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“I’ve seen worse,” he tells me.
For a long time, Wilson and I sit in the silence. I let his words sink in because the truth is that I know he’s right. No dragon shifter has ever been taken by Lucky and then returned. That just doesn’t happen. If you’re stolen away by an organization designed to test you, to hurt you, to damage you, then you’re gone. Done. There is no escape. There is no saving. There is no haven.
You’re just done.
“Why did she even go?” I ask him. “There was a plan. We were going to do recon. We were going to get him out.”
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“Wouldn’t you have gone, Cameron? If Lucky had taken your husband and your baby, wouldn’t you have done everything in your power to rescue them, too? Even if it meant suicide. Even if it meant you couldn’t return to your clan. Wouldn’t you have gone?”
“Yes.” I don’t bother lying. Not to Wilson. The truth is that I would have made the same choice as my sister. If it had been my partner who’d been captured, and I knew what happened, I would have moved heaven and hell to get them back. If I died in the process, I wouldn’t have cared because living without them would have been worse than not living at all.
“We have to make a choice,” Wilson says, and I know what he’s talking about. As the clan leader, he has to make a call of whether we attack the Lucky division that captured David. When we realized he’d been captured, along with my sister’s daughter, Daisy, we started formulating a plan for rescuing them. We were going to do recon before going in because we really didn’t know much except that one of our scouts saw him being taken into the facility. We knew where it was located, but that was it. We didn’t know how big it was, how many guards they had, or what kind of security they had in place.
All we knew was that David had been spending an afternoon with his child, and he had been taken. How did a bunch of human tech nerds steal a dragon shifter? That part I don’t know. Maybe David had gotten too close to their building and they’d simply grabbed him. Maybe they’d been tracking him. Perhaps he’d shifted to show Daisy what a dragon looks like, and they’d nabbed him.
No clue.
But they’ve already got my sister’s entire family, and although it’s tearing a hole in my heart bigger than I could ever have imagined, I know it wouldn’t be right to send unprepared dragons into battle. Not against humans. Not now when the world is so volatile.
For years, there was this idea that humans and shifters could get along. There were movements designed to make us believe in each other, to create this environment where everything would be okay between our worlds, but now?
Now we have a human president who doesn’t like shifters, and the world has suddenly become a lot less understanding about us.
“We can’t afford to lose more,” I tell him, and Wilson nods.
“We’ll do recon,” he says. “We’ll find a way in, Cameron. We’ll avenge her no matter what it takes.”
“I should clean up the glass,” I whisper, choking on my words.
“I’ll get a broom,” Wilson nods, and he leaves me alone. I stand and walk to the mirror hanging next to his desk. How have I aged so much in four days? Four days, and my sister hasn’t returned. She hasn’t contacted us. She hasn’t done anything.
It’s been four days, and something tells me that if she hasn’t come back, it’s because she can’t. It’s because something more horrible than I could possibly imagine has happened to her and right now, I need to focus on bringing down the bastards responsible.
Chapter Three
Peggy
“There, there,” I murmur, bouncing the baby. “Everything is going to be okay.” She cries for just a minute, but then I start to sing to her, and she stops. I sing to the child, and for a little while, it makes me believe that everything is going to be okay.
Daisy.
Her name is Daisy.
I never would have guessed, but her name is embroidered on the tags of her clothes.
“It’s going to be okay, Daisy,” I whisper, rocking her, but I don’t know if that’s actually true. To be honest, I’m not even sure why I brought her home with me, but going to the police seemed wrong.
I started to.
When I started the car, I began to drive toward the police station, but when I neared it, I got the strangest feeling in the pit of my stomach, like it was wrong, like it wasn’t safe, and my wrist started to throb where Ellie bit me. Something told me that if I brought the baby to the police, she really never would see her family again, and although I don’t pretend to be a good Samaritan, I don’t think I could live with myself if that happened.
So I stopped by the gas station near my house, picked up a bunch of pre-mixed formula bottles, some diapers, and some wipes, and I brought her home to my little house.
It’s really not much, but it’s isolated: just on the edge of the forest that surrounds all of these little towns. It’s the biggest, uncharted, unexplored forest in this part of the country, and it’s strange to me that more people haven’t wandered through, making maps and trying to discover secrets about the world.
Still, I suppose that’s for the best. Living where I do affords me a certain amount of privacy, and it means that when I’m not working, I can practice painting and drawing. I can focus on my art, which is what I really want to be doing.
