Earth Born (The Earth Born Cycle Book 1)

by N. E. Conneely

  Shasta focused on the earth. This time it allowed her to feel what it was doing. The heat was being drawn away from the rocks around Cord. A moment later, the flow of energy stopped. Then the earth began drawing heat from the rocks in every part of the corridor. In a few moments the entire area was the same temperature it’d been before Branstan had to incinerate the undead snake creature.

  Good?

  Shasta patted the ground. Very good. Thank you for the aid.

  The earth sent a surge of happiness to both her and Cord. It didn’t communicate with Branstan, but the dragon didn’t seem to notice or care. Shasta slowly got to her feet, dusting herself off as best she could. Across the hall, Cord was doing the same thing, but the dragon still hadn’t moved.

  “Branstan, is there anything we can do for you?”

  “Let me rest.”

  Every bit of training she’d ever received said they should stick together, but they needed to examine the chamber at the end of the corridor and get out. The longer they stayed here, the more likely it was something else would come attack them or something bad would happen back in town while they were away.

  “Shasta, you go.” Cord tipped his head in the direction of the chamber.

  “I don’t know—that’s not how we were trained.” Though she had to admit training hadn’t really covered being on a supposedly peaceful assignment and then suddenly being attacked by a guy using dragons to fuel blood magic. Not to mention his undead serpent thing. Sure, Mom and Dad had covered how to deal with demons even though they were extinct, but this hadn’t been in the curriculum.

  “Training can’t cover everything.” For a moment Cord looked at the pile of rocks around him. “Besides, any girl crafty enough to figure out how to stop us from getting killed by superheated rocks flying through the air can hold off an enemy long enough for help to arrive.”

  She hesitated. There was no denying that of the group she was best suited to investigate the chamber. After all, she’d been in the room before. Even so, they would be splitting up.

  His voice grew impatient. “You know I’m right. Besides, contrary to everything your parents said, sometimes partners stick together and sometimes they split up because it’s the best thing to do.”

  Shasta picked her way over a pile of rocks, setting her feet carefully. She had a feeling he was talking about more than the cavern. “You aren’t always right, Cord.”

  “This time I am,” he called after her.

  The rocks shifted underfoot. She steadied herself with one hand against the wall. Rather than answering, she rolled her eyes, trained her flashlight on the next pile of rocks, and kept moving. After twenty feet of rough going, the spray of rocks slowly thinned until it was the same mostly level cave she’d traversed last time. As soon as she wasn’t in danger of falling, she resummoned her sword.

  When the cavern opened up around her, she stopped, sweeping the light across the space. The chamber had been rearranged. The area that had been devoted to torture or dissection was gone. Rather than the four cages that had been here before, there were now more than fifteen, each one of them large enough to hold her. A few of them were bent and broken, as if something had burst out of them. Mr. Evil had been busy.

  Taking a deep breath, she stepped up to the first cage. There was a dead humanoid male curled up at the bottom. If she had to guess, approximately twenty-five years of age, though without knowing his exact species it was hard to say. What she didn’t smell was decomposition, and she should have. She stretched out a tiny probe, far smaller than the one she’d used on the electricity spell. Sure enough, there were spells on the cages. It would take too long to figure out exactly what they were, but she had a pretty good guess. From the lack of bloating and smell, the spells on the cages were dampening odor and pausing decay.

  With that cheerful analysis, she pulled the tendril of magic back into herself and moved on to the next cage. It was another male. This time the skeletal structure had been altered, elongating the nose and jaw, and his back was hunched. Like the remains she’d found last time, he was some strange mix of human and something else.

  The next body was human-shaped and largely unaltered except for wings coming off his shoulders. Her stomach knotted as fear, dread, and a hint of understanding started to come together. She hurried to look at the rest of the cages. Each of the misshapen bodies was part human, but they all had different parts of a dragon. One had the talons and forelimbs. Another had a tail and paws where his feet had been. Yet another was some unsettling mix of both—skin of the human, wings and claws of the dragon, and grotesquely misshapen face that was both and neither all at the same time.

  She stumbled back. This was why Mr. Evil had been able to move so quickly. This was why he had a hunch and moved through the air as if he could fly. He was trying to change himself into a dragon.

  Her elbow hit something hard, and she whirled around. One side of the cage had been bowed open, as if something burst out of it. She lowered her light to the floor. That something was a dragon. But that didn’t make any sense because there weren’t any dragons missing. She leaned a little closer, flashlight focusing on the creature’s chest and head. This one was almost completely dragon, nearly twenty feet long, but the hands and eyes were human.

  She scrambled over to another exploded cage. This one was full dragon except for the eyes. The next cage had exploded differently. The body in there wasn’t completely dragon. It had a dragon’s scales and wings but the overall shape of a human.

  Shasta ran back to the corridor. “Branstan, Cord, you need to get in here.”

  Instead of waiting for an answer, she weaved her way through the massive cages, back to where the blood and bones had been. The vats of blood were gone. Not so much as a single cauldron remained. The bones, which had been cleaned and stacked, were now pitted. The holes were cylindrical, almost as if someone had used a big drill to bore into them.

  She closed her eyes as a horrible thought dawned on her. What if he wasn’t trying to make himself into a dragon? What if he was trying to create a new race of werecreature? She’d been taught from a young age that there were no werespecies that could shift between humanoid and a magical creature. They were all normal creatures, like cats, dogs, birds, but nothing like this. Nothing like a weredragon. “Oh no. Please not that. And not with blood magic.”

  Blood magic harvested from a dragon, generated from pain, fear, and death, couldn’t create anything good. By its very nature it could only create evil. Perhaps not the type of evil that legends were made of, but plenty bad enough to hurt and terrorize people. This type of blood magic was a vile abomination, an affront to nature, and its creations could not be any different. One thing the world didn’t need was a group of dragons—or worse yet, weredragons—who were fundamentally evil, incapable of having a positive contribution to the world, and physically indistinguishable from their natural counterparts. The police in the humanoid parts of the country weren’t equipped to deal with dragons. Not only did they rarely cause trouble but dragons policed themselves because most other species simply weren’t capable of dealing with a problematic dragon, at least not safely.

  “Shasta!” Cord bellowed.

  Branstan echoed him. “Shasta!”

  She should turn around, she should say something to them so they knew she wasn’t in danger, but she couldn’t. The evidence in this cave and what it added up to had her frozen. She’d always thought it was against some law of nature to mix magical creatures and humans. But this, this was why he needed dragons. He couldn’t use blood magic from another creature to create weredragons. He needed dragons. He needed powerful ones, and he needed enough of them to experiment with until he got the procedure right.

  Cord was in front of Shasta, hands on her shoulders, gently turning her toward him. “Shasta, can you talk to me?”

  She looked at him with horror-filled eyes. “But how did he get the humans here? He needed humans too. You can’t make a shifter from another shifter.”<
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  “What are you talking about?” His eyes darted around the room, still searching for danger.

  “The bodies. Look at the bodies.” She tried not to hear how empty her voice sounded.

  Without a word, Cord went to the nearest cage.

  She dismissed her sword with a turn of her wrist. The only danger here was information. Not only had Mr. Evil snuck into the Dragon Lands and been using blood magic drawn from dragons but he’d gotten test subjects here too. Then he’d used them to try to perfect his weredragon creation.

  Branstan hissed. “Abominations.”

  “I know, and later you can burn them, but right now you need to look at these bones.” The dragons had been able to identify Edgar’s remains. Branstan might be able to tell for sure if this was Ophelia. Considering his reaction to her scales, Shasta was sure Ophelia was dead, but they needed to know if Mr. Evil had managed to get his hands on more than one mature dragon.

  Branstan huffed but wormed his way through the cages. He slowed as he neared her, carefully stepping around the rock formations. Then he stopped, stretched out his head until the tip of his nose barely touched the bones, and hummed. The vibration filled the air, making her own bones resonate a faint echo of the sound. Cord returned, standing next to her.

  The hum shifted down a note, and the bones started to pulsate with light. At first the pulses were slow, one every few breaths, but then they sped up. In a matter of seconds the flickering was so fast she was forced to close her eyes. Even through her eyelids, she could see the light fluctuations. Then in a flash that had her seeing spots through her eyelids, the light and humming ended.

  Shasta opened her eyes, blinking until the spots faded away. The bones were gone. At least Branstan had given that poor dragon an escape. The bones wouldn’t be stuck down here forever.

  Branstan sighed heavily. “That was the last of Ophelia. I can still scent her blood in the air. The monster wasted no part of her in his sick experiments.”

  “Do you think he managed it?” Cord’s voice was as empty as her own had been a few moments ago.

  “If he did…” Shasta couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence.

  Branstan hissed his words. “Then he could infiltrate us as a dragon.”

  “We have to get back. Now.” Shasta turned and started picking her way across the room.

  “Is there a way we can send word ahead of us?” Cord asked from behind Shasta.

  “I cannot think of a way that would not also have the potential to alert him,” Branstan answered.

  Shasta headed into the hall. “I think we need to get back. I don’t know how many of the dragons know each other, but this would change how you do security. Everyone would have to be vouched for by a few people who know them. You couldn’t even trust just one because the dragon could be under his control or one of his creations.”

  “Then we fly quickly.” Branstan hissed.

  Shasta turned to see him facing the room filled with misshapen bodies. “Can you burn it?”

  “I intend to, though it will be the last time I can produce fire today.” He rumbled. “It would be best if you waited at the top of the path.”

  Shasta wasted no time in following instructions. She and Cord scrambled across the mounds of rock that the earth had so kindly cooled for them and jogged up to the area she thought of as the living quarters. She stopped and looked back. She couldn’t hear anything from down there, so whatever Branstan was doing was quiet for the moment.

  Cord turned his attention to the tables. He quickly pulled open drawers and shuffled through papers. “Help me look for more evidence.”

  She forced herself to turn away from the lower portion of the cave. She wished another dragon was with them, one who could help Branstan with this task and share in his pain. However, Cord had a point. There could be useful information here, and they’d skipped this area on their way down. She opened drawers in the table closest to the exit. The first were empty, but the bottom one had a stack of papers. She lifted them out and leafed through them. Most of it was in some type of code she didn’t understand. She started a pile of things to take with them for further investigation.

  “Look at this.” Cord trailed his finger along a page in a notebook.

  Shasta joined him and trained her light on the booklet. There was a series of diagrams, the sketched version of what they’d seen in the cavern, complete with labels. The human figure had arrows showing the progression from human to dragon and back again. Shasta gently flipped the page. For a moment she closed her eyes, wishing it was all a bad dream.

  “Specimen one. Success in partial changes, though dissection proved that they were primarily superficial.” She sucked in a breath. “Cord, the date.”

  “That’s when Edgar went missing.” He flipped through two more pages as the number slowly climbed. “We didn’t find this many bodies.”

  “There were different remains here last time.” She couldn’t voice the rest of her fear. That Ophelia hadn’t been the only powerful dragon taken, that she’d simply been the only one anyone had noticed.

  “Specimen sixty-two,” Cord read.

  A chill ran up Shasta’s spine. “I know dragons have very potent magic in them, but how many dragons have been taken to fuel at least sixty-two experiments on humans? Could Edgar and Ophelia have powered all of those?”

  “I don’t know,” Cord said softly. His eyes kept scanning the page. “Listen to the rest of the entry: Full internal and external change. Was able to successfully transition from human to dragon and back but unfortunately expired as a result of his efforts.” They were both silent as they looked at the entry. “Did he die from the experiment, or was he killed?”

  Anything she might have said was interrupted by a loud crack of rock splitting that echoed through the chamber. Both of them jumped, light swinging first toward the tunnel leading out of the cave and then to the cavern where Branstan was disposing of the bodies. A series of pops and low rumbles filled the air. In the distance, yellow light flickered across the opening of the tunnel. Branstan dashed out, skidding as he turned to scramble up the path.

  “There’s probably a record of the changes he made to himself in here.” Cord closed the book and tucked it in his pocket. “Get ready to run. If the fire is as intense as it looks from here, it could cause the cave to collapse.”

  “Running sounds real nice at the moment,” Shasta muttered as she walked over to the tunnel entrance.

  Branstan bounded to the top of the path. “Go!”

  She felt the ground under her tremble. Little bits of rock peppered the area around them. Shasta sprinted into the tunnel, only slowing when she had to carefully walk across the slender shelf of earth around the pit. When she picked up the pace again, Cord had moved up beside her, staying with her as they twisted and turned their way through the cave.

  Branstan was right behind them the whole time, urging them forward. Shasta kept expecting to see sunlight. The tunnel gradually lightened but never truly got bright. As they ran outside, Shasta realized the sun was sinking below the horizon, leaving them with the last bit of twilight in which to make their escape. Branstan slid to a stop, pivoting so that he was next to the saddle and packs. Cord tossed the saddle on Branstan’s back. Shasta started fastening straps and buckles. Cord added the packs to the back before helping her with the last few straps.

  The ground trembled as they finished saddling Branstan. Cord boosted Shasta onto the dragon’s back. She didn’t waste any time in securing herself. Cord had only gotten his legs tied down when Branstan launched into the air. Shasta grabbed the pommel and a fistful of Cord’s shirt. When Branstan leveled out, she let go and handed Cord the straps attached to the back of his seat so he could finish securing himself. If they were going to be attacked again, this would be the time.

  Branstan’s back muscles bunched under them as he shot through the air. Shasta wasn’t sure how well he could see in the dark, but she hoped it was enough to get them home safely.
To that end, she added prayers to the earth and moon to see them safely back to town. The other dragons had to know what they’d found.

  Slowly the hum of adrenaline faded away, leaving her stomach gnawing at her backbone. Shasta twisted around and managed to wiggle two sandwiches out of the pack behind her. Leaning forward, she tapped Cord on the shoulder. “Hungry?”

  “Ravenous. Can you get anything?”

  She pressed a sandwich into his hands. “Enjoy.”

  She was pretty sure she heard him grunt his thanks, but her own mouth was full of sandwich, so she didn’t really care. Her water was still clipped to the saddle, so they had enough to drink. She even took the wrapper from Cord and shoved both of them back into the pack.

  The little bit of twilight that had been around when they left the cave was gone now, leaving only the stars for company. She couldn’t stop replaying the horrible evolution that had been left for them to find. From human to weredragon. From what she’d seen of the blood sorcerer, he’d tried the experiment on himself and hadn’t quite gotten it right. Undoubtedly he was trying to fix his mistakes and give himself the abilities he’d been testing out on other people. The only important question right now was had he perfected the spell? If so, then he could be in the air with them. If not, then he was likely in a different hideout, trying out a new version of the spell.

  There was the added issue that he would need more dragons to continue his research. She didn’t know of any other dragons that were missing, but dragons were always heading off to explore some corner of the world or simply to do whatever it was dragons did. They didn’t really keep account of them, and it wasn’t unusual for a dragon to wander off for a while.

  It wasn’t just the cold night air that chilled her blood. He could already have his next victim. Right now he could be tucked away in some other cave, hacking away at some poor dragon for the sake of his sick experiments.

  A sharp whistle cut through her thoughts. Two higher-pitched whistles came back in response. Shasta looked around, but all she could see were large shapes moving through the air. Under her, Branstan angled himself down. There were no lights below, so they weren’t at the town yet. Whatever his reason, Branstan continued to glide to the ground, landing with a bone-jarring thump. She felt his body expand as he sucked in a deep breath. Then he spoke in a series of whistles and trills.