Dragon Born 1: The Shifter's Hoard

by Dante King

  I glanced down at my metal-sheathed claws. “Why, would you prefer it was something else?” I asked with rakish good humor.

  Carli’s eyes narrowed. “Not like that,” she insisted. “Could you summon the metal outside yourself, instead of all over your body?”

  It felt like an interesting idea. I unsummoned the spell, allowing the metallic casing around my fingers to dissolve into thin air. Reflexively, I made fists out of my claws like someone shaking off the cold, though my fingers flexed as easily within the magical glove as they had outside of them.

  I concentrated, picturing a ball of metal floating in the air before me. It felt very important to keep focused on that mental image—to not allow the spell to choose where its energies manifested, but to guide it. For a few moments, it felt like herding cats as some unseen resistance pressed against my mind—then it burst like a dam, and the air before me shimmered into a new form.

  Thousands of tiny flakes of metal levitated over Carli’s living room table, hanging together in a loose sphere.

  “I did it,” I said, glancing over at Carli to see her pleased reaction. “Now what do you want me to do with it?”

  Carli didn’t answer at first. She rose from the couch and pressed a hesitant finger against the side of the loose sphere, pressing this flake and that one out of the way. As soon as the pressure left, the flakes of metal snapped back into formation, like geese flying south for the winter.

  “Very cool,” the Raiju shifted purred, hands on her hips. “That first scroll Soojin gave you taught you telekinesis, right?”

  I laughed. “You’re damn right it did,” I said, the idea occurring to both of us at the same time.

  Up until that moment, I’d had no idea whether mages could handle two spells at the same time. I figured it was like trying to handle two women at the same time—fun as hell, but deadly dangerous at the same time.

  With a mental push, the ball of pebbles soared across the room. I twirled it in a wide circle, pushing the formation into different shapes as I did a quick fly-by of Carli’s furniture.

  Now it was a spider’s web—now a long cylinder like a bottle rocket.

  Moving it around felt almost effortless, and I wondered how much of that had to do with the metal being of my creation. It felt easier to manipulate something I’d created with a spell, versus shoving a couch or a table out of the way.

  Finally, the ball of metal landed on the coffee table. Carli clapped her hands like she’d just seen a magic trick, then pivoted into her next request almost immediately.

  “You should make it into a weapon,” she whispered, her voice husky with arousal. “Could you make a sword?”

  I had no idea—but since she’d asked so sweetly, I’d have to try. Moving each individual piece of the puzzle increased the complexity. I felt my brows furrowing together as I moved metal against metal, focusing as hard as I could on the final form of a sword.

  It didn’t work. Instead of fusing together, each individual piece attempted to lengthen into the form of a miniature blade. The calm, sedate looking paperweight I’d deposited on Carli’s coffee table now resembled a tangle of thorns.

  Disappointment filled me—but Carli’s reaction couldn’t have been more different. She picked up one of the long, thin pieces of metal, testing her finger against the tip. It pierced the pad of her thumb, leaving a small drop of blood behind.

  “Fuck,” the shifter whispered. “Hang on a second.”

  Before I could ask her what she was doing, Carli raced from the room. She headed down a side hallway, the sounds of her rummaging around echoing into the living room. A few moments later, she came back carrying a thick book, which she sat on top of the mini-fridge. A man in a black robe and a black-and-white mask stared at me from the cover, carrying a strange blade with a square edge where the point would normally be.

  “I want you to hit that,” Carli said, pouncing onto the couch next to me. “Let me see how accurate you are, Derek.”

  I cocked an eyebrow. “Are you sure? Those things’ll probably obliterate the book—”

  “I can order a new copy. Besides, I’ve read it a billion times. Show me your stuff!”

  Well, I thought. If you insist…

  The first shard ripped through the black-robed man’s mask, burying itself hilt deep in the cover. Within the span of a few heartbeats, a dozen more ringed the initial strike like arrows clustered around a bull’s eye. The book rocked backward and landed on the floor next to the mini-fridge, speared almost all the way through in more places than I had fingers to count.

  Silence reigned in the living room. Then Carli said in a choked voice, “Alright, Derek. You can unsummon it now.”

  The shards vanished.

  Carli went over to the mini-fridge and picked up the book, which now hung in tatters. She gave a low whistle as she flipped through the ruined pages, then carried the thing back to the living room and tossed it on the table.

  “You see how powerful magery is?” Carli said, shaking her head. “When you think outside the box, you realize how easy it is to create chaos with even the simplest powers.”

  “You almost sound like you wish you were a mage,” I said without thinking.

  Her blush told me I’d hit the mark closer than she was comfortable with. “There’s a sigil that gives shifters like me the ability to throw lightning bolts,” she confessed, whispering it like a secret dream. “The Lightning Strike Sigil. I’ve always wanted to claim it and pick up that Anatomical Form—it’d be the closest thing to seeing what being a mage is actually like. Fat chance I’m going to get the opportunity, though. Even Soojin says it’s a longshot.”

  Carli didn’t seem to want to talk much more about that. Even that short declaration appeared to have pained her. Not wanting to hurt her, I decided to change the subject.

  “You and Soojin seem pretty close,” I said, patting the cushion next to me. As Carli settled herself back down, tucking her tail beneath her fabulous ass, I asked: “How did the two of you hook up, anyway?”

  Carli’s brows furrowed together. “We’ve never hooked up, if that’s what you mean,” she said, sounding a little taken aback. Then something flashed in her eyes, and she got a cunning kind of look. “I’ll tell you the story if you answer a question for me,” she said, crossing one leg over the other. “Deal?”

  What was this, now? From the tone of her voice, the question sounded like it was going to be along the lines of, ‘can you take me in the bedroom and give me the greatest night of my life?’

  But I sensed a trap.

  “Sure,” I said, keeping my voice nonchalant. “You want me to go first?”

  Carli shook her head. “I’d rather get it all out there. You want another drink, first? It’s kind of a long story. Don’t think that I’ll forget about your end of the bargain, though. We’re going to have words once I’m done.”

  Hopefully we’d have a hell of a lot more than words.

  I leaned closer, letting Carli feel me against her. “Maybe one more,” I said, gesturing toward the bottle of fairy mead. “As long as it doesn’t bind me to anyone…”

  “You don’t like being bound?” Carli asked with a wiggle of her eyebrows. Oh yeah, she was definitely feeling her liquor. “I find it liberating, myself. Letting go and letting someone else tell you what to do…”

  I almost started telling her what I wanted her to do right then and there. But I wanted to hear her story first—and there was the matter of this question, besides.

  Both of us knew that. So as soon as she came back with two fresh glasses and poured us a final nightcap, I sat back and listened to Carli’s story of the night she met Soojin.

  The same night she got the powers of the Raiju.

  The night she almost died.

  Chapter 13

  “So, this all happened a few years ago,” Carli began, sipping daintily at her glass of fairy mead. Despite the fact that she was tipsy, she’d taken on a more serious tone. I could tell she wanted me to
listen to her—that telling it was important to her. “I won’t tell you how many years, mind you—that would be like telling you how old I am. And a lady never tells.”

  “I assumed you were eighteen,” I said with a smirk, putting a hand on Carli’s stockinged knee.

  “Ha!” Carli snorted. “What a charmer. So, let me ask you—you’ve met Soojin in her shop, right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “You’ve seen that damn radio she stays glued to night and day, then, yeah?”

  “I think I’ve seen something like that,” I admitted, remembering the scene I’d spied upon in Soojin’s backroom. A vague sensation of guilt flitted through my stomach at the memory, but I dismissed it. We were way past that now. “Definitely seen something like that.”

  “Well, if Soojin was telling this story, that’s where it would start. With the hunterwave, and with the call about a ‘freshly minted’ legendary shifter.” Carli paused, as if realizing she might have started her tale on the wrong foot. “This isn’t about Soojin, though,” she said, staring down into her drink. “It’s about me.”

  “That’s cool,” I assured her, wanting her to feel as comfortable as possible. “Go ahead and take your time, Carli. We’ve got all night.”

  The shifter brightened. “You’re right. My story starts with me getting back to the hideout. Not this hideout, of course—I didn’t get that until later. A lot later. My normie hideout.”

  “Didn’t think you had anything to do with normies,” I said, slapping her thigh playfully.

  “Yeah, well, this was a different era,” Carli replied, rolling her eyes. “Back then, Carli Weber was just another normie like everyone else. Don’t tell anyone.”

  I made a ‘zipping the lip’ gesture. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

  “Even back then, I worked as a private investigator,” Carli explained. “I never did get much out of college—Dad was more of a ‘graduate and go to work’ kind of guy, so my family didn’t really do the whole higher education thing.” She said it with a hint of shame, as if she should have felt bad about it. Belatedly, I realized she already knew about my college career.

  “It’s not for everyone,” I told her with a shrug, letting her know I didn’t think less of her in the least. “Besides, if you’d gone on and got some kind of degree, you wouldn’t be here right now, would you?”

  “Nope,” Carli agreed. “Anyway, that night I’d been out super late, working this case. You know those big warehouses they use to ship packages, where they make a final stop before they get handed to the mailman or whatever? Distribution centers, I think they’re called.”

  “Yep. I have a cousin who works in one.”

  Carli nodded. “This woman hired me to investigate her husband. She thought he was cheating on her with one of his co-workers. The problem was, he worked at one of these distribution centers—on the fucking graveyard shift. This place sorted and shipped boxes twenty four seven, literally never stopping.”

  “That’s how they get them to people’s doorsteps so quickly,” I said with another shrug. “Gotta suck being stuck on the night shift like that, though. Doesn’t justify cheating on your wife, though.”

  “That’s true,” Carli said. “Honestly, the client was kind of a bitch. But she was paying me, so I did stakeouts of the place for an entire week. Every day, this guy walks into a big, nondescript gray box, sits inside it for a whole shift, then drives straight home. The most boring routine imaginable. By the end of the first week, I was about to pull my hair out—until…”

  She drew the moment out, milking it for all the suspense it was worth. “You caught him?” I guessed.

  Carli grinned. “Friday, right around midnight, the goober clocks out all of a sudden. He comes out of the building—and this time, he’s not alone. He’s got some little Latina cutie dressed in the company uniform with him.” The shifter wiggled her eyebrows. “Not just a coworker, Derek. Management.”

  “Wow. What happened next?”

  “Well, they went to his car, parked it around the other side of the building, and… you know.” Carli made a circle with the thumb and index finger of one hand, then stuck the index finger of her other through it several times, in the universal sign language for ‘they boned.’ “I got the whole thing on camera, and was feeling pretty great about it. Best of all, it happened early enough in the shift that I managed to get back to my office before the ass crack of dawn. All I had to do was upload the photos, send them to the wife, and get paid. Another satisfied customer.”

  I heard the hesitance in her voice. “But something else happened on the way, right? You ran into a troll—or a shifter of some sort. Something that blew your ‘normie’ mind…”

  “Good guess,” Carli purred. She was really getting into this now—the girl had a natural flair for the dramatic. She made one hell of a good storyteller. “But no. I made it back to the office perfectly fine—except that I got soaked all the way through to my fucking skin. On the way back, a huge storm moved in, like something out of the freaking Bible. The kind of weather that makes you start looking around to see if you’ve got anything to build an Ark.”

  “I’m trying to picture you soaking wet,” I said, taking another sip of my mead. “Those clothes stuck to your body, moisture just dripping off of you…”

  “Perv,” Carli said, but she was grinning from ear to ear. “I’ll have you know I dried off as soon as I got into my office. At the time, it wasn’t much to look at—not like the wonderful Batcave I’ve got here. I wouldn’t stoop to working out of my apartment, as that’s too low even for a gumshoe with nothing to lose. But, ah… let’s just say I had to seek alternative means of finding office space…”

  I felt my brows furrow together. “What, like one of those work-share companies?”

  Carli hesitated, then something inside of her gave. The pleasant buzz of alcohol and arousal made her feel like she could trust me, so she confessed.

  “More like a storage locker,” the shifter said with a laugh. “The kind where they don’t lock the doors at night and they don’t check too closely whether people are staying in the units or not.”

  “Gotcha,” I said, trying to picture it. Rain pouring down in sheets, Carli swearing as she lifted a big metal shutter to reveal a tiny storage unit crammed with computers and other gumshoe equipment. It would’ve been cute if not for whatever must have come next.

  “I booted up the computer and started finishing the job,” she said. Suddenly, the jovial expression dropped from her face. “And then it happened.”

  I leaned in a little closer. “What happened?”

  Carli met my eye—then clapped her hands together right in front of my face.

  “Boom!” the shifter shouted. “Lightning struck!”

  I sat back, more dazed than I’d expected. This fairy mead was really getting to me. “Lightning struck what? The storage locker?”

  Carli shook her head. “No. It struck me. That shit arced right inside the storage locker, zapping my cute ass with thirty thousand volts. I ought to have been dead on the spot—nothing but a greasy smear where Carli Weber had just been standing. Deader than a doornail!”

  I frowned. “Lightning doesn’t go into buildings,” I said, cocking my head to the side. “Are you sure you weren’t standing outside?”

  Carli nearly spit out her drink. “That’s the part you’re questioning?” the shifter asked, getting up on all fours on the cushion. “It wasn’t ordinary lightning, alright! I’m getting to that part!”

  “Okay, okay,” I said, chuckling. She could really be cute when she was mad. “Go ahead.”

  “Like I said, I should have died. But I didn’t. Instead, it was like all my senses were ripped away in a single moment. All of a sudden, I wasn’t standing in my shitty storage locker office any more—I was above the clouds, and the sky was clear and blue. And standing there was…” Her expression changed. “Have you ever seen Godzilla, Derek?”

  “Which one?” I asked,
rising to the occasion. “The 1954 original, the awesome Hideaki Anno one from 2016, or the garbage version from the 90’s with Matthew Broaderick?”

  Carli looked stunned. “Damn, you know your monster movies,” the catgirl whispered. “Which one’s your favorite?”

  “Godzilla vs. MechaGodzilla,” I answered automatically. “But Shin Godzilla’s definitely up there. What about you?”

  Carli gave me a bashful look. “Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah,” she admitted, glancing away. “It was the first one I ever saw, on my Dad’s old VHS player.”

  “Wait, with the Futurians!?” I gasped, nearly spilling my drink. “Aww hell. If that was my first Godzilla movie, I dunno if I’d have watched any of the others.”

  “I was a kid!” Carli giggled, moving closer to me.

  Damn, had my knowledge of old kaiju movies actually gotten me closer to getting laid? I had to thank my lucky stars.

  “Sure, sure,” I said.

  “Anyway, that’s what it looked like. Except instead of a building-sized lizard, the thing that stood in front of me looked like Mufasa from The Lion King if you blew him up to the size of the Goodyear Blimp.”

  Now it was my turn to be stunned. “The Raiju?” I asked.

  Carli nodded. “In the flesh.”

  Wow. A legendary creature had visited Carli. Sounded awesome to me, but I figured there was some kind of catch.

  “What did it say?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “It didn’t say anything. Just zapped me with about a billion more volts, until the whole vision dissolved like soda going flat. I woke up laying on the concrete floor of my storage locker, sparks flying out of places I didn’t even know I had. My computers were fried—and the SD card I’d stored the client’s pictures on was borked beyond repair.”

  “Shit,” I grunted.

  “Ah, I didn’t really care about it. I was just glad to be alive. Besides, that’s when the flying monkeys came and started trying to kill me.”

  I stared at Carli as if she’d grown a second head. “Flying monkeys?”