Inferno (Talon #5)(99)
I hoped it would never come to that.
“Are there any more questions?” I asked, and when no one answered, I turned to Tristan, standing rigidly beside me. “Are we ready to go, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, sir,” Tristan replied. “The car is waiting out front now.”
“Dismissed,” I told the soldiers before me. “Alexander, you’re in charge until we return. Contact me if anything unusual happens.”
“Sir.”
“Let’s go,” I told Tristan, and we left the room, heading outside into the hot Arizona sun.
*
“Damn,” Tristan muttered a few hours later. He craned his neck, gazing up at the skyscraper towering overhead. It loomed against the evening sky, a monolith of glass and steel rising into the twilight. “To think, an office of the Elder Wyrm was right here, and we never realized it.”
“Good thing we didn’t,” I replied as we walked toward the front doors. A security guard opened them for us with a nod, and we ducked into the air-conditioned building. “I can’t imagine going head-to-head with her again and not being completely obliterated.”
“God, that was a fight, wasn’t it?” Tristan agreed, keeping his voice low, as our footsteps echoed across the spacious lobby. “One thing that confuses me, though. How did you become the leader of St. George when, technically, I was the one who killed the freaking Elder Wyrm?”
I shot him a glance and saw that he was grinning. “You want the job?” I asked, heading toward a trio of well-dressed humans who looked like they were expecting us. He snorted.
“Fuck, no. But a plaque on my office door would be nice. Tristan St. Anthony, Slayer of the Legendary Elder Wyrm, has a nice ring to it.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I muttered, and then fell silent as the trio of smiling humans came forward, shook our hands and requested that we follow them to the meeting.
The elevator took us to the very top floor, and when the doors finally opened, a wall of windows showed off open sky with a few dotted stars, and the glittering city streets very, very far below. A pink tinted cloud floated in the sea of navy blue, and for a moment, I felt a sudden, irrational urge to stand at the very edge of the building, as close to the sky as I could get.
“The meeting is about to start, sir,” one of the humans said, gesturing at a large wooden door at the end of the hall. “Please, go on in.”
Tristan and I pushed open the doors, and walked into a roomful of dragons.
Everyone had arrived before us, it seemed, though we had arrived early. Across the table, Riley and Mist sat side by side, with a very bored-looking Wes lounging over his laptop. Jade and another Eastern dragon, a slender man with a white mustache down to his waist, perched at the other end. Both wore elegant robes, and Jade’s hair was pinned up with ivory chopsticks, adding to her unruffled mystique. The older Easter dragon’s eyes were closed, either in meditation or trying very hard to appear serene, given the final dragon in the room. At the head of the table, the Archivist, the ancient Wyrm who guarded Talon’s Vault, stood beside an empty chair, a sheaf of papers in both wrinkled hands. His pale blue eyes met mine as we entered, and he inclined his head.
“Commander Sebastian,” the ancient dragon greeted, his quiet voice making the tiles shiver under my feet. “Lieutenant St. Anthony, welcome. We are glad you could join us.”
“Thank you,” I said, and seated myself at the end of the table, Tristan beside me. The Archivist leaned over and pressed a button on the phone in front of him, speaking into the receiver.
“The Order of St. George has arrived, ma’am.”
My heart beat faster as a door opened on the opposite wall, and Ember came into the room. Gone was the girl in jeans and a T-shirt, a firearm hanging at her waist and her hair standing on end. Now, she wore a dark green suit jacket, a matching skirt, and her hair was brushed back, looking almost manageable. For just a heartbeat, I felt a flicker of apprehension at how similar she looked to Dante. Maybe not her clothes, but her posture and appearance spoke of the same cool, businesslike attitude I’d seen in her twin and many of the other Talon dragons.
But then our gazes met and she gave me a smile, instantly becoming the Ember I’d always known, and I relaxed. Despite the expensive clothes and sudden acquisition of an entire multi-billion-dollar company, she was still the same.
“Everyone.” She took her place at the head of the table and gazed around at the assembled humans and dragons. For a moment, she seemed to gather herself, to collect her thoughts or her composure, to act in the way the new CEO of Talon should. Then she smiled, and it filled the entire room.
“This hardly seems real, doesn’t it?” Ember regarded the table with shining green eyes. “I never really thought that, in my lifetime, we would see the end of the fighting between Talon and the Order of St. George. But here we all are.” She raised her hands, indicating the table, though her gaze lingered on me. “Alive. At the end of the war at last. Though it’s been hard getting here. I know we all lost something to finally see this day come.”
A shadow crossed her face, and my heart ached for her, knowing she was thinking of Dante. Her sibling’s body had been lost in the lab explosion, and Ember had taken that hard, not being able to say a proper goodbye. I understood. I, too, had left someone behind in the explosion, someone I’d never imagined running into. Seeing him in the depths of Talon’s laboratory, knowing exactly what he had become, what he had turned into, hadn’t made it any easier. It was painful, but the last piece of my past was truly gone; I was Garret Xavier Sebastian, Commander of the Order of St. George, and now, I would look only to the future.