Later, I decided, between one muffled ring and the next. I would sort through everything later. I couldn’t think about…what Garret had said right now. First, we had to find our missing dragons.

Faith stirred. Rising groggily from the mattress, she fumbled in her pocket and brought the phone to her ear with a mumbled “Hello?”

Instantly, she bolted upright, eyes going wide. Gazing across the room, she spotted me and swung her legs off the bed, holding out the phone. “It’s Ava!”

I lunged and snatched the device from her hand. “Ava, are you all right?” I asked, putting it to my ear. “Is Riley with you?”

“Ember?” The voice on the end was a gasp, and cold fingers clutched my insides. “We couldn’t…make it back,” Ava panted, sounding frantic and breathless. “St. George followed us from the building and have spread out. They’re not letting us leave the area.” She took two deep, ragged breaths, her next words laced with fear. “You have to come quick.Riley’s been hurt—”

The blood froze in my veins. “Where are you?”

“Some old rail yard a few blocks from the hotel. Please, hurry. We don’t…” She trailed off, and in the distance, I thought I heard the sounds of gunshots.

“Ava?”

“They’re coming,” the other dragon whispered.

The line went dead.

“Ava! Dammit!” I yanked the phone from my ear and stood there, trying to calm the fiery urge to Shift and crash through the window after them. What did I do now? Riley was out there, wounded, maybe dying, and St. George was closing in. Panic raged inside, the dragon flaring up and down my veins, screaming at me to do something.

“What happened?” Faith asked, her eyes bright with terror. “Are they all right?”

“Riley’s been hurt,” I said, clenching the phone so that the edges bit into my palm. My skin felt tight, the air in my lungs simmering with heat. “They’ve been trapped, and can’t get back to the hotel. We have to help them.”

“Where are they?”

Garret’s cool, steady voice broke through the rising panic. My dragon snarled at him, impatient and wanting action, not this sitting around to chat. Stop it, I told her. We can’t just charge through the window and wing off to find Riley. We need a plan. I took a deep breath to calm us both and forced myself to think.

“Ava said something about a rail yard a few blocks from the abandoned hotel,” I told the soldier. “But she didn’t give me any street signs or numbers. And I didn’t see any railroads when we were running from the building, did you?” Frustration reared up again, and I rubbed a hand across my face. “They could be anywhere, and we don’t have time to guess. St. George is almost there.”

“We won’t have to guess. Come on.” And Garret strode purposefully from the room, leaving me and Faith to scramble after him. We crossed the nearly empty hall, not pausing to look for would-be enemies, and Garret banged twice on Wes’s door.

It swung back, and the gangly human glared out at us, looking exhausted. Dark circles crouched under his eyes, and his hair stuck out in every direction. “What do you—”

“Ava contacted us,” Garret interrupted, making the human’s brows shoot up. “St. George has them cornered in a rail yard a few blocks from the building we left. Can you pull up a map of the city?”

“Shite,” Wes muttered, and ducked back into the room, hurrying to his laptop. We followed, crowding around the chair, as his fingers flew across the keyboard and his shoulders hunched in concentration.

“All right,” Wes muttered, his nose very close to the computer screen, making it hard to see around him. “A rail yard, you said? That shouldn’t be terribly hard to find.” He typed a few more things, and the screen flipped to a large map of Las Vegas. “Okay,” Wes mumbled, zooming in until street names appeared on-screen, “this is where we are now. And here—” he scrolled over the map “—is the site of that abandoned hotel. So, now we’re looking for a railroad… Wait, that must be it.” The mouse arrow circled a confusing jumble of lines and squares on the map. “About five blocks east from the hotel site,” he said. “Right on the edge of town. Bollocks, Riley, what were you thinking? You don’t run away from the lights and crowds if the Order is chasing you. Certainly not to an isolated warehouse in the middle of nowhere.” Sitting back, he eyed us over the chair back. “If they’re down there, that place will be crawling with dragonslayers. You’ll be walking into a death trap.”

“We don’t have a choice,” I said. “Riley’s in there, and he’s hurt. Besides,” I went on, glaring at him, “I thought this was what you wanted. It’s my fault he’s in trouble, isn’t that what you implied?”

“That doesn’t bloody mean I want you to rush into a trap and get your stupid head blown off,” Wes snarled back. His eyes flashed, staring me down, before he sighed and scrubbed a hand through his hair. “What do you think Riley will do if you get yourself killed?” he went on in a softer voice. “He nearly lost his mind the last time you were hurt. If anything happens to you now, he’ll never be the same. Riley is the beating heart of this underground, but if you die, the resistance might very well die with you. Because he might not have the will to care anymore.”

I blinked in shock. Wes sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose, his face taut with pain. “I just want you to think, hatchling.” He sighed. “To come up with some sort of plan, otherwise you’ll all be killed.”