But he was finally awake, and lucid, and that itself was a massive relief. Watching while he’d jerked and muttered nonsense in his sleep had been horrible. One night he’d thrashed about so violently we’d considered tying him down. I knew it was the dragon blood working its way through his system, causing fever and sickness as his body tried to adapt to or reject the infusion. I knew that without it Garret would most certainly be dead, and that Riley had saved his life with his quick thinking. But, watching him moan and thrash trying to ward away phantom enemies, hearing what was almost a snarl erupt from his throat one night, I couldn’t help but wonder what he would be like when he finally came out of it. If he came out of it at all.

Thankfully, he had. And it didn’t appear to have changed him. At least, not on the outside. What was happening inside him was anyone’s guess; as far as any of us knew, no human had ever received a transfusion of dragon blood, so there was nothing to compare it to. I doubted Garret would sprout wings and a tail, as cool and disturbing as that might be, but I also doubted any human could get injected with the blood of a dragon and not experience side effects.

Right now, watching him sleeping peacefully for the first time in over a week was all that seemed important. He was alive, not delirious, and now I could rejoin the rest of the world. Riley, I knew, would be relieved. I’d barely seen him and Wes since our arrival, and the only times I’d left this room were the instances when I’d fallen asleep at Garret’s side and Riley had carried me to my own bed. I knew he’d want to hear that Garret was awake, if for no other reason than I would stop worrying about him.

With one final look at the unconscious soldier, I tiptoed out of the room and slipped into the hallway beyond.

I nearly scraped my skull on the low, curved ceiling—again—and ducked my head with a stifled growl. The corridor was actually an enormous corrugated steel tube with rooms branching from it. A steel ladder at the far end of the tube led up to a tiny concrete hatch in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming. As fallout shelters went, it was pretty typical. Riley said he’d “stumbled onto it” many years ago and had modified it into an emergency fallback center. It was dark, it was claustrophobic, but it was, according to Riley and Wes, the most secure place we could hope for, a refuge where we could wait out the craziness up top and know that St. George wouldn’t come for us all in the night.