Free Smoked by Mari Mancusi Page A

smirk spreading across his face.
    Oh, Buttercup , she imagined him saying. I knew I could count on you.
    Finally, after what seemed an eternity (though was perhaps no more than twenty to thirty minutes), Emmy seemed to slow. Scarlet opened her eyes. They were out of the clouds and into the open sky again, and she willed herself to look down. The arid desert landscape seemed to roll out before them like a blood-red carpet in all directions. But straight ahead, a gigantic rock structure, the remains of some kind of long ago volcanic ash, rose to the sky like the Dark Tower of Mordor.
    â€œWhere are we?” Scarlet questioned aloud. She had no way of estimating Emmy’s average miles per hour and had no sense of whether they were only a few miles or a few hundred from their home base.
    Where we need to be , Emmy replied simply. Now hold on. I am going in for a landing.
    Scarlet gripped the dragon’s scales tighter as the beast lowered her head and raised her wings, coming in for a landing on an uneven ledge near the top of the rock structure. A moment later, they touched down—perhaps not as elegantly as Emmy would have done before they’d broken her wings and not set them straight, but Scarlet managed to hold on and bite back an oomph as pain ricocheted through her.
    Once they were settled, Emmy lowered her wing, allowing Scarlet to leap down to the rocky surface. Now on solid earth again, she looked around, trying to determine where they were and what they were doing there.
    Emmy made her move before she could inquire, walking around a towering rock structure and disappearing from view. Scarlet scrambled after her, curious. Her eyes widened as she turned the corner to find a small, dark cave cut into the side of the cliff. Emmy made a gesture to the cave. I am too large to enter , she told her. But go inside and tell me what you see.
    Now Scarlet was feeling truly freaked out. The last thing she wanted to do was enter some strange, dark cave on the top of a random mountain without any light source. After all, who knew what kind of creature might make this den his or her home?
    Stop being such a coward , she berated herself. Emmy needs you. This is your chance to prove yourself to her, not to mention help poor Caleb.
    Mind made up, she sucked in a breath and pulled out her cell phone, switching it to flashlight mode. Then she willed her feet to step forward, ducking down to enter the cave.
    It was small, cramped, not even large enough for Scarlet to stand in, and so she was forced to hunch over and crouch down to walk through it. She wondered, as she made her way inside, how Emmy had even fit inside this small of a burrow in the first place. She’d been told that dragons liked to jam themselves into tight spaces—it made them feel more secure—but this was ridiculous.
    It’s no different than your pirate cave back home , she tried to tell herself. You and Mac spent hours in there as kids. It was the safest place in the world.
    The thought made her feel a little better, and she waved the phone/flashlight around, trying to figure out what she was supposed to be looking for. Something Emmy had left behind and was now too big to retrieve?
    A sudden thought struck her. What if Emmy’s soft scale had fallen off in here back when the dragon was holed up inside? What if that was why Emmy had brought her here—so Scarlet could retrieve it? Maybe it couldn’t be reattached to the dragon herself but had enough blood left inside to heal Caleb.
    There may be another way , Emmy had said. Could this be what she meant?
    Scarlet’s heart rate picked up as hope started pumping through her. Yes. That had to be it. She would find the scale, and they’d bring it back to Caleb, and everything would be okay. Turning her flashlight to the ground, she started looking for—
    â€œOw!” she cried, practically jumping out of her skin as she felt something sharp pierce her ankle. Startled, she