by Kayla Wolf
”Fine, no thanks to Dad.” Olivia glanced over her shoulder. “I saw him flying off when I was coming home. Did you two fight already?”
”Not exactly,” David said, shrugging. “He wants me to go live on some patch of land up North.”
”Oh, good! We hoped he’d come around to that conclusion.” Olivia smiled. “Sorry for not letting you in on the planning, but we figured if he’s going to force you to come live with us, we could at least make sure you’re not living right on top of him.”
He had to admit, his sisters had a point. The idea of living back home in the valley had been suffocating to him for a long time, but being a few miles away from his overbearing father did make the prospect feel more bearable. “Thank you. For doing that. You’re always taking care of me.”
”You’ve always got your nose in the clouds, we figured someone should have an eye on the ground level,” Olivia said wryly, pouring herself some tea.
And William was as good as his word. After they finished their tea, David set out with his sisters in tow to inspect his new home. It was only a couple of minutes by wing, but he couldn’t help but frown as they swooped in for a landing, shifting back to their human shapes for a thorough appraisal of the land.
”It’s definitely—something,” Olivia said blankly, staring around at the rocky, arid landscape.
Rosaline, ever the optimist, was tapping her feet on the rock. “It’s good rock! Easy to carve into. You’ll have a nice cave system sorted out in a few months.” Dragon claws were sharp enough to carve rock—it was how the network of caves the dragons lived in had been hollowed out, thousands of years ago. David had to admit he wasn’t thrilled by the prospect of doing that kind of work himself.
“It’s a few hundred acres,” Olivia was explaining. They were standing on a ridge, looking down over land that sloped and rolled down towards a flatter section towards the bottom of the valley. “Good size for a farm, if that’s something you’re interested in.”
”Would anything grow here?” David said doubtfully, looking around. He liked the idea of growing things, but the landscape didn’t seem particularly amenable. “Do you know how Dad even got hold of this land in the first place? I’d never heard anything about it.”
”You know Dad,” Rosaline said, shrugging. “He’s a dragon. He hoards things. He’s got the paperwork that says he owns it, so he’s proud of it.”
”He said he got it from someone,” David said, squinting around. “A long time ago. Seemed pretty offended when I asked who.”
”Well, you know Dad,” Olivia sighed. “Gets offended when someone looks at him sideways, these days. Speaking of, we’d better head back. Recon mission successful?”
David looked around at the land… then, habitually, his eyes drifted upwards. The sun was starting to set, and the thick cloud cover of the day had cleared. It would be a clear, bright night.
”I’m going to stay for a little while,” he decided. His sisters made their farewells, and he watched them shift forms and head back home, their iridescent scales glittering in the sunset light. He’d never seen two dragons fly so close together—every wing stroke seemed like it was going to herald disaster, but somehow Olivia and Rosaline never quite managed to hit each other. As the sun set, David found a rock to lean his back against and gazed up at the stars. The view of the sky here wasn’t bad, ringed by the tips of the mountains on the other side of the valley.
“Is this a good idea?” he murmured aloud. Among his vast collection of books on the cosmos and the stars had been a strange little tome that dealt with the ancient art of prophecy—with particular focus on the stars. He wasn’t so sure he believed any of it… but he had to admit, there was something tempting about the idea of being able to figure out his future just by gazing at the stars. He’d been in love with the sky since he was a child. Could the answers really be up there, waiting to be deciphered?
He stayed out a long time, but he had no fresh answers by the time he finally flew back home.
Chapter 2 – Quinn
”Quinn, do we really need to dredge all this up again?”
Quinn gritted her teeth, resisting the urge to run her hands through her short black hair. It was an old habit, a gesture of frustration, and her father knew her well enough that he’d recognize it as such and start escalating the argument. Still, her hands twitched as she calmly took a sip of the fresh orange juice she and her father were sharing on the back patio of their farmhouse.
It was a beautiful morning. It was always a beautiful morning down here—if you liked the heat, that was, and huge blue skies that went on forever. Quinn didn’t mind it, exactly, but a part of her had always known, deep down, that this wasn’t home. She always felt better in the winter, when the nights would get freezing cold. Sometimes she’d step outside, under the twinkling blanket of stars, and let the freezing air sink deep into her bones. A part of her always craved snow, for all that she’d lived here in the Mohave Desert for most of her life.
“It’s not about dredging anything up,” she said now, trying to keep her voice level. “There’s new information, Dad. It’s worth talking about, isn’t it?”
”And how exactly did you get hold of this new information?” Charles said, raising an eyebrow at her as his gray-blue eyes narrowed suspiciously. “By dredging.”
”I didn’t dredge! I went to a shifter meet-up, that’s all. Like we should have been doing for decades now. It’s bad enough we live out here in the middle of nowhere, we can’t keep isolating ourselves socially as well—”
”It’s not the middle of nowhere, it’s our home.”
”Dad, you know that’s not true.” Quinn sighed. She’d wanted to avoid dragging up old arguments about their past, but she’d also hoped her father would have expressed a little more interest in the information she’d discovered at a recent meet-up of shifters in the area. “Our home’s back in Colorado.”
”Quinn, I know you’re still angry. I’m angry too, I promise you, but… home is where the heart is, isn’t it? I have this beautiful home we built, I have the garden… and I have you. What else could I need?”
She sighed. Charles knew exactly how to tug at her heartstrings when she was developing a head of steam—and he knew it, too, his gray-blue eyes twinkling. “Fine. This is home. Whatever. But Dad, there’s a new king! That means there’s a chance we could talk to him, explain what happened, get our ancestral home back. Don’t you want that? Don’t you want to go back home, see all your old friends?”
He ignored those pieces of bait. ”A new king. Reagan’s son?”
”That’s what the wolves said.” She’d met with a few delegates from a nomad pack that travelled all around the center of the continent, gossiping as they went. In exchange for a few crates of fresh fruit, which Quinn had been more than happy to provide, they’d shared all the details they knew of the political situation in the valley that had once been her family’s home. “From what they said, he’s very different to her. He’s making a lot of changes around the place. He married a human, for a start.”
That caught Charles’s attention. The old dragon leaned forward across the table. “A human?”
”Yes. And his brother married a wolf, and his sister a bear—”
”You’re joking. And what did Reagan have to say about all this?”
Quinn hesitated. She hadn’t wanted to bring this part of the story up. “She died, Dad. A few years ago. The wolves said there was a sickness in the valley, something to do with some prophecy, or…”
”Poor Stephen,” Charles said quietly, and Quinn could see that his eyes were far away. She let him have his space, trying to quell her own impatience. He was an old dragon, and old dragons thought slowly… but she knew he had a lot of unresolved issues with the dragons from the valley that she’d always thought of as home. He must miss it back there, she knew it—for all that he claimed that he was as happy as he could be, living out here in the middle of nowhere, tending the impossibly lush garden th
at surrounded their desert home. He’d spent his whole life in the valley. The dragons back there were his friends, his community, his family. She couldn’t stand to see him isolating himself like this. All because of the machinations of one dragon.
”Maybe we could go back and visit?” she said hesitantly. “Offer congratulations to the new king, condolences for the loss of the queen? Just because Reagan sent us away, doesn’t mean we can’t go back and visit—”
”I don’t want to visit,” Charles said, and his voice was full of pain. “I don’t want to see what he’s done to our home—”
”I thought this was our home.”
”It is,” Charles said fiercely. “I don’t—I don’t want to go back there, Quinn. I know you’re still angry, I know, and trust me, I understand. But I can’t—” He took a deep breath, and she could see him working to steady himself. “I don’t want to face him.”
Quinn tried not to keep track, but she knew it had been at least a century since they’d been displaced from their family home. She’d been so young then, barely old enough to shift forms. All she could remember about their old home was the stream that ran from its source deep in the belly of the rock, out into the sunlight and down to a crystalline pool at the bottom of the valley. She’d swum there as a child, laughing and playing, the pure, cool waters bathing her skin. One day, her father had taken her to the water’s source.
”This has been in our family for longer than anyone can remember,” he told her. Set deep in the stone, she could see the gleam of something gray-blue, something surprisingly close to the color of her eyes. Her father’s eyes. The eyes she shared with her family. “It’s an ancient artefact, the source of the water here, the source of the richness and fertility of the land.”
”It’s a rock,” she’d said. A practical child. Charles had laughed.
”It’s a lot more than a rock, Quinn. It’s old magic. Even older than the magic that lets us shift from dragon to human.”
”Cool,” she’d said. “Can I go swim now?”
Years later, her father had returned to the cave, alone, to retrieve the stone—and then they’d taken flight, all three of them. Quinn, Charles… and Sarah, her mother. It had been Sarah who’d chosen their eventual resting place, after the longest flight of Quinn’s young life, deep in the heart of the Mohave desert. It had been Sarah who’d drawn up the plans for a home that would house all three of them, while Charles planted a garden to grow food for them to eat. And it had been Sarah who’d disappeared overnight, not long after their move, leaving no sign at all of where she’d gone, or why.
Quinn tried not to think about her mother. She knew it only caused her father pain. And when she did think about her, all she could summon was anger and disappointment. How was she supposed to believe in love, in soulmates, in the importance of family, when her own mother had left her mate and her daughter without a word?
She couldn’t believe in love. But she could believe in justice. And she knew who was to blame for the injustice of their expulsion from their family home.
”We have to face him,” she said to her father now, trying to keep calm even as her pulse pounded angrily in her ears. “We have to go back to reclaim what he took from us. Dad, he stole our home! He forged papers and stole our home from underneath us—”
”It’s in the past,” Charles said, and there was something so broken in his voice that she almost cried. “Leave it there, Quinn. We have a home. We have the artefact and a flourishing garden that provides everything we need. What’s the good of dragging up all that unpleasantness?”
”Dad—”
”I’m going to go and check on the orchard,” Charles said abruptly, rising to his feet so quickly that his chair skittered out from beneath him. “I think you have chores to see to as well, hm?”
And just like that, he was gone, stiff-legged strides taking him down the porch steps and away through the raised garden beds that grew their supply of vegetables towards the orchards that lay on the far side of the farm. Quinn ground her teeth as she watched him go—then ran her hands through her hair, trying to vent some of the frustration she felt. It didn’t help. She gathered up the glasses they’d been drinking from and took them inside, the cool air inside the house soothing her skin. Yes, it was a beautiful home they’d built—they’d been here for centuries, of course they’d made it comfortable. But it wasn’t home. It would never be home, not truly. Not as long as William was still back in Colorado, presiding smugly over the land that had once been theirs.
She knew her father took a little comfort in the knowledge that the land would not have fared well without them. The reason William had coveted it so much, from what she could gather, was the richness and fertility of the land, the way almost any plant would grow and prosper there. But what William didn’t know was that that fertility came from the clear, pure waters of the artefact that they had brought with them when they’d fled. Without that water source, the land would be arid and rocky, devoid of the life William had so coveted. Quinn hoped, savagely, that it grated on the old dragon, that it kept him up at night. It would serve him right for what he’d done.
She only knew the story in fragments, which was a big part of what was so frustrating about it. Her father didn’t talk much about the old days, about the dragons from the valley that had been his friends and close community, so she was forced to hoard the tiny tidbits of information she did receive like rare and priceless gems. She knew about Reagan, the old queen, golden-eyed and magnificent, who’d presided over the community for centuries. She knew Reagan and her mate Stephen had three children—twin boys, Alexander and Samuel, and a daughter, Helena. Quinn supposed she’d met them a few times. She had a few distant memories of glowing golden eyes… but then again, that could have just come from her imagination, from visualizing the stories her father had told her. Alexander was the king of the settlement, now, after the death of his mother. That was strange. Dragons didn’t tend to die of natural causes. Most other species of shifters did, and humans, of course—but for dragons, old age was no death sentence.
Quinn often wondered if her father bore Reagan any resentment for what she’d done. It was Reagan, after all, who’d expelled them from the settlement. It was William’s fault, of course. William had forged paperwork, from what her father had said, that he claimed proved his ownership of their family’s ancestral home. Sarah and Charles had fought that claim fiercely, of course, and the resulting unpleasantness had prompted the queen, always firm in her decisions, to send them away from the valley altogether. It was hard to get Charles talking about it, and when she did, there was always the risk that he’d do what he’d done over breakfast—simply get up and walk off into the orchards to calm himself down. For all that she appreciated her father’s calm spirit, sometimes she worried that he repressed his feelings too strongly.
Then again—maybe he had good reason to do so. One area she could never get him to talk about at all was the subject of her mother. All she knew was that it was highly unusual for a dragon to leave her mate like that, let alone her family. Weren’t mates supposed to be destined to be together? From the way the shifters at the gathering had talked about their mates (she’d overheard more than a few conversations while she was there—shifters did love to gossip when they got together) finding your mate was a pretty significant part of life. But nobody had ever talked to Quinn about it. The only person who could have clearly found the whole subject far too painful to even go near.
Did that mean there was someone out there, waiting for her, Quinn wondered as she washed the dishes? Was that how it worked? It seemed to be the case. But it just sounded ridiculous. There was some shifter out there who was predestined to fall in love with her the minute they met her? Really? And she’d feel the same way? She almost wished she’d spent more time at the shifter gathering finding out about soulmates—but she’d been so interested in finding out about the new king that she’d tuned out a lot of the more idle-sounding gossip. She supposed sh
e could always ask her father to tell her a little more about it. But for all her frustration with him, she couldn’t bear to bring any more pain to his face.
Well, there would be plenty of time to find out about soulmates later. For now, she had more important things to deal with. A centuries-old injustice, for one thing—she needed to find a way to get their land back. Her father had clearly given up on the idea. She couldn’t blame him, for all that frustration seethed in her chest at the thought of it—the fight had died in him, and that was fair enough. He was an old dragon, and he’d been through a lot. Time for her to step up. She was his only daughter and heir, and with her mother gone, it was going to fall to her to find a way to reclaim their home. To go back to bright stars and cold, crisp air, to the stream she remembered from her childhood, tumbling down the slopes of her valley home. To snow in the winter and cool breezes in the summer, away from this brutal heat and red horizon.
And maybe, she thought to herself—for all that she usually tried to suppress those kinds of thoughts—maybe if she managed to get them home again, to rebuild the life they’d once had… well, maybe her mother would come back again. Quinn heaved a sigh as she finished putting away the clean dishes. Her father had been right. She had chores to do.
Maybe while she worked, she’d be able to come up with a better plan than simply storming back to the valley to demand her birthright back from the dragon who’d stolen it.
Chapter 3 – David
“David, do you really need this many books?”
David ducked his head a little sheepishly. Olivia had discovered his boxes of books—his sister was standing with her hands on her hips, examining the piles that he’d tried to put in an unobtrusive corner of their home.
”I’m a dragon,” he tried to justify it. “We hoard things, right?”
”I don’t hoard things. Neither does Rosaline.”