Wanted

======================================================================

"It heals wounds," Kaelen said. "My pheromones are already inside you."

"That is not an answer."

"It is the only one you are going to get." He sat back on his heels, and the red light threw the shadow of his horns long across the wall. "Your body is far more honest than your mouth, Commander."

"Enough."

The radio at Lucian's hip was dead, but the tunnel had a service speaker, and it spat to life with a squeal. Both men went still.

"Attention all forces. This is Acting Lord Thorne."

It was the voice of a patriarch at a graveside, grave and grieved and perfectly steady. It rolled through the underground like a bell.

"It is with a heavy heart that I report that Commander Lucian Winters has fallen under dragon control. He has leaked the coordinates of the Heartstone Nexus. And the death of our beloved Lord Aldric, my brother, was part of his conspiracy."

"That is not true." Lucian lunged for the speaker and Kaelen caught his wrist. "Put me through to him. Put me through. This is Lucian. Who murdered..."

"The Council of Elders has issued an extermination order," Thorne went on. "Lucian Winters is stripped of all rank and authority. All forces: if you find him, execute him on sight."

The speaker clicked. The tunnel was silent.

"Answer me." Lucian's fist hit the wall. "Answer me, damn you!"

"What are you doing?" Kaelen's voice cut through, hard as an order. "Lucian."

"He..." Lucian had no breath. "My father built that house. I spent my whole life..."

"When will you open your eyes?" Kaelen took him by the shoulders and turned him around, and the gold gaze was merciless. "Thorne only needed an excuse to erase you. Your own house calls you a traitor, and it did so without a single question. They cast you aside just like that."

"Let me go."

"Look at me."

"Let me go!"

"Look at me." The prince did not raise his voice. "This is the house you swore to die for. It is stupid and greedy and ready to tear you apart the moment it is convenient. And I am not like them."

Lucian stopped.

"Your house may abandon you, my Commander," Kaelen said, very softly. "But I never will. From now on those eyes belong on me. You have no one but me."

It was the most awful thing anyone had ever said to him. It was also, God help him, the only thing that had held him together in the last ten minutes.

He did not answer. He did not pull away, either.

---

They ran.

The service tunnels went on for miles beneath the Frostline, a rabbit warren of ducts and conduits that Lucian had walked a hundred times in daylight. In the dark, with a dragon at his shoulder and every light in the district flickering to red, they felt like a different country. Twice they ducked into side corridors while squads thundered past. Once Kaelen caught him by the back of the neck and pressed him against a pipe, one hand clamped over his mouth, while a patrol swept the passage with flashlights, and Lucian felt the dragon's heartbeat against his spine and forgot, for six whole seconds, how to be afraid.

It was the baying that undid them.

Lucian had heard it once before, on a night raid, across a frozen field: a long, rising howl, metal-throated and wrong. Kaelen's head came up as if he had been struck.

"Tracking hounds."

"How many?"

"Enough." The dragon's nostrils flared. "They have caught the scent of my blood. And yours."

"Then we fight."

"With what? That last burst drained you dry. If you keep this up you will fall down." Kaelen looked at him for a long moment. "There is one more way."

"Say it."

"Let me mark you."

The word dropped into the dark like a stone.

Lucian knew what a dragon's mark was. Every officer on the Frostline did; it was in the manuals, under *Ember Conclave: Hazards*. A bite at the junction of neck and shoulder, laid by a dragon in the fullness of his regard. It rewrote a body's scent from the inside out, burying a human's smell beneath the smell of the dragon who claimed him. It also opened something else.

"A dragon's mark means total psychic exposure," he said slowly. "My mindscape will be open to you forever."

"And mine to you. That is how it works. A guide, a lantern." Kaelen's gaze did not waver. "It is deadly, I know. You are the commander of the human border. You would rather die than let a dragon mark you."

"Yes."

"Search carefully!" a voice cried in the distance. "Don't miss a single drop of blood!"

Closer. Closer. The baying came in waves.

"Then you can cut off Thorne's head yourself," Kaelen said, very quietly, "and avenge your father. But first you must live."

Lucian closed his eyes.

He thought of his father's hands, which had taught him to hold a rifle. He thought of a field of white, and a hole in his memory the shape of a dragon. He thought of Thorne's face on the monitor, smiling.

*I cannot die here. I have to avenge my father. I have to expose Thorne.*

He opened his eyes.

"Bite me," he said.

"That's my commander."

Kaelen took him by the back of the neck, gently, almost reverently, and turned his head aside. Lucian felt the heat of that mouth against the sensitive skin below his ear and shuddered in spite of himself. Fingers slid beneath his collar and folded it back. Warm breath. A whisper, too low to be heard.

Then teeth.

It burned. It burned like the first sip of whiskey, like the first frostbite thaw, like a lightning strike running down the length of his spine and out through the soles of his boots. Lucian's hands went tight in Kaelen's hair. A cry broke out of his throat that he could not hold back. And behind his eyes, vast and gold and sudden, something opened.

A mountain. A city of ash and amber. A hundred years of winters, and a single bright thread running through them, a boy in the snow.

*Lucian*, said a voice in the center of his skull, and it was not Kaelen's voice, though it was Kaelen's heart. *Lucian. Mine.*

It was done.

The dragon lifted his head. A line of gold light flared at the junction of Lucian's neck and shoulder, settled, and sank into the skin like the last coal of a fire. When Kaelen's thumb passed over it, Lucian made a sound that he would be ashamed of for years.

"It burns," he managed.

"It will pass." Kaelen's voice shook. He looked as wrecked as Lucian felt. "Hold on to me."

The hounds hit the corner at a dead run.

---

The tunnel ended in a drop.

Kaelen did not slow. He took Lucian around the waist and went over the edge like a man stepping off a curb, into a black, roaring void that turned out to be water: the old underground river, snowmelt from the whole of the northern range, running fast and bitter cold toward the sea. They went under. They came up gasping. The current took them like a hand.

Behind them, the hounds reached the lip of the shaft and stopped, whining. Their handlers' flashlights played over the water and found nothing.

"Captain." One of the soldiers was on the radio. His voice carried down the tunnel, small and tinny. "The scent ends here. There's the underground river right below us. Lucian was wounded and the beast was barely standing. They must have been swept away."

"Do we keep searching?"

"The current's too strong. We won't find bodies or survivors."

The lights moved away.

In the black water, three hundred feet downstream, Kaelen set his shoulders against a ledge and dragged Lucian out of the river. They lay on the stone side by side, soaked and shaking, and for a long time neither of them said anything.

"Get your hand out of my clothes," Lucian said at last.

Kaelen did not move it. "Once a dragon's mark is set," he said, with enormous calm, "your body remembers his scent forever. You cannot resist me now."

"Watch me."

"I fully intend to."

======================================================================