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Evacuate the humans to the tunnels. Mason flashed the frequently practiced but never before used code to his brothers, ultraviolet pigments in his scales changing to match the pattern they’d developed during a misspent youth. In reply, Zane immediately peeled out of formation, shifting even as he landed on the Riverview’s roof then sprinting for the stairs to carry out the Lord Dragon’s orders.
With both sets of towers taken care of, that left only the bomb itself to defuse. Cold air bit into Mason’s hide as he turned away from the houseboats arrayed across Golden Reservoir. The west, in contrast, was a Green stronghold, a spot where Fee could drop the explosives without harming human life.
Heading established, Mason twisted his neck backward to check on his precious cargo. Despite a clear understanding that the redhead had come to the Aerie with the intent to do harm, his belly immediately filled with peaceful embers as he watched his treasure work.
Long tresses whipped around her face while pellets of ice settled into the gap between collar and skin. But Fee was so engrossed in her task that she noticed neither wind, cold, nor the fact that she was currently perched on a dragon’s moving back.
So much like Sam. Mason couldn’t count the number of times he’d walked in on his brother intent upon a sea of engineering drawings, how many times he’d slipped a plate of food onto the corner of Sam’s desk only to return hours later to find the offering still untouched.
Instinctively, Mason shied away from the memory...but then he slowly eased back toward an image that emanated warm nostalgia rather than the usual flame-quenching guilt. His chest expanded as his fire grew. And for the first time since Sam’s premature death, a reminder of his twin sent Mason soaring higher into the cloud-filled sky rather than plummeting toward the grasping plants below.
But the moment of tranquility was short-lived. Even as the dragon watched, his treasure’s chin tilted earthward and her hands went abruptly still. Then she peered toward Mason’s face, her already pale skin now so ashen that the dragon was terrified she’d lose her grip and fall down, down, down toward the perennially hungry Green.
Immediately, he whipped his own head forward, berating himself for startling a human who wasn’t accustomed to staring into a dragon’s gargantuan eyes. Fee was so small in comparison to his true form, her body so nearly weightless that he could barely feel human thighs squeezing the saddle of draconic neck as his passenger clung on for dear life. No wonder she’d been startled.
Maybe Fee can relax now that she’s not gazing into eyeballs as large as she is tall....
Except his passenger didn’t relax. Instead, her muscles tensed further and her fists started pounding a staccato against hard-edged scales.
The pummeling didn’t hurt, but it did provoke Mason to glance backward one more time in an effort to assess the situation. “...Dangerous men!” his rider was saying, words barely audible as she yelled against the roar of the whipping wind.
But her hand signal was easier to understand. His treasure had lost her focus on the bomb and was pointing east and down, back toward the towers from which they’d come.
At first, Mason saw nothing but swaying trees and falling snow. Then, at long last, a bright yellow jacket glinted into view.
Once color alerted him to location, impending danger quickly became apparent. Here, there, and everywhere, the forest swayed with movement as humans passed underneath. The invaders were scattered at first but soon coalesced into a circle around the undefended buildings he and his brothers had so recently left behind.
Enemies. Mason whipped his tail up to loop protectively around his treasure’s waist. He knew the gesture was frightening for a human unused to dragon-riding, but he couldn’t risk the woman falling off as he dove directly for his dangerous prey.
Because prey they were. At any other time, the Lord Dragon might have given the invaders benefit of the doubt, might have asked questions before assuming malevolent intent despite the men’s unusual actions. After all, supplicants knew they could arrive openly and make their requests at the public docks. So why bother creeping toward the towers through the danger of the Green?
Mason knew better than anyone how dragons could frighten humans out of their good sense. Still, his treasure had recognized something about these men. Why else would she have turned from tunnel-vision engineer into terrified girl at the drop of a hat? And from the way she now leaned forward, fingers tense as they clung to the gaps between scales, Fee knew the humans below were up to no good.
Which meant Mason was equally confident of the same. Thrusting swirling eddies of snow aside with beating wings, he roared out a warning as he gathered flame inside himself to prepare for attack. The initial goal would be to capture the secretive humans without loss of life. But he wouldn’t risk the safety of his people to do so, not when a hot tear whipped away from his treasure’s cheek and sizzled harmlessly against his flame-riddled hide.
Then an even less familiar sensation captured his attention. The vibration worked its way through his treasure’s leg and into his skin, and for a soul-shattering moment the dragon thought his rider was shaking with terror. Only when he risked another glance backward did he realize the tingle had instead emanated from the chiming of a silenced phone.
The invaders were so close to the Aerie by this point that Mason’s rage threatened to turn him into a ball of formless fire. Yet he managed to squash the impulse and hover above their heads, watching as Fee reached toward the cell phone with shaking fingers.
“Hello?” she said at last, one finger swiping to accept the call. But she hadn’t removed the device from its holster, and her legs squeezed against his neck so hard that she must have expected the bomb to blow them both to smithereens as soon as she touched the screen.
Nothing happened, though. Instead, the only explosion was the pounding within Mason’s chest that sped up to match the pulse of the woman once more clinging to his neck with her one free hand.
“Is the dragon listening?” a male voice asked, not bothering to greet Fee by name. Instantly, flame within Mason’s belly channeled itself into intent focus. This was the true enemy, the man who had sent an honorable but bruised mage into the Aerie with an incendiary device strapped around her huggable waist. This was the man Mason was meant to find and kill.
“I’m not sure if he can hear...” Fee started.
Mason might have been tempted to see how much information he could glean by pretending not to notice the conversation taking place on his back. But his treasure’s voice shook and his fire rose up again, refusing to accept her pain.
Roaring, the Lord Dragon made his presence known.
And as his bellow faded away, the air descended into silence broken only by the beating of massive wings. Two brothers had formed up at his flanks while invaders below gave up on stealth and began running toward their goal as fast as puny human feet could carry them.
But the Lord Dragon was willing to wait. Because he was stalking a far more important enemy now. One who wasn’t close enough to see or fight.
Or was he?
“Look east,” came that insidious male voice. Together, Mason and Fee swiveled to glance toward the reservoir that connected the Aerie to the larger outside world. At this time of year, the smooth-surfaced water was sparsely populated, the haven no longer quite so necessary to protect people from Green encroachment. Still, there were more than a dozen boats currently peppering the surface, each representing several human lives buoyed up by the rivers that Sam’s genius had helped to dam.
But surely that wasn’t what the enemy wanted Mason to see?
Then magenta light flared from the massive embankment that held back the flow of two rivers. A lone human figure stood atop the weir, his index finger pointing down to the right, down to the left, then to a dozen other spots along the tremendous face of the dam.
From his current distance, Mason could barely make out specks where the man gestured. But when a burst of violet turned into a gushing flow of water, his brain quickly filled in the blanks.
Fee’s bomb was the least of the Aerie’s worries. Because if this man destroyed the upstream dam and released reservoir waters to gush down into the Aerie’s valley, then every human currently hiding beneath Sunsphere and Riverview would drown.
Houseboats would be swept along and crushed into splinters as they slammed into trees and fell over the newly created falls. Bodies would float to the surface just like that one gut-wrenching memory out of the Lord Dragon’s guilty past.
In the end, everything Mason and his brother had envisioned would be lost in one moment of complete devastation.