Page 77 of Dragon 7

Good enough. Still following him, I took another bend and the headlights swept across a cluster of Scales in the brush—seven men crouched behind a fallen log with rifles laid across the bark, faces turning toward the cart's light and away again.

Their masks caught the beam. Solid red and black. Eyes carved deep. They were still as the trunks behind them. What can you do to the planes?

I don't know. Let's see.

Hunger moved through the smoke of his body. The wings stretched wider. The trailing wisps reached across a gap between the trees, and I felt that same hunger echo in my own chest and recognized it as mine too.

Good. We are both ready.

We are.

How far can you go from me and still hear me?

I am you and you are me. He banked left.

I turned the wheel to follow without deciding to, as if the answer had been in my hands before it reached my head.

Distance is not the limit. You are.

What does that mean?

I can go far.

Far enough to go after my father?

Goryū’s body shimmered gold. Our father.

The correction sliced into me.

Yes. . .our father.

He is on the way here. He is in the air.

My hands tightened on the wheel. How do you know that?

He carries a darkness I can see many miles away. Goryū's head turned slowly toward the northwest, beyond the island's edge where Akiro's planes had come from and would keep coming. And it is in the air right now. Darker than the sky. He’s scared.

"Good." The word came out cold and clean. "So. . .the Fox is coming to the island?"

He is. Goryū turned right. His tail swept through the canopy and a shower of leaves and broken branches fell across the path ahead. This way.

I wrenched the wheel.

The warmth in my chest flared again—more rage from my Tiger.

What is wrong? Who is bothering her?

She is bothering someone else.

What do you mean?

Our Tiger’s rage smells like another’s death.

What? I don’t understand.

She is safe.

I pulled my right hand off the wheel and pressed it flat against my sternum. Her rage was still there—hotter now, tighter, aimed with a precision that told me she had found her target. Whatever she had walked toward in that basement, she had arrived.