Dragon's Moon Read Online Free PDF

though her old one would not recognize her. Gone was the stubborn girl who loved her family and people with every passionate fiber of her heart.
    Ciara did her best to feel as little as possible; she had no desire to love with a devotion that could so easily destroy her again.
    Laird Barr’s hope that she might forget painful memories more easily away from all that was familiar had proven fruitless, but she did not blame his plan.
    The memories were burned into Ciara’s mind with a dragon’s flame; it was impossible for her to ever forget orfeel completely safe again. That fateful day in the forest and what followed lived inside her in a maelstrom of grief, awe, confusion, disbelief and sometimes utter terror.
    Not that she ever let these feelings come fully to the surface, but Ciara often woke in the night to her brother’s final scream, only to realize it had been her own. She dreamed of blood-soaked walls and a waxen-faced woman searching their cottage for a son and husband that would never again be there.
    Ciara was grateful for the stone walls that kept her nightmares private, but she was even more thankful that far from forcing Ciara to marry when she came of age, Laird Talorc and his second, Niall, frightened off any prospective suitors. Chrechte and human alike.
    Laird Talorc and Abigail treated Ciara like a cherished member of the family, to be protected and watched over. She knew they thought she was broken.
    Too broken to be forced to mate.
    She did and said nothing to dissuade them of that belief.
    She wanted no true family to lose again; she had no desire to ever marry or have children that could be taken from her by that undefeatable enemy, death. She hoped she never met her mate, or that he was already committed to another.
    Helping to care for Abigail and Talorc’s twins, now in their fourth summer, was difficult enough. The boys did their best to worm their way into Ciara’s heart. It took all her stubborn resolve not to let herself love them.
    And deep inside, in a place she refused to acknowledge, she feared she already did…even more than she feared the dragon that had killed her brother.
    Shaking off her thoughts, she peered through the moonlit night, seeking out her first glimpse of the Éan soon to join their clan. She wasn’t supposed to know about the Éan at all. No one but a select few were. And Ciara, better than most, understood why.
    However, it was not her fault she knew many things she should not. Even without the eavesdropping. Her dreams and visions had grown more frequent since she had seen the scarlet dragon breathing fire from the sky.
    And of late, the
Faolchú Chridhe
called to her even more insistently than her dead brother’s screams and mother’s spilled blood. Ciara rarely slept, and when she did sleep it was to dream, each dream growing more fraught with urgency than the last. She could not eat because that urgency followed her into wakefulness, making her stomach tight and filling her with dread she did not understand.
    Ciara did not know what to do.
    Perhaps it was time to tell another soul about the existence of the wolves’ stone. Would that knowledge be safer in Laird Talorc’s hands than it had been in Galen’s? Pain sliced through Ciara at the probability it would.
    Galen had wanted the power of the stone to destroy the Éan. Laird Talorc would want it to help them.
    In her silent, stealthy wanderings around the keep, Ciara had heard enough to know this to be true. She knew Talorc was aware of her presence. He was a wolf with a wolf’s senses, but he never scolded her. Maybe he knew she had no one to tell the secrets she overheard.
    The faint sounds of multiple horses had Ciara looking up and dismissing all thought of secrets and the
Faolchú Chridhe
for now. A group of perhaps twenty people riding on horseback came into view. She watched intently as they rode closer and closer to the fortress without being