Chapter Four
“Evie and Vin will betrailing you from the ground,” Cooper said.
Iz made herself stand still and listen to the details of her backup, even though she already had her overnight bag in one hand and was eager to jump into action.
“Call in as often as you can, and they’ll keep heading in your direction. I know you’ll be in the sky a lot of the time.”
Iz nodded. And when she wasn’t in the sky, she’d probably be dropping down into various dragon villages she knew, trying to get information from them.
“Theo will join you the second he’s free. We’ll track your phone too, if that’s okay.”
“Of course.”
Vin said, “It wouldn’t hurt to have a tracker implanted in you, either. A microchip. This Sebastian guy is dangerous and unpredictable.”
Iz would have agreed to that too, but she couldn’t. “It won’t work.”
“Won’t work?”
“Mythic shifter,” Cooper said briefly. “We make a lot of implants go haywire. Bad news for any of us who ever wind up needing a pacemaker.”
“I don’t need a pacemaker,” Iz said. “And while a microchip might be handy, I can get by without one. I’m ready.”
“You’re twenty-three,” Vin said.
“You were all twenty-three once,” Iz snapped. She hadn’t come to Robinette just so she could be stuck as Little Izzieheretoo. “And you all survived.”
He looked at her with those inscrutable gray eyes. “Barely.”
Considering all the evidence of trauma left on his body, it was hard to argue with that. And considering the pocket of silence that followed, no one else wanted to either.
“You’re brave and you’re capable,” Cooper said finally. “But don’t push it. You’re still inexperienced in the field, and there’s not a chance in hell that I’d be putting you in this situation if I had any other choice.”
“I understand.”
She did. Or, at least, she understood that she was neck-deep in a chaos shecouldn’tunderstand. She wasn’t looking to take any unnecessary risks.
She had prepared herself as thoroughly as she could, under the circumstances. She knew what little there was to know about Randolph Sebastian’s background. She knew his interests—rare animals, mostly, and he was more the “put their antlers on their wall” type than the “take a beautiful picture to remember them by” type. She knew what charges she was supposed to arrest him on once she found him.
But she didn’t know where those charges came from. She didn’t even know if he’d had one victim or several.
She was chasing a fugitive, but she was also headed straight into a mystery. And the circumstances of her pursuit—the dragon vs. dragon face-off of it all—meant that she would spend a lot of time on her own.