Page 1 of Lachlan

CHAPTER ONE

January 4th,

Drake House, The Scottish Highlands

“There’s a girl missing from the village.”

Lachlan looked up from where he had been about to move one of the exquisitely carved chess pieces on an equally uniquely carved chessboard.

Instead of making the move, he watched his brother Hunter as he threw himself into a chair beside the blazing fire after making that dispassionate announcement.

Hunter raised his eyebrows at the partly played game on the chessboard, having commented more than once about how sad Lachlan was for playing chess against himself.

Lachlan ignored the derisive glance. “How do you know that?” he prompted his youngest brother.

“I overheard two men talking about it in the local tavern.”

“I thought we had agreed you have to stop going there.”

The brothers were dragon shifters and had been born of the same clutch twelve hundred and ten years ago. Lachlan first, then Ranulf, and finally Hunter.

They had stopped physically aging at the age of thirty-three, eleven centuries ago.

They were capable of masking their presence, if necessary, but Hunter liked to go to the public house in the nearest village five miles away and enjoy a pint of beer and a chat with the locals.

Having lived for so long meant the brothers had to disappear for a couple of generations every century. The break was necessary to add authenticity when they returned and claimed to be ancestors of the previous members of the Drake family who had lived in Drake House.

The time for that break this century was fast approaching.

The brothers knew it, and each responded in their own way.

Hunter became morose at being completely cut off from humanity.

Ranulf welcomed it.

Lachlan usually dealt with the approaching solitude pragmatically. It was something that needed to be done, so he did it.

But for the past few days, he’d been feeling restless. As if there was something he urgently needed to do, but he had no idea what it was.

Very soon, the house would be closed, the windows shuttered against intruders, and the brothers would withdraw to the safetyof the network of connecting caverns in the mountain behind Drake House.

Their hoards were there anyway, so it was no hardship to spend a few decades guarding that treasure in their dragon form. That lack of exercise meant they weren’t hungry as often either. Even when they were, they only left the caverns on the nights there wasn’t a full moon, which would have made it possible for them to hunt for food during the hours of darkness without detection.

The existence of the internet in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries was making all that more and more difficult to achieve. Too many people took photographs with their mobile phones nowadays, which they immediately uploaded to social media platforms.

It had its benefits too, of course. Hunter was the technical expert in the family, and he had been able to add to their considerable wealth with the many investments he had made online, both in business and property. Online banking also enabled him to access their many bank accounts without having to appear in person. Again, for the purpose of it not being noted that the brothers weren’t aging.

Once the brothers were hidden in their caves, Hunter had set things up so those investments would simply rumble on for another fifty years or so, increasing in value and adding to the billions of pounds they already had. That was without the value of the hoard of jewels and gold they had stashed away in their caves over the past twelve hundred years.

Hopefully, this strange restlessness inside Lachlan would also have dissipated by the time it was safe for them to reappear.

“You said soon, not immediately,” Hunter defended. “Besides, I didn’t go into the tavern, but masked my presence as I stood outside looking in,” he explained wistfully. “That’s when my acute hearing allowed me to overhear two of the local men talking about the missing girl.” He shook his head. “It made me nostalgic for the days when the villagers used to leave out a virgin sacrifice for us at the bottom of our mountain.”

Hunter threw one of his jean-clad legs over the arm of his chair before taking a large, unconcerned bite of the apple in his hand. His teeth were very white and even and nothing like the two rows of razor-sharp incisors the brothers could bare as dragons.

A thousand years ago, the local people had believed that leaving the sacrifice of a virgin every spring as an offering to the dragons guarding the mountains would prevent those fierce creatures from eating them if game should become scarce in the area.

What was one virgin against the welfare of the rest of the villagers?

---