Exactly.
15
Talakai
I was leaning on a cloud—Dragon slang for hanging around.
It involved catching a thermal and soaring in lazy circles while barely lifting a muscle to keep me there.
The academy lay below. While I might appear as a barely discernible bird to those on the ground, my keen Dragon eyes had no issues identifying the fight instructor, Cody, with his mates and offspring, as they walked out into the field.
I watched the scampering cubs with interest.
Remarkable.
TwingirlSabres—now one of the rarest inhabitants throughout the realms. Females dying in childbirth over the last fifty years created the scarcity—the child shifting form during delivery had catastrophic consequences for all involved. No one knew why it was happening, or how to stop it.
Many claimed that the council’s recruitment of hybrid human females would come too late for the big cat shifters, and that they were on the verge of extinction and could not be saved. As I watched the cubs tumble and play, my mind ticked over.
In the underworld, you survived by recognizing and capitalizing on opportunity. I watched the twins with full recognition of what they represented.
There were collectors who would pay a small fortune to own those baby Sabres. As one of the last offspring of a dying species, they had significant prices on their heads. Much more than what rested on mine.
They’d also be a good investment. Their value would only increase as they matured. Once they were of mateable age—I couldn’t even begin to estimate it. Long-lived species would think nothing of waiting the twenty years it would take them to reach it.
I was a wanted Dragon. Paying Xumi off would be pricey—but selling those twins would likely do it. My underlord nemesis might even consider them a fair trade...
Maybe.
She had a penchant for collecting things. I ought to know.
If she wasn’t such a mercenary bitch, there’d be no way. But she was.
And if it worked? I could be free. Free to do as I wished with my life. And there might be enough to pay Kala back what I owed her.
I gritted my teeth as the twins frolicked, and I forced myself to evaluate my options. Instincts had kept me alive all these years. I ignored them now at my peril.
But what were they telling me to do?
Movement from the compound’s other side caught my attention. I quivered from nose to tail tip as the Watcher walked out of the forest with Anna.
The Dorinthian giant was with them too, but my eyes locked on the woman from my dreams. Not as shapely as a Dragona, she nevertheless filled the eye with her beauty.
Her beauty? I gave myself a strong mental shake. I’d dropped three hundred feet in an eyeblink, as though her presence drew me in. If I came down any lower, they were sure to notice a Dragon circling overhead.
But even as I flapped my wings and rose, I watched her. She moved fluidly, like someone who knew her body well. The thought of facing her in fighting class had my blood singing.
Something huge blocked out the sun.
Instinctively, I ducked and twisted away, buying myself time to calculate the risk.
A Dragon hovered just above me, turquoise eyes sparkling. AhugeDragon.
“Goods reactions,” he rumbled, his deep voice carrying effortlessly to me. His long jaws slurred the “s’s.”
The other shifter’s beast was something to behold. Easily forty feet across from wingtip to wingtip, and another ten added from nose to tail—there was only one thing that flashed through my mind—Legion.
Only the Emperor’s elite Dragon corps ever got that big. But—two days ago, I’d gleaned from a caretaker that an instructor here had been exiled from their ranks.
