Dragon Oracle Urban Fantasy Boxed Set (Dragon Oracle Complete Series: Books 1 - 9)

by Jada Fisher

  “What?” I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. No matter how I shook it, that was not normal behavior. “Who did he take?” One of their leaders? A scholar? Someone who had expansive knowledge of the underground?”

  “One of our little ones.”

  “I’m sorry, he what?”

  “Her name is Arielle. If you want, you can meet with the father, but I warn you, she’s his only family since his wife died from complications giving birth to her. To say he is beside himself is putting it lightly.”

  I instantly thought of how I had felt when I lost Mallory. I didn’t need to experience that again through the eyes of a parent.

  “No, no, that’s alright. Can you tell us anything about this girl? Was she gifted, mixed, something?”

  The woman just shook her head. “She has a brown eye and a green eye but other than that, is your average dwarf child. Nothing that we can tell. We had hoped that maybe you more magically inclined folks might understand what use a single eleven-year-old girl could possibly have. He clearly knew that she was there down to the level and was interested in only her. We tried to stop him, but it was as if we didn’t even exist to him.”

  “That’s…strange.”

  The woman nodded. “I will keep you abreast of anything else you should know. But please look through whatever connections you have to see why he needed her.”

  “What about the rescue?”

  “Pardon?”

  I looked uncertainly to Mickey, then to the woman. “The rescue. You know, the plan to go get the girl.”

  The woman gave her a long look and then sighed. “I don’t think you understand the gravity of the situation. Our last stronghold has been completely destroyed and we’re suddenly having to get everyone underground or into human channels for their own safety. A single child was taken to the nest of our greatest enemy and one that currently has the world at a standstill. You know they sent a bomb, right? A literal bomb and he just teleported it away to Washington DC. We will not be sending a team after a single child because it will result in the death of all of them, including the girl. We can only hope that whatever he wants from her requires her to be alive.”

  I drew in a sharp breath, my temper ramping right back up, but it was surprisingly Mickey who slid into the corner of my vision and put her hand on my arm.

  “Let’s rest, alright? Nothing will be done tonight. After a full night’s sleep, we can look at this from all angles.”

  I wanted to argue with her, to tell the woman that war wasn’t an excuse to be cruel. But I also knew that nothing would be accomplished while the seven of us were crammed into a supply closet, and also that she didn’t have to tell us at all.

  “Please keep us informed of any updates.”

  The woman nodded. “Likewise to you. We’re aware that oracles have access to information and knowledge that we have no way of obtaining ourselves. So if you were to suddenly find out crucial information, we are always willing to change our plans and priorities.” She gave a curt nod. “My people owe you a great debt for what our kind has done. We will bear the scars for generations.”

  Huh, that was surprising. Sure, there had been a trial and all, but it had been easy to assume that the conviction for all of those who were manipulated by the anti-humanists to kill oracles before they could awaken had been mostly political. I wasn’t aware that a chunk of the population was on our side.

  Maybe we weren’t as alone as I felt sometimes?

  Maybe, but best not to get carried away.

  I returned her nod then headed out, silent as my mind churned. Where was the girl? Was she even alive? She had to be terrified. I couldn’t imagine being hunted down and picked up by something as heinous as the rotted dragon when I was just a kid.

  I knew, without a doubt, that my dreams would be full of her. Even if I didn’t know what she looked like.

  True to her word, the woman did keep us informed, or at least someone always did. And unfortunately, there was a lot to update us about.

  The next day, before even the noon meal, we got word of a military base being attacked all the way in Japan. They had unloaded everything on the rotted dragon, but none of it had worked. I was beginning to fear that they were going to try to nuke it, and I wasn’t nearly educated enough to try to extrapolate all the awful ramifications of that.

  So it seemed the entire world knew of dragons all of a sudden. Although I didn’t have access to international news channels or really any form of media, it made me wonder what our planet would be like if we ever made it through to the other side. It was the end of an era. Before Dragons and After.

  Wait… There already was an AD. That was just confusing.

  And once more, it seemed our enemy was only after one thing. There were more casualties, that was for certain, but that made sense considering that trained soldiers with human weapons and no knowledge of what was going on would fight harder against something that wasn’t supposed to exist suddenly popping into the sky. But even with all the death, there was only one person taken: an older sergeant there, one who had been considering retirement but was well respected and stayed on longer than most would. He was American Japanese who had been born on base shortly after the second world war and had lived in both countries. By that night, we got two images—one when he was young and one that was current—and he was an interesting mix of features. Bright green eyes like his American father, but dark hair and that slightly cool olive tone of his Asian mother. He wasn’t like Mickey and I, who were pale enough that we were often mistaken for being Caucasian from our grandmother on our maternal side, who had been entirely Irish. He was a clear and direct mix of the two.

  And it was the next day that we got some of his family history. His father had died in a shooting when the sergeant was young, and he’d been raised by both his mother and his father’s sister. He had a wife who was also a soldier and a first generation American, her parents hailing from Senegal, and her interview with the news was just about as heartbreaking as I’d imagined it would be.

  Time was passing too rapidly and yet I didn’t know what to do. Nothing in my short experience with the dragons had ever been like what was going on. There were no dark dragons come to knock on the shield and demand our surrender. There were no power plays to try to wrest the throne from Bronn or to get at us oracles. It was clear that the rotted dragon had to be planning something, but I had absolutely no idea what.

  I tried to have a vision. All of us did. We held hands while we meditated, we tried gripping each other’s wrists while looking at the book and its melty letters—although still apparently only I could read it. We tried sleeping with the printed-out pictures that we managed to get of the two.

  Nothing.

  It was frustrating to say the least. I hadn’t realized just how much I depended on random visions fueling me forward until I didn’t have them anymore. In fact, if I wasn’t in direct physical contact with one of the other oracles, I couldn’t so much as feel a pop of magic at all. It was isolating and made me feel useless. I couldn’t fight—I was still real shaky on the whole walking thing. The only thing I had going for me was that I could conjure impossible information out of thin air, and if I didn’t have that…what was I?

  That sense of responsibility and failure followed me into the next day. And the next day as well, when we heard of yet another attack. This one was all the way in Australia and was at a hospital. A patient in recovery was kidnapped. He was a twenty year-old who had been very, very sick and had undergone an experimental procedure where they’d 3-D printed his heart out of cells that had somehow been made into a ‘personalized hydrogel’ and a mechanical valve or something. Other than that, he was a typical Caucasian guy. Brown hair, brown eyes, average build.

  We increased our efforts, and it seemed that everyone could feel time ticking down above our heads. When I wasn’t sleeping, I was either trying to force a vision or reading the book, hoping that it would give me some sort of insight into what th
e rotted dragon was doing.

  Because he absolutely was doing something incredibly specific. That was his style. I hadn’t known it at first, but he’d invited me to his prison, planted the idea of using it as a central hub, and then just waited for me to use it so he could infect one of my friends with some bit of himself.

  It was because I had underestimated him that Mallory was dead. It was because I’d been playing the short game while he’d been playing the long one that the world was falling apart, and he was in it. If I ever wanted to somehow undo everything, I needed to see at least as far as he did.

  But poring through the pages wasn’t exactly quick going, and I couldn’t skip anything lest I lose out on some important detail. I missed the days where my latent oracle-ness would just lead me to whatever part of the book I needed to read. Doing things manually sucked.

  We were so sure that Faeldrus’s machinations would be for naught. After all, how could he connect mirrors that had never touched? He had nothing from them; they had nothing of our world. We were separated by the divide.

  We would have done well not to underestimate him. It took him years spent as a pariah, but he was able to create a ritual that allowed him to reach into the other realms. He did the impossible. It could have been an incredible accomplishment. Perhaps could have changed the way we looked at our gifts permanently.

  Except for the fact that it required death to fuel it.

  Blood magic is forbidden. No power is worth the sacrifice of a soul. But that did not stop Faeldrus. Like the four of our holiest stars, he needed a quartet of blended souls, those that were split between what we considered to be two ideals.

  A mother from the north and a father from the south? That seer would do.

  A seer who was blessed with the touch of the chimera? That seer could be the next point.

  An orphan seer who was adopted and loved by their chosen parents? That would work as well.

  Two things at once, a whole with two halves. Distinct ideas living in harmony. This was the foundation of his ritual. In killing them on his altars, he built the lines of his new order.

  I wish that the carnage had stopped there. But the final straw, the final boost of greatness and power that was supposed to connect him to each and every mirror world, laid within the shifters.

  A rare enough of the fey, I had only met a handful of shifters in my life. Truly astounding, they could take the shape of any living thing, adapt its mannerisms and sounds. While there were certain breeds of shifter who chose specific forms and kept to those forms only, they were not the majority.

  Until Faeldrus wove his way into their ranks.

  We do not know of how he wooed them, or how he convinced them to take on a body that we’d never seen, but in just one century, most of their kind had rallied to him in a beauteous but deadly form. They had wings, and great snapping jaws. Most had no legs of which to speak of, but that did not seem to slow them down. They flew, great wyrms through the sky, breathing fire or lightning. They abandoned all other forms, all of their connections to magic and the inner workings of the wild, and served only him.

  What I don’t understand is how they couldn’t see what he was doing to them. How some of their young went missing, stolen from their very beds. How their maidens began to disappear into the night. How they couldn’t smell their blood on him, in him.

  But they worshipped him still, even as he consumed them each night at his table. But no one knew, especially not us, and we were shocked when he emerged as one of them.

  Faeldrus was never a shifter, never blessed with such magics, and yet he was able to twist things and turn into one of them but greater. He had legs. He had many, many horns. He was coated in overlapping, natural armor across his whole body. It was both amazing and terrible, and he used his new body to take over the capitol with his horde of acolytes.

  I am sure that they thought themselves quite smart, aligning themselves with someone clearly so set on ruling the world, but they couldn’t have counted on being the final peg of his great ritual.

  I wonder, even if they had known, would they have stopped him? He required a hundred willing sacrifices. Those willing to let their blood flow in the name of his gain. Considering the fervor of his following, considering how much the shifters worshipped at his feet, would they have said no? Or would they have thrown themselves at his feet?

  A moot point, I suppose, as it is Maedryell who turned at the last moment and foiled him before he could enact that plan.

  It is unfortunate that it took her over a hundred and fifty years to shake herself from his shackles. Perhaps if she had resisted his influence earlier, our society wouldn’t be on the brink as it is now, with thousands of the winged shifters wandering with all of their memories erased. Many of our leaders think we should adopt them—

  I stopped as it shifted into a discussion of what responsibilities their society had toward the dragons that apparently couldn’t remember their entire time while serving Faeldrus. My mind was spinning.

  I knew what the rotted dragon was doing. Finally, I knew.

  The child was half an orphan with her mother dead and half not. Her eyes were both brown and blue—heterochromia, I believed it was called. The soldier had been of the east and the west. He’d been of a soldier and a civilian. He too had been half an orphan. And the kid with the heart? Part human, part machine. He was both dying and brand new at the exact same time.

  Two halves inside of a single whole person. People of duality. He’d gotten all of the points he needed, which apparently could only mean a singular, very specific thing.

  Once more, he was trying to unite all the realms. All those mirror worlds that I had caught glimpses of when I was dead. Worlds where the anti-humanists had won. Worlds where we’d never arrived. Worlds where some of us had arrived and flourished, and others where we’d been wiped out. Worlds nothing like our own. He wanted to connect all of them, reunite them with direct passageways until they were all one, interconnected mass that he could rule.

  It would destroy so much. Nearly all life could be wiped out by that kind of shift, and only Fauldrus would be left to absorb all the power that gave him.

  What then? What would he do when the universe was in ashes and he was sitting alone? Would he finally be satisfied? I doubted it, but at the same time, I couldn’t imagine what happened if everyone was dead. Not just everyone in my world, but everyone in every world. Would the universe wink out? Or would it birth itself again and Faeldrus would just wait until the timing was right before culling all of them too?

  The thought made me sick. It made me burn. But it also gave me hope.

  Because I knew what he had to do.

  He had to gather all the dragons that he could, at least a hundred of them, and have them willingly sacrifice themselves for him. I had no doubts that he would be able to twist the words to make it sound appealing. Most of them probably wouldn’t even get that they were about to die.

  All I had to do was stop that, and then he would be up a creek without a paddle. He could attack and kidnap as many dual people as he wanted, but he wasn’t going to get anywhere without the sacrifice of his dragons.

  Maybe if he hadn’t eaten so many of them, he wouldn’t have such a shortage on his hands.

  But I got it. I got why he had to eat him. In the end, he was right. Me and him were a lot alike, at least genetically. He was an oracle just like me, or a seer as the journal called them. It was only through twisting the natural laws and consuming the flesh of children and maidens that he’d been able to take on the dragon form. It seemed that coming to our physical world had forced him to consume quite a bit of his flock in order to maintain his shape.

  …could we starve him out? Was there a way to keep most of the dragons safe from him until he eventually burst in a rush of pus and decomposing matter?

  I had so many questions, all stacking in my mind on top of each other, but I was invigorated by the rush of it all. Because finally, after days of having nothing,
I had an answer.

  I jumped to my feet, nearly hitting my head in the process. I was tucked into the little cubby that we had abandoned when the dwarves had dug out a new access tunnel to the main chunk of the underground. It was quiet and people were less likely to bug me, so it served my purposes well enough. Unfortunately, it meant that I was at least a fifteen-minute walk away from everyone else and waiting that long to do something seemed wasteful and also like it might actually make me lose my mind.

  First things first, I needed to know more. I had enough to lay the foundation of what I needed, but it wasn’t enough. I needed someone with insider knowledge. Someone who probably already knew what kind of trap Faeldrus had laid for the other dragons and how to subvert it.

  Someone who’d already done it before.

  It was a tricky thing, going about summoning a spirit of death, someone who was cursed not to be a part of my world but had directly interfered with it. I supposed there was always the chance that she had stopped existing entirely, undone by breaking the rules and saving me. But nevertheless, I went about paging through the book until I found an explanation of the curse that was placed on none other than Maedryell, my own personal grim reaper.

  It wasn’t hard to find the spot—it was full of diagrams and arrows and all sorts of things I didn’t remember. But even without the push of my magic to tell me what to do or how to write or how to channel things, I was able to find the symbol that I was pretty sure was supposed to represent her. Or maybe it was her duty. Either way, it worked for me.

  A sharp piece of metal worked well enough for scratching the spell circle I needed into the floor, copying lines and changing a few depending on what I remembered from my short time of being a ghost. I didn’t want to redo her curse, or somehow double it. I just wanted her to come to me, even if she didn’t have the energy to do so herself. A sort of…spirit delivery system, as it were. Maedryell Prime.

  It probably took me more than fifteen minutes to draw it all out, but it didn’t matter. It was fifteen minutes that I had been proactive. Every single line was something I carved out of the rotted dragon’s hide. I was a thorn in his side, alright.