Beyond all their obvious physical attributes—and the longer I stared, the more physical those attributes became—the four were something else, and something rather unexpected. There was no sense of malice coming off them. That seemed a ridiculous thing to think. Bad people didn’t always seem bad. And yet, these men carried everything before them; what you saw was what you got. They exuded a sense of everything they were; strong, honest, decent, arrogant, perhaps, but not without cause. I felt zero negative vibes.
Which meant I was either a major sucker, or Stockholm Syndrome was setting in.
I cursed myself for my weakness in this terrible situation. Making excuses for my captors…what the hell was I thinking?
"Perhaps," MacKenzie spoke again, "you will believe the story if it comes from four people rather than just me, as you've clearly made up your mind what you think about me."
"What does she think about you?" asked Duncan, his voice bouncing with pent-up energy.
"That I need help."
"Well, she's not necessarily wrong there," mused Callum, his voice low and husky, set at a timbre that made my insides vibrate.
“And that I might make a suit from her skin,” he added with a smirk. “So, we’ve got some work to do to convince her, boys.”
"Let's get on with it, then.” Alistair had a hint of an accent that I couldn't place, but which I very much liked.
To my surprise, the four men sat on the floor in front of me. MacKenzie sat cross-legged, Duncan sprawled, Alistair squatted as if he might have to get up at a moment's notice, and Callum sat with one leg out and one knee crooked up on which he leaned.
"There were always dragons," MacKenzie began, as serious now as when he had first introduced that unlikely word. “Legend says they were born of the fires that raged when the earth was young. I don't know about that, but our race was old when humans first walked on the planet."
"Which is when our kind chose to walk with you," Callum added.
"To be a Shifter is to have a foot in both worlds," MacKenzie explained. "We look, as you see us now. But the dragon lives in each of us."
That was the first thing in all this nonsense that I almost believed. If dragons lived in anyone, then these four were prime candidates.
"It lives in you, too," Duncan said with a nod.
I blinked and stared at him. “What?”
"You're telling the story out of order," Alistair chided Duncan.
Duncan rolled his eyes. "You think she'd be more willing to believe it after you've droned on through millennia of history? We're here to tell her, so I told her."
"Well, it's done now," said MacKenzie. He turned back to me. "Duncan has cut a long story short."
"Very short," put in Callum.
"Well, it was very long," Duncan responded.
"Quiet." The word was spoken softly but both Duncan and Callum immediately closed their mouths and MacKenzie continued. "To give you the essentials without the details; our ancestors joined the human race."
"Joined the human race?" Why was I even entertaining any of this? Like the answer to that question would make any more sense than what had come before it.
"The truth is complicated. Fact and legend have become mixed over the years. The outcome, though, is that we walked among you, lived with you, fought with you." His green eyes flicked up to meet mine. "Loved with you. And yet we remained dragons within. A sub-species, if you like."
"I don't like that term." Alistair shook his head. "We are not 'sub'."
"It's just a way of making it easy for her to understand," Duncan pointed out.
"Yep," Callum nodded, casting a glance in my direction. "That's the face of a woman who understands."
"She understands fine," argued Duncan. "She just doesn't believe."
"There's no point in keeping the story short if you insist on arguing through it," MacKenzie said sharply, again bringing his brothers back in line. "Where was I? Oh, yes. Over time and integration our blood became more and more watered down. No one knew it was happening at first—who understood such things in those wild times?—and by the time the realization came it was almost too late. Our numbers had dwindled and too many offspring born failed to show any dragon characteristics at all."
"For some reason," Alistair took up the tale, "the problem was particularly evident in our females. The last female Dragon Shifter died centuries ago."
"How have you survived?" Later, I would tell myself that I was asking these questions to make them think I was buying into it, but the truth was that I had become caught up in their story.
"Because," Callum now spoke, "while pure Dragon Shifter females died out, the blood of our species still runs in many of yours."
"There were no distinctions in those early years," Duncan raced in. "No dragons, no humans, just people. People who fell in love and... and so on." He winked at me, and I was frightened to find that I rather liked it.
"It's why we started to die out," Callum added.
"It's also our salvation," said Alistair. "Some women—very few—still have enough undiluted dragon blood in their veins, passed down from their ancestors and ours, that they can bear dragon children."
"You, for example," concluded MacKenzie.
Only a fool would have failed to see where this conversation was going, but even knowing where they were heading I still felt my stomach contract as MacKenzie spoke the words. I was part dragon? It was the sort of thing that little Bobby White would say to me at school.
"How do you know that? Do I have, like—I don't know—markings or some sort of sign?"
MacKenzie shook his head. "We used findmyancestry.com."
“What?" I demanded with a growing sense of hysteria. I’d been sitting here, about ready to fall for this crazy talk, and they found their information on findmyancestry.com.
"It's a very good site,” Duncan added with a sage nod.
“Are you kidding me right now?”
Alistair stepped in. “Point is, when the problem of our dwindling numbers first became obvious, our race tried to track which humans had dragon blood. They succeeded to some degree but there were simply too many to keep track, and when they got married and had children then you had to know the lineage of their partner to know to what extent the children might also carry our blood. But the site makes searches like that easy."
"You can see whole lineages at a glance."
Alistair nodded. “It really is invaluable.”
"A tool, really,” Duncan piped in.
"Are you advertising the fucking site right now?" I snapped. "Being kidnapped, stripped and told I have dragon blood is one thing but I draw the line at my forcible captivity pausing for a word from your sponsor. You're all insane and I’m just as nuts for sitting here listening to this drivel.”
The four men looked at me and I felt my heart melt. Insane or not, there was such genuine sadness in their handsome faces that something inside me gave a hitch.
Whether they were crazy or not, something told me that they believed what they were saying. Every word of it. And if that was the case, if they were sick in the head? Then they deserved my sympathy, at least a little. I wasn’t going to buy into it, and maybe bashing them in the head with a candlestick was too harsh, but I had to get away. Sick people, even with the best of intentions, could be dangerous, after all.
"I need time to think about all this,” I said finally.
A flicker of suspicion passed fleetingly across MacKenzie's face but he nodded. "Of course. It is a lot to take in. Let’s go, lads, give the girl some privacy."
They all stood and followed MacKenzie to the door.
"It is true, you know," he said as he went. "All of it."
He said it with such heartfelt conviction that I almost believed it all over again.
Duncan was the last to go and I called him back with a wave of my hand.
"You can take the tray," I said.
"You should eat,” he said, his face lined with concern.
"I'm fin
e."
He shrugged and picked up the tray of food before walking for the door.
“Wait. I might be hungry later and regret it.” I went over and helped myself to a pastry, heart pounding. As I did so, the tray conveniently shielded Duncan’s view of my other hand as it stole to his belt and deftly unlooped the key.
"Alright?" he asked as I stood back.
"I'd be happier if you'd let me out."
He pulled a face and MacKenzie stepped back into the room to level me with a sad smile. “We don't want you to feel like a prisoner, but until we can convince you that we're telling the truth, I wouldn't know what else to call it. I'm sorry. We can’t let you go yet, lass.”
He waved Duncan out the door and then followed, closing it behind him. I listened with my heart in my throat as the lock engaged.
If Duncan knew I’d snatched his keys, there was no indication of it.
I listened to them walk away, barely able to hear their footsteps over the thudding of my own heart. My sister and I used to play cops and robbers when we were little so I had some experience busting out of a locked room. Though, now, of course, there was considerably more at stake.
I waited a full ten minutes before lifting my shaking hand with the key in it, hovered at the lock. I counted slowly to ten, leveling my breathing as I did so. Finally, I slid the key into the lock. At that moment it sounded like the loudest thing I had ever heard in my life but I kept going and then turned it, gritting my teeth at every rusty squeak until that beautiful click.
I pulled the door open and peered out into the corridor beyond, lit by blazing torches. If there were such things as Dragon Shifters then this was exactly where they would live. I crept out, turned right and almost jumped out of my skin, clamping a hand over my mouth to stop myself from screaming. A suit of armor was standing by the wall, staring at me silently. I crept on.
Whatever else they were, these dragons were not house-proud. Dust coated every surface and so many spider webs veiled the corners that they could be having their own private Game of Thrones. A mouse skittered along the wall and nearly made me scream again. Which was ludicrous when you thought about it—if seeing a mouse was the worst thing that happened to me today then I could chalk that up as a win.
Finally, I passed down a broad staircase into what could only be the hallway. My heart was in my mouth as I raced across the cold flagstones to the vast double doors that led out. Fortunately, there was a smaller—my brain unhelpfully thought “human-sized”—door set into it. Was it too much to hope that it might be unlocked? I turned the handle and could have wept with relief as it turned freely. All caution now thrown to the wind, I pulled the door open and stepped out.
Thankfully, I had kept one hand on the door handle as I did so, and could use it to drag myself back in. This time the scream came, shrieking raw from my lungs. The door led to nothing.
Outside was a sheer drop—a craggy cliff plunging down a thousand feet to the sea below. In a panic, I scrambled to get backward, but my ankle turned and suddenly, I was in a free fall, plunging to my death…
Chapter 6
Face first I fell, the icy wind robbing the breath from my lungs. Presumably hard earth was down there somewhere but right now I was falling towards cloud. It was going to be a really long time before...
Before, you know.
Which meant a really long time to think about what was coming, to regret, to be angry, to cry. The distance I had to fall, I probably had time to go through all the stages of grief before I came to a sudden and terminal halt.
I desperately tried not to think about family—about what this would do to my mom. I tried not to think about the future I had wanted and would now never have, of the true love I had never found, of the children I had wanted—God, how I had wanted—to have.
I closed my streaming eyes against the rushing air, blocked all thought from my mind and waited for the end.
Would I feel it?
Would I feel anything at all?
Suddenly, the breath was knocked out of me, and I screamed out loud as my whole body convulsed with the shock of coming to a stop, far sooner than I would have thought. I couldn't have hit the ground yet, surely? Not least since I still seemed to be alive.
I allowed my eyes to open a crevice, peering through interlaced lashes. The clouds were still below me, but now they were getting further away.
I was no longer plummeting down…I was going up. I was flying, and for a brief moment, fear was replaced by relief.
It was only then that I noticed the increased pressure about my mid-section—I had thought that it was just my stomach tightening. Had someone, somehow, looped a rope about me in mid-air?
I opened my eyes wider, watching the vast landscape of clouds rise and fall beneath me, towering into mountains, descending into a billowing fantastical world of white cotton candy. Almost afraid to do so, I twisted my head around to look up, and my blood ran cold.
Above me was a vast reptilian torso, moving in and out with each stentorian breath. I grabbed for my belly and felt smooth, cold scales, culminating in a sharp, hooked nail. A huge clawed hand —or foot?—held me in its grip, lightly but firmly.
The exhilaration of flight was now voided from my mind, making way for blind panic.
This couldn't be real. Was I hallucinating as I fell? Perhaps due to oxygen deprivation? Was this just what happened when you died?
At that moment, nothing sane was left in me. There was no room in my body for conscious thought or considered actions, there was only instinct, blinding common sense in the overwhelming need to get away from this thing, whatever it was.
I struggled, kicking and thrashing, screaming my lungs out, too terrified to see that getting away meant certain death. A low rumble—an animal sound and yet slightly questioning—issued from the chest above me and, before my staring eyes, a huge head, sapphire blue and with green eyes, curved down on the end of a long neck to look at me.
I howled again and the head shook, as if to say “foolish creature”, before it snaked away again out of sight. The grip about my middle tightened slightly, keeping me safe without hurting me.
I struggled to breathe, gulping in lungsful of air though it never seemed enough, then whimpered as we angled slightly down. In the periphery of my vision, I saw something move and turned to see, for the first time, the massive wings stretched out to either side of us, flapping with strong, even strokes.
Another rumble came from the dragon—there was nothing else I could call it—this one a different tone, as if attracting my attention, and I looked up ahead to see that we were coming up on a cliff, breaking through the clouds like an island.
As we drew closer, the dragon reared back, bringing me vertical again, beating its wings more quickly now to hold its position, hovering at the cliff's edge, on which it now placed me, as daintily and carefully as if I was a china doll. I fell forward on my hands and knees, wanting to kiss the ground, every limb shaking with fear, relief and, buried away in some dark portion of my mind, a sharp thrill of excitement. I looked back at my unlikely savior. With a strong flap of his wings, the dragon shot up again, twisting in mid-air, looping its body round and down to plunge down through the cloud layer. For a heartbeat there was nothing, then it burst forth again, soaring back into view in a long, aerial arc and landing on the cliff top some small distance from me.
I should have been scared. A part of me wanted to run and jump off the cliff rather than face the truths that awaited me. And yet... The dragon fixed me with its green eyes and took a few steps closer, its movements confident and muscular and—though I fought the idea—familiar. There was something about it that made me feel safe in its company, something that let me know that it meant me no harm. I was still scared, but not as scared as I had been or as scared as I should have been. I pulled the fur blanket—which somehow had survived my ordeal—more closely around me. It might not have meant me harm but its eyes on me still felt intrusive.
The dragon rea
red onto its hind legs to look down at me. It was a deep blue color, radiant and gleaming in the high sun. It was not sleek, exactly, streamlined, perhaps, but it was also rugged, its muscles moving like oiled machine parts beneath its scaly skin. Mentally, I tried to find words to describe it and kept coming back to the same one; handsome. An insane word to use and yet the dragon demanded it, it carried with it an air of magnificence, a presence, a charisma. And as I looked into its sharp green eyes, I knew where that strange familiarity had come from.
The dragon coughed out what I took to be a warning as it stepped back from me, threw back its beautiful head and... Before my astonished gaze its head shrank down into its neck, the features twisting and reshaping themselves as it went. Its wings folded and seemed to be absorbed into its back. Scales retreated beneath pink skin, claws retracted to nails, the broad, muscular dragon chest was replaced by a broad, muscular human chest. Only the eyes remained the same, and I met MacKenzie's remonstrating look as he gave his neck one last twist to complete his transformation.
"Well, that wasn't how we wanted to convince you—it’s a shock, I know—but can I assume that you do now believe at least part of our story?"
I was lost for words. Right at that moment, I honestly could not have said if I was more astonished by the existence of a dragon, the fact that it turned into a human, or by MacKenzie's naked body. I remembered a time when I was at that awkward age when you are technically an adult but still watch TV with your parents. My mom and I were watching a show, chatting through it, and suddenly a naked man entered. In an effort to break the awkward silence that had descended, my mom uttered the immortal words, “He's healthy”.
Based on his general physique, some observations made when we were pressed together dancing, and blind optimism, I had always had pretty high expectations about how “healthy” MacKenzie was. He met them, and then exceeded them. In fact, I was pretty sure that, if properly stimulated, he would be at least two inches “healthier” than I had even dared to fantasize.
Kidnapped by the Dragon Harem: A Paranormal Holiday Fantasy Page 4
