Page 68 of Bad Blood Panther

Chapter 26

At the Bad Blood compound, the atmosphere was grim. Tank monitored the tracking app on Flynn’s phone, while Jaz and Brody moved the dining room table and started unloading weapons from the cache under the floor.

Sloan paced back and forth, bloody and bandaged and pissed off as hell. “I can’t believe I let them get the drop on us,” he muttered.

“It’s not your fault, babe,” Caitlyn said for about the tenth time, looking up from the satellite map she was studying on her computer. “Don’t blame yourself.”

“Do we need grenades?” Brody asked.

“Better bring some, just in case,” Jasmin answered.

“It is my fault,” Sloan said. “I promised Xander I’d take care of them. And I let them get kidnapped. If anything happens to them—” He ran his hands through his hair in frustration.

“We’re not going to let anything happen to them,” Flynn yelled down from the loft.

Lissa yelled back, “I’d feel a hell of a lot better about that if we were on a plane already, heading to Broken Hill. Why the fuck are we still here, again?”

Flynn replied, “A) because we didn’t know where they were fucking going. And B)—”

Tank interrupted, “Transmitter stopped moving again. Signal’s holding this time.”

Caitlyn traced the coordinates on her map. “Not another airfield,” she announced. “Wooded area, isolated, with a valley in the middle.” She enlarged the map. “And a whole bunch of cabins. If that’s not a shifter encampment, I don’t know what is.”

“Too bad we can’t get live satellite,” Sloan muttered. “I might know some people…”

“No time,” Flynn said.

“Well, there would be if we’d started contacting people hours ago when Xander freaking went with those assholes,” Lissa said. “And I won’t get started again about why you let him go with them alone.”

“Please don’t,” Tank said under his breath.

Lissa glared at him, and then up towards the loft. “So now we know A) where they were fucking going,” she said. “What’s B?”

Flynn bounded down the curving wooden staircase, carrying a plain metal box. “And B, you don’t need a plane when you’ve got a plan.”

He held the box up to eye level. A small beam of light flashed out, and there was a tiny buzz and a click as it did an iris scan. After that, he pressed his left thumb onto a fingerprint scanner.

Sloan stared. “What the hell do you have under that kind of security?”

He stopped as the box opened, showing a velvet interior holding two thick gold cuff bracelets, engraved with intricate designs. “Holy fuck.”

Flynn lifted the bracelets out of the box. They were dragon-made, over a thousand years old. They were also terrifyingly magical. Sloan and Caitlyn had almost lost their lives only a couple of months ago, retrieving one from Afghanistan and another from a seriously psychotic ex-Intelligence analyst.

Sloan said, “Ashley told me she was going to give those back to the dragons.”

Ashley Sliver was a cobalt dragon—a princess of the Draken House of Akkabi, as a matter of fact. She was also a country singer and a friend of the Bad Blood clan.

Flynn gave him a flat black stare. “I believe her exact words were that she was going to make sure they got to the right person.”

“And?”

“They did.”

Caitlyn’s mouth had dropped open at the sight of the bracelets. Now she said, “You know how to use dragon magic?”

“I know how to use these,” he said. “They were made for the Lion Guard of the Draken House of Al-Maddeiri.”

Which answered no questions whatsoever. Just raised more.

“And the dragons and this Lion Guard won’t care that you’re using them?” Tank asked.

Flynn snorted. “They’ll care. But I’ll deal with that when the time comes. For now, this is the only way to get to Xander without Alton Raines knowing and shutting us down.”

The bracelets, among other things, gave the wearer the power to travel through the spirit world while still in their physical body—a rare and dangerous ability. They could also take other people with them.

“You’re going to travel us right through the spirit world to their territory?” Lissa asked.

“I hope to hell it isn’t going to make you into a psycho like Donnelly,” said Brody. Jared Donnelly was Caitlyn’s ex-fiancé, and also the psycho ex-intelligence agent who had nearly killed her and Sloan to get his hands on the bracelets and the power they contained.

Flynn gave him one of his famous crooked grins. “Already crazy. Haven’t you heard? And no, they’re not going to make me any crazier or more homicidal than I already am.”

The grin turned deadly. “Nobody fucks with my crew.”

“So?” Jasmin jumped out of the weapons locker and looked around the room. “What the hell are we waiting for? Let’s go liberate us a panther family.”