Page 4 of Starting Over (D.O.A. DRAGO #1)

“River, we didn’t get anymore information from Rain’s employers or co-workers. He came into work as scheduled and went to the back to grab some stock. No one saw him after that,” Wyatt said.

“The people I spoke with said he stuck to himself and didn’t really talk to anyone,” Ryan added.

There was silence on the other end of the phone, and Wyatt had to look down to ensure they hadn’t been disconnected.

Nope, the line was still open. “River?”

“Just give me a minute,” River grumbled as sounds of tapping on a keyboard were finally heard. “What did his neighbors say?”

Tandris sat forward, answering, “He was quiet and kept to himself. No visitors that they ever saw coming or going.”

“No car either. He took a bus or Uber to and from work,” Asod said from the back seat.

Sighing, Tandris said, “This guy knows how to stay off the radar. He isn’t going to be someone that rents a car or even takes a bus.”

“Why are we looking for this Rain guy anyway? He isn’t the bounty,” Ryan grumbled.

Wyatt sat back, “No, but he is in Danny’s line of sight. I know that if we find Rain we’ll find Danny. I feel it in my gut.”

“Well, take an antacid, Wy. This is a dead as fuck end,” Ryan muttered.

“I found him!” River shouted, making Wyatt and his men snap to attention.

Wyatt sat forward, asking, “You found Danny?”

River scoffed, “Uh, no, I found Rain Sterling.”

“What? How the hell did you find this guy when you never left your desk in the office?” Tandris asked in a huff.

“I left my desk at the office. I have you know I’m in my room right now,” River said with a snicker.

“Fuck you, River,” Tandris grumbled.

Wyatt rolled his eyes, and used the tone that said “enough shit, get on with it,” “Both of you knock it off. River, where is he?”

“Okay, I’m going to warn you. I didn’t exactly follow the law here, but I can tell you that his workplace has outdoor cams facing the parking lot.

Rain got a lift from one of the customers and from there he was dropped off at a truck stop.

He got a lift from a trucker that was going to Montreal.

He was let out at a Shell and then got into a brand new Buick Encore GTX owned by one Doctor Jude Riddle, a visitor from Pennsylvania. ”

“Damn, okay,” Wyatt murmured.

“Here’s the thing, Wy, Rain is not human,” River said.

“What? How do you know?” Ryan asked.

River huffed, “Maybe because I saw him shift… well, I didn’t see what he shifted into, but whatever it is, is small because one second he was there, the next he was stripping and gone.

Anyway, Jude went shopping at a grocery store, and I guess somehow he found Rain stowed away in his back seat.

I only know this because his naked ass reappeared and he was soon dressed and sitting in the passenger’s seat. Now here’s the weird thing…”

“Because the fact that the doc didn’t kick his ass to the curb wasn’t weird,” Ryan muttered.

Thankfully River ignored Ryan, saying, “They sat in the car for a really long fucking time. I mean like forty-five minutes long…” River stopped talking a few moments, then said, “…not saying a word to each other at all.”

“You think Jude called someone?” Wyatt asked.

“I do, but I have no clue yet who. Which leads me to something else really odd. I tried following Jude’s cell phone, but it’s not in Canada with him, it’s still in Pennsylvania.”

“Okay, so he called someone, but not with his own cell. That means he’s using a burner,” Wyatt said.

Wyatt could picture the man nodding his head, as he replied, “That’s my thought.

I might be able to figure out who he called, but it’s going to take a little more time because I’m going to have to do some fancy moves that takes a bit longer than ten seconds.

Anyway, once they finished speaking to whoever Jude was speaking to, he took off and I have to admit I almost lost him. ”

“Lost him? What do you mean? I figured you were just following the guy’s GPS?” Wyatt said in more question than statement.

River snorted, “Well, that’s the other odd thing. His GPS is not just disabled it’s not on the vehicle at all. It’s like this Doctor Jude is running from someone himself, but I looked into his background, and… now understand this is just a quick dive not the deep end.”

“It’s fine, give us what you got,” Wyatt said.

“Jude Riddle was in business with a Doctor Bren Billman… although Billman is a vet and Riddle’s a human doctor,” River said with a laugh, “That would be interesting to see.”

Ryan laughed along with River, “Yeah, hopefully they don’t mix up their patients.”

All the guys in the truck laughed along with their friends, and when River got himself under control, he said, “What’s really interesting is that they just sold their business, and when I try and find their address, all I get is a PO Box, and even with that there is no physical address, at all, for either man. ”

“What the fuck? How is that possible? I thought when you opened a PO BOX you had to give a physical address?” Ryan asked in confusion.

“Well, that’s the thing. It isn’t owned by either Bren or Jude. It’s owned by a Rene Telkin… a known leader of the biker gang Dragons of Anarchy,” River said.

The silence in the car was deafening.

It took a while for anyone to speak, but as usual it was Wyatt’s job to pull his shit together and get the job done. “That has to be a coincidence.”

“I don’t know, Wyatt. I need time to see if it is what it seems to be,” River replied.

“But DOA is a myth,” Ryan said, looking at Wyatt for answers he didn’t have.

Wyatt sighed, “And they still might be. River, as much as I want to know if the myth is real, we need to focus on finding Danny Houdon and that means finding Rain Sterling.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay. I used cameras of the businesses and damn near lost them because they went in an unexpected direction, and I did lose them when Jude turned on Harricana Road. I have no idea where he went from there because it’s a residential area and the road dead ends at the Harricana River.”

“I have a question,” Asod said.

Wyatt turned to his longtime friend, “Go for it Asod.”

“I know River didn’t exactly find Rain, but he did get the man’s general location. How easy will Danny be able to do the same?” Asod asked.

“I don’t know, but if we don’t want to come across a dead body, we need to find Rain,” Ryan said, setting the GPS and driving off.

“River, have you found a fucking picture of this Rain? It might be good to know who it is we’re looking for,” Asod said.

Wyatt appreciated Asod more than he let on. The man rarely spoke, but when he did it was always words you needed to listen to.

“Yeah, I sent it to Wyatt. I’m figuring he has his phone on silent if he didn’t hear the ping,” River said.

Wyatt pulled out his phone, muttering, “Shit, River, sorry. I forgot. I didn’t want any interruptions when we talked to Rain’s employer.”

The moment the picture came up, Wyatt damn near swallowed his tongue.

Holy shit, the man was sexy as fuck! Hell, he even felt a flutter of interest from his beast within.

Rain wasn’t all muscular, more a stereotypical geeky look. His hair was light brown and swept to the side and a type of flat cut on top. However, his eyes… what an unusual shade of brown. They weren’t dark and they weren’t light, but they were… hell, Wyatt didn’t even know how to describe them.

They spoke to him… called to him… begged to him… they…

“Hey, Wy, you going to share with the class or keep him to yourself?” Tandris asked with a laugh.

“Fuck, I was going to ask him if he needed a moment alone?” Ryan said with a laugh of his own.

Wyatt wanted to tell his men to fuck off, but they weren’t wrong. There was something about Rain that called to him and his beast, and he was reluctant to let them see him… but he finally handed his phone to Tandris.

“Huh, he’s cute,” Tandris muttered before handing the phone to Asod.

Asod thankfully just looked at the picture, then handed it off to Ryan. “Dude! I’m fucking driving. I’ll look at it later.”

Asod gave a low huff, but handed the phone back to Wyatt, asking, “Maybe Tan and I should shift and see if we can find where Rain’s holding up?”

Shaking his head, Wyatt answered, “No. We don’t know exactly where we’re going or how much coverage it will be, and we don’t want all of Quebec to start talking about seeing dragons in the air.”

“Fucking humans,” Asod grumbled as he sat back and closed his eyes.

“I honestly wished there was a world where we didn’t have to worry about a human seeing our dragon.

I just want a life of peace and quiet, damn it.

We’ve lived for hundreds of years always hiding, and honestly, I’m just sick of it. ”

Ryan quickly said, “We’ll find it, Asod. This is our last case and we are going to find that utopia. Right, Wyatt?”

Wyatt looked out the front window softly answering, “We’re going to try. With a world that everyone has cameras and radar out there, it won’t be easy, but we’ll find a place to call our own.”

“We could always live in Antarctica. I don’t think there’s much there but polar bears,” Tandris said with a small laugh.

“Polar bears live in the Arctic not Antarctica. They do, however, have penguins,” Asod informed them.

Ryan laughed, “That should be interesting.”

“We are not living in Antarctica. We’ll find a place. Once we have this case finished, we’ll be able to sit down and see what options we have,” Wyatt said firmly.

No one spoke for a long time. All of them in deep thought and just trying to rest their brains. At least two hours passed, before Ryan said, “I’m going to take this exit.”

“Where are we?” Tandris asked.

“Mont-Tremblant,” Ryan answered as he made his way off the exit and turned into a gas station. “I’m going to fill up here. We can grab some grub from the McDonald’s or the Tim Hortons. I honestly could give a shit, but I need to eat. Every time I swallow my stomach says thank you.”

“Yeah, well we have Wyatt to thank for that shit. He didn’t give us a chance to even grab a sandwich from the last place we stopped,” Asod grumbled uncharacteristically as he got out and stretched.

Tandris stood up doing the same as Asod, “To be fair we were asleep when he was driving.”

Wyatt ignored their bitching as he made his way inside to the McDonald’s.

His men weren’t wrong. He could have woken them up, but he wasn’t in the best of moods when it came to taking on this case, and wanted nothing more than to kick River’s ass when he found out he’d accepted the call from the fucking Mayor to begin with.

God, he was so fucking burned out from all this cops and robbers bullshit. He and his Thunder had been hunting low lives for far too long.

Thunder, that word to describe his team made Wyatt want to smile every time… maybe because it was humans that came up with the term to begin with.

Apparently when a large group of dragons flew together through the sky it gave off the sound that thunder makes during a storm… which when you think about it sounds pretty cool .

Thunder Bounty Hunters Plus started over two hundred years ago because of the stories their parents had told them about who DOA were and how they came to be.

The idea that the right-hand man to the human creator got with Typhon, the creator of the original dragons and joined the two together in order to fight serialists…

the worst of the worst and help save the world was like a dragon shifter’s own version of super heroes, and it sounded so cool to want to grow up and be like them.

Well, they were both cool and their own version of the boogeyman, because it wasn’t unheard of for a parent to say, “If you keep doing that, DOA is going to come and take you away where all bad men go.”

However, the older they got, the more the story became just a myth, but it also had Wyatt and his friends thinking. Why couldn’t they become the heroes of their childhood? Why couldn’t they fight the fight?

It was too dangerous to be outed to join with Pinkerton so instead they created Thunder Bounty Hunting Plus and did their best to emulate their heroes from childhood.

The problem was how they had to go about hunting their prey.

In order to find an evil fucker you had to think like them. You had to immerse yourself into their mindset and damn near become them… and that came at a price. A price that all of his thunder was sick and tired of and wanted out.

Yes, two hundred years Thunder Bounty Hunters Plus existed.

Thankfully, their foolproof plan of passing the business onto their children had allowed them to keep doing what needed to be done and never once having to reinvent the wheel.

However, this last time that they were going to have to change their names and make a move, they’d all talked and found out just how much the very idea of continuing on with the business didn’t appeal to any of them, and they all wanted to take a step back… far, far back.

To put it simply, they were done.

That’s why when River told them he’d accepted this case they all about kicked his ass.

Oh well, there was nothing to be done about it. One last job and they were officially retired.

“The guys are coming in. You order yet?” Asod asked.

Shaking his head, Wyatt said, “No, I guess I got lost in thought.”

“Crazy that this is our last job. I know you guys had to hold me back from ripping River’s head off, but I’m glad that my last is going to be with you,” Asod said.

Wyatt snorted, shoulder bumping Asod. “Shut the fuck up. You still plan to rip River’s head off when we get back.”

Pursing his lips, Asod gave a sharp nod. “True, but I’m still glad we have the team we do. It’s kind of fitting when you think about it.”

“What do you mean?” Wyatt asked as he walked up to the screen, and started hitting buttons on it until he had enough food for them all and then some.

“Wyatt, our first job was you, Ryan, me, Tandris, and River. Now granted this time River’s remote, but he’s still working the case with us. It’s like closing the door the way we started it.”

Wyatt tapped his card and turned to Asod. “I’ll be damned. You’re right.”

Standing and waiting for their number to be called, Asod asked, “What is it with you and that picture?”

It took Wyatt a minute to understand what Asod was asking and then when he thought about the picture his dragon once more perked up.

Shaking his head, Wyatt said, “I don’t know.

I looked at the picture and he took my breath away.

It’s kinda odd, but I can’t deny it and besides, Rain even caught my dragon’s attention. ”

Their number was called and they walked up to the counter to grab the bags and drinks, Asod saying in passing, “Sounds to me like you might have found your mate.”