Page 61 of A Dragon's Desire (The Pretern Wars 2)

The time for complacency was over.

No more would they be hunted.

It was time to take a stand.

“ARE YOU GOING TO TELLme what you’ve been doing back there?”

Sorin had finally finished burning...whatever he’d been burning.

At least Gia thought he had. He’d returned to the cabin early in the morning, before the sun had risen, while tired men slept in the dirt on bedrolls, coming to rest next to her in front of a small fire while Wyn slept fitfully on a ‘bed’ Gia had glamoured into being for him.

Wyn hadn’t even questioned the bed. He’d simply climbed into it, pulled fat blankets over his thin frame and dropped into sleep.

Now, cuddled against Sorin’s long, warm frame as if he was the best of pillows, Gia peered up at him in the night.

“You’ll see. We lay Amy to rest tomorrow.”

“Here?” Scowling, Gia pushed onto her elbow and glared at him. “No. I don’t like that idea at all. She’ll be alone, forgotten and abandoned. As much anger as I have with her, I don’t like the idea of her being just...left here.”

“Will you trust me?” Sorin stared into her eyes, the gold of his glinting in the dimness.

The question caught her offguard.

“Just give me a few hours. I’m weary and need to rest. Then I’ll show you why we want it to be here.”

“...we?”

Sorin looked to where Wyn slept. “Yes. We. I talked the idea over with him. He approved.”

Gia opened her mouth, then closed it. Seconds passed and finally, she dropped her head down onto his chest and sighed. “A few hours, dragon.”

He chuckled and stroked a hand down her head. “Thank you, witchling mine.”

GIA FELT THE RUMBLEin the earth and shot upward, taking off running toward the pond.

Only moments earlier, the men had evacuated the pit using crudely cut steps on the far side. She’d gone to look over their work and for that reason alone, she knew all were safely on the other side.

Wyn still slept in the cabin and she gave a half a thought to his safety, only to decide the men who’d finished digging that pit were far too afraid of her and Sorin to dare risk hurting the boy.

She found her shade hovering at the pond’s edge where water flowed in a torrent down the new path way. Only yards in, it met the churned up dirt Sorin had been dumping in, turning into mud.

“What are you doing?” she demanded, glaring at her shade.

The pond was small and the trench long. Soon the pond would be all but empty, leaving a muddy rent in the earth.

“What I asked her to do,” Sorin said.

Gia spun around with a startled curse just in time to see Sorin drop a chunk of stone the size of a car into the trench, cutting off the flow of water. He gave her a sardonic smile and added, “I asked you to trust me. This is part of it.”

He lunged into the air, transforming, his human skin vanishing as he exploded up, and up, and up, gold scales spilling out as muscle, bone, sinew tore and reshaped.

She gaped at him for long moments before turning to her shadow.

“What is going on?”

“The dragon only wishes to leave a sign,” the shadow said. “I agreed to help. I’ll go sit with Wyn. He is close to waking.”

Then she was gone, leaving Gia to stew.

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