Page 11 of Dragon’s Rogue

Blaze ran up to the landing, automatically casting a simple spell to protect her bare feet from the glass splinters on the floor. She put her hands on the windowsill and leaned out, feeling like she’d been speared through the heart.

She pressed her hand to her still-throbbing lips. One moment the thief had kissed her like his heart was on fire, filling her head with images and dreams, strange yet familiar.

And the next moment, he’d leaped to his death.

She scanned the terrace below, dreading what she would see, but there was nothing there. The outside lights shone on the flagstones, four stories down. They were blank and undisturbed, except by bits of glass glinting in the light. She twisted and looked up, but above there were no ropes, no ledges he could have grabbed onto. Nothing.

Her intruder had vanished into the night.

Chapter 7

Zane flew through the starry night, a dragon blue as a summer sky. He was cloaked again, hidden from the eyes of anyone who might look up and see him. If they looked at just the right angle, at the right moment, it might have seemed as though a cloud passed over the moon.

That was all.

Behind him, he could hear the flapping of Tyr’s wings as he tried to catch up. Zane’s dragon was bigger than Tyr’s, though, and he soon left his brother behind.

Zane? What the hell? You okay? Did the witch beat you up, or what? Slow down, for fuck’s sake!

Zane ignored him, stretching his wings and catching an updraft to get away from all the questions. He didn’t know what to say, or what to think. Or what to feel.

He’d gone looking for the Dragonfly Seal, and had found the woman of his dreams. Rogue witch, dabbler in dark powers, adversary to his mission.

Human.

He didn’t know whether to laugh, get drunk, or just let out a huge gout of fire and burn half of North Portland to slag.

When he fantasized about one day meeting his dream woman, he’d always imagined she was another Wild Dragon. Maybe even a rogue Draken, willing to defy convention and upbringing to mate with an outcast.

Not a human witch with no past, a dark present, and an uncertain future.

How could they ever be together? But if they weren’t destined for each other, why the dreams?

A hundred years of hope, dissipating to nothing in the darkness of the night.

He rode the current all the way to the river before circling back. Even in dragon form, the skin of his face and throat were still prickling from the red dust.

Magical tracking dust, to be exact. It turned invisible once it touched skin, and was impossible to wash off by normal means. It was like the tracking residue that the CIA put on their top priority targets on TV—except it was powered by magic, not technology.

Blaze could track him anywhere he went—for weeks, if not months. If he were human.

But he was a dragon, and he had defenses against nearly every type of magic. It took only a few minutes of concentrated thought for him to burn the magic from his hide, and from inside his body where he’d inhaled it.

From inside his blood.

He continued circling over downtown Portland as he rid himself of Blaze’s magic. She might not have activated the tracking spell yet, but if she did, he intended the trail to end right where he was—in the sky, a thousand feet above the city.

He had every intention of seeing her again, but until he knew what she was involved in, he wasn’t bringing her home to the ‘family.’

Thorne had enough on his plate without Zane leading a dark sorceress straight to their lair.

Satisfied that he’d burned away every speck of the tracking dust, Zane banked and headed back toward the ridge. He only wished he could burn the witch out of his system so easily.

The dragons’ house was built into the side of the ridge—not unlike Blaze’s house, except about a hundred years older. Humans thought it had been built by one of the first men to make his fortune in Portland—and it had, in a way. One of the first Draken Guardians had built a mansion on top of the cave system he’d lived in for a thousand years.

Before there were any humans here but scattered tribes of Native Americans, who knew better than to come near the caves on the ridge.

But times changed, and dragons changed with them. Those who couldn’t adapt had gone back to the Dragonlands years ago, to fight their petty wars and annoy each other.