Blazing the Trail (35 page)
Authors: Deborah Cooke
To my astonishment, the shape swelled. It rounded. It grew. And by the time Granny poured the third ladle of water over it, it had become a griffin that towered over the three sisters. It could have been a black sculpture, a griffin carved of dark marble.
All three sisters blew on the griffin, and the blackness that covered it fell away like soot.
It was beautiful. It had the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion. Its coat was all in shades of gold and black, an elegant and beautiful creature. I could see the fur on its sides and the gleaming ebony of its nails. Its eyes were as dark as bittersweet chocolate. Its beak could have been made of hammered gold and it shone like the fierce weapon it was.
But its wings were astonishing. They shaded through every color of the rainbow: yellow at the tips, then orange and red and violet and blue, and green where they joined its body. Each feather glistened and each one was tipped in gold.
Then Skuld clapped her hands. My eyes nearly fell out of my head when the sculpture came to life. It could have thawed or awakened from a long sleep. The griffin flapped its wings; it stretched and let out a fearsome cry. That cry could curdle the blood of anyone. And those wings were even more stupendously beautiful when they were spread wide. Just when I thought nothing more weird could happen, it shimmered blue.
A familiar pale blue, a blue light that illuminated its perimeter and danced through its veins.
And the griffin shifted shape into a woman with long dark hair and elegant strength. She embraced the three sisters, then turned to face me. I saw the tears glisten in those beautiful dark eyes as she bowed low and touched her forehead to the ground before me.
“Thank you, Wyvern,” she said, the words resonating in my thoughts like old-speak. She blew me a kiss, changed back to her griffin shape with a roar of delight, then launched herself into the air. She circled once over the great tree, dipped low in triumph, then gave that fearsome cry before she flew into the starry night.
“Always liked them,” Skuld mused with satisfaction. “Even if I did have to wrestle one once in a while over a choice morsel.”
“I’m glad they’re back,” Urd said.
Granny gestured with her ladle, returning her sisters’ attention to the business at hand. Urd chose another shape, a shape I now realized was a shadow, the shadow of one of each kind. The extinction of each kind of shifter had added to the NightBlade, strengthening it, creating new layers like mica that were made of shifter shadows. We’d broken the bonds that enchanted them, and the Wyrd sisters were setting all those kinds of shifters loose in the world again.
I watched the sisters work, my mind filling with questions and possibilities. How many kinds of shifters were there in total? How would we all get along? It looked like I’d be learning a lot from my dad about alliances and treaties.
I thought of the chart I’d made just days before and envisioned it becoming a massive spreadsheet. Did these other shifters live openly among humans or hide themselves? The
Pyr
were charged with defending the earth and its treasures, but what were the quests of all these other shifters? What could we shifters do together to make the world a better place? What would humans think of so many myths coming to life among them?
No doubt about it—the world had become a much more interesting place.
I’m ready for the adventure.
Are you?
Deborah Cooke
has always been fascinated by dragons, although she has never understood why they have to be the bad guys. She has an honors degree in history with a focus on medieval studies and is an avid reader of medieval vernacular literature, fairy tales, and fantasy novels. Since 1992, Deborah has written more than forty romance novels under the names Deborah Cooke, Claire Cross, and Claire Delacroix.
Deborah makes her home in Canada with her husband. When she isn’t writing, she can be found knitting, sewing, or hunting for vintage patterns.
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T
here was a guy in my bedroom.
It was six in the morning and I didn’t know him.
I’m not much of a morning person, but that woke me up fast. I sat up and stared, my back pressed against the wall, sure my eyes had to be deceiving me. No matter how much I blinked, though, he was still there.
He seemed to think my reaction was funny.
He had dark hair and dark eyes, and he wasn’t wearing a shirt, just jeans—and he had one heck of a six-pack. His arms were folded across his chest and a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
But he seemed insubstantial. I could see through him, right to the crowded bulletin board behind him.
Was he real?
I was going to try asking him, but he abruptly faded—faded and disappeared right before my eyes.
As if he’d been just an illusion. I jumped from the bed, then reached into that corner. My fingers passed through a chill, one cold enough to give me goose bumps. Then my hand landed on a pushpin holding a wad of drawings, and everything was perfectly normal.
Except for the hairs standing up on the back of my neck.
I took a deep breath and looked around. My room was the pit it usually was. There were some snuffed candles on my desk and bookshelves, a whiff of incense lingering in the air, and the usual mess of discarded sweaters and books all over the floor.
No sign of that guy. If I hadn’t seen him, if I’d woken up two minutes later, I wouldn’t have thought anything was wrong at all.
I shuddered one last time and headed for the shower. Halfway there I wondered, had Meagan’s plan worked?
The visioning session had been my best friend’s idea. Her mom calls herself a holistic therapist, which makes my mom roll her eyes. I was skeptical, too, but didn’t have any better ideas. And Meagan, being the best friend ever, had really pulled out all the stops. She’d brought candles and mantras and incense for my room, and even though I’d felt silly, I’d followed her earnest instructions.
When the candles had burned down and she’d left—and my mom had shouted that I should open a window—I’d been pretty sure it hadn’t worked. Nothing seemed to have happened.
But now I didn’t know what to think. Who had that guy been? Where had he come from? And where had he gone?
Or had I just imagined him? I thought that if I was going to imagine a guy in my bedroom, it wouldn’t be one who
thought I was funny when I wasn’t trying to be, never mind one who kind of creeped me out.
I’d have imagined Nick there.
In fact, I frequently did.
I heard my mom in the kitchen and my dad getting the newspaper and knew I had to get moving. I did my daily check in the bathroom, but nada. No boobs. No blood.
Four more zits.
At its core, then, the visioning session had failed.
I’m probably not the only fifteen-and-a-half-year-old girl who’d like to get the Puberty Show on the road. Even Meagan got her period last year, which was why she was trying to help. But my best friend didn’t know the half of it.
That was because of the Covenant. I couldn’t confide in Meagan because I’d had to swear to abide by the Covenant of our kind. I come from a long line of dragon shape shifters—
Pyr
, we call ourselves—and we pledge to not reveal our abilities to humans on a whim.
That would include Meagan.
The Covenant goes like this:
I, Zoë Sorensson, do solemnly pledge not to willfully reveal the truth of my shape-shifting abilities to humans. I understand that individuals may know me in dragon form or in human form, but I swear that I shall not permit humans to know me in both forms, or to allow them to witness my shifting between forms without appropriate assessment of risk. I understand also that there will be humans who come to know me in both forms over the course of my life—I pledge not to reveal myself without due consideration, to beguile those who inadvertently witness my abilities, and to supply the names
of those humans whom I have entrusted with my truth to the leader of the
Pyr
, Erik Sorensson.
Do humans know we exist? Sure. Humans always have—thus the dragon stories they tell. But knowing dragons exist, believing that there are actually dragon shape shifters, and being convinced that your neighbor is one of them are entirely different things.
That’s probably a good thing.
The Covenant came about pretty recently. During the Dragon’s Tail Wars, some
Pyr
decided they wanted to be more active and visible. My dad, though, remembers when we were hunted almost to extinction. The Covenant is a compromise between putting it all out there and living in secret. So humans might see Sloane on the news, appearing at the scene of natural disasters to help—he’s the tourmaline dragon—or Brandt, the orange dragon, making another daring rescue, but they don’t know their names or where they live in their human lives.
We teenage
Pyr
had to pledge to the Covenant after Nick tried to impress the twin girls living next door, and his dad caught him.
I still thought it was funny that they hadn’t been impressed.
I, in contrast, was awed by Nick in dragon form.
The fact is that most humans don’t believe they could personally know a dragon shape shifter. Those twins thought Nick had pulled some kind of illusion to make himself look cooler than he was.
So, in a way, we might as well be a myth.
Which is funny, if you think about it.
The trick is that the dragon business is all theoretical when it comes to me. I’m the daughter of a dragon shape shifter, so I should also be a dragon shape shifter. Sounds
simple, doesn’t it? Except it’s not happening. Nothing special has happened to me. I can’t do it and I don’t know why—much less what I can do to hurry things along.
Dragons are by nature patient. That’s what my dad says. He should know, seeing as he is about twelve hundred years old. That’s supposed to reassure me, but it doesn’t.
Because dragons are also passionate and inclined to anger. I know that from spending my life around all those dragon shape shifters who are my extended family. And the fact that my dragon abilities were AWOL—despite my patience—was seriously pissing me off.
The
Pyr
are all guys—men and their sons—except for me. The story is that there’s only one female dragon at a time, and that she’s the Wyvern and has special powers.
Yours truly—I’m supposed to be the Wyvern.
The issue with there being only one female dragon shape shifter at a time is that the last one died before I was born. And it’s not like anyone has her diary. Zero references for me. Zero advice.
Zero anything.
Just an expectation from my family and friends that I’ll become the font of all dragonesque knowledge and lead the next generation to wherever the heck we’re going.
Sooner would be better.
No pressure, right?
My dad says I was a prodigy, that I was already showing special powers before I could walk. Then I started to talk and all the Wyvern goodness went away.
Poof.
Instead of being special and a prodigy, I was just a normal kid.
I’m still waiting for the good stuff to come back.
No sign of it yet.
Some incremental progress would be encouraging. It’s one thing to be a disappointment to everyone you care about, and
quite another to just sit back and accept that inadequacy. In fact, I was starting to think that those dragons who believed I wasn’t really the Wyvern might have it right.
Thus Meagan’s session.
An act of desperation.
Because the one thing I did know was that the other dragon teenagers like Nick had come into their powers with puberty. Their voices cracked and bingo, they were shifting shape like old pros. So being a late bloomer has bigger repercussions for me. Meagan thought we were doing the ritual for my period to start. She didn’t need to know I was after a little bit more than that.
Instead I got a guy mocking me in my own bedroom at the crack of dawn.
Like I said, it wasn’t the best way to start the day.