A Shade of Dragon Read online

  A Shade of Dragon

  Bella Forrest

  Contents

  Also by Bella Forrest

  Copyright

  1. Prologue: Nell

  2. Chapter 1: Nell

  3. Chapter 2: Nell

  4. Chapter 3: Nell

  5. Chapter 4: Nell

  6. Chapter 5: Nell

  7. Chapter 6: Nell

  8. Chapter 7: Nell

  9. Chapter 8: Nell

  10. Chapter 9: Nell

  11. Chapter 10: Nell

  12. Chapter 11: Nell

  13. Chapter 12: Nell

  14. Chapter 13: Nell

  15. Chapter 14: Nell

  16. Chapter 15: Nell

  17. Chapter 16: Nell

  18. Chapter 17: Nell

  19. Chapter 18: Nell

  20. Chapter 19: Nell

  21. Chapter 20: Nell

  22. Chapter 21: Nell

  23. Chapter 22: Nell

  24. Chapter 23: Nell

  25. Chapter 24: Nell

  26. Chapter 25: Nell

  27. Chapter 26: Nell

  28. Chapter 27: Nell

  29. Chapter 28: Nell

  30. Chapter 29: Nell

  31. Chapter 30: Nell

  32. Chapter 31: Nell

  33. Chapter 32: Nell

  34. Chapter 33: Nell

  35. Chapter 34: Theon

  36. Chapter 35: Theon

  37. Chapter 36: Theon

  38. Chapter 37: Theon

  39. Chapter 38: Theon

  40. Epilogue: Nell

  Read More by Bella Forrest!

  Also by Bella Forrest

  A SHADE OF VAMPIRE SERIES

  Derek & Sofia’s story:

  A Shade of Vampire (Book 1)

  A Shade of Blood (Book 2)

  A Castle of Sand (Book 3)

  A Shadow of Light (Book 4)

  A Blaze of Sun (Book 5)

  A Gate of Night (Book 6)

  A Break of Day (Book 7)

  Rose & Caleb’s story:

  A Shade of Novak (Book 8)

  A Bond of Blood (Book 9)

  A Spell of Time (Book 10)

  A Chase of Prey (Book 11)

  A Shade of Doubt (Book 12)

  A Turn of Tides (Book 13)

  A Dawn of Strength (Book 14)

  A Fall of Secrets (Book 15)

  An End of Night (Book 16)

  The Shade continues with a new hero...:

  A Wind of Change (Book 17)

  A Trail of Echoes (Book 18)

  A Soldier of Shadows (Book 19)

  A Hero of Realms (Book 20)

  A Vial of Life (Book 21)

  A SHADE OF KIEV TRILOGY

  A Shade of Kiev 1

  A Shade of Kiev 2

  A Shade of Kiev 3

  BEAUTIFUL MONSTER DUOLOGY

  Beautiful Monster 1

  Beautiful Monster 2

  For an updated list of my books, please visit my website: www.bellaforrest.net

  Join my VIP email list and I’ll personally send you an email reminder as soon as my next book is out! Click here to sign up: www.forrestbooks.com

  Copyright © 2015 by Bella Forrest

  Cover design inspired by Sarah Hansen, Okay Creations LLC

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Prologue: Nell

  Looking back on it all now, I was such a fool to have ever fought.

  When the prophets are madmen and the madmen are prophets, who do you trust to decide your fate?

  I trusted no one at all, and I can’t say that it could have happened any other way. Should we consider the alignment of the stars when we love someone? Is it even possible to stop a train by yelling for it to stop?

  We’ll never know what could have been, in some alternate universe where we did what we were told.

  Maybe we derailed destiny.

  Maybe we were stronger than all of it.

  Chapter 1: Nell

  The world splayed out beneath the night-time Delta flight was almost magical, with its pearlescent mountains of clouds and its vast black beyond. Instead of gazing out the window, however, I was examining my ticket. The slumbering wannabe rap icon on my left twitched and kicked in his sleep, and a mustached gasbag on my right was enjoying his fourth and hopefully last bag of Cheez-Its. And then there was me: Penelope O’Hara, Delta Flight 353, seat 34B, zone one. I was the kind of girl who would find herself stuck in a middle seat with no feminine wiles at her disposal to get out of it.

  My phone vibrated in my lap. I clenched my jaw, unlocking the phone and allowing the incoming messages to scroll.

  ANDREW HARDY tweeted: “all I want for X-mas is more time at this dance with @michellabe11a… #bluechristmas #feelingthis…”

  I rolled my eyes. Feeling This? You mean that typical Blink-182 song you obsessively repeated all last summer?

  The other chirp from my phone had been an update from Michelle Ballinger’s Facebook.

  MICHELLE BALLINGER has changed her profile picture. Even though it would challenge the six-month streak of her perfect bikini-at-the-beach profile picture. I chewed on my lower lip and, against my better judgment, tapped the tab and pulled the feed onto my screen. I knew what I was going to see.

  Michelle, a dusky bombshell with dark brown hair gathered into a cluster of retro curls around her cheeks, was wrapped in Andrew Hardy’s arms beneath the blue-tinted lights of the Lawry Hill Academy gymnasium, altered painstakingly over the course of the past two months to resemble the same romantic night sky surrounding the aircraft I was now sitting in. Of course, I couldn’t be bothered to take a glimpse out of the window. I was glued to my phone, no matter how many times I clenched my jaw and let the screen go idle.

  Michelle and Andrew had been flirting via social media for the past several weeks. I could only imagine how heavily they laid it on while they were at college.

  Not that I cared. I didn’t have any right to. Andrew and I had been a casual thing, a summers-and-holidays-only thing.

  My mind shifted to the stupid, sexy, slinky sweater dress I’d packed before leaving DC, promising myself that it was only my imagination that he and Michelle were getting awfully cozy. They’re friends, I’d told myself. They go to the same college. Their families are friends! Of course they’re cozy; it doesn’t mean anything. Just because Michelle has a body like Carmen Electra and Andrew used to be the quarterback of the football team… and she used to be the head cheerleader… it doesn’t mean anything. If something was going on, Andrew would’ve told me. Michelle would’ve told me!

  But deep down, I knew that wasn’t true.

  I was, after all, a child of divorce. And children of divorce knew that unfaithful hearts didn’t give up their secrets.

  It’d been eleven years now, but I couldn’t get over it. Maybe I never would. To outsiders, the dissolution of Bryce O’Hara and Patricia Fitzgerald had seemed sudden and shocking. At cocktail parties and the country club, they’d always been the perfect couple, a sterling example of having it all: power, class, and wealth. Patricia, the dark and brilliant queen of the O’Hara Resort and Spa empire, had seemed a natural fit for impulsive Bryce. They were yin and yang. Bryce would tell the stories; Patricia would smile on his arm. Patricia would focus on her golf swing; Bryce would imitate a bird call at the last second, breaking her concentration. Whatever you needed, they could provide, whether it was introspection or frivolity, good advice or a good laugh. They had it all—separately. But as a couple…

  Only I had known that the spli
t had begun back when I was five years old, concluding three years later, when I was eight. Friends of the family had marveled over quiet, meek Penelope, wondering how they could convince their own children to be as well-behaved as I was. Try shouting at the top of your lungs about how unhappy you are during their formative years. You’ll find that they bend over backwards to try to keep the house from falling down around their ears.

  My phone vibrated again, and I grimaced, checking it without even hesitating this time.

  Instagram. Marvelous.

  I tapped the tab and enabled the application.

  Michelle Ballinger and Andrew Hardy.

  Kissing.

  Michelle cupped his face with manicured hands, and her pouty lips seemed almost to engulf his own. Andrew’s head was tilted, so his profile was obscured by the shadow, but I could recognize the perfect cut of his jaw and the silky spill of flaxen hair anywhere. That had been my playground—my admittedly casual playground—for the past three years.

  I sighed and rolled my shoulders.

  Everything would be fine. What, had I been surprised? Me? Penelope O’Hara, not only a child of divorce, but a straight-A student? Honor society treasurer and captain of the debate team at the Shenandoah Institute, the absolute best private college in all of DC? Let’s just say that I was smart. Observant. Painfully honest with myself. And I had never had any illusions about the eternity of love, particularly the kind of love you found with a sixteen-year-old boy in the back of his stupid father’s Ferrari.

  “Attention, ladies and gentlemen.” The pilot’s voice crackled over the intercom. “We’re about to begin making our descent to Portland International Jetport. I have to ask that all electronic devices, including laptops and cellular telephones, be turned off. Please remain in your seats until we have landed. Thank you.”

  I pursed my lips for the hundredth time that flight, and extracted my compact from the purse beneath the seat in front of me. I unfastened its clasp and gazed at myself in the tiny oval mirror. Much like my mother, Patricia, it was of the utmost importance to me that I appear unruffled, particularly in front of my father.

  As I was a child of primarily Irish parents, my complexion showed irritation easily. Just now, two bright spots of blush stood out on my snowy cheeks. I opened the compact further, revealing a hidden tray of pale foundation beneath the mirror, and delicately dabbed the concealer onto my cheeks. My gray eyes were steady and my small mouth was as straight as an arrow. My hair, a long, silken shock of coal black, fell without any particular style over my narrow shoulders. I clipped the compact shut and replaced it in my purse.

  As the airplane tilted downward and began to descend toward the state of Maine, the clouds broke apart and revealed a sprawling landscape, inky at this nighttime hour, yet twinkling with the lights of a thousand streetlamps and storefronts. Even though I hated visiting my father, I couldn’t help but get a homesick ache at the sight of my home state. My mother and I had only relocated to DC in the past three years, and it had been quite the adjustment. I struggled to make new friends as it was, and in DC? They trusted me to be sharp, but they didn’t invite me to parties.

  I powered my phone down, secretly relieved that someone had forced me to stop checking the constant flow of updates from my best friend, Michelle, and my former kind-of-but-not-really boyfriend, Andrew.

  Though if I thought about it, Michelle was my former kind-of-but-not-really best friend, too.

  Chapter 2: Nell

  Portland International Jetport was a massive, thriving hub on the coast of Maine, not far from Beggar’s Hole, where I had lived from birth to the age of sixteen. I searched the many signs erected along the walls and dangling from the ceiling, a whirlpool of numbers and letters and arrows. Even though I flew up to visit twice a year, I still couldn’t find the damn baggage claim.

  But this had been my life since I was a child. I imagined myself as some sort of lone crustacean, a hermit crab adrift on the tides. Hard on the outside, soft on the inside. Much like a crustacean, I rarely if ever abandoned my shell.

  I powered my phone back on, jammed it into the pocket of my jeans, and ignored its every ding as I hunted for the baggage carousel.

  Come on, come on, come on. I can’t let Dad find me scouring the airport for the baggage claim. Boy, would he love that. The chance to play father again. Tousle my hair, call me adorable. No way. Screw that, Dad. I don’t need you or anyone else. You made sure of that when I was busy fixing my own lunches while you and Mom fought in the yard like a couple of animals.

  Sometimes their insults had been so furious, they hadn’t even made sense. Patricia Fitzgerald—a Harvard-educated lawyer with her own practice—had been indistinguishable from the people who threw chairs at talk-show hosts.

  Not for me, thanks. It was good that Andrew and I had never made anything official. After all, long-distance relationships never worked. I’d hate to end up emotionally invested and then abandoned.

  My phone hummed in my pocket, but I ignored it. It was just another tweet, or photo, hashtagging Michelle and Andrew’s undying affection.

  I had always looked to my mother as the bedrock of our little family, and at least Mom hadn’t done the unthinkable and gotten remarried. No, she’d been decent about the whole thing. She’d gone on a date from time to time, but whenever I asked her about this one or that one, there was always some excuse. “Augh, he listens to nothing but oldies,” had been one complaint. “It turned out that the hair he had with his Halloween costume was his real hair,” had been another. “He doesn’t know how to ride a bike. This is DC! You can’t drive here.”

  There it is. Thank God. Baggage claim. Concourse C. That was just down the hall… and the escalator… and another hall…

  I resisted the urge to just collapse with my purse at the nearest Starbucks and grab myself a hot, extremely caffeinated beverage. Mom had taught me the value of adhering to a strict schedule.

  What the hey. Dad’s voice cropped up in my head. I’m going to be late anyway, baby cake. Just relax!

  Just relax. Because life was so easy, right? Who needed time management when they had an entire staff to take the flack? Who needed principles when there was luxury to be had?

  Frowning, I swooped up to the closest coffee counter and ordered myself a hot mocha with two extra shots of espresso to go.

  While Mom had instilled values like stability, and persistence, and hard work, and restraint, her first and only ex-husband had been the king of relaxation, and change, and confidence, and pleasure—all things to which I had become deeply averse.

  “Here you go,” the barista announced. “That’s four dollars and ten cents.”

  I gave him a five, told him to keep the change, and marched off toward Concourse C, chugging my coffee with a rebellious sense of victory. There, Dad. I will be slightly late to the baggage claim. When the super-charged mini-train arrived, I climbed aboard and grasped one of the thick metal poles.

  The shuttle lurched, and I sloshed rich brown liquid onto the chest of my favorite white sweater.

  * * *

  Naturally, Dad was late to the baggage claim.

  “Hey, pumpkin!” Dad cheered, advancing on me and sweeping me up into a bear hug. He had a genuine smile on his face, but I patted his shoulder twice and quickly extracted myself from his embrace. My own smile was small and strained.

  “Hi, Dad. You made it.”

  “Aw, come on, I’m only a few minutes late. Hey, it gave you the time to go get yourself a coffee, didn’t it?”

  The dregs of my mocha were cold now.

  Dad had charm, I had to admit. He was an attractive and likable man; I could see why Mom had gravitated toward him in spite of their differences. Dad’s only wrinkles were laugh lines, which had given him crow’s feet at the age of forty-nine. His hair was expertly styled; the only natural thing about it was the streak of silver which traveled back from either ear. His every garment was tailored to his lithe build and average height, and he carrie
d himself with such a looseness and candor that he seemed constantly to have just drunk a single beer. His current girlfriend—excuse me, fiancée—was only thirty-four, but I couldn’t judge her. Dad, though? Him, I could judge.

  “So, which bags are yours?” Dad asked, gesturing toward the packed carousel and fringe of travelers surrounding it.

  “These right here.” I gestured to a matching set of blue plaid luggage pieces which had come off the carousel half an hour ago. The luggage currently packing the carousel belonged to a different flight.

  “Oh, okay.” Dad hefted as many as he could and didn’t acknowledge the sour expression on my face. “So, anything you need to do before we go? You want another coffee for the road, baby girl?”

  I frowned. As if he could magically go back and father me in my childhood if he spoke to me as if I was still a child.

  “I’m pretty tired, actually,” I informed him, although it was only a little after eight. “Could we just head on home?”

  Home being a loose term.

  “Sure, sure,” Dad agreed. “Even better; don’t have to pay for parking.”

  We strode together out into the lot and located Dad’s Mercedes, a classical black number with heated leather seats. Dad started the car with the touch of a button and opened the trunk as we approached it. I tried to help him with the luggage, but he insisted—with an unusual edge to his voice—and I allowed it, collapsing into the passenger seat.

  The driver’s side door opened, inviting a blast of wintery air, and Dad settled behind the wheel and slammed the door. “I hope you’re hungry. Zada spent all evening working on a dinner for the whole family, and you know Zada doesn’t really have any idea how to cook.” He slanted a wink in my direction. “This is a real personal victory for her. She’s so happy to see you.”

  Zada Brinkley was Dad’s former masseuse and now fiancée. She was a single mother, never married, and she straddled the age barrier between Dad and myself with eerie perfection. Her son was fourteen.