Chapter 260: The Dragon Was Done Being Patient

ASH’S POV

Ash had been told to wait for a radio call, which was becoming an excellent way to get the radio operator killed.

He knew that was unfair. He also knew the man had checked the same wire three times while Dove remained somewhere beyond the canal with people hunting her. Fairness had stopped improving his mood several hours ago.

After another night of broken signals, he stood in the dental clinic’s back yard, where the morning sun had baked yesterday’s puddles into dark stains. Beyond the fence, two security men escorted a prisoner toward the rear entrance. The prisoner kept looking at the gate, calculating a run he would not survive.

Ash watched him realize that.

"Inside," he said.

The prisoner obeyed before either guard touched him.

They took him into the old waiting room, away from the treatment beds. Plastic chairs lined one wall. A child’s faded drawing hung beside a notice about brushing twice a day. Ash didn’t know why he kept noticing ordinary things like that. Perhaps because people still expected somebody to be alive next Tuesday.

The older guard placed a stained jacket on the desk. "Caught him trying to collect payment from the men at the east gate. The witness says he made the rain."

Ash went still. "Which rain?"

The prisoner started talking about how he hadn’t hurt anybody. Ash picked up the front of his shirt and brought him close enough that the excuses stopped.

"Which rain?"

"The courtyard. Those streets. That’s all I can do. I can’t make it go farther."

Ash remembered the straight edge of the shower he had flown through with Thorne beneath him. Red water on one side, dry roofs on the other. He had thought somebody had used a skill. Now the man was here, sweating into Ash’s fist.

The guard set a chair behind him, and Ash let him fall into it.

"Start again. Slowly."

The talent had arrived weeks earlier. A brief shower over a small area, red enough to look like blood. Not a storm he could move across the state, not the rain reported from other bases, and not something that had injured anyone by touching them. Before the attack, the man had used it to frighten people away from places his friends wanted to search.

Then somebody had offered him supplies to make it happen while armed men went into Dove’s building.

Ash looked at the jacket on the desk. He could still see her wiping red water from her face, searching her husbands for wounds. The memory tightened through his chest until breathing felt like something he had to choose.

"You wanted them scared," he said.

"I just wanted food."

The guard’s expression hardened. "You were paid in fuel and ammunition. Try again."

Ash admired him for catching the lie before Ash decided the conversation was finished. The man gave them a description, a meeting place, and the name of somebody who had promised the rest of his payment. He didn’t know who had fired the shot. Ash believed that particular answer because the man had begun offering guesses instead, desperate to keep himself useful.

He made the guards write every guess separately from what the prisoner had actually seen.

Dove would need the truth. A pile of frightened lies would only send them after the wrong men.

Ash made the guards keep the prisoner away from the treatment rooms. The man could spend the afternoon staring at a wall; the people he had terrified needed somewhere to rest. When a guard asked whether Ash wanted to watch the questioning, he looked toward Thorne’s door. He had already got the useful answers. He would not delay Dove’s news to enjoy making the man afraid.

The operator appeared in the doorway before Ash could ask another question. "The reservoir diner has her. She’s safe for now. Bear’s with her. They’re waiting for the next clear transmission."

Ash released a breath so abruptly that the prisoner flinched.

"Put her through."

"I said the next clear transmission. The signal’s dropping."

Ash stared at him. The operator stared back, pale but stubborn, and pointed toward the treatment room.

"She asked for the panther first."

Of course she had. Ash knew that. Knowing it did nothing to stop the ugly pull beneath his ribs.

He went to Thorne instead of arguing with a man holding a radio. Thorne sat against pillows with a bowl on his lap, looking better than he had yesterday and nowhere near well enough to satisfy either of them.

"They found her," Ash said.

The bowl nearly slipped. Thorne caught it, swore at the pain, and put it aside. "Where?"

"Reservoir road. They’re arranging a call."

Thorne shut his eyes. Ash watched relief change his face and hated, for one brief, poisonous moment, how openly the other man could show it. Thorne didn’t have to pretend he was concerned about a former resident. He could love her in front of anybody.

Ash had flown through gunfire with this man’s blood on him, and still some part of him wanted what Thorne had so badly it hurt.

"Stop looking at me like that," Thorne said without opening his eyes. "You’re frightening the nurse."

"The nurse isn’t here."

"Then you’re frightening me. Help me sit up."

Ash did. Carefully, which earned him a searching look he ignored. He explained what they had learned about the attack’s rain, keeping the wider reports separate. Thorne listened, jaw tightening as the story took shape.

"Tell her," he said. "She noticed something was different before we got to the stairs."

That was Dove. Terrified, furious, still seeing the thing everyone else missed. Ash pictured her making some sharp comment with red water on her lips, and had to turn toward the window.

Outside, a security patrol crossed the yard. He wanted to be above that road, searching every roof and every stopped vehicle until he found her. He wanted to land beside her and have her look relieved instead of bracing herself for an argument.

He wanted too much to keep calling it duty.

The radio crackled in the next room. The operator raised his voice, repeating the clinic’s name, and Thorne reached for the bedrail.

Then her voice came through the open door, thin with static and so familiar that Ash’s hands curled at his sides.

"Please tell me he’s there. I need to hear him."