Kidnapped by the Dragon

by Kayla Wolf

  They had so much to learn from each other, wolves and dragons. Angela wondered why they’d spent so long at war. It seemed like such a waste—especially given how well she got on with almost every dragon she’d ever met.

  Well, one exception. William, the green-eyed Elder from across the valley, was insufferable. Cruel and unpleasant, he refused ever to take human form—especially when other shifters were present. Wolves like Jessica and Angela, or a bear like Art, were beneath his contempt. She didn’t much like him—he made the hair on the back of her neck stand up, no matter what form she was in. But Stephen had assured them that he was all hot air. And despite his threats, no terrible fate had befallen the valley as a result of other species of shifters moving in.

  They spent a few hours examining the books—but the dust was copious, and Angela found a dull headache starting up behind her eyes. The records were fascinating, but they were slow going, especially with her having to work through translating them before she could consider their content, and she found herself yawning.

  Stephen was looking at her sideways. “I think that’s enough for today,” he said gently, a few hours into their session.

  ”No way,” Angela protested, shaking her head. “I’m just a bit sleepy. Seriously—I really want to keep going.”

  ”I think you need a bit of sun, my dear,” he said gently. “Why don’t you take a book out and read outdoors? A bit of fresh air is good for the soul. I wouldn’t mind doing a bit of sunbathing myself.”

  That caught her attention. Stephen didn’t spend much time in his draconic form—from what she’d gathered from talking to Helena, the old dragon had shared too many memories with his lost soulmate in his dragon form, and he found it very painful to transform. Still, a few years ago he’d taken dragon shape to rescue his daughter Helena from the clutches of a nasty little community of dragons up in Montana who’d contrived to kidnap her. Since then, he’d spent a few afternoons in his dragon shape, just bathing in the warm sun that touched the tops of the rocky peaks of their home. It seemed to be good for him—and Angela was hardly going to obstruct the healing process.

  So she took one of the dusty old books and headed back outside. Now she thought about it, Stephen was right—a bit of cool, fresh air was exactly what she needed to keep her mind sharp as she slogged through this translation. The book was fascinating, so far—it claimed to be about ancient dragon magic. It felt a little strange, as a wolf, to read these old books—but if Stephen was happy about it, so was she. After all, it wasn’t like she was trying to use these secrets to hurt the dragon family. If anything, they were her family. They were certainly more of a family than her own father—and her pack—had ever been to her.

  There was a big flat rock next to the river, and it was there she was headed to sit and read. The breeze was cool, but the sun was warm, and she grinned to herself as she settled in for a long session of reading. She’d go until the sun went down, she thought—she’d even remembered to stop by the kitchen and grab a couple of pieces of fruit to keep her brain fueled. Soon enough, she was so immersed in the book that she’d forgotten all about her surroundings. So immersed, in fact, that she didn’t see the huge gray wingspan that sailed by above her head.

  A little later, a sound caught her attention, and she looked up—and yelped in surprise to see a complete stranger standing right in front of her.

  Chapter 3

  Owen walked through the woods for a good half-hour. It was a decent workout, in the end, moving up a reasonably steep hill at a fair clip, and he felt the buzz of endorphins moving through his human form. It felt good, to work a little in this body. He’d been spending a lot of time as a dragon lately. Well, he was always a dragon—but his winged form was the one he used to travel, and there’d been a lot of travel in his recent past. The College was down on the West Coast, and he’d had a long flight all the way up to the Canadian border.

  He knew some guys who actually flew in those human aeroplanes. Dragons, actually choosing to fly coach. It made sense for shifters who couldn’t fly in either body, like the wolves and bears he knew, but it just seemed downright strange to fly in a metal bird if you had a set of wings of your own ready to go. He understood the arguments, though. The world was getting smaller. Gone were the days that flying through the sky was an unproblematic option. The air was, more and more, full of humans. Humans in metal birds, humans with sharp eyes and inquisitive minds. Some guys just reckoned it wasn’t worth the risk, and fair enough, too. He’d been chased, once or twice, by fighter jets. Pretty funny, all told. He wondered how they’d explained him away after he’d given them the slip. Unidentified Flying Dragon. But still—he flew carefully. Did a lot of flying at night, actually—made it easier to avoid planes when you could see them coming a mile off, lights glaring through the dark sky. And his slate-gray body had a lot of natural camouflage in the dark. Technology was still unreliable enough for any radar detection to be waved off as a malfunction.

  The world was getting smaller and smaller—and more full of humans. So it was nice to walk around for a bit in a section of the world that seemed to have been bypassed by all that so-called progress. Just trees, and rocks, and the occasional wild animal sprinting by. He found himself settling into quite a pleasant state of non-thinking. Just one job to do—walk around until he found someone or someone found him. He had his story ready to go. All he needed was an audience. And sure enough, it wasn’t long before he saw a collection of colors that weren’t quite at home in this natural setting. Someone in human shape, sitting on a huge flat rock that perched on the river like a toad. A good spot, Owen though remotely, standing stock still in the shadow of a tree to get as much of a bearing on the situation as he could.

  A young woman, sitting cross-legged with a book in her lap. Couldn’t be older than twenty-five. Pretty—long blonde hair braided elegantly behind her back, long eyelashes covering big eyes that were downturned, focused on the book. The sun wasn’t favoring him, and Owen couldn’t work out their color for the life of him. Blue? Gray? These Rocky Mountain dragons were hard to get any intel on. Nobody knew what their eyes meant any more, whether they corresponded with family group or ability or both. Perhaps he should have asked the white-eyed dragons what they remembered about their attackers’ eyes.

  The young woman looked up a little as she turned a page, frowning as she flipped through a second book, smaller than the first, that was propped up on her knee. He caught a flash of silver when her eyes moved in his direction—and his black eyes widened. That was interesting. A wolf, all the way out here? By herself? In a valley that belonged to dragons? What was that about? Perhaps she belonged to one of the traveling nomad packs that were getting more and more common as it became harder to live in permanent settlements without humans poking around. The choice between living with humans and living on the road was a tough one, but for some packs, it wasn’t a question. Though the traditional enmity was between dragons and wolves, there were plenty of wolves who hated humans’ guts. And fair enough, too, Owen though privately. He’d read the kinds of stories humans told about wolves—werewolves, they called them, mindless beasts who couldn’t help transforming at the full moon and went on rampages. It was ridiculously shallow thinking. Yes, it was true that the first transformation tended to be a little bit… uncontrolled. He’d heard from young wolves that the first shift was intoxicating. So much power, so much speed… it was common to run wild. But the kind of wild, bloodthirsty tales humans told about so-called ‘werewolves’? Completely unfair. Couple that with the human tendency to kill anything they didn’t understand… well, it made sense to live life on the road.

  But this wolf didn’t look like the nomad sort. She had nothing with her, for a start. No bag—just a book in her lap and an apple in one hand that she was meditatively nibbling at as she read. That wasn’t the posture or the act of a nomad wolf. This was a woman who’d come out of her house to sit and read for a while in the sun, even bringing a snack along with her. That me
ant she lived around here. And unless there was a whole settlement of wolves that lived up here that the College had never heard about… was it possible that she lived with the dragons? Could this even be the so-called princess he’d been sent to find? She looked like a princess. Not that Owen was much of an expert on royalty… but a beautiful girl like that, with that crown of golden hair? Violet had said that Angela was a young blonde woman. But he’d assumed she’d be a dragon - he felt a flare of annoyance that the Alpha hadn’t specified that he was going after a wolf.

  He moved up closer, unconsciously smoothing his movements to make no sound before he remembered that it didn’t matter if he got her attention. After all, he was supposed to be just a regular guy, right? A lonely dragon, looking for companionship and somewhere to call home. Like maybe a cave in a rocky valley… hypothetically. So he adjusted his movements to make a bit more noise, his boots crunching against the pebbles and dirt underfoot. But to his amusement, the girl didn’t notice. Absolutely absorbed in the book, he could tell. The way her eyes kept flicking to the second book she had propped open indicated that she might have been working on it in translation—something to be decoded, it seemed. He felt a burst of interest despite himself. Something that had her so absorbed might be of interest to him. After all, the College was as interested in information as it was in maintaining a network of highly-paid bounty hunters and assassins across the country… it would look pretty good on his record if he brought them home some new intel, as well as the fee for the job from the white dragons up north.

  Was this girl ever going to notice him? He didn’t want to scare her. So as he moved up closer, he took a deep breath, went to clear his throat to catch her attention—just as her bright silver eyes looked up and caught him. Damn. Not good timing. They widened with shock, and before he knew it she was starting backwards—he saw her losing her balance and jumped into action, almost on autopilot.

  If he’d given it any thought, it would’ve been better to let her fall into the river, he thought later. After all, it would raise questions—the lightning reflexes he’d relied upon to race forward weren’t exactly common in the population. But at that moment—that frozen, split-second moment when she’d looked at him for the first time, her eyes meeting his—all he’d wanted was to protect her, to keep her safe from falling. Funny, that. Very strange little impulse. He made a note to investigate that later, give some thought to what had caused it so he could put some effort into destroying that part of himself. Wanting to protect people was not how the College operated.

  But he was in character. Time to act. He’d been able to catch her before she fell—he’d lunged forward, closing the space between them, and grabbed her by the wrist before she could topple into the rushing water of the river. She yelped again, clearly just as startled by his grabbing her as she’d been by his sudden appearance—but to his amusement, her first concern was to make sure both of her books were safe. The one that had been on her knee had flown off—he grabbed it for her and handed it to her, moving away a little to let her regain her equilibrium. The books were saved, the girl was saved… unfortunately, the apple wasn’t so lucky. He saw it bobbing away downstream, having flown out of her hand in all the ruckus.

  ”I am so sorry I startled you like that!” He widened his eyes, pitched his voice a little higher than he naturally would have, and adjusted his body language. His usual instinct was to be as big and tough and frightening as he could be—but that wouldn’t serve him here. Important to be shy, self-effacing, to present as little of a threat as possible. With a private chuckle, he channeled the body language of the white dragon who’d met him up at their settlement, the guy who’d been almost too scared to speak to him. That was why it was important to spend time talking to people. You never knew when it might come in handy.

  ”It’s okay,” the girl was saying, laughing a little as she closed the book that had been on her lap. “My fault. I was miles away.”

  ”Still—are you okay?”

  ”Fine!” She smiled at him, brightly. Definitely pretty, he reflected, unexpectedly. Beautiful, even. Almost enough to throw him off his rhythm. What’s wrong with you, Owen?

  ”My name’s Owen,” he said. No need for a fake name—the College didn’t really believe in elaborate cover stories. They were an easy way to get into trouble. Besides, the kind of work they did didn’t tend to get their individual operatives any kind of reputation. A huge, faceless organization, that was the goal. So Owen felt comfortable using his real name. It was a common name, after all. Common enough that the College had let him keep it. They hadn’t let him keep anything else from his old life, so he felt a little attached to his name.

  Just a little. Not enough to be dangerous.

  “Nice to meet you. I’m Angela.” Well, that settled that. He’d found the princess. She extended one slim hand, and he shook it, smiling a little at the gesture. “What brings you up here, Owen?”

  Could she tell what he was, he wondered? He’d known she was a wolf since he’d caught a glimpse of those silver eyes, but dragons were a little harder to guess, with their eye color being about family connections rather than species. Not that his eyes had been the color of his family’s for centuries, now. She was looking up at him a little curiously, he could tell that much. He pictured himself as she must see him. Tall, broad, muscular—with jet black eyes. Irises the same shade as the pupil. It was unusual, for shifters. She wouldn’t have seen it before. Very few people had seen it before—and fewer still lived to tell about it. But some wolves could smell a dragon—or so he’d heard. Tarik could. Tarik, blind as a bat though the old wolf may be, could pick shifters by species out of a lineup a hundred feet away.

  “I’m not really sure, honestly,” he admitted. “I’ve been wandering a long time. Something just told me to land here, by the river, so—here I am.”

  ”Land? So you’re a dragon.”

  ”Yep. And you’re a wolf, I can see. Does that mean we have to fight?” he joked. The girl grinned, her silver eyes lighting up, and raised her fists to her chin as though getting ready to take him on. He couldn’t help but laugh—not an entirely manufactured sound.

  ”I live with dragons,” she said matter-of-factly, sitting down again. “Consider me an ally.”

  ”That’s a relief. Can I join you?” He nodded at the rock, and she shuffled over to give him room to sit down beside her. “A wolf, living with dragons? There’s a story there, I bet.”

  ”And I bet there’s a story behind a black-eyed dragon landing a mile from my front door on a whim,” she retorted, her eyes gleaming. Owen found himself revising his initial estimation of this girl. She was smart. Maybe too smart. The cover story might need some adjusting if she wasn’t going to buy his appearance there as a coincidence.

  ”Well, who’s going first?”

  ”You, I think. You’re on my rock, after all,” she said nonchalantly. He hid the urge to grin again. He liked this wolf. Time to improvise.

  ”Alright, you got me. I had an idea I might find someone here. But I have been wandering a long time, that part’s true. I—“ a little flicker of his eyes, a redirection of his gaze over towards the trees. He waited long enough to feel her lean forward a little, clearly interested in what he was holding back before he continued. “I lost my people, some time ago.”

  He heard her take a breath. That had hit home. It usually did, for shifters. Family was important to people like them. Stories like this one, the one he’d made up earlier that day, weren’t uncommon—that was what made them such a reliable cover story.

  ”What happened?”

  ”I—haven’t really talked about it. Um. We lived by the sea, over in California. Traced our family back for thousands of years. Peaceful, mostly. We fished, we sunbathed, we swam. But there were these… others.” He took a deep breath. Angela’s community had had some kind of run-in with the gang of dragons up north, he knew that. Would it be too much to suggest that it had been the same group that had murdered his
family? It’d raised too many questions, probably. He decided against it. This girl was too smart to buy in. But he’d make it dragons, that took his fake family down. That would ring a bell with her, at least. “Other dragons. They wanted our home, so… they took it.”

  ”I’m so sorry.” She was gazing at him, and he resisted the urge to look back. Much easier to lie when you weren’t looking someone in the eye, in his experience. Besides, if you weren’t making eye contact, it was that much harder for your face to give you away.

  ”I was out fishing at the time, or they’d have taken me out, too,” he said softly. “When I got back, it was too late. So I just—ran. Took off, kept flying.”

  ”How long ago?”

  ”I’m not sure. A month, a year? I haven’t been keeping count. And the first few weeks I was too messed up to even take care of myself.”

  ”I can imagine. A friend of mine—well, kind of my brother-in-law—he went through something similar. It’s taken him years to even start healing. Who were the dragons who did it? Did you ever get any kind of justice?”

  That was a tricky one. He didn’t want her trying to raise an army to get revenge. Still, there was something charming about that impulse from her that made him smile. She was soft-hearted, that was clear. “Honestly… nothing’s going to bring my family back. All I’m really looking for is a new life.”

  ”Is that why you came here?”

  ”I wound up at a shifter bar in a town nearby,” he lied smoothly. There were shifter bars in every town—no need to be too specific about which one. Give as little information as possible, that was the key to lying. Some guys got bogged down in details to try to be believable—and that was a huge mistake. Details were what tripped you up and trapped you. Details were what would get people suspicious of you. In general, people were willing to believe just about anything, unless you gave them a reason not to. Keeping it nice and vague had always worked best for Owen. “They were talking about—a little community, up in the hills. A place where dragons and wolves lived together. A peaceful place. That sounded good.”