All or Nothing (49 page)

Book 1 in the Dragon Diaries

Zoë Sorensson is perfectly normal—well, as normal as a girl with an obsession with drawing dragons can be. The thing is that she's always been told she's special and destined for great things. It's not just because of her good grades, either. Zoë's the Wyvern, the one female dragon shapeshifter with special powers. But Zoë is at the bottom of the class when it comes to being
Pyr
and her powers are AWOL. Worse, there's no reference book to consult and the last Wyvern is dead...

Everything changes when Zoë's best friend is bullied and Zoë reacts. Before she can blink twice, her inner dragon is loose, she's suspended from school and headed to a boot camp for the
Pyr
guys she's known all her life. But soon she's doubting her powers—and even some of her friendships.

Zoë quickly realizes that she has to master her powers yesterday—the
Pyr
are in danger and boot camp is a trap. The Mages want to eliminate all shifters and the
Pyr
are next in line—unless Zoë and her friends can solve the riddle, work together and save their own kind...

Chapter One

T
here was a guy in my bedroom.

It was six in the morning and I didn't know him.

I'm not much of a morning person, but that woke me up fast. I sat up and stared, my back pressed against the wall, sure my eyes had to be deceiving me. No matter how much I blinked, though, he was still there.

He seemed to think my reaction was funny.

He had dark hair and dark eyes, and he wasn't wearing a shirt, just jeans—and he had one heck of a six-pack. His arms were folded across his chest and a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

But he seemed insubstantial. I could see through him, right to the crowded bulletin board behind him.

Was he real?

I was going to try asking him, but he abruptly faded—faded and disappeared right before my eyes.

As if he'd just been an illusion. I jumped from the bed, then reached into that corner. My fingers passed through a chill, one cold enough to give me goose bumps. Then my hand landed on a pushpin holding a wad of drawings and everything was perfectly normal.

Except for the hair standing up on the back of my neck.

I took a deep breath and looked around. My room was the pit it usually is. There were some snuffed candles on my desk and bookshelves, a whiff of incense lingering in the air, and the usual mess of discarded sweaters and books all over the floor.

No sign of that guy. If I hadn't seen him, if I'd woken up two minutes later, I wouldn't have thought anything was wrong at all.

I shuddered one last time and headed for the shower. Halfway there I wondered, Had Meagan's plan worked?

The visioning session had been my best friend's idea. Her mom calls herself a holistic therapist, which makes my mom roll her eyes. I was skeptical, too, but didn't have any better ideas. And Meagan, being the best friend ever, had really pulled out all the stops. She'd brought candles and mantras and incense for my room, and even though I'd felt silly, I'd followed her earnest instructions.

When the candles had burned down and she'd left—and my mom had shouted that I should open a window—I'd been pretty sure it hadn't worked. Nothing seemed to have happened.

But now I didn't know what to think. Who had that guy been? Where had he come from? And where had he gone?

Or had I just imagined him? I thought that if I were going to imagine a guy in my bedroom, it wouldn't be one who thought I was funny when I wasn't trying to be, never mind one who kind of creeped me out.

I'd have imagined Nick there.

In fact, I frequently did.

I heard my mom in the kitchen and my dad getting the newspaper and knew I had to get moving. I did my daily check in the bathroom, but nada. No boobs. No blood.

Four more zits.

At its core, then, the visioning session had failed.

I'm probably not the only fifteen-and-a-half-year-old girl who'd like to get the Puberty Show on the road. Even Meagan got her period last year, which was why she was trying to help. But my best friend didn't know the half of it.

That was because of the Covenant. I couldn't confide in Meagan because I'd had to swear to abide by the Covenant of our kind. I come from a long line of dragon shape shifters—
Pyr
, we call ourselves—and we pledge to not reveal our abilities to humans on a whim.

That would include Meagan.

The Covenant goes like this:

I, Zoë Sorensson, do solemnly pledge not to willfully reveal the truth of my shapeshifting abilities to humans. I understand that individuals may know me in dragon form, or in human form, but I swear that I shall not permit humans to know me in both forms, or to allow them to witness my shifting between forms without appropriate assessment of risk. I understand also that there will be humans who come to know me in both forms over the course of my life—I pledge not to reveal myself without due consideration, to beguile those who inadvertently witness my abilities, and to supply the names of those humans whom I have entrusted with my truth to the leader of the
Pyr
, Erik Sorensson.

Do humans know we exist? Sure. Humans always have—thus the dragon stories they tell. But knowing dragons exist, believing that they are actually dragon shape shifters and being convinced that your neighbor is one of them are entirely different things.

That's probably a good thing.

The Covenant came about pretty recently. During the Dragon's Tail Wars, some
Pyr
decided they wanted to be more active and visible. My dad, though, remembers when we were hunted almost to extinction. The Covenant is a compromise, between putting it all out there and living in secret. So, humans might see Sloane on the news, appearing at the scene of natural disasters to help—he's the tourmaline dragon—or Brandt—the orange dragon—making another daring rescue, but they don't know their names or where they live in their human lives.

We teenage
Pyr
had to pledge to the Covenant after Nick tried to impress the twin girls living next door, and his dad caught him.

I still thought it was funny that they hadn't been impressed.

I, in contrast, was awed by Nick in dragon form.

The fact is that most humans don't believe they could personally know a dragon shape shifter. Those twins thought Nick had pulled some kind of illusion to make himself look more cool than he is.

So, in a way, we might as well be a myth.

Which is funny, if you think about it.

* * *

Flying Blind

is now available in both a digital and print edition.

In addition to writing paranormal romance and paranormal YA novels under her own name, Deborah Cooke also writes historical romance and urban fantasy romance as Claire Delacroix.

Read on for a taste of
Love Potion #9
by Claire Delacroix, a romantic comedy with paranormal elements.

Italy, August 1420
—A gypsy named Lilith sees her lover hanged for a crime he didn't commit. On the gallows, he swears to return to her. Convinced that one day, he'll be reborn, she searches for a fabled elixir—rumored to grant immortality...

Toronto, August 1999
—Waiting has taken its toll on Lilith, now a fortune teller with a gift for matchmaking. So she concocts her strongest love potion ever. She is certain her magic has worked when the spitting image of her one true love moves in next door. A very practical—and skeptical—single father, Mitch Davison is intrigued by Lilith's passionate welcome, yet suspicious of her motives. After all, he's never believed in magic—and hasn't believed in love since his wife left him. But when Lilith doubts her own intuition, it's Mitch who must convince her that the greatest gift of all is the talent to follow your own heart...

Chapter One

Toronto—August 1999

I
t was hotter than Hades in the city, the kind of sticky steamy summer day that most people consider more characteristic of New Orleans than the great white north. The humidity was oppressive and tempers were wearing thin on that Saturday afternoon.

And Mitch Davison had the misfortune to be moving.

“I wanna go swimming!” three-year-old Jen wailed from the back seat of the much-abused Honda wagon. She kicked her feet against her car seat impatiently and Mitch caught a glimpse of her trembling lower lip in the rearview mirror. The treasured toys she had refused to entrust to the professional movers filled most of the back seat of the car—at least what was available after the family wolfhound staked his turf.

“I'm hot,” her brother Jason agreed.

Both children looked expectantly to their father, as though he could solve everything.

Mitch tried. He really did.

“Well, you're just going to have to wait a little bit longer,” he said with as much cheerfulness as he could manage. “What kind of Kool-Aid should we make first?”

The dog nudged Mitch in the back of the neck with his wet nose, demanding an open window. Mitch rolled down his window and got a great furry head beside his ear as a bonus. Colley panted like a blast furnace on his shoulder.

“Cherry! And I wanna swim
now
!” Jen cried, as though volume could make it so.”

The combination of a restless night and an unsettled day was affecting the toddler's usual sunny disposition. It was a tough day for the kids, Mitch knew, but he wasn't having a lot of fun himself. The traffic was brutal, the air conditioning had given out in the car and the sweat was running down his back like a river. Not for the first time, he knew why parents usually came in teams.

Not that Janice would have done any better with this day than Jen was doing. That thought did just about nothing to improve Mitch's mood.

Maybe,
maybe
, Andrea was already at the house. Mitch could really use his stepmother's help this weekend.

Which pretty much guaranteed she had forgotten the whole thing and gone to the Caymans instead. The last trait Mitch would attribute to Andrea was reliability.

Charm she had by the bucket, though.

“I'm working on it, Jen,” he said. “Just hang with me. How about a song for our new house?”

Jason started ‘Old Macdonald' and much to Mitch's relief, Jen went for the diversion. They got through the intersection on the next green light, and entered a miraculous stretch of unjammed road. Within moments, Mitch was turning into the common driveway that ran behind the houses on their new street. Ramshackle garages were interspersed with new ones. Gangly tomato plants and grapevines dangled over fences with such abandon that he thought they might take over the lane, given half a chance.

“Look at those sunflowers!” Mitch pointed to the flowers in an effort to distract the kids when their song ended.

“Those ones are really big,” Jason said, in his usual quiet voice.

“Orange!” Jen shouted, the contrast marked as always. She shook her beloved Bun by the ear. “I wanna swim!”

“Any minute now.” Mitch turned into the driveway behind the house and his heart sank.

The yard that was now his was a chaotic mess of greenery. The dandelions certainly had been more manageable when he had looked at the house.

Two months before.

Well, Jen would have to make do. Mowing the weeds was hardly on the agenda today.

A striped grey cat sat on the fence between their disaster of a yard and artfully lush garden beyond. The cat was backed by a brilliant array of bobbing flowers. It eyed the Honda's occupants, then calmly licked its paw.

Cooley took one look and barked, the noise enough to deafen a normal man at such close proximity. Mitch had already started to open the door, only to have 140 pounds of wolfhound muscle him aside and explode across the yard.

Barking his brains out the whole way.

Well, it was no secret that they'd arrived.

The cat gave Cooley the disdainful look that cats everywhere reserve for non-felines and proceeded to clean the other paw with great care. Cooley was beside himself, running back and forth beneath the cat's perch.

At least he was occupied.

And he
was
flattening some of the weeds.

Jen began to bellow for escape; Jason was out the door and off to explore—no doubt to look for bugs—and Mitch was left to manage the details. Once he had broken trail through the yard and unlocked the kitchen door, he wasn't surprised to find no sign of Andrea.

The movers were ringing the front bell.

It was going to be a long day.

And he was, one more time, all on his own.

* * *

Lilith was in a funk. She rattled through her house, picking listlessly at this crystal or that astrological chart. She was dimly aware of the moving van disgorging possessions next door, but wasn't really interested.

She was hot in more ways than one.

It was their 579th anniversary and—just like the last 578 times—Sebastian hadn't shown.