“Ahhhh!” Indi suddenly screamed.

  “WHAT?” Cat winced and then shot Indi a look that said it better be good.

  “I just lost Internet. You need to turn around.”

  “What?” Cat kept her foot on the accelerator.

  From the back seat, Falco started laughing.

  “You need to pull over, turn around, and then drive back the way we’ve just been for several hundred metres,” Indi insisted.

  When no one immediately replied and the car showed no indication of slowing down Indi continued. “I just need to push this commit. I said I’d have it in by this afternoon and we might not have any internet where we’re going.”

  “How do you have internet now?” Cat inquired.

  “Well I don’t right now, that’s the point,” Indi cried. “Please. I’ll pay you. There’s satellite internet back there though. You just need to get in range. It won’t take me long.”

  Cat sighed and the car started to slow. “You don’t need to pay me. I don’t understand how you get internet from a satellite though.”

  “Well-”

  Cat waved a hand. “And I don’t need to know.”

  With a screech, Cat slowed and then spun the car 180 degrees in such a way that had everyone else reaching for something to hold on to.

  Indi squealed again and then laughed once they’d straightened up.

  Beside him, Falco could hear both Wolf and Sirius groaning. Wolf was in the middle and had piled at least three books in the gap between the front seats, making it impossible for anyone in the back to reach the radio controls, not that it mattered, Indi wasn’t about to let anyone steal the pop away from her. Not even Cat, who had already grumbled about it but amazingly let Indi have her way.

  Falco would have preferred Cat’s music and he was certain the other two would have as well, but nobody wanted to see Indi unhappy and nobody cared about the music quite as much as she did.

  Falco caught a look of confusion from Kass in the other car, as they sped by them in the other direction. She soon slowed down and Falco watched them turn around and follow.

  They were on the cusp of the Dragon Mountains, not quite in them yet. The sun was well up. The sky was blue. Perfect dragon hunting day according to Cat. She certainly wasn’t one to sugarcoat the truth. Then again, given the way she’d said it, she might have just been teasing or maybe she’d meant it was a good day for hunting dragons? Falco could never be quite sure with her.

  “You got internet yet?” Cat asked Indi when they’d gone some distance.

  “Almost, just a little further... there! Got it! Just pull over up ahead somewhere. This will only take a second.”

  Cat did as asked with a sigh.

  Kass frowned as she watched Cat’s car suddenly slow down and then spin around.

  “What are they doing?” Amanda asked from the back seat.

  “Maybe Indi forgot a set of clothes?” Zephyr quipped.

  “Do I follow them?” Kass asked.

  “Might as well,” Amanda replied. “It’s better we stick together.”

  Kass slowed down enough to pull over to the side, then much slower than Cat had done, she turned the car around.

  They found the other car pulled over on the side of the road. Cat was leaning against the outside, not doing anything other than enjoying the sun.

  Kass pulled in and parked behind them.

  “Indi wanted internet,” Cat explained when Kass went to go see why they’d stopped.

  Kass explained as much to the passengers in her own car when she returned to the driver’s seat.

  “There’s internet out here?” Zephyr asked. “I thought you needed cable or a short distance to something with a cable?”

  Amanda shook her head and pointed up toward the sky. “It’ll be via the satellites.”

  As they waited for Indi to do whatever it was she was doing, Kass looked at the road ahead. They were close enough to the mountains now, and the grey peaks loomed up above them, near enough to look intimidating even though what could be seen from this vantage point was likely not the top peaks at all but false ones.

  Kass remembered her last trip through here, how the dragons had chased them, how close they had gotten. She hadn’t forgotten the look in that one dragon’s eye as it had crouched at the roadside, burnt out car in its clutches.

  She’d seen worse atrocities during the war in the north and similar looks to the one the dragon had worn. That look of pure primal hunger, only in the eyes of men instead. She liked it more when it was in the eyes of the animal. A dragon was not cruel, simply hungry and driven by instinct. But her preference was only a small one and that pure and unfiltered drive for destruction was terrifying no matter whose eyes she saw it in.

  She never saw it in Cat’s though. The few times she’d caught a glimpse. Meeting someone else’s eyes was like baring your own soul too though, and Kass hated that.

  She watched the woman leaning against the other car in a relaxed manner, as if she wasn’t worried about the drive ahead at all. She probably wasn’t. But Cat wasn’t without fear. That much Kass knew. Nor did Kass think she was as ruthless and vicious as Cat seemed to want people to think she was. Cat was a lot of bark and just enough bite to keep people wary but it was defensive, reactive. It wasn’t aggressive or hungry and that was something that puzzled Kass in relation to the Nolan case.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Everything she’d read in the file suggested there had been no immediate threat. The man hadn’t died fighting. He’d died sitting in a chair. All the evidence suggested the event had been preplanned. The way it had been made to look like he’d killed himself. It hadn’t been done as an afterthought.

  When they’d been back at the facility Cat had been reluctant to kill a man who was already down. Maybe this had been different. Maybe the nature of who the man was and what he had done had made it different but for all her anger and posturing, Kass didn’t think Cat was a violent woman. Impulsive yes, but still always in control, just like she was when she was driving away from a dragon.

  Perhaps it did not matter. After all, the man was dead, his kids were safe, and Cat’s charges had been dropped. But if Cat hadn’t killed him, then who had?

  Kass found herself lost in thought as the others chatted around her. It was the start of an engine that eventually pulled her from them.

  They wound their way up into the mountains. She was soon drawn back into her thoughts again as the smooth and predictable shifts of gravity around each bend and up and down each hill, lulled her body into calm the way a cradle soothed a small child. She had no idea if her parents had ever rocked her to sleep. From the moment she could remember her and her siblings had been raised by nannies, and yet the rhythm still felt familiar in an ancient way. Perhaps it was just how people were built and she was no different.

  Beyond the familiar and smooth motions, Kass didn’t care for the driving quite like Cat and Zephyr did. She’d been taught to drive as she did out of necessity. She did appreciate the scenary though. There was something about the mountains, a solitude, a loneliness that could be felt even in company. It wasn’t a sad kind of loneliness though, rather more of a comforting one, a shared loneliness. It reminded her of a poem she’d read once, about joy being shared and sorrow being one’s own.

  She remained ever vigilant though, even as her thoughts threatened to carry her off elsewhere, an instinct she hadn’t been born with but had at some point acquired, jerked her back. It reminded her to pay attention, that danger lurked in these mountains, hidden in the dark cracks where light did not reach and which looked like streaks of tears running down the mountain face.

  It was this vigilance perhaps which allowed her to notice as they rounded the next bend, that the rock sitting just up the hill had eyes.

  She saw it and then it was gone, hidden behind the bend behind them. Someone else might have assumed they’d imagined it, but not Kass. She knew what it was. A dragon.

  She hit the accelerator and at the next straight she pulled out and overtook Cat.

  “I don’t think she’s seen it,” Kass remarked forgetting that she’d not yet pointed it out to those in her own car.

  Amanda’s head jerked up. “What? A dragon?”

  Kass nodded. “Keep watch for it will you?” She focused on the road before her, pushing the limits of the tyres as much as she dared. She glanced back only just enough to be sure it wasn’t on their tail. She saw Cat keeping pace behind her. Whether she’d seen the dragon or not she seemed to understand that they needed to move faster, or maybe she just relished the chance to go the speed she’d been wanting to go anyway.

  The dragon might not be following but it didn’t matter, Kass wasn’t taking any chances.

  She was proven right a moment later when a beefy grey dragon rounded a corner and halved the distance between it and them with no more than two flaps of its wings.

  Cat overtook Kass before disappearing around the next bend leaving Kass and company alone with the dragon. Amanda reached up and opened the sunroof.

  “Shouldn’t we help them?” Indi asked as Cat drove them out of sight of the other car.

  Cat brushed her concerns off. “They’ve got Amanda. They’ll be fine.” She glanced back to see if Kass was following, ignoring the nagging feeling in her gut. She knew if she hung back she’d just increase the risk to them all though. Sirius didn’t look worried so she wasn’t worried.

  At least, she wasn’t worried until the second dragon appeared.

  Sirius did not like this one bit. It wasn’t the dragons that concerned him. He knew Amanda could handle those. It was that every time the car swung round a corner he felt like they were going to go flying off the edge. And when a red and black dragon suddenly leapt off a peak just ahead, and swooped down toward them, causing Cat to hit the accelerator even harder, Sirius became almost certain that they were going to run straight into the rock wall right up ahead.

  But just at the last minute Cat swung the car to the left and steered them into a hidden tunnel.

  When Sirius glanced back, he could no longer see the dragon.

  “Hmm, Kass might be in a bit of trouble,” Cat remarked.

  “Should we help them now?” Indi asked before tearing the head off a green gummy dinosaur with her teeth and chewing it like her life depended on it.

  “How long will it follow us for?” Falco asked.

  “Until we lose it,” Cat replied stoically. “They can fly pretty far.”

  When Sirius next looked back all he could see was a giant wall of flame.

  Squashed in the middle of the back between Falco and Sirius, Wolf scowled as they narrowly dodged another spray of fire from the dragon. He wasn’t worried about the dragons at all. It was annoying though, how he kept losing his place every time the car took too hard a corner. He hoped Cat would lose the dragon soon so he could get back to studying.

  The current book he was reading wasn’t so much about necromancy as it was about zombies. It was a very rare copy of a book which had been written way back in the post splice days, when the earth was newly split and the rules of this world had yet to be established. It had been written when a group of witches had experimented with necromancy and looked into how to make even a poorly done necromancy last. The author himself had died at the hands of his zombie sister, or possibly a ghoul imitating her. History was unsure on that note.

  Not long after that, the sorcerers had hunted down and burned every copy of the book in existence, or at least that was how the story went. The truth of the matter was, as Wolf had eventually discovered, that the sorcerers did not like burning books and that every single book ever confiscated was actually stashed away in the underground library of Myst, which from Wolf’s perspective was about as good as being burnt, since he could never get to them.

  Except, every now and again, one of them seemed to escape out into circulation. Or perhaps these were copies that had simply never been found in the first place. Either way, one had found its way into Wolf’s hands. Initially he’d bought it from a passerby out of interest and a morbid sense of curiosity, maybe even as something to trade in the future. He’d never imagined he might actually read this book with the intent of using some of this stuff.

  Not a single ritual in this book could be done without the spillage of blood. One particularly nasty one called for five times the beating heart of an unborn child. Ignoring the obvious ethical concerns, the practically of such a ritual was a challenge in itself since each heart had to be beating at the moment the spell was cast, which likely meant at least five casters, unless you were particularly quick with a knife. How anyone had even figured it out in the first place was beyond him. Back in those days, psychics had been a lot more common though. Unfortunately not all of them had always been very skilled. Wolf did not want to know how much experimentation had been done to come up a spell that still likely did not last forever.

  Wolf knew the way spells were figured out meant there was a chance that not every ingredient was necessary. But who in their right mind would want to test such a thing?

  Except Amanda had already tired a blood magic ritual and Wolf had no doubt that if it came down to it, she would do it again. It was better if he dove into the rabbit hole too, lest they all get lost. Perhaps there was something he could get from this book that they could try which didn’t require sacrificing any babies.

  He grunted as the car swung violently left and right again and the book went flying off his lap to the floor.

  Falco picked it up for him. “I don’t know how you can read at a time like this.”

  “Do you want some help?” Indi asked. “I could use a distraction.” Without waiting for an answer she grabbed a book.

  Wolf didn’t bother telling her that none of them were written in English. She’d find out soon enough.

  As he was looking forward though, he saw a sudden flash of yellow and then blue. Was that another two dragons?

  “Err, how many dragons are out there?” Wolf asked.

  “Five,” Cat replied completely deadpan.