Phoenix and the Dragon

  Lick of Fire 3

  Phoenix and the Dragon

  by

  Bianca D’Arc

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Copyright © 2018 Bianca D’Arc

  Published by Hawk Publishing, LLC

  All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Lick of Fire #3

  Paul is a dragon shifter—the only one of his kind. He's been searching the world over for signs of other dragons, but so far, he’s the only one. When he feels a familiar fire magic tugging him toward the Southwestern United States, he has to investigate.

  Syd is very much afraid she’s losing her mind. Subject to increasingly disturbing visions, she’s afraid the simple premonitions she’s had all her life are evolving into something darker. Something scary.

  When her car breaks down in the middle of the desert, Paul appears out of nowhere to help her get back on the road again. She offers him a ride, knowing—somehow—that the simple gesture will change her life forever. Whether for good or evil... well... that remains to be seen.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE & DEDICATION

  Note: The phoenix trilogy is an offshoot of my Tales of the Were series, which has many nooks and crannies. This set fits after the Redstone Clan and overlaps a bit with the latter part of Grizzly Cove and the Grizzly Cove Crossroads set. The phoenix books (there are three of them) can be read as a standalone set or in conjunction with any of my other paranormals, since they all take place in the same basic world, just in different parts of it. Characters do crossover and make cameo appearances from time to time. For a complete rundown of all my books check the list at the end of this book or you can always check my website, which will always have the most up-to-date book list.

  I’d like to dedicate this book to my late mother, who never read any of my books, but supported my dream with all her heart.

  I’d also like to send special thanks to my editor, Jess. She’s been my editor from the first book I ever had published and I’m blessed to still be able to work with her now, more than a dozen years—and many books—later.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from The Jaguar’s Secret Baby

  About the Author

  Other Books by Bianca D’Arc

  PROLOGUE

  In the town of Grizzly Cove, on the coast of Washington State, a dragon stirred. Something was going on to the south. Something very odd, indeed. Something he needed to investigate…

  In the Superstition Mountains near Phoenix, Arizona, a rumble flowed through the earth, down into a secret cavern where beings of magic and myth slumbered…but not for much longer...

  And, on the outskirts of the city of Phoenix, a woman clutched her head and squinted into the sun, seeing things that weren’t there. Not yet, anyway. They were portents. Images out of a dream…or a nightmare. Fire in the sky, wings and bolts of flame. Showers of sparks. And evil. Unspeakable evil…

  CHAPTER ONE

  Syd—short for her much-despised proper name, Sybil—shook her head in the parking lot of the grocery store she liked on the eastern edge of Scottsdale, Arizona. She’d had one of her dizzy spells again, but this time, the images flashing through her mind had lingered. The fear they evoked had threatened to make her scream.

  She glanced around quickly. Nobody was looking at her. Nobody had seemed to notice her momentary visit to the land of space cadets. Thank goodness!

  She quickly shut the hatchback of her little car and raced around to the driver’s side after rolling the empty carriage to the cart return located conveniently next to her parking space. She’d parked there on purpose, just for that reason. It came in handy, now, so she could make a quick getaway.

  She had a trunk full of supplies for the old man who lived out in the middle of nowhere. She brought him groceries about once a month, worried that the old dear wouldn’t have enough to eat if nobody else took pity on him. He didn’t have a vehicle and probably could no longer see well enough to drive anyway. As a result, he depended on friends and neighbors to keep him supplied with the things he needed.

  Syd had crossed his path a few years back, when she’d been lost out there, her plans for an adventurous little day trip into the hills having taken a seriously wrong turn. Arthur had helped get her back to the highway, but not before charming her totally. He’d invited her in out of the sun and given her cold lemonade from his ancient refrigerator. They’d talked, and she realized the old gentleman was lonely for company.

  She couldn’t rush out on him. Instead, she stayed and listened to his stories about living out in the desert and the strange things he’d seen. Whenever she visited, he always had lemonade and stories to tell, and she ended up staying for a couple of hours, helping him put the groceries away and making sure he was well supplied with everything he needed for a couple of weeks. She even cooked for him, making lasagna or one of her few other “specialties” and freezing portion-sized amounts that he could take out later and just reheat.

  Today, she’d given herself the whole afternoon to hang out with Arthur. His home was far out on a small side road that led up into the mountains. As long as she headed home before dark, she wouldn’t have any problem finding the highway again, and once on the main roads, she’d be safe enough getting back to the city.

  As she drove, she wondered if she could ask old Arthur about her strange visions. He was Native American and had once told her that he’d served as a shaman in his younger days. Now, he called himself a caretaker, but he’d never elaborated about what he was taking care of. She assumed it was something spiritual, like he was looking out for the planet or something, but she’d never dared to ask.

  Still, he was really the only person she knew who had ever talked with any authority about non-traditional spiritual matters. Maybe he would understand about the weird things that had been happening to her and the strange visions she’d been having. She might feel foolish asking, but she decided to at least try to feel him out on the subject before she left his house.

  As it turned out, Arthur was more than receptive when Syd finally found the courage to broach the subject with him later in the day. She’d put away the groceries she’d bought for him with his help, then sat with him and drank lemonade while they talked. Eventually, she worked her way around to the subject of visions and waking dreams, which made Arthur regarded her with keen interest in his dark eyes.

  “Do you have the gift?” he asked bluntly, looking at her as if measuring her in ways she couldn’t quite comprehend.

&nbs
p; “I don’t know. I’m not sure what’s happening to me. All I know is that it’s getting more intense.” She went ahead and told him about the episode in the parking lot of the grocery store, and he listened calmly, seeming to take it all in without judgment.

  “What were the images? What do you remember specifically about the vision?” he asked, sitting a little forward in his chair.

  She hesitated but realized she trusted him—and there really wasn’t anybody else she knew with whom she could talk about this kind of thing. She took a deep breath for courage, then spoke the words that felt like crossing a line in the sand. Once she said this out loud, there would be no going back. Or, at least, that’s what it felt like.

  Weird.

  “I was flying. Or…it felt that way. Big things were flying around me. Creatures that breathed fire. That were made of fire. Wings of fire and dark-winged things with fiery breath. At first, I thought the flying things were fighting each other, but then, I realized there was something else. Something evil below. The flames were all directed at it, but I couldn’t see it clearly. Just a huge ball of flame that didn’t look like any normal flames I’ve ever seen before.”

  “Two different kinds of flying creatures?” Arthur asked quietly once she’d subsided. He wasn’t rushing her, which was good. She was barely able to speak the words. It all seemed so insane.

  She nodded in answer to his question. “Things that were made of flame with fiery wings. And dark things with leathery wings and sparkling scales that breathed fire. It was night. The whole thing was set against a dark sky, and with all the flashes of flame, I couldn’t see it too well.”

  “My dear Syd,” Arthur said slowly. “You are seeing thunderbirds.” Her heart skipped a beat. “And dragons.”

  *

  Paul wasn’t sure what drew him southward, but there was some kind of familiar magic down there, calling to him. A fiery magic that spoke to his innermost being—the dragon that lived within.

  He was young for a dragon. Young for a human, too. He was only in his twenties, but he’d seen more than his fair share of suffering, cruelty, and warfare. Having discovered his dragon spirit in his teens gave him the freedom to go wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted, for the most part. He had to be somewhat cautious to only fly at night or with cloud cover.

  He didn’t think he showed up on anyone’s radar. His scales might have something to do with that, reflecting any signals that might come his way. Whatever the reason, he’d never had any indication that ground-based systems were able to see him.

  He’d spent time in Canada, looking for information about others of his kind, but so far, he was the only dragon he knew about. That couldn’t be right, though. Could it? He had to have come from somewhere. Although he’d grown up in an orphanage, he had to have had parents. A mother. A father. Someone. The dragon part of his heritage couldn’t have just appeared out of nowhere. It didn’t make sense.

  He had spent time among shifters of various kinds, learning all he could about werewolves, werebears, big cat shifters and the like. As far as he’d been able to discover, they were all born that way, except in very rare cases. So, it stood to reason Paul’s inner dragon had been there since birth. He had to have inherited his shifter genes from at least one of his parents, but he had no information about either one of them. As far as the orphanage records went, he had just appeared on a doorstep one night with no indication of where he had come from.

  Just recently, he had connected with a bear shifter who claimed to have dragon blood in his ancestry. The bear’s new mate—a strega, which was a kind of hereditary Italian witch—had been looking specifically for a dragon and had sought Paul out through the werewolf Pack he’d been living near in Canada. Intrigued by the situation in a strange new town called Grizzly Cove on the Washington coast that was inhabited mostly by bear shifters, Paul had flown down to check it out.

  It was there he had found the bear shifter with dragon blood, and the man’s grandmother—his babushka, whom everyone in Grizzly Cove called Granny Ivana—from the Kamchatka Peninsula on the easternmost coast of Russia, near Siberia. The old bear-woman’s grandfather had been a dragon shifter of Italian origin, and she seemed to think Paul might be related to her grandfather’s sister. She had put calls in to her Clan in Kamchatka, but they had still been waiting to hear what had been found in the family archives when Paul had felt the fiery magic rumbling to the south.

  He’d decided to make his home—at least temporarily—in Grizzly Cove, to learn what he could from Granny Ivana. He’d told her where he was going and why when he left. He wasn’t sure how long it was going to take to discover what was going on in the desert to the south, but for a dragon, it was only a short flight.

  He’d left at dusk, and within an hour, he was coasting down along the tops of different mountain ranges. He could clearly see much drier lands ahead of him. He could scent the desert winds. The cactus and sagebrush. The unique plants and grit of the American Southwest. A place he had never been before but found intriguing now that he was drawing near.

  Little winding roads led from the arid mountains toward the bright lights of a sprawling city in the distance. Phoenix, he thought it was called. An intriguing name, given the mythology linking his kind with those mythical birds of flame. He wondered, for perhaps the thousandth time, if there was anything to the ancient legends.

  His gaze fell on the headlights of one intrepid little car making its way through the foothills, heading toward the city. The little car was right below him as he circled, dropping altitude. He was cloaked in darkness and wanted to get closer to the ground before approaching the city. He planned to circle it several times before making a decision about where to land, or indeed, if he should land at all.

  He tried to calm his mind and listen to the wind. Something had drawn him here, but he wasn’t able to pinpoint the location of whatever it was that had called to him. The only thing drawing his attention at the moment was the little car—with its flickering headlights.

  That didn’t look good.

  *

  Syd started her long drive back to the city much later than she’d intended. Arthur hadn’t laughed at her talk of visions. In fact, he’d gone to his bookshelf and taken down a heavy volume all about mythological creatures and showed her images that sent chills down her spine.

  The artistic renderings of scaled dragons with leathery wings that breathed fire in long streams were just like in her visions. And there were thunderbirds, and firebirds, and even phoenixes, that were depicted more stylistically than what she’d seen but were still possible suspects for the creatures in her visions. She had been speechless as she looked at the pages in the book.

  Arthur had given her time and space to peruse the book. He’d gone into the kitchen, ostensibly to get refills for their glasses of lemonade. She knew, however, that he’d been being polite. Her emotions were all over the place as she looked at those images, and she could even remember a tear flowing down her cheek at one point. That’s probably what had sent the old gentleman scurrying for the safety of the kitchen. She chuckled, recalling those moments, even as she squinted to try to see the road ahead.

  There were no streetlights this far out from the city. The road was narrow, and it would be all too easy to drive off the side of it into the sandy dirt, which was something she definitely didn’t want to do at any time—especially in the dark.

  Arthur had really listened to her about the visions and made her feel better. Someone believed her—and didn’t think she was crazy. It was a reassurance she needed right now, even if it was only from an old codger who lived out in the middle of nowhere.

  Arthur might be a bit of a recluse, but she respected him and his lifetime of experience. He had knowledge. He knew things about the world and the creatures in it. Things she didn’t really comprehend but, somehow, was just beginning to understand. She trusted her instincts, which said there was a great deal more to Arthur than met the eye.

  Part of it mi
ght be that he was Native American. She’d always had a deep respect for the various Native American cultures and beliefs. She loved the art and style of the Native peoples and had often wondered if there was Native blood in her heritage. She had been adopted as a baby, so she didn’t know for sure, though she was really tempted to have one of those DNA tests done that would at least tell her what her cultural heritage might be.

  Regardless, Arthur was a mysterious fellow who commanded her respect, though she supposed he seemed pretty harmless to most other people. Only Syd suspected the core of steel—the heart of the warrior that still beat in his elderly chest. She’d met him the one time and then couldn’t get him out of her head. Going back to see him again with a trunk full of groceries had been an impulsive move, but it was something she was glad she had done.

  He had to be lonely all the way out here on his own, but he wouldn’t consider moving the few times she’d mentioned the nice retirement communities going up closer to the city and all their amenities. No, Arthur was happy where he was, although always glad to see her when she visited.

  Today, they had talked of visions and mythological creatures. There was never a lack of conversation when they were together, but today’s was especially far-reaching. She felt so much more settled now that he’d taken her seriously. The only problem was going home so late. The road wasn’t the greatest even during the day, but now…

  She felt almost like something was watching her progress through the dark night in the middle of nowhere. A shiver coursed down her spine, despite the heat. The desert got cold at night, though it wasn’t late enough yet to be truly chilly. Still, there was a presence, of sorts, in the night. She could feel it.