Page 1 of Curse of the Midnight Dragon (The Moonlight Dragon #2)

Amaya

“A malevolent magic is blowing this way.”

The old woman who’d made that terrible prediction tugged at her tattered shawl until it lay snug against her bony shoulders and arms. Her movements reminded me of an automaton as she rocked in a chair by the fireplace. Her joints creaked with the movement like gears in need of oiling. She’d arrived a fortnight ago from the north during a blinding storm. No one this high up in the Andalotian Plateau knew her. And despite our urgings, she refused to offer up her name.

But since Beithir society required us to give hospitality to travelers, I’d opened my family home to her when she’d appeared at my doorstep and kept her well-fed and sheltered within the ancient manor house’s walls.

Anther, my adoptive brother, wanted to turn her out after the first night. He’d said he didn’t like the smell of her. As if we could smell intentions on humans. He’d started telling me that she’d already overstayed her welcome as soon as the skies had turned sunny again.

Usually, I would have heeded his advice. He had, after all, lived twenty years longer than I had. At twenty-three, I was still considered an infant. It chafed how the others treated me sometimes. Still, my adoptive parents had left the running of the family manor to me, not Anther. They should have returned months ago.

To say I was worried about their prolonged absence would understate the turmoil of my emotions, which was why the old woman’s warning had sent an extra chill down my spine.

I picked up a few logs and tossed them into the fireplace. Without considering the human in the room with me, I opened my mouth and sent a stream of fire to set the new logs blazing.

The old woman’s eyes widened.

“You’re one of them,” she whispered, tightening her shawl even more. Like that thin cloth would protect her from the heat of my flame.

I snorted, and a tiny whisp of smoke spiraled from my nose. I wasn’t supposed to show who I really was in front of humans . But our kind had been living apart from the rest of the Jayden Continent for so long that I hadn’t stopped to think about how many of my everyday actions might be considered magical.

“I’ve been told that dragons were nothing more than myths.” The old woman coughed.

“Dragons?” I raised my brows as if to suggest I had no idea what craziness she was talking about.

She didn’t seem concerned that she’d somehow found herself in the middle of a dragon’s lair. Foolish human . “Glad to see the storytellers are wrong, child. Still, your powers don’t change my words. Wickedness is blowing this way. You did me a kindness by taking me in when my old bones could go no farther. I feel a debt needs to be paid, no matter what you are.” She leaned forward. “Be on alert. I fear you’ll find yourself standing alone and broken before the dark times have passed.”

Eight Days Later

I tied back my long, black hair with a strip of leather cording and peered over the side of the cliff. The old woman’s ramblings about wicked magic must have been rubbing off on me. I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone (or rather some thing ) was lurking out in the wilderness watching…waiting. I no longer felt safe on our own land.

My fellow dragons would scold me for my hesitation. They raised me to be fearless. I am fearless . Creatures living in the forest below this plateau trembled at the sight of my shadow whenever I’d soar above their heads.

I shed my clothes and shifted to my true self. Stretching my long, black wings, letting them soak up the warmth from the midday sun, helped me push aside the old woman’s warning.

I dove off the side of the cliff. For a moment, I felt the rush of falling. And then with a snap, my wings caught against a current of air, and I soared. I spiraled up, up, up with the sheer joy of flying.

It was my turn to hunt for the household, but the prey could wait. The deep blue of the sky called to me. The sun heated my midnight black scales as I swooped down and let the tips of my wings skim over the tops of the pine trees. I couldn’t understand why anyone in Beithir would ever want to leave this village…or why my parents had not yet returned. This place, our home on the top of the plateau, was paradise.

A healthy herd of deer lived in our forest that surrounded the plateau. They belonged to our lair. I could smell them as I flew toward the Farreau River. I swooped lower, readying for the kill. A young buck would feed us well. I sniffed again.

Wait…

No…

The scent. It was wrong. Twisted.

Blood. The rancid metallic stench of blood and rotting flesh hit me like a punch to the gut. I threw my wings back and shot like an arrow out of the sky, diving toward that disgusting odor.

No. No. No. The entire herd of deer lay dead, scattered on the banks of the slow-moving Farreau.

How could this happen? Our carefully tended food source. Gone.

And under my watch.

Should I have taken extra patrols? Should I have sent scouts out to search the woods surrounding our lands after the old woman gave her warning?

But why would I have believed the ramblings of an old human? What did humans know about anything?

My fault. My fault. I was going to have to confess my failings to my parents when they returned… if they returned. It felt as if my entire world was ripping apart.

And the rest of the dragons. How could I face them? They always expected me to bring destruction to any task I’d been given. Hell, they were right to believe that of me since I failed every time I tried to prove the clan wrong.

I spiraled in the air, putting a halt to my sharp drop from the sky. No need to land. Dead was dead. Gone was gone. By the bitter scent assaulting my senses, the deer had been dead for more than a few days. The meat already taken by rot.

I roared my fury. The ground shook from the shock of it. I roared again, sending birds scattering into the sky for miles around. Whoever had done this to our land would die a painful death. A slow , painful death.

My wings beat an angry tattoo, causing me to jerk in the air, which made for a messy ascent as I turned back toward the plateau, back toward home. While I dreaded facing the others in the village with this news, waiting would help nothing. The old woman had warned this would happen. Our lands had been invaded. I hadn’t smelled magic in the air, but since the kill was days old, the stench of evil castings probably would have dissipated by now.

Human hunters who occasionally wandered into our territory would kill one or two of our herd for their own bellies. They’d never slaughter an entire herd, never leave the dead to rot.

There had to be magic involved.

But why? What was the purpose of killing our deer? All our deer?

A blood sacrifice?

Vampires used blood in their black magics.

Our kind had escaped the vampires ages ago, fleeing our lands, abandoning our kingdom. Only the tales survived, making it feel as if the age of the fifth kingdom were a fantastical dream—a time when dragons had ruled over the Jayden Continent. History books would report that our numbers on the continent had been so great that flights of dragons would darken the sky when they had passed overhead. But the human authors of those histories were careful to note that this must be a myth, a falsehood created by superstitious humans before they developed a rational mind.

But it wasn’t a myth. Dragons did once rule…didn’t they? They’d ruled the continent until the vampires found a magical weapon that could kill us all. A weapon that fed on blood.

What this weapon was and how exactly it worked had been lost in the mists of time.

And yet there wasn’t a dragon alive who didn’t fear it. Myself included.

I needed to get back home to warn the others.

If the vampires were hunting us again—

If that happened, we were all doomed.

The plateau was speeding toward me when something foreign and fiery tore through my side. I cried out in pain and crumpled in on myself. My wings collapsed. And suddenly, I was falling, tumbling out of the air like a boulder breaking off the side of a cliff. The pine trees cruelly ripped at my scales, tore at my wings as I crashed through their canopy. I then slammed into the straw-covered ground with a bone-bruising jolt.

Each breath hurt. Poison. I must have been shot by a poisoned arrow. One tinged with that cursed blood magic. A mere arrow wouldn’t have taken me from the sky. It felt like the poisoned fire that had blasted into my side was spreading, consuming me from the inside out.

“Well, well, well,” a deep voice rumbled.

I peeled open one eye halfway. My fuzzy vision could barely make out a tall, shiny black boot and the end of a black cape. I blinked several times, as I struggled and failed to bring the blurred face of my attacker into focus.

A gloved hand pressed on the side of my face. “You’re a young one, aren’t you? But strong.” He stroked the shimmering scales beneath my eye with the tips of his fingers. “Pretty, too. You’ll do nicely.”

I tried to pull away from him.

“Ah-ah-ah,” he murmured. “Don’t fight me.” There was a clank of metal before a heavy cuff—imbued with so much of that blood magic that its power tunneled deep into my scales—closed around my leg. And then another. And another. And another until all my limbs were shackled. “You’re mine now. You move only when I tell you to move.”

“You can’t do this ,” I tried to protest. But the world went dark as my body shifted. Without my consent and with a fiery explosion of pain, I shifted from the sleek shape of a midnight dragon back to my soft human form.

“I can do this. And I have,” he said as he wrapped his thick cloak around my naked body. He lifted me into his arms as if I weighed nothing. With a sigh, he started the long trek out of the forest.