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Dragon shifters were, by definition, motherless. But Mason would be the first to admit he was a mama’s boy.
Well, not in the wimpy, mollycoddled way that term generally suggested. After all, he was the Lord Dragon everyone in the Aerie looked to for answers. The Lord Dragon before whom underlings genuflected if he didn’t take the time to break them of the habit. The Lord Dragon who kept his small contingent of two-leggers safe from the Green.
But despite all that, when his foster mother showed up at his office door with a concerned wrinkle creasing the bridge of her nose, Mason dropped everything and ushered her inside. It was time to call out the big guns.
“Mason...” Sarah started. But the shifter put one finger to his lips and led her in silence to the seating alcove that overlooked the western horizon. Despite the mountain of responsibilities on his desk, he’d recently noticed how stooped the older woman’s shoulders had become and how her formerly sprightly steps slowed into a trudge by the end of every day.
And, yes, she was about to celebrate her seventieth birthday. But the Sarah he knew would have met aging with grace and dignity. Something was seriously wrong.
Luckily, Mason possessed the antidote. Opening the secret compartment his twin had built into the side of the sofa years ago, Mason drew out a small parcel wrapped in a much-used square of dingy waxed paper
“What is it?” his foster mother asked, intrigued.
Ah ha! She hadn’t even seen her gift yet and already the spark was back in his foster mother’s voice. The quiescent fire in Mason’s own belly grew even as he pulled back the edges of the paper to reveal his find.
Treasure. Rare and delicious, the nuggets scintillated his senses. The scent was nearly strong enough to taste, but Mason didn’t partake of a single morsel himself. Instead, stretching his arm out, he popped the prize into his foster mother’s mouth before she had time to protest the luxury.
“Where...?” The question halted as Sarah’s eyes closed in surprised rapture. “Mmm,” she hummed gently, that troublesome crease fading back into just another lax wrinkle in time-worn skin.
And therein lay the true treasure. Sarah’s joy was worth every harrowing moment Mason had spent hunting ginseng in woodland glades that yearned to eat him alive. He knew his brother Jasper would feel the same way about his own lengthy flight south to trade for this decadent treat ripped so carefully from the heart of the Green. One moment of peace on their foster mother’s face was worth any number of risks to life and limb.
So Mason didn’t fidget as they sat in shared silence. Instead, he watched and waited as Sarah’s closed eyes signaled her contentment. Her worries would bubble back to the surface sooner rather than later, but for now he would revel in the intensity of her pleasure.
Still, when his foster mother’s eyelids opened at last, her face remained almost girlish in its peacefulness. “Wherever did you find chocolate?”
Mason could smell the bitter sweetness on her breath, his shifter senses making the world more vivid than it appeared to those who spent their entire lives on two legs. Sarah’s face glowed gently with infrared light as her aroused limbic system elevated her temperature ever so slightly. Operation chocolate had been a resounding success.
Now the goal was to maintain that hard-won tranquility. Sidestepping her question, Mason merely shrugged and placed the remainder of the parcel in Sarah’s unresisting hand. Her slender fingers closed around the gift, a hint of a smile curling her lips upward into what he hoped were good memories from the Before.
This is how life should be. Rich, sated, full of love.
The reprieve was short-lived, though. Soon, his foster mother’s usual keen intelligence filled her face and Mason braced himself for the inquisition that he knew was soon to come. Only, the initial question wasn’t one he’d expected.
“Have you seen Jasper lately?” Sarah asked, that darned crease reappearing on her face. Mason wanted to reach over and strangle the worry out of existence, to snuff it out with one iron fist.
But he’d learned from hard experience that women—or at least this one very important woman—didn’t react well to overbearing management. No, if he wanted his foster mother’s concerns to die a speedy death, then he’d have to be more subtle about his intentions.
“Jasper?” he asked, as if he’d forgotten the name of one of the five dragons who shared the Aerie’s towers.
“Yes, your brother,” Sarah replied, her voice as tart as the juice of the little sour oranges that grew wild down by the river.
Mason ignored both her reproof and the fact that Jasper wasn’t really his brother. Dragons only enjoyed one blood sibling apiece, a twin who hatched within their same egg. Neither he nor Jasper currently boasted such a relationship.
But long-standing sadness would do neither of them any good. So Mason squashed that line of thought and merely shook his head. “Not lately.”
He hadn’t spoken to Jasper in a week, actually, not since the other shifter had returned with chocolate in hand and a plan for bringing their foster mother back to her usual vibrant love of life. But a few days or even weeks between visits wasn’t unusual given Mason’s center of operations in the Sunsphere, a tower set apart from the rest of the Aerie by a sea of hungry Green.
“Well, you need to go check on him,” Sarah countered. “He’s been withdrawn lately. Absent-minded. A bit cold.” She paused, then dropped the bomb she’d obviously come to share. “I’m worried he might be succumbing to the Fade.”
And just like that, the pleasure of the preceding moment fled. Mason had heard rumors of the fading sickness, an unexplained ailment that began unobtrusively within certain shifters then grew like wildfire. The afflicted complained of cold, weakness, fatigue. Then, one day, they simply ceased to exist.
The magic that had merged man and beast imploded and left nothing behind but ash.
“There hasn’t been a single confirmed case...” Mason began. But, uncharacteristically, Sarah interrupted rather than affording him the deference every other Aerie human offered to their dragon overlords.
“He’s twinless,” she said, her voice a hoarse whisper. The older woman cleared her throat and spoke more calmly even though Mason could tell that squashing her fears required a supreme effort of will. “Everyone knows it hits the twinless first.”
Mason opened his mouth to say...well, he didn’t really know what to say. But before he could think of a way to calm his mother’s fears, the older woman had jumped to her feet and pressed her nose up against the angled glass that wrapped all the way around each floor of the Sunsphere.
“Is that smoke?” she demanded.
Mason growled in frustration. Between the chocolate and that dratted crease, he’d missed the obvious. Because the vision that met his gaze was more than smoke. It was fire...and fire kindled by a mage.
Brilliant magenta light flared out in all directions, the streaks of color invisible to the human eye but vivid as the nearby sunset to the shifter retina. The sight was beautiful, but it set Mason’s teeth on edge nonetheless. Because while the presence of mages was never a good sign, human magic always boded ill for their sworn enemies—dragon-kind.
Without speaking, he rose and flung open the massive fiberglass door leading into nothingness. Cold winter air swept inside, tearing papers off his desk and whipping his mother’s hair into a frenzy.
Mason’s long, flexible tail reached out and plucked Sarah out of harm’s way. Ah, so he’d shifted. Good. The sooner back in his own true form, the sooner this crisis could be averted.
Spreading his wings, the Lord Dragon prepared to leap. Then, remembering his mother at the last moment, he paused to glance back over one shoulder.
“I’ll alert the others,” Sarah yelled, her voice barely audible above the roar of rushing wind. She was unfazed by his abrupt transition from ordinary man to beast large enough to eat her alive and was equally untroubled by her adopted son’s descent into his instinctual animal nature. Instead, she stood tall, clutching her waxed-paper parcel in one hand while holding hair out of squinting eyes with the other.
Still, Mason strove to showcase the manners his foster mother had so carefully drummed into her family of reptilian predators ever since hatching. Nodding his thanks, he met her gaze. Then, bugling, he leapt into the air, wings beating hard to turn the initial plummet into a soar.
Jasper and the fading sickness would have to wait. Because if a mage threatened the Aerie, then Mason would have no problem squashing the intruder like a bug.