Above her, the dragon tips a quarter-turn, and the loop draws tighter.
My voice is no use here. Shout across open ground with a Syndicate dragon overhead, and it marks us both. Nothing to do but close the gap. I’m closing it. The saddle is wide, she’s quick, and the thing in the air has caught something. A shift in the warm air off the rock. Her scent. Both.
It stops circling.
The wings snap in hard at the shoulder—one clean fold—and the body drops. Neck angling down. Tail spread to steer the fall.
Diving.
I’m two hundred yards back with no cover, and nothing in my hands, and out ahead of me is the woman I’ve spent daysrefusing to think straight about, running flat out, with no idea what’s coming down on top of her.
Chapter 16
Grace
The wolf runs, and I let her. Move fast. Get away. That’s the whole plan.
The ground fights us the entire way. Loose rock where I want dirt, trees thinning out when I need them thick. I don’t know this mountain. He does. That’s reason enough to keep moving.
My side burns where the stone ripped it on my way out of the cave. Not deep, but every stride pulls at it, and the cold makes it worse.
Even out here, running for my life, my head won’t let go of Serenity.
Viktor and Jericho may have said they’d find her, but if they think I’ve been lying all this time, will they even believe she’s real? And if they’re no longer looking for her, that means she has no one now. No one pushing. Just me. If I can get back to the Syndicate, there might still be something to trade. My silence. Myself. Anything.
There has to be a play.
The last time I ran like this, it worked. I slipped out of a Syndicate facility on a night when one guard looked away at the right moment, and my magic did the rest. Two days later, an old wolf found me on a back road, half-starved, and took me to Aurora. They fed me. They gave me somewhere safe.
Now they’re hunting me too. There’s no one left to run to. Only away from.
My skin starts to crawl.
It builds between my shoulders, that old feeling of eyes on me. I slow half a stride and look up.
High above the open ground, dark against the gray sky, something is circling. Slow. Patient. Wings spread wide, riding the air without a single beat.
This can’t be good.
Whether it’s Aurora or Syndicate, I’m not ready to just hand myself over. I need a plan. And now I’ve run straight out into the open under something that can only be hunting me.
Short grass. Bare rock. The next trees are too far to matter.
I’m exposed.
My magic comes up before I ask for it. It always has. Fear pulls the trigger and the glamour answers, wrapping tight around me until I’m barely there at all. It’s the only thing I own that’s truly mine. It got me out of that facility alive. My mother lived on it, and her mother before her. It’s the whole of what they left me.
I run under it and wait for the dragon to drift wide. To lose me.
It doesn’t lose me.
The circle shrinks. One pass. Two. Each loop pulls in tighter, until it’s hanging almost straight overhead.
Over me.
It’s not flying away. Its huge head sweeps from side to side, picking something up.
It can smell me.
