“It always does, with you.”
Tyr, grinning, scooped up a handful of gold and sprinkled it down on Thorne. “You should thank me. I sensed you sleeping down here for forever—which you never do—and you wouldn’t answer when I called. I was afraid you’d done something stupid like take the serum when I wasn’t around.”
“Which he did,” Rebel said.
“See? And I was afraid you were lying here in a coma. Admit it, if you were lying here in a coma, you’d want me around.”
Thorne was still lying with his eyes closed. “They say you can still hear the people around you when you’re in a coma. So, not really.”
Tyr mouthed to Rebel, Is he okay?
Rebel made a so-so motion with her hand, mouthing I think so. She murmured, “It was close, though.”
Thorne said irritably, “I’m fine.”
“He sounds okay,” Tyr said. Then he mouthed, His dragon? He mimed flapping wings, presumably in case her lip-reading sucked.
She shook her head fractionally.
“Shit,” Tyr whispered softly.
Yeah.
“I’m hungry,” Thorne announced. “And I need to get to the control room. Because I’m sure you idiots have accomplished nothing today.”
“Au contraire,” Tyr said. “Your minions have been working their talons to the bone while you’ve been napping. Zane and Blaze picked out a nice mid-priced artifact as a gift for Jean-Claude D’Amboise, to entice him into seeing things our way as far as Corwyn is concerned. They’ve also called him and made an appointment.”
Thorne sat up. “For today?” he asked.
“Um, no. First, because it’s technically tomorrow. If this shit keeps up, pretty soon we’re all going to be nocturnal, like vampires. And also, because he’s being cagey and annoying, making them wait. He won’t see them until Thursday evening.”
Two days away. And hell only knew what Corwyn would be getting up to in that time. “Dammit,” Thorne said. “I need to find that fucking sorcerer and put him out of his misery.”
“You and me both,” Rebel said. “He almost killed my sister.”
“Who is my mate,” Tyr added. “Back of the line, bro.”
“Any other leads?”
Tyr glanced at Rebel. “Actually, yes,” he said. “Come on down to the Batcave. We’ll order up a side of beef or something, and then I’ll tell you what we’re doing.”
Chapter 24
They walked down to the Batcave, Rebel stretching her sore muscles. She felt way better than she expected, like she hadn’t slept on a pile of metal at all.
Zane, Blaze and Tempest were already there. When Thorne walked into the room, everyone looked up and froze for a second, stunned.
Then they converged on him, all talking at once. Blaze gave him a big hug, and Zane thumped him on the back, grinning widely. “Holy fuck,” he kept saying. Relief was all over his face. “You did it.”
Even Tempest kissed his cheek. Rebel was amused to see him go red at that.
Then Tempest ran to Rebel. “I’m glad you’re okay,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” Rebel said. “I should have left you a note or something. I didn’t think.”
Tempest gave a little one-shouldered shrug. “The others were worried.”
“And you weren’t?”
Her sister shook her head. “I didn’t have a bad feeling this time. I knew you would be okay.”
Were they really okay, though? Thorne was still missing his dragon. She could feel the hole inside him from across the room.
“Not all of us,” she muttered.
They all sat down at the conference table, and Tyr asked the zefirs to bring food. While they were waiting for it, they told everyone the short version of what had happened.
As far as Rebel was concerned, nobody needed to know the details. Thorne seemed to feel the same way—his explanations were even briefer than hers.
Finally, Zane asked the question they were clearly all wondering about.
“What about your dragon?”
Thorne glanced at Rebel, and she saw him absently rubbing the dragon-scale bracelet on his wrist. She put her hand gently on his thigh, trying to show her support. The corner of his mouth lifted slightly, and he covered her hand with his.
He took a deep breath. “He’s gone.”
The words dropped into the silent room like stones in a pond. Rebel heard the hiss as Zane drew in a shocked breath.
In that moment, she realized none of them had really believed it could happen. Thorne was so strong, so solid, so… always there. It took a minute for it to sink in, and then she could see the questions and speculation on their faces, what this might mean.
Then Tempest said, “He could still come back. You all saw the research.” She looked defiantly around the room, as if to convince them all she was right. “Lots of the shifters couldn’t Change again at first, but then their animals came back. There’s still hope.”
“Of course there is,” Zane said, his voice a little too hearty.
He didn’t believe it. Looking around, Rebel could see none of them did. She opened her mouth to tell them what the dragon had said to her, but Thorne broke in before she could.
“There’s nothing we can do about that but wait,” he said. “In the meantime, we have to find the Seal. Tyr, Zane, let’s get up to date on what you’ve been working on.”
Everyone was relieved to have something else to talk about. Their late dinner/early breakfast arrived as he began to explain, and the parade of trays floating out of the elevator was astonishing.
“Holy hell, Tyr,” Rebel said. “Did you order everything in the kitchen?”
Tyr looked at the high-piled platters accumulating on the table. “Not me,” he said. Everyone else shook their heads.
Tempest looked pleased. “The zefir must be happy to have Thorne back.”
Thorne glanced over at her, brow furrowed. “I only was gone for a few hours.”
She smiled. “Your human form, I mean.”
Tyr looked puzzled. “Zefir don’t have feelings,” he said. “Do they?”
Rebel thought of the irritated zefir almost-slamming the balcony door of her room last night. “Um, yeah,” she said. “You guys didn’t know that?”
Zane said, “I’ve always been nice to them. It seems like the least I can do for the people—beings—who make me cake.”
“Huh,” Tyr muttered. “I need to look up some references on that. I wonder if…”
“Focus, people?” Thorne said.
Rebel grinned. He was back to his normal, grumpy self. She noticed, though, that when Blaze’s cat, Bucephalus, came in and twined around his chair legs, purring, Thorne slipped him some slivers of steak.
Softy.
Thorne ate and listened to the situation reports, a feeling of satisfaction slipping over him. He was back where he needed to be, making sure everything was working according to plan.
And making new plans. Now that he had his human body back, they could do some real work finding the Seal.
At least, they could if Rebel didn’t try to back out of mating with him. Had she really invoked the mating bond to free him from Vyrkos? If so, he wondered if she realized what she’d done.
He’d just have to win her over before she realized she’d trapped herself.
He watched her plowing through a plate of steak and fried potatoes, showing every evidence of being just fine.
She seemed so solid and together, but he was beginning to realize how much pain she was masking underneath that tough exterior.
He didn’t know how to connect with her. Every time he thought he’d made some progress, she slipped out of his reach again.
“So we had this idea,” Zane was saying. “Since Rebel and Tempest don’t know where their Seals are, we’ve been working under the assumption they may have been lost somewhere along the line because their importance was not understood. So far, we’ve checked out all the places they lived in foster care, and gone through all the poss
essions they’ve kept with them since childhood. Nothing has pinged on our radar.”
“Which it might not, until they bond with their Destined Mates,” Tyr said.
“Yes, I know,” Zane said wearily. “But we can only do the best we can, and hope that by checking out every avenue, it will give the Seals the opportunity to reveal themselves. That’s what we did with the Dragonfly Seal, and we were successful.”
“Blaze had her Seal tattooed on her ass,” Rebel pointed out. “I do not.”
“Are you sure?” Tyr said, leering. “I could check.”
Thorne growled at him. “I’m sure.”
Tyr’s eyes went wide. “Does that mean there was naked boinking? Are you two—”
Zane began to talk loudly over him, saving Thorne the trouble of head-slapping him.
“We agreed the next step was to go back even further, to the last place Rebel and Tempest lived with their family. And that’s where we ran into a dead end.”
“Because we don’t remember,” Rebel said.
That still didn’t sit right with Thorne. Rebel’s memories of the time leading up to her parents’ death had been blurred, although he suspected she remembered the attack itself vividly. Too much so.
Tempest had no memory of that night—in fact, she had no memory of their parents at all.
It was clear someone had tampered with their memories. The question was who, and why? And how to find the missing pieces?
Zane skipped tactfully over that part. The few times they’d brought it up, Rebel had stormed out in a rage. That was another indicator of tampering—implanting a resistance to the person recovering the memories.
According to their records, some Draken had been skilled in mental manipulation and memory recovery, but the Wild Dragons lacked the ability to be that nuanced. All they could do was basic memory blurs—enough to confuse people who’d seen things they shouldn’t. Like giant blue dragons.
Zane continued, “It’s possible—likely even—that there’s a clue to the whereabouts of the Seals hidden at that location—or even the Seals themselves.”
Her voice tight, Rebel said, “The trailer was destroyed in the explosion that killed my parents.”
“The Seals could have withstood that,” Tyr said. “We still believe that searching the area is our best next step.”
“Yeah,” Rebel said. “If we could find it.”
And that was the dead end. Because of her blurred memories, Rebel didn’t remember exactly where the trailer had been. Rural Oregon, near a small town, within a few hours’ drive of Portland. That described dozens of places. They didn’t even know which direction to head in.
“That was our idea,” Tyr said. “We might have come up with a way.”
Zane said, “See, I kept going back to the idea that an exploding trailer and two orphaned kids would have made the news.”
“But it didn’t,” Thorne pointed out. “We already checked.”
Exploding trailer. Rebel tried to make the words into just sounds—sounds that had no meaning. No memories. No mental pictures attached.
“We checked the state and local TV stations, and the major newspapers,” Zane said. “Nothing there. But suddenly it occurred to me. Lots of tiny little towns have their own local newspapers. What if it were reported there?”
No meaning, Rebel told herself. But she could see fire in the edges of her vision. She could hear voices, hear the ugly, threatening shouts.
She started to feel like she couldn’t breathe.
She tried to focus on what Tyr was saying. “Even if the story were suppressed, someone working on the newspaper might remember. So we’ve been working on designing a search to look for all current and former local newspapers operating in rural areas in a three-hour driving radius of Portland sixteen years ago. See if we can find any news articles mentioning the explosion and the kids, together or separately.”
He looked at Thorne. “And it turns out you turned human just in time. Because we need your computer mojo to make it happen.”
The threatening voices grew louder in Rebel’s mind. There was still time to save her parents. If only she could find what these people wanted and give it to them, they’d leave her family alone.
The shouts filled hear ears, so loud she couldn’t hear anything else. She heard her baby sister crying, and there was a noise like thunder…
She stood up, shoving her chair back. “Stop it!” she shouted. “Just stop it! Stop hurting them!”
Her vision cleared, and she realized she was standing in the middle of the Batcave, everyone staring at her.
She turned and slammed out the great carved wooden doors. She stopped in the middle of the atrium, her chest heaving. Breathe, she told herself, but she felt like she wasn’t getting any air.
She heard the door open behind her. “Go away,” she said.
“As if.” She felt Thorne’s bulk and warmth coming up behind her. His hands closed on her shoulders. “Are you okay?”
She started to say, “I’m fine,” but heard herself say instead, “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Come here,” Thorne said softly.
Rebel resisted for one final moment. Then she turned and slid her arms around Thorne’s waist, burying her face in his chest.
He enveloped her in his embrace. He was so warm, so solid, and his hand rubbing her back felt so comforting.
“I’m going to have to go back there, aren’t I,” she whispered.
“I wish I could say ‘no,’” Thorne said. “But there’s a chance the Seal is there, and it may only respond to you.”
“I know.”
“I’ll be with you,” Thorne said. “Every step of the way.” He paused. “If you want me.”
Rebel was strong. She handled things alone. Always had.
But suddenly, a new road opened up in front of her. ‘Always had’ didn’t automatically have to mean ‘always would.’
“Okay,” she said. “But buckle up. I have a feeling it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”
Chapter 25
Thorne compiled everything they knew into the computer searches and started his web crawls, looking for specific references to key words, especially in conjunction with each other.
Rebel got antsy.
Her memories were starting to come out of the box she’d put them in, and it was making her feel shaky and vulnerable.
Things she swore she’d never feel again. That she refused to feel again.
The horror of that night would have paralyzed her, if she let it. But she just kept putting one foot in front of the other, doing the next thing that needed doing, until it was forced out of her mind and into the box.
Now grief was threatening to rise up and overwhelm her, like a tsunami coming in from offshore.
She couldn’t let it. They had to get the Seal. That was all that mattered. And she was the one who had to find it, or attract it, or whatever the fuck she had to do.
None of which could happen if she were curled into a fetal position while her heart shredded inside her.
Rebel knew only one thing would keep the feelings at bay when they got this bad. Focus. Something she had to focus on so hard that there was no room for anything else.
She went back to her room and got her spare cable and harness. She hadn’t been back up on a wire since the night on top of BioGen, and that was bad.
She couldn’t let the next time be a time when it really mattered. What if she froze? She had to make sure she had no lingering fear.
So she went up to the landing pad on the roof and hooked her grappling hook over the parapet. She crouched there, balanced on her toes, where there was no support and nothing to hold on to. She was on her own.
Below the house, the almost vertical slope of the ridge dropped down over five hundred feet. If she fell, she’d either bash her brains out on a rock, or be impaled on the pointy top of a pine tree.
But that couldn’t happen, she reminded herself. She had her cable and harnes
s, and she’d tested the emergency stop mechanism herself. Twice.
She retested the hold of the grappling hook, and then pushed off the side.
For a second she was dizzy, seeing the BioGen parking lot rushing up at her, but she shoved that vision away. She focused on the feel of the cable sliding through her gloved hands, on counting the seconds as the cable unwound, nothing but air under her feet until she arced back and they hit the reassuring stone wall of the mansion.
She was okay.
She pushed off again, gritting her teeth against the fear.
And again.
And then the fourth time, she felt that sweet, soaring exhilaration of freedom. Her whole body relaxed, and everything felt right. She was flying, then came to rest against the side of the mansion like a bird alighting on a branch.
She did it again, and again.
When she got to the bottom, she climbed back up, finding hand- and footholds on the rough stone of the mansion, climbing from balcony to balcony, knowing her cable would catch her if she fell.
But she wouldn’t fall.
And when she got to the top, she did it all again.
On her second trip up the side of the mansion, she pulled herself up to a balcony railing and found Thorne waiting for her on the other side. He was leaning against the wall, arms folded.
“How long have you been there?” she asked, panting and exhilarated.
“Long enough,” he said. “May I ask why you’re climbing up the side of the mansion like you’re planning on breaking in?”
“Practice,” she said. “I have to keep my skills sharp.”
He looked over the edge of the balcony. “I’d feel a lot better about it if you had wings.”
“I have this.” She patted her harness. “As long as a wandering hellhound doesn’t come along and slice my wire, I’m good.”
He looked super-hot, standing there in the sunshine with his messy hair blowing in the breeze, his biceps looking even bigger with his arms folded.
She unhooked her harness, went over and brushed the hair back from his forehead, giving him a light kiss. He looked surprised, then pleased.
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