Leif stalked across the clearing, snatched a dropped Selesee sword off the ground, and ended the man’s suffering with one clean swing.
In the ringing, midnight silence that followed, Leif became aware of a sound that he’d heard in his wolf shape, but hadn’t comprehended, too caught up in the frenzy of the kill. A man was shouting, over and over again. Was calling someone.
Was calling for Amelia.
Overhead and a half-mile distant, he heard the unhappy shrieks and cries of the drakes.
“Shit,” he muttered, and set off for the walls of the chateau at a run.
He spotted the drakes first: crisp black silhouettes against the purpling sky. Alpha was larger than the females, and Leif picked him out straight away; watched him scream, and then swoop down low, out of sight behind the chateau walls.
Leif ducked a low-hanging branch and lengthened his stride. His wolves fell in around him, still four-legged, muzzles blood-stained and pink tongues lolling.
When they arrived at the gates, they found them standing open, Lord Connor’s Strangers standing guard with arrows nocked.
“What’s happening?” Leif called, slowing to a walk as he approached.
The one on the right shook his head. “I don’t know. The dragons went crazy, and Connor is trying to find Lady Amelia.”
Leif’s heart lurched. “She’s missing?”
“Ameeeeeeeliaaaaa!” the call went up beyond the gates.
That was Reggie. He sounded far from calm.
Leif jogged through the gates and onto the chateau grounds.
The gardens were overgrown, the once-tidy hedgerows heaped with last year’s uncut, dead-and-brown growth, the plantings all gone over to weeds and wild bird nests. Weeds had grown up between the smooth brown pebbles of the gravel footpath, but it still glowed in the moonlight, and Leif followed it around the turreted corner of the chateau to arrive at a large, decorative pond studded with lily pads.
He drew to a halt and spotted Connor, and Reggie, and at least two-dozen other Southern men searching the area, hacking at overgrown vines with swords, peeking under apple trees, ducking under trellises.
Reggie cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed, “Ameeeeeeeliaaaaa!” again.
A breathless soldier lit out of a side door and down a wide set of stone stairs. “My lord!” he called, and Reggie turned to him. “We’ve searched the house top to bottom, and found no sign of Lady Amelia.”
Connor’s jaw tightened, grim but resigned.
Reggie breathed open-mouthed and quick; Leif could smell his fear sweat even from a distance. “You checked the cellars?”
“Yes, my lord. She’s not there.”
“Damn it,” Reggie hissed, turned, and propped his fists on his hips. “Gods damn it all.”
Alpha dove low above them again, wings buffeting them with a tugging wind that bent ornamental trees double and sent waves across the pond.
Reggie shouted something up at him that was lost in the drake’s distressed cry, and when he lowered his head, he spotted Leif, and then waved him closer.
“What’s happening?” Leif said when they were closer. “Where’s she gone?”
“She fell. She—” Reggie broke off and raked his sweat-damp hair back with both hands, fingers linking at the back of his neck afterward. Wild-eyed, frightened, near panic. “I watched her fall from Alpha’s back.” He lifted one hand to mime the action, a swift downward drop. “I was too far away to see her land, but it was in this area.” He encompassed the garden and the pond with a twirl of his arm. “I saw Alpha try to catch her, but…” He pointed up at the distressed animal, who was back to circling up high and calling for his mistress.
“We’ve scoured the area,” Connor said, and rested a hand on Reggie’s shoulder that was immediately brushed off. He settled for scratching at his jaw instead, his gaze, when it met Leif’s, one that said not to hold out hope. “If she was lying here somewhere in the grass, we would have found her by now.”
“Where did she go, then?” Reggie snapped, rounding on him. Beneath Connor’s resignation, Leif could sense the pounding of his heart, the way he wanted to offer comfort to his lover. And Reggie, beneath his panic, was fast sliding towardgrief, desperate for a quiet, close place where he could accept that comfort. “Did she disappear? Did she vanish into thin air?”
“The pond,” Leif said, and both of them glanced his way. “If she fell into the pond, and she was unconscious when she went in the water…”
Reggie swore. “It’s pitch dark down there. We’d be searching blind.”
