Verdant Magic: A Standalone Dragon Shifter Adventure (Dragon Mage Chronicles Book 1) Read online

  She’d waited so long for Charlie to make his move. Had considered taking the lead herself a dozen times over, only to step back and decide the moment was never quite right.

  After all, earth witches understood the importance of timing deep within their bones. Plant a seed too long before spring rains fell and field mice would consume your intended harvest. Wait too long and frost would nip tender buds before the plant ever bore fruit.

  The signs had never seemed quite right for that all-important first kiss. So Amber had left the field fallow, had ignored her yearnings, and waited.

  Only now that the longed-for moment had finally arrived, she felt nothing...or at least nothing good. Instead of dancing hearts and singing bluebirds, the images filling her mind were stark and dangerous, bringing bile up her throat.

  A knife in Charlie’s hands pointing toward a man’s unguarded back. Blood that would have splattered across earthen floor if Zane hadn’t moved lightning fast. Death in the tranquil town of Greenwich, all due to her trust in a childhood friend who had become something else entirely while her attention had been turned the other way.

  Chapter 9

  Amber had waited a lifetime for her first kiss. But now that the moment had finally arrived, a tightness in her stomach and tears pooling behind her eyes promised that she’d relinquished something precious in the kissing.

  “The knife was a mistake,” her companion had offered moments earlier. But had Charlie meant those conciliatory words as a true change of heart...or were they merely an apology for a failed strike? What would her friend do the next time his simple existence was shaken up, the next time something unknown but not necessarily treacherous walked into their midst?

  Perhaps that’s why Amber ended the kiss after only a few seconds. Or maybe her frozen uncertainty was broken by a muffled grunt from her prisoner, reminding her of everything she had to lose...and to gain.

  Either way, Amber found herself drawing back then glaring Charlie away until he stood near his sister at the cavern door. For her part, the Watcher moved in the opposite direction, toward the incensed vine that was squeezing Zane in a hold that had already transitioned from restraint to attack.

  Humming, she teased the kudzu into submission with both magic and words. “Shh, be quiet,” she murmured. “Bind him but don’t kill him. Remember what I asked of you when you first came out of the ground.”

  The words were calmly authoritative...but they didn’t work. Instead, Amber’s breath caught as she took in Zane’s stillness, the tense agony denoted by clenched shifter fists. How could I let my attention be drawn away when a life was on the line? She berated herself. Then: Surely one willful vine won’t be enough to snuff out a dragon’s inner fire....

  Despite its lack of assistance, though, this particular plant took mulishness to an extreme. Tiny patches of human flesh visible between fluttering leaves were already turning red from lack of oxygen, and the witch immediately pressed fingers deeper into the tangle in an effort to turn the tide. She squashed down her urge to rip twining tendrils aside and instead stroked gently as she argued her point with silent but focused intent.

  Unfortunately, the vine continued to fight against supposed danger beneath its shroud of interwoven stems. Like Jasmine, the plant had been swayed by the certainty in Charlie’s voice when he claimed Amber was ensorcelled by the shifter’s silver tongue. Dragons were evil, dragons should be killed. In the eyes of the Green, there was no room for a gray middle ground.

  And for one terrifying instant, Amber thought she’d lost. Her powers were weaker down here beneath the earth, so she couldn’t outright force the vine to do her bidding either. And there was no way she could physically rip the kudzu away before it snuffed the shifter’s life.

  But then Thea picked her way over to join her mistress. Goat teeth nibbled on trailing tendrils, yard after yard of soft tissue sliding down waiting caprine throat. And, abruptly, the kudzu saw reason.

  If Amber would call off her pet, it offered, then the plant would loosen its stifling strands. The being no longer cared about an imprisoned shifter when its own life was on the line.

  I accept your deal, Amber told her floral partner quickly. Then, holding her breath, the witch waited as plant moved to obey.

  Slowly, far too slowly, the living drapery receded. Zane’s blue eyes emerged one at a time until both shone out of the darkness like the final coals of a midnight bonfire. And like that metaphorical conflagration, her dragon’s gaze beat back the chilly damp that had settled onto Amber’s shoulders as soon as they both stepped underground. Even without the collar, Zane’s mere proximity made her feel stronger, taller, bolder...as if she herself was a dragon preparing to take flight.

  Out of the corner of one eye, Watcher noticed prisoner begin to lift the offending satchel away from its place secured around his shoulder. But then Zane paused, brows rising as he waited for Amber’s permission before proceeding further. It wasn’t the shifty-eyed glance of a prisoner to his captor, either. Instead, a lump formed in Amber’s throat as she realized Zane was doing her the honor Charlie had not. He was treating her like an equal, asking her permission before diving into her domain—the world of sometimes pesky and always ornery plants.

  And despite the fact that Amber had saddled her prisoner with the living restraint for a reason, she nodded acquiescence. Given recent events, she trusted Zane to control himself far more than she trusted the kudzu—or any other resident of Greenwich—to protect her prisoner’s life.

  “Here, come to me,” she cooed to the disgruntled plant. Reluctantly, vines parted, curling away from Zane’s body and creeping around Amber’s arms instead. They were tentative, confused by her command and by their location deep beneath the earth with no life-giving sun to feed their leaves. Still, when the Watcher asked, the Green obeyed. And, at long last, Amber was able to set her helper down beside the spring box to be carried back to the surface at a later date.

  “See what I mean?”

  Only when Charlie’s clipped voice pulled her eyes away from the shifter’s magnetic gaze did Amber notice what had happened in the rest of the cavern while she’d been intent upon her magical task. How had she missed the clatter of footsteps as dozens of worried witches filed into the open space? How had she failed to overhear Jasmine’s frantic call for reinforcements, the muttered conversation between brother and sister that likely preceded the call?

  With one final glance at her companion, Amber knew all too well why her usual keen senses had been sidetracked. One long kiss from the lips of her best friend had left her unmoved...but merely gazing into this shifter’s eyes stole Amber’s breath and left her yearning for something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

  Not the time to turn into a lovesick teenager, she reminded herself, scanning faces of friends and neighbors arrayed against her.

  No, this definitely wasn’t the time to become sidetracked by hormones. Because the frowns and grumblings emanating from the crowd suggested that Amber had lost something crucial while rescuing Zane from the kudzu’s attack. No longer Greenwich’s sacred Watcher, Amber had morphed into the evil within their midst.

  Chapter 10

  “Come here,” the man at the center of the crowd—the Mayor—said, his words more of a suggestion than an order. Amber recalled using the exact same cadence when her precious goat ended up perched on a rock ledge elevated twenty feet above the forest floor while spooked out of her good sense. So she understood where Mr. Schumacher was coming from...but she still cringed away from the implication.

  Greenwich’s secular leader clearly agreed with his son that their Watcher had lost her mind to a dragon shifter’s insidious spell.

  “Zane isn’t dangerous,” Amber began. Then, glancing at her best friend, who was cradling a recently bruised arm against his chest, she muttered an addendum. “Well, he’s not dangerous if you don’t hold a knife to his back.”

  “He’s a dragon.” Charlie didn’t even bother replying to her directly, the
ir kiss forgotten as quickly as it had begun. Instead, his words were aimed at the crowd he hoped to sway over to his point of view. “He’s compromised our Watcher, but a dragon can’t shift with a collar around his throat. And water will finish the job the Green started.”

  Only then did Amber notice that her friends and neighbors weren’t merely providing a captive audience for the four-way drama. Instead, they’d lined up into a bucket brigade, large plastic pails from the Before dipping into the deepest pool then passing hand over hand up the slope toward the speakers on the rise above.

  The chilly liquid seemed like a laughable weapon. What did the villagers plan to do, wash their enemy to death? But the other witches must have known something Amber did not. Because Zane’s eyes widened at the sight and he took an unconscious step backwards as if he’d been struck.

  Perhaps that’s why her feet moved before Amber recalled giving them an order, carrying her over to wedge protectively between bucket brigade and her prisoner’s taller form. Rationalizations aside, she couldn’t bear to lose this shifter who she’d led into the heart of danger...nor could she bear to watch her neighbors turn themselves into murderers on her behalf. No, she’d simply talk sense into her friends and relatives before they made a mistake everyone would later live to regret.

  “Don’t you even want to know what he’s doing here?” she demanded, her customary stage fright giving way to the necessity of the moment. “Why the other dragon is battering down our doors?”

  “The other dragon?”

  Finally! Now everything will be alright. This was the voice of reason she’d been waiting for, the Mayor taking on his customary role as resolver of conflict within their underground town. The older man would never allow Zane to be murdered without a trial, and Amber found the former’s understanding smile drawing her forward now like a moth to a flame.

  Unlike his parent, though, Charlie took stubborn intensity of focus to an extreme. “The black dragon is gone,” her friend interrupted, dismissing the moon-marked beast with one wave of his broad hand. “This invader is the only true danger left. We can’t allow it to wheedle its way into our minds and steal our free will. We need to act fast.”

  Amber felt as if she was standing in a storm, being pummeled from every direction by beating rain and biting wind. Her best friend was unwilling to listen to reason. His father’s face was turning inward as Mayor was swayed by son’s rhetoric. And people she’d loved since childhood were obeying Charlie without question, not bothering to ask the Watcher for explanation before throwing in their lot with her opponents.

  Then a pocket of calm opened as the aforementioned shifter spoke so softly that only she could hear. “He’s not going to let this go,” Zane murmured. “Is there another way out? And if I leave, will they let you walk free?”

  His voice was silky smooth...but not magically manipulative. Perhaps that’s why Amber accepted the release valve her companion presented. She cocked her head to one side and considered exit strategies for the shifter...and for herself.

  Despite its size, the chamber only boasted two doorways and each was now blocked by a burly earth witch. Yesterday, she would have considered both of these middle-aged men friends since Fred and Grant had acted as honorary uncles during her not-so-distant childhood. But now she had a sinking suspicion they’d restrain her far more thoroughly than ever she’d restrained her own prisoner if she dared to stumble within arm’s reach. Neither she nor Zane would be leaving the spring room if it meant slipping past their muscular forms.

  Meanwhile, buckets of water were inching closer by the moment, the first no more than twenty feet away. And now that she’d digested Charlie’s words and Zane’s reaction, Amber guessed that the liquid would quench a dragon’s inner fire the same way flames were so effective at stealing the will of the Green. Perhaps the collar currently clamped around her prisoner’s neck would even magnify that effect? If so, then Zane might be harmed or killed by the dousing.

  Amber refused to twiddle her thumbs and turn her companion into an oversized science experiment. But despite the need for speedy action and her growing disillusionment with her best friend, she hovered indecisively. These were her people—surely they would come around to her point of view if she just tried to explain one more time.

  Glancing around the room, the Watcher picked out Auntie Mae who had taught her how to knit during several long December evenings when Momma was too sick and Poppa was too intent upon his own duties to entertain an energy-filled child. Over there in the corner stood red-headed Claire, with whom she’d played when both were children and whose toddler-aged kids Amber now babysat. Meanwhile, grandfatherly Samuel had tended to minor wounds and lied about their cause whenever Amber’s stupidity would otherwise have seen her grounded for life.

  Every man, woman, and child present shared a history with their Watcher. She’d thought they would share a joint future as well.

  But perhaps Amber had spent too long alone in her parents’ cabin, slowly losing touch with the people she worked so hard to protect. Because now, no one was willing to so much as meet her gaze as she turned to better scan the crowd. No one spoke up in her defense when the Mayor’s hand reached for the pistol belted around his waist.

  Amber’s breath caught at the menacing gesture. Then she forced herself to exhale normally as she berated herself for jumping to conclusions. Mr. Schumacher wasn’t planning on shooting anybody, today or ever.

  In fact, she was so certain that the Mayor would never point a loaded gun at a human being that she stood for far too long gazing into the muzzle’s black maw. Was it really possible that the man she’d come to think of as a second father now cradled a gun in two steady hands, aiming directly at the sliver of shifter shoulder that must have been faintly visible behind the Watcher’s back?

  For a long moment, nobody breathed. Then, the Mayor spoke at last. “Are you sure, Charlie?” he asked, not taking his gaze away from the scene for long enough to make eye contact with his only son.

  And Amber’s previously kind-hearted friend hung her out to dry. “I’m certain, Dad.”

  Sidling sideways, Mr. Schumacher cleared his line of sight so he was a trifle less likely to injure his own villager while murdering the shifter standing only eighteen inches away from her quivering form. “Step aside, Amber,” he said at last.

  And this time his words held no sign of wheedling. Instead, they were a solid, if gentle, command.

  ***

  In Zane’s shoes, Amber was pretty sure she would have focused solely on her own continued existence. But as the Watcher felt herself being shoved sideways to sprawl across the irregular stone floor, she realized that her dragon had chosen to waste his millisecond of lead time in order to protect his captor rather than saving his own skin.

  Thea was less aware of the deadliness of firearms. So it wasn’t selflessness that sent the goat scurrying toward her fallen mistress. Still, the soft nose and furry limbs pressing up against Amber’s stunned body pulled her back into the present with a jolt.

  During her long hours of self-starting childhood, Amber had once read that it was impossible to dodge a moving bullet. By the time the target heard the sound of the gun’s retort, the missile was already lodged deep within her unprotected chest.

  But an earth witch who knew the soul of the shooter could easily react before finger ever pulled trigger. “Please,” she whispered, thrusting her toes into the damp earth and hoping the offering of blood welling out of both skinned knees would suffice as payment.

  In answer, the ground rumpled and swayed beneath her bum. Then, slower than she would have liked but effectively nonetheless, soil leapt upward to create a solid wall between her and the cavern proper just as the muffled retort of the gun rang out.

  Rang out and thudded uselessly into the barrier she had created. Zane was safe...for the moment.

  The first effort had been fully instinctual, a gesture intended only to save her companion’s life in the face of imminent peril. But in
the seconds that followed, Amber listened to the screams from the other side of the barrier and thought her decision the rest of the way through.

  Was she really planning to throw in her lot with a man she barely knew, cutting off all ties with people who were as close to family as any she had left? Was Amber willing to lay down her role of Watcher even though that job was the sole thread connecting her to two dead parents who had been killed by a dragon’s fiery breath?

  “You can still go back.” Zane’s strong arms lifted her to her feet effortlessly. His warm palm brushed hair out of her face and tucked it behind one waiting ear, making her shiver with pleasure at his touch. “Just point me toward the nearest exit and I’ll make my own way. You need to do what’s right for you and for your people.”

  Maybe it was dragon magic or just the proximity of his heated skin, but the hard lump of doubt in Amber’s chest melted at his words. Between Charlie’s knife and Mr. Schumacher’s gun, she had to admit that Greenwich wasn’t the peaceful settlement she’d spent her life protecting. She’d been willing to accept stifling surroundings for the sake of duty...but what duty remained when the people themselves thoroughly rejected her without so much as listening to what she had to say?

  It wasn’t as if she’d be leaving her neighbors entirely in the lurch either. There were other witches who could do her job nearly as ably as she ever had, other witches who could take turns teasing the Green into allowing humans to harvest and sow. They could trade off shifts watching from the creek willow perch beside her parents’ cabin, could send farmers scattering toward the tunnels if another dragon came to call.

  But no one else could follow this shifter out into the unknown and determine whether Greenwich villagers had been wrong to run from the species for so many years. No one but Amber now enjoyed the sensation of Zane’s warm hands rubbing smooth circles between her shoulder blades, his interest humming against her agitated skin.