The Betrayed Dragon (Cycle of Dragons Book 2) by Dan Michaelson (best free ereader TXT) 📕

whipped around me, threatening to throw me off of the dragon’s back, but somehow I managed to hold myself in place.

We hit the treetops.

As soon as we did, the dragon let out a soft roar and heat exploded from him.

Strangely, there came a reverberation of heat and energy that seemed to answer him. We crashed, landing on the ground.

Thomas jumped from the dragon’s back, flames stretching from his hands, spreading out across the forest floor. They didn’t burn anything.

“Come with me,” he snapped.

I climbed down, following him. I could feel the connection he shared with the dragon, the way it swooped out from him, cycling through him before returning to the dragon.

“What are we looking for?” I asked.

“What you detected.”

“I don’t know what it was.”

“But it was something,” Thomas stated, looking back at me.

I could still feel it out there, though I wasn’t at all sure what it was—but it was faint and fading, becoming increasingly difficult for me to detect anything.

“There’s something, but I don’t know what it is,” I said.

“Then we follow.”

Thomas seemed to think it was important enough for us to track it through the forest. In the darkness, it was difficult for me to make anything out. I could feel the occasional sense of power fluttering against me, a surge of energy that suggested there was something out there.

“Do you feel anything?” I asked Thomas as we raced ahead. He seemed to have some way of navigating through the forest much more easily than I did, slipping between the trees, a pale light glowing from him. It took me a moment to realize that he used his connection to the dragons to illuminate the path ahead of us.

“I don’t detect what you did, though I suspect there’s something there,” Thomas said.

I continued to hold on to the connection to power to feel for something. What if I connected to the green dragon and used that to probe for something else?

I tried to reach across the distance, to use what I could feel of the green dragon. The sense of it was faint, but the dragon was there. For a moment, I wondered if I had ever separated that connection to the dragon. Strangely, I could feel it in the heat deep within me, without having to do much more to connect to the dragon itself.

I held on to that energy and realized there was something more fluttering from me, flowing outward. It drifted into the forest, probing at what I detected.

Thomas glanced back at me. “What did you do?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t do anything. I just—”

There came a strange crack.

I jerked, spinning, and froze. A face in the darkness caught my attention. One of the Djarn. Thomas was there quickly, wrapping power through him, and he sent it streaking toward the Djarn.

“Don’t,” I said, grabbing for him.

Thomas pushed me back. “Be careful,” he said. “They can be dangerous. They’ve been moving toward the capital.”

I frowned. “You think the Djarn are responsible for the dragons?” Thomas didn’t say anything. The face I saw wanted us to know that it was there. I was certain of it. “If there’s one of the Djarn, then there are likely others. The fact that we have seen this one tells me there are probably more in the trees around us.”

Thomas looked over to me, frowning deeply. “How well do you know the Djarn?”

“I’ve encountered them before. They live within the forest outside of the plains near Berestal, but I haven’t had any interaction with them. I have a friend whose father has.”

The timing of all of this was more than a little troubling. Not only had the Djarn begun moving, surrounding me in the forest during my test and now here again, but Joran and his father were visiting after having been with the Djarn. I wanted to think they weren’t connected, but I had to wonder.

Thomas turned back away, focusing on the Djarn. Heat radiated from him, the power of the dragons flowing off of him, flooding toward the Djarn.

“I don’t know what you think you’re going to do,” I said. “There are probably a dozen of them around us.”

“You can feel them?”

I shook my head. “I can’t feel anything. If the Djarn are here, it’s because they want us to know that they are.”

How is it that I knew this and Thomas didn’t?

Unless he’d wanted to come to face the Djarn.

I wanted no part of that.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about the Djarn, but I didn’t want to see them slaughtered.

The heat of the dragon swirled around Thomas. It was faint, but it was at least easing, and there wasn’t much intensity to it—not at all like it had been before.

“Go ahead then,” Thomas said.

“Go ahead with what?”

“If you have some way of communicating with them, go ahead and do it.”

I shook my head. “I don’t have any way of communicating with them,” I said.

He glanced over at me. “You seem to know so much about them.”

I didn’t want to anger Thomas, but it seemed I already had. Now here I was trying to prove that I wasn’t somehow siding with the Djarn, but at the same time, I also knew that if I didn’t intervene in some way, Thomas would end up attacking. My experience with the Djarn had told me that doing that was a mistake.

“All they want is to be left alone,” I said, repeating something Joran’s father had once told me, hoping it was true despite what Manuel—and now Thomas—claimed. “They don’t care about the kingdom.”

“Exactly,” Thomas said.

“What do you think you’re going to do?” I asked.

Thomas turned toward me, glaring. Heat built from him, and I raised my hands.

“I’m not trying to challenge you. I’m just asking what you think you’re going to do against the Djarn. I can tell you there are more around us than you know.” Even as I said it, I could feel a hint of power. It seemed to come from the dragon in the distance,