The wizard’s words echoed in Destiny’s ears: “Ethan McNeil. Kill your mate.”

She’d seen that Lamorat could control them. Even now, she couldn’t make herself speak. But she still couldn’t believe that Ethan would ever hurt her.

And so she felt no fear of him. She saw the corded tension in his body and the set determination in his eyes, and she feared for him. He was fighting the wizard’s order as hard as he could—as hard as it was possible for a man to fight. When an irresistible force meets an immovable object, can both survive the collision?

Destiny’s own love and determination burned through her. Her tiger roared, and her woman’s strength fused with her tiger’s fury. It wasn’t enough to break the wizard’s hold. But it was enough to crack it.

“I love you,” she forced out through lips that would barely move. “I’m not afraid.”

And Ethan replied, though he too had been silenced. His whisper sounded like a tiger’s growl. “I love you. I’d die before I’d hurt you.”

“Kill her,” Lamorat ordered again.

Ethan folded his arms across his chest, but otherwise didn’t move. His face, which had gone red with effort, suddenly went white.

“I take back my order,” Lamorat said quickly.

The instant the wizard finished speaking, Ethan collapsed at her feet.

Destiny’s heart almost stopped. She wanted to drop down beside him, to check his pulse and breathing, but she couldn’t move. All she could do was stand there and watch and wonder, in the worst moment of her entire life, if he had died so he wouldn’t hurt her.

Then she saw his chest move as he inhaled, and the rush of relief almost made her collapse herself. Maybe it would have, if she wasn’t already under magical orders to stand.

“I took back my order because I may still have some use for him,” Lamorat said. “If I’d let it go one more minute, the strain of trying to defy me would have stopped his heart. So that’s where we stand. You can obey me, or you can die.”

He paused, obviously expecting a dramatic silence to fall. After all, no one was able to speak.

In that pin-drop silence, the barely audible whirr of the miniature drill that had been going the entire time they’d been distracting him was suddenly very noticeable indeed. Lamorat whipped around just in time to see dust drift down from the last of the pencil-tip sized holes that had been drilled around his hidden door.

But not in time to do anything about it. The door fell in, forcing him to jump back. It smashed down a bare inch from his feet.

Drat, Destiny thought. She’d seen Fiona pull that trick before, and she’d hoped the door would hit him over the head.

But the figure standing in the hole in the wall where the door had been wasn’t Fiona. It was a man Destiny had never seen before.

“Let them go,” the stranger said.

“Silence!” Lamorat snapped.

“Nope,” replied the stranger. “I like the sound of my own voice. That’s the one thing you and I have in common.”

Destiny’s spirits rose. Whoever the man was, he was obviously on their side, and Lamorat couldn’t control him. So he must not be a shifter. She wondered who he was.

Lamorat frowned in concentration. “Freeze!”

The man in the doorway gritted his teeth. With obvious effort, he took a step forward.

“I know you,” Lamorat said. “You’re Subject Nine. Carter Howe.”

“Got it in one.” Carter Howe took another step forward.

Destiny watched him with even more curiosity. She’d never met him before, but she knew who he was. He was the tech billionaire who’d been presumed dead in a plane crash. In fact, he’d been kidnapped and held by Apex until Fiona and Justin had released him. But she’d been under the impression that he was a shifter, though she didn’t know what kind, so she didn’t know why Lamorat’s power wasn’t working on him.

Lamorat edged a step backward, though unfortunately not close enough for anyone to touch him. “I read your file closely, so as not to repeat past errors. You were Apex’s failure. Broken. Ruined. The fact that you can resist me at all only proves what a monstrosity you are. Still, even that thing inside you can’t fight me for long. FREEZE.”

Carter wavered, stumbled, and nearly fell. He had to grab one of the empty cages to catch himself. Then he pushed himself upright again. He and Lamorat stared at each other, locked into a silent showdown.

And Destiny, who had been fighting all along, felt the wizard’s hold on her loosen. She still couldn’t budge from where she stood. But she could kneel down beside Ethan and take his hand. His eyes didn’t open, but he traced the letters O and K on her palm with his nail.

Thank God, she thought. She doubted that he’d faked his collapse, but he’d obviously recovered a lot more than he was letting on.

If only they could distract Lamorat a little bit more, they might break his spell entirely. Maybe if they all shouted at once…?

Shane gave a tiny jerk of his chin in Lamorat’s direction.

A gray blur dropped from the ceiling. The wizard let out a very undignified shriek as Shane’s gray moth kitten wrapped itself around his head with all four legs, like the face-hugger in Alien.

“Go!” Catalina yelled. Her butterfly kitten flew to Lamorat, landed square in the middle of his chest, and began to enthusiastically shred his coat and everything underneath.

At the same moment, Nick let go of his little dragon and Justin released his Cerberus puppy. The next thing the beleaguered wizard knew, two puppy jaws were biting his left ankle and one was biting his right, and his pants were on fire at the crotch.

With a howl of pain and anguish, the wizard shifted.

Like a dragon, he didn’t shift instantaneously. When dragons transform, the air around them begins to sparkle until they vanish within the glow; when the sparks wink out, the new form appears in the place of the old. So Destiny knew what was happening when the air around Lamorat began to thicken and seethe with flashes of light.

She tried to help Ethan to his feet, and found that she could do it, but didn’t need to; he stood up easily, put his arm around her, and pulled her away. The spell that had held the humans in place seemed to have broken entirely; everyone was backing away from the wizard, watching him warily. The pets too were sensibly flitting or zooming or darting or bolting back to their owners.

Destiny had no idea how dangerous the wizard’s shift form might be, what it might be, or even how big it could be. She was uneasily conscious of the size of the room, and particularly of its unnecessarily high ceiling. And also that the wizard-cloud was blocking all the exits. They were very likely about to be trapped in a room with something very, very large.

“Carter! Can you get their collars off?” Justin indicated Roland and Ransom.

Carter examined the collars, then opened his coat. Destiny was boggled to see that the interior of the expensive designer overcoat had been altered to include a high-tech mini tool belt. “Yeah. Just keep whatever that thing is off me while I do.”

“Got it,” said Justin. “I thought you were staying in the plane. Thanks for coming to the rescue.”

Carter made a brushing-off motion with one hand while running something like a Star Trek tricorder over Ransom’s collar. “You’re welcome. Don’t expect it to ever happen again.”

The rest of them formed a protective circle around Carter, Ransom, and Roland. The lightning cloud around the wizard was becoming more and more active, and getting bigger and bigger, pierced with flashes of green, blue, red, white, and even black light.

The cloud vanished, leaving them staring up at a gigantic, five-headed monster.

At first Destiny couldn’t even comprehend what it was. The heads resembled those of dragons, but they were attached to long, sinuous, snake-like necks. And the necks were attached to a stumpy body with four squat legs, all of it covered in extremely tough-looking plate armor. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the heads were circled by octopus-like tentacles, some long and thin, some short and fat, but all covered with suckers and dripping slime.

The necks writhed, the tentacles writhed harder, and the heads made experimental-looking darts in and out. Destiny was relieved to see that they couldn’t reach anyone… yet.

“Not half as cute as you,” Justin muttered, patting his Cerberus pup. All three heads let out nervous whines as they stared up at the monster.

All five heads suddenly reared back. Instinctively, everyone dove aside. Destiny and Ethan clutched each other as they tucked and rolled. A wave of heat passed over her head, she heard a roar and crackle and hiss and clatter and splash, and she smelt a revolting combination of sudden stinks.

As they slammed into a set of empty cages, she looked up just in time to see the scarlet dragon head breathing out a burst of flame, the white head spraying a barrage of icicles, the green head spitting green slime that melted the walls and floor where it hit, the blue head shooting a bolt of crackling lightning, and the black head emitting a cloud of toxic-looking smoke.

“Fuckin’ A,” muttered Nick. “Seriously?”

Destiny was immensely relieved to see that no one had been badly hurt, though Roland was slapping out a fire on the sleeve of Carter’s coat and Shane, plucking a needle-sharp icicle from Catalina’s shoulder, had murder in his eyes. All the pets had flown or scampered free, as far as she could tell. She had a moment of alarm when she couldn’t spot Shane’s kitten, then decided that like its master, it preferred to lurk unseen.

“Convenient that they’re color-coded,” Merlin remarked.

“Just like a dungeon crawl,” said Ethan encouragingly. “We’ve got this, nerd girl.”

Destiny tapped her ear, then her mouth: It can hear us. Don’t plan aloud.

Ethan nodded, then glanced around speculatively. They were on the same side of the room as Justin and Nick. Carter, Ransom, Roland, Shane, Merlin, and Catalina were on the other side. Destiny’s eyes met Ethan’s, and she knew that they were thinking the same thing. They just needed to find a way to explain it to the people they couldn’t whisper to…

Then she knew how to signal at least one of them. And once he knew his job, hopefully the rest would follow.

As the dragon-thing ponderously swiveled its heads for another try, Ethan gathered her, Justin, and Nick into a tight huddle, and breathed, “The others will distract. I’ll take black. Nick, green. Justin, blue. Destiny, white. Whoever finishes first takes red.”

As the dragon heads reared back to attack again, Destiny yelled, “CHICKEN TIME!”

Merlin became a chicken-sized raptor and rushed the dragon-thing, leaping up and down and screeching. Destiny and the others nearest to her transformed and leaped for their targets. The monster swung its nearest head (the white one) toward Merlin, but before it could cut him to pieces with slivers of ice, Destiny was upon him.

Her claws sank in, but it was hard to keep her balance on the slithery, squirmy neck. She tried to bend her head to bite, but a slimy tentacle grabbed her around the waist and yanked hard.

A glint of silver sparkled, and the pressure released. Roland stood with one hand pressed to his side and one holding his sword high. Half a tentacle fell at his feet.

“Come back, Roland! You’re next!” Carter called, as he twisted a tiny tool. Ransom’s collar dropped to the floor with a clatter.

Nick managed to get atop the green neck, but was shaken off; his wolf claws couldn’t dig in the way a big cat’s could. Undeterred, he leaped and snapped at the green head, dodging blasts of acidic slime. Pete ran forward, ducked under a jet of acid, and boosted Nick up. His shoulder muscles bulged with strain, but he held his position until Nick could sink his teeth into the green dragon’s neck.

A tentacle whipped out and slapped Justin off the blue dragon’s neck. He fell to the floor, rolling to escape a lightning bolt. The blue dragon head darted to follow him. Shane and Catalina leaped for it, their lithe black and yellow bodies moving as one, and landed on its neck. Justin hissed and clawed at it from the floor, dodging lightning bolts as his friends tried to sink their teeth in.

Beside Destiny, Ethan was trying to get a grip on the black head, biting and slashing. But a nest of tentacles pulled him off and flung him hard to the floor.

The fire-breathing red dragon head bent over him and drew in a breath. Destiny released her hold on the white dragon neck and jumped down to protect Ethan. But as she landed beside him, she realized that she was too late. She’d only share in his fiery death.

Better to die with Ethan than live without him, she thought.

But the blast of flame didn’t come. Bewildered, she looked up. A beast she had never seen was ferociously attacking the red dragon head. It was a black hound the size of a pony, shaggy and fierce, wreathed in black smoke and with fiery eyes like windows into Hell.

Ethan and Destiny scrambled away. Justin stopped taunting the blue dragon head and, shielded by the giant hound, leaped on to the neck of the red dragon. He clung to it, biting and clawing, as the black hound snarled at it. The red dragon head jerked back, its tentacles cringing away, as if even that fire-breathing monster was intimidated by the hound’s burning regard.

Destiny had no time to figure out what was going on, only to see what still needed to be done. No one was attacking the white dragon head. It twisted sinuously to spray everyone with dagger-sharp shards of ice. Ethan and Destiny leaped for it together. Their teeth and claws sank in as they sought to bite hard enough to kill it.

Out of the corner of her eye, Destiny saw that Catalina’s butterfly kitten and Shane’s moth kitten were flying at and distracting the dragon head they fought, Nick’s little dragon was doing the same for his, and Justin’s Cerberus puppy was leaping up and down and snapping at the tentacles that tried to drag him off.

“Everyone!” Roland shouted. “Bite NOW!”

Destiny bit down as hard as she could.

CRUNCH.

The thing that had been Lamorat collapsed with an immense thud, followed by an immense splat a split second later as all the tentacles hit the floor.

Destiny and the others scrambled off it, shifted to human form, and backed away, eyeing it warily. It was a huge heap of ugly fanged heads and tentacles, so tangled up that she couldn’t trace the necks back to the body. Not that she’d want to.

“Looks like Eel Day at the Venice fish market,” Justin remarked.

“I’m crossing Venice off my list of places to visit,” Catalina said.

“Does anyone have any more spare clothes?” Destiny asked plaintively. Justin and Catalina might be comfortable standing around stark naked in an evil lab in front of people they barely knew, but she certainly wasn’t.

With a grin, Justin ostentatiously turned his back, then bent to pick up his backpack. She was too relieved to care about him mooning her when he tossed it over his shoulder. She scrambled into the spare clothes as the rest of the non-mythic shifters did the same. When she turned back around, she saw that everyone was dressed, the fiery-eyed hound (which she had by now figured out had to be Ransom’s shift form) was still a hound, and an audibly frustrated Merlin-raptor was maniacally switching between chicken and turkey sizes.

A clang of metal made Destiny jump. She whipped around, only to see that Carter had finally succeeded in getting Roland’s collar off. The noise had been the metal bouncing off the floor.

She heard an unpleasant sucking sound, and swung back in the other direction.

From the midst of the enormous pile of heads and necks and suckers, a slimy tentacle as wide as her waist was blindly feeling its way out.

“Everybody back!” Roland shouted.

They instinctively obeyed his commanding voice. He stood alone, facing the mass that was once again beginning to writhe, a tall man who looked small before it, a dark silhouette in a white room.

Roland spread his arms wide. Flames blossomed along his arms, but he didn’t burn. Instead, his arms became fire. They stretched out behind him, and for the briefest moment he was a man with wings of streaming flame. Then his entire body transformed in the blink of an eye. He hovered in midair, burning wings outstretched, a magnificent bird made entirely of fire.

Destiny had never seen anything so beautiful. She could feel the heat, as hot as a furnace fit to melt steel, but it didn’t burn her. She could see the brilliance, bright as the mid-day sun, but it didn’t hurt her eyes.

A phoenix, she thought, and was filled with awe. I never knew they were real.

The phoenix cried out in the high pure voice of a hunting hawk, and dived. He left a trail of flame in the air. A single blazing feather at the tip of one wing touched a single reaching tentacle. For a split second, the reviving monster was outlined in white-hot fire.

The light dimmed, and the bird of fire was gone. Roland staggered. Pete jumped to steady him. In the center of the room, only an immense gray heap in the shape of tentacles and dragon heads remained. And then a breath of air touched it, and it collapsed into a shapeless pile of ash.

A door slid open. Rafa, Lucas, and Fiona piled in with guns drawn.

“Humans, freeze!” Rafa yelled. “Dog-thing! Dinosaur! Lie down!”

The huge black hound turned its burning eyes toward him. Destiny could swear she saw a familiar expression of world-weary cynicism in them. And then the hound dissolved in a wisp of smoke, leaving behind only Ransom and his own sardonic gaze.

“Still want me to lie down?” he inquired.

“He’s one of the good guys,” Ethan said hurriedly. Waving his hand to encompass Merlin, who was now vacillating between chicken and human-sized raptors, he said, “And so’s he. And these guys.” He indicated Roland, Pete, and Carter.

Fiona gave Carter a cold stare, and didn’t lower her gun. “I wouldn’t be so sure about him.”

Justin put his arm around her shoulders. “He did fly us here. And he’s been very helpful.”

“Don’t get used to it,” Carter said.

“That wasn’t a ‘dog-thing,’” said Lucas. “That was a hellhound. But I thought they were legendary.”

“So speaks the dragon,” replied Rafa. “But who are you all?”

Ethan quickly introduced everyone, adding, “And I’ll tell you the rest of the story on the way home.”

Fiona looked down at the Cerberus puppy, which was panting happily at Justin’s feet. “I can’t wait.”

“Same,” said Rafa, glancing from the butterfly kitten clinging to Catalina’s shoulder to the moth kitten clinging to Shane’s to the blue dragon on Nick’s forearm and finally and most incredulously, to the Cerberus puppy, which was now licking Fiona’s hands with three small pink tongues.

“Have you finished searching the base?” Destiny asked.

Lucas nodded. “Not a stone left unturned.”

“We threw everyone out,” Rafa said. “Some of them piled into planes and took off, and the rest of them fled into the jungle. Either the Indian police will find them and deport them, or something in the jungle will find them and eat them.”

“Hopefully the latter,” said Shane, reaching up to stroke the gray kitten on his shoulder. It rubbed its head against his chin and purred.

Sounding very pleased with herself, Fiona said, “The self-destruct is ready to remote-activate as soon as we’re all out.”

“You didn’t find any prisoners?” Roland asked, as if he couldn’t help himself. But his sad eyes told Destiny that he already knew the answer.

“None,” said Fiona. “Did we miss someone?”

“No.” After a moment, Roland added, very quietly and more to himself than to anyone in the room, “I’ll never even know her name.”

Destiny, who was standing nearby, heard him. “I’m so sorry.”

“I wish we could’ve gotten here sooner,” Ethan said.

Roland shook his head. “I woke up wearing that collar. Whatever they did to me, they did right away. And she was already… gone. The only person who could’ve saved her was me, back in the US. If I’d convinced her to leave me… If I hadn’t rolled my car in front of her, so she felt obliged to help me...”

“That was her choice,” said Ransom. “It’s better to die as yourself than become a person you’d despise.”

“What the professor is trying to say,” Pete broke in, “is it wasn’t your fault. You tried to save her. She tried to save you. Sometimes things just don’t work out, no matter how hard you try.”

“This place—these sorts of places—break people,” Carter said.

“I didn’t save anyone either,” Shane said softly.

“Yes, you did,” Justin said to Shane. “You saved me.”

“And me,” Catalina added.

“Roland, you saved people too,” said Merlin. “All of us. Just now. When you became a phoenix to burn the hydra—”

Suspiciously, Pete inquired, “Exactly how do you know what all these weird creatures are, anyway?”

Merlin smiled brightly. “Once I was the guest host for a quiz show in Moldava where the topic was mythology.”

“Yeah, right,” Pete snorted.

“Let’s get out of here. We can catch up on everything later.” Rafa again looked from Nick’s little dragon to Justin’s baby Cerberus to the winged kittens. “Grace is going to be so disappointed that I arrived too late to get her a weird little pet.”

“Maybe there’s more in some other room,” Catalina said hopefully.

Lucas glanced up from the floor where he’d been kneeling. “I don’t believe so. Fiona and Rafa and I checked the base very thoroughly. We saw some Apex workers loading sedated dinosaurs into a plane with a forklift—”

“I hope you recorded its flight path so I can avoid it when they wake up mid-flight,” Carter remarked.

“—but no mythical animals. You see this?” With one long, elegant finger, Lucas indicated a patch of the floor that was very faintly shimmering. “That’s the trace of a portal.”

“I remember now!” Destiny exclaimed. “There was a flash of light, and Lamorat said they’d gone through a portal.”

Lucas stood up and dusted off the knees of his pants. “Yes, a very few magical beasts have that ability. One of them must have been imprisoned here, and once it was freed, it created a portal to allow the rest to escape.”

“But where did they go?” Destiny asked, reluctant to give up on the idea of her very own winged kitten.

“I assume back to their places of origin, where they must have been captured. There are still a few secret, hidden, protected places in the world where magical animals live.” Indicating Nick’s blue dragon, Lucas said, “We have dragonettes in some parts of my own country. They rarely bond with humans. You should feel very lucky, Nick.”

The dragonette trilled and delicately plucked something from Nick’s shoulder. Leaning closer, Destiny saw that it was a long, shining silver hair.

Lucas chuckled. “I should say, you and Raluca should feel very lucky. I believe your dragonette intends to bond with you both. Just like the Cerberus pup has chosen two pack leaders.”

Justin and Fiona, who were on the floor playing with the three-headed puppy, glanced up. She said, “I want to name him.”

Justin spread his hands. “All yours.”

“Trio,” she said. “It means trio in Italian.”

“Perfecto,” Justin replied, grinning.

Trio barked as if in pleased acknowledgment. Once per head.

“I’ll wait for Raluca,” Nick said.

“Got a name for yours?” Shane asked Catalina.

“Carol.” She scritched the butterfly kitten behind the wings. Carol stretched luxuriously and purred. “For Carol Danvers. You know, Captain Marvel.”

“I know.” Shane smiled at his mate. His moth kitten lay draped across his shoulder, claws dug in to keep its hold, but Shane obviously didn’t mind. “Mine’s Shadow.”

“Shadowcat? Like Kitty Pryde from the X-Men?” Catalina asked.

“Just Shadow.”

“That’s a good name too.” Catalina noticed the look of envy that Destiny had obviously failed to suppress, and patted her on the back. “You’ll get your flying kitten. When Carol and Shadow grow up, they’ll have kittens and then everyone can have one!”

“That will require some patience,” said Lucas. “Mythic animals have a very lengthy childhood. Those kittens will still be kittens for years to come.”

“How cute!” Catalina exclaimed. “I mean, what a shame.”

Rafa made a “forget about it” gesture with his big hands. “Don’t worry about it. Grace and I will have our hands full with our baby pretty soon! Same with Hal and Ellie. The last thing couples with new babies need are new pets—especially a new pet that can fly or set the carpets on fire.”

“I wish—” Pete broke off, then reconsidered. “Well, cat’s out of the bag now.” Catalina snickered. Ignoring her, he went on, “My daughter would’ve liked one. That’s all. And that’s all I’m going to say about her, so don’t even think of asking.”

Lucas broke the silence. “Journey and I travel too much to have pets.”

“I work too much,” said Roland.

Ransom said, “The last thing I need is to be responsible for another life.”

“I wanted one,” Merlin said. Then, ever hopeful, he said, “Maybe they’ll turn up later.”

“You heard Lucas,” Pete said crushingly. “Secret hidden places. Wherever they went, it won’t be any place any of us will be.”

Ethan and Destiny glanced at each other. She said, “Want to make sure we don’t pine away for a flying kitten?”

“New babies of our own?”

“One at a time, jarhead.”

“Can’t count on that,” Ethan said with a smile. “Twins run in my family.”