Page 10 of Kidnapped By The Messy Dragon

I’m out of bed with my quilt still hanging off me. I cross to the window in the dark and open the curtain a finger’s width. The street is empty everywhere the working streetlights reach. I can’t make out anything under the oak across the road, and nothing on my block is moving.

I stand there anyway, watching nothing, until the cold of the floor comes up through my feet.

Back in bed, I lie in the dark doing the math I’m best at: what I know, who knows I know it, and how fast a quiet life can end.

The math keeps coming out the same. If I stay quiet, I keep my job and my name and my little life. If I move, I lose some of that or all of it, and there’s no version where I get it back.

Tomorrow after work, I start researching how to get this to Shadow Wolf Creek. I’m skipping the channels that chewed me up the last time. Someone in that town deserves to know what’s being built across the valley, and this time the information goes straight to the people it’s aimed at.

It will probably cost me the job. Depending on how loud it gets, it will cost me the quiet too, and the small name I’ve spent a year keeping small.

I’ve tried talking my conscience out of things before. It doesn’t negotiate.

I turn over one way, then the other, and my thoughts keep trading places: the job against the folder, the quiet against the town. Sleep doesn’t come until the window starts going gray.

5

JALEN

Malachi is already packed when he opens his door. His bag sits zipped on a made bed, and the room already looks ready to rent again. The notary showed up this morning, the papers got signed, and there’s nothing left for my brother in Millbrook but the drive home.

“Car’s out front,” he says. “We can be home for dinner.”

I sneeze into my elbow instead of answering. Only a thin curl of smoke comes up with it, less than yesterday. Whatever I’m coming down with is wearing off.

Malachi sets the bag by the door and turns around. “You’ve been weird, man. Even for you. Are you going to tell me what’s going on or not?”

The heat in my chest has been aimed across town all day, and it’s getting less patient by the hour. I have to give him something, and this time it might as well be the truth.

“I caught a scent while I was scanning the town.” I stay in his doorway, where the exit is.

He pushes his sleeves up and pours himself a glass of water from the nightstand pitcher. “Make it quick, whatever it is.” He drinks half the glass. “One night away from Brandy already hasme climbing these flowered walls. I don’t sleep right without my mate breathing next to me.”

“I used to file that kind of talk under dramatic.” I sit down on the edge of his stripped bed. “I understand it now.”

He frowns into the glass, working it. My brother runs numbers for a living, and this one adds up fast. His eyes go wide over the rim.

“Ohhh,” he says.

“Her name is Zuri.” Smoke curls off my ears on the Z.

It’s harder to say than it was to hear. Everything under my skin pulls toward the tree side of town, and I’m this close to leaving through the window instead of the door.

Malachi sets down the glass, and the grin that spreads across his face is pure brotherly revenge. “The best-informed man in the valley,” he says. “Scooped by his own nose.”

He lifts the water glass at me. “Where there’s smoke.”

“Yeah, I earned that.” I flex my hands to keep them still. “But this pull, Mal. I’ve had it since last night and it’s already running my whole body. I’m about to tear some shit up.”

Malachi puts both hands up. “Okay. Okay.” He sets the glass down and looks at me the way he looks at bad numbers. “Where is she?”

“The tree side of town.” I’m back on my feet and pacing. “She’s human. I followed her home last night and stood outside her building in the dark.”

Malachi nods along.

The room is too small for the pacing I need to do. Heat climbs my back, and my wings itch under my shirt.

“Sit down,” he says, and he steers me back onto the bed by my shoulder.