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Chapter Two
Sorin slept.
He didn’t enjoy the practice. When he slept, he dreamed. And the dreams of the golden dragon too often took him into the past, and everything he loved was back there—everything he no longer had.
But he went too long without shifting into his true form lately and it took a toll. Living among humans also took a toll, one that stretched his patience to its rather impressive limits.
And it would get worse.
Sorin was no fool. He’d seen the changes coming decades ago, longer.
A few short weeks, a state outside his territorial borders, a group of men who considered themselves a militia had slaughtered a migratory Therian pony shapeshifters. The youngest victim had been two, the oldest over a century. Many were outraged, but the government and law enforcement weren’t doing anything.
Unrest grew. Unrest. Anger. Rage.
There would be another war. Another bloody war, one he suspected would rock the planet to its very foundations.
The widespread violence hadn’t quite reached this fairly quiet part of the New World, but it would. And soon. Some part of him almost ached for it. But he’d seen too much war and knew innocent blood would also be shed.
He’d seen too much blood in his life.
Because of that, and because he wearied of all of it, he did what he could to minimize conflict in his territory. It only delayed the inevitable. But if taking to his dragon form a few nights a week instead of every day helped delay war in his lands a few more months, was that a bad thing?
He couldn’t see how it was.
So, he only allowed himself to fly a few times a week, usually at night, hidden by dragon magic until he was far, far, far above the world, too far for even the sharpest-eyed mortal to see.
There were, of course, their damnable satellites, those ever-spying eyes in the sky, but as often was the case with technology and creatures of pure magic, satellites often had trouble...seeing him in his dragon form.
Some theorized a problem with how magic affected electromagnetic currents and such. He didn't care. So long as they left him alone. More than once, a news piece would flash: Large unidentified flying presence detected in the skies above Missouri. Could it be the famed Dragon of the Ozarks?
Dragon of the Ozarks.
Ridiculous.
Those thoughts, and more, tumbled through his sleeping mind. A dragon, whether in his natural form or wearing the much weaker, but still very impressive human skin, was a predator, and predators never left their guard down, not even when they rested.
The scents of the world drifted past him. They were processed, catalogued, dismissed.
The promise of rain.
A fire some miles away.
The familiar damp scent came from the cave he’d made into his home more than a century and half past. Sprawled on a massive bed he’d never admit to enjoying, Sorin slept wearing his human form because he hadn’t felt like traveling deeper into the cave system where he had a comparably larger bed that almost fit his dragon form.
Although he slept deeply, he wasn’t unaware. His mind raced. His eyes moved back and forth. Occasionally, a scent struck him on a level that had him taking in larger, slower breaths, filtering in the scents, before deciding nothing was amiss. Other senses worked on a deeper level, that part of him that was all fire and magic.
Abruptly, Sorin stopped breathing—struck down to his core by some strange but certain knowing.
He jerked upright, eyes open and the sleep falling from his mind as if it had never been there.
“What?” he whispered, turning his head in the direction of the faint pulse of...something.
Like most magical creatures, he was territorial, although his ... instincts had changed over the centuries. To him, territory no longer meant home. Home had died with Adela. Now, home simply meant a modicum of peace. But claiming territory meant protecting it and an elemental creature such as a dragon could never claim territory without also bonding to it.
He'd wandered, just as the Vâlva curse predicted, roaming far and wide after Adela’s death.
His own failure to protect her and the people Adela had claimed as her own shattered the bond forming between them. He’d been unaware of that bond, so arrogantly full of himself ... and foolish. When she’d died, along with so many people, that bond had snapped.
