Page 69 of Red Dragon’s Heart

“If they don’t hurt him,” she said. “You don’t know how dangerous Eric is.”

Emon said darkly, “He doesn’t know how dangerous we are.” Addressing the security supervisor, he asked, “Any luck tracking the fake transport? Traffic cams?”

“Still working on it,” was the reply.

“Work harder,” Zak growled.

“Yes, sir. Transmitting complete call video and audio now. Is there anything else?”

“Not at the moment,” Emon said. “Let us know if you get any leads.”

The call cut off, but Troy’s image remained on the screen. Maddie turned on Emon. “You have to give me the data back.”

Emon leaned his hips against the desk and folded his arms. “Giving them back the data is a last resort—and one that’s not going to happen. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to get your brother out before the deadline.”

“We don’t even know where Eric took him!”

“That’s the first thing we need to find out,” Emon said. “Now that they’ve contacted us, we have an outer limit of how far they could have taken him, figuring in distances and the time it took to prepare the video for the call. Do you have any ideas? Any buildings belonging to him or his company that would be a good place to hide a prisoner?”

Maddie bit her lip, obviously trying to think. “He has a cabin out in the wilderness,” she said. “I was there once—it’s pretty lonely.”

Cazbek said thoughtfully, “One small, easily defensible building with no human neighbors for witnesses would be a good choice if they were dealing with humans, but not shifters. Especially dragons.”

At Maddie’s questioning look, he explained, “If there’s nobody around to see, we could fly in there and take the place apart, not to mention magically transporting in a shifter ops team. They’d know that.”

“We’ll check it out anyway,” Emon said. He handed Maddie a pad and pen. “Write down the location.”

As she wrote, Cazbek said, “He’s more likely to have gone someplace larger, with multiple layers of security, so that it will be harder to find Troy’s exact location within the building.”

“Like an office building or an apartment house,” Zak said.

“Possibly somewhere in the city,” Cazbek continued. “The more humans are around, the less advantage we have, because we can’t allow our dragons or our magic to be seen.”

Maddie said, “He owns half a dozen corporations, and they all have office buildings, warehouses—it would take forever.”

Zak put his hand on the back of her neck, rubbing it gently. He began to hum, ever so softly, hoping his music would calm her down. She closed her eyes, and he felt her relax slightly.

“Okay,” she said. “Eric has an apartment in downtown Seattle—but it’s a penthouse so it might be vulnerable to cloaked dragons. He has an office in a high-rise downtown, too.”

Cazbek took the pad and pen and wrote the addresses down as she gave them.

“And he has a country estate—that’s more isolated, but he feels safest there. There’s a lot of it—acres and acres—but it’s all walled and he has a twenty-four/seven security force on duty. There’s the house—which is huge, with basements and wine cellars—but at the other end of the property is the Belvedere Labs complex.”

She opened her eyes. “I know you said he’d take Troy to where there were people, but that’s his most heavily fortified option by far. That’s the place.”

“If he took Troy there, it’s almost certainly warded,” Zak said. “He has that purple fucker Larkin working for him—the one we ran into when we rescued Tristan’s family.”

“If he’s got wards—and Larkin’s not as good as me—then we should be able to see the magical signatures,” Emon said. “I’ll send Kira and Flynn to check it out. She might even be able to find Troy’s exact location, if he’s there. We’ll also check out the penthouse and the office. If all that comes up empty, then we’ll have to start running down the other addresses. But I tend to agree with Madeleine—the estate is his bolt hole. It’s our best shot.”

Emon and Cazbek started making calls and issuing orders. Maddie murmured to Zak, “How could Kira and Flynn find Troy?”

“Magic,” Zak said. “You saw Emon make a portal for us to come here. Kira can walk between worlds without a portal, by traveling through the spirit world. It’s an Al-Maddeiri gift, but she’s the only one of the three of them who has it. She can see into this world from the spirit world, so she might be able to see Troy from there as well.”

Maddie said, “Can she get him out that way?”

Zak sighed. “Possibly? The place may be warded against that, though. It’s pretty well-known that the Al-Maddeiri have worldwalkers, and we’ve been targeting labs like Belvedere for years.”

Kira and Flynn arrived while Maddie was on the computer, downloading a better picture of Troy from her cloud account, to print it off for Kira. Kira took the picture in one hand, and then clasped Maddie’s wrist with the other. “Think about your brother,” she said. “When he’s happiest, being most himself. Hold those images of him in your mind. If I get a feel for his essence, it can help me hone in on his presence from the spirit world.”