Legions of Bone: Dragon Rider Book 3

Chapter 5: Always Watching

^^^^Quinn growing up

Quinnlyn

Quinnlyn missed her apartment. She missed the grand windows stretching floor to ceiling and wall to wall. She missed sipping the coffee she got from the cafe down the street as she watched the night come alive and the bars open. Looking over the city with its beautiful lights made her feel powerful, and knowing she would walk in the streets, hunting, made her feel dangerous.

    And Quinnlyn liked feeling dangerous.

    But this house had ordinary windows and a bland kitchen with white tiles and brown carpet everywhere else. Outdated, she thought, watching the grey wallpaper curl while dragging her fingers along the walls. And the neighborhood... It was too quiet, most of the house lights were off by nine.

    It was all so... Mundane.

    "This house needs a pop of color," she said eight days ago and painted the house red.

    Now she sat in a chair on the second floor, carefully sucking orange buffalo sauce from her fingers. There was a drama show playing in the background, voices drifting from theTV, but Quinnlyn was focused. Her blood quickened knowing that the longer she sat here, the closer she was to her trap closing around her intended victim's neck.

    She had spent the majority of her week learning the routine of the house next to hers. There were always two silver heads plus a boy and girl. They switched off at the same time every morning and evening, just like the people hiding in the shadows around the house. But the girl always stayed inside, only leaving on rare occasions to get the mail. Quinnlyn had noted in the beginning that the girl spent most of her days reading a large, ancient book before handing it off to the boy in black who took far too long to read each page.

    She knew all their names. Norah and Dagen. Holland and Riveta. Bronn and Evra and the brother Kaiden, and the older sister, the judge. She could smell their kin when she first studied the house, could smell the sickness of a dying girl.

    Quinnlyn didn't care why Norah needed to die. Khalixis had never told her that and she never asked. But she had given her extremely specific instructions on how the girl was to die.

Do not kill her until she says yes.

The goddess said the girl would understand what that meant.

    Rage burned the demi-god's veins. Killing was hers. It was her pleasure. Done the way she saw fit, not what some arrogant goddess wanted.

    But Quinnlyn couldn't refuse, not with the blood bond connecting her to Khalixis acting as an internal alarm for the goddess. If Quinnlyn tried to lie, tried to run, the goddess would know and then she'd be the prey.   

But that didn't mean Quinnlyn couldn't make this her own.

She studied, learned, set her trap. And then, late at night, she'd stare out her window and into Norah's room. Her golden-orange eyes would be like orbs in the night, and she was sure the girl had seen them. Quinnlyn expected screaming and fear but the girl had just stared as if she weren't sure Quinn were real, her black tendrils swirling up her jaw and into her temple. Then, she'd shut the blinds.

    Be that way. Quinnlyn spun and marched back to her seat. The girl was hallucinating, Quinnlyn knew that much. Had seen her talking to air, heard her screaming in ways that made the demi-god's stomach heat and veins boil with jealousy. Etin was hurting her and barely leaving sliced skin. The hunter wanted to share notes.

    Quinnlyn glanced at the clock on the wall, stood, and strode downstairs where a wretched smell was steeping like tea. The longer you left it in water, the stronger it became.

    She had considered going to the house on the other side of Norah's home; it was modernized with granite counters and wooden floors, but there was no view into the house. And moving would mean she'd need to kill the people in it, which wasn't a problem, but timing a dragon's death and a rider's at the same time without anyone noticing was far more difficult than she liked to admit. And it was cold outside and this house had good heaters.

    She went to another window at the front of the house and peeked an orange-gold eye around the brown curtains. The boy in all black was stepping onto the front porch as he always did, refusing to knock as he always did, and like always he stared at the house Quinnlyn was in.

The demigod narrowed her eyes to slits, blocking out as much of her gold-orange color as possible could without sacrificing her vision. She knew he couldn't see her or smell the reek of death but he always studied the house like he knew something was happening.

    And then he stepped inside the house.

    And Quinnlyn returned to her seat, and waited for her trap to spring.