Dragon Call by Emily Ryan-Davis Read Free Book Online Page B

him.”
    “Yum, big city melodrama,” Cora muttered
beneath her breath. She followed Diane from the lift and toward the
stairs.
    “It’s not like that,” Diane whispered. “Just
trust me, alright?”
    The pair climbed the three flights of stairs
up to Diane’s floor.
    “Stay away from him. He knows you’re
protected now, anyway, so he’ll stay away from you whether or not
you’re smart enough to do the same.”
    “Could you be anymore condescending?” Cora
asked as they emerged from the stairwell.
    Diane didn’t answer until after they were
inside her apartment. “Look,” she said, “I know you don’t get it,
and you don’t want to get it. I respect that. You need to
understand, though, that there are people who aren’t passive, who
are very, very dangerous. The Collector’s one of those people.”
    Cora sighed, kicking out of her shoes. “It’s
a moot point now, anyway. He knows about us, so we need to figure
out what to do about him instead of how to avoid him.”
    “Just avoid him,” Diane said on her way to
her bedroom.
    Cora frowned after her sister. “Are you
listening to me? He knows about us. About you and me and ma
and—”
    “That we’re witches?” Diane called from the
other room. “Everybody knows that, Cora. You’re the only one of us
who doesn’t talk about it openly. Ma and I don’t hide ourselves
from the world.”
    Diane’s words struck Cora with the force of a
slap. Cora’s tendency to keep her Lune heritage private was a
longtime source of contention between all three Phillips women,
with Diane and Miranda resentful of what they viewed as shame and
Cora resentful that they tried to force their beliefs upon her.
She’d never been able to present a solid stand against Diane and
Miranda when they got up in arms about her view of the matter, so
she instinctively shied away from getting into it with Diane over
the same tired topic.
    “Never mind,” she mumbled to herself.
    Diane sailed from her bedroom, whipping her
hair—long and dark, unlike Cora’s blonde bob—up into a high
ponytail. She’d changed into a pair of sequin-studded jeans and a
glittery blue tube top, which she covered with a blue wool half
cape. “I’m going to Alissa’s for the night,” Diane said. “She’s
waiting for me downstairs. Call if you need anything.”
    As soon as Diane closed the door, Cora
retrieved a pint of cherry vanilla ice cream from the freezer. She
ate it directly out of the container and paced Diane’s apartment.
The only light came from the kitchen, itself a small bulb over the
sink that shed just enough illumination to keep Cora from running
into walls.
    The apartment reflected Diane’s flair for the
dramatic perfectly, done up in all dark wood floors and naked
windows that allowed the sun in to heat the wood during the day and
the moon in to cool the wood at night. A rocking chair stood in
front of a huge window, in easy reach of Diane’s several
bookcases.
    Even though she didn’t share Diane’s
religious affinity with the goddess, she understood the power of
faith. Diane’s apartment reflected her belief. It was a ritual
place, a woman place—the rocker was their great-grandmother’s,
cherry wood shaped and carved and waxed and worn until it shone
blood red by sun and moonlight alike. The antique bed had no known
age, and for all Cora knew it was an eternal thing that had taken
life as often as it had ushered life from womb to world: countless
lives, bloodstains marking each birth on the feather mattress.
    Diane had inherited both pieces of furniture.
Their ancestor’s journal had been bequeathed jointly to Cora,
Diane, and Miranda. The private writings revealed the old woman’s
own reverence of the moon goddess. Cora, then up to her neck in
econ courses at NYU, had not been in the proper frame of mind to
receive such a legacy with anything but skepticism, especially
after weaning herself off her adolescent lifestyle.
    Occasionally, she wished she were as