Page 13 of Red Dragon’s Flame

It ended there.

One look at his face, and Michelangela put down her energy drink and Cheetos and got out of her gaming chair.

She read the message, a frown growing between her eyebrows. Finally she looked up at him and said, “What do you think?”

“Either she’s getting a divorce, or…”

“Or she’s in real trouble.”

“Come on,” Mikah said. “What are the odds she’s in real trouble?”

But he didn’t sound convincing, even to himself. Finally Michelangela gave a deep sigh.

“Don’t tell anyone I did this.” She put her Cheeto-dusted fingertips on the screen, right on top of Shadowfire’s message, making orange smudges. She laid her other hand on Mikah’s arm and closed her eyes.

Mikah stayed still, watching her. Michelangela was half white wolf, though she didn’t talk about that side of her heritage, and she’d never shown any hint of the psychic abilities that often came with it.

Her breathing slowed, slowed, slowed… until she wasn’t breathing at all. He was about to jolt her back to attention when something did it for him.

Michelangela gave a jerk, like she’d received an electric shock, and she drew a deep, rasping breath. Her eyes flew open.

“She’s in danger,” Michelangela said.

“How the hell do you know?”

She had her hand to her chest, her breath still coming in deep gasps. “I can… feel it. And no… I don’t know… how. I just do.”

He believed her. Michelangela was not above injecting a little drama into things, but not about something as important as this.

And she was obviously not happy about him knowing that she had white wolf powers.

“Great,” he said. “So what the hell do we do with that?”

“Duh. We go find her. You know. Stalk her house. Lurk in the street. Peek in her windows.”

“Get arrested,” Mikah said.

Michelangela waved dismissively. “Phht. That’s why you have cloaking powers.” She added, “Derek Silver tried to teach me how to be invisible, but it didn’t work.”

“Of course not, you’re not a dragon,” Mikah told her. “Anyway, you get in enough trouble when you’re visible. The idea of you invisible make my hair stand on end.”

He touched the screen himself, getting Cheeto dust on his fingers. “And invisible or not, I can’t go peer into her windows because I don’t know where she lives. Hell, I don’t even know her real name. Just her game handle.”

“Mmm. Too bad we don’t have Uncle Jesse’s hacking powers.” She glanced sideways at him. “Or Thorne Greystone’s.”

Thorne was a wild dragon—a part-human dragon shifter raised on earth and living in Portland, Oregon. He was over five hundred years old, had tapped into the Internet when it was still being built, and over the decades had created his own shadow web that gave him access to every major network in the world.

If you wanted the president’s private cell phone number or emails from the Kremlin, Thorne Greystone could get his scaly blue talons on them—although he probably wouldn’t. Getting IRL info on a player in an MMORPG would be a slam-dunk for someone with his skills—but that didn’t mean he’d do it.

Mikah toyed with his beer bottle, thinking. It was easy to get hold of Thorne; he was a major ally of the Al-Maddeiri clan and there was a dedicated portal from the castle to the Greystones’ lair. It was how they got their wi-fi.

Getting him to do what Mikah wanted was a different matter. “You know what Thorne’s like,” he said to Michelangela. “I can’t see him spending his time tracking down a random human for me based on a cryptic message and a feeling.”

“I know.” Michelangela compressed her lips, and then said, “Okay. If you take me with you, I’ll tell Thorne what I sensed, if you think it would help.”

That was a big deal. If people found out she had white wolf powers, there would be pressure on her and her pack from the Shifter Council to keep her isolated until the extent and danger of her powers was determined. And Thorne was one of the Wild Dragons’ representatives on the Shifter Council.

“You’d do that?”