Sometimes, you gotta have some action.

Or maybe that's just a me thing.

But when one of your protagonists is a dragon, it's just kind of . . . required.


.


Kisara sat in the front parlor of Kaiba Manor; Seto, Noa, and Mokuba were all seated around her, watching as she spoke. She looked at them each in turn and said: "I want to believe that this dream means nothing. That I'm wrong about all of this. I want to be wrong. I want to believe that I'm simply overthinking things, that I'm only doing what I've always done: worrying too much about nonsense."

"But . . ." Seto pressed.

"But," Kisara went on, "she told me that I would think that." She frowned at her hands, held in her lap. "She told me that I would wonder if her warning was false, and she said . . . she said that the only thing she could offer to reassure me was: trust our chosen." She turned her gaze to Seto. "You."

Seto scowled. His eyes flitted this way and that; he was thinking, hard, about something. He eventually said: "I have seen too many extinction events wrought by magic to cast this aside." He nodded. "Okay." He drew in a breath and squared his shoulders. "Kisara," he said, "we are going to start keeping tabs on your family. I'll have Roland send some of our best out to Iowa. If you wish, you can call ahead and tell your parents that we've received word of some manner of threat following me, and it's tracked my movements as far as your home city. Standard procedure. I can promise you that I only hire the best."

Kisara nodded. "All right," she said, shakily. "That sounds . . . like a good idea."

"What about topside, Aniki?" Noa asked.

"Heads on swivels," Seto said. "Mokuba, I know you're on break, but I need to insist that you stay in the house as much as possible. If you do go out, take a member of Team Vanguard with you." Mokuba didn't protest; he simply nodded, his face grim and his eyes bright. He'd been through situations like this too many times, himself.

He knew how this went.

"What will we do if my parents disregard the danger?" Kisara asked. "I cannot promise that they will listen to me. My father is stubborn. He will not want to admit that we saw a threat to him before he, and his people, did."

"If it comes to it," Seto said, "we'll 'let him in' on a plan to ensure the children are safe by offering to bring them all here, for a vacation at Kaiba-Land. That will be our cover story, if you like. If that doesn't work, we'll take more . . . formal measures. I have a certain suspicion that your father trusts law enforcement."

Kisara nodded. "He does, yes."

"Military?"

"Absolutely."

"There's our opening if we need it," Seto said. "Roland can handle that. He's a retired Marine. He knows how to talk to men like your father. This isn't the first time we've had to deal with stubborn men, and it won't be the last. You say that she told you to trust me?"

"She did."

"Then trust me. We take care of our own."