Chapter Thirteen

Dead silence greeted Tineen as he landed directly in the center of the black dragon village. No coming in by stealth. Though he could have. He figured speed and suddenness would serve him better. Only the place was deserted.

Not a whisper of sound.

Granted these were all black dragons, and most of them had been pretty fucking nonexistent on the last visit here. This was different. Felt different.

“Boss—” Roan said beside him.

“I know.”

Shifting quickly, Roan following suit, Tineen strode into the nearest building, raising his nose in the air to sniff. Someone had been in this room not too long before. A day or two at most. If he’d come here first, he probably would have found them all in residence.

What the seven hells? “Check the other buildings.”

“Sir.”

They split up to go faster, and every space he checked told the same story. Beds left in haste. Dishes in sinks or on tables. The scent of recent bodies inside and out. The settlement had been abandoned. Quickly.

Slamming the last door behind him, he strode across the wide-open space at the center of the so-called town just as Roan emerged from the woods. “I found a trail.”

“Good.” Roan’s expression flattened, and Tineen narrowed his eyes. “What else?”

“I smell that old Huracán dragon, Deep, here.”

Fury hit a slow boil. Had Deep been here while he’d been distracted with his new mate? Or before? “Follow the black dragons’ trail and report.”

As Roan shifted to obey the order, Tineen yanked out a satellite phone from the pack he carried when he traveled. He didn’t dare use his cell phone for this.

“Xi,” the man on the end answered.

“Report.”

“All quiet here.”

“Boss?” Roan’s voice broke through.

“Hold on—”

He muted the call and waited for his second.

“The trail goes cold heading south.”

“To the Huracáns?” Roan would still be close enough to pick up the sound of the words.

“Can’t be sure. Fucking black dragons.”

Tineen tipped his head back to glare at the star-studded sky above. He put the satellite phone to his ear. “Contact Mathai and inform him that the black dragon mate in my chambers needs to be moved to the Alliance headquarters immediately.” Wasting his resources on keeping her bitch of a mate from trying to get her back wasn’t his focus right now. “Also, bring the men in the field back. Put the men currently in headquarters on standby. I want drills run until I return.” He hung up on Xi’s yes, sir. He couldn’t put them on full alert. The Alliance would learn of it and want to know why.

If any one of the Huracáns or his new mate or her fucking orphans ran, they would need to follow. He planned to be ready.

He shifted and took to the air. Rapidly gaining altitude, he caught up to Roan who held in wait for him. “I’m heading back to headquarters.”

“And me?”

“Stick to the plan. Go back to the Huracán mountain and watch those traitors for any movement in or out.”

“You got it.” Roan tipped his wings and disappeared into the night.

Tineen, seething with every beat of his wings, was tempted to follow his beta. Gut instinct told him he should just go back and take Lyndi now, force their hands instead of waiting for them to play this out. But he needed to get that newly turned mate, still held in his room, to the Alliance first. The sooner she was off his hands the better. He’d lost one of the pair. He wouldn’t lose the other, dammit.

But Lyndi—she was the prize. The catalyst. He’d waited for this moment since the second those cowards in the Alliance hadn’t taken the entire Huracán team down after Yosemite. Now he would. He could taste it. He just had to keep his end goal in mind.

…

Deliberately, the entire journey to the Alaz mountain, a straightforward route to stick to her story of being there for her mating, took several days to give Levi and the boys more time to get away. Lyndi had struggled to keep her focus on what was coming. Every cell in her body, every thought, had been where her heart was. Somewhere on the way to the Alaskan wilderness.

Had they gotten away okay? How far had they made it? Had they run across any trouble? Would she see them again?

But now that she was here, the towering peaks of the Rockies all around her as she used every skill at her disposal to follow Shula up the Alaz mountain, she had to focus.

Getting in would be the easy part. They had a plan. She and Shula had flown to the base of the mountain and climbed their way up until they were perched against the bare rockface, out of sight of where the main entrance was hidden. If the Alaz sensors and cameras were the same as the Huracáns’, they were searching for dragons coming at them, not humans.

Mental note to tell Drake to change that situation.

A shadow flashed overhead, and Lyndi froze and held her breath, slowing her heartrate. She needn’t have bothered. A red dragon swooped down to the flat ledge above her and Shula’s hiding spot. Deep. The distraction.

He flew directly to the front dragon entrance and essentially knocked on the door with a thump of his tail against what appeared to be solid rock. After a long wait, the rock silently split in half, folding back to reveal a dragon-sized tunnel beyond.

Whatever was said between him and the dragon that opened the door, she couldn’t hear, since she was in human form. Deep’s story was that he thought he’d discovered the location of the grizzly bear shifters who’d been involved in the fight that lost the Alaz team a dragon last winter. It must have worked, because both dragons extended their wings and flew inside.

The instant they moved, she and Shula, on silent feet the way Rune had taught her, were up and over the ledge and sprinting through the shadows toward the closing door. This door was like a massive double garage door made of stone, closing in from both the top and bottom.

“Dive,” Shula hissed.

Lyndi leaped without hesitation, arms stretched out in front of her. She barely cleared the door as it whispered shut, then tucked and rolled to slow her motion.

Fuck that hurt against the uneven stone, but they made it.

“Follow me,” Lyndi mouthed.

Every enforcer team had detailed schematics of the other team’s installations, which Drake had her memorize before she’d headed here. According to Deep, Bree wasn’t being held in the dungeons. She was in Tineen’s room. How he’d got that information, she had no idea. Slipping quietly from room to room, using the darkness to their advantage, she and Shula moved through several levels unhampered, upward to where the team suites were located.

On the final staircase before the level where Tineen’s rooms were located, a low murmur of voices and pad of steps headed their way froze them halfway up.

Shit. They were going to be scented any second now, no matter how invisible they made themselves.

“Hide,” Lyndi mouthed.

Without hesitation, Shula leaped straight up, attaching herself to the rocky ceiling like a freaking bat, blending into the crags and darkness. A handy skill Lyndi didn’t have time to admire. Deliberately she blew out a small stream of fire, her scent meant to mask the other woman’s and make the men follow her. Then she ran, light-footed, back down the stairs, leaving a trail behind her to the level below and into one of the rooms her ears told her remained unoccupied.

She had a minute at most and ignited her fire fully, blowing a long stream of it into the room, the red-tipped flames curling around themselves in midair. Then she shut the door and sprinted farther down the hall where she found the next room unlocked. Where were all these men? They couldn’t all be on night duty.

She swung inside and left the door barely cracked so she could listen better. Not fifteen seconds later, the sound of running made her stiffen and silence everything about herself. Then a shout and the sound of a door being thrown back and thumping into the rock wall.

“Where is it?” one of the men barked at the other.

“Search the place.”

Lyndi had one shot at this. She pushed the door she hid behind wide enough to scoot back into the hallway. Then with agonizing slowness, controlling her heartbeat with every inch gained, she crept down the hallway back past the room where the men searched. If she could get past them and to the stairs…

A hand wrapped around her neck from behind and lifted her off her feet. “Got you!”

The telltale crack of something hard connecting with a head sounded a millisecond before Lyndi found herself tumbling to the floor in a pile of limbs. Luckily not under the man who’d grabbed her.

She jumped to her feet and spun, crouched and ready to defend herself, to find Shula there, pressed up against the wall beside the open door, a finger to her lips.

“Xi?” A man came running out of the room, and Shula cracked him with a wicked-looking baton right in the head, dropping him like a sack of bones.

Lyndi raised her eyebrows at Shula who shrugged. The woman had skills.

Quickly crouching beside the men, she checked their pulses. Killing Alaz enforcers was not part of the plan. It would only bring more down on them and the team. Luckily, they were both alive. Giving Shula a signal, the two of them dragged the shifters’ bodies into the empty room, closing the door behind them.

Together, she and Shula ran up the winding stairs to the next level, down the hall, and to the door that she was sure was Tineen’s suite. Shula held up her hand to wait, then shifted her nails to black talons at the tip of each finger, her expression one of concentration.

“I’m in here,” a small female voice cried out.

Bree. Shula must’ve shifted to speak to her mate telepathically.

Confident that Tineen wasn’t in there, they pushed inside, shutting the door behind them. Bree they found quickly enough, handcuffed with dragonsteel chains to a dragonsteel bed. In a rush, Shula was on the bed, her lips claiming her mate’s in a kiss so desperate and achingly tender Lyndi glanced away, giving the two women privacy.

“Thank heavens,” Bree whispered. “But you’ll never break these chains. Believe me, I’ve tried.” She held up her hands, raw and caked with dried blood from her efforts.

The growl Shula loosed promised death to the man who’d dared to treat her mate this way. They didn’t have time for that.

“Where is Tineen?” Lyndi whispered.

Bree shook her head. “I haven’t seen him in days.”

The disappointment at that news might as well have been dragon fire down her throat, burning her up from the inside, and Lyndi froze in place. This couldn’t be right. He’d left before she had. He had to be here.

He had to be. She was going to kill him and that would fix everything—

“Lyndi,” Shula hissed.

She had to shake her head twice, blinking at the black dragoness as she dragged herself out of the world of what was supposed to have happened and back to what was happening.

Shula held up Bree’s cuffed hands. “What do we do?”

Right. Help them, get to her boys. Stick with the plan that everyone else had thought was the plan in the first place.

Dammit.

“Good news,” Lyndi said, giving herself a final mental shake. “They have the same restraints we have in our mountain designed specifically for enforcers to use in dungeons. They have a universal lock connected to a database that’s activated by the blood of any enforcer.”

Good thing she’d fought hard to make Drake code her blood into the system.

She joined the others on the bed and took Bree’s wrists in her hands. She flipped open the small covering on the cuffs to reveal a tiny screen and pressed the pad of her thumb onto the small needle there. After a small pause, while she found herself holding her breath, the panel lit up green and the cuffs opened with a click.

“Let’s go,” she said, jumping from the bed.

No time for reunions. The hard part was going to be getting out of here. Lyndi’s secret plan was that Tineen’s death would be the distraction they needed, but she and Deep and Shula had come up with another one.

The three of them made their way back a different way, an opposite path, laying their scent in extra rooms and halls as they went along. They went down more levels in search of the corridor Finn had described that connected the dungeons built into one peak to the taller, main mountain peak across the way.

Sure enough, they turned where he’d described and ended up peering down a long, narrow chamber with walls that only came up to her waist. Built into the mountain’s natural layout, the corridor skirted a narrow ridge connecting two peaks. Apparently, before dragons, this had been an arch carved by the elements over eons, and the Alaz had left it windowless. Who needed a door when she had access to the sky from here?

No place to shift, though. That was the tricky part.

Lyndi was the first to climb over. Only, the second Bree realized what they had planned, she balked. “I can’t shift that fast yet,” she said to her mate, gaze trained in terror on where Lyndi balanced outside, gripping the walls.

“If you don’t, I’ll catch you,” Shula promised.

But even in the darkness—the land visible only by starlight thanks to the new moon—Lyndi could see how the other woman remained pale and shaken.

“She’s afraid of heights,” Shula informed Lyndi briefly. Then she took her mate’s face in her hands. “It’s this or death, my love. Do you trust me?”

Bree’s wide eyes were turning glassy with fear, and she was breathing hard through her nose.

“I can’t lose you again,” Shula said.

The other woman cracked a tiny smile. “If you do, you die, too. I’d call that incentive.”

“I love you. That is incentive enough.”

Bree managed to give a jerking little nod. “Okay. Let’s do this.”

“I’ll go first,” Lyndi said.

She balanced herself on the outside, holding on to the ledge behind her and taking in the sheer drop below. Not perfectly sheer though, with parts of the mountain jutting out into what would be her pathway.

“Try to stay right,” she warned the women with her.

Then she brought her dragon as near to the surface as she could without shifting right there. She flung her body from the edge and let her animal loose. Shimmers briefly took over her sight as she pushed the shift to the point of pain, her skin feeling stretched thin as though she’d rip herself apart any second.

Shifting always took time, and she tried not to let panic claw a scream from her throat as the looming death of the rockface flashed by her in a blur. By a hair’s breadth, she cleared a large boulder, the whoosh of the wind changing pitch as she flashed past it. But then her wings unfurled and she caught the air. With a grunt, she fought the grip gravity had on her before her momentum abruptly changed and she shot back upward, clearing out of the way for Shula and Bree.

Lyndi craned her neck to spot them and almost did a fist pump as two black dragons—one a rich mahogany in color and the other silver—shot into the sky right behind her. Before she could direct them, the piercing wail of an alarm split the night.

Fuck. She’d hoped for more time.

“We’re out.” She sent the thought to Deep.

“Don’t wait for me.” He sent a thought back immediately.

That wasn’t the plan. “But—”

“Go.”

He’d sent the thought to Shula as well. Following that part of the plan they’d made ahead of time, the black dragoness took Bree, and they flew straight up, into the pitch darkness of night where they’d never be found. Lyndi followed, only they headed south, and she went north.

The second she hit an altitude she deemed safe, though, she stopped and waited. She couldn’t leave Deep.

She didn’t have to wait, though, the mountain already reacting. The view far below her sent spikes of terror through her. The mountain swarmed with dragons like an ant hill that had been kicked over. They had to have discovered the missing mate and the two enforcers Shula had knocked out. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be reacting with full force.

Where was Deep?

Difficult, even with her dragon’s sight, to discern colors from this far up and when the night was this dark. Were they holding him? Maybe she could sneak back in after the rest of the enforcers had left the mountain and get him out. No doubt only one or two would remain behind to monitor things.

There he is.

Relief was a short-lived burst inside her, buried under an avalanche of taking in the scene and figuring out what to do. Deep, the dark red of his scales unmistakable, emerged from the dragon-sized tunnel they’d all entered through earlier, following a bigger gold dragon out. Was he pretending to try to help?

If so, she couldn’t mess that up for him or he’d never get away. The goal was for Shula’s group, already in hiding, to take the blame for this one. Not the Huracáns.

Knowing what she had to do now, Lyndi turned away and shot into the night as fast as she could fly without making sound. To the meeting place she and Deep had arranged as a backup plan. If he could get away, he’d meet her there. If not, she’d wait until the designated time, then go on without him if she had to, careful to cover her tracks.

An hour later, she spotted the small lake below in a fairly large valley, but surrounded by thousands of pine trees, their sharp fragrance drifting to her even this high. Rather than dive right down, she paused, beating her wings to hover in the air as she waited and watched. If anyone had followed, this was her chance to see them. Another twenty minutes of that, her wings growing tired with the effort to sustain altitude without the break of gliding forward at the same time, and she was as satisfied as she’d ever be. Slowly, in wide circles that grew smaller as she neared the ground, she spiraled down to the small pond, landing in a nearby clearing hardly big enough for her—though maybe not for Deep—beside the water. The glassy reflection turned into ripples and ridges at the wind she created as she landed.

Then Lyndi shifted and stepped into the surrounding woods, planting herself against the rough, sticky bark of a pine tree, near enough to see anyone else who landed. The trees would mean they had no other options on where to set down. No dragon liked landing on trees. Drake once speared a hole in the membrane of his wing doing that. In addition, enforcers were trained not to leave evidence of themselves, like a massive bunch of flattened trees, behind like that.

There, she waited.

Then waited some more, fighting the growing heaviness of her eyelids that wanted to close. She was supposed to go before the first light of dawn, but she waited through that hour.

Come on, she silently willed. Please let him make it.

The dim light of early dawn, before the sun managed to top the towering peaks of the mountains, started to turn a dark purple. She should go, but she couldn’t make herself do it. Even with Levi and her boys waiting. This was Deep. He and Calla had been like parents—better parents than her own had ever been—to her since she’d arrived with Drake all those decades ago. Friends and confidants.

But silence continued to be her only companion. If only she’d learned how to shift a part of her body so she could reach out to him telepathically.

“Lyndi.”

She straightened but didn’t move away from her tree. That had been Deep, but faint. So faint.

“Lyndi.” Louder now.

She opened her mouth, intending to answer aloud, though quietly, and hope he caught it.

“Don’t reveal yourself. I have company,” his thought reached her first.

Lyndi shrank against her tree trunk. The darkness would no longer be her helper, and her dark red scales would be a beacon in the daylight if she tried to shift and leave now. She couldn’t get out of here easily, and Deep knew it.

“I thought I’d followed without leaving a trail, but he caught up to me,” Deep said next. “He thinks I’m following your trail. We’re going to have to kill him.”

A flash of a shadow was the only warning she had before a massive gold dragon—almost sunflower yellow in color and not as big as Levi—landed in the clearing. She waited for him to shift, but he didn’t.

Instead, he came straight at where she hid in the trees, wings sticking out as his claws gouged into the ground, tail slashing back and forth behind him with each thundering step. Yellow eyes trained on her patch of woods, lit with fire and deadly intent.

“Got you, you little bitch,” it snarled in her head, loud enough that she winced.

With nothing left for her to do, Lyndi didn’t move. She didn’t dare. He could smell her, but maybe not see her yet. If she ran, he’d definitely track the movement.

No shadow or warning prepared her for Deep coming in hot and fast and slamming into the gold dragon from the side. The two rolled directly toward her in a wad of limbs and wings and spikes and she got ready to run, but suddenly the gold dragon went limp and the two stopped, lying there in a heap with the gold on top.

Deep. Lyndi waited.

Then the gold dragon’s body sort of twitched and slowly, with a lot of grunting, Deep crawled out from beneath him. Chest heaving with the effort, he turned his head, gaze intent on her hiding space. Then the shimmering of his shift whispered about him, reflected strangely in the water of the pond and the pale-yellow rays of sunlight fanning out over the trees behind him, until he stood there in his human form.

Except something was wrong. He was limping. Deep made his way over to a large boulder, lowering himself to sit on it, visibly exhausted. Lyndi burst from the trees to run to him.

“Are you hurt?” she said, searching him for blood anywhere.

He shook his head. “No. It’s just been some time since I tackled a dragon and I’m feeling my age. I think I pulled…everything.”

Lyndi blew out a long breath at that, then chuckled. Then grimaced. “We can’t stay here.”

Deep raised a hand in acknowledgment. “I know. When I don’t come back with him—” He eyed the gold dragon. “They’ll follow.”

“Do you want to ride on my back for a bit?” she offered.

Deep eyed her with a flash of red in the faded brown depths of his eyes and said nothing.

She grinned. “I’ll take that as a no.”

He snorted and she winked. Then he waved her ahead. “You first.”

Trying to not show her own exhaustion after a long night, Lyndi backed up and shifted, then took to the sky to clear the way for Deep who would need all of that space.

“Okay,” she said as she turned in the air. “Your turn— No!”

The golden dragon—apparently not dead—rose up behind Deep like a demon from hell and lashed out with its taloned claws. It caught Deep right in the side, and he dropped in a heap, trying to drag himself away.

Lyndi acted on instinct. Fury driving her down, she landed with all the force she could muster from the height she’d been at. Right on the fucker’s neck. With a vicious growl, she twisted hard. A grunt was followed by the snap of bones as she broke his neck, and the dragon went limp beneath her.

Lyndi shifted as fast as she could and ran for Deep to find him crawling his way out of the woods, leaving a crimson trail of blood in his wake. She dropped to her knees at his side, turning him over and cradling him in her lap.

“Deep. Oh gods. Should I give you my blood?”

He managed to shake his head. “I’m already healing…”

Not fast, though. Even swallowing appeared to take him a lot of effort. He waved an ineffectual hand in the air, as though he couldn’t quite control the limb, and she took it in hers, squeezing. “Deep,” she whispered.

What did she do? She had to fix this.

“I’ll be fine. I need to rest and heal first. You go.”

She shook her head hard.

“Yes,” he insisted, gripping her hand tightly. “As soon as I’m healed, I’ll go a different direction, lead them away from you. The scent of my blood will cover anything of yours. You find Levi. Keep those boys safe.”

Oh gods, could she leave him?

Deep’s craggy face shifted into a smile. “You are a daughter to me and to Calla. It’s my job to protect you. Not the other way around. The same way it’s your job to protect your boys.”

Tears burned her eyes and she swiped at them impatiently with the back of her hand. “If you die while I’m gone, I’m going to kill you.”

He chuckled, then coughed. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“You know what I mean.”

Deep lifted a hand to cup her face. “Go be a mother to those boys. They need you.”

With a nod, reluctance dragging at every single step she took away from him, she left Deep lying in that clearing, shifted, and flew away.