Dragon Chained Read online

  Dragon Chained

  The Dragon of 23rd Street

  Haley Ryan

  Page Nine Press

  Copyright © 2020 by Haley Ryan

  All rights reserved.

  Published by: Page Nine Press

  Cover Design, Layout, & Formatting by: Page Nine Media

  This is an original work of fiction. All characters, names, places, and incidents are products of the creative imagination of the author or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), businesses, institutions, places, or events is entirely coincidental. No part of this book may be used, reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any manner without the written consent of the author, excepting short quotations used for the purposes of review or commentary about the work.

  https://www.authorhaleyryan.com

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Thank you for reading

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Okay, so if I’m being honest, this book happened because I had a wild idea the night before NaNoWriMo.

  And nobody talked me out of it.

  So I’m dedicating this to everyone who encourages us to believe in our wild ideas and helps those ideas take flight…

  This is all your fault.

  One

  My name is Kira, and I’m a dragon. Technically a dragon.

  On the surface, though, and for all practical purposes, I’m just your average nineteen-year-old living over a bookstore with her eccentric aunt to avoid being found by her murderous relatives.

  Yeah, yeah, it sounds worse when you say it out loud.

  It’s really not so bad, most days. I get to drink tea at work, read all the books I want, and rarely have to put up with customers coming in to disturb the order I’ve imposed on the maze of bookshelves that takes up the bottom floor of the house. There’s an amazing barbecue place just a short stroll down Twenty-third Street, a genius goblin baker making cupcakes a few houses down, and some seriously fantastic coffee around the corner for whenever I’m in the mood for something different.

  But let’s face it, sometimes a girl wants more, so I was secretly thrilled when “more” walked into the shop one rainy Friday morning.

  My first clue was when Chicken, my aunt’s Sphynx cat, jumped down off the counter and hissed before disappearing into the back of the store.

  About three seconds later, a man walked in, which was odd enough by itself. I’m not saying men don’t read, but… Okay, the better ones do, but they don’t often go looking for their next thriller at a bookstore called Ever’s Afters. Especially if said bookstore is located in a pink and black house with a front porch that looks like a flower shop threw up on it (thanks to the book-loving pixie living on the street behind us).

  But I digress.

  The guy was still pretending to look at books near the door when a second man came in and disappeared into the stacks, without so much as a word or a glance in my direction.

  I was thinking about following him to make sure he wasn’t up to something nefarious when the first man approached the desk. He was tall and dark-haired, with brown skin and gray eyes—gorgeous, if I was being honest—and he looked down at me with a faint smirk that suggested he knew it. “Was that cat wearing a sweater?” he asked, sounding as though putting a sweater on a cat was somehow on par with dipping a perfectly smoked brisket in ketchup or carrying a dog in a handbag. Yes, both of those things belong in the same category, but Chicken doesn’t have any hair and sometimes needs a little help to stay warm.

  So I gave the guy my bubbly, air-headed teenager smile and batted my eyelashes. “What cat?”

  After an instant of confusion, he smiled wider and glanced around the shop with an air that suggested he was amused by its existence.

  There was very little he could have done to annoy me more. Ever’s Afters is my home and my happy place, so his amusement only served to put up my hackles and sharpen my teeth. Literally. I would need to get my temper under control before I smiled at him again.

  “Are you Ever?” he asked suddenly, turning to fix me with a smoldering, gray-eyed gaze that felt like it left a scorch mark on my forehead.

  “Am I ever what?” I asked brightly, wishing I was chewing gum so I could punctate the question by popping it as loudly as possible. My aunt hated it when I played dumb with customers, but I only did it to the ones who deserved it.

  “Are you ever not beautiful?” he asked, smirking at me again. “How about ever available? Ever interested in going out for coffee on a Friday night?”

  Ugh. I suppose he thought he was clever, but it wasn’t like I hadn’t heard a million lines like that, usually directed at my aunt, who was still quite attractive for her age. I should probably be thankful he hadn’t asked me out for a drink. He looked to be a few years older than me—maybe twenty-two or three—and there was no way he should have assumed I was old enough to be his date.

  Even my aunt would have to agree that this guy, gorgeous though he was, deserved to be toyed with.

  “I’m only beautiful on Tuesdays,” I said, tilting my head to the side and wrapping the ends of my ponytail around my fingers. “On Mondays I’m helpful, but I’m never available because the store is open every day and I’m supposed to be selling books. For example, we have a buy-one-get-one-fifty-percent-off special every Friday, except on the rare and vintage collection.” I gave him my wide-eyed, serious stare. “Is there something specific you’re looking for?”

  His smirk faltered, and he blinked at me uncertainly before taking a step back from the counter and shoving his hands in his pockets. “Yes. I’m looking for Morghaine.”

  A truckload of dread settled in my stomach, so I turned around and started tapping the keys of the shop’s computer to conceal just how uneasy that statement made me.

  “Is that the name of the book or the author?”

  I could tell he was fighting to maintain his flirtatious facade, which filled me with a visceral sort of satisfaction. After all, it’s good to develop one’s talents, and my aunt had always maintained that I had a remarkable aptitude for driving people crazy.

  “She’s not an author. Rumor has it she’s the owner of this bookstore.”

  Crabapples. He knew something. But we’d been so careful. After all these years, how could he have found out?

  My aunt’s human name was Morgan—Morgan Everleigh—and it was the only one she’d used since we came to Oklahoma City about eleven years ago. But Morghaine was the name she’d been born with. Her dragon name. Which meant that my visitor most likely wasn’t human.

  It wasn’t like that was completely unheard of. We had a fair number of non-human neighbors, even though Oklahoma City wasn’t what you would call popular with any of the numerous magical races that now made the human world their home.

  We hadn’t always been here. Centuries ago, there was little to no magic on Earth, though our worlds had been tenuously connected for thousands of years. There were doorways, of sorts—elusive, invisible places where one could cross whatever distance of time and space existed between the two realms. Many magical races had visited Earth over the centuries, whether out of curiosity or a desire for adventure, but all that had changed about fifty years ago, when our homeworld, Idria, mysteriously began to decay.

  With no other way to escape, many Idrians—my aunt among them—crossed through those elusive doorways and bec
ame refugees here on Earth.

  “There’s no Morghaine here,” I told my visitor, honestly enough for the moment. He didn’t need to know any details about her absence. “If you’d like to leave your name and number, I can ask my aunt whether she’s heard of this Morghaine person.”

  “I think you would probably know her,” the man insisted, moving closer and shifting to a cajoling tone. “She’s about six feet tall, brown skin, dark hair, amber eyes.”

  Yep, that was Aunt Morgan. He’d left off the part where she could grow scales and breathe fire, but maybe—hopefully—it was because he believed I was human and ignorant of things like dragons who drank tea, kept cats, and owned bookshops.

  Humans knew about our existence, of course. At least, they knew about most of the magical races who now shared their world. We’d never been able to hide completely, not with so many of us flooding Earth as our last strongholds collapsed into rubble and chaos.

  Fortunately, after the first twenty years of shock and general unrest, most of us had been accepted by this world’s native citizens. To aid in maintaining the peace, we tended to either keep to ourselves in walled enclaves or use small touches of glamour to cover up our differences so we could pass unremarked among the humans. While we were rarely targeted, some people still stared, and there were always those who chose to hate what was other.

  But there were no enclaves in Oklahoma, just a scattering of folks who preferred to blend in with the humans as much as possible—like the goblin baker down the street and the pixie living behind us. Few humans could detect or see through glamour, and for the most part, we all lived together peacefully, just with a little more magic around us than the humans were often even aware of.

  “That description isn’t very precise,” I pointed out, with perfect truth. “Do you have a picture?”

  He regarded me silently, having fallen into a state of seductive brooding as his gray eyes glittered beneath the raven wings of his brows.

  Yes, so help me, I occasionally said or thought things that sounded like a bad gothic novel—the price of living surrounded by books.

  “Morghaine has answers I need,” he said finally, with a sigh worthy of Romeo or Rochester. “Time grows short, the fate of many is at stake, and strange as it may seem, I believe she is the only one who can help me.”

  Okay, so I wasn’t the only one who sounded like a gothic novel. But in this guy’s case, he probably sounded that way out of necessity, rather than overindulgence in pilfered romances.

  He must have come straight from one of the courts.

  One might think that whatever catastrophe had destroyed Idria would have brought all of us newcomers to Earth together, but just as we had for millennia, we remained divided. The four courts—Fae, Shapeshifter, Elemental, and Wildkin—retained their own sovereigns and their own ideals. Sure, on the surface, we obeyed the human laws. But behind our glamour, the magical races kept a tight grip on our deeply held prejudices, our ancient laws and traditions, and our wildly convoluted political games, all of which remained invisible to the humans unless they spilled over into the mundane world.

  Which we all knew must never be allowed to happen.

  So if there was something dangerous going on, and my aunt was the only one who could help, we might be in serious trouble.

  Because I had no idea where she was, and up until a few weeks ago, I lived with her. All of her stuff was still upstairs, and as far as I knew, she hadn’t moved out—she’d just never come back from her most recent trip. I was the only one she trusted, and I hadn’t heard from her in weeks. If she didn’t return soon…

  But I couldn’t afford to think that way. She was coming home. She was just a little later than usual.

  “Why don’t you come back later,” I suggested, taking care to make it sound like a suggestion. I couldn’t afford for this guy to realize he’d made me nervous. Or for him to figure out I wasn’t technically as human as I pretended to be. “You can ask my aunt if she knows this Morghaine. Unless you’d care to look at some books, I really don’t see how I can help you.”

  “But I’m sure you can help me.” His voice softened again. “At least you could tell me when you think your aunt will be available for an audience… I mean, to speak with me.”

  Available for an audience? For all his attempts at flirtation, this one didn’t seem to have spent much time interacting with humans.

  Which made me wonder exactly which court he was from, and why he’d been sent on such a delicate errand.

  I didn’t think he was a shapeshifter—we had a much easier time passing as human and tended to be far more comfortable out in the world. But who outside of the shapeshifter court would have taken the time to hunt down a dragon in exile?

  Deciding it was worth the risk, I sniffed the air quietly, concealing my intent behind a quick sneeze. Then I sneezed again for good measure. I wasn’t familiar with the smells of all the different races, but this one I did know—one quick whiff had been enough to suggest that he was probably a fae.

  He mostly fit the profile, even in his human guise. Without their glamour, the fae tended to be supernaturally beautiful, tall, and athletically built, with elegantly pointed ears, cool skin tones ranging from alabaster to the dark sheen of titanium, and gray eyes that were typically inverse of their skin. Their passions ran deep, or so I’d heard, though they hid those feelings behind a coolly reserved facade and a general disdain for emotional display. When outside their enclaves, they often used their looks to their advantage, especially when dealing with human women who had few defenses against their natural beauty.

  Once, when Aunt Morgan had been just a little bit tipsy, she’d told me they smelled of dark chocolate, pine, and snow, and that ancient histories suggested a fair number of them had been eaten during a long-ago war with the dragons. That was, of course, before we’d allied with the other shapeshifters. We were far more evolved and sophisticated now, and wouldn’t dream of eating anyone.

  Unless they seriously annoyed us.

  I kid, I kid.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, lying as sincerely as I could manage, “but I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to give information about my aunt to a stranger. Would you like to leave your name and number, and I can ask my aunt to call you?”

  “I would very much prefer to—

  A crash from the back of the store startled us both.

  “What is he doing back there?” I asked, my eyes narrowed as it occurred to me that the two men could have been together. The second man might be getting up to all manner of mischief while his companion distracted me. Unless Chicken had taken to climbing the stacks, which I doubted. He was far too lazy.

  “What is who doing?”

  “The man who came in right after you,” I reminded him. “Weren’t the two of you together?”

  The fae seemed genuinely confused by my question. “He wasn’t with me,” he insisted, looking at me as though he’d begun to suspect I might be slightly crazy.

  “Please excuse me,” I said, stepping out from behind the counter. “I should see whether my other customer needs any help.”

  “I thought you were only helpful on Mondays,” he called after me, which at least suggested that he possessed a sense of humor.

  But I didn’t smile. I was still feeling a bit uneasy about his “questions,” and I didn’t have any glamour I could use to hide my teeth—one of the many downsides to being a defective shapeshifter.

  “Feel free to look around.” I threw the words back over my shoulder. “Or leave your number, and my aunt will call you.”

  The moment I stepped behind a shelf, I heard the bell over the front door jingle to indicate that he’d chosen to leave instead, which was a momentary relief.

  But only momentary, because now I had to deal with his friend. Or, most likely, a second suspicious person with no connection whatsoever to the first.

  Unless the fae had only been pretending not to know about the second man. They might have
sent the handsome one in first to distract me, leaving his companion free to search the shop.

  But for what? We were careful not to keep any books of dubious origin or any magical tomes that might hint we were more than we pretended to be. My aunt had kept no artifacts from her previous life, and we owned little of value outside of the books themselves.

  As I peered between the shelves, Chicken strolled around the corner and began to rub himself against my ankles, purring and staring at me until I gave in to his demands and picked him up. Most of our customers found him horrifying and refused to so much as pet him, which was part of why we’d resorted to the sweaters. Somehow, they seemed to minimize his wrinkled, squint-eyed air of menace. In reality, Chicken was a giant softie who just happened to look like a tiny, hairless gremlin.

  “Hello?” I called, trying not to feel creeped out, or notice how quiet and empty the shop suddenly seemed. “Can I help you with anything?”

  When no one answered, I shoved down a surge of irritation and continued my search. The store wasn’t that big. The man had to have heard me, and the fact that he refused to answer suggested that he didn’t care to be found.

  It was possible he was no more than a petty human thief, and if so, I should have little trouble dealing with him. I might be a lousy shapeshifter, but I was stronger than most humans, despite my diminutive size.

  After confirming that the potential customer was not in any of the main areas of the store, I passed through the narrow doorway into the room that had probably once been an enclosed porch. We’d fortified it and added plenty of insulation before turning it into our display room for rare and vintage books.