Jake.
How could they have found out his name? He'd known that Susan might know his number, but his name? They never use their names in the field. Even when he's out in secret with Rose, he's 99 and she's Huntsgirl.
They must have infiltrated the Huntsclan. How? Did they hack the servers? They're warded against magic of all sorts, but Jake suspects that someone skilled with technology could still find a way in. Not that it would do much good, given how divided the information is. It would take so long to find anything useful.
Did they find others like Susan to send in as initiates? Short of turning up with a convincing story, the American Dragon herself is too young to make the attempt without raising suspicions even if she could find ways to circumvent the security measures. Most of their initiates are teenagers fleeing circumstances that those raised in the Huntsclan had been able to avoid because they'd already been welcomed into a better family.
At least, that's what he'd always thought, but now—
We named you Jake.
He knows he is not doing a good job of keeping his emotions off his face. They're too rampant, too close to the surface, and it is all he can do not to lose control. He can only hope that she can't interpret them correctly. He isn't even sure he can pinpoint what he's feeling. Part of him wonders if he might be sick, if the twisting feeling in his stomach might try to crawl up his throat to escape.
Jake.
He does not think it is a coincidence. It is too precise to be a coincidence, too much, after everything else, to merely be a guess on their part. Isn't it? Jake is not an uncommon name, exactly, but this—
No.
He doesn't want to think it.
He isn't sure he wants it to be true.
How much of his life is a lie if this is all true, or at least as true as Susan can make it?
"I don't know the name you have now," Susan says. Her words are nearly lost in the rushing within his ears, and he takes more than one deep breath to ground himself. He cannot afford to lose his control and change. "I don't expect you'd like me to call you anything but your number now that you know my connection to the American Dragon, and I know that connection is simply one more reason for you to disbelieve my words. I simply…."
Her voice catches, and he sees tears in her eyes.
He looks away, tucking his chin closer to his chest. His hair falls over his eyes, masking his own prickle of tears until he can hide them entirely behind his arms as he rests his forehead against his forearms. He can feel himself shaking, trembling with more than the effort to keep calm, to stay in control. He can't seem to stop, but at least curling in on himself will make it more difficult for her to see.
He wants—
He doesn't know what he wants.
He wants family.
He wants safety.
He wants to be with Rose, somewhere where he doesn't need to keep secrets from her, where they can laugh again and be friends like they used to. She has always been his best friend, always been the person who sees him for who he truly is, even when he isn't sure of it himself, and he doesn't— He's so close to losing her now, too. To losing everything.
What if it's better if it's lost?
He doesn't want to think on that.
Susan never wanted to give up her son. She never had a choice. If she spoke truthfully, if she is right in thinking that he is the one she believes him to be, then he was taken from her. She'd thought him dead.
Jake thinks back to the others he knows who bear the Mark of the Huntsclan. He and Rose are the only ones their age at their base who were born with it, though there are a handful who are older than them and one younger girl and two boys who are already showing skills beyond their years. There would be more still among the elders, and Jake knows there must be others in other divisions of the Huntsclan, scattered across the world as it is, but most of their peers had not had their birthright emblazoned on their skin for as long as they could remember in a testament of their natural talent. Most of their peers had chosen to bear the Mark after earning the right.
He has attended more than one ceremony, of course. He was allowed to go once he was old enough to understand its significance. After the trial year is over, if the initiate in question survives and chooses to continue—as nearly all who complete their year do—then they take their vows, and the Mark is inked onto their skin. They are bound to the Huntsclan by choice. He is not sure the Huntsclan would survive without those who choose to fight for it.
He suspects there are not enough who are born with the Mark to continue it on their own, even if recruitment has always been a quiet thing to avoid discovery by the dragons or any magical creatures who would carry the news to their ears.
"Even if you aren't my son," Susan whispers, "I want to help you as I would him. You are still a dragon who's been bound to the Huntsclan, and I can only imagine the horrors you would face if you were discovered."
Jake can imagine the horrors all too well—and some he needn't imagine, as he's old enough to remember the last time the Huntsclan was able to capture a dragon. It was not their division, but he and Rose had been allowed to go with the upperclassmen to see a dragon in the flesh. To learn from it.
They were supposed to learn to hate it.
He remembers hating the screams.
They had sounded so…human, even coming from the belly of a dragon as its scales were stripped off and collected, one by one.
He still remembers those screams, even now.
Sometimes, in his nightmares, they are his own screams.
Jake's throat aches, and he tries to tell himself it is in sympathy, a makeshift memory of screaming until there is no voice left to scream, but he knows it is sore because of the tears and the ache he is trying to hold inside.
The fear of discovery has haunted his nightmares for months. He has not been safe since this began. He has accepted that the dragon within him has always been there, that he'd been born with it as surely as he had been born with the Mark, but it's only now, when he thinks on it, that he realizes he isn't sure when the fear of discovery eclipsed his own self-loathing. They had gone hand-in-hand for so long….
He is a dragon.
He is Susan's son.
It could be a clever lie, but— But he doesn't want it to be.
He wants to be wanted, to be loved, to be accepted.
He wants to be Susan's Jake, the son she'd once grieved, the son she needn't grieve any longer.
Jake takes a deep, shuddering breath, and tightens his grip around his legs as he tries not to cry.
They are his family, his birth family, and they cannot trust him because he was raised by the Huntsclan. The bars around him are a reminder of that. They do not trust him.
They should not trust him.
They are right not to trust him.
How long has he been here? He doesn't know the potion they used to knock him out, and he hasn't any way of telling how long it lasted. There is no clock in this room—no functioning one, anyway—and the dim light filtering in the back window only tells him that full night has not yet fallen. When he listens, he can hear the steady tick of his own watch, but he doesn't dare check it while Susan is with him. Under the current circumstances, doing so is all too likely to make her think that he has planned this from the start and that he is wondering how much longer he must stall them.
But he never planned this.
He never planned anything like this, never planned for anything like this, and he should have.
He must have missed his check-in. They must know he is gone. It is entirely too likely that someone is looking for him. Why had he never thought of this before? He'd thought of the danger his actions posed to him, to Rose, but while he'd tried to do everything he could to keep Rose from danger, he'd never thought about Susan.
He hadn't thought he'd be caught.
He hadn't had any plan beyond continuing to hide in the Huntsclan to buy himself more time to come up with an actual plan.
Of course, he'd never imagined he might find his birth family. If he had, he never would've imagined that they'd want him.
But do they want him? Truly?
However nice it is to imagine, he isn't their Jake, the son they'd lost.
He is 99.
Before 99, he was 18, a number now worn by a girl who would happily stab Rose in the back for the official position of Huntsgirl. 18 has a sharp tongue and even sharper knives and daggers—her preferred weapons, though Rose says she's just as happy to use her nails in a catfight—and any other day, he would have felt confident that he could take her on in a fight and win. After all, she did not challenge him for his number and win it; he gave it up to become 99. (At the time, Rose had been 93, and he'd hoped having a number closer to hers would encourage them to be paired together on missions. In the end, it hadn't mattered, as he'd later learned that pairs were based on skills and showings.)
Today, however? Right now? Jake isn't sure he can fight anyone right now. He isn't sure which side he should fight for.
Which means that whoever has been sent to retrieve him will succeed in doing so, regardless of whose blood is shed.
He has no tracker on him, but that won't stop a search and retrieval mission; it will only slow it down.
The Huntsclan is coming, and Susan—his family—will think that it is his doing.
It is, in a way.
It simply isn't his choice.
But the Huntsclan will come, and his chance to know his birth family will be lost forever. He can't imagine that there is any way they won't see it as a betrayal. Even if he's lucky and the Huntsclan hasn't guessed his nature, even if they're lucky and the Huntsclan doesn't realize this is one of the bases of the American Dragon and that she herself is here, he has still been taken captive. The Huntsclan will act accordingly.
If he warns them, will his words be believed? What's to stop them from thinking it's all a trap? From believing him a spy sent to gather information? It must be what they think already. It might even be why they haven't tampered with his memory yet; they might think it too dangerous to try to take everything at once, lest they take something he discovered and reported before, or they might think this an opportunity to feed him lies.
Even if he tells them who he is, even if he transforms and proves to them that he is the one they believe him to be, that will only buy him time, not trust.
Jake squeezes his eyes shut, trying to force away his tears, and attempts to surreptitiously wipe his eyes on his arm as he looks up. Susan must have been talking; he can't remember her words, but her mouth is partially open, and he knows that slightly startled expression of hers by now. He wonders if it is his movement or his appearance that steals her voice and leaves her in silence.
He swallows.
He's making a choice, and he hasn't taken the time to think through the consequences.
Part of him thinks he doesn't have the time to do so.
Another part doesn't even care.
"You—" His voice cracks, and he clears his throat. "You can call me Jake." It is a peace offering. It is all he can give her. Nothing else he says will be as pleasant to hear.
She smiles again, the same sad smile he's seen her wear so often over the course of their meetings. He had never realized all that was behind it until now. "You needn't take up a name for my sake."
She doesn't call him by his number, though he had thought she might.
He doesn't know how to tell her that Jake is still his name, that it was always his name, that it has been his name since—apparently—she and her husband gave it to him.
He doesn't try.
"I want you to," he says instead. "Please." He's afraid it will sound like a ploy to her ears, something he's agreeing to in anticipation of manipulating her, and he hates it, because in other circumstances, that's what he'd be trying to do.
And maybe it is what he should be trying to do.
If he can escape before the Huntsclan finds him, Susan and her family—his family—won't be in as much danger.
He'd intended to warn her of the Huntsclan's coming, but if he can convince her to release him instead—
"Hello, then, Jake," she says. He can't tell what she thinks of his request. She has always been so good at schooling her face and guarding her emotions in their interactions, and this is no different.
He suspects she is merely humouring him, and it hurts.
He wants her to be happy. She— She's risked so much for him already, and he wants to see her real smile, but he can't even grant her this one wish without—
Jake is not often called reckless, but in that moment, he makes another decision without pausing to think of the consequences.
Perhaps, if he had been raised with Susan's family, he would have been called reckless often. He doesn't know. What he does know is that recklessness is not something that can be afforded in the Huntsclan.
Recklessness can get you killed.
Cautiousness and care have kept him safe thus far, and now he is throwing all of that away on a chance—a slim, tiny sliver of a chance—that recklessness will reap a reward that's worth the risk.
He scrambles to his feet, approaches the bars, and holds up his right hand for her to see.
The fire within him burns away his human flesh to leave behind a dragon's talon, and he turns it toward her so that there is no mistaking the pattern on his red scales.