“I’ve been here long enough to memorize the watch schedule.” The grass beneath Elnos’ feet rustled as he tried to make himself comfortable. “The captain of the night guard spends his days with a woman in town. He should come by in the next ten minutes.”

We settled in to wait for the captain to show up. My eyes were trained on the dirt road, but my thoughts were elsewhere—on Rylan, specifically. I still couldn’t believe Iannis had sent for him to help us, knowing how I felt about him. Rylan had done the unthinkable—he’d hired a witch to put a spell on me. Such a thing just wasn’t done in the shifter community. If someone had a problem with another shifter, they handled it according to clan customs. Using a charm or hex or other magical device on another shifter was dishonorable, and most clans considered it a punishable offense. The only acceptable excuse was if magic were required to save a life, but since shifters healed so quickly and we were immune to most diseases, such an event was extremely rare.

Maybe Rylan figured the exception applied, since in his mind, he was saving your life, a voice in my head pointed out.

I gritted my teeth at that. It would be exactly like Rylan to convolute the situation in just that way in order to justify what he had done. But by making me forget to warn Iannis, he’d ended up putting me in danger anyway. Rylan knew me better than anyone else in the Jaguar Clan—he should have known I would go after Iannis. Doing so had involved infiltrating a Resistance camp and thwarting a plot to assassinate the Minister, and shortly after that, the Resistance had put a price on my head.

So in the end, Rylan had only created more danger for me, and helped plunge all of Solantha into a terrible civil war the moment Iannis was gone from the scene.

“Sunaya,” Elnos hissed, nudging my arm. Blinking, I cleared my thoughts, then caught the whistle of a steamcar coming from around the bend. “Are you ready?”

“Yep.” Tensing, I watched Elnos lift his hand. In it, he held a tiny metal spike. The car came chugging around the bend, a shiny, maroon-colored vehicle that looked brand new. Clearly, the captain was being paid well—or perhaps he was skimming profits from the factory somehow.

Elnos spoke a Word, and the spike shot from his hand and into the captain’s front tire. It ripped through the rubber, causing the tire to deflate instantly, with a loud hiss.