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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.
