Stolen by the Dragon (Storm Dragons Book 1) Read online

  Stolen by the Dragon

  Storm Dragons (Book 1)

  A Winterspell Academy Novel

  Riley Storm

  Stolen by the Dragon

  Copyright© 2020 Riley Storm

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic means, without written permission from the author. The sole exception is for the use of brief quotations in a book review. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal.

  This book is a work of fiction. 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.

  All sexual activities depicted occur between consenting characters 18 years or older who are not blood-related.

  Edited by Annie Jenkinson, Just Copyeditors

  Cover Designs by Kasmit Covers

  Table of Contents

  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

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Other Books by Riley Storm

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Damien

  “Damien.”

  He jerked his head up in surprise as his name was called. “No!” The cry escaped his lips before he could help himself. Heads turned in his direction. “I want to stay.”

  The woman standing on the raised platform at the front of the room sighed. This was not the first time she’d had this argument, nor would it be the last, she was sure of that. It was the same argument she’d given when her name had been drawn.

  “Listen Damien. None of us want to go. We all want to stay, to fight. This is our home, our world. I understand. The Elders understand. But we have no choice. Some of us must go through, to protect those who cannot fight for themselves. We must have soldiers on the far side who can fight anything we may come upon. Someone must be brave enough to go to the unknown.”

  Damien railed against the words, even as he felt his back up against the wall. If he tried to stay again, then he would appear cowardly, too scared to go through and brave whatever dangers may be on the other side. But if he went…

  “Just say okay,” Altair hissed under his breath. “You think I want to go either?”

  Glancing at his best friend, Damien could see the war of emotions on the other storm dragon’s face and knew his own features must be doing the same. This wasn’t easy on anyone. He had to keep that in mind, as his feelings weren’t the only ones at stake here. Everyone was being asked to do something they didn’t want to today. They just knew they had to.

  “Very well,” he said stiffly, not wanting to hold up the process any longer.

  The woman, a matron of the jade dragons, nodded in relief, and returned to drawing names and placing them in one of two boxes.

  “I’m going back up top for a few minutes,” he said quietly to Altair.

  The other dragon glanced up at the wall, noting the time. “We depart in an hour and a half. Please don’t be late.”

  Damien smiled. “When am I ever late?”

  Altair just rolled his eyes.

  Slipping from the room, he took the main corridor to its end, then headed up a set of stairs. Five floors later, he reached ground level, emerging out onto the hard-packed ground in the center of the massive fortress.

  It wasn’t earth upon which he walked, however, but tundra ice. Fortress Glacis was located at the very top of the world, a sprawling complex that had stood mostly unused for centuries. Now it was a bustling hub of activity, and the last stronghold of the dragons on all of Dracia.

  The last stronghold that we know of, Damien thought glumly to himself as he bent his knees and leapt up to the first landing of the stairs that would carry him to the top of Glacis’ walls.

  Perhaps there were other places where his kind still held out, but if there were, none of the dragons knew it. They had been cut off long ago, retreating, ever retreating, until Glacis was the only place left to go. A tiny fraction of the population, a mixture of almost all the various types of dragons, huddled together in the coldest regions of their planet.

  Sitting and waiting for the arrival of the enemy.

  “Any sign yet?” he asked, his breath puffing as he looked over the top of the wall, the constant freezing winds taking the little cloud of moisture and winging it away immediately.

  “Not yet.”

  Damien glanced at the nearest sentry. A frost dragon, he was clad from head to toe in ice, a suit of blinding white armor forged from the very heart of the lands around them. Only a slit for his eyes was visible. Next to him lay a wicked-looking sword, also carved from the element of his birth.

  Pulling his jacket tighter to ward off the bite of the wind—the temperature itself didn’t really bother him, but the wind brought with it tiny little icicles that prickled his skin—he peered out over the battlement.

  It was but a waiting game now. The enemy would come. They always did. Then he would have to go back below, to take his place with the others.

  To run away.

  Damien’s fists clenched tightly, part of the top of the wall breaking off as he dug through the ice in his anger.

  “Hey. Stop that.”

  The stern warning from the sentry brought him back to reality. “Sorry,” he muttered, patting gently at the top of the wall as if that would fix the twin divots he’d taken out of it. “I didn’t mean to.”

  There was no reply. Irritated that his apology had gone unacknowledged, Damien looked at the sentry. But the guard wasn’t paying attention to him. Not anymore. His gaze was fixed. Outward.

  Over the wall.

  A shiver ran down Damien’s spine as he slowly turned to follow the dragon’s gaze.

  All along the horizon ran a line of mountains. Fortress Glacis was at the very heart of the range, a near-perfect circle likely forged from an asteroid strike in ancient times. They blocked access from everywhere. Everywhere but the direction he faced.

  Coming through the sole break in the mountains was a solid black line. It was too far away for him to view just yet without calling up the wind to aid him, but Damien didn’t need to do that to know what he saw.

  Thousands of marching figures. Tens of thousands.

  Seconds later, the skies darkened as more crested the mountains and began to blot out the sky. Damien corrected his earlier estimate.

  Millions.

  “My God,” he heard the sentry whisper as the might of their e
nemy continued to march toward them. “There are so many of them.”

  Horns began to blow within Glacis, announcing the arrival of the final battle for their planet. A battle he wouldn’t be participating in.

  Damien almost called up the wind then, to reshape the air around his eyes, to let him see farther into the distance, but he decided against it. He didn’t need to see what was out there. He already knew.

  “Above!”

  Jerking his head back at the shout of alarm from another sentry, Damien saw a group of shapes descending toward the fortress at breakneck speed from high above in the sky.

  A roar of anger filled him, and he reached out to the elements. While the glaciers and tundra were the natural habitat of the frost dragons, storms raged anywhere and everywhere. Damien was always near the source of his power.

  Air whirled around him and he flung a swirling gale of storm winds at the approaching group. The attack must have come sooner than they expected, because the diving group scattered and slowed.

  “Are you to stay?” the nearby sentry asked as he hauled an arm back, ice flowing from seemingly nowhere into a sleek icy spear with a needle-sharp point. He hurled the weapon like a javelin, growling in success as it took one of the enemies in the wing, sending it tumbling from the sky to impact on the ground below.

  A nearby fire dragon gestured, and a torrent of fire incinerated the downed creature in seconds. Damien winced, but he knew that hesitation was the death of any of them.

  “No,” he said reluctantly.

  “Then go. Get below! They must know of the portal. It’s the only reason they would strike so soon.”

  Damien stared in horror at the unknown sentry. “How is that possible?”

  “It doesn’t matter how! It just is. Go, now! Warn them, get everyone through that you can.”

  “But we’re not ready,” he protested, but his feet were already moving, launching him out from the wall to the packed ice forty feet below. He landed with a crunch, packing the ice under his feet another six inches down.

  All around him, dragons were readying themselves for battle as he fled.

  Coward.

  Damien pushed the word away; there was no time to think of it now. He ran down the stairs and into the chamber.

  “We must go now!” he shouted. “They’ve launched an attack. They’re after the portal!”

  He didn’t know that for sure of course, but it was a wise bet. Somehow, their enemy must have learned about the portal. A lightning strike now would give them access to it—and with it, another world to conquer.

  Not to mention the last vestiges of his race as they prepared to flee through it.

  “Okay everyone, you heard him. No time to waste. Pick up what you have on you and proceed through the portal at a steady rate. No pushing, no shoving, but no dawdling.”

  Damien felt a sliver of relief enter his system as Rokh took charge. The powerful fire dragon had been chosen to lead the expedition through the portal. He strode forward now to the front of the chamber, where two-dozen dragons stood waiting, a blank wall in front of them.

  “Now,” he said, the quiet command heard easily through the silent chamber.

  The dragons nodded and closed their eyes. Power began to hum through them, in a way Damien could not understand. In two lines of twelve, the rear ones slowly reached out to touch the shoulder of the one in front. Silver-purple light glowed brightly as it was transferred up the chain, until the two dragons at the front of each line were barely visible.

  Acting as one, they thrust their hands forward at the same time. Power flowed into the blank wall, spiraling out until it formed a giant circle nearly fifty feet across at its max. Part of the circle was invisible, flowing into the ground, leaving only three-quarters of it to be seen by those who watched.

  A moment later, the silver-purple light in the center shimmered and solidified.

  Damien gasped along with the rest of the assembled dragons. There was an image there now. One of a snowy mountainside. A familiar place, yet different all the same.

  Rokh nodded to himself. “We must go,” he called, and without another word, he turned and plunged through the portal.

  Into a new world.

  Others began streaming after him in ones and twos at first, but as the trickle gathered up more, it became a stream.

  The roof of the cavern shook, and chunks of rock rained down on the group below. Younglings cried out in fear, huddling closer to their mothers and fathers for protection. There were far too few of the former for Damien’s liking, but the toll on female dragons had been extra high in the early stages of the war, and now their numbers were dangerously low.

  To top it off, most of the female dragons had lost some or all of their young. The majority of the soldiers fighting above were now female. They had nothing more to live for, and wanted to die here, on the same planet as their children.

  If only all they did was die…

  There was more shaking, and Damien spun as he heard a noise up the corridor. One of the enemy appeared, shaking off its landing and rushing forward with a frenzied determination, bloodshot eyes focused on the portal behind Damien.

  He should be enraged by the sight in front of him, a demon hellbent on killing his friends, his kin.

  But it was hard to be furious when the image looking back at him was another dragon shifter.

  Damien barely reacted in time, launching himself into the path of the enemy. The two went down in a tussle, and he reared his head back, slamming it into the other’s head. They parted, and he blasted the creature with a bolt of lightning.

  The creature barely noticed the blackened mark that appeared on its side. Silent as death, like always, it flung itself at him, eager to kill him.

  Kill me and make me one of them.

  Damien met the charge, hands tingling with power. He clamped them down on either side of the thing’s head—he refused to think of it as a dragon any longer—and channeled power from one hand to the other. Through its head.

  The creature’s eyes dulled, and then grey goop began to seep from its nose and ears before it fell to the ground, lifeless. But Damien wasn’t done. He knelt to a knee, still clasping the head, energy surging between his palms, burning the entire thing. They had made this mistake early in the war.

  He wasn’t going to make it now. Only when the entire head was a blackened ruin did he let go, confident that the thing inside it was dead too.

  “Damien!”

  He looked up to see Altair waving at him from the portal entrance. Most of the dragons were through.

  “Come on, we need to go now!”

  He rose to his feet, backing toward the opening, wary of any more of the Infected.

  “Go now.”

  The voice from nearby startled him. Damien turned to see one of the dragons holding the portal open, looking at him. His eyes were silver-purple, but he was staring right at the storm dragon.

  “Go. They must not get us, or the open portal. If they do that…” the dragon trailed off, but Damien understood.

  If the Infected were able to do that, then his people would never be safe.

  “Run!” the dragon shouted. “The portal will collapse, and the energy will destroy us and anyone in this chamber. Go!”

  Nodding, he turned and ran for the portal as Altair disappeared through it.

  Damien was the last of his kind. The last dragon in the chamber.

  Taking a deep breath, he plunged through the portal, and into the unknown.

  Chapter Two

  Anna

  They were deep into the mountains now, and the smile would not be denied any longer.

  Anna grinned widely from ear to ear, wanting to whoop loudly so that the very titans of the earth sticking up around her would hear and send her shouts echoing back. She refrained, however, because while a moment of prideful indulgence was acceptable, something so outwardly visible was not the way of things.

  “Good for you,” she said quietly, spea
king to herself instead, only the winds themselves hearing her.

  When she’d first been told that she was to command the day’s patrol, she’d nearly fainted on the spot. It was an honor she’d worked long and hard to achieve, and now it had been given to her. To her!

  Now she led a full wing of her fellow Initiates through the mountains, their shimmering, translucent steeds easily galloping along on the wind itself, effortlessly carrying them along their route.

  Far below, the snow-covered mountains had finally extended their grip to the valleys between. Winterspell Academy had been cut off from the closest human settlement for a month now, and that would last for several more, until the spring thaws melted the sole path through the mountains.

  That was okay. The witches of Winterspell were more than self-sufficient, and they even preferred to be isolated. It was in their nature.

  Reveling in the freedom of flying, Anna sat up straight, feeling the wind whip across her face, the goggles keeping her eyes clear to scan the land below. Although she might be letting herself indulge just a bit too much, she intended to do her job. They were on patrol after all, and Winterspell was located in this mountain range for a reason.

  She needed to be on the lookout. In the winter, the already fragile barrier between Earth and the Abyss was even weaker. Like all who resided at Winterspell, Anna had taken an oath to defend humanity from the creatures who would come forth. Faeries of all sorts, elves, werewolves, vampires and more, everything humans had ever dreamed up, they lived in the Abyss.

  And that’s where I’ll send them back to if I find them!

  “Patrol Leader!”

  The unexpected call from one of the other Initiates broke her reverie. Turning in the saddle, she found the speaker and followed their pointed hand.

  “What in Furies’ name?” she whispered to herself, invoking the name of ancient witches.

  Far down below, in a tiny wooded depression between two peaks, a cluster of shapes moved. Not just one or two, but easily half a dozen. That was unusual in itself, but it was what Anna saw behind them that grabbed her attention.

  The air was shimmering in a vast semi-circle. As she watched, something appeared in the center of it.