In a Dragon’s Dream by Riley Storm Page 0,44

her grandfather had written down. “Badly. The military didn’t know what they were up against, and they were being pushed back.”

“It wasn’t pretty,” Rakell said. “I wasn’t there, but I’ve heard the stories from the few survivors. Your father’s unit, they lost a lot of men.”

“Then the dragons arrived,” Laura said. “Grandpa wrote that in great detail. Deep in the mines, fighting against the creatures who could see in the dark, who took on the faces of his friends, even the dead. Snatching up men and hauling them off into the blackness. It was a nightmare. One minute they were alone, no hope of survival or stopping the onslaught. The next, a man appeared, covered in gleaming red scales, horns jutting from his head. And he spoke a simple command, and fire shot back down the tunnel, incinerating everything.”

“We were almost too late,” Rakell said. “But guarding the Gate, it’s our purpose. Our reason for existence.”

Laura frowned. Her grandfather’s journals hadn’t mentioned any of that. “Why is that?” she wondered.

Rakell looked away bitterly. “We don’t know,” he admitted. “No dragon does. Only the Faerie lords and queens know the answer to that, and they sort of hate us for keeping them confined to the Otherworld. So we exist for a purpose, but who made us? Where did we come from? None know the answer.”

“That must be…difficult,” she said, reaching out to rest a hand on his knee.

Rak’s hand came down to cover hers, holding it tight. She didn’t pull back.

“I don’t think of it too often,” he said with a wry smile. “Besides, those your grandfather was fighting with had it much tougher. From what I’ve been told, the military tried to detonate another nuke before they pulled back.”

“Yes, grandpa did say that,” she confirmed. “Apparently it didn’t work.”

“One of the Faerie Lords was caught in that blast,” Rakell said. “It…did something to him. Warped him, twisted him, in mind and body. From what I’ve been told, he nearly wiped out the team of dragons that arrived before they could defeat him, at the very mouth of the Gate itself.”

“You mean like, the radiation got him?”

Rakell shrugged. “Nobody knows. There was no body to examine by the time the dragons were done.”

“Oh. I see.”

Silence lingered between them, but their hands stayed entwined.

“So you’ve known your entire life then?” Rakell asked at long last, the first to speak in several minutes as their minds drifted to the past, to those who had come before them.

“No,” she said. “Grandpa said in his journals that they all made a pact never to tell anyone. They even got Crazy Donnie to sign it, which was apparently tough after he went and fell in love with one of them.”

Rakell grinned.

“What is it?”

“Donnie wasn’t crazy,” he said. “Well, other than for Addy. He was a nice guy, met him several times before he passed. One of the rare human males to come up into the mountains.”

“Oh. Well, that sounds much more adorable.”

“They were obsessed with each other,” Rakell said, smiling wide. “I’m sorry your grandfather isn’t around. I would have loved to talk to someone who lived through that.”

Laura shrugged. “He died when I was very young. I found the journals when I was twenty-two, in my father’s possessions. He never read them.”

“Eighteen years,” Rakell said, doing the math to her current age. “How is it you never once came to spy on us, to try and see one of our dragons?”

“Respect,” she answered instantly. There was no hesitation. “Grandfather said in his journals, that anyone reading them should respect the privacy, and only come if invited. That the dragons saved the people of Five Peaks, including his wife, my grandmother. He says he owed his entire family’s existence to them, otherwise he would just be another of the corpses in the cave. Instead, he came out a hero to the government, who were never told about the dragons of course.”

“Well, never officially,” Rakell said. “Word did reach the highest levels, but we worked real hard to bury that. Thankfully it worked. The report will never see the light of day, and everyone who worked on it is now dead I believe.”

“Oh I see. Well, grandpa had the utmost respect for you, and so I did the same,” she said with a shrug. “It just seemed right. Though I’ve been curious ever since.”

Rakell smiled. “It seems I owe Blede a more thorough apology. Kristin had nothing to do with it after all.”

Laura grinned, patting his knee