Dragons Luck

Val wasn’t quite sure why that thought scared her so.

Most of the time she still didn’t think of herself as a dragon. Griffen seemed so preoccupied with extending his abilities. Animal control, charisma; hell, she was surprised he hadn’t started trying to use dragon fire to make toast in the mornings. Then she reminded herself wryly that he didn’t cook.

Val hadn’t experienced any of that. Other then the rare times when she had swelled in size, her signs of dragonhood were subtler. Like the speed, and her body’s growing strength. Maybe it was just that she was younger and less developed, but she didn’t really feel the need, or the ability, to control a stray dog or blow smoke rings through the air.

Were there varieties of power? Different dragons with different areas of expertise? When Mose spoke, he seemed to be saying that for the most part any dragon with pure enough blood could do what Griffen was doing. Val and Griffen shared the same blood, so why did she feel she would be different?

Feelings, now that was something she didn’t often think about. Feelings were a big part of what had gotten her more and more curious about dragons and their various traits and abilities. For a while now, her gut had been telling her something was wrong, something was about to break. No . . . not her gut. It was like a weight on her heart. A sharp, heavy pang.

Val shook her head and tossed the thought aside. She was just imagining trouble, convincing herself of problems. After all, something bad was always coming. Especially with this new life as a dragon that her brother had brought her into.

And where did this baby fit in her new life? Did it fit in? She still didn’t know how she felt. How she should feel.

She checked her watch and was a bit surprised that she had already been at it for more than an hour. She felt just as energized as before, barely even out of breath. Which was good—she shouldn’t have any problem getting through work—but it did sort of confirm everything she had been pondering while running. Sighing slightly, she turned off the path and started to head back to the steps, back to Decatur, then back to what she had now taken to calling home.

If she hadn’t been tired, hadn’t been deep in thought, she might have noticed the car on the other side of Decatur. It had registered out of the corner of her eye as being parked. She never noticed that the engine was on.

She had just stepped off the curb when it came at her.

Tires squealed. The car seemed to leap into motion, like a pouncing tiger. It cut across the two lanes of traffic, causing another car to slam on its brakes to avoid a collision, and straight at her. She had just enough time to catch sight of the small woman behind the wheel as she jumped to avoid it.

The woman was smiling, teeth white and gleaming in the morning light. That smile scared Val more than the speeding car.

If she had jumped back onto the sidewalk, Val would have been crushed. The car leaped the curb at a sharp angle, the driver clearly anticipating such a natural reaction. Val’s mind was as quick as her body; she leaped forward, onto the street. The car tried to jerk back, but it was too late. The driver couldn’t fight the momentum. The car swerved back onto Decatur, fishtailed, then took off, leaving Val half-crouched in the middle of the street.

She straightened carefully, fully alert now to any other threat. Her pulse pounded, her breathing was suddenly rough and erratic. The driver of the car that had braked was out of his door and headed toward her. She shot him a glare that stopped him cold, well out of arm’s reach.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“No, but I’m not hurt,” she answered.

More help started to arrive, people who had seen the attempted hit-and-run. The whole affair had taken seconds. Val tried to shrug them off, to get away as easily as possible before she ended up having to fill out a police report. She was too busy worrying about what this all meant to be bothered with such nonsense.

Especially since, for a split second before the car launched at her, that weight on her heart, that tiny bit of warning she had been trying to pass off as imagination, had throbbed. It had all happened too fast to be a merely human reaction, but she knew.

She knew she had started to move just before the car did.

Eighteen

Tuesday night and nothing to do.

Griffen sat alone in the Irish pub. It was rare, the pub being so empty. Especially at night. Yet here it was, 10:00 p.m. and he and the bartender were the only occupants. They had both agreed on a Hammer horror-movie fest on one of the movie channels, but then had slipped into silence. It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence, but still Griffen was searching his mind for a topic, any topic, that could get a decent conversation rolling.