What the actual fuck?
Is he a shifter, or is he a fucking fairy?
I don’t know, but I wiggle away, moving backwards, stumbling a little, and then I finally right myself and squat, looking over at him. He hasn’t moved. He’s just watching me cautiously, carefully.
“You’re human,” he says, pointing out the obvious.
“And you’re not.”
“Why have you come here?” He asks, but he doesn’t seem mad. He just seems curious.
This is the part where I decide whether I’m going to be honest or tricky. Do I want to tell this man why I’ve come? He might be the only one who can help me. On the other hand, what if he’s not a shifter like I think he is. What if he’s one of those evil people who were chasing Ellie? What if he’s a monster in disguise?
I have a choice to make, and I don’t know which is right.
I can be truthful and risk being taken captive, or I can lie and possibly risk not being taken to Fablestone.
In the end,
I decide that the most important thing is getting Daisy where she belongs. The most important thing is keeping the dragon’s oath I swore, so I take a deep breath, and I meet the man’s eyes directly.
“My name is Peggy,” I tell him. “And I need to find Cameron of the Fablestone Clan. It’s a matter of life and death.”
Chapter Six
Cameron
Those were not the words I was expecting the human to speak.
What DID you expect, Cameron?
I shake my head, as if that will silence my inner dragon. I want the beast to be quiet, to be still, but I know that this is a futile desire. My beast has been restless since my sister left. It’s been angry, desperate.
I miss her.
Dragon shifter twins are rare, almost unheard of. Our mother survived birthing us and is still alive. She lives happily with a clan across the sea and she is mated to a shifter there. After our father passed away, she was inconsolable, but then someone came into her life and made everything better. He saved her.
This woman could save you.
But Peggy is not the same as my stepfather.
She’s not a shifter.
She’s just a random human who stumbled upon the stone tower at just the right time.
No, she’s not. She came here for a reason. She came here to find you. Of all the shifters she could have been searching for, she wants you.
“Why do you seek him?” I ask her.
Another test.
She considered lying to me before. I saw it in her eyes. She was afraid. Scared. Nervous. She confessed, anyway. That surprises me. Most of my experiences with humans have been less than memorable. Humans lie more than they ought to, at least from what I’ve seen. Not that dragons are the most honest of races, of course. Dragons love to lie. We lie about treasure and we lie about what we are. We lie about everything, but there’s a difference between a dragon lying and a human lying.
We’re good at it.
When a dragon lies, he puts his entire heart into the lie. The good liars are so convincing that sometimes, even they begin to believe their own stories.
This human, though…she’s no liar.