by Paula Quinn
Table of Contents
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Nine
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Ember
Rulers of the Sky Series
Paula Quinn
Prologue
My dear children,
If you are reading this, I’m likely dead. If that is the case, I would have you all know that the subject of this letter was responsible.
I’ve hired my estate attorney to deliver this private letter to you all. By now, you have each received your monetary inheritance. But I ask you all not to forget your legacy. Though you were all born human and walk the earth as men or women, you are all descendants of Drakkon, with the blood of the ancients in your veins. As the White genus, our duty as peacekeepers is in grave danger. There are some, even among the Council of Elders, who want to rule the sky once again. Imagine a world of fire-breathers and humans living together. As an Elder, I lived during such a time and death ruled the scorched land. It’s likely that almost everyone you know, your family and friends, would not survive the reign of fire.
As you all know, (and I should hope you do,) the Phoenix Amber is the only source of transformation and it can only be used twice in a lifetime. Because the Elders have all transformed from Drakkon to men, they will not use it again because they could never be men again. The magical gem has its limitations. But there is an ancient Drakkon story that foretells of one who will restore fire-breathers to the sky without the help of any gem. He will use his blood, for he is both Drakkon and man. His “descendants” will both walk the earth and rule the sky.
As I write this, I believe the one the tale spoke of is alive in your midst. A human boy who hatched from the egg of a Drakkon. Yes, that’s right. A Gold Drakkon. He is the first of his brood in thousands of years, and an anomaly the Council of Elders knows little about. What Gold had laid him? Why did none of us know of her? Is he the one with the power in his blood to make Drakkon kings over men? Jarakan is the oldest on the Council and he doesn’t recall seeing a Gold in his lifetime. All we know are the tales of the last known Gold, a female that had been cursed for killing a Green and buried in the earth, never to reach the stars. Some of the Elders wonder if she somehow returned from the soil and brought forth this creature of earth and sky. We know nothing of the blood that runs in his veins or the power therein, or if he is the one the lore speaks of. But he must be! He will bring back Drakkon! Think of what it would mean to everyone you know and love. You must find him. You must stop him if you want to live.
I dread such chaos in the sky again and charge you all to end this threat once and for all.
Your father,
Patrick White
The young girl shoved the letter from her father in her pocket when the front doors opened. She’d read the letter a million times in the three years since a copy of it was presented to her.
She watched from behind the great banister as a procession of men and women filed into her half-brother’s spacious home nestled in the Highlands of Arran in Scotland. Many were armed with bows and quivers of golden-tipped arrows strapped to their backs. Some smiled while others stared somberly at their boots. They all looked exhausted and hungry. She imagined killing dragons was hard work.
When were they going to let her hunt? Her aim with an arrow was sure. She practiced every day. She was ready!
“Helena!”
She turned from where she was sitting to see Jacob, her only full-blood brother, hurrying toward her.
“They killed a White Drakkon!” he said, out of breath and crouching beside her. “It was Thomas White!”
“Then Hendrick was right to suspect him of harboring the Gold!” The Gold her father spoke of in his letter. The one the Elders feared was prophesied about in the ancient tale. The Gold that had killed her father.
“I heard the others talking about it,” Jacob told her. “They said the Drakkon burned six of our half-brothers and half-sisters before the rest shot him down.”
“Monster,” Helena whispered with loathing tainting her soft voice. Her father had sired many offspring during the fifteen centuries he’d lived as a man. After his death, his children obeyed his last request and formed a secret organization called The Bane. Their purpose was to stop the Gold from repopulating the world with Drakkon. They dedicated their lives to hunting him and the monsters he transformed. They had begun to believe their father had been wrong after eight years passed since his death with no sign of any transformations. But in the last month, they’d taken down two. Tonight’s being the third.
“Come on!” He tugged her sleeve. “Let’s go down and listen to more.”
She followed him down the stairs and quickly blended into the crowd in the grand dining hall. The guests were her family, half-siblings from different generations. She and Jacob were the youngest, the most recent to spring from Padgora of the Sixth’s loins. They both shared their father’s pale, almost white hair to prove it.
“Where are you two off to?”
Helena looked up at her half-brother, Hendrick. He’d brought her and Jacob to live with him three years ago, taking them from the nurses and teachers who’d raised them. Their lives, from that day on, revolved around the art of Drakkon hunting. One day, they would join The Bane and help save mankind against annihilation.
“Is it true, Hendrick?” she asked him. “Did you kill another Drakkon?”
“Yes, Helena, it’s true. Did you practice your violin today?”
“Yes,” she answered. She practiced every day. Hendrick included many lessons in her tutoring. A person, he often told her, didn’t make a living hunting Drakkon.
“Was he very big?” she asked. Oh, she wished she’d been there to see for herself.
“He was bigger than this damn house,” Albert, another half-brother from Dover, answered, wiping his pale brow with a cloth as he passed them.
Helena couldn’t imagine a monster so gigantic. She was going to have to practice harder. If she was going to face one, she wanted to be prepared.
“Did he turn into a man after you killed him, like the others did?” she asked, curious about the little she knew.
“The others,” her brother reminded, “were boys, not men.”
“Boys,” Hendrick said as he turned a flinty gaze to Jacob, “with twelve foot wingspans and talons that could have ripped you to shreds. They weren’t children. They were Drakkon. Pity will get you burned…or eaten alive.”
“Damn it,” Helena’s half-sister, three generations removed, sighed out. “How could Thomas have allowed that beast to turn him? He was a White! One of our own! How many others have gone to the Gold to be transformed?”
“We should have a moment of silence for Thomas,” someone else called out. “He was an Elder. Now he’s lying dead in Hendrick’s guest house.”
“He was a traitor.”
“He chose his death when he chose to fly and breathe fire,” Hendrick reminded them all. “He’ll be burned and buried in the morning.”
Helena turned to look at Jacob when he moved away and began pushing his way out of the hall. She caught up with him quickly and tugged on his arm. “You mustn’t let Hendrick think you have sympathy for the fire-breathers,” she whispered close to his ear. “You don’t, do you? Remember the Gold killed father.”
“We don’t know that for certain,” her brother reminded her.
She knew Drakkon killed her fat
her because, according to sources, the windows in her father’s luxury penthouse, from which he plunged, were shattered to bits. Her father’s bow lay scattered on the floor. At what had he shot one of his gold-tipped arrows? Since there had been no other Drakkon alive during that time, it had to have been the Gold.
Jacob stared into her eyes, the same shade of deep sapphire as his. His gaze searched hers for a moment. And then, as if not finding what he sought, he turned and continued toward the kitchen. “It wasn’t enough that they killed a White, Helena. They will shame him with a cursed burial, as well. He died as Drakkon. He shouldn’t be put to the ground.”
Helena glanced around in the dark, hoping no one had lingered outside and heard him. If Hendrick thought that Jacob was a sympathizer, he’d put Jacob out. Where would her brother go? Would she go with him?
“Remember what father said in his letter,” she insisted. “If Drakkon ruled the sky, it would be the end of everyone we know and love. We cannot feel sorry for them. They won’t care when they’re charring anyone in their path.”
He shook his head but said nothing more.
“Where are you going?”
“To the guest house,” he replied
Helena knew they shouldn’t, but she wanted to see the man who’d been a Drakkon earlier today. She followed her brother along the moonlit path, glad that the guest house wasn’t too far beyond the trees. It was cold and she hadn’t taken her coat. She saw the chimney of the smaller house up ahead and began to hurry toward it. She didn’t get far, stopping at a slight breeze that lifted her white hair away from her face. Such a breeze was nothing out of the ordinary on the isle. This one, though, was warm, several degrees warmer than the cool autumn night. At the sound of flapping wings somewhere overhead, the hair on the back of her neck rose off her skin. Her heartbeat began to drum hard and fast in her ears. She looked up at the starlit sky then darted her eyes to Jacob, who had also stopped at the sound. “It’s getting louder,” she whispered, terrified, and hating herself for it. Here she was, possibly about to see a real Drakkon and she was shaking. “Is it…one of them?”
“Maybe,” he allowed, sounding just as afraid while he looked up. “I’ve never heard one before.”
And why shouldn’t they be frightened? If a Drakkon didn’t burn you alive, it could swoop low and chomp down its fangs and eat you. It had happened to members of The Bane when they’d taken down the first two young Drakkons. Helena didn’t want to die.
The sound grew louder, like a litany of echoed warnings resonating through her, chilling her blood. “We should go,” she whispered urgently to her brother.
“No.” He shook his head, his eyes widening at a sight in the distance behind her. “We should run.” He grasped her by the hand and charged toward the cover of trees. “Run!”
Her shoes pounded the leaf-strewn ground until they came to the thick trunk of an old oak and hid behind it. She tried to slow her heart, but it was no use. She had to look. She had to see, so she pressed her cheek to the bark and risked a glance.
Her heart slowed. It felt as if it stopped altogether.
The Drakkon’s golden scales glittered like living flames against the backdrop of a million stars. Long, leathery wings swallowed up the wind and carried its body, at least fifteen feet long from the tip of its spiked tail to the beast’s rounded snout. If she didn’t know what it was or the threat it posed to the world, she would have considered it the most beautiful creature she’d ever seen.
It was the Gold. For a fleeting instant, she wished it would fly away and never return before someone from The Bane shot him down.
What was it doing here? Her mouth went dry as the beast veered and flew toward the main house. “Jacob!” she said, her eyes filling with terror and tears as the reason became clear.
Revenge for killing Thomas White? She cried out and covered her mouth with her hands as the Drakkon reared back its head and exhaled a blast of fire down on the house. She watched, her eyes alight from the flames engulfing her home and everyone inside it. Anyone who escaped the house was quickly scorched in a seemingly endless assault of fire. Not an arrow was shot. No one had time to defend themselves.
Helena didn’t want to watch but she couldn’t look away. The Gold was killing her family, just as he killed her father, burning her home to the ground. She could only stare, horrified at the monster hovering above its destruction. If it had arrived sooner, she and Jacob would have been inside with the others, unaware of the monster coming for them. The house was gone, along with half her half-siblings in a matter of minutes.
What could a hundred of them do? A thousand? How would anyone stop him?
The Drakkon sniffed the air and then looked in their direction. Helena’s heart went silent. Had it seen them, heard them? They would never escape its fire.
Reaching around the tree, she grabbed hold of her brother’s hand and commanded herself to somehow not scream as the Gold flew toward them.
“It’s not coming for us,” Jacob said in a quiet voice.
He was right. The Gold soared over them to the guest house. When it reached the structure, it stretched out its long talons and tore the roof away, exposing everything inside. The beast looked inside for a long time, making no sound but that of its flapping. Finally, it dipped its thick forearm into the house, paused for another moment, and then flew away with Thomas White’s limp body clutched in its claws.
Fourteen years later…
Chapter One
Helena White pulled up the sleeve of her red rain coat with her gloved pinkie and glanced down at her watch, 10:15. She was tired and the screeching guitar practice in another part of the club was grating on her last nerve. Jacob’s alternative rock band might have more fans than the Philharmonic, but the sound was nothing like the silken wails of Mozart on her violin. How much longer was she expected to stay?
“Is Jacob seeing anyone?”
“My guess would be yes,” Helena answered, returning her ruby red smile to a small group of her brother’s birthday guests, mainly women. “Probably more than one.”
Some of them actually looked hopeful. She’d had enough. She yanked up her collar, readying for a quick exit. There were so many more important things she could be doing right now.
“What’s he like?” asked one of his admirers.
Helena shifted her cobalt gaze to her brother across the room. He was surrounded by more women and she let out a small sigh. He was intelligent and crafty, with the courage of ten men. But what good was it doing him in the easy, laid-back life he’d chosen of playing guitar in a mediocre band? What good was it doing any of them? The Bane had all but dissolved. Only about forty members remained. There hadn’t been anything to hunt in over a decade. But that hadn’t stopped Helena from looking. Let the others betray their purpose for pleasure and power. Helena never would. She’d never forgotten the night the Gold Drakkon had taken everything from her. Her half-brother, Hendrick, his family, forty-two members of her family, swallowed up in a blazing inferno of revenge.
Her father.
So many dead at the hands of one Drakkon. Her father had been right to fear their return. Up until the sixth century, before he discovered the Phoenix Amber, her father had ruled the sky as Padgora of the Sixth, with wings, fire and scales. He’d given it all up to help mankind and convinced every other Drakkon to do the same. Helena didn’t know what her father had promised them or threatened them with. But with the help of the Phoenix Amber and its power to absorb Drakkon essence and replace it with human DNA, they all transformed and became men and women. Drakkon traded their scales for skin and their hoards for money. Needless to say, all the Elders were ridiculous wealthy. Since they were the first brood, they would remain immortal and never lose the ability to look into a person’s thoughts, but their children and all their descendants would live mortal lives.
That was how it had remained for ten centuries, until Thomas White and two village boys proved the Gold’s power and his willingness to use it
.
He’d left no trail after that night. Every dragon sighting in the tabloids had proved to be false. It was as if the Gold had ceased to exist. All she’d learned was that after he’d been orphaned by The Bane, he’d been raised in the care of an Aqua. A twenty-first century transformed Drakkon, to be precise, altered by her father just twenty-two years ago. Marcus Aquara was living out his life like the other Elders—as a man, somewhere in England, married to a romance novelist named Samantha Montgomery. The Bane had watched Aquara’s home for years but there had never been another sighting of the Drakkon.
“If you’ll excuse me.” She took a step to leave. “I need to be going.”
One of the women with a mane of auburn hair cascading down one side of her face grasped Helena’s arm to stop her. “Give him my number.”
Helena’s cool gaze settled on her until the girl let her go. Then, without a hint of the frustration she felt marring her tone, she said, “Why don’t you be direct and go give it to him yourself. Maybe he likes bold women.”
Instead of accepting the challenge to see to her own destiny, the redhead raked her gaze over Helena from foot to crown. When her eyes reached the top of Helena’s head, her smirk deepened a dimple on her left cheek. “Have you ever considered dying your hair? White is ghastly on you. It makes you look old and frail.”
Helena patted the tightly coiled, pearl-encrusted knots at the back of her nape and offered the redhead her most serene smile. She could show this girl how frail she was with a hard punch to the temple but the blood of the peacekeeping White Drakkon ran through her veins and her hair was a constant reminder.
“It’s a defect in our blood.”
“Simone, you’re not serious,” another girl with a British accent laughed, coming forward. She wore a black, sleeveless shift that fit to perfection. A nimbus of black curls fell over her high cheekbones to her nape. The shape of her large, blue-green eyes reminded Helena of a wild bird that had spotted its prey. “Are you really that much of an insecure child that you could stand here and say that? To her?”
