Page 3 of Omega Captive of the Golden Dragon (Alpha Dragons #3)

VARIK

T wice a week I got food deliveries. Every bite was drugged. Every bottle of juice and water. Every soft drink. It was in the food.

I slept a lot those first few weeks. In my sluggish state, I had horrible nightmares.

In them, I was taken away in my sleep by strong men to a large empty barn.

A real barn. Shifted dragons guarded the doors.

Strangers stripped me of my clothes. Father was there whispering into my ears. “Shift, baby, shift.”

In those awful dreams, I was always cold and scared, so I obeyed. At least my dragon didn’t feel the chills. But the fear remained as they chained me down to the floor and muzzled my roars and fire.

“Look at him,” Father said. “He’s so perfect. One in a million. My golden dragon son.”

“Each scale has to be worth tens of thousands,” a stranger said.

“And they grow back fast when they’re young,” another stated. “If we control the removal rate, we can keep taking enough to sell to the liquidators—forever.”

Father remained silent, which confused me.

The first time I dreamed they cut into me while I was chained and muzzled, the dream stopped. Everything went black with pain. I woke back in my shed cage, shaking off the horrible feeling that I had been hurt. Violated.

My dragon didn’t speak then. He hadn’t spoken since I’d been locked up.

If he did try to communicate in those first weeks, I was too drugged to hear him.

But I wasn’t too drugged to feel his pain.

A dull ache took over my senses. Like a headache in every cell.

I woke to it every couple of weeks. It took days to fade away.

Then I’d have the nightmare again and the pain would return.

My brain had been half put to sleep, my energy depleted.

I spent my days playing video games and watching mindless TV.

Slowly, I discovered my senses returned only if I skipped a meal.

It took me months to learn this. When I had my bright, thinking moments, I began to keep a diary of everything I could remember, including my dreams.

It took me until I was seventeen to put it all together and begin the quite necessary communications with my beast.

It’s not a dream. They steal my scales.

It was the first thing Varikan said to me in two years, loud and clear as if my dragon sat right next to me on the little couch.

Why are we being held prisoner in such a horrible way?

I had the same question. As I began to remember more details, I had our answer. “I heard the strange men talking. Your—our scales are worth money. A lot of money.”

Everything made sense in that moment. My only parents had begun to act strangely after my adult scales grew in. I knew my coloring was golden but had no idea what that meant. Now I could see it all a lot clearer during my lucid, fasting moments.

A dragon’s scales were tough. They had properties that protected them from fire.

Metal properties. All were different depending on coloring, but gold was the rarest. A golden dragon’s scales had to have real gold metal properties, and as I remembered the way I was treated every time I was taken to the warehouse, it made me wonder if my scales held more than mere properties of gold.

The greed in the eyes of my captors as they muzzled and chained me spoke volumes.

My scales, each and every one, were treated as if made of pure gold.

Varikan confirmed it.

Pure gold, yes. From the top of my head to the tip of my tail. But I never knew that could be dangerous for us.

My heart started beating fast. Technically, I was rich.

Well, in dragon-mode, for sure. But I was worth nothing unless my scales were liquidated.

Every dragon shed a few scales each year, but not enough for greedy parents and their gold dealers.

They had to take more. How much each was worth I had no clue, but it had to be life-changing.

It had to involve a lot of power and prestige for my parents to agree to this.

The dragon instinct to hoard was so strong that greed was condoned in our culture, even encouraged. I held out hope that maybe my parents had been cleverly coerced and weren’t merely heartless evil monsters.

To think that the truth might be that my parents never loved me was much harder to take. I had to mull that one over in my mind for a long time. I questioned every childhood memory of Papa reading to us, cuddling us, playing with us.

I still had no firm answer.

Years passed. I tried to escape. It was no use.

I was too sluggish. Too weak. Fire didn’t burn the shed.

Once, when I was around twenty, I was taken out for scale removal and I refused to shift.

Rough hands dragged me to a room with a cot.

In walked a white-coated guy with a long needle.

I screamed even before the pain hit and my skin turned molten.

I called out for Father and Daddy. But they were long gone by then.

I hadn’t seen them in what felt like years.

Varikan cried along with me as golden scales burst through my tender human skin.

I was carried back to the huge barn where the painful shift continued, slow and torturous and beyond my control.

It had never occurred to me that such a drug could be invented to force shifts and give so much pain at the same time. I was in the hands of those who saw me only as an object, not a being. Slowly, they were taking me apart like pieces of an expensive machine to be sold to the highest bidders.

Often, I wondered what had happened to Val. What had my parents told him? Was he still alive? Were they?

My food deliveries came from strangers. Whenever my shed door was opened, guards surrounded it. The deliveries were made, then the door was locked and sealed again.

There was an air duct on the roof which I’d thoroughly investigated. It led nowhere and was far too small for anyone to fit through.

I had TV but no Internet. I had video games, books, notebooks, art supplies.

I kept up with my diary even if I could barely write only one word a day.

In my better moments, I taught myself drawing and painting.

I yearned to expand that art. But my cage kept me small and inert in both body and mind.

I had to accept my fate would never change until the day I died.

One day, during a particularly loud thunder and rainstorm, all the power went out. My room plunged into darkness. I hadn’t eaten yet, so I was more clear-headed than usual, and also more annoyed because I was right in the middle of a painting that was shaping up quite well.

Thunder boomed. My single barred window and locked door rattled.

If only the shed would collapse. That would be a dream come true.

Escape had become a dead wish for me, but I still thought about it.

I had no idea where I’d go or what I’d do.

Maybe go to the high forests in the mountains to become a feral dragon.

But from my years of captivity, I was weak.

Varikan hadn’t flown in years. Did he even remember how?

Had the frequent injuries to his body caused permanent damage?

I didn’t know the answers to any of my questions, but I still daydreamed the final destruction of my cage every chance I got.

Thunder made the floor shake. Through the dark shadows, I saw my easel nearly tip over. My paint table rocked. I ran to my little window and peered into the darkness. All I saw was a wall of rain in sideways sheets.

I heard my door shift in its thick frame and a pounding as if something was hitting it. Maybe a tree had fallen. Maybe the cute little porch was being shattered in the wind and rain.

I ran to it, putting my hands up to its smooth center. The pounding came again. I felt the vibration on my palms. Something was hitting it hard.

Suddenly, the door burst open. Wind crashed in around me bringing with it stinging bullets of rain. Before I could move away, a bright light shone in my face. I heard a voice.

“Varik?”

That voice. It was so familiar. But with the sounds of the storm, I wasn’t quite sure. Yet it continued speaking as if from one of my dreams.

“Varik, thank the gods. It’s you. I’ve found you.”

As the words sifted through my slow brain, thick parka-covered arms came around me. That was when I scented him.

Standing just inside my broken-down door, hugging me like there was no tomorrow, was my brother, Val.