Celtic Dragons

by Dee Bridgnorth

  “Damn, I wish we could just shift and fly back across to the harbor,” Siobhan said, taking a seat on the dock and propping her feet up on Moira’s lap. “We have to wait twenty minutes for the boat to come back?” She flapped an arm jokingly. “I mean, we do have wings, people.”

  “And it’s daylight,” Kean pointed out, poking her arm. “Ain’t gonna work. Can’t have five dragons flying around on a bright, beautiful Bostonian day.”

  “Especially not these two,” Ronan said, pointing to Moira and Eamon. Moira’s dragon form was flame red, and Eamon’s was a brilliant white, and neither of them could hope to have a chance of blending in. Eamon almost glowed in any form of sunlight, and even in the dark cover of night, he was always the one at most risk of being seen.

  But he agreed with Siobhan. Eamon was the one who was more at home in his dragon form than his human form, and he longed to walk to the edge of the dock, jump into the air, and shift above the water, letting his powerful wings take him higher and higher into the clouds until he simply disappeared.

  That was as close to heaven as Eamon ever got.

  Chapter Two

  Autumn

  Slipping her feet into brand new running shoes was like heaven.

  After a fourteen-hour shift at the hospital, where she was an ER nurse, Autumn Pruitt had gotten off work just in time to pick up her two girls, Anna and Rachel, from their summer camp program and take them home for an early dinner followed by as much family time as she could possibly squeeze into the four hours before their bedtime. Working at the ER gave her the means to support her little family of three, but it also kept her away from her children a lot more than she wanted.

  That was why she always waited until they were asleep for the night before going on her run, something only made possible by her next door neighbor, Tamara, who was Autumn’s personal angel. Tamara’s husband had passed away three years earlier, after almost thirty years of marriage, and neither of Tamara’s two children lived in Massachusetts anymore. She was lonely, and when Autumn had moved in with Anna and Rachel after her own husband, Robert, had passed away, Tamara had taken the little family under her wing. She was there when Autumn had to leave in the middle of the night for work, there after the girls went to bed so Autumn could go for her run, and there for any other important thing happening in Autumn’s life. The woman was more than twenty years older than Autumn, but she was also her closest friend and something of a mother figure.

  Standing up from the edge of her bed, Autumn wiggled her toes in her new running shoes, admiring the two-toned blue design that showed off her tanned legs. Running was a release for her, and even though she was absolutely exhausted from working all hours, taking care of the girls, and keeping up the house, she wasn’t willing to give up this half an hour of time that was just for her.

  Autumn walked past Anna and Rachel’s room, peeking in to make sure they were still sound asleep. She smiled at the sight of her daughters’ faces, so like her own, sweet and still in sleep. There was nothing in the world she loved more than her daughters, and everything she did was worth it if it gave them the kind of life she wanted them to have.

  Blowing them kisses they wouldn’t see, Autumn slipped from the hallway and walked quietly to the front door, opening it to see Tamara leaving her house next door. She waved to the woman, who waved back and urged her on. One of the great things about Tamara was that she just instinctively knew what Autumn needed, and despite their closeness, the woman never overstepped. She was giving Autumn permission to go off on her run and telling her that everything would be all right with the girls.

  Autumn didn’t need to be told twice. Taking off at a slow jog, she quickly warmed up to a steady seven-minute-mile pace. Her usual path took her through her neighborhood, located in the suburbs of Boston, until she reached the main road, crossed it, and took the trail that cut through the thick forest bordering her neighborhood. The trail was well-marked, and she lived in a low-crime area, so she felt safe running there—even after dark. Just in case, though, Autumn always kept pepper spray on the keys that were safely tucked in the pocket of her running shorts.

  As she ran through the trees, moonlight filtering through the branches heavy with green leaves, she felt the exhaustion of the day seep from her. With every landing of her foot against the soft dirt of the trail, she felt herself let go of the car accident patients she had seen at four that morning; the bickering between two of the other nurses on her shift that day, who she’d had to listen to for hours; the worries over her schedule; the traffic that had almost made her late to the girls’ camp; her guilt when six-year-old Rachel had asked her why they couldn’t spend more time together; the disappointment when her lasagna had turned out a little dry; and the way she had missed Robert when she had tucked the girls in to sleep that night.

  The wind tugged at her clothing and ruffled her auburn pixie-cut hair around the face that Robert had always described as doll-like. She picked up her speed, wishing that she could make her feet go so fast that she would just lift up off the ground, into the air, and fly.

  Autumn was in the middle of a fantasy in which she was doing that, soaring up through the trees and flying straight upward in a slow spiral, when she heard a strange sound that alerted her to the presence of at least one other person nearby.

  At first, she didn’t stop running. Though she rarely met anyone on this trail at this time of night, it wasn’t unthinkable that someone else might run after dark as well, and Autumn didn’t want to be reactionary, even if she did feel an immediate thrill of fear.

  There was another rustling, and this time, because she was listening for it, Autumn noted that it wasn’t a sound being made by someone on the trail. Whoever or whatever she was hearing was in the thick of the trees, walking amongst the shrubs and long grasses that surrounded her.

  She gulped, but reminded herself that it could just be a small animal…or someone who was lost…or someone…

  Autumn couldn’t come up with any other explanations off the top of her head, and her hand went into her pocket, closing around the pepper spray waiting there.

  The rustling happened again, but closer this time, and Autumn had to admit that she was truly afraid now. At any moment, someone could jump out at her, and her one-hundred-ten-pound five-foot-two frame was not going to be able to put up much of a fight if she was grabbed or dragged. Her daughters’ faces filled her mind, and she cursed herself for creating even the remotest of chances that they could end up without either parent. What had seemed perfectly reasonable just minutes ago—running along her favorite, well-used trail—now seemed like the most irresponsible thing she could have done.

  The darkness deepened, and the forest grew deeper, and yet Autumn didn’t dare stop running, knowing that if someone was tailing her, her only hope was to outrun them. She had good speed and excellent endurance, and if she didn’t stop moving, then maybe whoever was behind her—

  The rustling happened at her left side, and she almost screamed, clamping a hand over her mouth to stop herself just in time. It sounded to the right, and her stomach lurched up into her throat as she realized that there wasn’t just one person nearby but unseen—there were at least two. Maybe more.

  She ran faster, her heart hammering, and up ahead, she saw a light to her left. It was too far away for her to see what was creating the light, but she immediately began to run toward it, knowing that where there was light like that, there was someone creating that light. Someone who wasn’t chasing her. Someone who, surely, would help protect her from whatever seemed to be surrounding her, closing in all the time.

  The seconds passed like hours, and Autumn kept her eyes on the glow ahead of her and her ears open, tracking the rustling that was now prevalent on both sides of her. She was running as fast as she could when she finally reached the glow, stumbling through the trees and into a clearing, almost falling to her knees as she came to an abrupt stop in front of an enormous bonfire.

  The light was so bright
once she was in the clearing that Autumn stumbled backward, raising an arm to shield her eyes from the sudden light, and at first she didn’t notice the people on the edge of the clearing. But as she got her bearings and began to look around, she realized that the safety she’d been rushing to was actually the source of her fear. On either side of her, people emerged from the woods—clearly the source of the sounds she’d been hearing. But they weren’t dressed like her. They weren’t fellow runners who were out enjoying the night air.

  They were dressed in hooded robes, their faces just peeking out beneath the heavy brown fabric, and the glow from the fire eerily illuminated the lower halves of their faces.

  At first, neither the people emerging from the woods, nor the people standing on the far side of the clearing, seemed to notice that Autumn had intruded, and as she stared, jaw dropped and eyes wide, a few of them began to approach the fire, holding their hands up and chanting. The low sound of their collectively murmured words crept along her skin, and Autumn’s blood ran cold with an instinctive dread.

  She knew that she had to get as far away from them as she could before they saw her, but as she began to walk backward toward the tree line, one of the people who had emerged on her left turned his head and looked at her, lifting his head high enough that she could see directly into his eyes.

  His gaze narrowed, and he held a hand up to her, but Autumn knew it was no kind of greeting. It was some sort of attack—one that she didn’t understand but immediately feared. Abandoning subtlety, she turned and ran back in the direction she’d come, her feet thundering along the trail again, but without the release of tension and worry. Every muscle was rigid with fear as she ran, and when she heard someone behind her, she realized that she was running for her life. Her only hope was her lifelong fitness. If the person behind her was the man she had seen, then he was older and, from what she could tell through his robe, not terribly fit.

  But he might not have to rely on his speed.

  The thought came out of nowhere, and Autumn didn’t even know what it meant. She didn’t have time to think about it though, as her legs shook with effort, her lungs screamed, and her heart lurched from her stomach to her throat. All she could think about was getting out of that forest, and the path that had taken her twenty minutes to run down took her less than ten to run back.

  When she stumbled through the trees and back onto the main road that went past her neighborhood, she almost couldn’t believe it. The street lamps and the sight of the familiar houses ahead of her almost made her cry, but as much as she needed to stop and catch her breath, she didn’t. She slowed as she crossed the street and entered her neighborhood, and when she saw her house, Autumn dropped back to a walk, her heart pressed to her chest as she tried calm down.

  In the normalcy of her neighborhood, Autumn immediately began to doubt herself. She was utterly exhausted. Had she hallucinated a clearing in the woods filled with a raging bonfire and a group of hooded people chanting? Things like that just didn’t happen in suburban Boston—she wasn’t sure they happened anywhere!

  By the time she walked up to her front door, she had almost convinced herself that it had been some sort of bad dream, and she turned around, staring in confusion at the forest. A sense of dread draped over her like a wet blanket, and her hand tightened on her doorknob.

  If that had been a terrible hallucination, then she might be going crazy. If it hadn’t been, then her backyard was a far more terrifying place than she had ever realized.

  Chapter Three

  Eamon

  Eight days of searching for the child whose father had insisted he was not safe in the care of his mother, and they had finally tracked him down. It had been heartbreaking for Eamon to watch the mother, however troubled she was, break down in tears as they took her son from her wreck of a hotel room. It was filled with too many illegal substances to count, days of fast-food wrappers and moldy leftovers, and plenty of evidence that she was making money through what she believed to be her one asset—her body.

  It wasn’t a safe place for a child, but Eamon could see that the mother did love her four-year-old little boy, and only the knowledge that Nicholas was going to be safer and happier with his father eased the pain that Eamon felt for the mother.

  It wasn’t always someone’s fault when their life became so out of control that their new normal looked so horrifying to the outside world.

  Eight days missing had been long enough for a court to reverse its ruling that the mother was an acceptable custodian, and now Moira was handling the final stages of the case, coordinating both with social workers and the police to make sure that everything was being handled correctly.

  For the first time since beach day had ended early, Eamon went back to his office without the weight of a child’s well-being resting on his shoulders. The others went elsewhere. Kean went to see Dhara, whom he hadn’t gotten to spend much time with during the past week. Siobhan went home to check on her animals. Ronan had left town several days ago, unable to see the case through due to some pressing appointment he couldn’t tell them about. He had left the case in their hands, as he often ended up having to do with big cases these days.

  Everyone else had somewhere to be, but Eamon was most at home at the office, so he ordered a pizza and had it delivered there, leaning back in his oversized desk chair and propping his feet up on the desk as he ate and streamed the local news on his computer.

  He didn’t hear the front door of the office building open, but out of nowhere, a hesitant “Hello?” reached his ears over the droning voice of the news anchor. Standing up, he shut down the streaming site and poked his head out his door, seeing nothing down the main hallway of the office. Hoping that it was a delivery person just there to drop off a package, he walked out to the entryway and saw a woman standing there, looking all around her, as though a person might somehow materialize out of the air.

  Eamon could only see her profile, but he got an instant impression of her as an energetic, determined, vibrant woman. It was an interesting impression, given how tiny the woman was. She was like a doll, just over five feet tall, he estimated, and lucky to be a hundred ten pounds soaking wet. Her dark brown hair was rich with red undertones and cropped close to her head in a pixie cut that flattered her neck and the delicate features of her face. He couldn’t see her eyes yet, but he noted that her nose turned upward at the tip, giving her an almost elfish look from the side.

  He had the strange thought that she held as much color as he lacked.

  And then she turned toward him, fixing him with chocolate-brown eyes surrounded by thick lashes and smiling hesitantly at him with full, rosy lips.

  “Hi. I just walked in. I know it’s noon. I didn’t interrupt your lunch, did I? See, I work as a nurse at the ER, and my schedule is…well, it’s a bit all over the place you could say. Sometimes I have to start a shift at one in the morning, and I get off in the middle of the day. It’s hard to keep a normal schedule, so I sometimes forget that the rest of the world is on a more rigid work schedule. You know, nine to five, with a noon lunch break. I didn’t mean to be rude, just walking in like that. I just have a problem that I need to speak with someone about, and I really don’t feel comfortable going to the police. You might laugh at me, too, but at least you can’t make an official public record of my insanity.” She laughed nervously, and then her smile dropped. “Or can you? Oh God, you think I’m a crazy person. My oldest daughter—her name is Anna—says that I never stop talking, and she’s right. The younger one—Rachel—she gets that from me, I’m afraid. It’s not a very attractive trait, I know. Wow, you are very…are you Swedish?”

  Eamon’s eyes almost bugged out of his head as he tried to follow the torrent of words that spilled from the parted lips he had just been admiring, and he struggled to figure out which question he should answer first. He wasn’t all that great at answering people’s questions anyway, but there were at least four or five different things in her statement that he felt required a re
sponse.

  He decided to just cut his losses and answer the most direct question. “No.”

  She blinked at him, then flushed. “I’m sorry. That was a rude question to ask. I didn’t mean it that way. You’re just very striking. Your skin and your hair…I’ve never seen someone who is all the same color before.”

  He laughed, surprising himself. “You’re a strange woman.”

  “I know,” she said, covering her face with her hands. “God. I’m just very nervous.” She dropped her hands again. “Not that I don’t talk too much all the time. Everyone says it. My husband did, when he was alive. He would tell me—’Autumn, you have to slow down. That’s too many things at once.’ But I do everything fast, you know? I work fast, I play fast, I run fast—I talk fast. But it’s even worse when I’m so nervous.”

  “Why are you nervous?” Eamon stepped back as he asked the question, gesturing with one hand for her to follow him down to his office. Clearly the woman had something troubling her, and he was suddenly less opposed to the idea of immediately jumping into another case.

  She hurried after him and started to answer his question, but she stopped short as she walked through his office door. “Oh, you were at lunch! I knew it.”

  “It’s okay,” he assured her, sitting back in his desk chair, closing the pizza box, then looking up at her and reopening it. “Want some?”

  Autumn hesitated then huffed out a breath. “Oh, why not? I’ve already intruded, so I might as well join in.” Reaching out, she stole a piece of his pizza and took a big bite, leaning back in her chair.

  Eamon smiled. He had ordered a meat-lovers pizza, and the bite she had just taken was laden with cheese, pepperoni, sausage, and bacon. That didn’t seem to bother the tiny woman in the slightest, and he had to admire that. “Go on,” he encouraged her, taking another piece of pizza himself. “You were saying something.”