Page 3 of Cash

They had no idea how I wished I could tear them all limb from limb right now. They could say all they wanted that it was important we find out about our clan, that we should assist them if they were in need. Yet when the time came to put their money where their mouths were, they acted as if I were crazy for being concerned.

Perhaps it was because I still felt the pull of the old country and they didn’t. We had all acclimated to our new life, even if it had taken years. At first, there was little difference between what we’d known in Scotland and what we found in the New World—except back then, it wasn’t even known as such.

It was the home of multiple tribes of indigenous people who had lived alongside us without asking questions or making demands, and we had done our best to avoid them in turn. Probably because we scared the hell out of them. I’m pretty sure, in spite of wards to keep others from seeing us shifting into our dragons, that somehow one of them had seen and spread the rumor. How knows what they thought we were. But they steered clear. And that was just fine with us.

Over time, when settlers came from Europe, the tribes thinned out until the area where our mountain sat was literally the middle of nowhere. There were no villages for as far as the eye could see, no smoke from distant fires. It took a few hundred years for people to settle there, in such rocky and remote terrain.

Even then, we were virtually alone. Only the bravest of the brave had dared venture to our mountain, and we’d made short work of those who had cared to trespass. The only human contact we’d indulged in took place during our trips to the market. We had grown up with the area, so to speak. That was probably why the rest of the family acted like they had all but forgotten where we came from.

But I didn’t. I couldn’t forget the highlands in all their glory, the jade green grass and rolling hills. The lochs and glens, the fairy pools. There was nothing so beautiful where I’d spent the last thousand years, especially not in the advent of technology. Today’s blinking lights from radio towers barely peeking through the layers of smog and pollution were somehow less magical.

I could thank technology for allowing me to revisit my homeland, however. Sometimes, when none of the others were around, I’d look up photos of our home. The place where I’d left my heart so long ago.

Ruins of castles which weren’t ruins when we ran and flew and breathed the fresh, pure air there. Winding streams that had widened and even changed course thanks to the water as it carved new paths into rock. The beauty of it made my heart ache in a way nothing else ever had.

And there was something wrong with it. The heartbeats of our clan had stopped. Heartbeats that had run concurrently with ours over the millennia, like nature’s lullaby, now gone. Silence had replaced it. And it was a silence that gave me pause. And alongside the missing heartbeats, was the clan which inhabited that land. The ones that created the heartbeats. Our blood, in our true home.

And none of the guys seemed to care. At least, not as much as I did.

No wonder their derision and snide little jabs left me feeling murderous.

Any of them would’ve behaved the same if they gave a damn.

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