Oh good one, Quentin said, communicating with all of them in the way they could only do when they were all in their dragon forms. That’s another ball ruined, Barrett.
Barrett laughed. Maybe aim better and get one past me sometime, then.
With another ball in tatters, the Rockwell Clan of Dragons floated back down to the floor of the bayou, spreading out on the grass and looking up at the stars. It was Ryan’s favorite time of day—the nighttime. He loved the stillness of the bayou, and the soft sounds that harmonized together in the darkness. This was his home. It always had been, and it always will be. He didn’t need anything else.
He was part of the Rockwell Clan of Dragons, and just like the other members, his job was to protect the state of Louisiana, and specifically the Baton Rouge area, from the things that wanted to harm the people there—both natural and supernatural. The Rockwell Clan had always done so, for hundreds of years, and they would always do so, for hundreds of years into the future. His wingspan and strength meant that he could fly to California or Maine or across oceans in half the time that it would take for an airplane to get there. He could travel anywhere and do anything.
But Ryan didn’t need any of that. He had everything he needed right there, in that moment, with these people. He had learned at a young age, to value every moment with the people who meant the most, and he had learned it the hard way, too. It wasn’t a lesson he would ever forget.
I’m bored, Jordan said, echoing in all of their heads. What do we do now?
Ryan shook his head in amusement. Jordan could never sit still for very long. She had so much energy pent-up in that tiny body. It was enough for two or three people, probably.
What do you want to do? Hannah asked.
Hannah was a pleaser, though. She was strong, in her own right, but her strength lived in more than her physical power. She was a nurturer. A gentle, sweet, giving person who often gave so much of herself that she ended up being taken advantage of. Her black scales didn’t fit her as well as they fit Ryan. Ryan was an affable, easygoing, fun-loving guy who loved his life and his people, but he had enough darkness in him that shifting into a jet-black dragon made a lot of sense. There was nothing dark about Hannah, though. Not one bit.
Then again, the color of their scales wasn’t meant to reflect their personalities. The color of a dragon shifter’s scales was determined by what other abilities he or she possessed. Like Ryan, Hannah could make objects move without touching them. That was the special skill that the black dragon shifters carried with them. Jordan’s royal-blue scales meant that she had healing powers. Quentin’s maroon scales meant that he could see glimpses of the future—only four or five seconds ahead of the present, but it was an invaluable skill in combat. But only the original Rockwell family members, like Barrett, had green scales. Green scales reflected no special power in addition to shifting—they reflected sheer power, size, and strength. There were few dragon shifters who could go up against a green-scaled Rockwell dragon shifter and live to see the other side of the conflict. Barrett could handle being a team of one in their games because he was more powerful than the four of them combined. The way he moved, the way he flew, the power in his wings—all of it was exponentially more than any other dragon shifter could hope to possess.
That was the Rockwell legacy. That was why they were always the leaders of the clan. It was why the clan was named after them after all. And like the Rockwell’s that had come before him, Barrett bore the responsibility and handled the power with dignity. He had only just recently taken over as the leader of the clan, succeeding his father who had led for decades. But Barrett was already stepping into this own, and the clan members all believed that he would be a great leader.
Ryan believed it, too, and he knew what an honor it was to be part of the Rockwell Agency. The leader of the clan always ran the security agency, which was how the Rockwell Clan protected the people of Louisiana. And he always invited four other dragon shifters to work with him. They made up the core of the protective force, and it was a job they all took seriously.
They had all grown up together as good friends, but now they had been working side by side for six months, and Ryan knew that, together, they were capable of amazing things under Barrett’s leadership. And he knew that there was nothing else that he would ever want to do with his life. He was meant to be a part of that agency, taking cases and protecting people from harm. It was in his blood as much as the bayou was.
I don’t know what I want to do, Jordan said. Oh, wait—yes I do! Let’s race again. We ended at a tie last time, remember?
Quentin responded first, just like Ryan knew he would. Barrett always wins races, so what’s the point?
I’ll provide the finish line, Barrett said. The four of you can race, and whoever crosses my wingspan first is the winner. All judgment calls go to me.
Ryan rolled up off his back, flapping his black wings, so that the wind rushed through the trees. There goes Barrett again …Wanting to call all the shots. Last one in the air is a loser.
Five dragons soared up from the bayou, filling the Louisiana sky under the cover of darkness. The people sleeping below had no idea that the people who dedicated their lives to protecting them were blowing off a little steam by racing through the air above them. Nobody ever knew the truth about the Rockwell Clan, until they needed them.
Chapter 2
Angela
Angela Winston’s eyes shot open, and she stared up at the ceiling above her, a million questions flooding her sleep-drugged brain. Was this her ceiling? If it was her ceiling, then how had she gotten home? If it wasn’t her ceiling, then whose was it, and how had she gotten there? And, most importantly, what had she done in the period of time that she couldn’t remember at all?
She sat up gingerly, glancing around her. With relief, she noted that this was, in fact, her bedroom in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she had been staying for the past three months. She was British, and Louisiana was a foreign world to her, but she had taken a wonderful opportunity with a university in Baton Rouge that allowed her to further her botanist training. Plants fascinated her, and there was no greater place to explore the mysterious side of plants than Louisiana bayous. She had arrived in August, and it was now late October, and there was still no respite from the heat and humidity that she had never before experienced, having spent her whole life in Bristol. She liked to joke that the two places were equally wet, but in Bristol, the water in the air had the decency to announce itself through perpetual downpours. The water in the Louisiana air, however, just hung there like a heavy, wet, wool blanket that went with her every time she stepped foot outside.
But the heat was the least of her problems in Louisiana—or at least, that was true for the past month. She was far more concerned that she seemed to be losing stretches of time. At first, they were small stretches. A few minutes here and there. Then maybe an hour. But the time spans were increasing, and as she lay there, on her bed—thank God it was, in fact, her bed—she realized that the last thing she remembered was logging plant life samples in the university’s laboratory somewhere around 3:00 the previous day.
And if she was not mistaken, the light coming through her window was early morning light. That meant she had lost half an afternoon, a whole evening, and a whole night.
Angela swung her legs down to the floor, her toes pressing into the thin, beige carpet that covered her rather non-descript student apartment. She was in her late twenties, which made her several years older than anyone else staying in the housing provided to university students, but she’d found the place to be reasonably quiet and the other students to be pleasant enough.
Maybe they would know where she was last night.
She stood up, holding onto the dresser for support as her legs wobbled slightly. Making her way over to the mirror, she stared into it, hardly recognizing the person that she saw looking back at her. The auburn hair falling down her back was familiar. Everything else looked warped, though. Her pal
e skin was even paler than normal. Her gray eyes looked large, and there were dark shadows beneath them. Her lips, usually full and luscious—her favorite feature on her face—were pale and dry. She looked like she had been up all night, and the night had not been kind to her.
She winced as she lifted an arm up to sweep her hair into a messy bun at the top of her head. She turned slightly, so that her shoulder was visible in the mirror, and her eyes widened. She was wearing a racerback tank top that exposed most of her shoulders and back, and blooming there on her left shoulder was a florid bruise. It was already multicolored, and when she moved her shoulder it sent sharp twinges of pain down her arm.
“Good God,” Angela whispered, staring at herself in the mirror again. “What is happening to you? There is something seriously wrong with you, Angela, and you need to figure out what it is.”
She had lived alone ever since she was sixteen, and she was often too busy for close friends. She didn’t need a lot of people in her life. But that did mean that she spent a lot of time talking to herself. Hands on her hips, she stared herself down in the mirror.
“What are you going to do? Keep pretending like there isn’t something seriously wrong? You just lost twelve hours—more than twelve hours. You’re either losing your mind, or someone is tampering with you. For your sake, I hope someone is tampering with you, because your mind is all you have.”
Her reflection was unimpressed with her speech, and Angela turned away from the mirror, surveying her bedroom for clues. Everything was in its place. She didn’t have much stuff to clutter up even a small apartment like this one. Her whole life was wrapped up in her work. It was what she was more passionate about than anything, and it left little time in her life for collecting books, or clothing, or trinkets that she might have placed around the room.
She was wearing cotton shorts, which was essentially what she always wore to bed now that she lived in a pressure cooker, sweating through the night. So that wasn’t unusual either.
As she wandered out into the small living space and kitchen combined, she still saw nothing that would indicate that she had been up to anything other than her normal routine the night before. There were even new dishes on the drying rack, sparkling clean. She always washed and dried her dishes after making dinner each night and left them on the drying rack. Then she always put them away the next morning.
Angela walked over to the dishes and gingerly touched one, picking it up and turning it over. It was her pasta bowl. She had bought it in Italy one year, and it had little images of different types of pasta around its rim. It had been five Euros at a market in Florence, and its bright green finish with its cheesy painted pasta had seemed like a good souvenir at the time. Now, whenever she had pasta, she ate it out of that bowl.
But she hadn’t made pasta in more than a week.
Angela set the bowl down and hurried to the door of her apartment, pulling it open and glancing up and down the hallway. There was no one about, but that wasn’t unusual. It was still early in the morning, and the young college students she lived with tended to sleep until the last possible moment before their classes. She quickly walked down the hall, in bare feet, to the common area. When she saw Dennis, one of the other graduate students who lived in the complex, sitting at a table eating a microwaveable breakfast burrito and reading the newspaper, she pressed her hand to her chest in relief and hurried over to him.
“Dennis!”
The man looked up, pushing his glasses higher on his nose and studying her intently. “Yes?” he asked, seeming confused as to why she had rushed over to him even though they’d had any number of pleasant conversations over the past few months. Dennis was the type of classic nerd that people liked to write into fictional stories. He would have been great for a movie. He was utterly wrapped up in his work, which happened to be Renaissance art and philosophy, and everything he said, thought, looked at, and interacted with had something to do with his passion. The conversations they’d had mostly revolved around Renaissance art, in fact, and Angela now knew far more about Giotto’s frescoes than she had ever anticipated.
But this wasn’t the time to discuss realism and symmetry. “Did you see me last night?”
Dennis nodded and went back to his newspaper. “Of course.”
“Of course?” Angela sat down beside him. “Of course what? What do you mean?”
“Everyone saw you,” Dennis said, his tone holding a subtle but real note of disapproval.
Angela closed her eyes, her stomach feeling sick. “Everyone saw me do what, Dennis? Please—you need to tell me. I don’t remember last night.”
He sighed and put down his newspaper. “Angela, excessive drinking is highly inadvisable. You know, you and I are the oldest people in this student complex. We should consider ourselves role models to a degree. I thought you were English, not Irish.”
“Irish?” Angela asked, the non sequitur at the end of the sentence throwing her off her response to the rest of the lecture. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“The Irish are excessive drinkers.”
Angela raised her eyebrows briefly, but then shook her head, deciding to bypass that stereotypical statement. Since coming to the United States, she had run into any number of people who liked to make broad, sweeping statements about the things they had heard about the English, or the Irish, or the Scottish, or anyone who seemed remotely connected to the islands in the Atlantic that the Americans both loved and resisted. “Anyway …,” Angela said, pointedly. “I wasn’t drunk last night, Dennis. There’s something wrong with me, and if you can tell me what it is I did last night, maybe I can figure it out. What do you think? Can you just help me out?”
Dennis leaned back in his chair and studied her intently. “You gave a speech.”
“A speech?” Angela said. “That …doesn’t sound like me. Were there people there? I try to avoid talking to people.”
“Well, you were talking to people,” Dennis said. “You were talking about victimization.”
“What does that mean?”
Dennis shook his head and picked up his newspaper again. “I don’t know. I wasn’t interested, so I stopped listening. But several people recorded the event. You should find one of them.”
Angela’s heart sank, and she stood up, knowing that Dennis had dismissed her by bending his mousy-brown head back over his newspaper. With dread in the pit of her stomach, she walked back down the hall towards her room. But just as she reached for her doorknob, the door across the hall from hers opened and a younger woman stepped out. Angela had only talked with her briefly on a few occasions, but she was reasonably sure that the woman’s name was Charlotte.
“Hey,” Charlotte said. “I heard you in the hall. Mind if I come …talk to you for a minute? I have something you need to see.”
Angela nodded, stepping back to let her into her apartment. “I have a feeling I know what it is.”
“If you don’t know what it is, then you need to,” Charlotte said, walking over and stepping inside with Angela. “I know blackout drunk when I see it. But I have to admit …I’ve blacked out, and I’ve never done what you did.”
“Great …,” Angela said, the word falling flat. She couldn’t even imagine what this girl was about to show her, and part of her never wanted to know. Part of her wanted to flee back to Bristol and hope that whatever was happening to her was the result of a very bad reaction to Louisiana. But she couldn’t do that, and she couldn’t put her head in the sand either. Whatever it was, she was going to have to face it—and the fact that she couldn’t trust herself anymore.
She had to get help. Fast.
Chapter 3
Ryan
Ryan whistled to himself as he stacked books on the desk that dominated his office at the Rockwell Agency. It was a sunny Saturday morning in the middle of October, he had just finished a run along his favorite trail, and he was going to spend the rest of the day in his office, rearranging and reorganizing things. After almost a year wi
th the Rockwell Agency, he had figured out a system that was going to work for him, but first he had to get the oak desk over by the window, facing outward, and line-up the bookshelves on the opposite side of the room.
It was the perfect project for a quiet weekend, and he was already planning the takeout he would order for lunch, and what movie he would put on in the background while he worked.
The sound of the front door of the agency opening made Ryan pause and pick his head up, listening for footsteps. As a general rule, the agency didn’t open on a Saturday, unless there was a big case going on, but that didn’t mean that his friends wouldn’t be in and out of the space that served as a second home to all of them.
“Hey-o,” Ryan called out, hearing light footsteps in the front entryway. “Who dares interrupt me? I thought I would have this place to myself today.”
There was no answer, which Ryan thought was odd. The footsteps sounded like either Hannah’s or Jordan’s, and neither woman would hesitate to call back to him. He let the stack of books he was moving through the air drop on the desk and walked towards his office door, rounding into the hallway and almost bumping into a woman he didn’t recognize.
“Whoa there,” Ryan said, stepping back to avoid crowding the woman’s space. “Hi. You’re a surprise.”
She was a very sweet surprise. He couldn’t help but notice the sweetness of her features. She had big, round, gray eyes set in a porcelain face. Her lips were full and luscious, and her auburn hair was tied back at the nape of her neck, falling over one shoulder. She was tall and curvaceous, standing there in her fitted jeans and olive-green t-shirt. Everything about her was simple and classy, and there was intelligence in those big, gray eyes.
“Excuse the intrusion,” the woman said. “The front door was open, but it seems that the agency is …not.”
Ryan’s eyebrows shot up. On the surface, the woman was already appealing enough, but when she opened her mouth, she spoke with the lilt of an English accent, and her words were each perfectly articulated. “You’re British,” he said with surprise. “What are you doing in Baton Rouge, Louisiana?”
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