Free Dragon Storm by Bianca D'Arc Page A

fuel and battery power. She had to rely on solar energy for her electricity. On cloudy days, she didn’t always get a full charge on her batteries, so she had learned to be frugal. As a result, she didn’t have a whole lot of appliances that required juice—either electric or gas.
    She used the electricity mainly for lighting and entertainment, but she did have a few small electric appliances like her toaster and microwave. The stove was gas, and she had unpowered backups for almost every necessity. Hurricane lamps with full reservoirs of lamp oil stood ready should she need them, along with cords of wood for the fireplace. She could cook over it too, in a pinch, as the twins had tried to do, but she left that for true emergencies. So far, she’d never had to try it.
    Leaving the kitchen with dinner preparations well underway, Josie placed a call she never thought to make. She’d had the man’s number for over a year, just in case, but hadn’t planned to call. Tonight, it seemed, would be a first.
    She called the Alpha of the local cougar clan.
    Getting through to him was easier than she’d expected. Cougars, being native to North America, affiliated themselves more with the were population than the exotic cat shifters. They kept themselves somewhat apart from the were wolves and other were creatures, straddling the line between the cat shifters and the weres in a delicate dance of dominance.
    The leader of the small group of cougars in the area was located a few hours from Portland. They had a house and property on one side of the Columbia River Gorge and it was there, they agreed, that Darius, Connor and she would meet the Alpha the next day. She’d had to out herself in order to gain an audience with the man. She’d resisted alerting any shifters to her presence in the area for as long as she’d been here.
    This Alpha knew she wasn’t cougar. She didn’t have an affiliation among the North American clans she could claim. In order to establish herself, she’d had to tell him exactly what she was. Subterfuge was not welcome by most Alphas. He had accepted her claims with guarded interest and seemed willing to meet to discuss her problems further. Unspoken was the knowledge that if she proved she was who she said she was, her life here would never be the same. The cougars would talk. She may have just given up her privacy for the twins’ sake, but what was done was done.
    Josie disconnected the call with mixed feelings. She knew she needed help if she was going to get the twins to her grandfather, but she wasn’t sure of this Alpha. She’d never met the man, though he had a good reputation. She hoped she could trust him.
    She also hoped he and his clan members would be able to handle having a snowcat among them. Once other shifters found out what she was, they tended to get weird around her. Snowcats had a reputation for being closer to the spirits and more magical than most other shifters. It was something her grandfather and his followers did their best to encourage and maintain. As far as Josie was concerned, the reverence in which snowcats were held was only partially earned.
    It was true that her shift was more magical than others, but Josie didn’t particularly think that made her any closer to heaven, or enlightenment, or whatever you wanted to call it, than any other being. Just because she had a little more magic than most was no reason to idolize her. When other shifters started acting weird around her, Josie felt uncomfortable in the extreme.
    If they couldn’t handle her—a mere snowcat—how in the world would the locals deal with two dragons in their midst? Now there was some serious magic. Josie had felt it tingle through the air as her men shifted and ever since, she had noticed it around them. They were never entirely free of it. The magic buzzed around them in a low-level hum. It was a comforting sort of hum she hadn’t noticed until she’d felt it escalate into a symphony as they