The Dragon's Cure - Shaun

Prologue

A perfect summer night turned into a nightmare.

Not a breath of wind blew. The stars twinkled in the dark sky. The heat from the afternoon lingered, warming the little town of Newbridge, West Blighton.

Two months prior, humans hunted and massacred five dragon shifters. They retaliated and killed the men who slaughtered their brethren. Back and forth it continued until the elders feared for the lives of the remaining shifters. They planned to leave the planet to the humans, to flee, while they still had women and children to protect.

But someone betrayed them. A day before their departure, the humans came for them all.

Now, the only soul left standing at the cave's entrance, inside of Mount Calico, eighteen-year-old Shaun, peered out at the chaos before him.

The black night lit up as dragons exploded in mid-air. Human men screamed as dragons flew over them, engulfing them in streams of dragon fire, so hot, not even their bones remained.

Steal arrows cracked the rib cages of roaring dragons and pierced their human hearts, deafening Shaun to the soft whimpers of the women and children behind him. The ground shuddered as they tumbled from the sky, deceased before they hit the earth.

Shaun paid them no notice. His eyes never withdrew from the snow-white dragon and the sparkling blue one beside it; his parents. They stood below him, attempting to stop the human men from ascending the mountain to where the children and women hid, along with Shaun and his two younger brothers.

Sharp rock sliced his finger-tips as his thoughts went back to that afternoon, before all hell broke loose.

The fear in his mother's gray eyes froze the air, which he tried to draw into his lungs. The coarse material of the enormous bag she forced it into his hands, grazed his fingers. A ghostly sting remained where her nails pierced his skin when she hauled him up from his chair in front of his desk.

It all seemed to happen in slow motion, until his mother shouted, "Grab as many of your father's records and research as you can, and go help your brothers pack up some clothes. We have to hurry, boy. They are coming for us."

Weighed down with all their bags, he followed his parents, who carried his brothers. The stench of wet earth and decay surrounded him as they ran through the underground passages. He could still hear the gunfire, the bullets pinging off the walls, ornaments crashing to the ground, and the ringing in his ears from a deafening blast.

His mother had turned on the oven and the unused gas tank to saturate the rooms with vapor, so the house would explode, burying the trapdoor leading to the underground tunnels.

Shaun stretched his shoulders forward, struggling to ease some of the ache from using his wings for the first time since his first shift. He tried to concentrate on the battle at the foot of the mountain, but he could still hear his mother's voice after they arrived at the cave. Her voice, ricocheting off the rugged walls, silenced everybody.

"I have to try. We have lived among them for generations. They have to know that we are no threat to them. At least let me try!"

As much as he had wished she would succeed, he knew deep down she would not. Over the last 18 years of his existence, he came to realize humans hunted and killed anything or anyone who appeared different from most humans. His shoulders hunched forward as his heart overflowed with apprehension.

Right before it happened, before flaming steel arrows whizzed through the air, his mother glanced up at him, tears glimmering in her eyes, and said, "I will see you again, boy. I'm so sorry."

It started with a low rumble in his chest and then burst free from him in a thundering roar filled with anguish. The steel arrows tore through his parents' scaled chests, igniting their inner fire like sticks of dynamite. The explosions ripped through the air, one after the next, as the nine dragons, his parents included, blew up like atomic bombs.