“We’re mates, aren’t we?” Trent gave her a lopsided grin, doing his best to put a brave face on the situation. “From what I’ve heard about the mated bond, if I get into any trouble you’ll be the first to know about it. Butifthat happens, I want you to promise me, Zina, that you’ll run. I can take care of myself. But these guys need you.”
Zina looked up at him, her eyes wide. He could see the protest forming on her lips, but then she simply looked down, giving a quick, jerky nod. “Okay.”
As he came over to where she sat to kiss her goodbye, Trent wondered if she’d really stick to her promise, and leave him where he was and get the baby dragons and whatever might be in that egg to safety. He hoped so – she’d risked so much to keep them out of Hargreaves’s hands, and he’d really meant it when he said he could look after himself. He’d been in sticky situations before and lived to tell the tale.
Well, I guess I better find this Joy’splace, he thought a few minutes later as – having dodged Lianne’s questions about where he was off to, leaving his beautiful bride all alone – he walked down the main street. It wasn’t as if anywhere in Jackson’s Ridge was going to be difficult to find – there was one big road, and the rest of the place was just dotted with the small houses of the people he assumed owned businesses there, or had turned opal mining into their permanent occupation, as opposed to the ones who thought it’d be temporary, who mainly lived in shacks dotted around the hills, to save money on rent that they could then pour back into excavating their claims.
Joy’s wasn’t hard to find – the sign was right out the front, painted in red, swooping letters, the paint peeling under the harsh glare of the sun.
Glancing in the window to check it out without making it seem obvious what he was doing, Trent could see only a few occupied tables – he supposed most people were out working, and not sitting around drinking beer in the middle of the day. Hedefinitelycouldn’t see any sign of the Bloodhound, but still, without his kangaroo’s instincts to warn him of danger, he took extra caution as he entered the bar, choosing a seat with his back to the wall, facing the doorway, and with as close to a complete view of the rest of the room as he could get, while still being close enough to the toilets that he could slip inside if he had to get out of sight in a hurry.
He ordered a beer at the bar so as not to stick out too much, and then returned to his seat to wait, trying to look as much like a dozy tourist seeking shelter from the sun as he could.
C’mon, Tahnee’s contact. Where are you?
He realized he could be waiting here a while – Tahnee had been oddly unspecific aboutwhenher contact would be able to make it. Which was odd considering her sanctuary really wasn’tthatfar from Jackson’s Ridge, relatively speaking, and it was so remote that any flying shifter she knew would be able to make it out here by wing almost all of the way without having to worry about being spotted by humans on the ground.
He took a sip of his beer – fresh and cold, and perfect in the rising heat of the day. It was while he was placing his beer back down on the table in front of him that he saw the silhouettes of people passing by the front window of the pub, and he stiffened, his senses on high alert – or as high as they would go, given his kangaroo-less state.
I still can’t quite get used to it,Trent thought, grimacing a little. He trusted Zina when she said the kangaroo would be back, but it still felt odd and unpleasant to be without it, like having a phantom limb, only the phantom limb was inside him, and was an eight-foot-tall prehistoric marsupial.
Still, his human senses were enough for this. He kept his eyes trained on the door as he lifted his beer to his lips again, not taking a sip but only letting the liquid touch his lips as a cover – until the group of men he’d glimpsed through the window walked in through the door, and it took all of Trent’s self-control to not choke on the beer he hadn’t actually even drunk.
Hector?!
Trent froze.
What thefuckis Hector doing here?!
And it wasn’t just Hector: now that the other figures were in plain sight, he could see Euan’s hulking form too, and now Hector’s younger brother, Rhys, crowding in behind them. In other words, every member of his team at the Agency, except Callan and Brooke, who, Trent assumed, must be staking out the back door in case he decided to make a run for it.
Trent’s mind raced.Fuck. They must’ve tracked me somehow. Robb must’ve sent them to drag me back to headquarters to explain myself.They hadn’t glanced over to the darkened corner where he was sitting yet. He took half a second to glance at the toilet door – it was only a few meters away, and he could get to it if they didn’t look his way, but if they did, there was no way he could make a run for it in his current state. Hector and Rhys were griffin shifters, and Euan was a marsupial lion. They couldallmove faster than him.
In any case, in the next moment, Hector’s head turned toward him, and the entire question was moot.
“TRENT,” he bellowed, storming toward the table.
Trent tensed, getting ready to throw his beer if he had to – he hated to do it, both in terms of wasting good beerandit being a dirty thing to do to a mate – but there was no way Trent was letting them drag him back home, leaving Zina, Goldie, Dusty, and the remaining egg unprotected.
“You… youabsolute drongo,” Hector hissed, having apparently somewhat gotten a hold of himself since his earlier outburst – but that was Hector for you. He’d calmed down somewhat since he’d met his mate Myrtle and they’d started raising Ruby together, but he was still a hothead. “What the hell d’you think you’ve been playing at? And what thehellhave you done to your hair?”
Trent tensed, getting ready to do whatever he had to do to escape, if it came to that.
“What I had to,” he said, as Euan and Rhys came to stand behind Hector, similarly stormy expressions on their faces. He meant escaping with Zina, of course – not his hair.
“Youhadto disappear off the face of the earth without telling anyone where you were going?” Rhys cut in, shaking his head. With only a year between them, he and Hector could have been twins – and Rhys was just as big a hothead as his brother had been before he’d found his mate. “With someone who’s gone rogue and has a burn notice out on her?”
Trent couldn’t help the snarl that crossed his face – and within him, he felt his kangaroo twitch to life a little. It was nothing more than the slightest sense, but it was definitelythere.It must have been at the mention of Zina – if anything was going to awaken his shifter form, Trent thought, it was any threat to his mate.
“You don’t know anything about it,” he growled, his hands bunching into fists on the table in front of him. “And if you think I’m going to let you take her in, then you’ve got another one coming. I’ll do whatever I have to to protect her. You’renotdragging her back to get handed over to –”
“Wait, wait,” Euan said, holding up his hands. Trent had never really gotten along with Euan in the past – he thought he was too grumpy, too staid, and it seemed like he hated fun. Trent couldn’t blame him forallof it, since a lot of Euan’s grumpiness had come from the fact that he had lost his ability to shift – permanently, he’d thought – but still, given Trent’s laid-back, joking nature, they hadn’t had a lot in common. Since Euan had gotten his marsupial lion back – and with it, his sense of humor, such as it was – Trent had started to get along better with him, even though his face still looked like it was carved out of an especially cranky block of granite most of the time. “Why exactly do you think we’re here?”
Trent paused, frowning. “You’ve come to take me back to headquarters to get poleaxed by Robb – and to turn Zina in,” he said slowly. “Why else would you be here? Like you said, she has a burn notice. Obviously that’s what you’re gonna do.”
“Mate, you reallyareas stupid as you look.” Hector shook his head, throwing up his hands. “What the hell is the point of knowing someone for ten years and going through the academy with them and then being on a team with them if you don’t fuckingtrustthem?”
Trent blinked, trying to process what Hector was saying. “Huh?”
