Cameron
Those were not the words I was expecting the human to speak.
What DID you expect, Cameron?
I shake my head, as if that will silence my inner dragon. I want the beast to be quiet, to be still, but I know that this is a futile desire. My beast has been restless since my sister left. It’s been angry, desperate.
I miss her.
Dragon shifter twins are rare, almost unheard of. Our mother survived birthing us and is still alive. She lives happily with a clan across the sea and she is mated to a shifter there. After our father passed away, she was inconsolable, but then someone came into her life and made everything better. He saved her.
This woman could save you.
But Peggy is not the same as my stepfather.
She’s not a shifter.
She’s just a random human who stumbled upon the stone tower at just the right time.
No, she’s not. She came here for a reason. She came here to find you. Of all the shifters she could have been searching for, she wants you.
“Why do you seek him?” I ask her.
Another test.
She considered lying to me before. I saw it in her eyes. She was afraid. Scared. Nervous. She confessed, anyway. That surprises me. Most of my experiences with humans have been less than memorable. Humans lie more than they ought to, at least from what I’ve seen. Not that dragons are the most honest of races, of course. Dragons love to lie. We lie about treasure and we lie about what we are. We lie about everything, but there’s a difference between a dragon lying and a human lying.
We’re good at it.
When a dragon lies, he puts his entire heart into the lie. The good liars are so convincing that sometimes, even they begin to believe their own stories.
This human, though…she’s no liar.
She’s honest, and that’s quite rare in any species, let alone humans.
“I don’t want to tell you,” she says finally. “I don’t know if I can trust you,” she says, and I don’t blame her. She has my fucking niece, after all. Oh, Daisy might be wearing different clothes and covered in the human’s scent, but I know my niece when I see her. I almost lost control when I neared the sleeping human and was able to see who she had wrapped in her arms.
How did she get Daisy?
Does she know where Ellie is?
Did she do something to Ellie?
I don’t want to think the worst of this little human. I don’t want to assume that just because she has Daisy, she did something to hurt my sister. I don’t want to be naïve, though. I don’t want to give myself some false belief that she’s here out of the goodness of her heart.
So what it is?
Why is she here?
“You don’t exactly have a choice,” I tell her. I rise to my full height, then, and she cowers back in fear. Good. She should be afraid. “You’ve wandered into dragon territory, little girl, and the monsters have come out to play.”
Peggy closes her eyes for a long minute. She’s going to cry. I can tell. I can sense these things. This is the part where she breaks down, where she begs me to let her go. This is the part where she confesses everything, where she tells me that she’s sorry she wandered so deep into the big, bad forest. This is where she apologizes for trying to trick a dragon.
I cross my arms over my chest, elongating my body as much as possible. She’s still on the ground and I tower over her. She must be feeling tiny right now. She must be feeling weak and scared. She should, too.
What was she thinking, coming to the stone tower?
Did she think we were just going to welcome a human with open arms?
Did she think showing up would get her a free pass to Fablestone?
There’s no doubt that this woman thinks she’s clever, but she’s not. She’s just like all the rest of them. She’s normal and ordinary, and she’s about to have a complete mental breakdown. She’ll tell me what I need to know, and then I’ll take Daisy and the human can be on her merry way. Oh, I won’t kill her. I wouldn’t kill a human randomly, especially not one as beautiful as her.
She could be our mate.
My inner-dragon keeps whispering to me, taunting me, but I ignore him while I stare down at the human. She sniffles and wraps her arms around her chest.
Ah, yes.
The breakdown.
“You’re right,” she says.
“I am,” I agree.
“I never should have wandered into the woods,” she says.
“That’s right,” I tell her. “Now, why don’t you tell me why you’re really here?”
“I told you,” the woman says. “I came to find Cameron.”
Then she breaks the mold of what I expect her to do.
Then she deviates from my well-laid plan.
Then she gets crazy.
Before I even know what’s happening, the human shoves her fist out hard and nails me right in the balls. The scream that erupts from my mouth is so wild and unbearable that I’m sure creatures will be able to hear it for fucking miles.
“Fuck you!” She shouts, and then I hear her scuffling around. I’m too busy holding myself to see what she’s doing or where she’s going.
That.
Fucking.
Hurt.
Apparently, I completely underestimated the tiny human or her desperation to find Cameron.
Me.
She’s looking for me.
I could have just told her. I could have been honest with her and I would have spared myself from a lot of fucking pain, but no. I couldn’t do that, could I? I couldn’t just be blunt and honest. I had to be the winner in this little spat. I had to try to prove my worth as a dragon.
She tricked you. We like her.
Shut up, dragon.
Shut up.
Shut up.
Shut up.
After a minute, the blinding pain begins to fade and I can actually open my eyes and see. Of course, the clearing is empty. She managed to take the baby and her bag of cats. Who carries cats through a forest, anyway? Why would she carry a bunch of kittens around? That’s one thing I should have asked before this entire ordeal went to hell in a handbasket.
We must find her.
We’re in a relatively safe part of the forest, but it really is entirely relative. It’s mostly safe for me, but I’m a dragon. A monster. A beast.
The little human is…
Well, she’s little.
And anything could happen.
We have to find her.
With a growl, I leap into the air and shift. She couldn’t have gone far. Not on foot. Not in these woods. Even if she didn’t have my niece with her, I’d go after this woman because she’s in a vulnerable state and she’s going to be so focused on running away from me that she won’t be paying attention about what she’s running toward.
Hell.
She could be running straight into hell.
I don’t know.
I don’t spend a lot of time in this part of the forest. No one does, really. With a haven like Fablestone, we don’t often wander away. Why would we? Everything we need is there.
Unless you’re David.
This whole thing started with him.
He was the one who was stolen away.
He was the one who had been captured.
If our Fablestone scout hadn’t seen him being taken into the Lucky facility, we never would have known what happened to him. All we ever would have known was that he went out and then he didn’t come back. Maybe Ellie would have wondered if he was walking away from their relationship. Maybe she would have thought there was someone else for him. Perhaps, though, she would have realized it, anyway.
My sister is the bravest woman I’ve ever met until today.
Today, a contender takes her place.
Today, I have to find the woman who has my niece, and I have to do it before someone else – or something else – finds her first.
I fly low to the forest, and I start to search.