Dragon Born 1: The Shifter's Hoard

by Dante King

  Dragon Born 1

  The Shifter’s Hoard

  Dante King

  Copyright © 2021 by Dante King

  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 written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  Contents

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Aether Mage: Chapter 1

  Aether Mage: Chapter 2

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  Immortal Swordslinger

  Bone Lord

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  K-Town was haunted.

  That’s the only explanation I could come up with that made any sense.

  I’d been coming down here for years, first with my Mom and then riding the bus once I was old enough to do it on my own, and in those hundreds of trips, I’d never once managed to avoid becoming lost.

  No matter how well I thought I understood those winding alleyways and narrow streets, I’d inevitably find myself taking the left turn I remembered from my last visit and making my way down a dead-end street, or wandering into a completely different section of town than the one I wanted to go to.

  At that moment, I was about as lost as I’d ever been.

  According to my phone, the walk from the bus stop to the Dragon’s Hoard Apothecary shouldn’t have taken more than five minutes, but I’d been wandering the streets for nearly a half-hour now.

  I was starting to get worried—and it was beginning to get more than a little dark outside. My phone didn’t tell me what the hours of the shop were, but most places in K-Town didn’t stay open long after dark.

  Neon lights reflected off a puddle at my feet as I rounded the corner.

  Despite the fact that everyone had called this section of the city ‘K-Town’ for as long as I could remember, the architecture here was a mish-mash of East Asian cultures. Chinese restaurants fought for space against Filipino massage parlors, Japanese-style Karaoke bars, and dozens of different food stalls. My stomach rumbled at all the smells, but I had a job to do tonight.

  I was tempted to ask someone for directions, but I didn’t want to look like even more of a tourist than I already did.

  From the sideways glances I got from vendors and passersby, I knew I stuck out like a sore thumb. Tall, sandy-haired, and barely on the right side of twenty-five, I was not this place’s usual evening clientele.

  For about the hundredth time since I got off the bus, I wished that Mom had listened to me. My mother, Raya, was sitting at home as sick as a dog, down with some sort of rattling cough that refused to release its grip on her. I’d been trying to convince her to go to a doctor, but she’d insisted on sending me down to the Dragon’s Hoard instead.

  “Just go down there and ask for Soojin,” Mom told me, scribbling the address on a piece of paper before folding it up and handing it to me. “She’s got what I need. Trust me, I’ll be right as rain in a couple of days.”

  Mom had been a longtime client of this apothecary—I’d seen the little decorative bottles in her medicine cabinet. If she wanted to entertain woo-woo alternative medicine every once in a while, I didn’t have a problem with that.

  At the very worst, she was throwing a few bucks to local businesses. But that cough worried me, and I doubted whatever this ‘Soojin’ had could do anything for her that an antibiotic couldn’t.

  Hey, I recognize this, I thought, quickening my pace.

  At the intersection of two streets lay a ramen restaurant bustling with customers, with the symbols of a chicken and an egg over the sign.

  I remembered wondering ‘which came first’ whenever Mom and I would pass it, and the memory reoriented me toward this section of town.

  The apothecary was close! Just around the corner.

  But, of course, K-Town was never that easy.

  Feeling more confident, I shrugged off the strange looks from the diners and took a turn, then another. Each time I moved down another street, I told myself I’d be in front of the Dragon’s Hoard Apothecary within moments. It had to be here.

  Instead, I found myself staring at a brick wall at the end of an alley.

  Buildings loomed like colossi on either side of the narrow lane. Only a narrow band of sky could be seen between them, which was rapidly darkening from blue to black. The stars came out one constellation at a time, peering through the firmament.

  A chill wind blew across the alley, raising the hairs on the back of my neck. Have you ever been in a situation where nothing outwardly threatening was happening, but you still felt that fight-or-flight response? Like your Spidey-Sense was tingling something fierce?

  I felt it right then and there. I knew that if I turned around, I’d see something standing at the entrance of the alley—something bad.

  “Are you lost?” The voice wasn’t what I expected. It almost sounded kind, and was so quiet it could have been mistaken for a gust of wind.

  I put both hands in the air, pretending to be helpless. I didn’t look like much of a scrapper, but I’d thrown shot put on the track team in high school and lifted weights three times a week at my university’s gym. If someone thought I’d make easy prey for a mugging, they were dead wrong.

  “Relax,” I said, taking a step backward from the brick wall. “I don’t want any trouble—”

  On the last syllable, I whirled around, my hands balled into fists. The entrance to the alley was empty.

  Across the street, visible from where I stood, lay a convenience store with a neon green dragon over the door.

  Huh? I stood there, dumbfounded. It’s right there? How the hell did I miss it?

  The hairs stood back up on the back of my neck. “Because this place is haunted, that’s why,” I muttered, reaching for the piece of paper in my jacket pocket. “Screw this. Let’s get this medicine and get the hell out of here, Derek.”

  Any charm K-Town had held for me was totally extinguished now.

  I crossed the street as a light rain began to fall, pushing the few pedestrians on the street into restaurants and corner markets.

  The smell of something burning assaulted my nostrils as I stepped out of the alley, and I looked around as if
expecting to see smoke pouring out of a nearby building.

  “One of these restaurants must have burned the shit out of somebody’s meal,” I said after a moment, shrugging. “Hope it doesn’t set off the fire alarm…”

  I put aside thoughts of the strange burning smell and the voice I only half believed I’d heard at the mouth of the alley. For now, I cut across the flow of traffic and made my way to the Dragon’s Hoard Apothecary, happy to have finally found my destination.

  A lifetime ago, the store had been a 7-11. The city decayed around it and it closed, then K-Town’s immigrants gave it a second life by turning it into this shop. If gentrification continued at this pace, it would probably eventually become a 7-11 again.

  The circle of life, I thought, looking up at the neon sign.

  Beneath the big green dragon lay a smaller sign, advertising ‘Natural cures and herbal remedies’.

  A bell above the door rang as I stepped inside.

  The shop appeared empty; half-stocked aisles full of pills and potions stretched in either direction, dusty but well maintained. T

  The counter lay next to where the Slurpee machine stood when I was a kid. As I recalled, the blue one was always out of service, leaving red as the only option.

  Mom had said to give the note to Soojin, that she’d know what it meant. Clearly none of these off the shelf medications were what she was looking for, Mom wanted something stronger.

  Nobody came to the counter, so I did a slow circuit of the store, waiting.

  As I came around to the front, I thought I could hear someone talking in the back. I

  craned my ear to hear; on second thought, it wasn’t a conversation. Someone was listening to a radio, or maybe they had their iPhone plugged into one of those portable speaker docks.

  “Rabid sewer troll inbound on corner of Barker Street and Bachman,” a female voice intoned. The words crackled faintly with distortion, as if whatever radio station the set was tuned into was a little bit out of range. “I repeat, we have reports of a rabid sewer troll heading southbound, last spotted at the intersection of Barker Street and Bachman Avenue. Any hunters in the area please engage with prejudice. We need someone to take it down before one of the normies catches sight of it. A clean-up crew is already on their way…”

  What? Was this some kind of internet thing? Normies and trolls?

  Except the person speaking had mentioned two streets not terribly far from my Mom’s apartment—Barker Street and Bachman Avenue. Neither were in K-Town, so getting there wouldn’t have been a hassle.

  Unless the internet were somehow spilling out into real life, I couldn’t imagine anything involving trolls happening there.

  Was this one of those flash mob things?

  I looked around for a bell on the counter, but there wasn’t any.

  Maybe the owner wasn’t in—perhaps they’d run out to get a bite to eat and forgotten to close up shop.

  Or maybe, they couldn’t hear me because of whatever they were listening to in the back room.

  Under normal circumstances, I would’ve kept on waiting. But Mom was sitting at home, more sick than I’d seen her in a long time, and she needed that medicine.

  With a shrug, I stepped through the little set of waist-high saloon doors separating the part of the shop for customers from the part for employees. It felt strange to stand behind the counter—as if I’d suddenly decided to make a radical career change.

  A multicolored curtain of beads separated the space behind the counter from the backroom. I reached my hand in and pushed half the strands aside, peering through into the gloom.

  A narrow hallway stretched before me, ending in a dimly lit break room illuminated by candles.

  A woman sat at a desk inside, her back to me, listening to an ancient looking radio as she chowed down on a bowl of noodles.

  No wonder she can’t hear me, I thought, feeling a little silly. She’s eating. And she’s got that weird-looking thing on top of her head. What is it, cosplay?

  The woman was dressed in an otherwise conservative fashion, in a navy blue button down and black slacks.

  But on top of her head lay what looked like a kid’s beanie, with wolf ears sticking out of the top. It looked a bit blurry in the shadowy half-light of the break room, but the way the woman wore it almost made her look like she had actual wolf ears on top of her head.

  I cleared my throat. The woman sat up straighter, tensing up immediately.

  “Hello,” I said apologetically. “I’m looking for Soojin—”

  The woman reached out with surprising speed and switched off the radio. “Be with you in just a minute!” she said, louder than she’d probably intended. “Could you please wait for me out front!”

  Damn, I thought, retreating rapidly.

  I knew I hadn’t really done anything wrong—I hadn’t touched a thing, just stepped into the back room for a second to make my presence known—but I still felt like a trespasser.

  What if I’d been a robber, looking to loot the place? I could have robbed the whole store, even opened up the cash register, and the woman running the place would have never heard.

  Come to think of it, what was a woman doing working here all alone, anyway?

  A few moments later, the woman stepped out of the back, wiping the side of her mouth free of noodle juice with the back of her hand.

  The headgear she’d been wearing a moment ago with the wolf ears had disappeared, too.

  Weird, I thought. I guess she probably doesn’t want customers seeing a thing like that.

  “My apologies,” the woman said, with a short bow that was more like a nod. “I’m Soojin. You have something for me, I believe you said?”

  “Oh yeah.” I fished the piece of paper out of my pocket, taking another glance at the woman as I did so. Now that I could see her clearly, she was actually quite pretty. She looked to be middle-aged or a little bit older than that, with straight dark hair done up in a short bun the way a lot of Chinese matrons did their hair around K-Town. Her hairstyle made the beanie she’d been wearing a minute ago seem even weirder, and I decided I had to say something.

  “What was that you were listening to?” I asked, handing over the piece of paper. “It sounded kinda weird…”

  “Podcast,” the shopkeeper said with a guilty little smile. “Just something I like to listen to on my break. A silly program, but sometimes a little silliness is just what the doctor ordered, you know?”

  “Definitely,” I said. Inside, though, I was questioning her story. Podcasts were rarely played on the radio—and that old set top box in her breakroom didn’t look new enough to hook an iPod or a phone up to. “Speaking of doctors, I’ve been trying to get my Mom to go to one. But she insisted on seeing you first.”

  “Not a bad idea,” the shopkeeper said, glancing over the note. “Sometimes, it just takes a little… Wait a moment. This is for Raya? You’re Raya’s boy!?”

  “Uh, yeah?” I was confused for a moment, then I remembered that Mom had asked for Soojin by name. As a frequent customer of the apothecary’s shop, she must have been on a first-name basis with the shopkeeper. “I’m Derek. Raya’s son.”

  “Well my goodness,” the shopkeeper said. She set the piece of paper down on the counter and put her hands on her hips. “Let me take a look at you. Such a tall, strapping lad. Raya must be proud.”

  “She is,” I said, feeling more than a little awkward. “Anyway, she’s really sick, so she sent me here to pick up some kind of medicine for her. She said you’d know once you saw the note…”

  “Oh!” The shopkeeper dismissed my concerns with a gesture. “No worries there, young man. I know exactly what she needs.”

  Relief flooded me. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  The shopkeeper snorted. “Don’t ma’am me. You’re Raya’s boy! You can call me Soojin.”

  “Sure thing, Soojin,” I said, watching as the woman ducked behind the counter and began sorting through the bottles there.

  This was
getting stranger and stranger. First, the weird radio program and the wolf ears, and now, this woman was talking like she and my Mom were best friends. I decided to ask.

  “How do you and my Mom know each other, by the way? Just from the store, or…?”

  Soojin shot up from behind the counter, three different bottles of dark glass in her hands. “From the store? Ha! Your mother and I used to work together, young man. Oh, we were inseparable once. ‘Raya and Soojin,’ they used to say. ‘Two peas in the same pod!’”

  “You worked together,” I repeated, frowning. “At an apothecary store?”

  The woman paused, as if she’d only just realized something.

  “No,” she said, her voice suddenly hesitant. “Not in an apothecary’s shop. A different career.”

  Soojin quickly produced a mortar and pestle. She emptied about half of two of the glass bottles into the mortar immediately, then added a few sprinkles from the third as she ground the mixture down to a paste.

  Watching her work was almost hypnotic; I soon found myself forgetting my questions and confusion to just watch her go.

  She’s a pro, I thought dimly.

  If making poultices was an Olympic sport, this woman would take home gold.

  “How is Raya these days?” Soojin suddenly asked. Her eyes were big and dark, and for a few moments, I was sure she was far older than she appeared. Although if she used to work with my Mom, she might have been closer to her age. “Other than the illness, I mean?”

  “She’s surviving, I guess,” I said, tearing my gaze away from the sight of Soojin’s work. Strange how it seemed to just draw you in.

  “She told me that she had a kid going to college downtown, majoring in business.” The corner of Soojin’s mouth curled in a smile. “That would be you, right?” She clapped me on the shoulder over the counter. “A well-educated son! That should be enough to make any mother proud.”

  I’d thought that grinding those herbs into a paste was the end of Soojin’s work.

  It turned out to be just the beginning.

  The shopkeeper ducked into the back and came out with a mix of green plants and a pair of slender silver scissors, then began severing leaves to put in the mixture.