Reading Online Novel

Finding His Dragon(24)



“I know you’re here somewhere, Charlie. I can smell you,” Reyn yelled. No one moved in the dusty space, didn’t even breathe. After a few moments, his footsteps receded. A door close by clattered open, then a few moments later slammed shut. He repeated the process with each room. When he finished and still hadn’t found her, he gave a mighty roar. “Search the next level down. She can’t be far. Her scent is too strong.”

Charlotte listened for him to come back in their direction, but when the footsteps didn’t return, she sagged a bit. The first thing she had to do was figure out who the man staring a hole through her head was. He wasn’t working for Reyn. Otherwise, he would have given them up. Adrian maybe? That didn’t make sense either. Reyn would have delivered her to Adrian. There was something familiar about the man. Maybe she’d seen him around Eldurcrest before?

The man stepped to the window and pulled the curtain only wide enough to look through. The room was dark now that the sun had set, but dragon shifters had great eyesight. If he could see them, they could see him.

With a flick of his wrist, he beckoned her over. He stood back a little so she could see what he’d seen. He pointed to his eyes, then down to the tree line, and sure enough, three hunters were crouched down, their arrows pointed straight at the roof. Had she tried to take flight, she would have been shot down, most likely with a poisoned arrow. She and Maddie would have both been goners. The man let the curtain slide gently back into place, then pointed to his left ear before pointing up.

It wasn’t much, a scrape of a sound, but she heard it. Someone was on the roof. Damn it. She wouldn’t have even gotten Maddie in the air.





THIRTEEN


His first stop when he’d arrived in the village was at the Old Time Inn. He went around to where the boy had stopped him the night Charlotte had been taken and sniffed the air. The boy’s scent was faint, but it was there. He followed it down the street, then into an alley. There wasn’t a lot down there except metal garbage bins. There wasn’t even an exit. He found the boy sleeping, crouched behind one of the containers with broken pieces of cardboard covering him, and Jace’s heart broke. The kid wasn’t old enough to be on his own to live in the streets, even in a quiet village like Glen Farley.

“Hey buddy, do you still have my things?” he asked the boy after he’d shaken him awake. The boy’s eyes rounded, and he scurried back until he realized who was with him.

He nodded, then looked over Jace’s shoulder. Satisfied that no one else was around, the kid reached behind him and grabbed the cell phone, then the wallet and handed them over.

Jace helped him out of his hiding spot and then grinned at the sight of his huge T-shirt hanging off the boy’s shoulders. Without missing a beat, the kid started taking the shirt off.

“It’s okay, keep it on for now,” he told him.

Jace flipped through his wallet, noticing that five bucks were missing, but the twenties he’d had in there were still there. “Thanks for watching my stuff for me. You did an excellent job. What do you say we grab a bite to eat?”

The boy swallowed hard, his stomach rumbling loud before he nodded.

“Well, if we’re going to be friends, I need to know your name. I’m Jace.”

“Bradley,” he said, his chest puffing out as he stuck his hand out for a shake.

“Nice to meet you, Bradley. Now let’s go eat. I’m starving,” he said before leading the boy from the alley. If he had anything to say about it, it would be the last time the child would sleep under the stars unless it were some fun camping expedition or something.

After they had eaten, he took Bradley to the Woolridge place. It was always full of kids with no place to go, but they wouldn’t turn him away. Once there, they would take over. They’d know how to go about getting him off the streets for good. They’d even keep him fed and safe until the courts figured out what to do with him.

He was about to go into Josie’s Diner to see what the local assholes had to say about the increase in dragon presence when his cell rang. “Get your ass back here now, hunters are on the property,” he’d yelled into the phone before the line went dead. He hit redial, but nothing, the battery was dead. It was sheer luck that it had allowed him to answer the call at all.

Jace’s chest rose and fell with the fury churning a hole in his gut. The village was quiet, too quiet. With at least a dozen extra dragons in the area, he should have caught sight of them, but they were nowhere. He should never have left the estate. The only reason he had was so that he could check on the kid and get his wallet back.