“Stay here,” he said.
Without waiting, Rune let go of her. She managed, barely, to hold back words. Not even a whimper escaped her. Still, she couldn’t quite stop herself from reaching out in the darkness, grasping for a man who was no longer there.
Slow your heart rate, sweetheart, she could almost hear her dragon father beside her, but he wasn’t. He was locked in a hole with dragonsteel bars a long, long way from here.
Everywhere around her was the sound of water, a constant drip, drip, drip like the snow and ice on the towering peaks outside seeped inside the mountain to melt and weep through the walls. Hopefully that would mask the sound of her own clumsier footfalls, no matter how silent she tried to be. Shifters had extraordinary hearing.
No doubt Rune wasn’t thrilled to have a human, even one trained to be around shifters most of her life, making noises as he tried to escape. What if he left her to save his own hide? What if he dragged her into the middle of nowhere so that no one would ever find her body and know? What if—
“We’re in luck.” The low murmur of his voice in her ear made her jump.
He didn’t say more than that, merely took her hand again and tugged her along in his wake. More twists and turns, only slower going as this part of the tunnels had apparently collapsed. Rune kept having to help her over or under, or both, rocks and debris. Where in the seven hells was he taking her?
“Duck,” he whispered a second before he pulled her closer, his hand on the top of her head. “Foot up. One more step. Now down.”
Hadyn felt as though she’d contorted into a squat pretzel, using her free hand to feel her way over and under a fall of rough-edged rock.
“Okay. You can straighten.”
Even with his assurance, she still did so cautiously, waving her hand above her head just in case.
A low huff reached her ears.
“You better not be laughing at me,” she whisper-hissed.
A grunt was her only answer. One she had no trouble interpreting.
“Yes,” she said. “You totally would.”
“How would you know?” Even hushed, Rune sounded goaded.
“Doesn’t take a genius.”
“Let’s keep going.” Now he sounded at the edge of his patience. Difficult to tell when he didn’t emote, but that was her best guess.
In the cloying darkness, Hadyn grinned. No matter. She’d totally won that round.
He took her by the hand, and they kept going. With each turn in the tunnel, the way got increasingly more difficult to navigate, until they climbed over a larger fall of rocks and the unmistakable sound of a pebble plopping into water sounded. Water? But it remained too dark to see even the tip of her nose.
“I think we’re okay for now.” A flick sounded, followed by a tiny glow that illuminated the dark. The flame of a small lighter.
“What is a dragon shifter doing carrying one of those around?” she asked. They had their own flames, after all.
“It doesn’t burn as hot as dragon fire, so it won’t trip the sensors of any enforcer teams watching for heat signature when I’m near them.”
The longest explanation he’d given her for anything thus far. One that made total sense, too. According to her parents, all three Americas enforcer teams—the Alaz, the Imoogi, and Rune’s old team, the Huracáns—had a room of ultra-modern technology that was able to show the heat of any given fire in their region. The job of the enforcers was to put it out, or, if the blaze was big enough to bring human firefighters, to go in pretending to be a hot shot crew and help. The shifters might be backward when it came to just about everything else, but they did glom onto technological advances faster even than humans did.
Hadyn settled into having her sight back and glanced around owlishly. She hadn’t been wrong about the water. A large underground reservoir—a pond or maybe a lake, the light didn’t reach to the back of the cavern—greeted her. Black and glassy, like it held deadly secrets if she dared disturb the surface, the water added a chill to the room, a larger cavern that hadn’t been dragon formed. Natural, apparently. She glanced behind her to find they’d come through what appeared to have been a massive stone door. A modern panel to the right of the entrance told her she was right. What was this? Some kind of panic room? It must not have been all that well built if it had been forced open like that.
As she turned back to him, a dark object caught her attention. Propped up against the wall was a large computer monitor with the screen splintered, incredibly out of place in this space. There weren’t even wires or outlets to connect it to.
“What happened in here?” she asked.
“Long story,” was all the answer she got. “We need to keep moving.”
“Where?” Looked like a dead end to her.
He waved the hand holding the lighter, which made the flame dance and flicker, sending shadows leaping across the stone walls. “Around that bend there’s a longer tunnel. Human sized to start, eventually it turns big enough for dragons to shift and fly out. It leads outside.”
A secret back entrance? Most mountains had one, but even knowing Rune the tiny bit she did so far, she wasn’t too surprised.
“I bet you had this made after you took up residence,” she guessed.
“I don’t take chances.” Which was a yes.
Careful and paranoid. Maybe she needed to become a little more like him. Her parents had been cautious. Moving them from place to place. Often living in cities, hiding what they were among humans in number. Though that put them at a different kind of risk from other supernaturals.
Still, this dragon shifter took survival to a whole different level.
…
Since leaving his team decades before, Rune had taken multiple dragon mates, secreting them away, keeping them safe, often just ahead of the men who’d come to drag them, willing or not, to a choice that would result in a fifty-fifty shot that they’d die. The Mating Council was under Pytheios’s direction now, and that fucker had somehow convinced them to give more men a shot at the human women discovered who showed dragon sign. Sometimes even different clans and families than the signs on their necks showed, spouting nonsense about having a Seer who told the council who to include.
In theory, the mates still had a choice, like the dragon shifter version of that human show, The Bachelorette. However, according to what he could find out, half or more of the mates were dying, which told him the process wasn’t working.
Rune had never believed in fated mates. He agreed with some that a mate successfully being turned was more about her strength and ability to survive the fire that would be poured into her as part of mating. But what if the Fates, with the symbol they provided on each female, were giving his kind a sign about the best possibility for survival. Maybe the heart needed to be involved. Sort of the same way a young dragon needed blood family at his side the first time he shifted, a deeper relationship required in order to anchor his humanity so that the monster inside didn’t take over. Maybe a mate needed love, a deep love, to survive the change.