black water pressed the last of the fire out of my blood.

I let it. The cliff came between us. That was the point.

I dragged myself up onto the ledge in the inner grotto—the wet mouth of the deep place, where the sea reaches in and the rock climbs away above it toward the chamber I’ve kept for longer than the castle overhead has stood—and knelt there, human, steaming where the cold water met the heat still leaving me. My hands shook on the wet rock. I hadn’t run from anything in a long time. The taste of it sat wrong in my mouth.

A woman with a pencil.

Three hundred years I’d kept this coast clean, and I’d fled a woman on a broken wall who couldn’t have reached my shoulder. I bent my head and breathed like a thing dredged upfrom water with no floor beneath it, and I made myself say the law, because the law is the only kindness my kind ever found.

A witness dies.

It isn’t mine. I want that set down. It came to me the way my eyes did, my father’s before his father’s, back down a line that runs to before there were kings to hide from.A dragon seen is a dragon hunted; a dragon hunted is a dragon in chains; so the seeing ends where it starts, quick and clean, and you carry the weight of it because carrying it is how your children live.Every one of us still breathing owed our breath to some ancestor who’d cut a throat rather than be cut open on a table. It wasn’t cruelty, but mercy, and arithmetic.

The fisherman who rowed hard for shore and kept his eyes on the water lived, and I stayed a tale told to frighten bairns, and the two things were the same thing for so long I’d stopped feeling the seam.

She’d looked into my face. She’d stayed.

And here was the trouble, the thing that had me kneeling on wet stone arguing with a law I’d never once questioned: I didn’t want to. I have held to that law over gentler faces than hers. I have turned it, cold, on people who’d done nothing but be in the wrong cove at the wrong hour, and I have not enjoyed it, and I have not hesitated, because hesitation is how a line ends. Now it sat in my chest like a stone I couldn’t swallow.

Her.Some slight, drenched, unafraid woman who’d had the sense God gives a gull and had chosen, on a cliff, in a storm, not to reach for whatever was in her bag.

I built the case the way you build a fire against the cold. Go up. Find her before the rain washed her tracks. Do the thing my line had always done, clean and quick, and let the coast forget her by morning. I laid it out plank by plank and waited for the certainty to catch and warm me.

It didn’t come.

I had never learned to lie well. Three centuries of necessity and solitude had taught me the mechanics—when to duck, when to shift my eyes, how to press a voice flat as hammered steel—but the art eluded me. On myself, least of all. The lie pressed up against the inside of my skull, raw and exposed, refusing to settle into numbness or habit. I crouched there in the mouth of the grotto, salt wringing the cut on my lip, and waited for the old, familiar quiet to fall.