In the air over her apartment, a cluster of unfamiliar, black tactical gear-wearing dragon shifters hovered. They clustered around a central character she did recognize: Sard Carnelian, irate CEO of Carnelian Clothiers.

“What’s he doing here?” she asked.

Kyan, being his usual taciturn self, didn’t bother to answer.

They descended to her unlocked balcony and everyone crowded into her kitchen.

“Be careful of the cherry tomatoes.” She craned her neck at the CEO and his guards. “What are you doing here?”

“You don’t know?” His crossed wrists were bound with neon string and the sour expression on his face said it was not a fashion statement. “I’ve been kidnapped.”

“Did you have something to do with Pyro’s disappearance?”

“Obviously not. He’s clearly using this opportunity to insult me and frighten you. You’re going to pay for involving me.”

She tuned Sard out and searched the apartment for Melody. The front door hung ajar, again, and the fan whirred in the bathroom.

She tapped on the bathroom door. “Melody? Can you come out when you’re done? Uh, we have guests.”

Her roommate made a muffled noise of agreement.

“This is an affront,” Sard grumbled. “I have nothing to do with this.”

“Sorry to involve you, then.” Amy grabbed a freshly baked blondie off the counter. “Here. Have a cookie.”

He took the blondie but didn’t eat it. Focusing on her, since Kyan’s tactical team ignored him, he growled. “Pyro is an unreliable hothead. Pretending to have a counter offer and then skipping out on our meeting makes me look like a fool. Trusting him was your mistake and now I’m paying for it.”

“He wouldn’t disappear during such an important negotiation,” she replied angrily.

Kyan slipped through the open door to Melody’s room.

“He disappears all the time.”

“Have a little faith,” she snapped, following Kyan. “If you’re going into business together, you’re going to need it.”

Sard’s eyes gleamed a darker, richer, bloodier red and his canines seemed longer like he was growling silently in fury.

She turned away from Sard and was confronted by … not what she expected.

Melody used to decorate her walls with her favorite fantasy characters. Once, she’d printed out the entire map of Skyrim and laboriously put in pins marking the location of every vein of ore discovered in the fantasy world. Now, that video game map was plastered over by a wall-sized map of Portland. Pins noted times and locations. The bar where Amy had met Pyro was marked in red.

Kyan stood with his feet shoulder-width apart. “What’s this?”

“Um, it’s for fan fiction?” Amy guessed.

His expression didn’t agree. And he must be right.

Were these places she had seen or met Pyro? Something was wrong. This took stalking to a professional level.

Melody, fresh from the bathroom, squeezed past Sard and stared up at the bulky dragon shifters in discomfort. “Wow, Amy. Who are your new friends?”

“Where’ve you been?”

“We lost track of Josh’s dad, so I was checking the bar.”

Right, because Josh’s dad was an alcoholic. “You never go out.”

“I know, but Josh has a tournament. What’s going on?” She frowned at her wall. “Why did you take the blanket down?”

“It was down when we got here.”

Her eyes got wide. “Oh.”

“That thing you had me do — following Pyro and writing notes about him — it wasn’t really for fan fiction, is it?”

Melody sat on her bed and rested her braces on her lap. A snort and a smile crossed her face. She rubbed her cheeks. “I can’t believe you bought that for so long.”

“Well, you are one of the top twenty fan ficcers on three websites.”

“Yeah, but—”

Kyan cut in. “What are you planning to do to him?”

“It was for his protection.” Her shoulders deflated. “There are bad people on the internet. Most are harmless trolls. But you can stumble across real evil, too.”

Kyan’s eyes turned a richer shade of blue and his knuckles flexed. “What have you done to him?”

Melody looked up in confusion.

“Pyro’s missing,” Amy said, cutting through the crap. “He made it to our apartment and then disappeared.”

Melody’s eyes widened. “Oh, no.” She dialed her phone. “Josh? I don’t care it’s a tournament. This is life or death! Where’s your dad? … Go check.”

They waited. Kyan, Sard, a tactical team of dragon shifters.

“I thought Josh’s dad was an alcoholic,” Amy said.

Melody glanced up at her as though she were crazy. “What?”

“You always wanted to keep him away from the bar.”

“Because that’s where you spotted Pyro.” She refocused on the phone. “He’s there? Alone? He might have run into Pyro. Are you sure he’s alone? You’re sure? Okay.”

She ended the call and looked up at them with a helpless shrug. “It wasn’t his dad.”

Kyan looked at his team. “We will confirm.”

They turned without a word and trooped out of the apartment marching Sard between them. Sard grabbed another blondie square on his way out to the balcony.

Kyan scooped up Melody. “You come also.”

“Oh! Okay.”

He collected Amy in his other arm and flew off the balcony following Melody’s instructions to Josh’s house.

“Josh’s dad isn’t an alcoholic. He’s crazy,” Melody told Amy. “And he’s obsessed with lizard people. After dragon shifters appeared, he stopped taking his meds and went into a spiral He was hospitalized twice for stalking and once for assault.”

“Assault!”

“Always humans though.” Melody turned grim. “He’s taking his meds again, and after he was last released, he wanted to visit Josh. We thought it would get him away from the bad influences so we said yes. It turns out he just heard the dragons lived near here.”

“You could have said something.”

“I wanted to. But what if he was cured? Anyway, I had no idea you would ever talk to Pyro face-to-face, much less marry him.”

Fair enough.

“Josh and I set up an elaborate tracking system to make sure he didn’t run into any dragons, just in case. The only dragon who hangs out nearby, and so was at risk, was Pyro.”

They landed on the front step of a plain yellow house where Josh lived with three roommates. The windows were blocked out with black plastic. Melody knocked on the door and jiggled the handle.

“Locked.” She frowned. “I didn’t bring my key.”

Kyan lowered his shoulder and pushed in the door.

Splintering wood shrieked, and the handle slammed against the back wall enough to dent.

There went the security deposit.

Josh’s roommates worked during the day, so the dragons fanned out to search the rooms and came up empty.

Melody pointed at the stairs. “Josh’s game systems are in the day basement.”

They poured into his blacked out basement. He sat upright in an office chair, hands on a red-backlit gaming keyboard, thick headphones muffling his ears while the flickering of an assault game reflected from the computer screen onto his totally focused face.

“Josh.” Melody yanked off his headphones. “Josh!”

He jumped, thoroughly startled, and still did not remove his eyes or his tapping fingers from the keyboard. “Argh! What?!”

“Where’s your dad?”

“I don’t know.”

“I called you minutes ago. Did you really check?”

“Yes. No!”

“Josh!”

“I’m in the finals. God! What the heck?”

Kyan wheeled Josh’s chair around, gripped onto both armrests, and stared deeply into the anguished eyes of the tormented gamer.

Although Josh was a large guy himself, he shrank back. His obvious intention to fling off the people who had just destroyed his chance at winning the tournament was checked by their scarred, hulking fury.

“Where is your father?” Kyan asked with deadly softness.

“I don’t know. I don’t… oh my god are you a dragon shifter? You have to get out of here.”

“Josh!” Melody got his attention over Kyan’s shoulder. “Pyro’s missing. Where’s your dad?”

“I don’t know. Upstairs.”

“He wasn’t. We just came from there.”

“Maybe the shed. In the backyard. He was talking about fixing it up.”

“Fixing it up like what, an interrogation room?”

“Maybe?”

Kyan released the chair and wheeled to his commandos. They trooped out the sliding glass door.

“Did he?” Melody’s braces slipped in the muddy grass.

“I don’t know. I was at yours all weekend.”

Kyan hovered off the ground to see in the one high shed window. Then, he flew back and nodded to remove Sard’s handcuffs. “You’re free to go.”

Sard rubbed his wrists.

“So is he in there?” Amy demanded, ready to throttle them all.

Kyan nodded.

“Why aren’t you bringing him out?”

“The human is using dragon technology on Pyro. He could accidentally use it on himself and become hurt.”

“So?”

Sard answered when it appeared that Kyan would not. “Injuring a human violates the treaty.”

“But Josh’s dad could be torturing him.”

“He is.”

“You have to save him!”

The dragon-shifter refused. An entire tactical team led by a huge mercenary stood back and waited while the love of Amy’s life was being hurt.

She bit back her scream.

Josh squared his shoulders. “I’ll go in.”

Kyan stopped him. “You could become hurt.”

Josh looked relieved.

Before Amy could take his place, the dragons formed an impassable blockade. They prevented anyone, even Amy, from getting close or risking injury.

“Somebody has to stop this!” Amy cried, pushing against Kyan.

She might as well have been pushing against a wall. A silent, grim, battle-scarred wall.

Sard spoke again. “Being critically, even fatally injured by unbalanced humans is a risk all dragons accept when they come to Earth.”

Two of his bodyguards, Syenite and a second dragon shifter, landed beside Sard. He confirmed his statement with them. “Isn’t it?”

His bodyguards nodded.

“So, what? You’re just going to wait here until Josh’s dad gets bored or Pyro dies?” she demanded.

The answer appeared to be yes.

“I’m so sorry,” Melody whispered. Tears filled her eyes. “I had no idea it would come out like this.” She turned to Sard. “And I’m sorry that you got dragged into this too.”

The CEO lifted his chin. “Give me two hundred plates of those white chocolate cookies and I will forgive you.”

Melody nodded miserably.

“What? No.” Amy stopped that right away. “What is it with dragons and your ‘hundreds’ of things? You can have two plates of blondies. Two.”

He looked less pleased but still accepted her judgment. “Two.”

Amy got out her phone. She had three missed calls from her mom and two more from Corinne.

Whatever.

Everyone else might be willing to let things take their course, like Pyro was some unfortunate victim or disposable guy, but she wasn’t. Just like everyone thought Pyro was just being irresponsible and only she believed he was in trouble.

A bunch of dragon businessmen weren’t the highest authorities. Even if one of them seemed more like Special Ops than like a clothing manufacturer.

Amy’s call connected.

“9-1-1. What’s your emergency?”

“Police.”

Everyone turned to her in shock.

She stared them down. Why were they so surprised? When bullies gave you a bloody nose, you called the teacher, and when crazies tortured innocent victims, you called the police.

“I’d like to report a crime in progress.”