Paloma knew she didn’t have much time before the dragon appeared on the horizon. Her phone beeped with an alert every time it picked up on the dragon’s presence within the bounds of her surveillance — and those beeps were getting more frequent, the time between them shrinking. Her fingers spasmed on the steering wheel every time another one cut through the silence.
It would only be a matter of hours before Patrol appeared. If she wanted to save the rogue, she had to try tonight.
She would do it tonight. There was no other choice.
* * *
Paloma was no expert on dragons. She’d never even met one. The small town she’d more or less grown up in was home to a couple witches, a tight-knit were pack, a lone shifter or two, and a vampire who rarely ventured off of his remote, sprawling property but never failed to fund school plays and town initiatives when politely asked. The rest of the town was like her: arrant. Born without the right pathways to channel magic of any kind, they made their way in the world as best they could.
The EVP was home to the second largest population of arrants in the United Territories and Allies because it was — at least since the execution of its last mad Sovereign — the safest territory. Arrants didn’t have to worry about being muscled out of their homes or their livelihoods by those bigger and more magically inclined when the iron-fisted EVP government kept things running smoothly and relatively fairly.
Paloma grew up in a peaceful era under the brittle truce left in the wake of the Great War, but her father hadn’t. A quiet man of great intellect, he’d retreated to the jagged mountains of the Sierras after his time in the intelligence branch of the EVP army ended. He raised Paloma at the remote research station he’d built from scratch, and she’d never had much inclination to leave. The only time she’d spent away from home were the miserable, blurry years she’d spent in college.
If she met a dragon during her studies, Paloma couldn’t recall it. She tested into a highly specialized and selective program in the du Soleil Center for Magical Research in Los Angeles. Of the fifteen students in her year, only four graduated. The intensity of her studies and the size of her classes hadn’t allowed her any time to explore the city or meet new people. What she knew of the world beyond her mountain came from books and educational feeds.
Normally, she didn’t mind that. She liked her life. She felt privileged to be the steward of her own little slice of wooded territory, to spend her days satisfying her intellectual curiosity and furthering her field of study.
Sure, she got lonely sometimes. After her father passed, she had to grapple with his sudden absence from her life. For all that they’d been a small family, they were a family. Without his quiet muttering and the patter of his footsteps in the next room, Paloma finally began to grasp the downsides of her isolation. She’d even begun to entertain the terrifying idea of starting her own family. Her father had raised her on his own, and since she had few chances to meet a romantic partner in her day to day life, she’d finally settled on doing the same.
She knew she was inexperienced in most normal life things and usually it didn’t trouble her. Paloma did things in her own time and in her own way. It just never occurred to her that she wouldn’t have the luxury of time to do that.
Her truck was barely parked before Paloma threw herself out of it. Boots crunching in the gravel, she hustled toward the house. The floodlights fixed to her front porch cast the driveway and yard in an eerie glow that worked to scare off both the magical and non-magical predators slinking in the shadows of the forest.
The area around the front of her home was cleared for both equipment and fire safety. In the half-moon of land that radiated around her porch, she’d cultivated a healthy garden — dormant for the winter — and lovingly tended a small flock of chickens in a hutch, already latched for the night.
The back of her home wasn’t quite so hospitable — mostly because it clung to the edge of a sheer cliff overlooking a dizzying gorge. A strip of pale blue snaked along the bottom of that gorge, a ribbon of the icy Sacramento River. During the day, she could stand on the overhanging deck and take in the surrounding peaks, snow-topped in the winter and vivid green the rest of the year, and at night she could taste the crispness of the thin air and gaze at the soft bruise of the Milky Way.
It was beautiful, but it was also terrifying. The wind whipping through the gorge could sweep a person off their feet if they weren’t careful, and the sheer drop on the other side of the railing was enough to give even the heartiest soul vertigo.
Paloma was used to it, but even she treaded carefully along the deck on bad weather days. With the high winds, she could rarely put any sort of furniture out there besides an old iron fire pit, so she didn’t spend more than a few moments a week out on the wrap-around deck her father so painstakingly built.
Paloma craned her neck to scan the familiar skies. Her lips thinned.
Dragons were nearly impossible to spot in the daylight, but they were entirely invisible at night. The reflective bellies and undersides of their wings made them stealth predators, while their unique physiology allowed them to fly at altitudes no other living being could survive. If it wasn’t for her equipment, Paloma might never have seen the dragon at all.
It would have been better for the dragon if she hadn’t, but Paloma couldn’t change the past. She’d made this mess, and she was damn well going to fix it.
How, though… She hadn’t made it that far yet.
Paloma’s mind raced, sifting through every scrap of information she had about dragons at lightning speed as she threw open the front door to her home. She didn’t bother stripping off her down jacket or pulling off her knit beanie as she flew down the hall and flung open the door to her lab.
The glow of razor-thin screens lit the darkened room with an eerie blue light. Servers blinked with tiny LEDs and machines hummed a low, soothing song for her from their positions against the walls. A stainless steel workbench took pride of place in the center of the room, its reflective surface covered in bits of machinery and coiled wiring. A rolling cabinet of tools sat next to her scratched wooden stool, while her father’s seat stood across the bench, in the exact place he’d left it the day his heart failed.
For the first time in three years, Paloma did not skim her fingertips over the wooden seat as she passed it, recalling the decades he’d spent hunched on the stool, his nose buried in smoldering circuitry.
Hurrying to the bank of screens along the far wall, she braced one hand on the edge of the desk and waved her other over the large trackpad. Immediately, the computers came to life. A projected keyboard flickered into being next to her half empty mug of coffee from that morning.
Her phone beeped another alert in her pocket, but she didn’t need it. Scanning the screens, Paloma felt her heart drop to her knees.
“Godsdamn it,” she breathed, throat constricting hard around the words.
She hadn’t exactly held out a lot of hope that the dragon would miraculously alter its course and turn around, but she had some.
The data didn’t lie, though. The dragon’s course hadn’t changed. Its jagged, tightening circles around the mountain were closer than ever. It also appeared that the dragon’s altitude had dropped considerably. If it had been daylight, Paloma suspected that anyone within fifty miles would be able to catch the telltale flicker of light and the terrifying, swooping shadow now.
The dragon was looking for a place to land.
Paloma gripped the edge of her desk with fingers gone stark white. She lowered her head and squeezed her eyes shut, willing her brain to think. There had to be a way to save the dragon. She was a genius, wasn’t she? There had to be some scrap of information she’d absorbed over the years that would help her. Help them.