by Amira Rain
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE DRAGON
GENE
A PARANORMAL SHAPESHIFTER ROMANCE
AMIRA RAIN
Copyright ©2017 by Amira Rain
All rights reserved.
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About This Book
In a world where some humans are blessed with a special gene that allows them to shapeshift into different forms...
Kylie Donovan has just discovered she is a carrier of “The Dragon Gene”.
As a result she is being forced by the government to mate with a male carrier of the dragon gene called Matthew in order to produce a special “super” baby that will have two sets of the gene.
However, some genes should never be combined and the results of this match up could be about to threaten the existence of the planet and dragon-kind as they know it...
This is a unique spin on the average shifter romance novel. Download right now to enjoy this super-original book by bestselling author Amira Rain!
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER ONE
They notified me by registered letter.
Dear Miss Donovan,
Thank you for displaying patriotism by being tested for gene mutation 4A, henceforth referred to in this correspondence as the Shifter Gene. It is with pleasure that I inform you that your test results indicate that you do indeed possess the Shifter Gene.
As I’m sure you are aware, possessing the Shifter Gene means that if you agree to be mated to a shifter for the purposes of producing offspring, your female offspring will likely also carry the gene, and your male offspring will themselves become shifters in their late teens. As I’m sure you’re also aware, producing female offspring who possess the shifter gene, and male offspring who will become shifters, will be crucial to our nation’s defense in the coming decades.
Your government leaves the choice entirely to you as to whether you decide to join the National Shifter Mating Program, henceforth referred to in this correspondence as the NSMP. You can be assured that there will be no penalties, criminal prosecution, or legal repercussions of any kind if you do not, and this should be well noted.
However, if you do join the NSMP, please know that you will be compensated with a salary of one hundred thousand dollars (U.S. currency) yearly, for the next twenty years, or until reaching the age of forty-five, whichever comes first, provided you remain in a Mating Union (marriage) with a shifter. (For terms and conditions, please see enclosed literature.) Additionally, you will receive a bonus of five hundred thousand dollars (U.S. currency) for each child, whether male or female, born to your Union. (Again, for terms and conditions, please see enclosed literature.)
Important note: with each bonus, genetic testing is required to confirm that the child submitted for bonus is an offspring of this Union. You will also have the pleasure of knowing that you are doing a great service for our country.
After making your decision, please call the number on the enclosed card to inform us. If you decide to join the NSMP, we will advise you on your next steps.
Sincerely,
Maxine Thompson, on behalf of the Genetic Testing Commission for the United States Government, region 131
Somewhat in disbelief, I just stared at the letter, only half-aware that other residents of my apartment building were bustling around me, using tiny steel keys to get their mail out of personal mailboxes that lined one wall of the lobby. Others were coming in and out of glass double doors in the lobby, periodically allowing frosty air to rush in, although I hardly noticed this either, despite the fact that I wasn’t wearing a coat.
Having come down from the third floor of the building for the sole purpose of getting my mail, I was dressed in only the yoga pants and long-sleeved t-shirt that I’d been wearing around the house that day. On my feet were rubber-soled slip-on shoes made of plush, fuzzy fabric that put the shoes in “possible slipper” territory.
My best friend Amy had similar shoes, and the day before, she’d remarked that they’d officially become part of our “uniforms” as “ladies of leisure.” We weren’t really “ladies of leisure,” though. We’d been more like “ladies of boredom” or “ladies of zero direction” ever since the gymnastics, dance, and fitness center we’d co-owned had gone out of business several weeks earlier, just another casualty of the national recession caused by the Great North American Shifter War.
It had all started about four years earlier. In short, the country had become aware of the existence of “animal shifters,” which was to say, men who could “shift” into the forms of animals instantly, just by thinking about it. The country had learned of these shifters in dramatic fashion when one particular group of shifters, who called themselves the Bloodborns, had attempted an attack on the White House.
Later that day, another Bloodborn faction had attempted to attack the Pentagon. The nation watched the news coverage, stunned and horrified, while the military fought lions, wolves, bears, and dragons in real time.
The military tried to fight them with guns, which seemed to have a minimal effect on shifters. One now-famous clip of news footage showed a trio of machine gunners spraying a charging bear shifter with bullets for at least ten seconds before he finally went down.
In the days after the military finally managed to kill the attacking Bloodborns, still leaving thousands at large all over the country, the world came to learn that animal shifters had existed in the United States for a few hundred years, kept secret by the government.
Some of them had worked for the government in military roles; others had lived “regular” lives, never changing into their animal forms, or at least not often; and others had lived in small nomadic communities of shifters who were tasked with monitoring the activities of the Bloodborns, who’d apparently always been a thorn in the government’s side because of their violent ways.
The government claimed not to know, exactly, how the shifters had come to exist in the first place, saying that the shifters themselves d
idn’t even know. The best guess anyone had was that a gene mutation had created the first shifters, who’d then somehow found each other and established communities, producing shifter offspring. This was what government scientists had always posited, anyway.
However, according to the government, even though the shifters themselves had always accepted this theory, some of them believed that there must have been something “magical” in their origin, based on the fact that there was still something “magical” about them. This something was the fact that when they shifted, their clothes shifted right along with them, disappearing instantly in animal form, and reappearing instantly in human form. Government scientists had no explanation for this.
When the government had learned of the existence of shifters sometime during the Kennedy administration, the shifters had been “paid off” via yearly lump sums from the government to maintain the secrecy that they’d always kept. This was because the government was simply afraid that citizens would react with panic and terror if they learned about the existence of shifters, said the president in a televised speech not long after the White House and Pentagon shifter attacks.
He went on to explain that the continued secrecy about shifters became especially critical when many shifters had started working for the military, doing covert operations overseas.
Because of this, the president further stated in a roundabout sort of way, citizens shouldn’t “blame” the government for keeping the secret of shifters from the public for so long. It had been for everyone’s good, basically. And now, he remarked in this speech, the nation had a bigger issue to deal with anyway, and that was the problem of the Bloodborn shifters, who’d now been labeled domestic terrorists.
They’d always been “separatists,” the press soon reported, living apart from the other secret shifters in the nation, and the government always referred to them as “the friendlies.” Now-declassified government documents revealed that every few years since the Kennedy administration, the Bloodborns had petitioned the government for their own land in which to establish their own nation.
The government had always denied their request, paying them increasingly large sums of money yearly in exchange for their continued secrecy. Shortly before the attacks, though, the Bloodborns had apparently had enough of being “bought off” and had decided to take the nation they’d always wanted by force, claiming the entire United States as their own.
In the months after the attacks on the White House and Pentagon, there were more attacks, and it wasn’t long before the Bloodborns were waging an all-out war against the United States government and the group of shifters referred to as “the friendlies,” or, as the media simply referred to them, “TFs,” as in, “A group of TFs took out a group of Bloodborns today, just outside of Denver.”
The shifter war raged for years all over North America, sometimes spilling down to Mexico and up to Canada. It was during the first year of the war that Amy and I had opened our gymnastics, dance, and fitness center, which we soon began referring to as simply “the gym.” In hindsight, I could see that the timing of the opening had been a poor one, however. Fresh out of college with business degrees, Amy and I had been eager to start our adult lives and establish the business we’d been dreaming about opening for years.
Besides, despite the war, our hometown of Moxon, Michigan, seemed just as eager for a gymnastics center. The city hadn’t had one in years, which was somewhat unusual for a community of over sixty thousand people.
The city’s enthusiasm for the gym didn’t really last. Or rather, maybe the war just didn’t allow it to last. Within months of the war starting, several parents of kids in gymnastics classes expressed concern that large buildings like the gym might become targets in future Bloodborn attacks.
This concern wasn’t entirely unfounded, since Bloodborn shifters had been attacking large buildings like malls and hotels in other parts of the country; however, at this point, the Bloodborns hadn’t even entered Michigan. Thus far, the friendlies had successfully fought them off. This didn’t matter to the over-a-dozen families at the gym, though, who pulled their kids out of classes within months of the gym’s opening.
Over the next couple of years, Amy and I lost more students during an event called “the great Michigan bleed,” when the state “bled out” a full third of its population, with most of those residents heading west, which had, so far, been unaffected by the shifter war. By this point, the war had come to Michigan, and even though the battles that had occurred so far had been fought in unpopulated areas, people were scared, and understandably so. Amy and I stayed and ran the business, though, determined not to abandon our dream. The friendlies, who’d been renamed the USSA, an acronym for the United States Shifter Alliance, continued fighting the Bloodborns.
During the third year of the war, media coverage made it clear that the Bloodborn shifters remaining in the state were all dragons, and the USSA fighters trying mightily to wipe them all out were all dragons as well. “Which should make for some really epic battles in the next few months,” a male reporter said on the local news one night, unbelievably, as if he were actually excited about those “epic battles.”
Those “epic battles” ended up reducing several Michigan cities and towns to smoldering piles of rubble. Thousands of lives were lost. Moxon, as a whole, wasn’t outright flattened, but several residential neighborhoods within it were one night, as dead dragons from both sides of the fighting fell from the sky. My mom was critically injured and died in the hospital the next day. Listening to music on headphones while she vacuumed the house, she hadn’t heard the city’s “emergency dragon sirens” pealing, signaling all residents to take cover in their basements or in the bomb shelters that many people had constructed by this time.
Over the course of the next year, the USSA shifters managed to kill many of the Bloodborns in battles all across the United States, However, many Bloodborns escaped to Canada and ultimately did what they hadn’t been able to do in America, toppling the government and claiming the nation for their own, calling it the Bloodborn Federated States, or BFS.
Canadian migrants, millions and millions of them, flooded into the United States, desperate to escape living in a country under tyrannical Bloodborn rule. These millions of migrants, although heartbroken to have had to leave their country, soon joined the citizens of their new country in a celebration. At last, the Great North American Shifter War was over. The Bloodborns have their country now, people thought. They’ll finally leave us alone.
America began the process of rebuilding, and within a few months, there were no traces that war had ever visited Moxon. Amy and I continued running the gym, which had limped along with wildly varying levels of enrollment during the entire war. The damage had been done, though, by the state’s population loss, and people were still leaving. Most Canadian migrants were heading out west, where jobs were more plentiful. Also, the nation was now in a deep postwar recession, which was hitting the Midwest particularly hard.
Additionally, people were still worried about sending their kids to gymnastics classes in a large building that could still, at least in theory, become a target for the Bloodborns, even though the Bloodborns were all now in Canada. “All it would take is for one Bloodborn dragon to fly past our USSA dragons that guard Michigan airspace,” one mom said to me. “The Bloodborns are faster than fighter jets, you know.”
That was commonly said, although it was also commonly not accepted as the truth. The Bloodborn dragons were extremely fast, though; that was true. They were also extremely nimble and acrobatic in the air. At the beginning of the war, the government had quickly abandoned all hope of killing them via artillery fired from fighter jets and had just left the USSA dragons to deal with them. In addition to being much more effective than the air force at killing the Bloodborns, the USSA dragons were also better at where in the sky they killed the Bloodborns, trying to let them “drop” over unpopulated areas if at all possible.
It was early October
in the year after the war when Amy and I realized that we just couldn’t go on with the gym. Our dream had become a financial nightmare. We still owed a hundred grand on our initial bank loan. We owed eighty-four thousand on a second. Both of our credit cards were maxed. My personal debt exceeded thirty-six thousand. Not to mention that I still had twenty grand in student loans. The gym still wasn’t turning a profit yet, either. In fact, most months, it was all Amy and I could do to pay our three employees and keep the lights on in the building.
So, after a tearful last practice session and pizza party with the remaining fifteen girls and three boys on our competitive gymnastics team, we closed our doors for good. The kids would now have to travel about seventy miles one way if they wanted to continue with their gymnastics training at a different gym. A couple of parents were already trying to organize a carpool system.
The following day, a gymnastics center owner from Chicago bought all our equipment and mats, which gave Amy and me each a little money to survive on until we figured out what was next for each of us. Amy had thoughts of trying to find employment as a coach at another gym, even if that necessitated a move out of Moxon, and so did I. We were both also not opposed to trying to find decent-paying non-gymnastics, dance, or fitness-related jobs in Moxon, even though coaching was all either of us had ever done.
The only problem with this was that jobs of any kind had become incredibly scarce in the city. Ours wasn’t the only business that had been forced to close its doors because of the population bleed and the lingering effects of the war, not by a long shot.
Whatever happened, Amy and I were sure that we didn’t want to declare bankruptcy. For one thing, we both felt a moral obligation to at least try to pay off the debt we’d racked up as sole proprietors of the business, and for another thing, we were both worried about how bankruptcy on each of our records might affect us if we ever tried to start another gym down the road, like maybe when the economy was more stable. We had no illusions that we’d ever be approved for any kind of a business loan ever again if we both declared bankruptcy, or at least for a decade at a minimum.
