by Lili Zander
Daughter of Draekons
A Prison Planet Slice of Life
Lee Savino
Lili Zander
Copyright © 2018 by Tara Crescent, Lili Zander, Lee Savino.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Many thanks to Miranda for her sharp eyes.
Cover Design by Kasmit Covers
Contents
The Dragons in Exile Series
Daughter of Draekons
The Lowlands and surrounding areas
1. Harper
2. Viola
3. Raiht’vi
4. Harper
5. Olivia
6. Harper
7. Viola
8. Harper
9. May
10. Harper
11. Raiht’vi
12. Harper
13. Harper
Epilogue
The Dsar Cliff Inhabitants
Who’s who among the Zorahn
The Dragons in Exile Series
About the Authors
Books by Lili Zander
Books by Lee Savino
The Dragons in Exile Series
Are you all caught up with the Draekons? Don’t miss any of the books.
Draekon Mate - Viola’s story
Draekon Fire - Harper’s story
Draekon Heart - Ryanna’s story
Draekon Abduction - Olivia’s story
Draekon Destiny - Felicity’s story
Draekon Fever - coming soon!
Subscribe to Lili Zander’s mailing list and be the first to find out when new Draekon books are released! As a special thank-you, subscribers will receive a free Draekon Mate bonus scene, guaranteed to steam up your e-reader!
Daughter of Draekons
I'm pregnant.
I cycle between three states. Hungry. Horny. Weepy.
I eat French fries dipped in vanilla pudding.
I look like a beached whale.
I'm also scared. No one knows what my child will look like, or what species she’ll be. She could be human or Draekon, or…
Something else entirely. Something new.
Daughter of Draekons.
Daughter of Draekons is a short story set in the Dragons in Exile series. It does not not stand alone, and should be read after Draekon Destiny. Catch up with everyone on the prison planet while you’re waiting for Draekon Fever.
The Lowlands and surrounding areas
1
Harper
"Oooh, baby," I moan. "Oooh, yeah. Right there."
Vulrux grins at me as his hands massage up my legs. His thumbs stroke a particularly sore spot on my calf, and I melt into the bed. I'm propped on about a thousand pillows—thank you, Zunix’s syn—with all the essentials within reaching distance. A large cup of water, a flat leaf I use as a fan, and materials for a soft baby blanket that May is teaching me to crochet with thin strips of ahuma fabric before my due date.
Not that we know when that is—the due date, the length of this pregnancy, or how big or small my daughter will be when she arrives. Dariux’s med-kit was able to tell us the gender of the baby, but nothing else.
There’s no rulebook here. Draekon pregnancies are only four months long, but human ones are forty weeks. It could be any day now. In a few weeks, or a month, or who even knows? I got pregnant sometime during the rainy season. As best as we’ve been able to calculate, I’m hovering around the four-month mark, but so far, though I’m bloated, fiendishly uncomfortable, and needing to pee at the drop of a hat, there’s no sign that my baby girl is ready to leave my womb.
Sometimes, that thought makes me weepy. Ah, who am I kidding? I cry a lot nowadays. Yesterday, May had come over to help me troubleshoot my baby blanket—I am not crafty—and I sobbed buckets on her shoulder. “I can’t even make a stupid blanket,” I’d bawled. “How am I going to care for a child?”
She’d inched away from me, a terrified expression on her face. Poor May. I have to waddle over to her apartment today and apologize.
What if my baby goes the full nine-month term?
Dear stars above, I hope it’s not the case, because I’m already huge. I don’t even want to know how much weight I’ve gained. While my skin is glowing, the rest of me resembles a beached whale.
Correction: A beached whale with fantastic boobs. That’s one thing pregnancy has done for me. My breasts are large and lush. I lie around half naked because the temperature setting in our underground-apartment is a temperamental beast that only seems to work half the time, and when it’s on the fritz, it’s hot and humid here. I probably look like a wanton goddess, but most of the time, all I want is for someone to rub my aching calves.
My poor, poor mates.
“Have you gotten any more leg cramps?” Vulrux asks.
“No.” Thank all the pregnancy gods—human and Draekon. The last Charlie Horse I got hurt so bad it woke me up in the middle of the night. I moaned so loudly my mates thought I was going into labor.
“Good.” Vulrux keeps kneading my calf. His hair is mussed, and his face is serious and a little tired. That’s my fault. Lately, I’ve been up a lot at night. Between heartburn and having to go to the bathroom after the smallest sip of water, not to mention the tossing and turning trying to get comfortable, I’m awake every few hours. My mates wake up right along with me, though they never complain. Quite the opposite. They’re always patient, loving, and eager to help.
I totally hit the Draekon jackpot.
Speaking of jackpot… The door opens, and Dennox comes in. The smell of the food he’s carrying hits me, and my stomach growls. I just ate an hour ago, but tell that to my body. It thinks I’m starving.
"Did you get them?" I ask eagerly, sitting up in my pillow-nest.
My mate nods and offers me the platter of hot French fries.
"Ohmygherd," I sigh as I bite into a fry. "So good."
Dennox and Vulrux exchange amused glances. I ignore them in favor of the fries. Food hits my stomach, and it settles.
For the next few minutes, I munch happily, licking the grease from my fingers. I’ll pay for this later with heartburn, but Vulrux is working on some sort of stomach tonic he mixes with fruit juice. Fingers crossed, it does the trick.
Speaking of fruit… “Can you hand me that?” I reach out a hand, and Dennox hands me a cup of creamy vanilla pudding. Okay, it’s not really vanilla pudding, though it certainly tastes like it. It’s mashed kunnr fruit, and it’s absolutely delicious. “I’m going to try something.” I dip a fry into the sweet stuff, take a bite, and moan as the salt-fat-sugar combination hits my tongue. “That is amazing.”
Dennox grimaces, but Vulrux cocks his head to the side, as if his inner healer is fascinated by a particularly interesting patient.
The plate of fries is courtesy Raiht’vi’s food syn. The missing scientist developed a taste for American junk food during her brief stay on Earth, and programmed her food synthesizer to generate fries, chocolate, burgers… You name it, the syn will make it. No broccoli though, and no spinach. Ah well. Who needs nutrition?
Well, my baby does. I think. Then again, this is the first h
uman and Draekon baby... ever. Let’s be honest, we’re all just groping in the dark.
I eat the rest of the fries with the pudding. I love my mates, and while in theory, I love that I’m bearing our child, I’m sick of being the pregnant freak show of the Prison Planet. Felicity is pregnant too, but she’s barely started showing.
Cravings, weight gain, hormones, all the crazy symptoms. Not to mention my secret anxiety. No one knows what my child will look like, or what species she’ll be. She could be human or Draekon, or…
Stop it, Harper. Worrying about it won’t make things better.
2
Viola
We’ve been in our underground home for a month now. It’s not technically underground, of course. It’s built in the middle of a mountain.
When we first discovered it, the hollowed-out dwellings inside the Dsar Cliffs had been a great mystery to us. Someone had obviously built this, and what’s more, they’d filled it with tech. Door sensors. Lights. Temperature controls. Bathrooms with flush toilets. Halle-fucking-lujah.
Seven floors filled with apartments, communal spaces, greenhouses and more. On what is supposedly a planet uninhabited by anyone except a few Draekon exiles.
Then Dariux had dropped his bombshell revelation a week ago. A thousand years ago, when Draekons were being exterminated, Wonacx, the scientist who had created them, had smuggled away some of them to the prison planet. Our prison planet. Dariux believes that the descendants of those Draekons are still alive, hidden somewhere on this planet.
The lost city of the Draekons. It almost seems like a fairy tale.
Of course, there are several unanswered questions. If our underground home was built by the Draekons, where did they get the tech from? Why did they build this place underground, when there’s plenty of space above ground? Are they still alive?
And most important of all, if they are out there, why haven’t they made contact with us?
I hear the sound of footsteps, and then Bryce steps into the communal room. “Happy Tuesday,” she says cheerfully, walking over to the cooling unit in the corner of the room, and getting herself a drink of kunnr wine. If Bryce is drinking wine, then the beer experiment of the week has been a failure. Pity. I’m starting to develop a taste for her brew. “I just ran into Ryanna and May,” she says. “They’re almost done with their rounds.”
Days of the week don’t have much meaning on the prison planet, but I’ve decided to keep a calendar anyway. It’s too easy to drift from day to day here and lose track of time entirely. We’d done that at the start. The first couple of months, I barely noticed the passage of time. I’d been too busy having super-hot sex with my Draekon mates.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m still having crazy-hot sex with Arax and Nyx. That part hasn’t changed. I’m just tracking days better now.
We’re slowly setting up some routine in our new home. We don’t have as much to do here as we did when we lived in the Na’lung Cliffs, but everyone’s found something or other to keep themselves occupied. I spend my days in the greenhouses. I’ve found a large store of seeds held in stasis, and I’m in the process of growing them. There are some herbs that Vulrux needs for his medicine too that we’re trying to cultivate indoors.
Sofia learns as much about medicinal plants as she can. Ryanna’s learning to speak Zor. Bryce alternates between making beer and running after her pet karvil Fluffy McCutie. And of course, we all still have to hunt for our food and lay stores for the rainy season. Raiht’vi’s syn can generate some meals, but if all forty-five of us were to use it for all our meals, it’s going to run out of juice in less than a year. Syns don’t last forever.
Speaking of routine, ever since we moved in here, we human women have been making a point of getting together every Not-Really-Tuesday evening. It’s just fun to hang out and gossip. Plus, it helps stave off our bouts of homesickness. Every so often, it hits me that I’m never going to see Earth again, and a wave of sadness washes over me. Hanging out with the other women helps ease the pain.
May walks in, carrying a ball of ahuma yarn and a pair of wooden knitting needles, Ryanna following on her heels. “The rounds are complete,” she says. “All forty-five residents are accounted for.”
Ryanna nods. “The poor seaside Draekons,” she says. “They’re going stir crazy. They’re not used to being so cooped up.”
The seaside Draekons, as we call them, are the nine men that were originally part of the same batch of exiles as Olivia’s mates. They’re Lowborn and Midborn. They’d got tired of being pushed around by the Highborn, there’d been a fight, and they’d left to go live by themselves in a camp on the westernmost edge of the continent, right next to the sea.
I’ve never been to their original home, but Felicity has. “It’s spectacularly beautiful,” she’d said. “Long beaches of pink sand. The water’s shallow enough to wade out for miles and warm enough to swim in.”
“They’re not the only ones getting cooped up,” I sigh. “We all are.”
Last week, the men patrolling the Lowlands found the wreckage of five Zorahn ships. “They’re getting serious,” Arax had said, his voice laced with worry. “If we keep flying our patrols, we’re going to get caught. We’ve got to stop.”
No more flights. We’re confined to the Lowlands. Every single one of us has to come back to the mountain every single night. Ryanna and May do rounds at sundown to check to make sure that everyone is accounted for. It’s just not safe to be wandering around for days on end anymore.
Bryce goes slightly pink when the seaside Draekons are mentioned. I’m about to be nosy when Olivia enters the room, her face unusually serious. “Lio just got back home,” she says. “He saw a ship land in the Eastern grasslands. It took damage, but there are survivors. Three heavily armed soldiers.”
Fuck. I wanted to talk to everyone about throwing Harper a surprise baby shower. So much for that. There’s a very tiny voice in my head—a voice I’m not proud of—that wants to blame this all on Raiht’vi. It’s her that the Zorahn soldiers are looking for.
I wonder where she is right now. I wonder if she’s safe.
3
Raiht’vi
It would be so easy to give up.
It’s so tempting. The forbidden pill is embedded in my right thumb. All I have to do is slice my skin open. I still have one blade. One small nick, and then it all ends.
I’ve lost track of how long I’ve been hiding. How long that Draekon, Dariux, has been searching for me. It’s taken everything I have to stay ahead of him, to stay undetected.
My stomach rumbles with hunger. I’ve tried to hunt, but so far, I haven’t been able to kill anything. When I eat, it’s berries I’ve foraged, or fish I’ve managed to catch by improvising a hook using one of my earrings. But last week, I lost my hook. Ever since then, it’s been raw greens, fruit, and berries.
Just put one foot in front of the other. You can do it.
The Draekons are gone. The small village they live in is deserted. There’s no food there, unfortunately, Just some dried herbs. Sadly, I have a very good idea why they’ve left.
My father Brunox, the head of the Council of Scientists, and my betrothed, Lenox, High Emperor of the Zorahn Empire are coming for me. If the Draekons get in the way, they’ll be annihilated.
So they’ve gone into hiding. Smart move.
My father, in particular, must be going out of his mind. I’m valuable to him. My bonding with the High Emperor will get him closer to the Crystal Throne than any scientist has ever dreamed.
But it’s more than that. Brunox will be desperate to recover me because I’m the only person in the world, apart from him, who knows all his dirty little secrets. And if these secrets were revealed…
…If the High Emperor were ever to discover that for the last sixty-five years, instead of exiling the Draekons to the prison planet, my father has diverted their ships to secret labs spread out throughout the galaxy…
…If the citizens of the Homeworld were
to realize that the scientists have been conducting forbidden experiments on their loved ones, on the unfortunate exiles…
…If Lenox were to find out that Brunox wishes to create an army of Draekons, answerable only to him…
…If it came to light that the only reason Arax’s exile ship was sent to the Prison Planet was because there were too many eyes on the Firstborn, and even Brunox had to play by the rules that one time…
…A death sentence would be a kindness.
All my life, I’ve swallowed the lies I’ve been fed. I’ve believed every single falsehood about the Draekons. That they are savages, no better than animals. That they lose their minds when they shift. That a Zorahn who tests positive for the dreaded gene does not have long before the mutation erases his mind and transforms him into a beast with nothing but killing rage in his heart.
I killed that poor woman from Giflan—Vulrux and Dennox’s first mate—as surely as if I’d held the gun in my own hands.
But they’re not savages. Not even close.
