7.

Lawrence

I don’t deserve to be married to someone so kind or wonderful. She’d swear an oath to me, would she? No, I really don’t deserve her. This is who my bride is, though. She’s the type of person who will do whatever it takes to protect the people she loves.

Right now, I’d love nothing more than to lay her out and make love to her for hours. Unfortunately for both of us, we really do find ourselves in a sort of time crunch. I need to calm down if I want to be able to shift back into my dragon form. I’m starting to panic, and Julie knows it.

She squeezes my hand, and then we start moving.

Together, we scour the area for any sign of an item that could be putting a damper on our ability to access Thunderstorm. Each second that passes means we’ve lost a second to find any of the missing dragons. We search high and low, checking trees and shrubbery.

Nothing.

I’m starting to lose hope that we’re actually going to be able to find something. Maybe we’ve misunderstood the situation, but then the humans stop moving. Julie cocks her head. Peggy, too.

“Do you hear that?” Nicole asks.

“Over here,” Natalie calls out. The rest of us hurry to where she’s standing. She’s a few feet away from the steel walls surrounding Thunderstorm. She’s found a thick bush that seems to be holding something important. Could it be the item?

“What the hell?” Julie steps forward. “Shifters can hear that, though. They’d know.”

“It’s kind of shrill,” Natalie agrees. Nicole and Peggy nod, too.

“Is that the item we’re looking for?” Peggy asks. She reaches into the bush and pulls out a little red phone case. “This?”

I realize in that moment that the girls have found something important: something I can’t hear.

“What sound is it making?” I ask. The girls exchange looks.

“You can’t hear it,” Julie says.

“No.”

“It’s a sort of squeal,” Nicole explains.

“Maybe it’s a trap,” Natalie says. Then she shakes her head. “It’s definitely a trap. They set this thing up. I bet it controls that force field. Shifters can’t hear it, so they can’t find where the little phone case is. If they can’t find the phone case, then they can’t destroy the force field.”

“Awesome.” When I say the word, it holds no weight. This is anything but awesome. It’s terrible.

It means that we know exactly how the dragons were caught off-guard, and perhaps on a deeper level, it means we know exactly how they were captured.

“Do you think the poachers set this up and then went in?” Nicole asks. “Or did they go in, catch the dragons by surprise, and then trap them in there?”

“In other words, were the poachers inside or outside?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Julie says. “Let’s just get it turned off. Then we’ll be able to figure out what we’re up against.”

“Exactly,” I say. I flip open the case and examine the phone. It seems pretty normal looking until I swipe my finger up the screen. Instead of the screen roaring to life and asking me for a password, I see an image of a small lock. I click it. Nothing happens.

“Is that all we have to do?” Julie asks.

“Let’s go back,” Nicole says. “Let’s see if it worked.”