Page 2 of Pierce

My feet carried me past the suites occupied by my family members, then around the corner and down the corridor to the common area and the game room. The library was to the right, and filled floor-to-ceiling with more books and scrolls than I could possibly hope to read if I had another several centuries to do it.

The meeting room, originally intended as a throne room of sorts before we agreed there would be no set leader among us. The clan had its royalty, but there was no reason for us to carry on that tradition once we left the homeland. There were far too few of us, for one.

When a few hundred dragons needed governing, there was cause for a ruler to rise.

We were six. Just six.

We hadn’t even found our mates yet.

The longer I walked, the closer I came to the mouth of the cave and the more prominent the scent of moisture. The rain had already begun.

I heard the sound of water pelting leaves as I stepped out and pulled up the hood of my sweatshirt in an attempt to stay dry.

“Cash?” I called out.

He couldn’t have gone far.

The sound of heavy footsteps filled the air before I caught sight of his gold-tinged scales through the trees just beyond the cave mouth. I waited for him to shift back to human form—it only took a few seconds.

“What is it?” he asked, sounding perturbed.

We rarely shifted from dragon form while we were on guard duty, but I reminded myself that it would take less than the blink of an eye for him to shift back if trouble arose.

It wasn’t as though I didn’t have a good reason to interrupt him, either. “Do you hear it? The heartbeat?”

His brow furrowed, and I could tell in an instant that it wasn’t just me.

It was all of us.

“It disappeared overnight,” he explained. “One moment it was there, and the next…”

“Gone.”

“Right.”

“Nothing happened before that? Nothing to catch your attention?”

He shook his head. “Nothing at all. Just silence.”

It should’ve made me feel better, knowing I wasn’t crazy or losing my senses. Instead, I felt much worse.

Supplies would have to wait for the time being. I traced my steps and hurried back to the heart of the caves, where the rest of my family was likely sleeping. They wouldn’t be for long.

When I reached the control center, I sent out an alarm which would sound on all the touchscreen systems. They would hate me for it—I was the only early riser—but they would understand in time.

I waited for the four of them to join me. When they did, rubbing their eyes and scrubbing their hands through their sleep-mussed hair, I didn’t waste time with preambles.

“The heartbeat is gone,” I said. “Cash confirmed that it stopped overnight, with no warning or identifiable reason.”

Fence scratched at the stubble which covered his cheeks. “Has this ever happened before? I don’t remember a time when I didn’t hear it.”

Smoke shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything about it in the scrolls.” My brother, the amateur historian.

“Does it mean they’re dead? All of them? That’s not possible.” Gate looked around at the rest of us. “Is it?”

“No way,” Miles said, shaking his head. “There has to be an explanation.”

“Sure. For the first time since any of us has been alive, we can’t hear the heartbeat of our clan.” I shook my head. “Everything has an explanation, of course. The question is whether the explanation is one we can live with.”

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