With a grim smile, he homed in on a red dragon hovering at the center, no doubt readying for his next face off. Rune dove, arrowing straight for the fucker.
“Boss.” One of Lyndi’s boys’ voices broke through every mind, even their foes, his voice high and urgent. “The fire is coming down on the town. Fast. We need to stop it now. The humans.”
Those words jerked Rune up from his dive and he shot sideways. Fuck orders. He wasn’t waiting.
Duty that had been ingrained in him flash heated with the need to protect Hadyn and the other women, and every single thought for himself went by the wayside.
“Huracáns on me,” he said. “We have to stop that fire from spreading, or everything we fight for is lost.”
He wasn’t even trying to hide himself at this point, allowing every dragon in the area in on his thoughts. All dragons would understand why that fire was the most dangerous thing happening right now. The number one priority of every enforcer was to protect their secret from humans and protect humans from dragons.
Discovery wasn’t an option.
But his next words were for those fighting against them. “Attack us or help us. Either way, we’re going to deal with this. Your decision.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Rune didn’t have to look behind himself to know his team was on his six. What was happening with the dragons they’d been fighting, he didn’t give a fuck right now. He pushed his body as fast as he could go and came down hard and fast in the center of the blaze, the flames pushing out under the force of his wings. The middle was right where he’d always preferred to be when he’d worked with the Huracáns as firefighters to stop a dragon-caused blaze and hide the evidence from the humans.
From the middle, no humans would see him. Immediately, he started absorbing the flames through his scales, a trick only enforcers learned to master. Why wasn’t the fire turning the normal red-gold of human fire?
The cerulean flames swirled and whipped as another dragon landed beside him. Finn.
“Rivin and Keighan take the perimeter,” the alpha’s voice sounded. “Plant yourself between the fire and the town. Drake and Aidan, in the center with us. Delaney, Cami, take the north side, there’s a lake to the west which should help. Hall, call the shots from up high.”
“The mates,” Rune reminded the boss. Hadyn.
“On it,” came the grim response as Finn stood beside him absorbing flame into his body at the same rate Rune did. Faster, even, because it’d been a while for Rune. “Sera, Lyndi, go get those mates.”
“What about us?” An unfamiliar voice broke into their minds.
Rune jerked his head up, Finn doing the same, to search the sky only to find it filled with more dragons hovering over the blaze. The same ones they’d just been fighting, who wanted his head on a spike.
What in the seven hells?
“Dragon fire like this endangers all our kind,” one of the dragons said. “We stand with you…for now.”
He wasn’t wrong. This was one of the biggest reasons enforcers were needed in the colonies. To keep their secrets by keeping dragon fires hidden or under control. Especially when it still blazed the full color like this one, visibly obvious that it wasn’t man-made.
“They won’t be able to absorb the fire into their skin like the trained enforcers,” Rivin pointed out.
Finn remained silent.
But Rune, who’d learned that he had to work with all kinds, even people he didn’t trust, wasn’t going to look this gift horse in the mouth, even if it turned Trojan on him. “If you can safely draw fire back in through your mouths, start anywhere you see a spot we aren’t.”
“And the rest of us?” That voice he recognized. Zeke.
“Hey kid. Nice to see you made it.” Hopefully Rune didn’t come to regret not killing him after this was over.
“No thanks to you, old man.”
Rune snorted. “The rest of you go to the edges of the fire, outside of the burn line and start digging. The idea is to make a fire break.”
“We’ll get them organized.” Together Rivin and Keighan lifted into the air, and dragons bloodied from the fight made their way to the two white dragons who led their new “crew” away. Meanwhile, others landed in the flames and started inhaling.
Dangerous. If it went down the wrong pipe, it could burn them up from the inside out.
What the enforcers did was complicated, more like smothering the fire with their scales as they absorbed it into themselves.
“Rune.” That was Hall. Sharp. Urgent. “Get over here now. It’s Hadyn.”
Hadyn? Not out here, of course. She couldn’t be. She was with the mates.
“Where?”
At the edge of the blue flames, a spurt of lime green flame shot into the night, giving him a location. Close. Too fucking close.
What was she doing here?
Rather than fanning the flames with the downdraft of his wings, Rune moved in that direction. Every dragon was awkward on all fours with the wings and all, so his limp was more hidden this way. But he didn’t give a shit about that, anyway, moving as fast as he could, tail thrashing behind him, bursting through fire and felling burning trees in his wake. Other dragons hopped out of his path, seeing he wouldn’t give two shits if he bowled them over.
He skidded to a stop next to Hall, who had shifted to his human form and was kneeling next to a person lying on the ground.
Rune’s dragon whined at the scent of mint that managed to hit him, even through the overwhelming aromas of smoke and ash. Pushing himself to shift as fast as he could, the seconds ticked by like a damn time bomb.
She’s not moving.
Finally, he could get to her without crushing her. She was a mess of ash and dirt, but as far as he could tell, no burns. Thank the gods for that at least. “Hadyn?”
Her eyes fluttered as though she was trying to open them, trying to listen to him.
Then the breath in her lungs sputtered and spat, sounding like every inhale and exhale was pure agony.
“She wasn’t in the fire,” Hall told him quietly. “But I’m pretty sure she’s been inhaling the smoke since it started.”
“How?”
Hall tipped his chin off to the side. Sure enough, the burning carcass of a blue dragon lay there, already mostly ash. What the hell had happened here?
Another rattling gasp that made his own lungs ache as though charred racked her body. She was dying. He could hear it in the nuances of fluid filling the singed insides of her lungs, swelling the tissue and blocking her airways.