Dragon Chained Read online

  A swift glance suggested that the glass-fronted cases remained undisturbed.

  But Chicken suddenly stiffened in my arms, flattened his ears, and hissed at the strangely deep shadows in an otherwise empty corner.

  Seeing through full glamour wasn’t something even perfectly normal dragons could do, at least not according to Aunt Morgan. Most of us could tell when it was being used, but not what was on the other side, so all I knew for sure was that someone or something was hiding in that corner.

  For a moment, I wished that I was a real shapeshifter, so I could show the intruder what happened when you messed with a dragon. The bookstore was my home and my hoard, and the dragon buried deep beneath my skin itched to defend it. After all, whoever this guy was, he was clearly not the least bit human. And he was on my territory, so technically I had free rein to treat him according to Idrian laws.

  But sadly, that was impossible. And even if I were fully capable of shifting into a dragon and eating him whole, I couldn’t afford to reveal my true self, so I stared into the shadows and shrank back while taking a deep breath through my nose.

  Yep, I could smell him. But I had no idea what I was smelling. It was a little bit like fae—chocolate and cedar—but far stronger was the smell of a storm blowing in, a storm filled with lightning, wind, and rain.

  And that’s when I saw that the door near the bottom of one of the cases was open. It was only open a crack, and the lights were dim, but I knew exactly which books should be on that shelf, and one of them was missing.

  A book was missing.

  Which meant someone had stolen it. Someone had stolen from my store…

  Crap crap crappity crap. I could feel the heat beginning to build in my chest. I knew my eyes would start glowing any second—hot, molten amber—but I couldn’t stop them. My teeth lengthened, and a wisp of smoke escaped the corner of my mouth, indicating that the dragon was seriously pissed off.

  You’d have thought Chicken might panic, but he only settled deeper into my arms and began to purr. I think he considered my dragon to be a kindred spirit. Or maybe he just wished he could breathe fire.

  I should have run. Should have tried to hide what I was—and what I wasn’t—but the dragon’s reaction to the thief was just too strong. One step at a time, I moved closer and closer to the shadows until I was close enough to open my mouth and release a puff of smoke, bright as a summer cloud against the darkness. It drifted into the corner and revealed the outline of a man, leaning negligently against the wall, arms folded.

  I put one hand into my pocket and pressed the remote button for the alarm system.

  It should have instantly emitted a series of ear-splitting shrieks that would drive every living thing inside the walls to flee or risk madness.

  Instead, there was silence. It was anyone’s guess whether the thief had disabled the system or we’d forgotten to change the batteries in the remote.

  Chicken looked up at me complacently, with utmost faith that I was about to do something miraculous, but all I knew for certain was that someone had stolen from me, and he couldn’t be allowed to escape.

  “Dragons might be rare and powerful,” said a voice from within the smoke and the shadows, “but they are also depressingly predictable. Can’t resist the lure of a thief, can you?”

  I barely resisted the temptation to snarl at him.

  “I’d hoped to flush out a dragon. I just had no idea you were capable of parlor tricks. Can all of you do that?”

  He stepped out of the corner.

  And, pathetic excuse for a dragon that I was, I almost took a step back.

  Though I couldn’t immediately have said why. My thief was not as tall as the fae I’d just confronted, but tall enough to make me feel smaller than usual. He was broad-shouldered, but not overly bulky, as though built with both speed and strength in mind, with perfectly honed muscles that stretched the material of his dark, close-fitting shirt. Jeans and boots completed a fairly nondescript outfit that displayed no visible weapons, though I had little doubt he was armed with something. Every instinct I had told me he was by far the more dangerous of the two men who’d entered my shop.

  And while he wasn’t the more obviously handsome, he was somehow much harder to look away from. His hair was dark and close cut, his eyes a cool light gray that stood out against moderately tanned skin. A silvery scar ran down one temple to cross over his cheekbone and cut back beneath one ear, a lightly tipped ear that told me two things—he was at least half fae, and he wasn’t bothering with glamour anymore.

  He was older than me, I decided, but not by much—maybe twenty-three or four—though he carried his age more heavily, as though he’d been shaped by a life far more harsh and unyielding than mine. How did I know? Because thanks to my lack of control, he knew I was a dragon, but I couldn’t sense even the tiniest hint of fear.

  “You’re a brave man to walk into a dragon’s lair without a weapon,” I announced, standing up a bit straighter while trying to pretend I hadn’t frozen and stared like a trapped prey animal.

  “As I said, I was expecting a dragon.” He looked as relaxed as if he were in his own house instead of mine. As if he weren’t standing there holding something he’d stolen from me. “I just wasn’t expecting you.”

  “Who were you expecting?” I snapped. “Elliot, the cartoon dragon?”

  He didn’t laugh. He probably didn’t know who that was.

  “Morghaine,” he said, and I winced.

  Of course he was. Because why wouldn’t two strangers come in here on the same day looking for my aunt by her real name?

  “She is a dragon and a seneschal, and I need her help.”

  Seneschal.

  My gaze shot to his hand—the hand that still held my book—but saw no ring. If he were a seneschal, he should be wearing a heavy silver ring just like the one that lived on a chain around my aunt’s neck.

  All of the magical races had realized long ago that we couldn’t afford a war with the humans. We were far more powerful as individuals, but far fewer, and technology was entirely new to us. They would crush us in an open conflict, so we took care to keep our affairs separate.

  Which was where the seneschals came in. Each court maintained a small number of them as peacekeepers, to ensure that no one circumvented the strictures protecting the humans from our power. Morghaine had been among those peacekeepers, but anyone who came looking for her as Morghaine the Seneschal was a part of a world we thought we’d escaped. A world we couldn’t afford to return to.

  So there was no way I was telling this man anything about my aunt, no matter how badly he thought he needed her. Without knowing what court he served, there was no way to determine just what form of danger he posed.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” I said, “but there’s no Morghaine here. Whoever told you there was must have been mistaken.” As soon as my aunt returned, we needed to find out who was going around telling people where she lived. Two people looking for Morghaine in the same day couldn’t have been an accident.

  “There’s no mistake,” he said, with a cool, unruffled certainty that filled me with dread. “I know Morghaine has been here. You can stand in my way if it makes you feel better, but I will find her.”

  “Well, sorry to disappoint you, but there’s no one to find.” I stroked Chicken’s head and tried to think of a way out of this. It was all very well for him to talk about needing her help, but I wasn’t stupid enough to take him at his word. I might be soft-hearted (for a dragon), but I wasn’t about to betray my aunt to a complete stranger. What I needed was more information. Something I could tell my aunt that might help us unravel his goals and his identity.

  “Maybe you heard there was a dragon in the neighborhood and assumed she was the one you know, but I’m the only dragon around here,” I announced, with an extra-flippant shrug to show him just how little I cared about his problems.

  Then I sighed. Let my shoulders slump. Shot my visitor a reluctant grimace as I glanced up through
my lashes. “Why don’t you tell me what you need? I might not be this mythical Morghaine person, but maybe I can help.”

  He was supposed to be impressed enough by my acting to tell me all of his secret plans, but he behaved as though I hadn’t just made a truly noble gesture. Even if I didn’t intend to follow through, he ought to have appreciated the offer.

  “I don’t know Morghaine personally,” he said briefly, dismissing me after a single assessing glance. “But I need a real dragon. Not you. I need an adult.”

  “I am an adult,” I hissed under my breath, forgetting for the moment that I was supposed to be in hiding. Also forgetting that I shouldn’t care what a thief thought of me, but hey, I’m sensitive about my size. And my appearance. And that fact that I couldn’t technically claim to be a “real dragon.”

  But if I’m honest, there is literally nothing terrifying about my human form. I’ve been called cute more times than I can count, by people of all ages. (And genders, unfortunately. Who wants her high school crush to pat her on the head and call her cute?)

  I’m teeny. I have copper brown hair, pale skin, and freckles for gosh sakes. What kind of dragon has freckles?

  But for all that, I’m not helpless, even if the dragon part of me is broken, so it rankled that no one seemed to think I was capable of taking care of myself, let alone anyone else.

  I opened my mouth to let him know how annoying I found his dismissal, but he didn’t give me a chance to cut him down to size. He strode past me, dropped my book on the table near the door, and headed for the front of the store.

  “Hey, you can’t just leave like that,” I called after him. “You tried to steal from me.”

  He stopped and cast a sardonic glance back over his shoulder. “You don’t have anything I want, little dragon, but if I were trying to steal from you, I would have succeeded. And I wouldn’t be standing here having this pointless conversation.”

  I opened my mouth and sputtered like an idiot, completely choked by outrage.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Until I find Morghaine, I’ll be coming back, so you’ll have time to think up a suitably cutting reply.”

  He stepped out into the rain and vanished.

  Two

  You can probably guess how my day went after that. I spent most of it hunched over on the stool behind the front counter, petting Chicken and muttering various insults under my breath. Nothing I came up with seemed strong enough for my purposes.

  A few customers came in, but they didn’t stay long, probably put off by my twitching and mumbling. Or maybe by my preoccupation with what, exactly, I was going to do next.

  Insults aside, I couldn’t pretend this morning hadn’t happened. It seemed we’d been found out, though by whom and since when I had no way of knowing.

  But what did that mean? Would we need to leave? I couldn’t imagine abandoning our life here. The book store was my home and my hoard. Without it… Well, I really had no idea what my life would be without it.

  A few minutes before five, I quit pretending to care and turned our “Open until the tea runs out!” sign over so the “Closed until after my morning coffee!” side was visible from the outside. I locked the downstairs doors, turned out the lights, picked up Chicken, and headed up the creaky, uneven stairs to the second floor.

  It was time to face the facts—facts I’d been avoiding for weeks now but no longer could, thanks to my unexpected visitors.

  I’d been telling myself that I had no idea when my aunt was coming home, but I needed to acknowledge that I had no idea if she was coming home. For as long as we’d lived here, she’d gone off by herself on occasion, but never for more than a day or two. I typically assumed it was to visit whatever hoard she kept that allowed us to live here—in a bookstore that rarely managed to pay for itself, let alone support us—but occasionally she’d gone on other errands, the details of which she’d never shared.

  I tried to remember what she’d said when she left, but as far as I could recall, it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. “Keep an eye on things, Kira. I’ll be back in a flash.” She’d been saying that for ages. How could I have known that this time a “flash” wouldn’t be anywhere near as fast as usual?

  And if she didn’t come back at all?

  I had no idea what to do. We’d never talked about it. I had simply trusted that she would be here to take care of me as she always had, ever since she fled the dragon enclave with me when I was an infant.

  After I fed Chicken, I heated up some leftover phở and sat down on the couch in our tiny living room, hoping to distract myself with a book. Thirty minutes and two pages later, I snapped it shut and set my still-full bowl on the coffee table. I was too worried to eat.

  And here in our small apartment, everything I saw reminded me of Aunt Morgan—from the chipped pottery dishes and the drooping ivy plant on the windowsill over the sink, to the worn green couch pillows with half-eaten tassels and the “World’s Fiercest Aunt” magnet on the fridge. I’d made that in third grade. When all the other kids had been writing “World’s Greatest Mom,” I’d stubbornly insisted on my version until my teacher gave in.

  Even at eight, no one out-stubborned a dragon.

  What would Aunt Morgan expect me to do? What would she tell me if she were here? “Trust no one,” she always said. “Tell no one who you are. You must be as human as you can.” That was all very well, but what about when someone found out the truth? Could I risk staying? But how could I leave without her? Would she expect me to come looking for her, or to wait here forever?

  The lack of answers made me restless, so I pulled on boots and a jacket and went out the back door, locking it securely behind me and pulling on it a few times to make sure it was shut. A narrow set of stairs led from the second-floor apartment to what was more parking lot than back yard—it had been converted years ago to make life easier for our customers. After skirting an ancient green dumpster and casting a baleful glance at the street light that never seemed to work, I strode off down Twenty-Third Street, looking for something besides the nagging ache of worry and uncertainty.

  As I passed the cupcake bakery across the street, the smell tempted me to step inside for something sweet, and maybe even a cup of hot chai, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. That was our thing. Just like the hot dog place was where we used to go together every Friday after school.

  So instead of seeking temporary solace in food or drink, I wandered on through the rain, beneath the streetlights, halfway around the block, and knocked on Misty’s door.

  She opened it, took one look at me, and yanked me inside. “You can’t go around steaming like that, child. Everyone on Twenty-Third Street will be wondering what in the name of heaven you are.”

  I looked down at my hands, and sure enough, a few wisps of steam rose from my rain-wet skin. I’d been so worried, I hadn’t even noticed how hot I was.

  “Sorry,” I said miserably. “It’s been a weird day.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  I nodded.

  Misty is a pixie. Without glamour, pixies are taller than the average human and sharp-featured, with long fingers and an affinity for growing things. Their skin and hair glow, even in full sunlight, and others seem to find them comforting to be around.

  Misty is no exception. While wearing glamour to conceal her more obviously magical traits, she’s a tall, curvy woman with dark brown skin and gorgeous blue hair that allows a little of her natural glow to slip through. She doesn’t know everything about us, but she knows enough, and she’s been a friend ever since we moved here.

  Sadly, she’s also the first person I thought to question.

  After she hung up my coat and I curled up in my usual spot on her absurdly comfortable couch, I decided not to draw this out.

  “Misty, some people came by today, asking questions. Questions they shouldn’t even have known to ask. Have you seen any strangers hanging around lately? Mentioned anything to anyone about dragons living in the book
store?”

  She shot me a look, one eyebrow raised just like the time she’d caught me sneaking through her back yard after curfew when I was eleven.

  “Would you like me to show you my throat?” she asked dryly. “Swear that I haven’t betrayed you? Or will you accept my word that I am loyal to my friends, even when they’ve been keeping dangerous secrets?”

  I winced. “Then you did see my visitors.”

  She sighed and shook her head. “I didn’t see anyone. But I don’t need to. There was no way a secret like yours and Morgan’s wasn’t going to bring trouble sooner or later.”

  Her words didn’t exactly fill me with confidence.

  “My aunt…” I started to say, and was dismayed to realize that there was now steam rising from my cheeks. One of the problems with being a dragon—it was a lot harder to hide when you were crying.

  “Hasn’t come back?” Misty guessed shrewdly, tossing me a tissue box.

  I blotted away my tears before answering. “It’s been almost three weeks. She’s never been gone this long. Now people are looking for her, and I have no idea what to do.”

  “The courts?”

  I didn’t bother denying it. “I think so. But she’s never told me enough to help me figure out who or why.”

  Misty raised one eyebrow. “She never told you? Did you ever really ask?”

  “I used to,” I protested. “All the time. But eventually, I stopped. Aunt Morgan never wanted to talk about the past, and that included the courts. And pretty much anything about Idria.”

  “Do you know why?” The pixie’s brown eyes held me in an unflinching stare.

  “She wanted to protect me, I guess. She always said it wasn’t safe for me to know too much.”

  “Are you so sure it’s all about you?” Her question was oddly intense. “Think about what your aunt may have left behind when she brought you here. What broken bridges may be in her past. Maybe your aunt’s silence has deeper roots than you ever guessed, and the only way to discover them is to be brave enough to keep asking.”