Jared decided that he really needed to have a talk with Ginny about the human movies she’d let him watch.
“Anyway,” Chiara continued. “I’m not saying that you need to share your old scrolls online. But wouldn’t it be nice to have a backup? Just in case?”
“In what case?” Gareth growled. “And it’s not like you’d even know what to do with these books and scrolls. It took decades of study—you wouldn’t even be able to read any of—”
“I did just fine with my treasure map, thank you very much.” Chiara was still grinning, even though the moving shadows before them rapidly shifted, showing them a goat’s head, a dragon’s wings, and then back to the goat’s head again.
“You know,” Jared said slowly, “I think Liana would probably love to help with a project like that. She’s the ocean dragon’s mate,” he added for Chiara, “and a programmer. She runs her own video game company.”
“Really?” Chiara said, her eyes gleaming. “The alien conspiracy people I know have a database and a tracker for all UFO sightings, and I think if we—”
The chimera’s roar shook the walls of the cave. “I will NOT have your lunatic human friends track us!”
Chiara giggled helplessly. “But think about it for a moment. How many of these UFO sightings could be a shifter sighting, in truth?”
“How would tracking shifter sightings help us?” Jared asked.
“Well, not us personally, not right now,” Chiara admitted. “For one thing, it would take time to build, and we’ve got no time left. But this shadow dragon thing we saw... You say there’s an entire nation of crazy fire dragons out there who have somehow allied themselves with darkness. If we—or your friend—could hack into that alien conspiracy database, we might figure out where they’re hiding or planning to strike. Trust me, if there’s one group of people who always know about where there’s weird stuff going on, it’s my friends.”
“Actually, that makes sense,” the chimera grumbled thoughtfully out of the darkness.
Jared gave Chiara an impressed look. It had taken weeks to talk Gareth into getting internet access up here on his lonely mountain. For Chiara to talk him into hacking human databases when she hadn’t even been in Sky Home for a full day was nothing less than impressive.
“That’s decided then,” she said triumphantly. “Remind me to call your programmer friend before we leave.”
In the flickering shadows before them, Jared made out the head of a lion for a heartbeat, its jaws opening for a soundless laugh.
Then the darkness moved, the shadow twisting for a moment in a way that made Jared wince instinctively—and then it was gone. The cave was silent once more.
Gareth had retreated back to his chambers—and Chiara had gotten what she’d wanted.
Jared was still impressed. And very, very curious how she’d take to the council dragons and their human mates.
“In fact, I think you and Liana should meet up in person,” Jared said. “And how would you like to see the place where I grew up? Mountain View—the home of the storm dragon and his mate. Currently also housing the fire dragon and his human mate. I let them use my house, because I’m never home anyway.”
“I’d love to see it.” She paused for a moment, looking almost surprised. “And I’d actually like to meet your friends as well. I want to know what normal dragon shifters are like. I don’t want to judge them all based on the one dragon who kidnapped me. If they’re your friends, there has to be more to them.”
Chapter Nineteen: Chiara
An hour later, Chiara found herself hunched over Ginny’s laptop again. Ginny and Jared were both standing behind her, cheerfully waving at the webcam.
On her screen, a curvy, just as cheerful woman with golden-brown skin that glistened in the sunlight was waving back at her. She was wearing a turquoise sundress, and behind her, Chiara could see the blue of the ocean stretching to the horizon.
“You’ve found the right person for that job.” Liana sounded excited by the prospect of illegally hacking into a UFO database. “This sounds fun! I haven’t hacked anything since college—oops, I’m probably not supposed to admit that, am I?”
Chiara grinned. “I’m the one with the alien conspiracy friends. I promise I won’t judge!”
Liana cracked her fingers. “Anything for a friend. So what exactly do you want me to do once I’m in their database?”
“I don’t exactly know how these things work,” Chiara admitted. “But I thought if we could make something similar to what they have—something that collects their news about strange events, UFO sightings and so on, and maybe filter it somehow to see if there are concentrations in particular places...”
Liana made a thoughtful sound. “It won’t be enough to just get into their database and steal their data. We’ll need any new info they find as well. Which means I need to get in and then build a connection. One they won’t detect.”
“Oh,” Chiara said ruefully. “You’re right—is that too difficult?”
Liana looked back up at the webcam. She smirked. “Not too difficult. Just challenging. And it’s been way too long since I’ve been challenged like that.”
She looked back down, and a moment later, there was the sound of rapid clicking. “It might take a while,” she murmured, too distracted to look up, even when a man leaned into view and smiled at the camera.