Page 2 of Dragon’s Rebel

“Any time, Sky Dragon,” she said to Zane. She shifted in her chair. She was getting antsy, and not just because Zane wouldn’t fucking put his lips away and bet.

She was going stir-crazy, locked up in this place. Okay, sure, she wasn’t chained to the wall. There were no bars on the windows. She was drinking a cold one, sitting in a cushy chair in a comfortable air-conditioned big-ass cavern filled with computer servers and monitors, all blinking lights and scrolling screens and beeping alerts.

Theoretically, she could leave any time she wanted. But thanks to being sucked into fairy-tale hell, she and her sister were being hunted by the spirit of an evil sorcerer named Corwyn, who was last seen possessing a dead body and walking away with it.

Because that wasn’t creepy at all.

She looked over at Tempest, who was sitting off to the side, drawing in her sketchbook. Or at least she had been—now she was giggling over Tyr making a golden tiara dance for her. He was looking at her with the same mushy look Zane had when he looked at Blaze.

Tyr was clearly gaga over Tempest. He believed she was his Destined Mate, his forever and ever love. It was kind of cute—he let Tempest follow him around, asking a gazillion questions about dragons and shifters and magic. She’d gotten him to show her all over the lair, from the treasure chambers to the mechanical room to the goddamn bathrooms.

Which had golden toilets, for fuck’s sake.

Luckily, the lair also had the strongest magical protections known to man. It was the safest place for Tempest at the moment. But Rebel had always been a risk-taker, and she knew it wasn’t safety keeping her here. It was her own soft fucking heart.

She felt sorry for Thorne. She wanted to help him. And God help her, she wanted to do the right thing.

The one thing she didn’t want to do was be Thorne’s Destined Mate. According to some mystical prophecy Tyr loved to quote, she and Tempest and Blaze were the Three Destined Mates who held the keys to finding the three magical Seals that would keep the ancient Draken Lord Vyrkos from rising out of his tomb in a fiery volcanic eruption and raining fire and destruction down on Portland, Oregon, plus everything within a two-hundred-mile radius.

That last part was true. She’d seen Vyrkos trying to bust out of his tomb a few weeks ago—an evil destructo-dragon as big as a football field. She believed the Greystones when they talked about the fire and destruction and death. Blaze and Zane had nearly died getting the first Seal back in the tomb before that happened.

But the protections on the tomb couldn’t hold. They needed the other two Seals. And Thorne needed her help, even if this stay-forever thing was bullshit.

More than that, he needed a friend.

She looked over at him now, stretched out along the whole side of the control room, aka the Batcave. He’d been stuck in dragon form ever since their battle with Lord Vyrkos, when the Draken Lord had commanded him to change to his ‘true form.’

Apparently, that order had failed to mention anything about changing back, so Thorne was perma-dragon. They’d had to move all the computer equipment to one side so that Thorne could fit into the Batcave without wiping out half of it every time he twitched his tail.

She knew it was wearing on him. He could barely work a keyboard with his giant dragon claws, and that meant he was severely hampered in his search for the next Seal. All they knew was it was supposed to be connected in some way to Rebel.

How, she had no clue.

Thorne tried to work by directing one of them to type for him, but he was used to monitoring a dozen screens at once, running multiple searches, hacking into government databases and dark websites, crunching numbers, and constantly monitoring… well, everything.

Because Thorne Greystone was convinced that his constant efforts were the only thing holding the world together.

The problem was, there was a good chance he was right. Millions of people, their lives depending on him, and they didn’t even know it.

All that responsibility was enough to make anybody grumpy.

So every time she looked at him lying in the cavern, trying his hardest to work the computers and get something—anything—done, she felt a strange feeling in her stomach. Like she should do something.

So she found herself trying to be his hands at the keyboard. Trying cheer him up, trying to make him eat, trying to make him take breaks. Good luck with that.

Thorne had spent years desperately hunting for the Seals. And time was running out.

Which was why she’d put feelers out to everyone she knew in the shifter underworld, looking for a way to turn Thorne human again. And finally, someone had come up with something. A lead on a company that secretly developed shifter-specific drugs—including one that was rumored to help ‘stuck’ shifters Change.

The drug she wanted wasn’t available by any of the channels she had access to, for any price. They’d have to break into the company’s vault and steal it.

Luckily, she was a world-class thief. One of the best.

She hadn’t said anything to the others. She was waiting now for the final confirmation and price for the security codes to hack the company’s systems. It had been two days now, and she was praying her contact didn’t ghost on her.

Thorne’s voice came into her mind. Rebel, I need your fingers.

She jumped, startled. You’d think she’d be used to it by now, but dragon mind-speech could still take her by surprise.