Cameron
It’s been almost a week since I heard from my sister. Nearly a week since I heard her voice, since I held her in my arms, since I tried to comfort her after the news about her husband. It’s been nearly a week and there’s still no word on whether or not she’s okay.
She has to be okay.
Still, as I make my way to the fourth stone tower, I can’t help but wonder if I’m missing something. Is there a chance she didn’t make it? Could the others in Fablestone be right? What are the chances that something has happened to her?
I can’t think that way, though. I can’t allow myself to believe that something horrible could have happened to my sister. I won’t. I won’t let myself think it.
Ellie and I have been close for…well, for forever. Growing up dragon wasn’t easy, and it was nice to have someone to talk to, especially since we were raised in the human world. Our parents thought it was important for us to be integrated with our classmates and human counterparts.
“We can’t hide away,” my father always said. “We can’t act like we’re ashamed of who we are.”
To him, dragons living in clans was distasteful and wrong. He didn’t like the idea that dragons would separate themselves from humans. My mother agreed with him. For a long time, I thought they were right. I didn’t mind living with humans or going to a human school. I didn’t often tell people I would one day be able to shapeshift. I didn’t like the idea that people might catch wind of who I was…
Of what I was.
But all of that changed when someone hired a shifter hitman to kill a high profile target: a senator. It was a bad choice for everyone involved. The shifter did his job, all right, but he was caught, captured, and the world suddenly changed. It didn’t matter that humans killed each other all of the time. Nope. All the world saw was that this one guy who had done something wrong.
All the world saw was that he was also a wolf.
He was executed immediately and almost instantly, rules and laws were put into place to protect humans from shifters. There was lynching, and there were witch hunts, and suddenly, it really was safer for us to go away and live in clans.
My father was devastated.
He’d worked his entire life to create a place where shifters could be happy, but it didn’t happen. He’d tried his best to create a universe in which shifters and humans could live side-by-side in peace.
It’s been twenty years since that murder.
Twenty years, and things are a little better for shifters, but not entirely.
Ellie and I both remember the good times. We both remember being free. It affected her more than me because she was older when it happened. Me? I was just ten: a scrawny little dragonling who hadn’t even gotten his wings, but Ellie? Ellie was 16 and bright and beautiful. She’d already learned to shift. She’d already figured out how she could use her dragon prowess to impress the boys she liked.
And then my parents brought us away into the darkness of the forest and everything changed.
We changed.
There’s only one way into Fablestone and this is it. No one knows where our clan lives except that we’re tucked in the depths of the forest. No one knows that when it comes to Fablestone, we’ve finally learned that privacy is the key to our survival. We don’t take outsiders. We don’t take charity cases. We take only dragons, and only when they follow our rules.
They have to come to the fourth stone tower at midnight on a night when there’s a full moon. If they can do that, we’ll accept them into our clan.
In the last year, no one has come.
We know another clan that lives in the forest, but they tend to keep to themselves. They’re private, like we are, and that’s the way it has to be. Still, there must be a way for the dragons to take back the world. There must be a way for us to live that doesn’t involve hiding away in secret.
There’s word that there are other clans who are more modern and tech-savvy than us. Our hacker guy has connections all across the globe and he’s always offering us new insight as to how we can further secure our world from the outside, but there’s only so much Lee can do from behind a desk. The rest of us have to find ways to make sure our community survives.
And right now, things aren’t looking so good.
Right now, shifters are outnumbered, and dragons? We have one major flaw that scientists have already discovered. It’s the reason we haven’t shifted and emblazoned the entire world in fire. It’s the reason we’re slowly being dissected and killed.
Dragons can’t shift when they’re scared.
It has something to do with elevated heart rates. The same thing happens when we get too excited or too angry. This is why at Fablestone, every dragon has to learn meditative breathing and calming techniques. It’s like yoga, but for shifters. It helps us to relax and learn to control ourselves so that if we’re ever in trouble, we won’t be inhibited or killed because of our inability to shift at that moment.
As far as I know, there’s nothing we can do to counteract the effects of this curse that’s been put on us, but I don’t really care. Right now, all I care about is getting to the stone, waiting the required hour, and then going home. That’s more time I can spend trying to figure out what happened to my sister.
I need to find her, to save her.
I can’t believe someone may have taken her. I can’t believe she might be out there, hurting somewhere. I shouldn’t be waiting. I should be tearing apart the fucking world to find her, but no. Wilson wants to do recon first. He wants to go in carefully, cautiously. He wants to plan this thing out completely before he decides what his next move is going to be.
And while I know the leader of the dragon clan is right, it still pisses me off.
We have money.
We have safety.
We have a magical world that’s hidden away from prying eyes.
What we don’t have is my fucking sister, and that’s the one thing I want.
While I shouldn’t risk flying to the tower, I decide to take my chances under the cover of darkness. I leave long before the moon is high in the sky. There’s a lot of ground to cover, and as long as I fly low to the trees, I should be okay.
I know I shouldn’t risk shifting. I probably shouldn’t even be coming here because something very wrong is happening and it might take everything I have just to get through tonight.
I don’t need to risk being abducted, too.
But the stone tower calls to me.
If a shifter needs to seek refuge from the human world, it’s where they’ll go. I’m not about to leave anyone – wolf, bear, or dragon – alone in the world. I’m not particularly keen on dying for people, especially people I don’t know that well, but at the end of the day, I will risk anything to save another shifter.
We are all we have left.
When I get to the tower, I drop down into the clearing. For a moment, I wait, but then I shift back into my human form. I’m naked now, obviously, and I don’t keep a spare set of clothes here. Perhaps I should, but it’s been so long since someone actually used the stone tower as a rescue point that I don’t even think it matters.
No one is coming tonight.
No, it’ll just be a chance for me to be alone for a little while and try to come up with a way to find Ellie.
I circle around the tower slowly: sniffing, examining. No one has been here since the last full moon. Even then, that was only me. Still, it’s nice to know the space is undisturbed. Although wolves are the ones with the strongest ability to scent, dragons aren’t bad at it. We aren’t bad at anything.
Except, apparently, finding lost sisters.
I shake my head and circle the space two more times before I find a tree to settle into. I climb up, lean back against the trunk, and observe the stone tower.
It’s a mythical thing, really. The stone towers were built by the dragons who first inhabited these forests. We wanted mountains and secrets and places we could be alone, and we got it. Westbridge Forest, as the locals call it, is over 15,000 square miles of woods that backs up to an incredible mountain range. There are little towns and homes and cabins sprinkled here and there, but for the most part, the forest belongs to the shifters, and that’s the way we like it.
There are wolf clans nestled in different areas of the forest, along with groups of bears and tigers and, of course, the dragons. We aren’t even the only dragon clan in the forest, but Fablestone is, in my opinion, the most wonderful. It’s not just because I grew up in the clan.
It might be because I grew up in the clan.
Still, what matters now is making it through tonight and then figuring out where to look for my sister. If only she could send us a message. If only I had anything to go off of, but right now, I have nothing. I don’t even have her fucking scent right now.
I hope Wilson comes up with a fucking plan because if I have to wait much longer to start the hunt, I’m going to go crazy. I’ve waited because I respect him and his judgment. I know he wants to do more recon before he starts some sort of interspecies war, but at some point, enough is enough.
As the moon rises, I find myself starting to relax. I should be more on edge than ever, but there’s something so calming about being alone in nature and just staring at the beautiful night sky.
Is Ellie out there looking up at the same sky?
Is she thinking of me?
Of us?
Of her clan?
Does she know that we’re here, wishing for her?
I hate not knowing where she is.
I hate not knowing if she’s in trouble.
I hate not knowing she’s lost and afraid.
And then I hear a twig snap, and I stop feeling sorry and instantly go on alert.
Someone’s come to the stone tower, and it can’t be anything good.