2. Orsen
Orsen
Rowan was gone.
One moment, she was on our lands, safe with us, the next, just… gone.
Again.
I didn’t—couldn’t—handle it. All the emotions welling up were too much, so I did what Bastian seemingly did best and shoved them down.
Later, I could freak out. After we’d found our mate.
“I’m putting cameras in her clinic,” Grey muttered as we paced the woods, desperately trying to pick up her scent. “Like, patient privacy, sure, but on those doors? Cameras. Lots of fucking cameras.”
Grey and I were on foot, whereas Nix and Bastian were in the air.
My dragon was itching to come out, to take to the sky and look for our mate, but I knew that a divide-and-conquer method would be best. Sometimes, there were things that human eyes could see on the ground that dragon’s eyes couldn’t from the sky.
Was the universe out to fucking get us? We’d already lost Rowan once, and now it was happening again?
My gut churned as I stalked through the undergrowth, hunkering down as I shuffled to pick up on the slightest change in scent, any shift in the earthy freshness that even whispered Rowan’s faint scent.
You fucking lost her.
My thoughts were still screaming at me, my stomach heavy with guilt and nausea.
It was impossible to ignore how they choked me, the blame that followed every step I took.
We hadn’t been there. I hadn’t been there.
We were Rowan’s mates, her Alphas; we should have stopped whoever had taken her, but it was clear that someone had.
“Nothing over here. Let’s move to the south,” Grey called out. We shifted our search pattern easily so that we didn’t miss anything.
There had been the distinct scent of a male dragon mixed with Rowan’s at the clinic. She’d been with another male moments before she’d gone missing. I wasn’t leaping to conclusions when I assumed someone had kidnapped her. But why? And who?
You have to do better than this. You need to be a better fucking mate.
My dragon growled, and I was in full agreement. I needed to protect Rowan. Not only was she an amazing healer and valuable to our pack, but not having her near made me feel like the forest’s walls were closing in on me.
I didn’t want to admit it, but Rowan was quickly becoming my everything.
The way she tilted her head when she was deep in thought. The soft but firm tone she used when standing up for herself. The poise she maintained while working with everyone around her, putting them at ease.
She was perfect in every way; our mate, fated by the universe.
I couldn’t lose her again.
Whoever did this… they were going to pay—dearly.
As I stomped off to the southern end of this section of trees, I forced myself to focus on the scents. With Rowan missing, every second counted. Who knew what kinds of terrible—
“You need to stop that.”
I shot a glare at Grey when he came up next to me. “I can feel your thoughts spiraling. We can do that later. Right now, we need to find Rowan, so put your feelings on the back burner.”
He let the words hang, and I begrudgingly nodded. “Stop. Got it.”
The two of us were practically on our hands and knees as we combed this new area for any trail we could follow to Rowan. Earthy smells of forest and lingering humanity filled my nostrils, and I picked each one apart meticulously, searching for any sign of our mate.
I’ll do better than this, Rowan. I vow, I’ll be better.
And then, there, faintly in the background—it hit me.
I turned to Grey, who was wearing the same desperate hope on his face that I knew I was wearing myself.
It was her. We both picked up on her scent, despite how faint it was.
Without speaking, we zeroed in on it, testing the edges until we could pinpoint a stronger direction.
In fact, it was getting stronger the farther south we pushed.
We worked silently in sync, the need to find our mate reducing us to one singular thought. I couldn’t remember a time when we had worked so well together, as a unit, since we had lost Emmeline.
There was a trail.
I stopped, looking at the sky to see whether we could flag down Bastian and Nix.
We couldn’t communicate mentally without shifting, and I didn’t want to risk losing the scent because a big fucking dragon body ruffled up all the damn leaves.
Thankfully, we knew about this hiccup in our plan and had come up with just the right tool to solve it.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone, able to pick up the distant swoosh of wings overhead.
On the alarm app we’d all downloaded, I found the screeching noise, right up there with a dog whistle, and as loud as a train.
Cranking up my volume, I dipped my chin at Grey and he stepped back, preparing himself, and then I hit play.
It echoed through the trees. As if it were an ice pick, it went straight to the heart of my brain, loud and completely unavoidable.
Dragons were so sensitive to sound that Bastian and Nix would pick up on it even from up in the clouds.
I could have just shouted at them, but there was a chance they wouldn’t hear me. Super high-pitched alarms, on the other hand, were near impossible to miss.
Come on, you bastards. We’ve found something.
Grey and I didn’t speak; we simply waited for the others to come.
After what was objectively not a long time, but felt like ages, they appeared in the clearing overhead and landed, sliding into their human skin with an ease only well-seasoned dragons could achieve.
They rushed over to Grey and me through the tall undergrowth, and I didn’t waste time with pleasantries.
I threw them a few spare T-shirts and sweats.
“This way. We’ve picked up on her scent.”
That was more than enough to get Bastian and Nix moving. The four of us trudged through the trees and brush, following the scent with our noses to the ground. Rowan’s smell was faint at first, a fraction of the overall landscape of smells. But the farther we pursued the trail, the stronger it got.
We followed it pretty damn far, just off the edge of the horde lands, and then deeper into the woods. The trees here were dense and old, the pungent smell of wood and organic matter nearly strong enough to block out Rowan’s scent entirely. But there was no way I was losing it now.
As the landscape grew denser, with less obvious foot traffic, no trails, and no packed-down earth, something bright sounded in the distance. I couldn’t make it out at first, but as we all rushed forward, it came again. That time, I could distinguish the sound.
A scream.
Adrenaline surged through me, and I took off at a dead sprint, not giving a single fuck that branches slashed at me from every direction.
My chest constricted, panic unlike any I had ever experienced strangled the air in my lungs.
I could hear my clanmates running along with me, sense their panic and desperation funneling into me alongside my own.
If someone was hurting Rowan, I was going to tear them limb from fucking limb.
Worse, though, was the fact that, if Rowan was hurt, I didn’t know what to do. She was the healer, not me. Not any of us.
Please be okay. Please be okay. Please be okay.
Images of dragon fire scorching skin hounded me as I ran faster than I’d ever done before. I knew what that stuff could do to a person; I’d seen the scars on Rowan’s body. What if whoever had done it to her before was back? What if we were too late?
Then another scream lit up the forest around us.
I came to a halt as a squat cabin came into view, looking really rough around the edges.
I didn’t recognize it, which was surprising enough.
We didn’t poke around outside of the horde lands a lot, but we kept an eye on the perimeter.
Where the fuck had this place come from?
I turned to Bastian, and he shook his head.
So, he didn’t recognize it, either. Tension swarmed the four of us like a disease.
For a moment that stretched on like taffy, we all stood there, frozen, until another scream tore free.
Immediately, we rushed toward the house, giving it everything we had. I couldn’t lose her again.
My thighs burned as I dashed up to the door and then paused long enough to kick it in, sensing Bastian behind me.
The first thing I noticed was a man standing behind Rowan, who was crouched over something, her back to him.
Another dragon. I could sense it. And this asshole had the gall to sneak into the healer’s hut on our land and kidnap her.
I didn’t think, just reacted, flying across the groaning floorboards to the asshole and grabbing him by the throat. I held him in the air, growling low as I bared my teeth, logic officially out the window.
“You took my fucking mate.” I glared into his eyes, a rage I’d never known powering through my veins and demanding I spill his blood. “You took my fucking mate!”