Chapter One
You almost never see death coming. It’s almost always a surprise. You laugh and joke or you cry and complain and you trudge through the day or the night taking existence second by second, trapped in the now. You wake up groggy and stumble for your coffee and you smell it and it’s nice, but you never think, “This is the last time I’m going to smell coffee.” Or you pull up a song in the car and it’s a favorite so you sing along, but you never think, “This is the last time I will ever sing with this song.”
It’s not as bad for the one who never sees it coming, though. One second you’re there and the next you’re floating and then you’re gone. It’s so much worse for those who never saw it coming… and are still around to see it go. The ones left behind.
The funny thing is, when you lose someone you love, all of those moments just before – the sights, sounds, smells, every tiny detail – they become imprinted on your mind forever. Like a brand, indelible. That smell of coffee you had just before you rounded the corner to find her lying on the kitchen floor will always remind you of your wife. That song you were listening to just before you answered the phone will always make you think of your sister.
Indelible.
That was how Evangeline saw, heard, smelled, and felt the details of that morning.
Her mother had been gone several days. She’d left to travel to nearby villages for supplies, supplies humans needed and dragons didn’t. Eva missed her horribly, but her father seemed to know he needed to fill the empty space she left behind, and he’d spent a lot of time with her that week.
That day was supposed to have been a clear day; that was what she’d hoped for anyway. Her father had promised to take her to the top of the mountain and practice gliding from the cliffs. But the smell of rain and the sound of thunder woke her up in the den. When she entered her parents’ room, their bed was empty.
She stepped out of their home and into a building rage of a storm. Clouds had gathered low because they were high in the hills, and when clouds gathered, they always gathered low. But these clouds were dark. They were filled with anger.
Wind whipped at her long white hair, tangling it as it brushed past, sweeping up the mountain toward the peaks in the short distance. That was where her eyes traveled, following the wind as if it were saying to her, Look Evangeline. Look here. Look now.
At the end of the winding ribbon of trail, at the very tip of the craggy hill she’d traveled many times, two figures were discernible beneath the building gale. One was dressed in white. The other was dressed in clothing the color of unspent charcoal. Both were instantly recognizable.
The figure in white was crumpled on the ground in an unmoving heap of snowy hair and white scale armor. It took a moment for young Evangeline to fully register what she was seeing. But once she did, she realized she was already moving. Her legs, her body, and her racing heart all figured it out before her mind accepted it.
“Pata!”
She ran as fast as her legs would carry her, but she was still so young. She could count her years on one hand. She’d couldn’t even fully transform yet. She was slow. So very slow.
Something was wrong with her father. He didn’t answer her, he didn’t look up at her. He always answered her right away. “PATA!”
It took her forever to reach the cliff. She remembered the air smelling like dragon magic. It was an electric scent, so strong it almost burned her nostrils. It was the scent of her father’s magic, terribly powerful. And another’s… but she couldn’t place it. She’d never smelled it before.
As she ran, the world grew darker, the storm so deep it seemed night had fallen on the land. A lifetime passed before she was dropping to her father’s side. She shook him with her too-young arms. She shook him with all of her strength, but there was no life in his body. The world grew blacker.
But she could still see his face. His eyes were too white. They were usually white, unless he was angry or happy or excited or feeling mischievous, and then they turned red. She loved his red eyes; they were ruby and deep and glittering. But right now, they were neither silver-white nor ruby-red. They were unseeing. There was no smile on his lips. He didn’t chuckle, he didn’t reach up and hug her. He just stayed there on the ground, unmoving.
The storm overhead let loose, screaming at last as lightning slammed into nearby trees, splitting them in two and setting them alight. Thunder crashed around Evangeline, outlined by the crackling of a newly ignited fire. She barely heard any of it.
Through blurry sight, she looked up at the Great Gray standing over her. He was nearly invisible in the unnaturally dim light, his outline dark against the building blaze behind him. But he met her eyes just once, and she was caught in the gray-white flames of his gaze. Those eyes had always reminded her of what fire would look like if all of the color was taken out. Rather than yellows and reds, it would be whites and grays, flickering and blazing hot, but without hue.
He stared at her steadily, with the only part of him she could see.
“Why?” she finally asked. But her tiny, quivering question was swallowed by the storm. And then he was gone, whisked away with another flash of lightning and sudden night.
A hand was on her shoulder. Eva looked to her right to find her mother kneeling beside her, blue eyes bright as Eon Blooms. The bluest eyes the world had ever seen. How she’d managed to be there at that moment, she would never know and she didn’t care.
“Come to me, child,” her mother said, holding her arms open. She was a human then, frail by dragon standards but oh-so-beautiful. She had long red hair that flew all around her in the storm. Eva had inherited her own strange purple eyes from her parents, a mixture of a Great White’s strong-emotion red and the blue eyes of a kind Nomad. But right now she could not see through them. The rain and her tears were drowning out the world.
Eva rushed into her mother’s arms, falling into them as if all of the bones had been taken from her young body, leaving her as lifeless as her father. And there, she joined the storm in her fury.
All around them, the fire spread. Trees went up like candles, reaching long, crackling arms to the sky. The two of them stayed there in a circle of safety for hours, the dragon child and her not-so-human mother, as the world went up in smoke. In the billowing black of the dying woods, the dragon dens were destroyed. The village dispersed. The dragons disappeared.
Legends were born that day, stories that grew as twisted and faded as the years, like all stories. Thousands of years had gone by since that morning. She’d seen the dawning and dying of countless civilizations. She’d grown up and grown strong.
In the first fifty years of her strange, relentless life, she’d witnessed her Entity-human mother grow old and die, only to take the form of something else. A fae, an animal, another human… and little by little, the small changes became glued to one another like snowflakes, until they piled up to make one big change. One that covered up the past. Making it unrecognizable.
Except for that one day. That one morning when she’d lost everything.
And the man who had taken it from her.