Chapter One
Isle of Harris, Scotland
The Twenty-first
Jacob the White flexed the sinuous muscles in his shoulders and lifted his long, leathery wings. A thread of sheer exhilaration coursed through him as he brought them back down, snapping them around his thick, armored girth. His heart sang on the wild wind that battered his scales, in the altitude that snatched his breath as he rose toward the stars. He was flying. He was finally flying.
He’d dreamed of it for so long—a deeply rooted instinct, born from the blood of his father, Padgora of the Sixth, to soar and rule the sky. A haunting desire that called up from the chasm and robbed the luster from every other pleasure, leaving Jacob in an endless pursuit of its equal.
He looked around at the world in all its panoramic splendor and thrilled in the wind cutting across his wide, spiky head and scaly nostrils. He’d found it. He’d found what he’d been missing. This other part of himself.
He swung his long neck back and took in the vision of his white, spike-tipped wings. He was an impressive beast. His haunches were bursting with muscle and tipped with ten eleven-inch long claws. His jaw was as wide as three buses. His fangs could snap almost anything in two. He was power in its most primal form and he felt it. He reveled in it.
With a burst of elation at finally being set free, he flapped his wings and swung his great, spaded tail and played in the clouds.
Though he’d been altered two months ago, this was his first full night as Drakkon. He basked in it; enraptured by floating mountaintops and stars that felt so close he could touch them. The power was like nothing he’d ever known and he was unprepared for the intense desires that came with this part of his heritage, like the need for a horde, a treasure to protect, a virgin or two, and the need for food.
Everything that had breath and blood flowing through it tempted him to partake.
The first sheep he devoured sickened the human part of his brain and made him question the wonder of what he was. Almost instantly, his white, gold-tipped scales began to change. His wings folded and shimmered.
He was changing in midair! Hell, he thought, plummeting naked to the earth in his human form. He tried not to panic as wind cut off his air and the cold made his meager skin numb. For a moment, he failed and watched the ground grow closer. The backpack he’d so carefully tied to his claw, filled with his clothes, credits cards, and his cell phone, flew away. He remembered what he’d been taught. Now that his blood had been changed, he simply had to want to be Drakkon to become one. It had been what he’d spent the last two months learning to resist. But now…he was Drakkon. He could fly! He wanted to fly!
His vision was the first to change. His view, a panorama of mountain and sea, clear and vivid in the dark. Simultaneously, his skin stretched and hardened into scales while his bones decreased in density and increased in size. His organs also changed. It wasn’t painful, or maybe it was because he could heal himself before it hurt. He didn’t care. He loved his size and strength, the power in his wings.
His heart’s truest desire, one he had learned to mask since the days he first understood it, had been given to him. Flight. He pierced the clouds and soared on the wind over the ocean, forests, and mountaintops—and he knew he’d never be the same.
He was the last son born to Patrick White, or Padgora as his father was known prior to finding the legendary Phoenix Amber. The Amber held the power to change Drakkon into man, permanently. Jacob’s father had used it on all Drakkon, ending their reign, so that he could rule as a man.
Because of their pure Drakkon blood, Patrick and the other Elders lived for many centuries as men, fathering generations of children who were human in all aspects, except for their ancestral Drakkon essence.
Descendants—of which Jacob was a first generation, making his desire to fly even stronger. His desire had never been about actually being Drakkon. His essence didn’t come with the knowledge of what it was like to be one. He’d never missed it. He’d been born human. It was all he knew. There would never be a chance to be anything else.
Until Garion the Gold, rarest of all Drakkon, and an anomaly born of sky and earth, appeared from their dreams and nightmares and proved that the Phoenix Amber was as worthless as a rock.
Garion’s essence had the power to turn any living descendant into Drakkon that could live as both man and beast. Jacob’s father had wanted it. The Elders feared it and funded an organization, to which Jacob and his sister had belonged, called The Bane, a band of White descendants trained in the pursuit of killing Garion the Gold before he refilled the sky with Drakkon.
Fourteen years after killing half of Jacob’s relatives with his fire, Garion used his essence to save Jacob’s life.
Healed and altered, Jacob was now one of three who possessed the power to transform at will. His sister being the third.
Jacob understood the danger Drakkon presented to the world. He’d spent years in The Bane. He’d seen the carnage one Drakkon could rain down with a few blasts of fire. But killing Drakkon was against his nature and, now, so was belonging to The Bane.
The essence of a pure Gold Drakkon flowed through his veins now. The evidence of it grew more apparent with every week that passed, affecting both his forms. He was faster, stronger. His senses were growing sharper, especially his sense of smell, and he could see in the dark. Even his appearance had changed. His near white hair and scales had taken on a golden tint. He was familiar with the lore of the Elders and what powers Drakkon possessed; telepathy, inherently knowing how to speak and understand any language, even dead ones. Drakkon could only be destroyed by gold, whether it be bullets, sword, arrow, or Garion’s tail, as long as it was pure gold. No Drakkon was permitted to burn another Drakkon, and many types of self-healing were possible.
But Garion’s existence changed everything they knew. His blood could do things never possible before, like alter at will and heal descendants and who knew what else? Garion didn’t even know for certain because he’d managed, through extraordinary strength of will, not to change into his Drakkon form for fourteen years. He had no idea how his blood would eventually change someone. No one did.
They did know, though, that the more power Jacob gave Drakkon, the more difficult it would become to harness.
Jacob must not risk being spotted as Drakkon and if he must take to the sky, to be mindful of cell phones that could offer evidence to The Bane and to the world of his existence. The Bane didn’t know he’d been turned. He needed to keep it that way. He’d even had his last name changed so he’d be harder to find.
He would be mindful of all Garion’s warnings. He’d train himself and strengthen his will. Not just in the power of altering or not, but in staying out of trouble. A troublesome Drakkon would be a dangerous thing. He understood that. But he had to fly. He could no longer pretend to have found fulfillment in being the lead guitarist of a Billboard-topping band, or in chasing women, and especially not in service to The Bane. It was time for a new path.