“They’re dragons, too?”
“Yeah,” Wilson says. He doesn’t look up. “They’re ferocious. Fighters. They love a good battle. This is the kind of shit they live for.”
“So what’s the plan?” I ask Wilson.
“We’ll leave at dusk. That will give us time to get there and get into place. At midnight, we’ll have coordinated attacks on the two facilities. We’ll get the center we know about and they’ll get theirs. Lucky could have more buildings and they probably have a headquarters somewhere, but that’s not the point. Our goal is to seriously maim them and inhibit their ability to do anything. We want to get David, Ellie, and any other captured shifters out alive.”
“And what about the Lucky scientists who work there?” Peggy asks quietly.
Wilson meets her gaze. His eyes flash yellow.
“We’ll take no survivors,” he says, and I breathe a sigh of relief. This isn’t the time to be heroes. We don’t need to be moral. We need to be fierce.
Hang on, Ellie. We’re coming for you.
*
Once we’re all in position outside of the facility, we wait. For a secret experimental laboratory, the security here is lax. It’s understandable. Lucky scientists believe they’re untouchable. They think there’s no way the dragon shifters of the forest can ever find them. They think there’s no way anyone could ever take them down.
Well, they’re wrong.
Now they’re surrounded on all sides by shifters from our clan. We might be big and bulky in our dragon forms, but right now, we’re slinky and cautious. We’re nearly invisible as we hide among the trees that surround the facility.
The building itself is a two-story facility surrounded by a high fence. It’s probably electric, but that’s to keep out forest animals: not shifters. No shifter would get within twenty feet of this building, anyway.
Not if they were smart.
There are several cars parked out front, but it’s a lab. It’s not an Army base. There are no tanks, no planes, and no armored vehicles. There’s just a beat-up Impala and a couple of busted-up looking Saturns. There is one single blue Mustang, and I make a mental note to flame that once I shift.
Fuck whoever bought that, and fuck whoever stole my sister.
If we were planning on being sneaky, we would steal keycards and break in through the main doors. That’s not the plan this time. We’ve stayed away from Lucky because up until this point, they’ve never really bothered us. We’ve heard rumors, but nothing serious, and rumors aren’t a good enough reason to destroy an entire building.
Besides, we wanted to be sure they didn’t have any weapons they could use against us: weapons that might prevent us from shifting, from fighting.
Now we’re pissed off enough that we don’t care.
Still, we didn’t come completely unprepared. We’ll enter in two waves. The first wave will shift and destroy the building. The second wave will stay in their human forms and enter with guns and anything else they need to clear out the rest of the building and get our people to safety.
Wilson signals from beside me. He lets out a long, low cooing sound. He sounds like a baby bird, but we all know better. We all know it’s time.
Now’s the time.
I take a deep breath, and I leap out of the tree where I’m hiding at the same time Wilson does. Together, we shift and head toward the roof of the building. Once I’m directly above it, I realize that the Lucky team members aren’t as stupid as they seem. There are traps on the roof to catch anyone who might think of landing there. In the darkness, they’re almost invisible.
Good thing our eyesight is impeccable.
Wilson notices the traps, too, and he growls. Then he breathes out a long, deep flame and douses the top of the building with his breath. The flame doesn’t stick. That’s not the point. The point of the flame is just to destroy any pathological agents that might be accompanying those traps. Then two of the dragons swoop down, lift the traps with their claws, and toss them off the roof.
One problem down.
Wilson lands on the now-clear roof and jumps. Two other dragons do the same. The roof begins to crumble, and the rest of us begin flying in and breaking off pieces of the roof. An alarm sounds, but we ignore it. In a matter of seconds, the top of the Lucky facility is completely gone, and we’re able to see what’s inside.
And what’s inside makes me sick.
We should have come here long ago.
We should have been brave.