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?”