Dragon's Challenge

by Jasmine Wylder

So. He just had to think for a moment—what was his special skill?

  That much was obvious. He was goddamned determined. Didn’t matter what it was, if he knew what he had to do in order to make sure that things went right, he was going to get it done. And the thing that needed to be done right now was to get the rest of them out of jail. Maura might be okay with using the blackmail as their only card, but he wasn’t. For one thing, the information was just as likely to burn them as their targets.

  For another thing, if the blackmail victim decided that whatever information Maura had wasn’t worth giving up their crusade against the Blaze Ops, where would they be? No. You couldn’t put all your eggs in one basket.

  So now the question was, did he go after Evan and Maura and convince them that they needed to plan more jailbreaks, or did he just go on his own? He was good at doing his own thing. When he was at school, group projects never went as well as when he just did it himself. It was one reason why he was having such a hard time getting a new job.

  With the Blaze Ops, it felt natural to work as a group. He didn’t feel like they were holding him back from his potential. He’d felt more like himself with them than he had with anybody. And it wasn’t just because he felt comfortable enough to come out as bi to them—trying to be casual with that in an office setting made him feel like ripping off his scales—it was because they were a real team. And he missed that. He missed it so much.

  “But if I do join up with them again, what do I say?” He pressed his head against the bark of the tree and stared up at the sky. He was in the right here. If that information could make their situation worse, then they needed to destroy it. He couldn’t imagine what the others might have in their files, what Maura had gathered to blackmail them with—he didn’t know what was in his own file, for that matter.

  But he also didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to think that Maura would hoard their darkest secrets to use against them. Because if she had, it meant he couldn’t trust her. And if he couldn’t trust her…

  Well, whatever. It wasn’t like he had anywhere else to go. Trying to break people out of jail alone was a dumb idea. He needed Evan’s technological expertise to hack into the systems so he wasn’t just caught straight away, and he needed Maura’s contacts to know where the others were even being held. They wouldn’t have left anything behind to indicate where they were going next in case one of their enemies found the camp before he got here.

  So where would they go?

  “Fort Stinky Butt?” He mused aloud because the silence of the forest around him was too much combined with his own thoughts. “It was compromised by the Pack, but it could be used as a pitstop to recover some food at least. Have a solid roof over our heads for a single night while we decide where to go from there.”

  Well, it was a better place to search rather than just sit here any longer. It wasn’t like this spot was well protected, he was practically right out in the open. If he left now and flew south-west, he’d be able to double back after dark and get to Fort Stinky Butt by midnight. If they weren’t there, he could at least spend the night there.

  As he was getting to his feet, though, he spied something on the ground. Something shiny and metallic. He stepped toward it, annoyed that they would leave a granola bar wrapper behind when they’d been so careful all this time.

  But it wasn’t a granola bar wrapper.

  He stared down at the foil package for a single condom. Open, just laying there. No condom in sight—at least they were smart enough to take it with them or bury it somewhere. Maybe they burned it in the fire.

  Part of him wanted to check but the larger part of Stephen’s mind rebelled against seeing any more evidence of how utterly stupid he’d been. His hands clenched at his sides as he glared at the foil. He knew he should pick it up, hide it, stop the hunters chasing them from finding it and going after Maura and Evan.

  But he didn’t. He just stood there, understanding exactly what this meant.

  Maura did warn him that it was just because of the situation. She told him that feelings and hormones were running wild because they were being hunted, because they were in danger and with how their lives were, being together was the only bit of peace they could find. She warned him and he disregarded her warnings, assuming that she felt the same way he did.

  And here he was, made the fool once more.

  Stephen let out a jet of fire, melting the foil into an unrecognizable bunch of ash and kicked it around the site to hide it entirely. Soon, it was like it had never even existed. Like what it represented had never happened.

  He wasn’t sure what made his fires flicker hotter. Anger at Maura for sleeping with Evan when he had told her how he felt about her, when they had been sleeping curled up against each other every night for the past few weeks. But if she thought he’d run off and wasn’t coming back because of that flash drive, why shouldn’t she seek comfort elsewhere? Stephen didn’t own her. They weren’t even a couple. Neither of them had agreed to that.

  Or was it anger at Evan, who slept with Maura despite knowing how Stephen felt for her? He knew and he’d seen them sleeping curled up together like that. Evan had never given any indication he was attracted to Maura! His torch burned for Erica. But then, Stephen knew that you could be attracted to more than one person at a time. And could he really blame Evan for seeking out the distraction of sexual intimacy when Erica had so coldly shut him down before she left them?

  No. He couldn’t blame either of them for what happened. Not when he’d left in such a rage.

  And that was the truth of it. He wasn’t angry at Maura and he wasn’t angry at Evan. He was angry with himself. If he hadn’t left like he had, if he had taken five seconds to tell them he was just needing to clear his head but that he’d be back, or give them a second location to meet up at…

  One thing was certain, though. After seeing what he saw here, he didn’t think he could look at either of them in the eye again.

  Stephen took to the air again, shifting seamlessly as the wings burst from his back. It was his fault for once again falling so hard for someone who didn’t feel the same way about him. He should have talked to Maura more about what the nature of their relationship was.

  It was his own damn fault that it felt like the world was spinning away from him, like he was caught in a hurricane and was too weak to fight his way free.

  ***

  Several days passed. Stephen narrowly avoided two more attempts to capture him. One was a bear shifter with two cougars with him, the other more vampires again. The vampires had crept up on him in the night and it was only because his hungry stomach woke him up that he’d seen them flitting through the trees toward him before their attack.

  He caught one of them to keep as a prisoner, to try to get some answers from, but while he was flying away, the vampire had sunk its teeth into his leg, biting straight through his scales, and he’d been forced to drop it.

  He didn’t know if the vampire survived the fall or not, but he didn’t really care, either.

  Finally, as dawn broke a week later and Stephen found himself huddled in a ball, starving but at the same time unable to really convince himself to get up to hunt for food, he had to admit this was a mistake. A big mistake. He wasn’t supposed to be doing this on his own. He thought that if he could just keep telling himself that he didn’t need help, it would magically become real.

  But a week had passed and all he’d managed to do was get himself lost, lonely, hungry and tired. His brain kept going back to that condom wrapper. And he kept thinking that maybe, somehow, he’d misinterpreted it. Although what they’d need a condom for if not for sex, he didn’t know. Maybe for one of Evan’s crazy mechanical things?

  In any case, he could not keep going like this. So he found a farm and staked it out for a couple of days, watching the family’s comings and goings. When they all loaded up into their minivan with tents and a cooler, he took the chance and crept across the fields to the house. They hadn’t locked the
door—the blessings of living in a small town, he supposed, and searched the house.

  A computer was set up in the living room and there was no password needed to get into it.

  He logged into Maura’s email—he had seen her password, although he hadn’t thought that he’d need it before. Now, though, he understood this was the only way they’d be able to meet up again. Maura would check her email, and when she did, she’d see the message he left her.

  But when he opened it up, he saw a message that was three days old and marked unread.

  Was this a message that Maura had left for him? Or had she merely abandoned all hope of ever getting the Blaze Ops off the hook? He opened it, quickly reading. And his heart leapt. The blackmail victim, the governor of the state, wanted to meet up. Discuss terms.

  Stephen grinned. Well, it seemed he had somewhere to go after all.

  Chapter Eighteen

  A week being kept in a dark, smelly cellar with nothing but bread and water to sustain her nearly drove Maura to her wit’s end. She was terrified of what might happen if the flash drive should pass while she was in here. If they found out what she had on her person, it’d be all the harder to convince Shane that she wasn’t able to help him the way he wanted.

  It was a fine line to walk, between keeping herself useful enough that he didn’t just kill her and Evan and making herself not so useful that he’d start torturing her. Maura had to guess that putting her into the cellar was part of a long game and that he was too patient to just switch to death threats and pain. Maybe he was testing her. Maybe he was torturing Evan. She had no way of knowing.

  Evan.

  She had seen nothing of him since she’d tripped the wire at the camp. She had wracked her brains, trying to figure out how Carter and his men had managed that trick, to get in and set up the trap without leaving anything behind for them to pick up on. She couldn’t figure it out, except to come to the obvious conclusion. She and Evan had been careless. They’d been too secure in their ability to hide to think about checking the camp closely.

  If Stephen had been with them, it never would have happened. He might have a reputation of charging recklessly into situations, but when it came to the safety of others, he was as careful as could be.

  Her heart twisted as she thought about him but pushed that aside. It had been six hours since Shane had last given her the blockers to keep her leopard repressed. It was groggy and irritable in her chest but very much there. And with only a few pinpoints of light being too weak for her human eyes to see in this dark, her leopard eyes were much sharper.

  She shifted, the change being more difficult than normal, and paced around the cellar, checking for anything she might have missed. She shuddered at the sight of several mouse tunnels, grateful that her feline scent had driven the critters away. People always laughed at her, a cat scared of mice, but she had her reasons. For one thing, they were disgusting.

  The doors, though, were the only way out of here. The floor was dirt, but the walls were concrete. The door, thick and barred from the outside, was nevertheless old. She could see the hinges rusting. So she clawed at the wood around first one and then another and grabbed it with her teeth. Her muscles tensed and rippled as she set to ripping the hinges out of the wood.

  On the fourth hinge, her right front canine snapped. Pain shot through her mouth and blood welled in her gums. But the hinge ripped free. A shove sent the door tottering forward and she bound from the cellar.

  Instantly, shouts of alarm were raised. Maura pinpointed their locations and dashed behind a row of chicken coops, the squawking animals covering up the individual words that were shouted. The trees lay just behind a ten-foot barbed wire fence. Her tail swished as she leapt, clinging to the side of a barn and scrambling her way up. She crawled through a narrow window, finding herself on a rafter.

  Evan hung in a cage suspended from the rafters. He looked up weakly when he saw her, and his eyes went wide. “Maura?”

  With a growl, Maura charged toward the chains, spitting out blood as she did so. Just as she reached them, though, something bit into her side. She jerked away, slapping at the thing—a needle. Her leopard yowled, a cry echoed by her, as she lost her balance.

  By the time she hit the floor, the blockers had taken effect and her leopard was gone once more.

  Maura cried out as all her bones jostled. The impact drove the needle deeper in her hip, hitting bone. She rolled over, trying to hide from Shane’s view even as she reached to yank the needle out.

  “I’m impressed. That was a rather good show of raw strength there,” Shane grabbed her face and yanked her head back so he could look at her. “Pretty sure that tooth isn’t going to heal itself, though. So now you see, trying to fight me doesn’t get you anywhere, does it?”

  Maura slapped his hand away and glared at him. “If you think you can use mind games on me, think again.”

  Shane shrugged. He stood and gestured to someone just outside the barn doors. They brought in Maura’s clothes and set them down in front of her. Glaring at Shane, thinking this had to be a trick of some sort, she quickly dressed. Even though their gazes on her naked form set her skin crawling, the feeling of unease didn’t disappear once she was dressed. Was this Shane’s way of telling her that he could do whatever he wanted with her?

  No. No, she wasn’t going to start worrying about that. Fear was a powerful motive and her worst enemy. She had to keep herself calm if she was going to make it out of this situation. Once she was dressed, she stood before Shane, keeping her expression blank and unaffected. From the look on his face, he didn’t like it at all.

  “So what was that?” she asked coolly. “Just testing to see what I was capable of with my leopard?”

  “Something like that.” He shrugged. “Do you want to know why I have left you alone for the past week? Why you and your companion up there,” he gestured vaguely toward Evan, “have been left unmolested, given food and water and I have not been asking you any questions?”

  Maura sighed, making herself sound bored. She wasn’t sure it was a good idea, but she had experience dealing with this sort of person, the kind who thought he was so much tougher than anybody else in the room. The kind that had to prove that he was stronger than everyone else.

  “My guess is that you’ve been waiting for something. Waiting to find something, maybe. Waiting for some event to happen. Or maybe even that you’re not the one calling the shots. Is that it? Were you waiting for your boss to tell you what to do?”

  Shane’s face twisted in fury.

  Maura saw the blow coming and instinctively flinched back, but that didn’t lessen the impact of his knuckles against her cheek. Pain flared in her jaw, something cracking. Blood began to flow freely, and she fell, crying out with pain. Shane didn’t stop there, kicking her soundly in the chest. The air burst from her lungs and she lay there, huddled on the floor, unable to even gasp for air.

  “Leave her alone, you fucking coward!” Evan screamed from above them.

  “You, shut up!” Shane shouted back. He kicked Maura again. There was less force this time, but Maura hardly noticed as the pain increased in her body. She curled in on herself, instinctively trying to protect herself from further damage.

  Get up, she screamed at herself. You are not a coward! You can’t let him cow you!

  But she couldn’t make herself move, too consumed with fear of what he might do if she did.

  Shane dropped to one knee beside her, as though he was going to propose. “I know that you have certain information on high-profile people, Alice Bishop. And I also know that you’re not stupid enough to leave it unguarded. That’s why the other dragon wasn’t with you, isn’t it? You have him hiding the information. Which means you don’t even know where it is.”

  Maura flinched at the name her parents had given her, but slowly the rest of what he was saying trickled into her mind. He thought Stephen had the information. He thought Stephen was the only way he was going to get it. So that’s what
this was all about. He was keeping them both unharmed to use as blackmail against Stephen.

  Her stomach churned, and she could almost feel the flash drive wrapped in condoms shift in her insides. The only reason it hadn’t passed yet was because it had become lodged somewhere. So far it hadn’t caused a blockage, and she could only hope that it would continue to not cause her trouble.

  Shane was a doctor. He’d be able to figure out what was happening. He’d be able to get the flash drive out, and then he’d turn his attention to making Maura do as he wanted.

  And she wasn’t sure how she was going to be able to get out of this situation if that happened. If they were going to contact Stephen, he’d at least know something was happening. He’d be able to find them and maybe even save them…

  Shane dragged her to her feet and shoved her into the arms of one of the other wolves. “We’re going to make a little video. I’m going to tell you what to say and you’re going to say it word for word, exactly as I tell you. Because if you don’t, I will have to punish you. And you don’t want that.”

  “Wait.” Maura dug her heels in as they tried to strongarm her from the barn. “Wait. I need to know Evan’s okay.”

  “You can see him,” Shane retorted. “You can see that he’s alive. You can see that he’s on blockers, or at least guess, and you can see that I’m going to shoot him between the eyes if Stephen doesn’t give me what I want.”

  Evan snarled, gripping the wire of his cage tightly.

  Maura yanked her arm free from the wolf holding her. “But I need to see for myself that he’s—”

  “No.” Shane shoved her out of the barn. “You don’t.”

  Maura cast one last glance up at Evan, swinging in his cage, before he was out of sight. As she ran through her choices, her stomach clenched hard again. She didn’t have many options. Without her leopard, she didn’t stand much of a chance fighting. She was outnumbered, and they had their wolves they could shift into.

  She could try to bribe him. Tell him that she could get the information if he let Evan go. Then he could join up with Stephen and the two of them could formulate a plan to get her out. Or… or Shane would torture and threaten Evan until she had no choice but to give up that information or else watch his head get blown off.