Only, she was coming too fast, and straight at him.
“Throttle back,” he yelled in his head, and out loud.
“What does that mean?” He managed to catch her own return yell.
“The stick for speed, pull it back toward you.”
The boat did slow, but not fast enough.
“More,” he cautioned, watching it loom up on him with trepidation. If she didn’t get it under control, he was going to have to dive to avoid getting run over.
“Slower!” he shouted. “Turn!”
The boat slowed and turned sharply all in one move. A little too sharply and it sort of tipped up onto its side, balancing haphazardly. If they’d been on land, she would’ve skidded in broadside. As it was, thanks to his own efforts to get out of the way, she barely missed taking off his head with the bow. But she did stop.
It said a lot about how hard he’d hit the kid that the boy didn’t so much as make a peep through the entire thing. Rune kicked and swam with one arm, still towing his passive passenger around the side of the boat toward the small ramp at the aft.
Hadyn’s head appeared over the side, pale as the faux leather seat cushions. “Don’t ever do that to me again,” she snapped.
“It’s not like I had much choice,” he shot back.
She blinked at the sight of him with the kid in tow, then plonked her hands on her hips, and damned if her lips weren’t twitching. “Unless that’s a whale shifter, I’m impressed.”
“Dragon,” Rune grunted, avoiding a mouthful of water. He grabbed onto the ramp. “Hold this,” he told the other man. Then heaved himself up into the boat first. No way was he leaving Hadyn momentarily unprotected with a shifter who’d been chasing them down. Then he turned and helped their assailant up.
Once inside the boat, he sat him down. The kid leaned forward, heaving air in and out of his lungs. Except, based on his eyes, this kid—and he really was a kid, still new to shifting and fighting—was a black dragon. All lanky limbs and angles he hadn’t grown into yet. Skin and bone. Where the hell was his family?
“You can’t be more than eighty,” Rune muttered. Around seventeen in human aging.
That had the kid jerking his head up with a glare. “I found you, old man.”
Beside him, Hadyn covered a laugh with her hand. “Who are you?” she asked, studiously avoiding Rune’s gaze.
“Imoogi.” That pointed chin came up, all attitude.
Nope. “Try again.” Rune leaned back in the captain’s chair, ignoring how his soaked clothes were plastered uncomfortably to his skin as he crossed his arms and feet at the ankles, staring the kid down.
Shoulders slumped forward as his expression turned sullen. “In training. They put out a call for more dragons to train as enforcers.”
“As Imoogi?”
A shake of a head. “Alaz.”
The Alliance must be desperate to be taking kids this young, even if they had an entire dead team to replace. Not even the Huracáns, who’d been forced to fill in their numbers, allowed any under twenty.
A few of Lyndi’s boys. Drake—the red dragon on the Huracán team who managed to out-sour even Rune—had brought his sister with him. Female born and stubborn, but also kindhearted, Lyndi had started an orphanage for young dragons who’d lost their families and had been forced into going rogue. Several of her oldest boys had joined the team in the last few years.
The Huracáns, of course, were playing that they had no notion of the Alaz team’s absence, yet.
“Why do they need more enforcers?” he asked, to further that illusion.
The kid searched Rune’s face before shifting his gaze to Hadyn and doing the same to her. “You should know,” he spat. “You killed them.”
“The hell I did.” The words came out in a snarl, and even Hadyn jumped a little. But he hadn’t been anywhere near that clusterfuck.
To his credit, the kid merely glared back, eyes narrowed, clearly disbelieving. “The Alaz team is missing. The news is all over the colonies.”
“Wasn’t me, kid.”
“Even if I believed you, as some kind of super spy, you should have heard about this.”
Hadyn openly laughed. “Don’t give him ideas,” she hooted.
Then she caught Rune’s stare and frowned dubiously. “Are you a super spy?” she asked, with almost the same naivety as the boy.
When he didn’t answer, she rolled her eyes, then dropped to sit beside the kid on the seat as though he were a friend. “What’s your name?”
“Zeke.”
She smiled. “I’m Hadyn.”
Zeke said nothing.
“How’d you find us?”
The kid’s lips flattened, refusing to speak, and Rune loosed a low growl of warning. Zeke still held his tongue, even if he did shift in his seat, gaze darting around as though he might suddenly see land and salvation.
“You came after me,” he reminded the boy. “I’m happy to break both your arms and dump you back in the ocean to become shark chum.”
Hadyn wrinkled her nose in visible dislike. “Graphic.”
It worked, though. Zeke had paled again under the dark hue of his skin, leaving him ashy. “Luck,” he said. “I was with the pack that tracked you to the mountain. They’d set sensors if anyone showed up there.”
And he’d missed that? Damn.
“They sent me to search in the direction you happened to go.”
“You caught our trail?” Rune didn’t hide his doubt.
“No. I was walking through the town to get food and caught your scent at the dock.” He shrugged. “Took a little chatting with the humans there to discover which way you’d gone and what boat I was looking for.
“Pretty fucking stupid to come out this far when you can’t swim.”
That comment only earned Rune a stubborn, teenaged glare.
“I assume you were after him?” Hadyn hitched a thumb in Rune’s direction.
“Yeah.” Zeke peered at her closer. Clearly smart enough to catch the implication that he could’ve possibly been after her. “Everyone is after him.”
Hadyn shot Rune a glance, eyebrows raised. “You’re that dangerous?”
Rune said nothing.
“Well…” Zeke broke in. “Dangerous enough that a bounty has been put on his head.”