Auctioned to the Dragon Read online

  She had read everything she could about human beings, and especially what they did with their bodies—from dancing to fighting to everything in between. She spent long hours practicing in her human shape, keeping it coordinated and limber, finding a comfortable home in a form her family considered unpleasant to remain in for longer than a few minutes at a time. She slept in a human bed, where her family favored the caves carved out for their draconic forms. And now, after years and years of her interest being considered strange, her expertise was finally being recognized as a valuable resource. It only took her brother falling in love with a human, she thought, amused. And her other brother falling in love with a wolf. The common shape between their families was human. So there they sat, the oddest little family on the continent. Helena wouldn’t have had it any other way.

  ***

  After lunch, Helena felt pleasantly full—and her body was itching for a stroll. So she said her goodbyes—Angela was headed for the library with Stephen and barely glanced back. Helena chuckled to herself as she wandered through the passageways of the palace, headed for a door she knew led out into the forest on the eastern side of their home. The passageways were winding and disorganized—it was easy to tell that the early builders of the palace and its surrounding caves hadn’t prioritized the human-sized passageways. All the enormous caves, the ones hollowed out with draconic forms in mind, were beautifully organized and carefully planned. These passageways felt like afterthoughts, as though they’d been chiseled into the rock at the last minute. And as a result, it felt like there were dozens of them, multiple pathways to every location… and some pathways that went nowhere at all. It was her brother Samuel who knew them the best. He’d spent years just wandering, finding every single little twist and turn. She’d often encouraged him to draw a map, but he wasn’t interested in sharing his knowledge—just in wandering. But ever since Jessica had moved in with them, he’d had considerably less time for his wanderings.

  The pathways felt dull and dusty, and she was itching to get out into the fresh air and sunshine. It had been a long winter, and even spring had felt like it had taken years to arrive. For dragons, time tended to pass unobserved, but ever since the human and the wolves had moved in with them, Helena had felt a very different relationship to the passage of time. It felt so good to be looking forward to things again—to be waiting for summer, for fall, for winter and spring again. Like waking up from some strange, dull fugue state they’d all been in. There was a future, now—and more to the point, there was a present. A present which Helena was going to spend walking by the river, she’d decided, and she beamed as she rounded a corner and found sunlight filtering through onto the rocks.

  Summer was for sunbathing. Most of her family agreed, but it was their draconic forms they liked to sun themselves in—they’d wing their ways to the upper reaches of the mountains and find flat sections of rock to bask on. But Helena felt differently. It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy being in her draconic form (flying, in particular, was absolutely incomparable) but there was just something so thrilling about human beings. The size of them, the way they moved so quickly, their dexterous little fingertips, their deeply bizarre mouths with their blunt, grinding teeth… and she had to admit, there was something nice and simple about having just two legs. First one, then the other, then the first one again. Four could be a bit of a handful, especially when you had to factor wings in to the mix.

  Besides, the sun did such wonderful things for her skin. Helena smiled contentedly to herself as she strode along the river, feeling the sun warm her olive skin. She knew by the end of the summer it would be a burnished bronze color, setting off her golden eyes beautifully, framed by her jet black hair. Another little vanity that her family members didn’t understand. Where her father kept his human hair cropped incredibly close to his head, and her brothers both let their wild dark curls tumble around their ears, she’d found a way of keeping hers straight and sleek. Quietly, she felt she looked rather like Cleopatra, a human queen—but vanity felt like a bit of a waste of time around family she’d known for hundreds of years. Nobody was interested in what she looked like in her human form. It was hard enough to get them into human form in the first place. That had been a big part of what had been so wonderful about Lisa, Angela, and Jessica moving to their home—finally, she had women to talk about hair and clothing with, women who actually knew and cared about things like that.

  She was thrilled for her brothers having found love, she truly was. Shifters had strange romantic customs compared to humans, she was beginning to learn—certainly, a lot of the books she’d read about humans sounded like they were coming from an alien species. With dragons—at least with their community—you met your soulmate, and that was that. Her mother and father had locked eyes at a ball and known instantly that they were destined for each other—and so they had been. They said you knew it when you felt it, that was the conventional wisdom… but she was beginning to doubt that. Alexander had taken weeks to figure out that Lisa was his soulmate. Samuel had been a little more clued in (the younger of her brothers had always had more emotional intelligence, she thought with amusement) but it had still taken him a lot of time to figure out what he wanted. Perhaps it was different between species?

  She wished she knew more. If Alexander suggested that she go along to the shifter festival, she’d be there in a heartbeat. Because though she’d never breathe a word to her family, Helena had been thinking more and more about love. She’d always been independent, always been the black sheep of the family, quirky and wild… but the more time she spent around the happy couples in her life, the more she felt alone. She had to admit… it would be nice to find her soulmate. She’d spent plenty of time alone.

  But it wasn’t that simple, was it? There was nobody among the dragon community who was eligible—she’d met all of them, and none of them had had that spark, try as she might to summon it. Clearly, her destined mate was out there somewhere, beyond the caves and passageways of her home. But how was she meant to find them? There was no prophecy for her like there had been for Alexander, and there certainly hadn’t been any gorgeous strangers falling through the ceiling of their palace, as had happened with Samuel. Perhaps the festival was the answer. Maybe she’d talk to Alexander later, try to come up with a complicated and important reason that she should be part of the delegation that wasn’t that she wanted to see if she could get a date.

  Her amused chuckle echoed across the surface of the river. She supposed she could just be honest with her brother—tell him she was lonely, that she wanted a mate like he and Samuel had found, and ask him to bring her along. But there was something so humiliating about that—about tagging along with her big brother in the hopes of meeting someone cute. And what would she even do after she met this mystery man (or woman, she supposed—who knew, when it came to soulmates?) She had no idea how to flirt, no clue how to communicate romantic interest to someone, despite all her reading on the subject. How did one even meet men?

  “Good afternoon.”

  Well-trained as Helena’s human form may have been, there was still a decided lack of grace to the way she jumped at the sound of an unfamiliar voice, surprisingly close to her. She almost fell into the river, recovering just in time and gasping for breath. There, only a few feet to her left, stood a young man wearing mottled green and brown clothing—camouflage, she realized as her heart rate settled. A fabric favored by hunters to disguise the shape of their bodies from their prey. She must have walked further than she thought—they rarely got humans up this far. This guy must have been pretty serious, to be this far from human civilization.

  “Sorry, you startled me,” she said, trying to regain her composure. “There’s not usually anyone else up this far.”

  “Beautiful day,” the man said. There was something strange about him—she tried to figure out what it was as she looked at him. Something—watchful, almost. He was too still. As though he was waiting for something to happen. Did he expect her
to attack him, or something? She was a tall woman, true—she’d learned that when she’d met Angela, Jessica, and Lisa, all of whom were a good head and a half shorter than her, but there was nothing aggressive about her body language. She was just a tall woman in jeans and a shirt and a pair of hiking boots, walking down a river. Why did he look like he was ready for a fight?

  “It is,” she agreed, smiling to cover her confusion. “I like to—”

  And then her voice seized in her throat. There was something on her—something cold and hard pressing against her neck, and a strange metallic ‘click’ sounded far too close to her ears for her liking. Startled, she raised her hands to her throat and felt a thick metal bar that curved right around her throat and to the back of her neck. Instinctively, she tugged at it—but it was too tight to pull over her head, and there didn’t seem to be any way of separating the pieces. What on earth was it? A collar?

  “Got her,” came an unfamiliar voice from beside her—and to her horror, she turned to see another man, clad in the same camouflage as the first one. He must have crept across the river while she was distracted with his companion—she could see a few rocks in the rushing water he could have used to leap between, though it would have been difficult to move as silently as he must have. Her confusion was giving way to alarm. What was going on? Why had these men put a collar on her?

  “You’re coming with us, darlin’,” the first man informed her with an expression that sent hot rage coursing through her veins.

  “I don’t think so,” she snapped. However fond of her human form she was, sometimes there was no substitute for two wings, a tail, and a mouthful of razor-sharp teeth. Helena’s eyes glowed gold as she reached into herself for the ancient magic that would change her body back to its ancestral form—

  Then she yelled in pain as the unfamiliar metal collar around her neck suddenly burned red hot. She grabbed at it, focusing on shifting—she knew from experience that no metal could stand up to the force of the transformation. But something was wrong. Scales ought to have been spreading across her body, her limbs ought to be swelling—she should have been feeling her shoulder blades spread and lengthen into wings. But none of that was happening. She was just a human woman, desperately gripping the collar that had been placed around her neck—and to her horror, the men seemed to know exactly what she was going through. The one who’d collared her was chuckling, toying with his fine blond hair with one hand as he watched her.

  “Enough,” he said finally—and then, so quickly she almost didn’t realize what was happening, she felt another set of arms clamp down hard around her body from behind. A third attacker, just as silent as the first two. Her arms trapped, she struggled wildly, her panic and shock eclipsing everything she knew about martial arts, anything that might have saved her in a calmer state of mind—and then someone was forcing a cloth over her mouth and nose. As she took a desperate breath, the world began to spin and lurch … and then she was falling, falling into darkness and oblivion.

  Chapter 2

  They came in the late afternoon. For some reason, that had always been the part that had bothered Art the most. No matter what he did with the rest of the atrocities that had happened that day, he came back, again and again, to the pure indifference of appearing in the lazy part of the day. Attacks were supposed to take place in the dead of night, or at daybreak—the time of day leveraged as a weapon against the victim. To attack in broad daylight? That just proved they hadn’t expected a fight. That proved they were complacent.

  And why wouldn’t they be? York was a tiny place—barely a village, though they had always called it that. York. The village. Home. Nothing more than a big old rambling homestead, and a few scattered buildings for farming supplies. And the barn, of course. But a village that shared the name of the family that lived there was never going to offer much of a fight. And that was what made the attack so galling. It wasn’t about them being a threat—it was about wiping them off the map so they could be forgotten. So that their space could be occupied, or left as just another patch of pristine wilderness for the attackers to stroll through.

  Did they know about who they were destroying? They must have. Nobody else in the area had run into any trouble—not their closest neighbors, the neutral wolf pack down the river, not the strange human family that lived a few miles south, preparing for some kind of apocalypse they were certain was coming. If it had been about territory, those groups would have been hit too. But it was just York that was targeted. Just York that sighted, at around three-thirty, the fluttering of semi-translucent white wings in the trees.

  Art hadn’t been there. But he knew the place too well to fight off visions of what it must have been like. The trees the attackers had hidden in were to the south, a stand they often used for firewood or to carve furniture from when the need arose. They’d have had to head up across the fields where their little herd of dairy cows grazed. They must have left the gate open, too, because the whole herd had scattered by the time Art found the scene. Then they’d moved around the barn. They’d found Eric and Yasmin there. Art had found their bloodstained bodies in the straw where they’d fallen. By that stage, he’d been so numb with grief that the sight of them hadn’t stirred any feeling at all in him. Looking at the lifeless faces of two of his oldest friends had stirred about as strong a reaction as looking down the road and seeing a tree or a road sign. Oh, look. There’s something. Nothing unexpected, nothing remarkable in it. Of course. This has happened.

  Because the majority of them had been in the house. That was where he’d come first. It had been dusk when he’d pulled in, the old pickup truck the family shared shaking as it trundled up the dirt road that wound through fields to their old farmhouse. He’d thought it strange that the porch light wasn’t on—they always left the porch light on until everyone was home, and Art’s monthly trip into town for supplies was regular as clockwork, it wasn’t as though it would have slipped someone’s mind that the whole family wasn’t back together. After all, counting to nine wasn’t that hard, even for the youngest of their number.

  It was the youngest he’d found first. She was just behind the doorway, lying on her back with dried blood running from the corner of her mouth. The sight of her face had seared into his skull in an instant, and for a moment all he knew was the Wild roaring in his chest like a bonfire. It had been so long—so long since he’d felt that roar come to life. He’d come so far in his training. Noah wouldn’t’ve let him make the monthly trip into town if he hadn’t been solid—and it had been Noah who’d packed the truck for him, humming to himself in the early morning light, his old hands working quickly on the knots and buckles. Excess produce to sell, and a shopping list of things they couldn’t grow or make themselves. A long, boring drive to civilization, to the only store Noah and the others trusted—there were closer stores, but none of them would do. To keep the family safe, Art obeyed without question, even if the pop music on the radio started to wear on his mind after a while. It was a good time to practice patience.

  And as the Wild roared seductively in his chest, coaxing him into the oblivion of that embrace, all that kept him alive was remembering that training. And like a gust of cold air, it ran through him, banished the fire in his belly, froze everything he’d ever felt solid. Yes. There she lay. Eight years old, still clutching the battered old teddy bear with two missing limbs that had been the only possession she’d brought with her to York. Charlie. Struck hard enough across the face to end her small life. It wouldn’t have taken much force, he thought dispassionately as he moved through the house, scanning for a weapon in case Charlie’s killer was still in the house. In the living room, he found more of the family. Jesse—typical of him to be in here before dinner, Art thought methodically. The teenager loved to sprawl out on the battered old couch once the day’s work was done and disappear into the old video game console Nell had picked up for the kids for Christmas one year. And on Saturdays, they finished work early.

  That meant the a
ttack had been recent. If he’d driven a little faster, he might have been here in time to stop it. Interesting. Just information. No feeling attached. No emotion whatsoever as he pulled the throw rug Nell had knitted for the couch across Jesse’s lifeless body. His throat had been cut, cleanly, with frightening precision. If they’d used a blade, it was surgically sharp. In the archway that led from the living room to the dining room, there were footprints in drying blood. Still red, but sticky. An hour, maybe two since this attack? Was it Jesse’s blood, or someone else’s? There lay Mel, hurled back across the table, a knife still clutched in her lifeless hand and a deep, horrific wound carved in her chest. Trust her to go out fighting. There was blood on the knife, and he hoped—in the detached way that was all he could manage—that it belonged to the attacker, whoever they were. Maybe she’d made it to the Wild state before they’d killed her. Nell had always said the body returned to its most comfortable state when it died. There was a strange kind of comfort in finding these bodies like this. Human. They’d all won, in a way. What a victory. There was a folded tablecloth on the sideboard, ready for the evening meal—he spread it across her body like a shroud, letting his hand brush across her wrist just once as he tucked the embroidered cloth around her. Nell had sewn intricate designs around the edge of this. Bluebells. Blood seeped through.

  Levi was on the ground by the sink, his throat cut like Jesse’s and his watery blue eyes still open, still shocked. Art stared down at him for a long time, as though some clue in his posture would give away what had happened here. He’d seen television shows about people who could deduce all kinds of things from crime scenes. And this whole house was crime scene after crime scene after crime scene. But what could he do about it? Call the cops? York didn’t exist on any map—there was no address to give, no GPS location. He wasn’t even sure their phone worked. Even the power in the place came from a generator—they were entirely off the grid. And calling the cops would raise far more problems than it would solve, because as soon as the police realized who had been living here all these years, Art would be in prison for the rest of his life.