Ivette stood in her office on the top floor of her research facility and stared out the bank of windows at the city lights beyond. Her office tower wasn’t the tallest in the Newgate city center, but it sat on the edge of a high rise cluster and offered her a spectacular view of the original century-old business district and half of the state university’s campus, which looked more like a park than an educational facility. This high up, with the ground covered in snow in a typical February freeze and early evening darkness creating shadows hiding the hustle of pedestrians on the street, she could almost forget that her facility was in chaos.

Almost.

The red light at the top of her computer screen — reflected in the office windows — indicated Rebecca Scott’s tracker had been deactivated, and Ivette’s computer techs claimed they had no idea what had gone wrong. Their best guess was that Rebecca had been somehow hit with a violent surge of electricity that had fried the tracker, or it had been cut out and deactivated. Given the device’s location, Ivette doubted Rebecca had removed it, and the last time the tracker had worked, she’d been halfway across town from the other subject who’d escaped with her, so he couldn’t have cut it out, either. But the electric surge was also doubtful.

Which left magic.

Ivette turned to her computer, reran the security video of the fight outside, and paused it on a clean image of the dragon. Nero Tassinari. Given how private the black dragon was, there was a surprising amount of information on him. Of course, that might be due to his age, and the fact that her association had been gathering information on dragons since the Dark Ages. Capturing and torturing a few dragons over the years had also helped gather more details.

It shocked her a dragon as old and powerful as Tassinari would get involved with anything relating to humans. He was a known leader of one of the dragon clans and believed to be a dragon Traditionalist — which meant he approved of slaughtering humans who possessed magic.

She hit play and ran the video to the part where Nero grabbed Rebecca and dragged her into the street and out of sight. He’d gone straight for her. He hadn’t tried to kill her or Werner Scholtz, which was surprising, given Werner had clearly demonstrated his magic to consume someone’s life force with a touch and had taken out more of her men than she’d like to admit. Her head of security would need to be replaced. He hadn’t imparted to his men the importance of not letting Scholtz touch them.

She started the video from the beginning again. Tassinari went straight for Rebecca. According to the tracker, he’d gated her twenty blocks over and then gated her away again when the facility’s men went to pick her up. This had to confirm he was a high-level member of the Asar Nergal, someone the dugga trusted to apprehend the human listening to all his telepathic communications. And while killing Rebecca outright would have been more efficient, the dugga had proven once again he was a cautious dragon and chose to investigate Rebecca’s power before ending her. That was what Ivette would do. Find the reason, the cause, and a way to prevent it in the future, then eliminate it.

Her office door opened and Dinah Koehn stormed in. “Didn’t you warn the men about Werner Scholtz? Security is your purview.”

Ivette fought to not roll her eyes. Dinah cared too much about their employees and especially about the subjects. Yes, they walked a fine line between gathering the necessary information about humans with unnaturally acquired magic and endangering those humans, but lives were on the line.

“The head of security was appropriately briefed. He’d even witnessed a demonstration of Scholtz’s abilities, so he was fully aware of the danger.”

“Werner outright killed three of them, two more are in comas, and five sustained injuries that will put them out of commission for weeks.”

But those injuries had more likely come from Tassinari’s wind magic. “So you’re saying we need to hire more men.”

“I’m saying you should have let me fully sedate Rebecca.”

Ivette hit stop on the video — it landed on a blurry image of Tassinari — and turned the screen. “But the facility just got a surprise lead on the dugga.”

Dinah crossed her arms. “Which beast is that?”

“Nero Tassinari.”

“The Major Black Coterie’s doyen?”

“Indeed.”

“What is he doing in Newgate?” Dinah inched closer to Ivette’s desk. “All reports indicate he’s usually at his home in Rome. He’s been there exclusively for the last sixty years.”

“I think the dugga sent him to grab Ms. Scott.”

“You think the dugga is more powerful than an ancient dragon? Maybe he’s the dugga.”

“The dugga wouldn’t be so stupid as to grab Scott himself.” Ivette turned her monitor back into proper position. “We need to find out if Tassinari has returned to Rome.”

“We need to activate the elimination protocol and destroy the facility before Nero returns,” Dinah said with a grimace, her expression clear that she didn’t like the idea.

Ivette didn’t like the idea, either. She might not like Dinah, and they might not have the same goals, but they’d been running this facility and overseeing this research for years. If they followed the required elimination protocol, they’d lose everything.

“Do we think Tassinari would return here so soon?” Yes, he’d return, but — if he was as smart as all information they’d gathered suggested — he wouldn’t rush back. Besides, he was the only lead Ivette had ever gotten in identifying the dugga, and she was damned if she was going to waste her time following protocol and let him slip away. Dinah might want to research the unnatural magic and the degrees of insanity developed by those forced to have a dragon soul invade their body, but Ivette wanted every dragon dead, and she was starting with those who reveled in murdering humans with a naturally born magical ability.

Dinah’s eyes narrowed. “Protocol clearly states if the facility is compromised, everything must be destroyed.”

“I know what the protocol is. I’m in charge of security.” Ivette gripped the back of her desk chair. “I also know your life’s work is in this facility. We have a secondary location…” A location Tassinari didn’t know about. If they moved, she might not be able to justify keeping a full security force here for when the dragon returned — and he, or someone else just as significant, would return to find out what was going on here — but if she slowed the transfer down, she could have at least a partial force.

“I could arrange to have the servers and the most important experiments moved while the suppression magic on the new cells is activated,” Dinah said.

“We could turn the elimination priority list into a moving priority list. The most sensitive information first. If Tassinari or anyone else shows up, we can always switch to the elimination protocol.”

“I wouldn’t lose everything, and we wouldn’t have to euthanize all the subjects.” Relief flashed across Dinah’s face before she schooled her features back to stern superiority. “We still need to get Rebecca Scott back and put Werner Scholtz down.”

Ivette raised an eyebrow. That kind of bloodthirstiness wasn’t like Dinah at all.

“All the unnaturals are mentally unstable. We’ve known that for hundreds of years now,” Dinah said. “Even if Scholtz hasn’t been demonstrating the same degree of insanity as previous subjects, his power has only grown in strength since we detained him and that was only two days ago. He’s a danger to society.”

And she must have had a thing for one of the guys he’d killed.

“Killing Scholtz won’t help us,” Stanbury said. Dinah might share the leadership of the facility, but she wasn’t the brains behind the operation. She possessed the medical education and scientific curiosity to further the facility’s knowledge about dragons and unnaturals, but she couldn’t envision a master plan nor set one into motion. That was Ivette’s job.

Like her father and mother, and theirs before them for generations, she — and Dinah as well — had been born into a select class of humans who knew the truth about the universe and possessed its true power. And like the generations before, she had been told of the terror of the Asar Nergal, the dragon death squad.

Her ancestors had tried to destroy the ferocious beasts but had only managed to force the creatures into hiding in humans, and for generations they had worked to finish the job. Having a direct link to the dugga’s communication would be a major success, something her association hadn’t seen in centuries. Captured members of the Asar Nergal or any dragon would be a feather in her career cap, and while killing the dugga was believed to be the ultimate goal by many of her peers, that wouldn’t solve the main problem. Ivette had confirmed from multiple sources over the years that the dugga was a position with power, not a dragon. Killing the dugga would alert the dragons’ sorcerer, and another dragon would be given the power.

But take the dugga’s magic, and Ivette was willing to bet the dragon sorcerer wouldn’t notice. She’d researched imbued spells for most of her adult life. The magic was always linked to the bearer’s life force, but not the bearer’s essence. One life force worked the same as another. Once she took the dugga’s power, she’d have a telepathic link to every member of the Asar Nergal. She could find and kill them all.

But to do that, she needed Rebecca Scott to lead her to the dugga.

“How does not apprehending Werner and keeping him alive help us?” Dinah asked.

“Scott’s tracker has gone dead. His hasn’t. He risked recapture to help her escape, and she hesitated to leave him behind. If the dugga doesn’t kill her, she’s going to contact Scholtz. And when she does, we can grab her and then the dugga.”