And the longevity, which the agency briefing had buried in a footnote because the implications were politically inconvenient. A bonded human lived as long as their bonded dragon lived. Pair-bonds added centuries to a human life. Multi-bonds, in theory, extended further. Any single surviving bonded dragon was enough to sustain the human.
By that math, the two recorded human deaths were anomalies.
I added the new protocols from the prelim.
Do not enter a room a shifter has already entered without acknowledging the shifter at the door.
Do not break eye contact with a shifter who has held eye contact with you, but don’t extend the hold beyond eight seconds.
Do not, under any circumstances, run.
The last one was new this year. The agency hadn’t explained why.
I looked at Dominic Graves’s photograph one more time. I was going to have to walk a circle around this man for two weeks and tread lightly.
Easy. People did harder things every day.
Probably.
I closed the bag with Dominic Graves’s photograph still open on the bed beside it.
Know the rules. Keep your distance. Don’t give him a reason.
The wordCordillerasat in the back of my throat. Foreign. Useful. Worth memorizing. Davis had said it once and I had heard it once and now it was mine for as long as I needed it, which would either be the next two weeks or the rest of my professional life.
I closed the file. I closed the bag. I went into the living room, where Nate had paused his show and was waiting for me.
I sat down beside him and leaned my head against his shoulder, and he pressed play.
Ashenmere
Catalina
Isaw the first dragon from the back of a town car on the I-5 northbound, and I almost dropped my coffee. It came out of the cloud cover at maybe six hundred feet, low enough that its shadow swept over the town car and briefly took the morning with it.
Black, with green-gold under the wings where the sun caught the membrane. Forty, maybe fifty feet of body. Every classified bulletin the agency had on dragon physiology had failed to prepare me for the sheer, terrifying size of one directly overhead.
I had read the briefings. I had seen the photographs. I had absorbed the official language: shifted form, wingspan, territorial flight patterns, heat tolerance, impact radius. Very clean. Very professional. Very determined not to mention that the thing passing over my car was also, under other circumstances, a person with a passport. That was the part my brain refused to file correctly.
My driver did not slow down. They had been doing this run for years.
Two more dragons came out of the cloud behind the first, smaller, the same green-gold. Three dragons in a wedge formation, descending toward the compound. The town car swung off the highway. The dragons swung with the road.
They were keeping pace.
A welcome.
I drank the coffee I had ordered partly because it was warm, and my hands needed the lie of steadiness. Mostly because coffee was the one uncomplicated love I had never been foolish enough to leave behind.
I was about to meet my first dragon. And my body, traitor that itwas, wanted to curl itself around fear.
Fine.
Fear was reasonable. Panic was not. And if I was going to feel like prey, I preferred to do it with caffeine in my hand.
By the time we pulled through the compound gates, the dragons had landed somewhere out of sight on the seaward side, and a man in a charcoal suit was waiting at the curb with his hands clasped in front of him.
Not the enforcer. Too smooth. The liaison.
