Chapter 22 #2
"Same positions as yesterday. Tess and Thalon on anchor.
Draven and Amrion on detection sweep. Raze and Talven on intercept.
Lunessa and Kaelthar on reinforcement." He paused long enough to make sure we were listening.
"I've seeded the perimeter with constructs.
Some of them you've seen before. Some of them you haven't. "
Raze grinned. "That sounds like a threat."
I turned back to Amrion. He was already lowering his shoulder, one foreleg angled forward—an invitation I was still learning to read. I gripped the leading edge of the saddle and swung up.
I worked through the buckle sequence while warmth bled through the saddle leather beneath me. Tension coiled in his spine, magic humming just under the scales.
"Comfortable?"
"Getting there."
"Honest answer. Progress." A beat. "You cinched the chest strap too tight again."
I loosened it a quarter inch without comment.
Amrion's body gathered under me and we launched.
The drop in my stomach never got old—that split second where gravity gave up, and then the surge of muscle and wing and up. Wind hit my face. The arena floor shrank.
Below, Thalon rose, his gold scales shifting into obsidian as he climbed. Tess pressed flat along his neck. The first time I'd seen her fly, she'd been rigid, fighting Thalon's rhythm. Now she moved with him.
She'd learned that. In a month.
I made myself look away.
Talven shot past us in a streak of storm-silver, Raze whooping through the earpiece. "Intercept team in position. Also, this never gets old."
Lunessa's voice was bone-dry. "Comms discipline, Ulrich."
"That was disciplined. You should hear the undisciplined version."
Amrion's amusement threaded through the bond—not at Raze. At me. At the effort it was taking not to track Tess in the sky.
"Focus," I told him. And myself.
The ward perimeter shimmered ahead—a vast dome of interlocking magical signatures, visible from the air as a faint distortion. I knew the strong points, the seams, the blind spots. I also knew, because my brain couldn't help running the other side, exactly where I'd hit it if I wanted in.
"Anchor set," Tess said in my ear. "All teams, call positions."
"Detection sweep, northeast quadrant, beginning first pass," I said.
"Intercept holding at south apex," Raze.
"Reinforcement, western seam. Kaelthar's reading stable," Lunessa.
Four voices. Four dragons. One team.
The first construct hit northeast—a bolt of compressed energy that slammed into the ward and flared gold-white. I called it out. Talven was there before I finished the sentence, Raze's raw energy shattering the construct on impact.
"Neutralized. That one was easy." Raze, grinning through the comms.
"Stay sharp," I said. "Theron promised new tricks."
He wasn't wrong to be cocky. But the next two came at once—a slow, grinding pressure on the western seam, no flash, no impact, just degradation eating into the ward's structure, and a second brute force construct slamming the south side at the same moment.
Two fronts. The sustained pressure was the kind you didn't feel until it was too late, but Kaelthar's seismic sense caught the tremor first, feeding Lunessa information she translated into reinforcement before anyone else registered the threat.
Tess's voice cut through the earpiece before the overlap could become chaos. "Raze, intercept south. Draven, keep sweeping northeast—there might be more coming. Lunessa, hold the western reinforcement, I'll back you up with Thalon's shield."
She'd read the board in a second and made the right move on every position—the kind of instinct you couldn't teach.
Raze and Talven banked south. Thalon's golden shield expanded behind the western seam, reinforcing Lunessa's wards. I kept sweeping.
In week one, this would have been chaos. Now the calls came faster, the responses cleaner.
My sweep drifted. Not far—just enough that Tess's position in the sky was at the edge of my vision.
"Northeast," Amrion said quietly. "Not northwest."
I adjusted. Neither of us commented.
Then Amrion went still.
Not physically—his wings kept their rhythm, our flight path didn't waver. But his mind sharpened in a way I recognized.
"What do you have?"
"I don't know." And Amrion never said that.
I focused through our bond, letting his perception layer over mine. The ward read clean. Authorized signatures. No pressure, no impact, no degradation. But underneath the clean reading—a texture that didn't match. One note off in an otherwise perfect chord.
"I've got something," I said into the earpiece. "Northeast, between markers six and eight. Ward reads clean but there's an anomaly. Can't identify the type."
"Brute force or sustained?" Tess asked.
"Neither. It reads authorized. But it's not."
Silence on the comms.
Either Amrion was wrong—unlikely—or something was wearing the right credentials. Passing through the ward with a stolen keycard.
"I can feel it moving," Amrion said. "It's already inside the outer layer."
I pushed deeper through our bond, trying to isolate the false signature—
The earpiece crackled. Theron's voice was flat and final. "That's the drill. All teams return."
Too late. Whatever it was had gotten through.
Amrion banked toward the arena. Frustration hummed through the bond.
"I had it."
"I know."
Boots on stone. I stood still for a second while my legs remembered gravity. Raze was already on the ground, hands moving, reliving the southern intercept for Anya, who was writing without looking up. Talven preened behind him.
Thalon landed last. His descent shuddered the ground. Tess was already working the buckle sequence and then she was navigating the long slide down his shoulder. She'd gotten better at the dismount, but halfway down her boot slipped on a scale.
Theron was there.
He stepped forward without hurrying. One hand out. Tess grabbed it, her other hand bracing on Thalon's side, and then her boot found the ground wrong and Theron's free hand caught her waist. She landed against his chest. His fingers spread across the small of her back.
Neither of them moved.
Three seconds at most. Tess looked up. Theron looked down. His jaw set, his hand still pressed flat against her back, and the control he'd been holding for four weeks showed its edge.
Then he let go. Stepped back.
"Good work up there." Pure instructor. "Debrief in five."
He walked away.
I read him without trying—the incubus did that automatically. Theron wasn't performing desire. He was fighting it. Every line of his body said he wanted to turn around, and every step he took said he wasn't going to.
And Tess, still standing where he'd left her, one hand on Thalon's shoulder—she didn't fully understand what had just happened. But her body did. I could read that too.
I wasn't jealous. She was my mate. Theron wanting her didn't change that—it just meant he had good taste and bad luck.
Tess shook herself. Straightened. Turned back toward the team, and her eyes swept the group—Raze talking with his hands, Lunessa unbuckling Kaelthar's saddle, Anya writing.
Her gaze found me, and she smiled. The kind of smile that assumed I'd been looking.
I smiled back.
"Are you going to tell her?" Amrion asked.
I watched Tess cross toward the debrief circle. The way she'd called the field today. The way she'd laughed before she remembered anyone was watching. The weeks of late nights and case files and her mind working through patterns I couldn't see until she showed me.
My incubus was quiet for the first time all morning. Not gone—settled. Content. Not restless. Fixed.
"Not yet."
Amrion hummed.
"But soon."