Darkness Bound

58

The New York Times, Tuesday, October 1, 20—

JOURNALIST MISSING, FEARED DEAD

Jacqueline Dolan, veteran reporter and senior war correspondent for the New York Times, has been reported missing. Last seen by a neighbor on the afternoon of Wednesday, September 25, Ms. Dolan initially rose to prominence with her coverage of the Iraq war. The first female reporter to be embedded with an infantry regiment on the front lines of a conflict, she was also one of the youngest reporters ever hired by the New York Times. Over the past decade, she has reported on hundreds of international military conflicts, and has traveled with US troops to war zones in foreign countries on more than a dozen occasions. A police search of Ms. Dolan’s apartment uncovered no clues into her disappearance, but friends and family speculate she may have been the target of retaliation by the subjects of her Pulitzer-nominated opinion piece, “The Enemy Among Us.” A treatise on the duty of the human race to preserve our culture and history in the face of the Shifter invasion, “The Enemy Among Us” was widely lauded as the driving force behind the adoption of new anti-Shifter legislation both in the United States and abroad, and sparked heated debate on the topic.

For now the investigation is ongoing, but anyone with any information about the current whereabouts of Ms. Dolan are encouraged to contact their local police department . . .

Aside from being a dragon, being a dolphin had to be the most kickass thing in the world.

Slicing through the water at a speed of just over eight knots, Jenna was having the most fun she’d had in a long time. In spite of the seriousness of her mission and the current—awful—outlook for peace between the Ikati and humans, the simple pleasure of leaping over and swimming through seventy-two-degree seawater with a group of twelve other dolphins was sublime.

Pod, she corrected herself, glancing at the sleek forms swimming beside her. A family of dolphins was called a pod.

Though she must look odd to them, pure white as she always was in animal form in contrast with their pearl gray, they’d accepted her with the happy, curious ease of Labradors greeting a newcomer in a doggie park. She’d flown most of the way across the Atlantic toward Morocco in dragon form because it was fastest—skirting the landmass of Spain and evading airplanes where necessary by Shifting to Vapor—but, famished and tired after almost ten straight hours of flying, she decided to rest.

Over the open ocean, there was nowhere else to rest but in the water.

So in she went.

Fish were plentiful, the water was warm, and echolocation proved to be awesome. It took a while to get the hang of communicating through her nasal passages, but if the other dolphins thought her clicks and whistles slightly strange, they didn’t mention it.

The urge to stay in this form was strong, but Jenna was close to her destination now. She had to focus on the task at hand.

She squeaked a farewell—it sounded a bit like a creaking door—thrust hard with her powerful tail, and sailed high out of the water and into the air, where she promptly Shifted to a gull.

A moment of disorientation and some awkward wing-flapping, and she was off.

The coast loomed wide and desolate ahead of her, a strip of virgin sand with a rocky scrub landscape beyond that opened to the vast Sahara, far in the distance. A stiff headwind hindered her progress, and with her small gull wings working much harder than larger dragon ones, Jenna was exhausted by the time she reached the outskirts of the sprawling, inland city of Marrakech. In the purple-gray dusk, it shimmered beneath her like a mirage.

Scent and noise and heat rose, buffeting her in waves. Roasting meats, kebabs, and couscous from the souks; cumin, coriander, and the warm musk of curry from the spice markets; sweet honey and baked bread from the chebakia vendors in the medina, the soft chivvies of women calling their children home for dinner from their play in the dusty streets.

She pushed on, determined to find Caesar’s hideaway near the Atlas mountains by nightfall. Perhaps she needed to Shift to something a little bigger beforehand.

The air felt strange.

Though the peculiarity of his Gift of Immortality had the unfortunate side effect of leaving him unable to Shift to panther, or anything else for that matter, Caesar did enjoy the heightened senses of his kind. Tonight his senses told him something was amiss.

It was like . . . an electric charge in the air. Like a storm descending, only without any physical evidence a storm would produce. He stood at the uppermost point of the kasbah, in the crenellated turret that overlooked the fortress and the desert beyond, eyes scanning the night sky.

No thunderclouds, no wind, no telltale darkening of the stars that foretold the oncoming rush of sand from a sandstorm. Nothing.

And yet . . .

High overhead, a falcon soared, making wide, lazy circles. Caesar narrowed his eyes, watching it turn. He’d never seen a pure white falcon before.

Peregrine. Female.

He knew it was female because they were always larger than the males, and this one had a wingspan to rival a vulture’s. That was where the similarity ended, however; this bird was beautiful and regal, nothing at all like the ugly scavengers that looked more like enormous, long-necked vampire bats, some kind of hideous prehistoric carrion eaters.

Strange . . . the falcon seemed to be looking back at him. Watching him with keen, intelligent eyes.