Den of Thieves - Shannon Mayer Page 0,3

what lay ahead of us, but I was no seer of the future. What I could see was the edge of the Blackened Market. Burned down, destroyed, but it was where the trail of the dragons’ eggs picked up. A beast from the east, huh? Maybe it was just a warning because whoever had the eggs saw us coming and thought to scare us off. Maybe it was a hyena pulling one last joke, which was not so out of the ordinary for the creatures.

But the image of the hyena’s skin pulsing and popping as though something else lived inside her was rather fresh in my mind and there was no joke about how she’d died. Which meant I wasn’t about to discount her final words.

“Let’s see what the market has to offer first,” I said, “then we go from there.”

Lila and Maks gave each other a look and I stuck my tongue out at them. Childish, but it broke the knot of tension that had been tangling inside my guts. Those who could see some bits and pieces of the future, like shamans, really shouldn’t be ignored. Not that they were always right, but by the same token, their words could be used to avoid shitty endings. I didn’t want a shitty ending for any of us after all we’d been through.

The two horses picked up on the swirling energy and broke into a quick trot covering the ground at a steady pace. Balder stretched his nose out enough to be in front. Batman could have tried to beat him, but he was not the boss of the two of them and didn’t like being in the lead. Try telling Balder that, though.

He stretched farther, putting distance between us and Maks and Batman. I didn’t try to hold him back because I was eager to see what the Blackened Market—or what was left of it—held for us in terms of clues.

Lila had grown up in the Dragon’s Ground, and for years, a huge portion of the unhatched eggs had been stolen. Seeing as dragons were not the most prolific of breeders, those losses were a blow not only to the mothers, but to the entire population as well.

Maks and I had promised the female dragons we’d find their babies and bring them back. A promise I didn’t regret, but wondered just how the hell I was going to manage to keep it when we had so little information to go on. Which brought us here to the Blackened Market. Truly blackened now, razed by fire in a fight that we may or may not have started. I narrowed my eyes, looking over the scene. The charred and broken timbers of the buildings, the sand crystalized in places from the heat.

The marks of blades that had cut deep into the wood.

The ground where it had been flattened by something, or many somethings.

“This happened after we left.” I reached out to touch a charred piece of wood, feeling the chunk where a blade had bit fully into it.

Balder slowed and I hopped off before he had completely come to a standstill. Lila was there in a flash of blue and silvery scales, doing her trademark loops through the air. A sure sign of her own tension.

The ground had the strangest tracks on it, or maybe they weren’t tracks at all. I bent low over one close to the edge of the remnants of a building. It was a wide foot, super flat, and two-toed. I spread my fingers over it and wasn’t able to span the width of the foot. Whatever it was attached to was a big boy.

But it was no dragon.

“This wasn’t Corvalis, was it?” I said as I walked onto what had been the main thoroughfare of the market. Corvalis was Lila’s father, the nut-job, power-hungry ex-leader of the dragons. Lila had killed him and proven her worth as his successor. We’d assumed that he’d been the one to set fire to the market after we’d left it at a dead gallop.

Lila swept over a few of the charred buildings, inspecting what was left of the destruction. “No, this was no dragon. Though I think it was done to make it look that way to anyone who doesn’t know much. Hence the burning of the buildings to a crisp.”

I made my way east on the strip, poking the toe of my boot into a few bits and pieces, pausing at the place that had been the weapons stall.