by Amelia Jade
Aurum Dragon
Dragons of Cadia Book 3
By Amelia Jade
Aurum Dragon
Copyright @ 2016 by Amelia Jade
First Electronic Publication: December 2016
Amelia Jade
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distributed via the Internet or any other means, electronic or print, without the author’s permission.
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental. The author does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for third-party websites or their content.
All sexual activities depicted occur between consenting characters 18 years or older who are not blood related.
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Aurum Dragon
Prologue
It always started the same.
First there came the fire. Red-orange flames appeared out of nowhere, surrounding them. They raced across the wooden floor, the dry wood going up like tinder as the tongues of fire lapped at the walls, window curtains adding further fuel to the rampaging monster that suddenly engulfed their home.
“I’m scared, Dax,” Kyra said, her fingers firmly entwined through his own as they climbed from bed, staring in shock at their picturesque little world falling apart around them.
“It’ll be okay,” he lied.
It was never okay. It always happened the same way each time. The quaint little house he’d built for the two of them, thatched roof and all, was burning to cinders around them. Smoke filled the rooms, making it hard to breathe for Kyra.
Dax never had any troubles breathing. He was a dragon shifter. Fire was part of his element. But it would kill her just as fast as the flames if he didn’t do anything.
What could he do though? There was never any time. Because as soon as he decided to make a move…
“Through the window, let’s go,” he heard himself say for the ten-thousandth time.
Kyra, eager to be away from the fire, darted forward.
“Kyra, NO!” he shouted, a split second before the window exploded inward under the impact of a blue-white ball of flame so intense he had to fling an arm up to shield his face.
The force of the blast hurled him backward, through the wall, and down into the river that ran next to their property. He sank like a stone, stunned by the force of the fireball.
Daxxton’s eyes snapped open as he sat up straight, ripping at the suddenly confining covers, gasping for breath. His throat was constricted. He couldn’t breathe. Images of Kyra flashed through his mind, that last look they’d shared before the fireball had disintegrated her.
He gritted his teeth in anguish, biceps bulging as his muscles flexed in painful memory of something that had happened nearly five centuries earlier.
Eventually he regained control of his lungs and slowed his frantic breathing to a more reasonable pace, going through all of the breathing exercises he knew of to try and compose himself.
As oxygen flooded his brain, sleep began to call him once more. He glanced over at the clock—such a wonderful invention of the modern world—and decided that he was done sleeping for the day. He didn’t need to remember the next part of his dream.
What came next was just as bad. The blood was horrible enough.
But the screams as he exacted his revenge…
It was the screams that haunted him.
Chapter One
Daxxton
He looked around the training yard as his sparring partner withdrew for a brief moment.
It was full. Or at least, as full as the Top Scale training grounds ever got. The most recent crop of graduates were all there, as were his chosen instructors.
To his right, Zander Pierce worked on the elements of certain kicks with Ezequiel “Zeke” Hawthorn. Instructor teaching student.
On his left, Senior Instructor Blaine Wingstar was engaged in a furious battle with Dominick Carunno, another former student of Top Scale Academy.
And directly across from him stood the leader of the three newly minted Guardians of Cadia, Asher Owens.
“You’re getting better,” Daxxton said, wiping sweat from his brow.
Asher was, to put it mildly, a prodigal student. A little over a year and a half earlier, he’d been invited to Top Scale Academy with his two friends, to train and learn how to unlock the full potential of the dragons within them.
For twelve long months they had trained hard—furiously—to learn to master their animal halves. In a world where they spent the first decade and a half as humans, learning to become one with the sky in a different form was a task many were not up to. Only the select few were invited to train at Top Scale, where they might learn how to become lords of the sky, and unleash the true potential of the magic imbued within them as dragon shifters.
All three of the now-former cadets had passed. But Asher had shown qualities and strengths within him that surpassed his friends. He was wise beyond his years, driven, and mastered new skills with a speed that would have surprised anyone but Daxxton. But the cagey old Wing Commander of Top Scale saw a lot of himself in the young Frost Dragon, and thus he encouraged him to push himself.
In the coming centuries Top Scale would need a new Wing Commander, and Daxxton had just the person in mind for the job.
“Well, you don’t exactly have the most lenient teaching style,” Asher replied with a grin. “Learning and getting better is far less painful than the other option.” He rubbed a welt on his upper leg as proof of what happened when he was too slow.
Daxxton smiled, dipping his head toward the younger man. “It is good to have you back,” he said.”
Asher looked around. “It’s good to be back. Thank you for agreeing to work with us.”
He tried to wave the other man off.
“No, I’m serious,” Asher insisted. “You already taught us so much about being dragons, how to master that aspect of ourselves. You could have stopped there, but to invite us to return continually to learn human-style combat as well? That was unnecessary.”
Daxxton smiled and accepted the thanks this time, instead of trying to fight it off some more. “It’s a pleasure having the three of you here,” he said.
“Careful,” a female voice said from behind them. “Keep that up and it might go to his head.”
This time Daxxton allowed a small laugh to escape as he turned to look at the heavily pregnant woman walking—he would not say waddling, he absolutely would not!—toward them.
“I’ve got enough tricks left in the bag to ensure he doesn’t let that happen, Rhynne,” he teased.
“You’d better. He’s worse than Dom these days, which is saying something!”
While Asher pretended to be insulted, Daxxton considered the newcomer to the conversation.
Rhynne Nova, daughter to one
of the most powerful scions in all of Cadia. Her parents had been furious when she’d mated herself to Dominick, a relative nobody, at least in terms of the so-called “aristocracy” that had unfortunately arisen within the shifter territory they all called home.
No, only her mother had been irate. Her father had wished her well. Daxxton mentally corrected himself there, marveling once again at how someone so well-grounded like Zoltan Nova could stand to be mated to a power-hungry…woman, like Klara. He shook his head, unimpressed with himself for almost using another word to describe Rhynne’s mother.
Behind them, a noise began to emanate from within the pile of his shirt and a spare towel.
Daxxton frowned as he walked over. He owned a cell phone, though he detested the device, as did most shifters. Their worlds were, for the most part, small enough not to need such lines of communication. But as the head of Top Scale, he was expected to be reachable.
“Yes?” he asked as he hit the green answer button, not looking at the number or asking who it was. He frankly didn’t give a fuck. If someone was calling him, it was either an emergency, or he was going to tear them a new one. Either way, there was no point wasting time.
“It’s Klara,” the sharp female alto voice said without preamble. “We have a situation.”
Wonderful. Just the person I wanted it to be.
He listened to her speak for a moment, his spine straightening as he did. “I understand. We’ll handle it.” The line went dead and he reached down, pulling his shirt from the pile even as he moved away from the others, into the center of a circle of rocks set into the ground.
“Playtime is over,” he said, his voice easily carrying to the others.
The tone of his words registered with them all, and they noted where he was standing, and without a word the five others—Rhynne knew she wasn’t going anywhere—all found stone circles of their own to be within.
Daxxton didn’t bother saying anything more. He snapped his fingers and fire exploded from his core, wrapping up and around him like a living, breathing thing. He saw similar bursts of color rise up from the ground.
White mist for Asher, the Frost Dragon.
Fire-stricken black clouds for Zeke, the Fire Dragon.
Lightning clouds for Dominick, the Electro Dragon.
A tornado of wind for Zander, the Gale Dragon.
A swarm of green fog for Blaine, the Fume Dragon.
Around Daxxton, the fire exploded outward, morphing to white frost as it expanded to keep his body shrouded, a body that was also growing. Even as he reached his full size, the white clouds turned dark gray and lightning began to flicker through them.
Daxxton felt the power of his dragon body infuse his core as the change was complete, and he launched himself upward before the protective cover had even begun to dissipate. The storm clouds were flung to the earth by his huge wings, the thin burnished gold membranes lifting him easily into the sky.
As the lightning hit the stone circle it turned to gold and rushed outward in a perfect circle until it reached the edge of the standing stones, where it evaporated into thin air.
A split second later, five other dragons of varying sizes followed him into the sky. They were all Guardians of Cadia, protectors of their homeland. When Daxxton had said playtime was over, they knew. Something was up, and whatever it was, there was no time to waste explaining it.
Daxxton didn’t speak until the six of them, split into two wings—one headed by himself, the other by Blaine—were winging to the east at best possible speed.
“There’s a situation developing along our eastern border,” he said, his dragon snout able to mimic the human language, though it gave it a distinct sibilant hiss to it that would throw off anyone not used to hearing it.
“What kind of situation?” Blaine asked.
Daxxton eyed his second-in-command. “A tricky one. Apparently, the Princess of Tanith is coming to visit.”
There were rumbles of surprise at the mention of that.
“And she’s being pursued by what she believes to be a Fenris hit team.”
All of a sudden everyone was fully alert and keyed in to the situation.
Tanith was a minor shifter territory to the southwest of Cadia. Fenris was a major—no, he corrected—it was the major shifter territory after Cadia itself. It was almost directly to the west of Cadia, on a separate continent. Tanith had long been neutral between the two superpowers, favoring neither one nor the other, but working with both.
So why was the ruler of Tanith fleeing Fenris agents, and trying to enter Cadia on the opposite side of a least-distant course?
“There are a lot of questions, I know,” he said. “I gave you all the information I possess, however. With the current disposition of the Guardians,” he practically spat the sentence out, “there is no force close enough to be able to make a difference. Our mission is to get to the border, and secure the princess.”
“And what about the Fenris hit team?” Asher asked after a moment of silence.
“Get to the border, secure the princess. Those are the mission objectives,” Daxxton replied.
“And if the Fenris team won’t let us do that?”
Daxxton’s yellow dragon eyes narrowed into vertical slits. “Then we deal with them. Permanently.”
There was silence as he waited for anyone to challenge his decision. Ordering his team to eliminate Fenris agents was a big step up from the tensions that had been racking the two political entities lately. It had, for the most part, been single incidents here or there that could be blamed on one individual.
This was different. This could be, in some circumstances, taken as an act of war. Daxxton hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but he was, first and foremost, a Guardian of Cadia. Despite the way the Cadian Council had practically dismantled the Guardians of late, reducing their numbers drastically so that the borders were closer to a sieve than a wall, Daxxton still believed in their original mission. Keep humans out, and unruly shifters in. It was for the best.
“Sounds like a plan,” Blaine rumbled, and the others all chimed in. None of them liked the idea of Fenris agents trespassing onto their territory.
They continued on in silence, the ground sliding by swiftly underneath their bellies as their powerful wings drove them forward toward the eastern border, a land of forests and trees. That included the mighty Vallenwoods, trees that rose up nearly two hundred feet into the sky, dwarfing anything around them with their thick boughs, each tree boasting dozens of branches bigger than the other trees nearby.
It was the land of the bears, and they still did a fair job of maintaining the border as best they could with the limited resources now allocated to them. But this wasn’t a fight they could win.
Although Cadia was a democracy, many of the other shifter territories were not. Tanith was one of those places, and it had an older style of rule. A monarchy. And in any shifter territory, it inevitably became dragons that ruled the monarchy. Tanith was no different. The princess was a dragon, as would be her security team.
Which meant that the team coming after them would be made up of dragons as well. Daxxton had the utmost respect for the bear shifters and their Green Bearet training program, their equivalent to Top Scale. But simply put, bears were not a match for dragons. It was up to him and his team to stop this, hopefully without any bloodshed.
“I see a cloud of dust,” Blaine said in a surprised voice. “Are they coming by ground vehicle?”
“It would appear that way,” Asher said.
“Yes, they are in motorized units,” Daxxton confirmed.
Using cars or similar vehicles was generally anathema to shifters, who preferred to travel in their animal forms, unless it could absolutely not be helped. That worked well within their own strongholds. Out in the human world however, they were not allowed to assume animal form without express permission. So it was always an odd sight when shifters arrived at the borders of Cadia in vehicles.
Blaine spoke again as the
dragons drew closer “I see another truck behind them, closing fast.”
“They’re almost at the border,” Asher said, his voice urging them on as the dragons began their descent.
Daxxton eyed up the situation. “The pursuers are going to overtake them right as they reach the border. Hopefully they will break off.”
They didn’t.
“Shit,” Asher muttered dully as figures piled out from both vehicles and spread out, the telltale colored clouds rising up as they prepared to shift.
“Dive!” Daxxton ordered even as the first breath weapons spat back and forth at the two sides.
Tucking his wings in flat to his sides, the Aurum Dragon plummeted from the sky. Behind him, his team mimicked his motions, the six of them swooping on their quarry like prehistoric birds of prey right out of a nightmare.
***
Miranda
The car bounced along, its suspension not made for the course they were currently taking.
“Tell me again why we came this way,” she muttered, just loud enough for the other occupants of the car to hear.
It was a rhetorical question, one that didn’t really need answering, but one of the other occupants decided to answer.
“We came this way, my—”
A cross look made Nolan reconsider what he’d been about to say. He very carefully did not smile, though she could see his cheeks flinching as he fought the urge.
“You know we came this way,” he began again. “Because it seemed like the smart option at the time.”
He also was very careful not to point out that she was the one who had argued in favor of taking the long, scenic route in an attempt to throw off the pursuers they’d expected to have.
After all, she thought with a glance at another occupant, it wasn’t often that the Princess of Tanith left the protection of her own enclave. By heading in the almost opposite direction of their intended destination, the princess’s security team, including Miranda, had hoped they wouldn’t be as concerned.