Page 70 of Red Dragon’s Heart

Zak, still with his hand on Maddie’s neck, got faint images of a young man, thin and pale, eating ice cream and laughing at something Maddie said to him. Standing at an easel, working on a painting of horses running with sure, confident brush strokes. Watching a football game on TV, cheering, face painted in his team’s colors.

Flynn stood behind Kira, his hands on her shoulders, eyes closed. After a few minutes, Kira turned to him. “Got it?” she said. He nodded.

“Okay, let’s go.”

Mayah said, “Don’t forget that trap Larkin lured me into the first time we met—the wards set to catch worldwalkers.”

“I won’t,” Kira said, baring her teeth. She swept her hand vertically through the air in front of her, and a rip appeared in mid-air, edges sparkling. Zak caught a familiar glimpse of a featureless plain of waving grass as she and Flynn stepped through.

The rift closed behind them, and they were gone.

Maddie let out a sigh, but her fists were clenched. Zak said softly, “I’m sorry. This is my fault.”

“Of course it isn’t,” she said. “It’s my fault. I’m the one who stole Eric’s data.”

“Yeah, and you eluded him for four months. Emon was right—once I got involved and they knew you were with me, they were able to use Troy for leverage. I should have never tried to find you.”

She turned suddenly and put her arms around him, burying her face in his chest. “I’m glad you did.”

He closed his arms around her, but inside, he was still beating himself up. This was what happened. Every time he had something—had someone—it turned into a disaster.

But he wasn’t going to let her brother suffer for it.

Once again, the waiting seemed interminable. Reports came back from the penthouse and the office high-rise—no sign of Troy, the van, or magical wards.

Finally, they heard a ripping sound, a rift opened, and Kira and Flynn stepped through, grinning.

“We found him,” Kira said. “He’s at the estate.”

Chapter 30

Maddie wanted to start making a plan right away, but Emon insisted they gather everyone together first, so they didn’t have to keep repeating things and risk some of them not having all the information.

They moved to a larger conference room and food was brought in. Zak made Maddie eat; she needed her strength.

She still wasn’t talking, but he could feel something happening inside her. That courage and steely resolve that had allowed her to escape from Eric Chisholm and had gotten her through the last four months was revving up.

She was going into warrior mode, and he knew from experience that her warrior was pretty damn formidable. His girl was ready to kick some ass, and damned if he wasn’t going to go in there and do it right beside her.

Finally they were all there. Mikah and Cazbek and Lucinda, Tristan and Mayah, Kira and Flynn. Flynn’s crew, the Bad Bloods, along with Jace Monroe, Rafe Connors and Kane Colton from the Silverlake wolf pack, with some of their Enforcer wolves.

Cazbek’s security officers, Thorne Greystone and his mate Rebel—a witch and a cat burglar—plus the two other Greystones and their mates, both of whom were witches and one of whom was also a dragon.

Maddie had provided a drawing of the basic layout of the estate, as well as what she knew of the interiors of the buildings. Kira and Flynn supplemented that with what they’d observed from the spirit world.

“They’re keeping Troy in the house,” she said. “It’s a second-floor room, no windows, approximately here.” The diagrams were being projected on a screen from someone’s laptop, and she made an X where the room was.

“Bad news is, the whole estate is warded against worldgates, so if we’re bringing in troops, they have to land outside the wall, or drop down from dragonback.”

“Can we fly in?” Emon asked. “What kind of overhead wards do they have?”

“Only sensors right now, but that’s not surprising. Keeping any kind of spell net going for an unlimited period of time would take more power than one tame dragon can muster. It would need a team of Draken sorcerers to make it permanent.”

Thorne said, “But we have to assume that once the sensors register dragons in the air, a spell net will kick in. And if Larkin made the one at that other facility, he’s damn good at it. It took Tristan and Mayah’s mating bond, plus all the white wolves’ psychic energy, to bring that one down.”

Maddie added, “And there’s a ton of regular security. A full security team, twenty-four/seven, most of them shifters. A big wall, topped with electrified barbed wire, fully manned with electronic surveillance. Inside both the house and the lab complex, different sections can be sealed off in an emergency.”

Kira added, “This room—” she tapped the ‘X’— “also contains one of Larkin’s worldwalker traps. We couldn’t even move inside it in the spirit world, without getting pulled in.”