by Jill Haven
His Elder Dragon
Divine Dragons: Book 1
Jill Haven
Contents
1. Carlisle
2. Haiden
3. Carlisle
4. Haiden
5. Carlisle
6. Haiden
7. Carlisle
8. Haiden
9. Carlisle
10. Haiden
11. Carlisle
12. Haiden
13. Carlisle
14. Haiden
15. Carlisle
16. Haiden
17. Carlisle
18. Haiden
19. Carlisle
20. Haiden
21. Carlisle
22. Haiden
23. Carlisle
24. Haiden
25. Carlisle
26. Haiden
27. Carlisle
28. Haiden
His Dragon Protector
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His Elder Dragon
1
Carlisle
“Are you even listening to me?”
I startled guiltily and glanced across the expanse of a crisp white linen tablecloth, past a perfectly gleaming crystal glass topped up with overpriced wine, to Bobby. From the corner of the vast marble-floored restaurant, a violin quartet played a piece that I thought might be Haydn, but I couldn’t be certain. It reminded me of the Civil War and all the madness that was happening in West Virginia during that time.
“Uh….”
Bobby wrinkled his nose. He was tall and blond with soft-looking lips and a nice gym-toned body, but human. I’d only agreed to go on a date with him so he would stop asking me out every time I ran into him at my lawyer’s office. He huffed and crossed his arms.
“You’re right, I wasn’t paying attention.” I tried to smile, but he narrowed his eyes on me. “Sorry, I was thinking about exchange rates. We’re getting a shipment of steel in this week, and with the new tariffs, that’s not as profitable as it used to be.”
He scowled. “I’m not more interesting than work?”
It was atrocious that at 350 years old, I still managed to feel like a teenager when it came to relationships. I thought about lying to Bobby—he was handsome and smart, after all—but where would this all end up? He’s human, I’m a dragon, and an alpha at that. He wasn’t what I needed or craved, and it wasn’t like we could even have a full relationship because I couldn’t knot him. Being stuck together would be a hell of a thing to try to explain away while I was buried in his ass.
“No, not really.”
With a glare, Bobby lifted his glass of wine and chugged it. His cheeks grew red, and I braced myself for impending disaster. He slammed the empty glass to the table and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth while he pushed back his chair.
“Lose my number, asshole,” he hissed none too quietly. At the table nearest us, a woman watched our drama unfold with rapt attention, but I couldn’t bring myself to care about that, either.
“Okay.”
He glowered. This really was too bad. With a pang in my heart, I wished more than anything that I could find him more appealing than I did, and that things were a little different. Sometimes living among the humans was difficult.
“Have a good night,” I called as cheerfully as I could to his receding back. I did let myself watch him walk away because it was a pleasant sight, his tailor should be commended, but when he disappeared behind a support column, I sat back in my chair and closed my eyes, tightly gripping the smooth cool stem of my own glass.
Fuck. This was ludicrous. Maybe I should pick a suitable dragon and begin courting them. It wasn’t like I was getting any younger, and the pool of eligible omega dragons had only seemed to shrink recently, not grow. I had agreed to this farce of a date because I was lonely. I missed company of a certain sort—intimacy. Dragons, in spite of the mythology that had sprung up around our people, were not solitary creatures. Yes, I would have to find an omega, have a real date, and give him an honest try.
“Sir?” I snapped my eyes open and the waiter stood there with a twisted, anxious sort of smile. He was human, painfully young—probably only about eighteen—and I could tell with one glance that he was struggling to figure out what he should do about Bobby flouncing off.
I gave him a reassuring smile. “Yes?”
He fiddled with the pen for his check pad. “Will your… friend be returning? Would you like to order?”
My phone buzzed in my pocket. “Hold that thought?”
The man nodded, I was paying enough for the wine alone that he had enough sense to be patient while I glanced at my phone.
Donovan:
Princeps Draco, meet me at the McGuires’ house.
Confused, my blood ran cold. Why on earth was he addressing me so formally? Yeah, I was clan leader of the Northeast in the US, and leader of my clan of Blood dragons as well, but that didn’t normally mean much. I gave a quick reply.
Be there in about a half hour.
Standing, I tugged my wallet out of my pocket, fumbling my phone for a second. When I had everything situated, I yanked cash out of my money clip and dropped it into the surprised boy’s hand.
“I won’t be staying for dinner. Not your fault. Keep the change.”
“Sir, that’s way too much,” he said, but I was already on my way out.
The low lights and classy atmosphere of Seraphino’s had seemed perfect for a date night. The live music, the classic table service, the real food—it all appealed to me. I just hoped that one day I’d find someone to share the finer things in life.
Traffic was a bitch. The drive through Charleston to the McGuire household was meandering, at best. Dying sunlight stabbed at my eyes and I seemed to be perpetually driving into it, so that I couldn’t even enjoy the peaches and purples of the sunset spreading across the sky. I had my window down to breathe deep the late September air, but car fumes choked me. My skin itched for the openness of the wilderness. At least September was feeling more like August, and I loved that. The cold wasn’t my friend, which was why I’d never moved farther north. By the time I made my way through downtown and out into the suburbs to the old, tree-lined residential neighborhood where the McGuire home was located, my nerves were on edge, and they weren’t improved by the fact that the drive up to the stately manor house was lined with cars—one being a hearse. My stomach dropped. Not much killed dragons. There were very few natural causes of death among my kind.
I parked haphazardly near the front door and exited my car into utter chaos. Thomas McGuire sat on his front lawn near a rosebush with only a few scraggly red blooms remaining—a massive man in his human form, with his head buried in his arms sobbing. Two female dragons who I didn’t know stood near him, holding each other. The only reason I was sure they were dragons was the tickle of a familiar smell, like applewood smoke, carried to me on a light breeze. Near the door there was a cluster of men, and as I approached, I recognized clan members I hadn’t seen in a while. There weren’t a lot of us, so I was startled to see so many dragons in one place.
Donovan Hess, a slim redheaded man who helped me keep track of dragons in the area, flew out of the wide-open front door to greet me, but he couldn’t get any words out. Younger than me, but with a grounded mind, I was not put at ease by the panic that seemed to radiate from him in waves. His large green eyes were stricken. My stomach socked right out of my body toward the center of the earth.
“What has happened?”
He didn’t speak, simply clasped my wrist in his cool, shaking fingers, and dragged me through the knot of people into the house. I wasn’t slow on my feet, but he moved me along with considerable strength, through old-fashioned rooms full
of wood furniture tended with lemon polish that hung in the air and on into a back parlor with fresh rose wallpaper which was not seen much anymore. Dragons tended to get stuck in eras they enjoyed, and this house was a monument to the 1950s. He took me to a small coffee table with something piled on it and a stained sheet tossed over it. Horror clear in his wide eyes, he lifted the sheet. For a moment, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, and then I turned away and pressed my fist to my mouth to hold in a choked moan. Cracking an eye, I turned back.
There, sitting on the table in the center of a lovingly arranged nest of soft blankets, was a beautiful egg. The shell gleamed opalescent like fire had been captured mid-play and turned into gems. But there was a spiderweb of cracks, and black liquid oozed out of each tear in that perfection to drip toward the blankets that cradled the egg.
“Dead?” I asked, my chest tight. “Is this… is this why Thomas… I didn’t realize his wife was pregnant.”
Donovan pursed his lips and tossed the sheet back over the egg. “Five.”
“What?”
“You’ve been busy running the businesses, and for the last fifty years you’ve charged me with watching over the local families while you concentrated on our clan wealth. It’s time, however, that you saw this and started taking it seriously, Carlisle. Five dead in the last year. We’ve had no live eggs. Maybe one in the past decade has survived. Have you not noticed the lack of young ones at our clan gatherings?”
Stunned, I stood there staring at Donovan’s outrage, and his face flushed red from his neck up to the tips of his ears.
“No. That can’t be right.”
“Yes, it is. We’ve got to do something. I’ve been asking around the other clans, all up and down the eastern seaboard. The same thing is happening. There have been no new dragons in the past three years. Not a single one, Carlisle. I can only assume the dragons in the West are facing the same issues.”
“But… why?” I struggled to think. Our birth rates had been on the decline for the past century, but I’d simply chalked it up to dragons not wanting to raise as many young with the growing population of humans. It’s difficult to have a young shifter in the city, and sometimes my skin itched so bad to change into my largest form—a dragon nearly the size of a barn—that I thought I might go crazy with it. The urge always passed, however.
“In the past thirty years, all the males born have been alphas and betas, did you know? There have been no new omegas. If this keeps up, in the future dragons like you… like me, who aren’t attracted to the females, won’t have anyone.”
It was difficult to swallow as I stood there staring at that sad, shroud-covered egg.
“Will they hold a funeral?”
“I don’t know.” He hung his head.
“You’ve obviously been looking into this. Do you have a theory on why this is happening?”
Donovan crossed his arms and nodded, staring at his feet. “I think the females aren’t shifting enough. Their bodies are too weak because of it. We’re not meant for the life we’ve been forcing ourselves to lead. The omegas haven’t been faring any better, and there were always far fewer of them, at any rate. We’re not human. We’re wasting away. Our dragons aren’t being exercised. It’s like a limb not used, and our dragon nature is what allows our females to endure birthing an egg that these weak human forms aren’t made to accommodate.” He shrugged. “Mitzy died, too. Thomas lost everything tonight.”
His lip trembled, and I reached out to rest a hand on his shoulder, my mind in a tumble. “Donovan, I’m going to rearrange some priorities. I didn’t realize… this has to be dealt with, and fast. I’m going to contact Mason Hardwick and you get ahold of Bishop Cane. We need to get a crew together and look for lone shifters, people who have been tending to their inner dragon’s needs more than their humans. Maybe they’re healthier? Perhaps we can convince them to marry into the lines of the clans who have been living primarily with the humans.”
He nodded.
“This is a dragon population problem, sure, but I also don’t want the Blood Dragon line to die out.” I darted a glance toward the egg again, and my stomach roiled. Poor baby. Poor Thomas.
He sighed. “I can do that.”
“You’re needed here tonight, I’d think. Now that I know what’s happening, I’ll find a way to fix it.”
He didn’t look convinced, but he gave me a small smile that was a whisper of what he normally walked around with. “Thank you, Princeps Draco.”
“Stop that crap, Donovan.”
He chuckled, but we both sighed when we turned to go back out into the main house. This would be a long few days. I rubbed the back of my neck. “I hope my vice president is up to running the company. This has been a wild time for imports,” I mumbled.
Donovan snorted. “I can’t imagine you’d put up with anyone who wasn’t capable of doing so. If I didn’t trust you, I wouldn’t have called tonight.”
Knocking my shoulder against his, I won another smile. “I’m glad you did, old friend. I know I get lost in building clan wealth.”
“Treasure,” he said sardonically, with an eyebrow tilt. “You’re such a dragon.”
“Yes, but I was already thinking tonight that not all treasure is precious metals. Dragons need other dragons.”
“Indeed,” he mumbled. We made our way back through the well-appointed rooms of the house in time to see two dragons carting a large metal coffin down the grand central staircase. I’d been spending so much time with humans that the sight of two dragons doing something perfectly reasonable for their strength gave me a jolt. Everyone clustered around the front entrance, turned, and stood silent as our dead clan member passed by out of the house. My resolve solidified.
Yes, this needed to be dealt with now. No more dragons would die on my watch. I followed the coffin out of the house and watched them load it into the hearse. Donovan sat himself down beside Thomas on the ground, offering his stolid presence as comfort. My duties as clan leader meant I should have known this issue with the birth rate was happening. I was the oldest dragon in the region and from the wealthiest family, so leadership had fallen on me by default, but it was still something I took seriously. I stopped to talk with the dragons who were present, but no one was much in the mood for talking. We shook hands, hugged, and I made my way back to my car.
On the drive home I lost myself in thought. Dragons were people of myth, and always had been. The ancient adventures had been transformed into horror tales and cautionary fables for mankind, but we had our own as well. There were stories of Divine Omegas, gems hidden among the humans. They were supposedly blessed by the old dragon gods, born of a dragon bloodline and the dragon’s human mate—females with human males. The myth went that if a dragon mated one of those omegas, they would give birth to live young. I’d always taken it for campfire tales used to titillate young dragons, since we all knew dragons were born from eggs.
But what if they’re real?
As I turned my car into the driveway of my house, even farther out of the city than the McGuires’ and shrouded by too few trees, I wondered for the first time in my life if Divine Omegas were real. I got out and went to a tree, leaning my back against it for support, and watched the stars come out while I formulated a plan. I couldn’t tell anyone else that I wanted to search for the Divine Omegas. They’d think I was crazy, but the longer I stood there, and the more I thought about it, searching for them seemed like a good idea. After all, dragons were real, just hiding, why not Divine Omegas too?
2
Haiden
“No!” I cried out as I sat up in bed.
The room was still dark and there wasn’t even a touch of sunlight on the other side of the blinds, so I knew it wasn’t anywhere near time to be awake. Sweat had plastered my shirt to my body, and I clawed at the collar. The cloth was choking me. I ended up peeling the shirt up and off, tossing it across the room.
The smell of smoke still stung in my nose from my nightmare, and the roar
of the wall of fire that had surrounded me and licked at my skin in the dream still crackled in my ears. The flames had danced close to my body on all sides so that I was trapped and marked for death with no escape.
“Oh, gosh, that was awful.” I gasped, shaking myself as I swung my feet over the edge of the futon and sat there staring at the tips of my toes. My hair fell down over my right eye as I ducked my head. The strands poked at my eyes, so I swiped them back, but they just swung into the same spot again. Grunting in irritation, I tried to take slow, regular breaths, but my chest jittered and rebelled. I snagged my glasses off the floor where I’d laid them and put them on.
This was the third time this week I’d woken up this way from that same exact dream. I got up quick, like my blankets were responsible for this crap, rather than my broken brain, and rushed from the futon I used as a bed to my kitchenette separated by a half wall in the corner of the room. My efficiency wasn’t large, so it was a quick trip. I flipped on the kitchen light and that helped dispel some of the lingering terror from my dream. I ran cold water at the faucet and snagged a glass out of the drainer next to the sink. My hand shook as I filled the glass and then stood there chugging water. I shut off the water and shifted around so that I could lean heavily against the counter. My hands shook and I shivered.
This was getting old.
The microwave above my small half-stove said the time was 5:07 in bright green numbers, but that couldn’t be right. I’d gone to bed early last night and still felt terrible. Shrugging, I drank more water and dug my toes against the bare wooden floor of the kitchen that badly needed to be redone. Years of spills and footfall had worn away the varnish in the middle of the floor so there the wood was bare.
