The Fate of Her Dragon Read Free Page B

sister Hannah’s voice. “Hey y’all! Anybody
home?” And then her brother-in-law Liam’s chuckle. “And is everybody decent? Man
in the house.”
    Alicia’s shoulders slumped as
she groaned to herself, “Well, hell, now the dragons are here too. Why didn’t I
just walk in and tell her? I swear to the Goddess, am I ever gonna learn?”
    Thankfully, everyone
including her mother had walked into the family room to greet Hannah and Liam,
so Alicia took her time revamping the speech she had planned to include all the
info Drago had given her. One foot over the threshold was all it took before
Fiona, the youngest of the sisters in attendance, yelled, “Hey Hannah, ask
Alicia where she was all night?”
    Spinning around, eyes wide,
Hannah gasped, “Alicia May…where were you?”
    As if things hadn’t already
gotten bad enough, the two oldest of their band of merry witches came walking down
the stairs. “Do tell, Alicia May,” they teased in a singsong tone. “Where were
you all night?”
    Annalisa, the oldest sister,
added, “Better yet, who were you with?” and wiggled her eyebrows for added
effect.
    Alicia blew out a long breath
and plopped onto the couch. “All right y’all, grab a seat. Cause you’re never
gonna believe this story.” She added a nervous chuckle to diffuse some of the
tension that had instantly filled the room.
    Everyone took a seat. All
eyes were focused on her. The room was so quiet her voice almost echoed as she
started to speak. “Well, it all started a few weeks ago. I began hearing a
man’s voice in my dreams.” Her sisters all snickered and winked, but Alicia
ignored them and powered on. It was a survival technique she’d learned when she
was much younger. “He was calling to me. Asking me for help. At first, I
thought it was just all the stress of the fight with the Dorcha, the
crap with Cleland, not to mention Mara being missing in action, but things
started to get much more intense. I started walking in my sleep.”
    The look on Sarah Beth’s face
said it all—she was worried and more than a little pissed that Alicia had
waited so long to tell her. Not willing to stop and deal with her mother’s
anger, Alicia kept going. “Every time I woke up I was up on the cliffs near the
caves. Just recently, I found myself outside the one with the entrance blocked
by that huge boulder. You know the one that’s almost perfectly round? Anyway, I
guess the worst was when the voice started calling out while I was awake. I
really thought I was losing my mind, but in my heart, I knew I had to help him.
It was like a compulsion but there was no magic. I just had to help the
man that was calling to me. Yesterday, everything changed. The faraway voice in
my head became clearer and for the first time I was able to answer back.”
    She looked from person to
person as they stared at her as if she had three heads, willing them to
understand… to believe . And just as it had been since they were
children, it was Hannah that came to her rescue. “So, you talked to him. What
did he say? Who is he? Can you help him?”
    Letting go of a breath she
hadn’t realized she was holding, Alicia smiled at her sister. Being number
three and four in a brood the size of the McKennons had made the girls not only
sisters, but also friends, and today Alicia needed all the friends she could
get. “Yeah, I talked—or thought—to him.” She laughed out loud at how crazy she
sounded. “He said he was trapped about a hundred years ago by the Dorcha, specifically the Grand Draoi …”
    “Cleland?” everyone almost
shouted at the same time.
    “No, that’s the weird part.
He said he didn’t know who Cleland was, and after I thought about it for a
minute it kinda did make sense, because Cleland isn’t that old and we all know
how that butthead came into power.”
    Heads were all nodding in
agreement with varying degrees of sadness and anger that Cleland’s bid for
power had cost their father his life. After