Page 3 of Rejected By Dragons

I swallow hard.

"I'm just trying to get to the library," I lie. The words roll of my tongue. I've practiced them enough times, always ready in case anybody catches me heading toward the garage. I have a book in my bag at all times anyway, so it's plausible enough.

"Nerd," Jasmine groans.

Apparently I haven't had my fill of being stupid today, so I narrow my eyes at her. "I mean, you could try reading a book. Or wait--can you read?"

Her disinterest flips on a dime, and oh shit, why can't I keep my mouth shut?

"You'll watch your tone."

"Or what?" I ask.

Her squad of bitches makes oohing sounds at that. Advancing, she puts a hand on Fury's biceps, and he steps aside.

Now real fear claws at my chest. Fury likes to push me around and remind me that I have to follow his every command, but deep down, I'm pretty sure he'd never really hurt me. His girlfriend, on the other hand?

I take a step back, and then another, but I come up against the brick of the building behind me. Jasmine crowds into me. Her pupils flash from round to vertical slits, her dragon at the surface of her skin. My own hisses, but it's as useless and ineffective as ever.

She reaches out and grabs my hair.

Tears spring to my eyes at the sting, but I try my best not to let the pain show.

"Now listen here, you freak."

And yeah. Okay, she's not wrong.

I am a freak. A broken-winged dragon who got dropped here in the Air Kingdom out of nowhere when I was twelve. Awkward and bookish and reeling from my mother running away in the middle of the night. No explanation. No goodbye.

One day I was a beloved daughter. The next, I woke up to my aunt staring down at me and welcoming me to my hellish new existence.

And what an existence it's been.

I didn't fit in. Clearly. My mother may have been an Air Dragon, but she and my father raised me out of suitcases. We traveled every inch of this earth. She worked as a translator and a mediator, trying to help the remaining dragon kingdoms find a kind of peace.

Whatever my father did before he disappeared, I never entirely understood.

But it didn't matter. We were happy. They showed me the world. Taught me every language and every culture. Introduced me to fire dragons and stone dragons, and I got to live in a fantasy where the three kingdoms were, in fact, one.

And then I was here.

And I got to see firsthand exactly how much of a fantasy that was.

Forget air, fire and stone dragons living in peace. I dared to raise my hand in class and question my teacher when she lectured us about the attacks allegedly being carried out by the 'savage' fire dragons in the lands across the sea. To push back against the off-handed, offensive jokes everyone made about the dragons of the stone realm.

To ask what King Zephyr could possibly be thinking, forbidding the dragons of the air realm from displaying any symbols of the other kingdoms.

To cry when my aunt took the only pieces I had left of my mother--of my father--of our time together and our life and travels...

And made me watch them burn.

A long-simmering rage fuels me, making me stupid and bold. "Just because everyone in this backwater town is an ignorant, small-minded--"

The rake of claws against my cheek stops me cold. My eyes go wide in shock as I whip my head up. Jasmine's sneer has morphed into white hot anger. She's still human--mostly--but the talons on her fingers flare outward, razor sharp. My heart pounds, my dragon bellowing steam inside my chest.

"Just wait, welp," she growls.

Sebastian laughs, ugly and mean. "She'd have to be a dragon to be a welp."

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