Theo said, “You take after her, you know.”
“I hope so. And better that than the alternative.”
Cooper tactfully redirected the conversation, keeping them from getting bogged down in family history. “We still have teams combing the forest, but unfortunately, Sebastian’s probably smart enough not to stick around there now. I’ve got Theo on loan from the Sterling office, and he’s volunteered to check out all the regular dragon haunts and stomping grounds you investigated the first time around, Iz.”
“I can do that,” she said sharply.
“You could,” Cooper said, without any hesitation. “But you’ve just been through hell, and you deserve a break. Youneeda break. I’m standing you down, Iz.”
Iz’s lips flattened out into a grim kind of scowl that was like a chink in the fashionable armor she’d put on.
“Fine,” she said. The word came out clipped. “Then I suppose I don’t have anything useful to do, do I?”
“You can rest and recover.” That was Vin, the ghostly silent member of the team, the one with all the scars. “That’ll be useful to you later, trust me.”
Logan could tell that that “trust me” carried a fair amount of weight, and he leapt to second it, at least as much as he could.
He wasn’t forgetting about his vow to catch Sebastian so Iz could breathe a little easier, but right now, there was a chance she needed peace and quiet even more than she needed justice. He could soldier through a few days off himself if it would help her give herself a little time to heal.
“I could use a break too,” he said to Iz. “Not that I have much of a job to go back to at this point.”
Cooper cleared his throat. “Well, for the record, if you want one ... we’d be happy to have you.”
Logan stared at him. “That’s it? No job interview?”
“That’s it. I don’t think too much of how your old supervisor handled things—”
“I was mostly on the road,” Logan said, feeling like he should defend this man whose name he couldn’t even remember.
“That’s no excuse for being too invested in secrecy and security to mount a proper search.”
“We’ve been listening to this for the last couple hours,” Simon said, as an aside. “He’s really pissed about it.”
“Good,” Iz said. “So am I.”
Cooper went on, “You’re already a marshal, and you’re a shifter, which is sort of our specialty. And as far as I’m concerned, your job interview was you and Iz getting out of Sebastian’s custody alive, and you aced it. You don’t have to rush anything, but there’s a spot waiting for you if you want it.”
“That’s amazing,” Iz said. It was like all her testiness had gone up in smoke. She was looking at Cooper with warm approval. “You won’t regret it. Logan is incredible.”
One corner of Cooper’s mouth twitched, and he’d apparently picked up on exactly the same shift in her mood that Logan had, because he said, “Does that mean you forgive me for saying that you’re entitled to a vacation?”
“No,” Iz said loftily. “But it means I’ll think about it.”
“Fair enough. Well, don’t worry about it too much, because before I send you off to relax, I need to debrief you—and Logan—about your time with Sebastian.”
“How long was I there?” Logan said suddenly.
Some part of him had expected Cooper to do a double-take, but Cooper was too on-the-ball for that, apparently. Besides, if Logan was remembering Iz’s story about him right, Cooper had his own lost time he would never get back. It had been eaten up by a human prison instead of a psychopath’s private zoo, but the days were gone all the same.
Cooper took a deep breath. “Once we finally got someone to talk, we did manage to track down an approximate date for when you went missing. That was about thirteen months ago.”
Over a year. He had been locked in Sebastian’s hellhole forover a year.
Howoldwas he now, even? If his human body hadn’t aged in shift-space, did that mean that he was really a year younger than his (now possibly expired) driver’s license would suggest?
Iz was next to him suddenly, squeezing his hand. Logan squeezed back, and he forced himself to swallow down the messy lump of emotions in his throat.
“That’s ... about what I expected. A little longer, I guess, but not by much. I guess I’m even happier to have a change of clothes, then, if I’d been wearing those ones for a year. Thanks, Theo.”