He stepped outside into the Canadian cold—sharp and clean and nothing like the much milder climate he was used to. The compound was quiet now, the organized chaos of the liberation settling into the exhausted calm of the aftermath. Guards stood at their posts, wolves and dragons side by side. Omegas moved through the corridors freely again.
“Jermon,” Zack said.
Jermon turned to face him. “What’s up?”
Zack pointed toward the guard tower. “They took the Fitzgerald banner down, Valerie said.”
They hadn’t dared replace it yet with the Murphy one, but that probably wouldn’t have taken long. “Let’s fix that, shall we?”
It took them a few minutes to find the banner, which had been carelessly thrown into a cabinet drawer. Jermon worked out the creases as best he could, then folded it neatly and went in search of Valerie. She was with the other omegas, quietly talking.
“Valerie, would you do the honor of raising the Fitzgerald banner again?” Jermon asked her.
She jumped to her feet. “Me?”
“Yes.”
“But I’m an omega. That’s an alpha’s duty, sir.”
Jermon smiled at her, not wanting to show her the deep sadness he felt at those words. “No need to call me sir, Valerie. Just Jermon is fine. And I want you to do it. Without you, this wouldn’t have been such an easy liberation.”
Her eyes filled with tears all over again. “In that case, I’d be honored, sir. Jermon.”
They all gathered in the courtyard, and everyone stood silently, their hands over their hearts, as Valerie slowly hoisted the banner high until it flapped in the breeze, proudly displaying the Fitzgerald colors.
They had done their part. Now they had to wait for news from the other team.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The shift took Gregor like a wave. Not the gradual, controlled transition he usually experienced but a violent, exhilarating eruption of power that remade him from the inside out. Bones lengthened and reshaped. Muscle expanded. Wings unfurled from his back with a crack that split the predawn air, and then he was airborne, his massive red form cutting through the sky like a blade through silk.
Dark crimson. Almost black in the low light, like old blood or aged wine. His scales were scarred—three and a half centuries of combat written across his hide in a map of silver lines that caught the fading moonlight. The dragon that shot into the sky was not a creature that inspired anything other than the immediate desire to be somewhere else.
They’d traveled the first hundred-and-seventy-five miles by car. They didn’t have another teleportation dragon and the wolves couldn’t run that far that fast. So they’d sped through the night, stopping at a safe distance to park the car and shift for the last bit.
Beside him, Erwan blazed. The White Dragon was luminous, a star given form and wings, and the power radiating from him made the air hum with frequencies that vibrated in Gregor’schest. Below, Lidon ran in wolf form—impossibly fast, eating ground in strides that shouldn’t have been possible for any animal, his gray fur silver in the moonlight. The True Alpha’s power was different from Erwan’s—older, wilder, rooted in earth and instinct rather than fire and magic—but equally staggering.
Flanking them, Fallon’s purple form pulsed with gathered magic, and Valdis burned orange like a torch against the dark sky. Behind Lidon, wolf alphas ran in formation, their paws drumming the ground in a rhythm that Gregor felt through the air currents beneath his wings.
An army. His army. Traveling south at combat speed toward a farmhouse where the other half of his soul was waiting.
The paradox of proximity: the closer he got, the worse the sickness felt and the better everything else became. The headache that had been a dull, constant pain sharpened into something bright and focused. The tremor in his hands—or claws, now—steadied as adrenaline burned through the fatigue. The cold in his bones was replaced by fire, his dragon’s fire, the red-hot core of a fighter ready for the fight of his life.
The property materialized out of the flat landscape like a bruise on otherwise healthy skin. Gregor’s dragon eyes—sharper than his human ones, evolved for spotting prey from miles away—picked out the details as they approached. A farmhouse, two stories, with peeling white paint. Three outbuildings—barns or storage structures, weathered gray. A fence line marked the perimeter of a hundred and fifty acres of scrubby grassland. A dirt road led to a gate.
Ordinary. Unremarkable. The kind of place you’d drive past at sixty miles an hour and forget before you’d gone another mile.
Except that Gregor’s magical senses were screaming. The wards around the property were massive—layered, reinforced, crackling with the dark magic residue that he’d learned to recognize during his Murphy years. Cladhaire’s work formed thefoundation, old and powerful, the defensive magic of a dragon king who’d had decades to fortify his hiding place. Over that, the Murphys had added their own wards that were cruder and more vicious, designed to hurt anyone who tried to breach them.
They landed a quarter mile out, Gregor, Erwan, and Fallon shifting back to human form in the cover of a dry creek bed. They put on the clothes they’d brought while the wolves kept watch, all staying in their animal form. Lidon’s massive gray body radiated an energy that pushed back against the dark magic like sunlight against shadow.
Gregor checked his phone. Blair’s text was already there.
Team One in position. Awaiting your signal.
He typed one word and sent it.
Go.
