A short huff moved through him.
I went back inside. Rhain was at the window of our quarters, watching the courtyard with both hands braced against the sill. He did not turn when I entered.
“How was it?” he asked.
I shut the door behind me. “He has the same eyes.”
Rhain’s shoulders softened. “I know.”
“And he’s enormous.”
“Yes,” Rhain said, and this time there was laughter in his voice. “That too.”
* **
Rhain and I crossed the courtyard to the chamber at seven fifty-five. He walked at my right in the Norwegian overcoat with the blank shoulder where his rank used to be pinned, his hand near mine.
Dominic had moved from the gate to the colonnade, pacing us at a distance, providing an intimidating escort. The green-gold flickering under the half-furled wings like a separate animal when he breathed. The sun had come over the roofline and laid the courtyard out flat and gold and entirely visible. There was no blind corner left in it.
For ten years, I had been a woman who checked the ground. Doors. Windows. Hands. Reflections. The angle of a shoulder beneath a coat. But this was not a human world, no matter how much stone and protocol they built over it.
The shadow crossed the flagstones a breath before I understood it was not a cloud. The operative in me moved faster than the rest. Counted wingspan against courtyard. Calculated descent angle. Rejected every harmless explanation.
Black. Green-gold under the wings. Ashenmere. One of their own, dropping out of the sun.
Cael.
Dominic was already turning. Rhain was already reaching for me. Neither of them was fast enough.
I did not see Cael decide. I felt the air change first, a hard downstroke of wind that drove me half a step into the flagstones. Then the courtyard was gone.
A foreclaw the size of a park bench closed around me from ribs to hip, four talons and the heel of a vast palm. I felt each talon settle against me and stop. The scale at my back was hot, ridged, and stank of ozone with something animal underneath it.
The wind tore my breath out sideways. Above me, his wings cracked like sails in a gale.
The ground left. The flagstones. The swept cobbles. The colonnade with Rhain beneath it, his hand still reaching for me. The whole courtyard tilted and shrank until I was looking down at it from sixty feet, then a hundred, trapped inside a fist I could not begin to open.
Cold air hit my face.
Cael climbed east over the south wall, toward the meadow and the open water beyond it. He was not trying to kill me. Probably. A dead hostage was not leverage. Cael was working for Martin. He was carrying me up and out, to where a clan-head an ocean away could trade for me.
Both bonds went stark. Nothing like the warm hum I had been learning to live inside. Alarm. No human word attached to it. Just the body’s ancient understanding of danger. And through it, I felt two other animals come fully awake in the same instant.
The first launched from the courtyard so hard I heard the downdraft before I saw him, a crack of displaced air that seemed to split the flagstones.
Black scales. Green-gold beneath the wings. The same coloring as the thing that held me. For one disorienting half second, I could not tell hunter from captor.
Then the bond told me:That one. The one climbing as if distance were a personal insult. That one is yours.Dominic. Seventy years of being the most dangerous thing in any sky, all of it aimed up the column of air at the dragon carrying his mate. Below him, a man came apart.
Rhain went down to one knee on the flagstones. Then he was not a man kneeling. He was unfolding, too fast and too large, pale gray and gold where the other two were black, the Norwegian coloring I had watched descend over this same compound two weeks ago. His under-scales flashed as wings tore wet from his back.
He did not ease into it the way Dominic eased into things. He tore into it. The diplomat’s polish burned off in a single breath.
He had been a dragon longer than I had been alive, and it showed the moment he caught the air. Even panicked, even furious, there was an old grace in him. For one impossible second, flight looked like what it was meant to be.
Then Dominic hit Cael from above. The sky lurched. My skull cracked against the inside of Cael’s fist hard enough to white out the meadow. The two black bodies tangled, wing fouling wing, and I was the thing in the middle of it, swung wide at the end of Cael’s arm as he turned to keep me between his throat and Dominic’s teeth.
Cael was good. Nineteen years an enforcer, and he fought like one. Economical. Vicious. Practical. And he had a hostage.
