Free Love Burns by Georgette St. Clair Page A

brother, you know. David robbed a bank and died in prison, and his brother – that was Louis – ended up in some kind of shootout with the centurions, and—”
    “Oh goodness, look at the time! I’ve got to get to my…” Olivia trailed off as she hurried out the door. Velma would start talking and never stop. Literally never. Word around town was that she gossiped in her sleep – at least that was what her husband said.
    As Olivia headed out to the Mortensen house, she felt a glow of pride that her mother hadn’t given in to the town snobbery. Maybe if more people had given the halfling family a chance, things would have turned out differently for the Mortensen men. Of course, they had made their own choices – terrible choices. But growing up in a town where everybody turned their back on you and told you that you were no good – maybe it had turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
    Most dragon shifters were rich, and a dragon shifter who was poor and was a halfling who couldn’t shift…well, unfortunately a lot of dragon shifters would look down on them. She was glad to hear that her mother had befriended them back in the day, and she intended to do the same thing.
    When she got to the Mortensens’ run-down house on the edge of town, she saw four children playing outside.
    The house was little more than a shack – it certainly wasn’t big enough for a mother and four kids. There was a scrappy vegetable garden that looked like one of the children had planted it. One of the windows was cracked, and from the way the Mortensens were treated in town, Olivia had a shrewd suspicion it had been a bully with a stone, not a kid with a baseball. It had been carefully taped – a neat repair job, but it would do nothing to keep out the weather.
    The children stopped and looked up apprehensively as she parked and climbed out. Based on how everybody had been treating them, she didn’t blame them.
    “Hey, guys! I just wanted to let you know that there’s an ice dragon security guard at the playground now,” she told them. “You can go back and play there any time.”
    “I don’t think we’ll go back there. My mom said to tell you thanks, though,” Robbie said. “She’s at work.”
    “Oh, what does she do?”
    “Waitress at the North Pole restaurant, waitress at the Ice Pops diner, and works for the town sanitation department on the weekends.” He ticked off each job on his fingers.
    “Wow. Busy woman,” Olivia said admiringly.
    Robbie glanced at his younger sister, who was drawing pictures in the dirt with a stick. “We don’t have insurance, and my sister needs her medicine. Otherwise she has seizures.”
    “Oh. That’s a lot to handle.” She tried to think what she could do to help without outright giving them money. “Would you like a part-time job in town?”
    He shook his head. “Can’t. I have to watch the kids while my mom works.” His face lit up. “When I’m sixteen I can drop out of school and then I can get a full-time job and help my mom.”
    Well, that sucks , Olivia thought. That was the best that he had to look forward to? At least he wasn’t robbing banks like his dad and uncle.
    “If you need anything, remember, call my office,” she told him. Then she headed to Calder’s house.
    Calder lived right on the border of South Lyndvale and North Lyndvale. The house was small, for a dragon shifter’s home. It was brick, of course; no fire dragon ever lived in a wooden house. It had a steeply pitched roof, probably with asbestos shingles, and steps leading neatly up to a stained glass front door with a mosaic of a dragon breathing fire.
    It was on several acres of property, studded with a string of small lakes sheltering among the pine trees. Beyond the water the land undulated gently before climbing into steep, thickly wooded hills that aspired to be mountains with their angular outcroppings of rock. Behind the house, she saw a small cobblestone guest cottage with roses growing