Chapter Two
T he ground flew past, and Julie’s face went numb from cold. She shivered against Sard.
The trip to her grandparents’ dilapidated old cabin took hours by car and a little under an hour by dragon.
Dragon shifters like Sard could soar around in human form like a superhero in addition to flying more normally with their scaly wings.
Until seven years ago, the residents of Earth didn’t have any idea that literally everyone in the entire universe could shapeshift—except them.
Recessive genes and lack of useful space minerals kept Earth an isolated backwater that everyone ignored.
Then, seven years ago, dragon spaceships landed in cow fields outside Vancouver, Washington.
Apparently, the Dragon Empire’s scouts had come in the Middle Ages and left again, considering Earth useless, so their sudden return was massively surprising.
Sard and the other dragon shifters had caused remarkably little upheaval, though.
They’d only wanted to export human art, music, and clothes—the more colorful, the better.
Earth’s isolation and lack of shifting abilities meant all humans had natural artistic talent and creativity.
Sard, already a rich aristocrat’s son on Draconis, had made even more money by exporting Earth commodities like thong bikinis and button-down shirts to the alien dragons.
Even though many dragons had settled near Portland and Julie had occasionally seen them—or their big alien ships—flying overhead, she’d never interacted with them.
But then, one day about four years into their extended visit, Sard had burst into the hair salon where Julie was a receptionist, and everything had changed.
They’d spent a year getting to know each other, then he’d disappeared. Two more eventful years had passed, and now he was back.
And within five minutes of his return, he’d already smashed all her plans and made her barely recognize herself. She had to escape, but she was clinging too hard to his warmth.
Sard hovered over the town nearest to her grandparents’ cabin. “Your ancestral lair was north of here.”
“F-follow the road,” she managed, her teeth chattering. “It’s u-up th-the m-mountain.”
“Why are you speaking in that funny way?” He zoomed up the road, following her directions as she pointed him the last twenty miles deep into the solitary wilderness where her maternal grandparents had once lived.
“B-because I’m fr-freezing.”
“You’re cold?” He veered down. The road was plowed until the four-mile turnoff because no one lived in this area during the winter. “Why?”
“S-seriously?”
“We’re not cold. Are we?” Sard asked Copper, who wiggled and pulled his hot hand free of hers to reach for Sard’s silver eyebrow piercing. Sard regarded him with amusement. She had never seen him around children and was surprised by how gentle he was, like he had a lot of experience.
Of course, who knows how many kids Sard had with his wife…
She hunched in. “W-watch out. H-he pulls h-hard.”
That was why Julie had given up on her clip-on earrings until Copper grew out of his grab-anything-shiny-and-yank phase. She still wore necklaces, even though the baby could choke her out.
Sard hovered over the snowy, evergreen-filled property on the steep-side hill searching for a place to land.
Her grandparents’ cabin, deep in the North Cascades, was a small A-frame with faded red paint.
The porch roof sagged under the weight of winter snow.
Sard landed and put her down on the cleared part of the porch.
Icy cold seeped up through her thin slippers.
She hugged Copper, who was burning hot, and the only thing keeping her aching fingers from succumbing to frostbite.
Sard used the old key in the lock. It was frozen. He rattled the door hard. With a terrible cracking noise, the door gave way.
“Enter,” he ordered. “You will be comfortable in your ancestral lair.”
Julie stumbled inside, not looking at the suspicious splintering around the latch.
Inside, the cabin was small, dim, and cold.
Copper wiggled desperately to be free, and she released him as she flipped on the light switch.
Of course, the room remained dark. She wrapped a cold afghan around herself like a cocoon and hobbled to the breaker box on the wall behind the open front door.
She’d last visited in early October. Copper had enjoyed experiencing his mountain-person roots.
When they’d left, Julie had turned off the power and opened the pipes to drain the well pump, which meant all the water was now frozen and inaccessible.
She flipped breaker switches using the side of her thumb. Her fingers were so cold, she couldn’t properly pinch the hard plastic.
Luckily, no trees had come down on the lines since October, and the lights clicked on, casting a cozy glow on the interior.
The main room was dominated by a modern wood-burning stove and boxes of kindling.
A few split logs were stacked for crisp mornings and evenings.
In winter weather like this, it would barely last the night.
Mismatched furniture—a sagging floral couch, a rickety wooden table, and kitchen chairs with chipped paint—was arranged haphazardly around the stove.
“A colorful hovel, just as I remember.” Sard looked around with satisfaction.
“C-close the d-door,” she ordered, kneeling on the brick fireplace guard in front of the stove and opening the clear glass doors. She stacked firewood into the teepee she’d learned in Girl Scouts, clamping the cold hardwood in a frostbite-friendly pincer grip. “G-get me a m-match.”
“No need.” Sard patted his pockets, then pulled out a small candy, unwrapped, and crunched it.
Brimstone?
He leaned down next to her, over her shoulder.
Beautiful orange-red scales emerged across his face, and his mouth elongated into a dragon’s majestic snout, filling up the whole opening to the stove.
His throat glowed orange, and a targeted stream of fire blew onto the wood, charring and then igniting it.
He leaned back, proud, his mouth full of dragon fangs. “We can stay here indefinitely.”
“W-we’ll need a lot more wood,” she said, rising creakily and hovering as close as possible to the stove.
“You have plenty stacked outside.”
“Under f-five feet of snow.”
“I remember.” He pivoted to stride past her. “I will melt the snow.”
She stopped him with a hand on his chest, and again, he almost seemed to wince, but the expression was harder to see on his ridged, scaly dragon face.
“You’ll m-melt the tarps, and I will not burn plastic fumes inside this cabin with the sensitive lungs of my one-year-old child.
B-besides, we’re not going to stay here long enough to need more wood.
You’re going to take us back home right this instant. Or, um, as soon as I warm up.”
He clasped her hand. His head stretched into dragon as if he was having trouble shifting back, but his fierce scaly expression lightened with surprise. “You actually are cold.”
“Of course I’m cold! It’s ten degrees below freezing and you kidnapped me in a T-shirt!”
“So, humans become cold in ten-degrees-below-freezing weather,” he mused as if it were a totally new concept. “Your bodies are strangely fragile.”
“You’re the one wearing a coat.”
“It’s not for warmth.” He turned away and unzipped the jacket. “I’ll give it to you. You should’ve asked earlier. It means nothing to me.”
Rage crackled inside her chest louder than the fire she shivered over. “Oh. I should’ve just asked. How silly of me to think a coatwas for the cold.”
“Yes, very silly.” He grunted as he pulled his arms out of the jacket. “With my infinitely clear thinking, I will decide our next course of action.”
“I know what my next action will be,”she said conversationally. “I’m going to thaw out, regain the use of my hands, and murder you.”
“Depending on the amount of stores you’ve got stockpiled in this hovel, we can stay here through the whole winter.”
“Copper and I will survive on your carcass until the snow melts and we can hitch a ride into town. I’ll sell my horrifying ordeal to Hollywood for millions. They’ll cast a real beautiful actress to portray me, and I’ll retire into luxury until Copper has to go to college.”
Sard’s undershirt had a strange red-on-red splatter pattern, with black charcoal strips. A new design, probably from his old business that was still named after him, Carnelian Clothiers. He always had dressed well.
He handed her the heavy leather jacket. “You still say funny things.”
“Funny like what? Like I’m a dragon-cidal maniac who accidentally stabs men with pens and, after being kidnapped against my will and tortured with near frostbite, fantasizes about eating them?”
“You’re being funny again.”
“I’m a very normal person usually.” She shook the heavy jacket at his pale face. “When I’m with you, something in my brain snaps and even I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“Ah.” He lurched, then rested his hand against the kitchen counter. His fingers elongated into claws, his bulging forearms straining the fancy shirt cuffs. “You, perhaps, do not need to pretend Iam dead…”
The jacket had a strange dampness inside, and it was dark red on her hand. It was soaked.
What in the world?
“Is this blood?” she demanded.
“…my lawyer…will be…in touch…” He swayed and collapsed, losing control of his human form as he fell.
Iridescent orange-red scales erupted all over his body, bursting through his trousers and shredding his blood-soaked button-down as his limbs extended and his wings thrust out.
He landed on the uneven, peeling linoleum as a massive sard-red dragon, clothes scraps fluttering around him, filling the room and getting blood all over the old furniture.