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The dragon let out a last huff of breath. I assumed it was air evacuating from his lungs as he died.
He slammed into the top of the car at a great rate of speed. In a thud of flesh and a twisting of steel, the car was crushed. Glass shattered and flew everywhere.
I had to turn my face to keep from getting any in my eyes.
Chunks of metal and other things I didn't want to identify rained down past us.
Knox dragged me down to the ground and Bain threw himself across my back, shielding me from the worse of the wreckage.
I closed my eyes and scrunched up my face. I winced at a heavy thud which sounded like the dragon's body rolling over and off the car.
The ground trembled for a moment.
Then everything went still.
My heart raced like one of those super speed trains that run on magnets. I could make it from coast to coast on my heartbeat alone.
"Are you okay?" Bain asked, finally backing up a hair or two.
"I'm fine," I said, breathless from the impact and the proximity of both guys. "Are you?"
"I'm okay." Bain would have said the same thing if he was missing a few fingers and an eye, but I nodded.
"Knox?"
"I'm okay," he said, but he sounded pained. "Just a bit of glass in my arm."
"More than a bit." My eyes widened in alarm to see blood soaking his sleeve.
"I'll live," he assured me.
"Shit," Bain said, just loud enough for me to hear.
"What?" I turned to see Bain and Slade standing a couple of metres away. Both stood looking at the twisted wreck of the car.
"Well, that's a write off," I muttered.
14
Bain
"Shit."I walked slowly around the totalled car in the hope of finding something to salvage. A knife, a water bottle.Anything.
Knox crouched beside the dragon’s body. In spite of the blood, his arm seemed to be fine. "There's enough undamaged skin to get a few scales."
I nodded and looked over to where Viva sat beside the road, under the only tree for several metres. Hair came loose from her ponytail and ruffled in the light breeze. She wore very little makeup, but needed none. She would be drop dead gorgeous in a paper bag, with bed hair and a scrubbed face.
"We can split some between the five of us," I said. "The rest can go to people who need it." I thought back to Pete, the hunter killed by the sand dragon who got aggressive before shedding her skin. Dex made sure his family were comfortable, but a few more of the valuable scales wouldn't hurt.
"You're really going to skin that dragon?" Viva asked. She rose to her feet and moved closer. She stood with her hand shielding her eyes.
"You don't have to watch," I said. "If we leave him here like this, he'll be skinned by whoever comes along next."
"I suppose so,” she conceded, “but I thought it might be more important to, you know, find a way back to the city." She cocked her head and frowned at me and Knox.
"Slade and Greg will be working on that," Bain said. "The Watcher would know better than anyone who might come along."
"That's what I'm worried about," she said.
