Dragon Soul by Jaida Jones Read Free Book Online Page A

being it would serve its purpose.
    “Like I said before things went to piss,” Rook muttered, “they had a fucking piece of Magoughin’s girl, all right?”
    I glanced down at the box in Rook’s hand, trying to follow. His words had barely made sense—and then someone had made a grab for the box, and he’d thrown the first punch, and after that all was chaos. Hitting and kicking and clawing—all manner of action that drove real thought straight from a person’s head.
    He’d said that before—
our girls
—but it hadn’t occurred to me at the time what he was actually talking about.
    “Chastity?” I said.
    “Yeah,” Rook agreed. His mouth twisted to the left, then resettled into its grim, hard line, like the slashed mouth of a ritual mask from the distant south. Those masks were meant to frighten away the curses placed upon a family by one’s ancestors. I would have explained the dark humor to Rook if I hadn’t already known the outcome:
Shut up, Professor. Shut the fuck up
. “You’ve still got all that memorized, huh?”
    “You do, as well,” I pointed out.
    “That’s different,” Rook snapped, and he was right.
    I steadied myself to be brave enough for my next question. “May I see it?”
    “It’s nothing special,” Rook said. “Just a fucking scale, nothing important. What good’s looking at it gonna do? Fuck me.” He lifted the box, though, as if he were about to slam it down on the table in front of us, then set it down gently, popping open the top. There it was, a scale indeed, though I personally would never have recognized it. I knew very little of the dragons themselves—I’d been given no real time to study them, and mechanics had never been my strong suit. In point of fact, what little I did know was of their riders. If this was Chastity, then it was as much a piece of Magoughin as it was a piece of metal.
    I reached forward to touch it with my bad hand, and Rook whistled.
    “Looks like that hurts,” he said.
    I sniffed. “It does. Quite a bit, actually.”
    “You bunched your fist too tight, that’s why,” Rook explained. “You made the muscles too tight. You gotta make your fist go loose—less bruising that way.”
    The theory made anatomical sense. “I hope I never have to put that advice into practice, in any case,” I said.
    “Well, don’t say I never taught you anything,” Rook muttered.
    “I wouldn’t exactly say that.”
    Rook got real close to me, his eyes crazy in a way I hadn’t seen them get for a long time. “That some kind of insult?”
    “A compliment,” I managed, voice coming out distinctly strangled. “I believe I intended it to be a compliment.”
    “We’re getting sidetracked anyway,” Rook said, wheeling away and stalking to the window. “What the fuck do you think about that thing?”
    “About the dragonscale?” I asked, knowing already what the answer was. But I was buying time to think my answer over, foolishly convincing myself that if I put enough thought into it, I could divine the
right
answer, the one that would assure Rook he hadn’t been completely out of his mind to take me along.
    I stretched my hand uneasily, trying to keep it from getting too stiff. I was treading on unsteady ground, and the hard lines of Rook’s back were as unforgiving as they’d ever been—even back in the days before we’d known what we were to one another. I stared at the dragonscale on the table, trying to mold my thoughts around the twisted shape of it.
    The problem was, I’d never been as close to the dragons as I’d been to the men—one had to call them men, even if other words were preferable—who’d ridden them, and I’d been somewhat reluctant to raise the topic during my time spent traveling with Rook. How did one broach such a delicate subject? Thus far, we’d never addressed the dragons or what had happened to them at all, to say nothing of those members of the corps still living—or those now lost to us forever.
    I’d written