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healed meant they were human mages, not dragons. The only way for a human to have magic was if someone had purposefully broken dragon law by body-sharing until the human’s body had connected to the earth’s magic. And when he had time, he’d consider all the ramifications of that. None of them were good.
    To make matters worse, Anaea shouldn’t have woken, and if her body hadn’t been so damaged by the cancer, she wouldn’t have. His soul magic was divided among too many things. If only he could make it not heal her, but that happened on a subconscious level. It would be easier to tell himself to stop breathing.
    Fiery pain washed over him as he regained control. He gasped and sucked in a slow breath. It would pass. Not soon, but it would pass. As much as Anaea wanted to find a doctor, he didn’t. He’d tried to convince her otherwise, but he couldn’t get through to her with subtle suggestions, and revealing himself to her was the very last option. Thank goodness she’d so quickly established a connection to the earth’s magic or they’d certainly be dead.
    Although that created a whole other problem, since now Anaea was evidence that Hunter had broken dragon law as well. If he was lucky, really lucky, he might still be able to convince her subconscious that calling fire had been a hallucination or a dream and he wouldn’t have to uphold dragon law and kill her.
    He coughed blood and shuffled to the stairwell door. If he could get to the morgue, he could get a new body, but Anaea was too damaged to survive. She lived only because his magic was focused on her body’s injuries. It would take time to heal. Sure, the bleeding had stopped, but internal organs took longer to repair and his magic was the only thing keeping them alive at the moment. It wouldn’t be safe for him to transfer out of her for at least a few hours.
    He had hoped to be long gone by that time. Of course, the woman was dying of cancer. Wouldn’t it be a kindness to transfer to another vessel and let her slip into death while still unconscious?
    The stairwell door swung open before he could reach it and a woman in a long black coat strode toward him. Her blond ponytail swished over her shoulders, accentuating her long neck. She flipped her coat open, revealing a long sword strapped to her hip.
    Shit. At least they were recognizable by their dress code. Hunter felt for his body’s magical thread, the single thing connecting him to the earth’s magic. It wasn’t there. He concentrated, searching faster, but couldn’t find it. It had to be somewhere. There was no other way Anaea could have called fire.

CHAPTER 4
     
     
    “All I want is the medallion, Hunter,” the woman said. The fact that she knew his name suggested she was in league with a dragon, or was a dragon herself. And until he had a stable connection to the earth’s magic, he wouldn’t be able to sense if she was or not—and maybe not at all, depending on how this body connected to it. He didn’t recognize her, but that didn’t mean anything. Accidents requiring a transfer into a new vessel, while infrequent, did happen. The irony of this situation was not lost on him.
    She drew her sword. The ponytail made her face look pinched and stern. “The medallion.”
    He scrambled back, and pain washed over him. This damned body wasn’t healing fast enough. Gulping air, he kept moving, past the dead-end corridor where the seared corpse of his new assailant’s associate lay, and continued to the next one. This wasn’t a dead-end and he turned down it. With the clean edge of his lab coat, he twisted the handle of the second room he found and leapt in. He searched for a lock but there wasn’t one. So much for that idea.
    Pressing his back to the door, he took a cursory note that it was an unoccupied private room with nothing in it that looked as though it could bar the entrance or be used as a weapon.
    The handle rattled and the door shoved forward. Hunter stumbled and it flew