Sure enough, when he turned to face the newcomers, both of their faces wore matching expressions of warm amusement. The younger man—a server just like Charlotte—smoothed his expression in reaction to Nicholas’s glare, but the other onlooker was less easily cowed.
“Tch, tch, brother,” Alexander teased. “What have I told you about manhandling serving wenches in the corridors?”
“That’s where you got it from?” Nicholas demanded, turning back to face his original conversational partner. “Please tell me he’s not...”
“He’s not,” she cut him off.
As if Nicholas would have spilled the beans even if he was physically capable of doing so. He flared his nostrils in lieu of rolling his eyes, then turned his glare onto the male server. “Take Charlotte’s tray.”
At least that human was intimidated by a dragon shifter’s curt command. Of course, then Nicholas felt like shit as the male moved to obey so quickly that he tripped over his own two feet and barely refrained from knocking Charlotte down in the process.
By the time trays had traded hands, Alexander was laughing so loudly the entire corridor reverberated with his amusement. Nicholas’s brother continued to chortle as the male server retraced his footsteps and disappeared back into the elevator from whence he’d come. And Alexander didn’t pause when Charlotte strode off in the opposite direction either, snub nose in the air and annoyance lending metaphorical wings to previously leaden feet.
Only once the hallway was empty save for the two siblings did his trouble-making brother fall silent at last. But then Nicholas flinched because Alexander’s usual easy-going smile faded as quickly as it had come, his eyes darkening with distress instead.
“No, please don’t tell me a secret,” Nicholas ground out.
“It’s not a secret exactly,” Alexander countered. “Half the Aerie will know within the hour. But there is a strange dragon up on the rooftop. We need your knack to figure out who she is.”
***
She. The word smacked Nicholas across the face just as his brother had intended, and his feet turned toward the stairwell as the fastest path to achieve his destination.
“There’s no big hurry,” Alexander called after his retreating back. “One of the visiting sloggers said she’d been up there for two hours already. He thought the female was one of us. Imagine, a silver dragon and he had no idea she didn’t belong.”
Nicholas could well imagine. Mudsloggers—or sloggers for short—were ordinary humans who occasionally visited the Aerie to trade or work. They were inevitably terrified of dragons, or were at least in awe of the tremendous beasts who prevented the Green from overrunning the few skyscraper safe zones where both dragons and humans lived in harmony. Why should a slogger bother to consider color and gender when the mere presence of a dragon was enough to make most of them piss their pants?
“She shifted?” Nicholas called backwards even as he pulled at his own inner fire and felt fiery wings pop out of human shoulder blades. Stairs were faster than the elevator...especially when you were a dragon and able to fly.
“Nope,” his brother answered, matching him wingbeat for wingbeat. Together, they pushed upwards, navigating the nine stories between kitchen and roof in the time it would have taken for the elevator to ascend a single level.
“She’s leaving then.” Nicholas wasn’t sure why his stomach lurched at the thought. Probably just because he’d never met a female dragon before. Never imagined there were sisters out there to match the brothers—some of his blood, all of his heart—with whom he shared this aerial retreat.
Because there weren’t new dragons being born or made. Every shifter had popped into existence three decades earlier at the same time normal plants morphed into the dangerous Green. Perhaps that was why learning about a female dragon after all this time felt like stepping into a fairy tale where knights and dragons were matched by princesses and tasks of honor.
“Hasn’t even spread her wings,” Alexander countered. Then, catching Nicholas’s arm before the latter could push open the heavy metal door that stood between them and the open summit of the Plaza, his brother admonished, “Slow down. You don’t want to scare her away.”
Nicholas couldn’t slow down, though. Instead, his feet rushed forward, hip thrusting out to press against the release bar in the middle of the door. Sister. The word danced like a newfound secret down his spine and for a moment Nicholas remembered what secrets used to feel like before they’d turned into a burden nearly impossible to bear.
Still, he forced himself to pause after stepping out into the cool, damp tang of evening so his eyes could adjust to the rapidly fading light. Back in the Before, the rooftop would have been ablaze with the glow of electric bulbs, the city beneath so brilliant it made stars in the sky impossible to pick out of the smoggy skyline. Now, the Aerie faded into near darkness as soon as evening fell, only a few beacons of light shining to the north, south, and west where five other buildings rose high enough in the air to provide refuge from the Green.
But Nicholas had no attention to spare for either absent lights or pesky vines that were unable to breach his current elevated location. Instead, his gaze locked onto the beast perched atop the tremendous air-conditioning unit that rose above the roof’s otherwise flat surface.
Silvery hide reflected the last rays of the setting sun and a long tail twined sinuously around the vertical wall below. The strange dragon appeared to be relaxing, basking even. But her eyes were open wide, her muscles tensed as if to flee. And Nicholas found himself motioning his brother backward with a single wave of one desperate hand.
“Go below,” he commanded, knowing even as he spoke that he was screwing up already. Dragons weren’t good at obeying orders, and Alexander was likely to do the exact opposite when faced with a stark demand.
But...a female dragon. The notion must have filled his brother with every bit as much awe as Nicholas felt, because footsteps obligingly retreated back toward the stairwell from which they’d both come. The door clicked open and clanged shut, then Nicholas was alone with the biggest secret he’d uncovered in his entire life.
Chapter 3
Nicholas had thought that facing only one shifter instead of two would have calmed the female’s fears. But instead, flames broke out to rage across her body while her crest surged skyward to catch the breeze like a sail. The stranger wanted to flee.
Her wings, though, remained firmly mantled. And that inconsistency more than anything was what clued Nicholas in to a mystery waiting to be revealed. All he had to do was wait for his knack to ferret the secrets out.
To that end, Nicholas sucked his own fiery appendages back into his body then stood before his newfound sister with palms open and head cocked to one side. “You’re welcome here,” he said softly, soothingly. “No one will harm you. No one will force you to do anything you don’t want to do.”
The stranger lashed her tail but remained silent. No bellow of challenge. No squeak of fright. Just the stark stillness of the truly terrified.
Sighing, Nicholas sank down onto his heels, then onto his butt. Some secrets took longer than others to hatch. Luckily, he’d come prepared.
Powering up his tablet, Nicholas pretended to pore over minutiae of Aerie management, paging through line after line of supply orders and repair requests. Usually, the data would have drawn all of his attention with its typical siren call. But tonight, he found himself resenting the way a glowing screen prevented his peripheral vision from picking up the sight of the silver dragon perched above his head. His brain rebelled against being forced to travel down any path other than wonder at the reality of a newfound sister.
So, eventually, Nicholas gave in. Letting the device slide into dormancy, he spoke into the darkness instead. “You probably already know this, or you wouldn’t have ended up here. But this is the Aerie. We pretend it’s run by dragons—my twin and I plus two foster brothers who are more sensible than me and Alexander put together. But, really, this place revo
lves around a human woman.”
He paused, hoping for an answer that didn’t come. Then, shrugging, Nicholas continued to spill the Aerie’s secrets to a sister he’d never before met. “Sarah found us all as hatchlings. Raised us like humans, although we made plenty of trouble with our fire and wings. She said she always wanted a daughter, and she’s been much happier since two of my brothers brought mates home.
“But neither of those females is a dragon. They’re my sisters but not my sisters, if you know what I mean.”
Despite the chill of falling night, Nicholas’s cheeks burned red. He sure hoped Alexander wasn’t waiting on the other side of that metal door, taking in words that would make Nicholas the butt of merciless teasing for the rest of his natural-born life.
Turning away from the thought, Nicholas peered up at the dark shape silhouetted against the first emerging stars. The stranger’s fire had faded as he spoke, suggesting that his rambling monologue had done its job of appeasing her fears...or that his sister was so exhausted she couldn’t even bear to hold onto her magic in preparation for defensive action. Then, in a sudden burst of returning flame, dragon became woman.
Became naked woman. Nicholas’s fingers were fumbling at the buttons of his shirt even as he averted his eyes. He’d seen plenty of unclothed females in his life, but he hadn’t been lying when he called this newcomer the sister of his heart. Nicholas was a gentleman and gentlemen didn’t ogle sisters in the buff.
And yet...even as he shrugged out of sleeves, he found himself nibbling around the edges of additional conundrums. Why wasn’t his sister wearing clothes when dragon shifters were perfectly capable of bringing small objects along for the ride after changing form? Why was she here alone when any male dragon worth his salt would guard a sister with his life?
So many questions, and so few answers.
“Here,” Nicholas said at last, holding out fabric that still possessed the warmth of his back.
A thump as the stranger leapt from condenser to floor. Secrets slowly drawing closer until the woman’s heat warmed the back of Nicholas’s extended arm.
But she didn’t pluck the covering from his grasp. And, at long last, Nicholas raised his eyes to take in the woman’s frightened face.
Just as when he’d first arrived, the stranger appeared ready to leap off the roof at his first wrong move. She quivered with fear, her teeth chattering with far more than cold. After all, air temperature changes never really impacted a dragon’s fiery nature.
“Take it,” Nicholas told her as quietly as he was able.
In response, his sister pinched the fabric between thumb and forefinger as if it were a filthy rag. Nicholas had thought the shirt rather well-made that morning, the weave nearly as perfect as machine-created fabric from the Before. Perhaps he’d been wrong.
“Not good enough?” he asked finally.
“No, I’m not.”
Her voice was stunningly beautiful, but her words tore at Nicholas’s heart. Who had harmed his sister so badly she considered herself unworthy of a shirt?
“Yes you are,” he growled, then could have kicked himself for allowing that hint of rage to come through in his voice.
But to his surprise, honest emotion did the trick where artful soothing had failed. White linen swirled through the air and covered nakedness, both skin and fabric gleaming against the starlight. Dainty fingers slipped silvery buttons through tiny holes.
And then secrets came spilling out. “I’m Steph,” began the first female shifter he’d ever known.
***
Whispers followed Sabrina across the ship’s deck the following morning. Whispers and grumbles and griping that had nothing to do with the cloudy day and everything to do with the Intrepid’s abrupt departure from port the evening before.
And, sure, the crew had been forced to lower her airship down through the low-hanging haze several times in dangerous moonlight to check their course against visual sightings of the landscape below. Once, the observation bubble at the bottom of the gondola had even clipped a grasping tendril of the Green...a close call that was mitigated only by slow growth of dormant plants combined with the fast action of her bosun’s mate.
Flying in inclement weather, though, was par for the course on a working airship that needed to meet deadlines and bag bonuses. Sabrina had pulled their four-hundred-foot-long airship through violent thunderstorms, had teased the outer edges of tornadoes to allow the Intrepid safe passage, and had always managed to reach the other side with both skin and cargo intact.
The crew really shouldn’t have been muttering under their breath and acting two steps shy of mutiny.
This never would have happened when my father captained the ship. Sabrina wasn’t sure who she was more disappointed in—herself, her crew, or the first mate who should have served as a buffer between captain and sailors.
And as if her thoughts pulled Claude out of the woodwork, the older man slipped up beside her with that fake smile she detested plastered across his weathered face. “Sorry to interrupt, Captain,” he said, not appearing at all sorry. Instead, this holdover from her father’s regime looked the same way he always had—subtly disappointed that he’d been saddled with a twenty-seven-year-old woman as his leader when he could have done the job much more ably by himself.
Sabrina inhaled a deep breath through her nose, any lingering joy from being airborne fading as she realized that Claude was, once again, not going to make this task easy for her. “Yes?”
“You may not have noticed...” her first mate began, the frown lines bracketing his mouth suggesting she really should have noticed. That a true captain would already know whatever he was about to say.
And, just like that, Sabrina’s last vestige of optimism retreated to join her faded joy. No, Claude wasn’t going to help bring the crew back into line. Instead, he’d likely found some further lapse in judgment to point out, some forgotten regulation Sabrina had broken due to ignorance. Yet another way to suggest that the hard-earned Intrepid wasn’t really her own damn ship.
That sort of silent reprimand had worked when Sabrina was twenty and uncertain she could ever find a way to fill her father’s shoes. Not so much now when her vision of Frank Fairweather as the perfect captain had faded deep into the distant haze of childhood memory.
So instead of pandering to a first mate who was her paid underling, the captain merely tapped one foot impatiently and waited for Claude to spit out the inevitable complaint.
Had the problem been merely a split rope or a rip in the balloon that held them all aloft, her first mate would have surely left her dangling for as long as was humanly possible. But this time around, he gestured with his chin, drawing her attention toward the starboard bow.
Well, if Claude wasn’t bothering to play his usual games of oneupmanship, then perhaps she’d better hurry. Swiveling in place, Sabrina gazed north toward ship and sky.
And at first, she had no clue what her first mate was referring to. The Intrepid appeared to be intact, the tremendous balloon above all of their heads still taut and full of lift-producing hydrogen. Meanwhile, beyond the ropes that attached gondola to balloon, the sky was a cheerful blue above the gray of low-lying clouds.
But off in the distance, the horizon was no longer empty and devoid of life. And the breeze blowing in her direction carried the faintest hint of electricity that came from only two sources now that cities were a thing of the distant past.
“Oh, shit,” Sabrina muttered before remembering her place as captain and pursing her lips shut instead.
Because that buzzing charge couldn’t be due to a thunderstorm, not with the only clouds in sight a low stratus layer that never spat out more than a slow, if endless, drizzle. And now that she’d been clued in to both sensation and direction, it was easy to make out four large shapes speeding in the direction of her ultra-flammable airship.
Dragons.
Which shouldn’t have been a big deal. After all, the Intrepid was traveling toward the Aeri
e, a settlement ruled by dragonkind. Those shifter overlords also happened to be her best friend’s found family, and more recently they’d opened their ranks to include Sabrina as well.
The captain knew each of those Aerie dragons on sight, though. After being raised by a doting human foster mother, Nicholas and Alexander sported brilliant red scales while Mason and Zane wore bright blue and gold, respectively.
In stark contrast, these dragons’ dingy brown and gray scales marked them as strangers, feral dragons unassociated with the civilized Aerie. No, a surly crew and a blackmailing gamecock were soon to become the least of her worries. Because the trickiest part of Sabrina’s mission had arrived sooner rather than later.
She was about to meet the wild dragons who’d hired Gleason for his dastardly task. Within minutes, Sabrina would come face to face with shifters who’d proven themselves the enemies of her newfound friends.
Chapter 4
Eighteen hours after meeting Steph for the first time, Nicholas winced as he took in the sight of the dragon by his side. Her wings were sad little stubs that did nothing to push her forward, their motion instead rolling his sister upside down as she attempted the short journey from Plaza to Sunsphere. Luckily, dragons were naturally buoyant, using their wings more for forward momentum than for lift. Still...no point in the poor shifter greeting the Aerie’s matriarch belly up.
But when Nicholas reached one taloned foreleg across the intervening space to correct his companion’s orientation, the female dragon shivered beneath his touch then froze as still as a cornered rabbit. Surprise at her reaction made him flinch away...which in turn accelerated Steph’s spin until her stomach must have been churning in protest.
Not the way this was supposed to go at all.
Cerulean Magic: A Dragon Mage Novel Page 2
