I was not the least bit surprised when Herald came down to take a nap with me. She’d eaten, her gear was in top shape, and now she needed to reassure herself that I belonged to her, and no one else. She clung to my neck like a child when she snuggled in, and her grip didn’t loosen in the slightest as her breathing grew soft and regular.
I’d been completely unprepared for her jealous outburst earlier, but in hindsight it wasn’t all that surprising. She was becoming more like me, in many ways. Prouder, more callous, more avaricious. More possessive. I wasn’t sure if it was her major Advancement, the one that truly bound her to me, or if she was just emulating me, but I suspected the former. Hell, her eye color had even changed from Mak and Tam’s rich brown to my own bright gold. But she’d never minded sharing me. She hadn’t questioned getting retribution when Tark’s thugs beat up Ardek. She thought it was sweet when Kira napped with me.
The obvious difference was that she genuinely liked Kira. She respected Ardek. She hated Zabra.
She may not have had the stomach for abuse when we kept Zabra locked up, but for all that she agreed that it was a bad idea, she would have killed the woman if I’d let her. And while I didn’t know if Kesra was damned by association, at the very least she and Herald were not friends. The warmest emotion I knew of from Herald towards the Night Blossom’s sister and unwitting accomplice was pity.
So, no. It should have come as no surprise that when I rescued the Tesprils from their attackers, brought them into our home, and then planned to go and destroy those who harmed them, my best friend and adopted sister, who loved me above everything except her two human siblings, threw a jealous fit. It was a good thing that the same incident that brought about said fit also provided us three sisters with an excellent bonding exercise.
When I called them my little dragons, those weren’t empty words.
“In there,” Hardal’s henchman said. He was a young, twitchy guy called Sort, tall and with curly hair that marked him as possibly having some Barlean ancestry. He’d seemed nervous from the start, which hadn’t improved at all when he saw the black scale armor under the sisters’ cloaks.
He was crouched around a corner with Herald and Mak, pointing to a smallish warehouse behind the southern docks that had guards on the door. I, of course, was right next to them, Shifted, and I doubted that he had any idea that I was there.
“With those five guys dead, the ones that attacked the lady’s house, I mean, they should have six or seven heavies left. Maybe a dozen others. No idea how many are going to be in, but we know that a lot of them don’t have anywhere else to go. They mostly live at the hangout. Uh, do you ladies want me to go with you? The boss only said to lead you here, but, uh— I mean— there’s only two of you.”
Herald turned her golden eyes on him. They gleamed even in the near darkness of the alley, and when she gave him a predatory smile he flinched. “We will be fine, Sort. Thank you for showing us the way.”
“Uh, right. Yeah. So—?”
Mak clapped him on the back. “You’re dismissed. We’ll find our own way back. Don’t worry.”
“Right.” His eyes turned hard for a moment before he left, and he said, “Good luck. Some of the guys at the house, they were my friends, you know? Give those bastards hell!” Then he was gone, melding into the darkness despite my night vision and moving almost as stealthily as Mak.
“Ready?” Mak asked Herald. She didn’t need to ask me. She could feel my eagerness through our bond.
“Ready,” Herald confirmed, loosening her sword in its scabbard. She’d left her bow behind; we’d expected to fight inside, and it would only get in the way.
There was a guard on the door, but he’d have to wait for just a moment. First, Herald Shifted and quickly slipped around the building, marking any other entrances.
“Front door is wide open,” she reported when she returned. “How do we do this?”
“As dramatic as kicking in the door would be,” Mak said. “How about…”
As Mak described her simple plan, I grinned. This was going to be fun.
----------------------------------------
“Piss off, girls! We’re not looking for any fun tonight.”
The tone was surprisingly friendly, despite the tension in the air. The man who spoke, lounging on a stack of sacks just inside the front door of the warehouse, looked at my sisters appraisingly. “Though, tell you what. Come back in a week and we’ll have some peacocks for you!”
That earned him a smack from the woman next to him. “Can you at least try not to pick up any whores right in front of me, Burl?”
“Can you blame me? I never had a ‘teki before. Besides, look at them! Especially the big one!”
From where I waited among the shadows inside, I saw Mak’s face twitch. She and Herald stepped in from the rain and she threw her cloak open, revealing her armor and her sword, and stepped up closer to the wide brazier lighting the scene. Her voice rang out, loud and clear, making the other gangers in the warehouse sit up and take note.
“We wish to talk with whoever runs this sorry excuse for a gang!” she declared, as Herald loomed behind her, eyes glinting in the firelight. “This morning you attacked one of our people. You owe us for the damage, and we’re here to collect.”
Now she really had their attention. There were amused, insulted, and angry mutterings, and people started getting up from their sacks, hammocks, and chairs. They weren’t arming themselves. Not yet. There were only two women at the door, after all.
“Well, that changes things, doesn’t it?” the man at the door said, slowly getting up. He was as tall as Herald, lanky, with hair that must be quite long up in a large bun. As he stood, he grabbed a sheathed sword from the floor beside him. “Now, before we make you girls regret coming here, I think I’d like to know who you are, and what we’re supposed to have done. Not that it matters, but you’ve got me curious.”
“You sent some people after the Tesprils,” Mak said, taking her cloak off completely and letting it pool at her feet. “Or perhaps you’re more familiar with ‘the Night Blossom?’ Whichever name you know her by, she’s made some mistakes. Now she and her sister belong to us. I invite you to think about that for a minute or two. The Night Blossom. Belongs. To us.” She paused there, letting the Blossom’s reputation lend weight to her words. “She’s also alive and well, which is why we’re giving you a chance. So. Will you pay for the damages you’ve caused, or will we have to—”
“Oh, shut those pretty lips of yours. We knew the Blossom was weak, but not this weak. Boss?” He turned to look inside, at a stocky man in his thirties who had, until moments ago, been playing some kind of board game. “What do you want us to do?”
“Kill ‘em,” the man said, picking up a simple hatchet from a table. “Don’t try to be fancy. They’re too confident to not be dangerous.”
“Well, you heard the boss,” the tall man said, turning back to Mak. “Doesn’t look like he’s interested in paying a single bit to you, even if you are the Night Blossom’s new boss.”
Mak laughed, short and musical, and said, “Oh, no! I’m not the Night Blossom’s new boss.” She waved inside. “She is.”
I Shifted back into my full glory right in front of the gang’s leader. There was a heartbeat of stunned silence, which shattered into shouts and screams when I uppercutted him, driving three clawed fingers up through his jaw and into his skull, then threw him across the warehouse.
“Submit, and live!” I roared over the pandemonium, and fell on the closest man with a weapon in his hands.
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It was a slaughter. They were completely disorganized, and nothing could have prepared them for a dragon, even a small one, suddenly appearing in their midst. And if I wasn’t enough, Mak might have been able to take them all on her own. With the full effect of my minor Advancements and her own being supercharged by the energy she’d absorbed from a Heart, she was simply too fast, agile, and strong for any of them. Nobody there had the advancements to stand against her, and any skill gap simply didn’t matter, since any attack that got through her defense would practically bounce off. Herald, on her part, had Shifted the moment the fighting started, and she moved around the warehouse like an angel of death. There simply wasn’t time for anyone to learn to fear the shadows, and she killed or disarmed at will depending on whether her victim was trying to fight or was just too scared to drop their weapon.
One or two got away out the backdoor, but I’d moved to block that pretty quickly. After a minute at most we were left with nearly a dozen bodies, but also a handful of cowering gangers who’d taken my offer at the start seriously. Five men and three women knelt on the floor before me, their foreheads pressed into the dirt.
“I actually thought that tall guy would put up a fight,” Mak complained, cleaning her blade. “But the moment I broke his wrist he just lost his will to fight. Sad, really.”
“I can’t help but notice that he’s dead either way,” I observed. The man lay slumped over the same bags he’d been reclining on earlier, next to the woman who’d told him off. I’d seen the whole thing, too. Mak had grabbed his wrist as he took his first swing and almost casually snapped it. She’d paused to cut down the woman, who was coming at her with a dagger, then cut his throat and threw him to the side. She hadn’t shown the slightest bit of hesitation or regret, either, just started working her way inward. It was quite a contrast with the woman who’d been too hesitant to spring an ambush back when we wanted to grab Simdal off the street.
“I didn’t like how he looked at Herald,” Mak said with a shrug. Then she looked at me, and a bit of anxiety crept into her voice. “Should I not have? I figured, since he fought—”
“Nah, no worries,” I told her. “You did good. You too, Herald!”
“Same to you,” she said, pausing in wiping blood off her armor to give me a tired smile. Supercharged or not, fighting while Shifted took a lot out of her.
That left only our captives.
Not one of them had moved since I put them on the floor. “Listen, all of you,” I said. “You’re going to close this place up. Then we’re going to have a lovely time relaxing until my girls get back here with Hardal, who’ll figure out how to use you. You work for the Night Blossom now, and she belongs to me, which makes me your new boss. Got it?”
Again, there was no answer. I even gave them a five-count before I roared, “Do you get it, or are you all too stupid to be useful?”
That got me the replies I wanted. Nobody wants the dragon to think that they’re useless.
True to my word, I stayed there while Mak and Herald went to find Hardal. It took a couple of hours, which I spent having the new conscripts gather anything of value in the warehouse for my inspection. There was an almost depressingly small amount of coin; only a dozen dragons and maybe two hundred eagles, which went in a purse. Most of their money seemed to be tied up in goods. On the bright side, most of those goods should be easy to sell, and I didn’t even need to feel bad about it. It wasn’t like they were dealing drugs or anything; mostly it was stuff from Tekeretek that an importer would normally have had to pay massive tariffs on. Stuff which might, very soon, be difficult to get a hold of. I marked that for later.
When Hardal got there with some of his guys he looked thoroughly unimpressed. His men, not so much. To be fair, it had been a while. I hadn’t allowed my new minions to remove any of the bodies from the now-closed off building, and the smell of blood and death was pretty thick in there.
As soon as he arrived, I left Hardal to deal with our mess. “Don’t kill anyone unless they give you a very good reason,” I told him on the way out.
He looked at the captives, giving me a grunt in response that I assumed was an affirmative, then added, “This would go a lot smoother if the boss was here. Well, the Blossom. You know what I mean. Boss.”
“Yeah. You’ll just have to make do until I can pry her away from Kesra.”
“Good luck with that. Last time her sister was sick she didn’t leave the estate for a week.” Then he turned to me, and gave me one of those unreadable looks of his. “Don’t worry, boss. This isn’t the first time we’ve absorbed a defeated gang. We’ll take care of them.”
“I’ll choose to trust you on that,” I said, and left.
I didn’t care all too much about the captives, truth be told. I’d very deliberately kept my shadow in check. She’d been eager to help, but I really didn’t want to find myself accidentally worrying over some random ganger. If Hardal killed them I’d still be pissed, because he’d lied to me. But I might be able to restrain myself from killing him, which I was pretty damned sure would not be the case if he killed someone I’d bound myself to. And as creepy and amoral as Hardal was, he was also exceedingly useful. I’d slowly started to get some insight into just how much he did to keep the Blossom’s organization running; with Tark gone, Hardal wasn’t so much a lieutenant or a captain as he was a general. If he wasn’t entirely devoted to Zabra and/or Kesra — I wasn’t entirely clear on that — I’d have been worried that he might try to take over.
As I leapt into the air, soaring out over the harbor, I considered whether I should just see if I could break him preemptively. The problem with that was that I wasn’t sure that I could break him. The man did not know fear. At all. I was completely convinced of that, and fear was how I broke people. And if I tried, and failed, well… I’d just have to kill him at that point. I couldn’t very well have a living monument to my own failure walking around.
When I got back to the inn I landed right in the yard. I kept shifting between worrying about being connected with the place, not giving a damn, and wanting people to know. That night, with my blood up, it was the latter. I knew that Sempralia had kept up her end of the bargain regarding her promised pro-Draka PR campaign, and the rumor mill was turning, but that meant little if no one could see me. With few people in the streets, and no one looking up if they could avoid it, there was little I could do to help the locals get used to the idea of a dragon living in their midst.
For that reason, I’d decided to stop hiding my comings and goings. If people stopped coming to stay at the inn, our coffers were full enough that it wasn’t a pressing problem. We kept filling the rooms with non-paying guests, anyway. If someone came to try and kill me, well… based on the past night, they could damn well try. With Mak and Herald backing me up, I wasn’t worried. Hell, I’d give a superheavy like Kalder pretty long odds against a dragon, a nearly invulnerable, super strong, super fast fighter, and someone who could literally stab you while invisible.
Not that I wanted to test that. I was arrogant, not stupid.
Mak was waiting for me, because of course she was, and she threw the cellar doors open the moment I landed. I threw the pouch of coins to her, then Shifted just before I went inside. It really was a wonderful quality of life trick; why track in mud and water when I didn’t have to? I had a nest of soft pillows and warm blankets in the strongroom, and I preferred to keep them clean and dry, thank you very much.
I wasn’t surprised to see Herald waiting for me, nor that she and Mak were both cleaned up and dressed for bed. What did surprise me was that she looked pissed, and the reason for that was plainly obvious. Sitting on the opposite end of the bench from Herald was Zabra, waiting for me with her.
When I Shifted back Zabra quickly rose and knelt on the floor before me, bowing down and touching her forehead to the stones before sitting back up. “My lady,” she said thickly. “Thank you. For saving us. For saving Kesra. For avenging our dead. Thank you.”
“What are you doing awake, Zabra? I thought I’d told you to sleep properly.” I sighed. I wasn’t annoyed. Not really. I just didn’t want to deal with her any more than necessary. “And shouldn’t you be with Kesra? Is she awake yet?”
“Thank you for your concern, my lady, but no, she isn’t. Bekiratag is with her, and says she doesn’t know when she might wake up, but that it may be a few days. As for why I’m awake… I thanked Bekiratag and Mister Tamor, my lady, but I had not thanked you. I couldn’t sleep, no matter how I tried. I’m ashamed, my lady. Even after what I did to you, and to Lady Drakonum and Miss Herald, you showed mercy. You rescued us both from certain death. And now you’ve punished those responsible. I’m ashamed that I never truly showed my gratitude.” She folded forward and pressed her head to the floor again. “Thank you.”
Dammit, she’s as bad as Tammy. I wasn’t sure if it was my own thought, or if it was all three of us in my head in chorus, but it was honest. And in a way it was very similar to how Mak had been in the week or so after I broke her.
Ugh. I didn’t like comparing Zabra to my dear sister. “Well, now you’ve thanked me,” I told her dismissively. “Go to bed. I hope you can sleep better.”
She rose smoothly to her feet, and if she felt dismayed at all by my dismissal she didn’t show it. All she did was to smile and say, “Yes, my lady. Good night.”
Us three sisters watched her go, Mak indifferent, Herald glaring after her the whole way up the stairs, and me feeling more weirded out than anything else. Once the door closed behind her I said, “Does anyone else almost wish that she’d go back to how she was before? I think I preferred femme fatale Zabra over… this.”
“I would prefer no Zabra over whatever a fem fattal is,” Herald said, “but yes. She is quite pathetic, as she is. Not to mention useless.”
“I can tell you from experience that she’s doing a lot of thinking right now.” Mak said. “There are parts of her missing, and she can feel the holes where they used to be. There’s no way to know if the old Zabra can exist without them, or if she’ll have to create something new. We’ll have to wait and see.”
Herald and I both looked at Mak, but neither of us said anything. She’d never really talked about what it was like when I broke her, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know. Not right there and then, at any rate.
“Well, I love what you made with yourself,” I told her. “Now come on, you two. We’ve had a productive night. Let’s get some sleep.”