Hydra Read Online Free PDF

from the mirror above the mantle, glowing with vibrant color.
    My mom makes an exasperated face. “Why don’t you want to marry?”
    I sigh. She’s asked me this question before, and I’ve thought about it. I can almost put it into words, but I don’t want to offend her. “I want to be me.”
    “You don’t stop being yourself when you marry.”
    “But I want to be me . Wren. Alone. Master of my fate, hero of my own story. Ever notice how many movies, when they get married, that’s it? The story ends when they get married, or fall in love, or whatever. I don’t want my story to end.”
    “It doesn’t end. You just live happily ever after.”
    “As someone else. Your name changes. You change. I don’t want to change.” I scowl. She’s gotten out of telling me her story. Time to fix that, and quickly, before my sisters show up and she refuses to tell it at all. “Enough about me. The Sheehys. What makes you think they’re dragons?”
    There’s a fireplace at one end of the sitting room, and a handy stack of wood beside it. Still cold in my damp clothes, I head toward the stone mantel, while Mom settles into one of the two sofas that flank the hearth.
    I pile wood in the fireplace, check to be sure the damper’s open, and open my mouth as though to yawn, instead letting loose a torrent of flames onto the dry wood, starting a crackling, cheery fire.
    Sometimes I love being a dragon.
    “Mom?” I turn to find her looking sheepish. “The Sheehys?”
    She begins reluctantly. “You know how my mother and father met, right? My mother, your grandmother, Faye Goodwin, is from Scotland. She was a dragon, one of the last of her kind. She saw her friends and family hunted nearly to extinction, and she began to despise what she was. So when Eudora, a dragon from Siberia, sent a rumor through the dragon world that she could change dragons into humans, my mother went to her.”
    I settle into the sofa opposite my mom, cringing slightly, because I hate this part of the story. My grandmother was tricked by Eudora and nearly killed. Fortunately my mom spares me the details.
    “My father, Elmir, had spies watching Eudora. He learned Faye was there and went to rescue her. Until that time, he’d never met her. Didn’t know anything about her, hadn’t even realized there was a female dragon anywhere in the world until it was almost too late. But as he tried to nurse her back to health from her injuries, they got to know each other and fell in love. I am their only child, hatched from the lone egg she laid before Eudora attacked again and the yagi killed my mother.”
    I nod, knowing well the story from this point forward. Mom had no idea she was a dragon until she was eighteen, almost nineteen, and the yagi hunted her down. My father protected her and brought her back to her father, Elmir, her only living parent.
    Mom continues, “At the time when my father and mother met, my father only knew of very few remaining dragons, nearly all of them male. He asked my mother if she knew any other dragons.”
    This is new. I’ve never heard this part of the story, and I’m instantly intrigued. “Did she?”
    “She said there was a dragon who lived near Loch Ness, a male dragon. Long before, they’d discussed marriage, but since she didn’t want to be a dragon anymore, she didn’t want to marry him. She wanted to be something else. She rebuffed his advances and refused him.”
    I’m on the edge of the sofa now, riveted. There is another dragon in this world? We’re not alone? It’s the most amazing feeling. Incredible, really. And since dragons don’t grow any older once they’ve reached the age of maturity, there’s every chance the dragon is still around, an eligible mate for one of my sisters. “What’s his name?”
    “She didn’t say.”
    “She didn’t say ?” I’m gob smacked. This is the most important information anyone could have told me, perhaps ever, and my grandmother simply failed to mention