Verdant Magic: A Standalone Dragon Shifter Adventure (Dragon Mage Chronicles Book 1)

by Aimee Easterling

  “Not my problem,” Amber muttered quietly as she slipped inside. It was dark within the building, electric lights a thing of the past. Without sight to guide her, she fixated upon a rustling in the walls that brought to mind squirrels—or rats. The air smelled of mold and damp and Amber jumped as a droplet of condensation landed on the exposed skin where hair parted atop her head.

  Fumbling at Nicholas’s tablet, she brightened its screen until the glow was sufficient to light her way. This was no time to be spooked by shadows. Onward, she told her feet, listening to heavy boot soles clatter against what had once been ceramic tiles and was now a jumble of roots and rot.

  According to her mother, the seed vault lay in the basement, so she pushed deeper in search of stairs. The original builders had planned for catastrophe, although none of them could have imagined a Change quite so dramatic as the one that had actually occurred. Still, they’d figured that earth itself would help refrigerate their life’s work if the worst happened and society collapsed around their ears. So there was hope that, even twenty-nine years later and without electricity to keep them cool, the seeds might still be viable deep within their shrink-wrapped casings hidden in the underground vault.

  Amber had initially intended to head straight to the source as soon as she reached the stairwell, but an anguished scream froze her footsteps. Sarah. The woman had been silent ever since her initial outburst, and Amber had hoped the wily old woman had merely yelled in the first place to make her presence known in case rescue was on its way. Now, though, there was a layer of terror and pain coloring the distant shriek that sent Amber running up instead of down, dashing through shambles of abandoned office desks and lab equipment, then hanging her entire upper body out a broken window on the very top floor.

  The sight that met her eyes was both beautiful and horrifying. Beautiful because who wouldn’t be inspired by sleek dragons spinning through the air with flames wreathing their wings? Who wouldn’t be awestruck at the sight of a draconic contest of keep away, writhing vines pressing upward as the Green fulfilled the role of goalie.

  Horrifying because...well Sarah appeared to be the ball.

  Baine was tossing the elderly woman with all the enthusiasm of a psychopathic ten-year-old deep in the grips of a sugar high. Amber hadn’t thought dragons could laugh, but the black beast cackled his glee, toying with his opponent as he pretended to fumble Sarah’s terrified form before clasping her once more to his unyielding chest. To Zane’s twin, this wasn’t a life or death battle. It was merely a game, a way to pass the time between murdering earth witches and flaming forests to cinders beneath his widely spreading wings.

  In stark contrast, the red dragon darted forward, hesitated, then backpedaled over and over again. For all his grimness, Nicholas apparently had a soft side—and the object of his affections was stuck in his opponent’s massive claws.

  Despite the lump that settled into Amber’s throat each time the older woman fell unsupported through the air, though, the Watcher would have turned away and fulfilled her own duty first. After all, she didn’t possess wings. She couldn’t fly. There was nothing she could do to turn the tide of the battle in Nicholas’s favor.

  But something told her the red dragon hadn’t noticed the squadron of shifters rapidly approaching along the northern horizon. Friends of Zane’s? Amber hoped so. But Baine was too clever to toy with the elderly woman out of mere spite. No, their enemy was killing time waiting for reinforcements to show up...and Nicholas had played directly into his hands.

  “We need to end this now,” Amber muttered. And even as she spoke, she abruptly knew which seed to choose.

  “XM1007.” The name sprang into her head in Poppa’s raspy voice. “If I was going to slay a dragon, I’d definitely start with XM1007.”

  Momma had merely laughed. “The goal isn’t to slay a dragon, Harold. The goal is to make earth safe for humanity.”

  “And you don’t think that’s the exact same thing?”

  Amber shivered as the memory of her parents’ nearly forgotten conversation rolled through her head. XM1007 had been considered a dead end by the original scientists. In the Before, when machines powered the world and magic was relegated to fairy tales, the plant had appeared purposeless, perhaps even counterproductive. Who would want to breed a crop that sucked electricity out of the air and used that energy in the place of sunlight to boost electrons to a higher valence level, giving roots and leaves the oomph with which to grow?

  Now, Amber found her feet clattering down the same steps she’d so recently walked up even as emotions fought against her rational mind’s conclusions. Yes, XM1007 would be just the ticket to save Sarah’s life. Assuming the plant grew quickly enough, it could overcome the enemy dragons with ease and shield the elderly woman from further harm in the process.

  “But it’ll make the Fade even worse...” At the bottom of the stairwell, the vault door stuck, and Amber was forced to kick out with the sole of one borrowed boot to jolt the rusted hinges into motion. Gradually, the door swayed open to reveal a pitch-black room full of dank, mildewed air.

  Amber hesitated in the entranceway. She couldn’t bear to imagine the expression on Zane’s face if she deployed a plant that not only hated dragons...but also ate their most basic self alive. Would she even be able to warn Nicholas in time for him to flee, or would her lover’s brother become a casualty sacrificed on the altar of her own convenience?

  Despite weighty misgivings, though, Amber found herself moving forward yet again, racing down the row of carefully labeled drawers. Had Momma herself stenciled some of these letters and numbers onto metal bins that survived the apocalypse and the experimenters’ own passing?

  Fingers paused as they drifted across the front of the drawer housing TR-series seeds. Nicholas had been opposed to this safe bet, and Amber knew the plants would do nothing to save Sarah now. But she suspected one of the TRs—maybe TR8734—could prevent the illness from sapping her lover’s strength. If she possessed only a single opportunity to experiment before enemy dragons destroyed every seed remaining within the vault, shouldn’t she germinate a selection that might save Zane’s precious life?

  “Don’t doubt yourself,” Poppa had told a much younger Amber one summer afternoon as they practiced focusing the enchanted looking glass high atop the Watcher’s spring willow. “You’re half scientist and half dreamer. That means you think with your head and at the same time know with your heart. So trust your gut—it’s almost certainly right.”

  “I sure hope you knew what you were talking about,” Amber said, her words echoing dully in the underground room. There was so much to lose—Nicholas’s budding friendship, Sarah’s kindness, the safety of Greenwich itself.

  Zane. His golden scales gleaming in the sun as he frolicked on air currents.

  Zane. His unwillingness to think ill of an earth witch even when all evidence appeared to be stacked in another’s favor.

  Zane. His glorious touch, the gilded hour they’d spent atop the Intrepid sharing in each other’s love.

  So much to lose...and also so much to gain. Perhaps that’s why Amber took a deep breath and walked past the easy choice, the safe choice. Fingers trembling, she brought Nicholas’s tablet a little closer to the row of drawers to make sure she was reading each label correctly.

  There it was—“XM series.” Then, a scrawled notation in her mother’s own hand. “Balance?”

  “It’s the right decision,” Amber told herself, slipping fingers beneath the indentation that formed a handle in the drawer’s metal front.

  Even through yards of earth and half a mile of distance, she could hear Sarah scream again. This cry was even more harrowing than the first. They’d run out of time...and the choice was made.

  Refusing to doubt her selection a second time, Amber pulled with all her might. And she nearly knocked herself off her feet when the drawer remained resolutely shut.

  Chapter 28

  Despite the building’s secure construction, w
ater dripped from the ceiling as chilly stone drew humidity out of the air. Water droplets beaded on the hairs of Amber’s arms and each breath sucked in enough moisture to ease her parched throat. No wonder the drawer had rusted shut.

  “I could use a little earth magic right about now,” Amber grumbled, fidgeting with the collar that had already chaffed a sore spot along the scruff of her neck. But she didn’t have time to run through the building hunting for a match, so brute force would have to do the trick.

  Bracing herself against the wall, she yanked even harder the second time around. Sure enough, metal screeched against metal, the drawer came loose in her hand, and small plastic packets scattered across the floor. Dropping to her knees, Amber began to search.

  For an agonizing moment, XM1007 appeared to be missing. Had one of the original scientists harbored the same instinct Poppa had about the seeds? Had the experimenter stolen a single packet while leaving his place of employment for the very last time, died with precious propagules clenched in one unyielding fist?

  But no. Turning over the final foil-lined packet, the letters Amber had despaired of seeing materialized at long last. “XM1007.” Dragon killer.

  There wasn’t time to gather up the rest of the XM series from where they lay scattered across the damp floor. No time to slide the drawer back into place, to carefully pull the vault’s swollen door shut behind her so wild animals wouldn’t find their way inside. Instead, Amber merely clutched her weapon in one sweaty hand while sprinting for the stairs as fast as her legs would carry her.

  Thumb and forefinger worried the scrap of plastic as she pounded upwards, ever upwards. The seeds were so tiny she could barely feel them through the protective sheath. Tiny was bad—tiny meant slow to grow and easy for weedy neighbors to squash.

  The entire Green was a weedy neighbor.

  And as Amber considered the sentient network of life she’d spent her entire life placating, another potential stumbling block made her wince. Would the Green embrace XM1007 just as it had so many trees and vines, mushrooms and grubs from the Before? Or would it reject both plant and Watcher when faced with a competitor introduced into its self-proclaimed domain?

  Panting, Amber pushed doubt from her mind as she crested the final rise. Outside the nearest window, the scene was even more dire than it had been a few moments earlier. Four additional dragons had arrived, their scales dreary browns and grays rather than the brilliant reds and yellows of the beasts who considered Sarah their own. Wild dragons. Somehow Amber knew in her gut that these dingy fliers were not Zane’s friends.

  Then, as she watched, her worse fears were confirmed. The newcomers must have arrived only seconds before her because Baine was still in possession of the elderly woman whose limbs dangled rag-doll floppy while her head lolled as if she’d already broken her spine. Now, though, the black dragon tossed his prey higher so she could be plucked out of the air by a brown beast who didn’t bother sheathing his claws. A long gash formed along Sarah’s right arm and Amber could feel the pain as deeply as if those talons had stabbed through her own flesh.

  But Sarah wasn’t dead...at least not yet. Because the wound bled—bled far too freely for comfort, in fact. Now the older woman had yet another reason not to make it through the endless afternoon alive.

  Nicholas must have come to the same conclusion because he harried the brown dragon relentlessly, darting behind to nip at the latter’s tail then dashing away before his opponent could muster the energy to retaliate. The red flier was smart and fast, but his motions were slower than they had been when Amber first ran toward the vault. Meanwhile, flame dripped out of deep rents along Nicholas’s side, the energy flowing away like Sarah’s oozing blood.

  One against four, the defender wouldn’t last much longer. Neither would the woman he hoped to save.

  “When in doubt, slow down and do it right,” Momma had told Amber a thousand times. And, sure, her mother had been admonishing a round-cheeked child to double check her measuring spoons when baking cookies, or had perhaps been warning a studious teenager to read over her data twice before entering it into the computer. But life-or-death battle wasn’t so very different from scientific protocol. Amber needed to make every second count...and that meant taking a deep breath and doing everything right the first time around.

  So she turned away from the terrible battle and backtracked in search of the blob of pink goo she’d noticed near the top of the stairwell during her ascent. With the dratted collar around her neck, it was unrealistic to think she could use her own earth magic for sprouting seeds. But if Amber could just get those tiny specks of potential to stick in the middle of Charlie’s power-infused ring, then she might be able to send XM1007 into the heart of the battle in time to save Sarah’s rapidly disappearing life.

  The ancient wad of chewing gum was just where she remembered it, stuck to the underside of the railing near the top of the steps. Had some scientist’s surly offspring loitered there, bored stiff during a bring-your-child-to-work day? Had a cleaning service somehow missed the sticky debris day after day until a wave of greenery cut off the clockwork routine of modern human life? With so many potential ways for the gum to have gone missing, it was hard not to imagine that the earth had stuck the used-up treat there just for her.

  Scraping gum loose was an easy matter, but massaging it back into stickiness proved far more difficult. Spit and finger action did nothing, the gob of plasticky ick slipping between fumbling fingers and nearly dropping away into the endless stairwell below.

  Grabbing her prize out of the air a millisecond before it fell, Amber gritted her teeth and went for the easy—if unpalatable—solution. Twenty-nine-year-old spit isn’t going to hurt me, she thought, sticking the gum into her own mouth to masticate into submission. The lump tasted vaguely of cherries and she tried not to imagine that same hypothetical child picking his nose and nibbling on boogers between every bite.

  At last, though, the gum became stretchy and pliable, just like the treat Momma had described from the Before. The newly flexible gob fit easily into the center of Charlie’s walnut ring, clung nicely to the XM1007 seeds she scattered across its surface like poppy seeds on a bun.

  Cupping the damp combo between shaky fingers, she breathed a bit of her own nearly absent magic across its waiting surface. And, instantly, stockpiled energy surged to life. Seed coats split and tiny rootlets reached into the sugary binding agent in search of nutrients. Maybe if she was lucky, the seedlings would manage to grow once they made contact with true soil on the forest floor....

  At the window, Amber didn’t allow herself to gasp at the sight of Sarah once again plummeting toward her death. She ignored the enemy dragons ripping and clawing additional slashes into the red beast’s battered hide.

  Instead, she yelled at the top of her lungs, giving her mate’s brother fair warning. “Nicholas, fly away now!”

  Then she flung Charlie’s ring, her parents’ memory, her own betrayal, directly toward the black dragon who had regained his prize and once more clutched Sarah in two enormous paws. Because Sarah was Zane’s heart, and Amber would do anything within her power to save the other woman’s life.

  ***

  XM1007 started off slow. For thirty achingly long seconds, Amber thought nothing would happen as the ring plummeted through the air and disappeared into a sea of greenery waving against currents of beating dragon wings.

  Then, abruptly, it grew.

  The experimental species wasn’t based upon a single plant like most of the scientists’ endeavors. Instead, it boasted the speed of a vine and the stability of a tree, all mixed in with a strawberry’s ability to root at nodes and reproduce without bothering to bloom and beg pollen from its neighbors. Add in a propensity for soaking up the least stray hint of electricity to fuel its explosive growth and the hybrid became a force to be reckoned with.

  Spiky leaves poked out of the undergrowth first, followed by vining tendrils that dug into nearby plants and pulled themselves erect at th
e expense of their neighbors. With so many dragons overhead, the forest sizzled with energy and XM1007 used that power to turbo-charge itself into growing faster and higher than any citizen of the Green.

  As the spiky plant neared the battle above, the lowest enemy dragon flickered like the glow of a failing light bulb. One second the gray beast was hovering five feet above the canopy. The next, it plummeted into XM1007’s iron grasp and popped into nothingness amidst a billow of scattering ash.

  Fade times ten.

  Poppa had been right—XM1007 was the anti-dragon. But could the plant act quickly enough to grab Sarah from her captors before the latter flew away? And would it bother to cradle the descending human gently enough to save her life as she fell?

  Across the distance that separated them, Amber met the red dragon’s eyes. Nicholas didn’t appear happy. Didn’t look like he appreciated her quick thinking that was already turning the land below into a zone antithetical to dragon life.

  Well, nothing she could do about that now. Instead, Amber backed away from the window and descended to a middle level where she’d caught sight of lab hoods, benches, and other scientific paraphernalia as she rushed past. Sure enough, tucked away in one cobwebby corner was an ancient Bunsen burner. And there beside it was an assortment of the tools she so badly craved—a source of fire to burn the collar away from her aching throat.

  The first lighter was empty, though. And the second had rusted so thoroughly that Amber abraded her thumb as she attempted to bring even tentative flames to life.

  When she’d almost lost hope, the third rasped against rust and flared brightly into much-needed fire. Fingers shaking, she held the lighter up under her chin...and singed sensitive flesh even as she toed off boots with shuffling feet.