Iz tried to quiet it down, but she felt the exact same way. If it was dangerous, and if it mattered, she wanted in on it.
Although part of her wished this exceptional offer of a quest wasn’t happening in a bathroom that smelled like lavender air freshener. But nothing in the world was perfect.
“If you need me, you have me,” she said firmly. “Just tell me what’s going on. Why do you need a dragon?”
“Sometimes you need to use a dragon to catch a dragon. And this one needs catching.” He handed her his iPad, a fugitive notice already loaded up on it.
A cruel, fleshy face stared back at her. It was a man in his late fifties, with silver hair and eyes so dark they looked black. He looked healthy and tan and somehow insolent, like his life had always come with a lot of comfortable padding. He looked like a man who knew he could get away with anything.
RANDOLPH SEBASTIAN.
“I don’t know him,” Iz said, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the screen. There was something hypnotic about the depth of cruelty—andconfidence—in Sebastian’s smirk.
It was a lot more real and disturbing than the adventures she’d been imagining.
“I’m glad. Good people who make the mistake of knowing Randolph Sebastian tend to have nasty fates.”
Iz moved her gaze lower, reading the list of crimes Sebastian was wanted for. It was long enough that she had to scroll.
But of all the charges, three of them stood out in particular.
“Murder, kidnapping, and false imprisonment. What kind of false imprisonment?”
Cooper’s grimness suddenly made sense when she heard his answer.
“I don’t know. This filejustgot to us after going through a bunch of different declassification screenings, and huge chunks of it are missing. That’s the problem with specializing in shifter-related crimes: someone else is always marking your stuff top secret. My iPad will probably self-destruct in five minutes.”
This probably didn’t count as an adventure—no adventure would have Randolph Sebastian’s face on it—but thiswaswhy she had joined the Marshal service.
Her father had been a high-status dragon, protected by his wealth and his community even as he’d taken money to shelter some of the human world’s worst—but richest—criminals. It had taken a huge scandal—and Cousin Theo—for anyone to care about what was going on right under their noses.
Living through all that had changed Iz. She had seen firsthand how hard it could be to get real, meaningful justice for shifter-related crimes that couldn’t always be discussed in an open court. Those were the cases she wanted to work with. She wanted to help out hurt shifters, and she wanted to catch the ones who thought they could use their gifts—and the secrecy their kind was forced into—to get off scot-free, no matter what they did.
There was no way she was turning down this case.
It was a big step up from a shoplifting octopus, though. She was still a rookie with octopus slime in her hair, and she could see why Cooper hated the thought of putting her in a situation that evenhewasn’t allowed to fully understand.
“I thought you were as high up the ladder as this kind of thing went,” Iz said, trying on a teasing smile to hopefully make him feel better.
It didn’t seem to work. “I wish that were true. I wouldn’t handle it this way, not even close. I wouldn’t keep information from the people who needed it.”
He held out his hand for the iPad, and she reluctantly passed it back to him.
He looked so bothered by all this that she almost told him that it was okay to not assign her. But he knew that was true, and he didn’t need her to remind him.
Besides, her curiosity was burning brighter than dragonfire right now.
And while other shifters could sometimes take down dragons, Iz agreed that it was wiser to fight fire with fire—so to speak. In their shift forms, she and Sebastian should be about equally matched.Andthey knew all the same hidden enclaves of the world, the places where dragons liked to go to get away from other people.
Someone else could bring him down, but she could do it faster. She knew she could.
From the look of resignation on Cooper’s face, he knew it too.