Page 34 of Dragon Gods

He grabbed her, hissing in pain even as he used his ruined hands to pull her up and throw her across the ground. Her spine hit a root and her lungs ached for lack of air. She couldn’t move. The shifter moved toward her, a look of pure malice on his face. He didn’t even have a weapon, but there was an intensity in his eyes as he lifted his hands and the claws extended from the tips of his fingers. Sofia tasted metal on her tongue and she wondered what it would feel like to be torn in two by this creature. She didn’t close her eyes, though, ready to face her death.

He pitched sideways before he reached her, falling on his knees before he faceplanted into the soil, unmoving. Ocon stood over him, a bloody rock gripped in his hand. She glanced behind him to see the other shifter crumpled on the ground, scrambling to push himself up but uncoordinated in a daze as blood dripped heavily from his face.

Sofia jumped to her feet and grabbed the dagger she’d dropped as the shifter stood, stumbling like a drunk. She tried to jump forward, hoping to catch him before he gained his senses, yet even in the second it took her to move, the shifter’s body contorted and twisted.

And a second later a large gray wolf bolted into the forest.

SOFIA

AGE 12

While the many of the shifters of Wueco were integrated into the various tribes, the wolfshifters were a volatile and isolated group, rebuffing all attempts at unity or collaboration. They were known for their territorial nature and refusal to assimilate into human society.

- Tales of the So-Called Dragonborn by Jules Vond

Sofia and Mina fell into a comfortable routine. Friendship was something she had always avoided, but it was too hard to shut away the small ray of light that Mina brought to her monotony and loneliness.

More and more as she became proficient in her writing and reading, the chief commander left her alone, some measure of trust developing between them in the cycle since she’d started working for him directly. Some days he didn’t even come into the office, leaving instructions for her to follow sitting on the small table. On those days, he was kind enough to have the maid deliver her a small tray of tea and bread for lunch, a kindness that she hated herself for appreciating.

Despite these occasional days of freedom, she and Mina kept their routine, with Mina only coming to the office after two and slipping out before four. Sometimes they had an entire hour to themselves swapping stories. Mina always heard the gossip during her time around the manor, including who was caught stealing a vase from the chief commander’s late wife’s room or the new stableboy that everyone thought was cute. In exchange, Sofia would whisper the stories she’d memorized in the books from the library, Mina listening with rapt attention.

* * *

She hadn’t been lookingfor trouble the day she found it. She was bored after finishing her to-do list from the chief commander. He’d been out of the office for the past week, the only evidence that he hadn’t died were the handwritten notes that were delivered every morning by one of the other staff members, a list of tasks for her to complete. Each morning the list got shorter and shorter, with no indication of what she was supposed to do otherwise. So she cleaned and organized and read through the books on his shelf she hadn’t gotten to yet. They were as dull as she’d suspected when she’d first perused the spines the cycle before.

She had gotten to the highest shelf that day, a series of trade records that were half in code and nearly impossible to parse. But she refused to leave a single page unturned, so she started with the book on the far left, attempting to pull it from the shelf. It stuck on something.

She was tempted to ignore it for the next volume, but the silence in the office allowed her to hear the softest of the clicks from behind. Pulling over a chair that allowed her to reach the shelf better, she lifted the book out. It slipped free easily this time, and she examined the clean wood of the shelf behind it, no indication of what it had been stuck on. She ran her fingers along the grain of the wood until one of her nails caught on the vaguest hint of a crease. She pressed and a small piece of wood clicked toward her. Hooking a finger around it, she pulled. She barely caught herself as the entire shelf moved, nearly knocking her off the chair.

Her eyes went wide as she took in the small crack now visible behind the bookshelf. It took a minute to move the chair and wedge her hands behind the shelf, pulling with most of her weight until it swung forward revealing the room beyond.

“Gods’ scales,” she said, unable to hold back the words as she took in the shelves and shelves of books. The room beyond was the size of a large closet, but it was packed with more books than she’d think possible in the small space. Every wall was lined with books and a few more were stacked on the ground, haphazardly thrown there when the shelves ran out of space.

The closest stack of books by the door was familiar and she leaned down to run a finger over the cover of the top book:Tales and Myths of the So-Called Dragonborn.It was a book she had read the previous cycle, one that had been in the main library up until the day she’d been caught. There was a thin layer of dust across the cover and she was careful to grip it from the side as she picked it up. Below it was another she’d read, a historical account of Wueco in the first generation after the civil war. The chief commander had moved all the books she’d been reading into this secret room. She examined the space, careful to disturb as little dust as possible. Some shelves were cleaner than others and she could see the fingerprints from where the chief commander had more recently perused the shelves.

While the stacks on the floor held some familiar volumes, most of the shelves were filled with books she’d never seen before—books the chief commander had deemed too precious or too dangerous to have displayed in his library. That thought, more than anything, had her reaching for the first book she saw already cleaned of dust.Assimilation or Elimination: A Philosophical Debate.It took approximately two pages for her to put the book down, a mixture of anger and disgust churning through her stomach. She left that shelf and looked at another one, lips quirking into a smile at what she saw. There was an entire section dedicated to prayers and spiritual practices of the Dragonborn, another full of faerytales and histories written in the dragon-tongue. Even more shelves held what looked like historical records of Wueco before the tribal war—before the great king had even claimed dominion over creation and religion.

These weren’t just children’s books, like the ones she’d found before, but records of her people and the gods from before the king. Things that she was sure wereextremelyillegal to have andimpossiblydangerous for her to know.

She needed to leave the room, lock the shelf back in place, and forget what she had seen, but Sofia had never been known for letting rules or common sense get in the way of knowledge. Instead, she took a moment to close her eyes, breathing in the smell of parchment, leather, and dust. And then she began to read.

CHAPTERSEVENTEEN

FOX

Sofia didn’t even bother chasing after the man as he ran in the forest. At least Fox thought he had run away. One moment, Fox was looking at him and the next the man had crouched, folding into the shadow and then…

Fox shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. He was exhausted beyond reason and his head was ringing with pain. He could only watch as Sofia turned on her heels, lunging at the other man who was struggling to stand after Fox had managed to bash his head with a rock three times. She drew the blade across his throat and he fell, unmoving. Perhaps he should have been relieved to see the man dead, but the coldness of the act made him shudder.

“Should we go after—” he started when she finally turned to look at him. Unable to finish the sentence, he gave a vague wave in the direction the man had run.

She raised an eyebrow. “He’ll be miles away by now, unless you can run at the speed of a wolfshifter.”

The sentence didn’t make sense and he stared at her blankly. “He was injured, he won’t make it that far. No man could.”

“Shifters can do a lot of things humans can’t,” she said, matter-of-factly.

He clenched his jaw. “You keep saying that word like it means something.”

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