Page 8 of Raven's Dawn

“That has helped with the famine here, sure,” Graham said. “But no, I mean the old king. The one who ruled the Open Lands when I left. Alre was his name. A real prick. He didn’t allow immigration. If you rode a dragon in, it would get shot down.”

My stomach bubbled, and I held his hand a bit tighter. “Damn.”

“Avery, though, she’s a good queen. She allows people into her land. That’s what Laila said, at least.”

“How much longer?” Jake called behind us.

“I can hear the others now,” Warren said with a glance over his shoulder. “Shouldn’t be much further.”

“Graham?” he asked.

“Aye, Warren’s right.” Graham turned back to Jake. “We’re getting close.”

“Good, because it feels like a lot longer than ten minutes.”

Jake’s presence didn’t help.

That wasn’t to say that I was unhappy with his return. He was my brother. I loved him. I’d missed him. I had mourned him.

I could say that was what made it so hard. That I mourned him for a decade, and he was never really gone. But that wasn’t true.

The truth was that I didn’t like him.

I was almost thirty years old. Mentally, Jake was still a teenager. He sure thought he was smarter than me, though.

For the decade or so that I had been an adult, I had been self-sufficient. Not in Jake’s eyes. To Jake, I was a pathetic little girl dependent on her boyfriends. One of whom he blamed for his disappearance.

We all felt the resentment. He stared at Warren like he was shit on the bottom of his shoe. He didn’t look at me much differently. Same went for Ezra.

He didn’t like me being in a relationship, let alone with them. Throw polyamory into the mix, and he was all but gagging at dinner each night.

When he wasn’t gagging, he was silent. Like he was now. Just along for the ride, ignoring those of us he didn’t like with each step.

“You think he’s ever going to stop doing that?” Graham asked, lowering his voice.

“Treating Warren like garbage?” I asked. “No, but it’s getting old.”

“I’ve tried to talk to him, but he’s not having it.” His voice was a whisper now. Undoubtedly, Ezra and Warren could still hear us, but if Graham thought this was too sensitive for the two of them to hear, he would’ve switched over to telepathy. “He acts like he had no fault in what happened. And I can sympathize with everything, but I was there too. I know Warren fucked up, but none of it would’ve happened to begin with, if not for Jake.”

“Honestly?” Beyond the pine trees ahead, a cluster of people came into view. The group we were meeting, I assumed. It felt like we were approaching a bonfire, the strength of their energy pulsing with a life and heat of its own “As angry as I was at Warren when we first found out, now that I know the whole story, and now that Jake’s okay, I don’t really blame him at all. Like you said, he fucked up, but Jake’s the one who tried to make a deal with the devil.”

“And almost got us killed in the process,” Graham said. “Now playing the victim? Yeah, it’s annoying.”

“Especially when you remember that we all almost died saving his ass.”

“Aye, it’s obnoxious.” A deep breath. “But he’s young.”

While that was true, it felt like we were making excuses for him. Even back then, when all three of us were teenagers, Graham and I knew it was a bad idea. Graham and I had tried to convince him not to do it. But he was a little bit older. He was the one we looked to for guidance. He was the one we let be the alpha of our pack.

And it ruined all our lives. He may have been my big brother once, and I deferred to him then, but I wouldn’t make that mistake again. The way I saw it, he was my little brother now. I had over a decade more life experience than he did.

Now, the others were only a few dozen strides ahead. It looked like the same group from earlier, minus a few people. Laila, Jeremy, Iliantha, and Luci were familiar. The others, about half a dozen people, I didn’t recognize.

As we got closer, I called, “Are we still waiting for anyone?”

“Nope,” Laila said. “Everyone else was just here for the vote. It’s all on us from here.”

“Hurry up so we can make the introductions,” Jeremy said. “The dragons will be here any minute.”