Brittany set down the last Charmed Star Ale for the giggling group of wizards, and then turned to make her way through the kitchen toward the back exit.

“I’m gonna take a five minute break, Joe,” she called to the other bartender. He nodded in her direction, not the least bit fazed by being left alone at a busy bar on a Friday night. He was used to running this whole show by himself. In fact, it had taken him a few days to get used to actually allowing Brittany to help serve customers. The first night Brittany had worked here, he’d jumped ahead of her when she went to take someone’s drink order, and hadn’t even seemed to realize he was doing it. Gradually, he’d gotten better at sharing the workload, but he still seemed to prefer to do it all himself when possible.

Soon enough he’d be back to doing it all himself. No one but Joe and Brittany knew, but Joe had given Brittany this job because he planned to open a second location of the Winking Wizard. The first one had done so well that he wanted to expand the business, but this meant training a bartender to work at the second location. Joe had chosen Brittany as his trainee, and she could hardly wait until she got to take over at her own location. After years of bartending, Brittany was finally going to be a “boss,” not just another bartender. She was grateful to Joe for the opportunity, especially because it had come in the middle of a war. Not too many people were expanding their businesses or hiring new employees right now. Things were going well enough for the Torch Lake army, but that didn’t mean victory was as certain as some seemed to think. If the last Great Dark War had taught Brittany anything, it was that evil often grew stronger just when you thought you’d beaten it. A war wasn’t over until it was over, and most of the business owners in Torch Lake understood that.

Joe understood, too. But he’d told Brittany that, in his opinion, opening a new pub was never a bad business move.

“Look,” he’d said when he hired her. “If the war goes badly for us, people are gonna want to drink their sorrows away. And if the war goes well, they’re going to want to come out for celebratory drinks. Either way, the Winking Wizard’s gonna do well.”

This made sense to Brittany, and she’d signed on as Joe’s apprentice. She’d been working at a pretentious downtown bar before, and she was happy to get away from that. She hadn’t quite expected to be hit on as much as she had been at the Winking Wizard, but at least the guys who hit on her here were more her type. The guys at the downtown bars who hit on her had all been stuffy corporate types who thought their money made them irresistible to women.

Kind of like dragon shifters always think being a dragon makes them irresistible to women.

Brittany let out a long, exasperated sigh as she made her way out the Winking Wizard’s back door. She hadn’t actually dealt that much with dragon shifters. The whole group of them seemed to prefer the Winking Wizard to any of the downtown bars, so this was the first time she’d dealt with them in person. But she’d heard plenty about them. Women who got tipsy at bars often talked your ear off, and just about every woman in the city had wanted to tell Brittany the bartender about having a crush on this dragon or that dragon. It was enough to make Brittany hurl.

“Just because they’re dragons,” she said aloud to the empty dark space behind the Winking Wizard. “Honestly, there are plenty of other shifters and wizards around. What makes the dragons so special?”

Brittany had never understood the infatuation. Yes, the dragons were objectively the most handsome men around, and they did all have high positions working for the government. But at the end of the day, they were still just the same as any other shifter, as far as she could tell. And the way they always seemed overly full of themselves drove her crazy. If there was one thing Brittany couldn’t stand, it was someone who was too full of themselves and needed to be taken down a few notches.

Brittany breathed in deeply, enjoying the feeling of fresh air in her lungs. Inside, the bar was stuffy, and full of the normal Friday night smells of wood, sweat, and beer. But out here, the night air smelled like rain. There were several clouds rolling in from the west, and Brittany bet that it was going to rain within the hour. That was good for business. Everyone who was coming to the bar tonight was already out, and they weren’t going to want to leave in a rainstorm. A lot of beers would be sold before closing time.

Brittany took another deep breath and sighed. She should go back in, but she wanted just another minute or two of peace before facing the crowds again. Joe was handling things just fine, she was sure. He probably hadn’t even noticed she was still gone.

Brittany wondered if Simon had noticed she was gone. She’d purposefully not looked in the direction of the dragon table all night. She’d seen him walk over there in a foul mood after she rejected him, and she wasn’t interested in making eye contact with him again. She supposed he was right in one sense. As the last single dragon, he was without a doubt the most eligible bachelor in town. She should have been flattered that he wanted to take her out, but Brittany prided herself in not following after the crowd—and swooning over a dragon shifter was definitely following after the crowd.

Brittany was about to turn and go back inside when a strange movement caught her eye in the trees behind the Winking Wizard. A dozen yards from the back door of the winking wizard, the open space around the building gave way to dense forest. Now, on the edge of that forest, a small, rounded black shape appeared to be slowly scooting out of the trees and toward the bar.

Is that a person? Brittany felt a chill of fear. It could not possibly be a person, could it? She had to go look, and yet she was afraid to. What if it was a person, and they were badly injured? If someone was moving that slowly along the ground, something wasn’t right.

Taking a deep breath to steady her nerves, Brittany inched across the empty space toward the black blob. As she moved toward it, she could hear whimpers coming from beneath the black blanket. Her heart froze at the sound. This was definitely a human, and, if her ears could be trusted, it sounded like a human child. Brittany had no idea how a child had ended up here in this state, but she knew she had to help. Rushing forward, she bent down to pull back the black blanket. That’s when she realized it wasn’t a blanket at all, but a bag. Her stomach turned. This child had been put in a bag and dumped out here, it appeared. Who would do such a thing?

Brittany pulled back the bag and got her first glimpse of the poor kid’s face. Even in the cloudy darkness, she could tell that things did not look good. Dark splotches of blood covered the child’s face, and his hair was tangled and matted with blood as well. It looked like deep gashes had been cut in his face, and his breath was coming in short, rasping gasps.

“Help…me,” he pleaded.

Brittany patted his back and tried to sound reassuring. “Shh. It’s ok. We’re going to get you some help. I’m going to go get someone from inside to help me and we’ll carry you to a car and get you to a hospital, okay?”

The child reacted in terror to this suggestion. “No! Please don’t leave me alone! They’ll find me. They’re coming back for me!”

“Who’s coming back for you? What are you talking about?”

“The bad men. They left me in the woods tied to a tree but I got away. But when they come back and realize I’m gone they’re going to come after me. Don’t leave me!”

Brittany wasn’t sure what to do. She had to get this boy some help, but she didn’t think she was strong enough to carry him back to the Winking Wizard. She couldn’t just stay out here with him indefinitely, though. He needed medical attention, and soon.

“I’ll just be a minute,” she said reassuringly. “Nothing’s going to happen while I’m gone.”

“No, don’t leave me!” he pleaded, and tried to reach for her hand. But he was weak and slow and couldn’t quite grab it. It broke Brittany’s heart to leave him there, but she told herself it was for his own good. She would be back soon, and when she came back she would be able to reassure him that more help was on the way.

She sprinted back toward the Winking Wizard’s back door, wondering how in the world this had happened. Who in Torch Lake would have done this to anyone, let alone a child? Torch Lake wasn’t perfect, but it was full of good people with good hearts. There was almost no crime, because no one tolerated people who acted like jerks. And there definitely wasn’t violent crime, like a child being beaten up in the woods.

Brittany’s stomach turned. Was it possible that some of the Dark Warriors had gotten into the city somehow? No, that couldn’t be! There had been some security breaches a few months ago that had resulted in some Dark Warriors getting into Torch Lake and attacking some citizens, but ever since then the guards around the city had been beefed up tremendously. No one could have gotten past them.

But try as she might to reassure herself of this, Brittany could not shake the growing fear deep down inside of her. She ran as fast as she could, but turned to look at the boy one last time just as she reached the door to the bar. What she saw made her heart stop.

A dark shadow, about the size of a large man, was creeping out of the woods toward the boy. Brittany instantly knew that the shadow was up to no good, and she ran toward it as fast as she could, screaming, “Stop!” at the top of her lungs.

At the sound of her scream, both the boy and the dark shadow looked up. The shadow did belong to a large man—a bear shifter, if Brittany had to guess. What she didn’t have to guess about, though, was that this man was up to no good. He must be the “bad man” that the boy had talked about.

The boy started crying at the same moment that the man started to shift. Brittany had no idea what to do. She was no soldier. She was a bartender, and the bars around here were pretty low key. No one ever got into fights, and Brittany had never had to break up any bar brawls. She knew a little bit about magical self-defense, but only from the basic classes she’d taken in high school, and that had been more years ago than she wanted to admit.

Still, she felt she had no choice but to try to help this boy. He was completely helpless and she couldn’t turn a blind eye while this shifter tormented him.

“Magicae arma!” Brittany yelled out as she approached the boy. The shield spell buzzed up around her, and she felt a small measure of relief. At least she could still manage a few moves. She had been the top of her class in magical self-defense, so maybe all of that studying was finally going to pay off today.

But almost as quickly as Brittany’s confidence rose, it evaporated. She saw that she had been right—the shifter was a bear. A large, angry grizzly bear. He snarled at Brittany, and she cowered as she hoped that her shield would hold against him. But he didn’t actually attack her. It wasn’t her he cared about. He wanted the boy.

“No!” Brittany screamed as the bear lunged toward the boy. And then in desperation she called out, “Help! Is there anyone out there who can help me?”

But she had little hope of an answer. The clouds were just starting to let loose their rain, so no one was loitering in the parking lot. And it was far too noisy inside the bar for anyone to hear what was going on outside. If Brittany wanted to save this boy, she was on her own.

“Magicae appugno!” she yelled out, lifting her magic ring and pointing it at the bear. She hadn’t used this attack spell since her final exam for her magical self-defense class, and she half-expected it not to work. It did work though, and laser-like light beams leapt out from her ring and toward the bear. He howled in pain, but he did not slow for long. With another angry growl, he once again lunged toward the boy, who was crying hysterically at this point.

Brittany gritted her teeth together and prepared to try again. “Magicae appugno!” she yelled. Again, her attack stopped the bear in his tracks, but again, only for a moment. Brittany tried not to panic. She knew that if this was all she threw at this shifter, he was eventually going to overcome her attacks. As it was, he was gaining ground in between each of her attacks. Brittany racked her brain trying to think of a stronger, better attack spell, but her mind felt numb. In desperation, she yelled out the same spell again. “Magicae appugno!”

The bear once again stopped, but only temporarily. Brittany was just gathering her strength to repeat the spell another time when everything changed.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, she heard an angry roar unlike anything she’d ever heard before. The sound sent chills down her spine, and she hoped with all her might that whoever had just roared was on her side, not the bear shifter’s. When she turned to look, she felt a rush of relief. The roar was coming from Simon, that obnoxious dragon shifter she couldn’t wait to get rid of earlier. Now, in this moment, she thought she’d never been so happy to see anyone in her life. He was shifting as he ran toward them, his dragon form already stretching out his body and leaving his clothes in piles of little shreds. His dragon hide was thick, and shimmered with iridescent colors when a flash of lightning lit it up. His tail and wings were spiked, and his horns and teeth looked sharper than anything Brittany had ever seen before. When he breathed in and then let his breath out in a stream of fire, she was in awe. She hadn’t actually seen a dragon shifter in dragon form before, and she had to admit that it was impressive.

Okay, so maybe all those chicks who are into dragons are onto something after all.

The bear shifter was impressed, too, but not in a good way. With a yelp of terror, the giant grizzly took off running into the forest at a surprisingly fast pace for a beast of his size. He didn’t stand any chance against Simon’s dragon, though. Simon went charging into the trees after him, snapping branches as he went. Brittany wasn’t sure what to do, other than kneel beside the crying boy and try to comfort him.

“Shh, it’s okay. You have a dragon looking out for you now. No one’s going to hurt you.”

The boy’s cries died down somewhat, but he still whimpered. Brittany herself was trembling. She had no idea how her five minute break had somehow turned into this strange life-or-death situation. She realized suddenly that she’d probably been gone about fifteen minutes now, but Joe probably still hadn’t noticed. That struck her as strangely funny, and she laughed. For some reason, her laugh seemed to calm the boy. He looked up at her and stopped whimpering, his eyes wide.

“You have a pretty laugh,” he said.

Brittany was touched. “Thank you.”

“Am I…am I going to be okay now? Really?”

Brittany smiled. “Yes. You are. Grizzly shifters are pretty fierce, but they still don’t stand a chance against a dragon.”

The boy’s eyes widened even more. “That’s the first time I’ve seen a dragon in person. I’ve only seen them on TV before.”

Brittany leaned down toward the boy. “Want to know a secret? It was my first time, too. It’s a pretty cool thing to see, huh?”

The boy managed a smile, but before he could reply, a crashing sound came from the woods. Brittany looked up, startled and hoping she wasn’t about to have to fight again. But when the figure crashing through the woods came into view, Brittany breathed a sigh of relief. It was Simon, in human form once again. He had a grave expression on his face, and she couldn’t help but notice the fact that he was stark naked. She awkwardly tried to fix her eyes on his eyes, avoiding looking at his body, which she had noticed was quite muscular from head to toe. Shifters were used to seeing people naked all the time, since they always lost their clothes when they shifted. But despite living in the same town as shifters for the last several years, Brittany still hadn’t gotten used to the idea of randomly seeing people naked. Especially not when the naked person in question was an undeniably gorgeous dragon shifter who had been hitting on her just an hour earlier.

Simon, of course, didn’t notice or care that his nakedness made Brittany uncomfortable. He jogged toward them and quickly bent down to check on the boy, furrowing his brow as he did a physical assessment of the child. Then he turned to Brittany and started giving orders.

“Go inside and go find the dragon shifters. You know the table where they all sit?”

Brittany nodded. Anyone who had spent more than one night hanging out at the Winking Wizard knew where the dragon shifters’ usual table was located

“Good. Go tell them I’m outside and need their help with an urgent matter. Don’t say more than that, and try not to let anyone else hear you. I don’t want the whole damn bar coming out here and gawking. After you’ve talked to the dragon shifters, call an ambulance so we can get some paramedics to get this kid to the hospital and take care of him.”

Brittany nodded and ran to do as she was told. The dragon shifters didn’t question her when she said Simon needed her. They rose quickly, leaving their beers at the table and heading outside. A few people raised eyebrows at their departure, but most people were already too tipsy at this point to wonder too much about why all the dragon shifters were suddenly leaving.

After Brittany called an ambulance, she went back to the bar to find Joe, who, as she’d suspected, hadn’t even noticed that she’d left. She probably could have asked and gotten permission to just leave for the night, if she told him something important had come up. And part of her did want to go out and see how the boy was doing, and thank Simon for his help. But another part of her felt like she’d just be in the way, and would feel horribly out of place amongst the large group of dragon shifters. And so she took her place behind the bar again, acting like nothing unusual had happened. On the outside, she looked perfectly calm. But on the inside, she was a jumble of nerves and emotions.

And the scariest emotion was the one that was making her think she’d been wrong to reject Simon. She’d believed for the last few years that all the dragons were just a bunch of stuck-up brats, but what Simon had done tonight had been anything but bratty. He’d stepped in and saved a child that Brittany herself had been doing a piss-poor job of saving.

Brittany realized that her hands were trembling, and she did her best to push away all thoughts of Simon and the boy. If she was going to make it through this work night, she had to act like nothing had happened.

But something had happened. And for Brittany, that something had changed everything. It had opened her eyes to how dragons acted in the moments that really mattered, and it had made her wonder if she’d been wrong to brush Simon off so quickly.

She vowed that if she ever got another chance to go on a date with a dragon, she would take it. But she wasn’t too hopeful that she’d get that chance. After all, she’d blown Simon off completely, and he was the last available dragon in town. Odds weren’t good he was going to come running back to her now.

Or were they?