As intimidating as this assignment was, it was also exciting. It was a chance to prove herself.
Yes,her dragon hissed.Ready, ready, ready. Go, go, go.
So, only a month after she’d been pulled out of her training at Glynco, newly-minted U.S. Marshal Isabelle Benoit went off on her first fugitive hunt.
*
IT TURNED OUT FUGITIVEhunts sometimes involved just as much mud as Marshal basic training.
Randolph Sebastian showed every sign of finding humans and so-called “lesser” shifters intolerable and beneath his notice, so if he had to hide out somewhere, he would almost certainly hide out alone or with other dragons. Iz went to village after village, flashing his picture and asking about him.
The results were mixed. Not every all-dragon enclave was as closed-off and stuffy as the one where she had grown up, but most of them still held to a strict code of honor that meant they didn’t like the idea of turning on their own. Iz had always imagined that the fact that she wasalsoa dragon would have helped. Maybe it did, but it didn’t help enough. Getting information out of most of the town elders was still like prying teeth.
And sometimes they asked her about her father, which didn’t make this any easier.
Yes, he went to prison. Yes, he broke my mother’s heart.
Yes, he was released about a year ago. No, I haven’t seen him.
I did hear that he was in France now, thanks. Yes, he did get married again. No, I wasn’t invited to the wedding. I’m the daughter he wants to forget about.
It wasn’t a conversation she had ever wanted to have even once, let alone once a day. She didn’t know how her mother could stand still living back in Riell, where everyone knew their business.
All these stops did make her start to suspect that Sebastian wasn’t hiding outwithanyone. Even the dragons who were reluctant to talk to her usually softened up once they saw Sebastian’s photo and got a look at the twinkling malice in his eyes. If all he’d done was retreat to a dragons-only space, she would have heard about him by now. He didn’t seem like the kind of person to win friends and allies wherever he went.
So her search turned from “tear through the dragon communities of North America” to “investigate every dragon-accessible hiding place she could find.”
Hence the mud. A lot of the hiding places were ...rural.
Isolated mountains too steep to be easily climbed by casual hikers and tourists. Cliffs and canyons it would take wings to scale properly. Forests that were dense except for a single, helicopter-landing-pad-sized clearing where a dragon could land and take off again. Iz plowed through them all, and she found nothing.
Or, more accurately, she didn’t find Randolph Sebastian. She found a whole family of werebears, a surly back-to-nature eagle shifter, and something that she thought at first was a yeti that turned out to actually just be a remarkably tall and hairy man who wound up making her a very good omelet for dinner.
Then, finally, she got a tip that sounded different from all the others.
It was hard to say what made this lead feel so strong. It was pretty good, she thought, but it still didn’t come with any specifics about Sebastian; it was just information about how bewildered hunters in Warrick Forest had reported seeing deer shoot up into the air. That last part almost certainly meant there wasadragon in the vicinity, or some other mythic shifter in invisible mode, but that didn’t mean it was Sebastian.
She had just gotten checked into her shabby motel after another long day of alternately flying and slogging through mud, and there was no reason at all why she should think this lead needed to be investigatedright now. She needed to just go to sleep and deal with it in the morning.
But her instincts nagged at her. Even if she couldn’t explain it, she knew in her bones that she was onto something big.
Maybe she was developing some kind of sixth sense, a trained Marshal instinct that told her when she needed to follow something up.
Yes,her dragon observed dryly.Going through mud and having yeti-men cook you omelets has definitely given you the instincts of a seasoned professional.
It couldn’t be a good sign that her innerdragon, of all people, was taking her down a peg. Dragons were usually the embodiment of arrogance. She must really be getting ahead of herself here.
But somethingdidfeel different, and her dragon wasn’t arguing with her about that. It might not be giving much weight to her professional instincts, but it was extremely interested in this forest.
Okay, forget professional instincts for a second. What aboutshifterinstincts? Didn’t they count as a sixth sense? (Her dragon, coiled up inside her head, smugly acknowledged that that was true.) And those instincts had been a constant pulse since she’d seen Sebastian’s photo.
Go, go, go. Find, find, find.
And now—this, this, this.
She prodded gently at her dragon.Do you know what it is? Since you’re so adamant that it isn’t just that I’m getting a better handle on the job.
No.It took a lot for her dragon to admit that kind of uncertainty.I don’t know what any of it is about. I just know that it’s important. As crucial for us as the blood in our veins and the beat of our heart.