deeper waters. But not too deep. I needed to draw him out.
Needed him to feel safe while doing so.
And for that, he’d need his feet on the bottom. He knew how well I could swim, so he’d neither risk going too deep nor bother shifting shape. Air dragons couldn’t breathe underwater like we could, and it was harder for them to take off from deeper water—there wasn’t enough room for the full sweep of their wings. Besides, while the beach wasn’t packed, there were still people about, and if there was one thing the scientists were fanatical about, it was not revealing our presence. Marsten didn’t want to share the glory with
It was probably the one thing he and the dragon communities would ever agree on.
When the depth was right, I headed for the light and the air. As I neared the surface, I let myself go and simply floated on the waves, as if unconscious. My arms were outstretched, my fingers in the water.
And still I called to the power of the sea and the waves, gathering it to me, letting it build, until the energy swirled around me, an unseen vortex ready to be unleashed.
For several minutes, there was no reaction from the dark-skinned man. No vibration or movement disturbing the waves rolling toward the beach.
Then I felt it. One step. Then another. Soon he was splashing through the waves, hurrying toward me. I moved my fingers slowly through the water, caressing the power, readying it.
Fingers touched my foot tentatively. Tension ran through the water, thick and heavy, as the man who held my foot braced himself against the slightest hint of movement.
I didn’t twitch.
His grip against my foot became firmer. Tentatively, he tugged me backward. The power of the sea surged against my control, as if eager to grab my assailant. I held it back, felt the anger of it roar through my body. Knew I wouldn’t be able to control it for very much longer.
His chuckle filled the air. A satisfied sound if ever I’d heard one. So I flicked my fingers wide, unleashing the vortex. It swirled past, sending me spinning, and hit the dark-skinned man hard, sucking him down into the ocean.
I flipped around, taking a breath of air, then ducked under the water. The hunter was spinning under the surface, held there by the vortex. Even if he changed, it wouldn’t have helped. The vortex was too strong, too powerful, and would have ripped his wings to pieces. Besides, shifting shape wasn’t an instantaneous thing, and he probably would have drowned in the process. The fear etched on his face suggested he knew that.
I spread my hands wide, flicking my fingers toward the surface, raising the vortex and allowing him to grab a breath before yanking him back down again. It was a pattern I kept as I swept him out to sea, until there was no beach, no nothing. Just ocean. Endless blue ocean.
And us.
Even then, I didn’t set him entirely free, keeping him locked within the vortex but no longer spinning. Just because I believed that dragons couldn’t take off in deep water didn’t mean that they couldn’t. It was definitely better to be safe than sorry with these bastards.
“Oh God, oh God,” he said, over and over as he fought to get free, movements panicked and almost believable.
Almost. Someone else might have bought it, but I knew what he was, and what he could do. Panic and a killer just didn’t go together.
“I know you’re a dragon, so quit the histrionics,” I said dryly. “I also know you’ll try and kill—”
I didn’t even get the sentence finished before he’d raised his hand. Fire erupted from his fingertips and burned across the waves.
I swore and ducked under the water, watching the thick flames fire past me. When they were gone, I raised a hand and yanked him deep, flinging him about like a useless bit of seaweed before pushing him back to the surface.
He spluttered and coughed, and glared at me with hateful eyes.
“Do that again, and I will kill you,” I said softly.
“How did you do this?” he asked, waving his arm angrily at the swirling water holding him captive. “They said your power comes at dawn or dusk, not during the day itself.”
I smiled. “Just goes to prove that the scientists don’t know as much about me as they think they do, doesn’t it?”
He glared at me, face pinched, eyes narrowed. “What do you want?”
I stared at him, seeing the fear buried deep behind the anger. “I want answers.”
“Or what? You’ll drown me? Go ahead. It won’t stop them coming after you.”
“I don’t care if they come after me.” A lie, of course, but he wasn’t to know that.
“Then what do you want?”
“I want to free my mother and the kids.”
He snorted. “That will never happen. The Drumnadrochit facility has been locked up tight, and no one, not even a flame-throwing dragon, will get anywhere near the place.” He paused, and his sudden grin was malicious. “Oh, I forgot, your pet flamethrower bit the big one, didn’t he?”
Anger surged through me. I ducked under the water, grabbed his ankle, and yanked down hard. This time I pulled him deep into the dark coldness of the water, watching his struggle to hold his breath, until his face went dark and the realization he was about to drown hit him.
Only then did I push him upward and let him breathe air rather than water.
He took several long, shuddering gasps, then somehow said, “Bitch.”
“Totally. And right now, you’re relying on this bitch to survive.”
He shuddered and wiped a hand across his red, splotchy features. “What do you want to know?”
“Tell me about the security at Drumnadrochit.”
“It’s been upgraded since your escape. A bird can’t fart now without security knowing about it.”
“What about the loch?”
“Sensors along the shoreline.”
“The whole shoreline?”
He hesitated. “Most of it.”
He was lying. The loch was too big, too wild, for such thoroughness. They’d probably only done the area near my mother’s lands. “Infrared sensors?”
He nodded. “And movement sensors.”
“What about the security codes—do you know them?”
“It’s all handprint-coded now. Everyone working there is registered with the computer. No one else gets in without clearance from the big man himself.”
Which meant we’d been doing nothing but wasting time here in Florence. Even if we’d managed to raid the old lady’s house successfully, it wouldn’t have mattered a damn. We couldn’t slide in a new password because Marsten would have final approval, and we couldn’t use someone else’s because of the whole handprint deal.
God, we should have figured something like this would happen, but I guess Egan and I had been working blind. We weren’t security experts—even if Egan had trained in the family “business” of stealing. Security equipment had probably zoomed ahead in leaps and bounds in the ten years he’d been locked up.
“So the security net around the research center is tight? There are no gaps anywhere at all in the system?”
“None that I’m aware of.”
Crap. Of course, he could be lying his pants off, but part of me doubted it. Fear lurked in his eyes, and I really didn’t think his loyalty to the scientists ran
“Tracker.”
“Where?”
He hesitated, then said, somewhat reluctantly, “In your foot.”
“Which we pulled out last night and destroyed. So how did you find us at the hotel?”
“Luck,” he muttered.
But his eyes did a shifty little sideways flicker, telling me he was lying. Or at least, not admitting the entire
