Phoenix and the Dragon

Dragon and man, Paul recognizes the magic in Syd, a woman just coming into her fiery powers. Can they withstand the flames, or will they both burn…with desire?

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 fears 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.

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.
“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.