Dragon Cursed: Dragon Cursed, #1

By Mia Hall

The series that brings dragons and witches together in the underground beneath a war-torn beach town in Texas continues.

Worst. Senior. Skip. Day. Ever.

Senior skip day. Things that can go wrong:

An explosion renders your hometown into a war zone.

Your twelve-year old brother vanishes.

The place your brother vanished in is full of dragons.

The guy that helps you find your brother is hot. But he has wings. And scales. Yeah, he's a dragon.

And, oh yeah, those dragons think you're their salvation.

And by the way, you're invited to a ball, in your honor.

Meanwhile your hometown is still in ruins.

Worst. Senior. Skip. Day. Ever.

Exactly.

 

Beware: Cliffhangers, violence dragons, and fierce witches can be found in this series of action-packed fantasy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: MiHaP
• Release date: Apr 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393362517

Book preview

1

Lily

If they don’t shut up, someone’s going to call the cops.

That wouldn’t serve us very well. In fact, that would throw my pitiful excuse for a life into a pandemonium I didn’t need.

I could hear my two best friends ragging on each other from my bedroom window. I tried to tune them out. I really did. But God, they wouldn’t quit.

Alecia and Brad were going at it, and as usual, I was the target. That would change though, soon enough, it always did. They’d start in on one another, then come back to me after a short spell.

"Come on, Lily. I seriously… don’t understand what’s taking you so long." Alecia’s voice.

I resisted the urge to yell out to them to shut up.

This was going to be a fun day. A heck of a fun day. I wouldn’t let their squabbling or loud voices ruin it.

Unless someone calls the cops on us for disturbing the peace.

Girls, right? What can you say? Can’t live with them, can’t live without putting up with their incessant need to plan and primp. Am I right? Brad’s voice this time.

He was kidding, I could hear the mirth in his voice. And I could also hear the serious crush he had on Alecia.

"You are aware that I’m a girl, right? I mean you have noticed that before, haven’t you?" Alecia’s pout could be heard, even from up in my bedroom.

What? Brad mock-shouted at Alecia. He probably only got an exaggerated eye roll and the ghost of a smile in return. You’re trying to tell me you’re female? How is this possible? When did this happen? Do your parents know?

I bit back a laugh and waited for Alecia’s response.

Ha ha, you’re so funny, Brad. How you’ve gone this long in life without having a girlfriend is totally beyond me. Like, for real. It’s a travesty. A national tragedy, even. She did sarcasm even better than I did sometimes.

It really is, isn’t it? Now can we stop picking on how lame I am and go back to picking on Lily for how long it’s taking her to get ready? I liked that much more. It was definitely more fun for me.

Yeah, Alecia replied with more sarcasm—so thick it could have been cut with a knife. "I just bet you did. You’re right, though. She’s been up there for about a century. Lily! Earth to Lily. We’re waiting here. And it’s not like we have all day." Alecia’s voice grew louder with each word.

Actually, I yelled back, leaning toward the open window of the shitty apartment building I called home. It is. That’s the whole point of Senior Skip Day.

Oh. Alecia, I do believe you just got burned. I could just see Brad moving his hand in the hand signal for burn.

Shut up, Brad. Sometimes you’re so dense it makes me want to scream.

Oh yeah? Well, I may be dense, but you just got burned.

My friends continued to bicker, and I shook my head, laughing quietly.

Brad Arbor and Alecia Bell were my best friends in the whole world. Even a couple stories up, without being able to see them at all, I knew exactly what they must look like down there.

The two of them would be lounging in the front seat of Brad’s Jeep, in the alley beneath my bedroom window, with Alecia tapping her woefully chewed nails impatiently. She wasn’t a girl who was good at waiting, not for anything, and the fact that she hadn’t marched up the stairs to bust down my door was a miracle.

Some people might have found her impatient, and yes, bossy was a word they might also use, but I just thought it was funny. Probably, in part, because she was so little.

She was barely five-foot-two, with big blonde curls, and even bigger blue eyes. She looked like a little doll—Brad was fond of describing her as small, but mighty. That was a comment that always got an eye roll from Alecia, but I knew she secretly liked it. Not because she had told me or anything. I could just tell.

Seeing her next to Brad was actually quite comical all by itself, come to think of it. He was six-foot-three at eighteen—towering over Alecia by more than a foot. He had messy auburn hair, freckles, and green eyes that always looked like he was laughing. When he was little, he had been a pudgy kid and had gotten made fun of for it, but as he got older, he kind of stretched out. By senior year, he was one of the better-looking guys in school. Girls drooled over him in the halls, and he had no idea. He was super chill, pretty much the opposite of Alecia’s Type A personality, which was part of why they got along so well.

Plus, I was pretty sure he was in love with her.

Actually, scratch that.

I knew he was in love with her, and she felt the exact same way. Again, I didn’t know this because he had told me, and not because she had told me, either.

I could just see it.

They were my best friends, had been from practically the moment my broken little family moved to Houston.

For years, the three of us had been constantly together, just like the three musketeers. I wouldn’t have been a very good friend if I hadn’t been able to see the way they felt about each other, would I? Nope, not a very good friend at all.

Lily. Alecia pulled me from my reverie. Come downstairs. Right now.

Jeez, Alecia, you’re being pretty harsh, even for you, Brad chastised her.

Come on. Alecia gave as good as she got. You must be ready to go too, right? I mean, right? The traffic is going to suck.

Maybe not, Brad shot back.

I silently sent my thanks to him for buying me a few moments longer to find socks.

"Please, this is Houston. Of course, the traffic is going to suck. Traffic in Houston always sucks. It’s like it’s state-mandated or something. Somewhere, some evil little bastards are holed up in secret offices passing laws that the traffic in Houston will suck or else, and they’re laughing at all of us poor suckers who are stuck driving in it."

Alecia, I mean this in the nicest possible way, but you’ve got to lay off the crime TV, okay? I think it’s doing funny things to your brain.

Lily. Alecia again.

I grimaced. They were going to get me in trouble with the neighbors. Mr. Jones, on the first floor, was always griping about noise.

As if summoned, the screeching began.

Will you please shut the hell up down there? People’s tryin’ to sleep up in here. Goddamn. Damned kids, should be in school. Gonna call the police, you just see if I don’t. That was Mr. Jones, the charmer.

I wanted to yell at him to go get his bottle and drink himself into oblivion, but I held back. Mostly because he’d complain. If we had any more complaints, we were facing eviction. Again. I couldn’t have that.

And my little brother would be devastated. He liked his teacher, and that was rare for him.

Plus, I couldn’t have him calling the police. Nor could Brad and Alecia. That’s all we needed, the cops, truancy, that hassle.

Brad and Alecia knew my precarious situation at home, I’d warned them not to get me into hot water.

Eureka. Socks! They didn’t match, but who cared? I’d be barefooted before long, dragging my toes through the silt that Galveston Beach liked to call sand.

There were a couple of beats of silence, followed by another neighbor’s disgruntled yelling, and then I could hear Brad and Alecia whispering to each other, laughing in that excited, nervous way people got when they believed they had narrowly escaped real trouble. Even getting yelled at by a crazy guy was fun for them, at least when they were together.

I sighed, allowing myself to have just a minute of feeling sorry for myself. It wasn’t that I wasn’t happy for my friends, because I was. I knew the two of them would share their feelings for each other any day, and not a minute too soon. They were going to make a totally adorable couple, and I thought they were perfect for each other.

That being said, I didn’t have any prospects anywhere in sight. Not even the hint of a prospect, and I would have been lying if I said that wasn’t a bummer.

I was one day from my eighteenth birthday, and I had never had a boyfriend, not even anything close to a boyfriend.

Not even a kiss.

It’s not like I was desperate or boy-crazy or anything, but still, it wasn’t awesome, either.

Okay, maybe it kind of sucked.

Despite the fact that my increasingly impatient friends were still downstairs waiting and were very likely to piss the neighbor off again, I stopped and stared at myself in the mirror.

It was something I had developed a habit of doing. I would just stand there in my bedroom mirror, doing my best to look at myself objectively.

If I was being honest with myself, not cocky, but honest, I had to say I wasn’t a bad looking girl. I was actually sort of… well, I was sort of pretty, although even thinking it made me feel funny and blush furiously.

I was of average height, about five-foot-five, with an athletic build. I had loved dancing since I was a little girl, and although we’d never had the money to put me in classes, I’d done my best to teach myself with YouTube videos. So, I had a good body, at least as far as I could tell.

I had brown hair, with a few even lighter streaks, long and usually piled on top of my head in a messy bun. Little wisps of the bangs I was in the process of trying to grow out were always slipping out and falling around my face, causing me to constantly blow my hair off of my forehead. I guess if I had to pick something, I would have said that my eyes were my best feature. They were blue, which was common enough, but they were ringed in gold, flecked with gold. They were beautiful, or so I’d been told. I was always getting compliments on them.

I actually got a lot of compliments from guys, but always the kind that were given on the down low, always sort of secretive.

I wasn’t an idiot. I knew why guys didn’t want to be seen with me, why they didn’t want to be caught looking like they had any kind of interest in me. It was because of where I came from. It was because people liked to talk and most of the school had at least heard rumors about the Rogers family, the girl from the wrong side of the tracks with the gimpy brother.

Of course, I would have beaten the shit out of anyone I actually heard calling my younger brother Ricky gimpy, but that didn’t mean the names didn’t get flung around.

Ricky was twelve years old, but the limp he’d acquired as a six-year-old was there to stay. That little gem had been courtesy of one of our stepmom’s boyfriends, a real bastard and a mean drunk who hadn’t liked it when Ricky spilled his cereal. He had broken Ricky’s leg, and although my stepmom had eventually dumped the boyfriend, she hadn’t ever taken Ricky to get his leg fixed. Because of that, it had healed wrong, and it would always show in the way Ricky walked.

Anybody would’ve thought that terrible incident would have been enough to get Mona on the wagon, but no such luck. All she had done was pick us up and move us from Louisiana to Houston, Texas, claiming we could all use a change. Since we didn’t have any money, we’d wound up living in subsidized housing.

And I’d put an end to my YouTubing dance videos and started to YouTube self-defense and martial arts videos. Best I could do, since we couldn’t afford any real classes. I’d gotten pretty good, too.

I had to, since my stepmother’s taste in men never got better.

The only reason Ricky and I were able to go to decent schools was the money our grandmother had put in trusts for just that reason. It was money my stepmom couldn’t touch, the only money she hadn’t used on drinking and the occasional asshole boyfriend.

I was grateful for the school, and I knew Ricky was too, but we also both knew that we were different from the other kids. All of our classmates knew it, too. That was why none of the guys in my classes wanted to date me, even though they had no problem sending me Facebook messages telling me how hot I was in the middle of the night. It sucked, and I couldn’t wait until it was time to go to college.

Once I was in college, it wouldn’t be like this anymore. In college, nobody would have to know where I had come from or how messed up my past was.

Lily? Better make it quick. I won’t be able to contain the beast for much longer.

Hey. Don’t call me a beast.

All right. I shoved my head out of my window this time, responding quickly so that Mr. Jones upstairs didn’t get seriously pissed off again, I’m ready. I’ll be right down.

I took one last look in the mirror, put on a fresh coat of lip gloss, and slung my purse across my body. I preferred cross-body purses. I liked to be able to move as quickly as I wanted to without being bogged down by a stupid bag.

Things had been freaking stressful lately, what with my home life being what it was and school quickly coming to a close, and I was definitely looking forward to a day off. I just had to get past my stepmom first, which wasn’t always the easiest thing to do. Her moods were unpredictable, to say the least.

2

Lily

My stepmom, Mona.

She’d married my dad while I was… I don’t even remember how old I was. My mother died when I was too young to remember.

Then Ricky’s mom left us. Then there was Mona. Then Dad died.

Now it was just Mona. The stepmom from hell, but she was all we had.

I slipped out of my room, calling softly, Mona?

Nothing. She was planted on the couch, a place she pretty much never left unless forced to, her body turned toward the TV.

I took a deep, quiet breath, trying to steady my nerves before talking to her. I loved my stepmom, in that you love what you have sort of way. But she was just so completely unpredictable, and she had been getting steadily worse for about as long as I could remember.

Her decline had started picking up speed after our move to Houston. I’d often wondered if that might have something to do with what had happened to Ricky, what she had let happen to Ricky, but in the end, the reason didn’t really matter.

What mattered was that she really wasn’t much of a parent or guardian at all, at this point. Most of the time it felt like I was the adult and she was the child.

Mona?

Come here, baby, come and look at this.

Oh, boy. I chased the grimace from my face so she wouldn’t read my disappointment.

I could tell what she was trying to say, but her words were already coming out slurred, and as I approached I could see that she had the bottle of vodka on the coffee table, next to a bucket of ice. It was only ten-thirty in the morning. On the plus side, it meant she may not even know what day it is, which meant she wouldn’t realize that I was skipping school and I wouldn’t get any shit for it. That was the only plus that I could see.

The bottle being out already, her slurred words so early, meant it was going to be one of her bad days. I cringed in anticipation of what it would be like when I got home from Galveston. If we were lucky, she would just be passed out. If we weren’t so lucky… well, I didn’t want to think about that. I wasn’t going to think about that, at least not until I had to.

I pushed my shoulders back and walked over to where she sat, bent down beside her to hear her better, and tried to ignore the now very intense stale smell of booze. Probably her Jack Daniels from the other day.

For what might be the millionth time, I promised myself that I would never be like her. I was never, ever going to let something like alcohol completely take over my life.

What is it, Mona? What do you need?

"I don’t need anything; I want to show you something. Look. Will you look at that? Just like Elizabeth Taylor’s. Doesn’t it look just like hers?"

I blinked, totally confused about what she might be talking about. Maybe she was actually going crazy or something. It couldn’t exactly come as a surprise. It was a long time coming.

But then she looked at me, her eyes bugging out of