Phoenix

CONTENTS

The books in the Dragon Eye Series:

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

Dear Reader,

Acknowledgements

Bonus Materials

Note to Readers, from the author:

A Summary of the Tedious Journey Felix Undertook in the Year Following His Encounter with the Volcano

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Phoenix

BOOK THREE OF THE

DRAGON EYE SERIES

THE BOOKS IN THE DRAGON EYE SERIES:

One: Dragon

Two: Hydra

Three: Phoenix

Four: Vixen

Five: Dracul

Six: Basilisk

This is a work of fiction. It is not meant to serve as an argument that dragons either do exist, or have existed. All references to historical events, real people, or actual events are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, events, and locations are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual places, events, dragons or persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2014 by Finley Aaron and Henry Knox Press

Cover Design by
www.designbookcover.pt

Be who you were created to be, and you will set the world on fire. —St. Catherine of Sienna

CHAPTER ONE

I’ve always been competitive. Perhaps it’s because I’m a dragon, and that’s how we are, especially the males of our species.

Or maybe it’s because I have one brother (and three sisters, not that they figure into this equation much). My brother Ram is three years older than I am, and practically perfect, so my life to this point has been one long lecture from my parents telling me to be more like Ram.

Maybe it’s my competitive streak showing, but I don’t actually want to be more like Ram.

I want to be better than Ram.

Not in everything. Just in something. In one thing.

Ever.

Just to be better than my brother in one thing, preferably something that matters to me and to my parents, so for once they can look at Ram and say, “Why can’t you be more like Felix?”

My brother Ram always said since he’s the oldest, he’ll get married before I do, and I always shot back, “Not if I find a she-dragon first.”

That’s why I’m at this cave right now, in Siberia, in the deepening darkness as the sun goes down beyond the mountains. Waiting. It’s like a stake-out, like in cop movies, except nobody brought donuts.

And instead of bad guys, I’m hoping to catch a bride.

It’s not just because I want to outdo my brother in the race for a wife. I want to catch a bride for the sake of getting married. It’s something that’s not only important to my parents and my brother. It’s important to me. We’re dragons, and dragons are nearly entirely extinct. We’ve got to find mates, and that’s why I’m here.

It’s finally gotten dark outside—that takes a long while in northern Russia in the late spring. It only gets dark for a few hours at night, it seems. The rest of the “nighttime” hours are dusky semi-darkness.

Taking advantage of the darkness, I’m hunkered down behind a pile of elk bones, waiting, when a blazing golden streak arcs through the sky like a falling star.

But bigger.

With wings.

In less time than it takes me to tell it, a fiery yellow-orange dragon has shot through the sky and landed about twenty feet from me, near the entrance to the cave. It’s got a billowy mass of cloth wadded up in its taloned claws, and it kicks this off at the opening of the cave and shoves it in the hole. Then it pauses and sniffs the air.

I freeze. Can it smell me? Can it tell someone has been here?

Though I fear getting caught, I can’t move. Moving might give away my position, and anyway, I’m fascinated by this new dragon. Granted, yes, I saw video footage of the creature earlier. I was expecting a dragon of this description to arrive.

But up close, in real life, it’s stunning. Like all dragons I know, this dragon’s scales give off a faint glow. Since the dragon is yellow-orange, the glow makes it look almost as though it’s on fire, it’s every movement flickering like burning flames.

I don’t believe I have ever seen anything so gorgeous in all my life.

The dragon spreads its wings—long, thin-skinned bat-shaped wings. It stretches as if stiff from a long flight. Then it gives its head one sharp shake, beats its wings, and rises into the sky.

If the video footage of the dragon’s previous visits to this spot on recent nights are any indication, the dragon has only gone a short distance to hunt up a meal—probably elk, hence the pile of bones I’m hiding behind—and then return to this spot to eat it. So I have every reason to believe the dragon will be back again soon, but at the same time, I’m tempted to fly after it just to make sure.

But no, if I fly after it, I’ll only give away my presence and probably scare the dragon. I must remember: according to all the intel we’ve received from our spies, this dragon is working for my enemy. It may try to fight me or run away if it sees me.

So I wait as patiently as I can, knowing my future, and the future existence of dragons, might well hinge on what happens in the next minutes and hours.

It may seem like I’m exaggerating when I say dragons are nearly extinct, but it’s true. Until my parents got married, there were only five dragons in the whole world, that we know of: my mom and dad, my mom’s dad (my grandfather, Elmir) and their arch-enemies, the evil mad scientist Eudora, who bred dragon killers in a lab to destroy us, and Ion, the other evil dragon, who sometimes helps her.

That was it. Five dragons in the whole world.

Then my parents married and had five kids. My brother Ram is the oldest. Then come my three sisters, who are sort of like triplets or litter mates or whatever you want to call them. Rilla, Wren, and Zilpha. And then me, Felix, the youngest, the only other boy.

So that would make ten dragons in all the world, except that Eudora is no longer a dragon because my mom changed her into being only human (long story). You’d think now that she’s no longer a dragon, that Eudora wouldn’t be a viable enemy anymore, except that becoming only human made Eudora even more angry than usual, and even more determined to destroy us. The only thing worse than a mad scientist bent on destruction, is a mad mad scientist bent on destruction.

So if we want dragons to continue to exist on this earth, we’ve got to stay clear of Eudora’s destructive plans, and we’ve got to find other dragons. It’s our only hope for keeping dragons alive for another generation.

Even though there are only ten dragons that we know of in all the world (technically nine if you don’t count Eudora, although it’s up to ten again because my sister Wren met a water dragon named Ed—another long story), we’ve always held out hope there might be more, hidden away in the most remote places on earth, surviving in spite of Eudora and all the dragon hunters who’ve ever come before her.

Until this morning, that hope was just a hope. And my brother’s claim that he’d marry first was an empty boast, because there wasn’t anyone for either of us to marry. But this morning, everything changed.

We’ve got these spies, you see, watching Eudora and Ion to make sure they’re not up to anything particularly bad. The spies warn us when danger is imminent. And this morning, when we arrived at their spy cabin in the Siberian mountains, they showed us some video footage they’d taken in the dark of night near this cave, of a dragon flying over the nearby lake on a mission to help Eudora.

The spies had assumed the dragon was our old arch-enemy Ion, since Ion is the only other dragon on the planet that we knew of, and he has a history of working with Eudora.

It made sense for the spies to assume the dragon was Ion. I even thought it was Ion, until my mother, who knows Ion about as well as anyone (another long story) looked at the footage and informed us the dragon in question was most certainly not Ion. And my dad (the only other dragon among us who’s ever even seen Ion) assured us it wasn’t Ion, either.

Which means, if you’ve been keeping track and haven’t gone out yet for donuts, there is another dragon on this planet. A dragon none of us knows, who we’ve never met before, unless you count just moments ago when it landed in front of my face and flew off again.

It’s impossible to tell whether this dragon is male or female, but statistically speaking, there’s a fifty-fifty shot it’s a girl, which means a potential bride for either me or my brother Ram, whichever one of us gets to her first, which is why I’m at this cave waiting for the golden mystery dragon to return.

There’s also a fifty-fifty chance the dragon is male, in which case one of my sisters could marry him, which would fulfill their dreams and be helpful to our species, so I’m more than happy to be part of the stakeout even if the dragon is not a she-dragon, although of course I’m really hoping it’s female.

And I suppose, if you want to get right down to it, there’s a chance this dragon might already be married, but that’s not entirely a bad thing, because then there might be another generation of dragons somewhere, which could mean more than one spouse for the rest of us. Age doesn’t matter. Once a dragon reaches maturity at around eighteen years of age, they don’t get any older. Dragons live forever, unless you kill them, and we don’t look any older at eight hundred than we did at eighteen.

So it doesn’t matter how old this dragon is, or even if it’s male or female. Another dragon means hope for the next generation.

But there’s a catch, of course, and you’ve probably already wondered about it. According to the video footage our spies showed us, this mystery dragon is working for our arch-enemy, the evil mad scientist Eudora. This poses a problem for a number of reasons, mostly in that the dragon is going to be more likely to want to fight us than marry us.

I don’t want to minimize that issue or overlook the threat it presents in the short term. But arch-enemies aside, and any painful battles we may have to wage in between, this is the biggest news of my life, right up there with the moment when my sister discovered Ed is a water dragon. It’s even better news for the dragon world than my own birth, because of course, I contribute almost nothing to the dragon world, not unless I can find a mate. I’m superfluous. My parents already had four children, and we can’t marry each other.

But this dragon? This dragon represents everything we’ve hoped for, searched for, fought for. This dragon is so close, we can smell the lingering scent of the smoke from the dragon-fire he or she used to roast his or her supper the last time he or she was here.

So I’ll wait as long as I have to wait for this dragon to return. And then I’m going to do everything in my power to befriend this creature, to bring it over to our side (I hate referring to a dragon as it, which implies something less than human, but that whole he or she bit was getting obnoxiously wordy).

So I wait. And before long the dragon returns with a freshly killed elk, sets down, and starts eating.

Now here’s something interesting: I eat as a human. Not necessarily all the time—I’ve been known to snack on fish while floating in a lake as a dragon, using my wings like a personal boat (think of a turtle on its back and you get the idea) but this dragon is eating while in dragon form.