A Dragon's Bond by S.B. Johnson Read Free Book Online

opened up to a page containing a picture of a man and a dragon. The two were overlapping one another. Beside the picture was writing that neither of them could decipher. It was written in some foreign language. There were scribbles of notes written along the edges of the page. Davin began turning the pages in the book. One of the pages pulled from the book as he went to flip the page, falling to the floor. Chloe quickly leaned down and picked the page up from the ground. Chloe's attention turned to a small iron box over a wood burning stove in the corner of the room.
    " Davin. Do you know what this is? It's a incubation box."
    The small box was entirely made from a thick heavy iron. From the sides down to the hinges that held the lid in place. It was large enough to hold one dragon egg. They were used to incubate a dormant egg. The heat from the stove caused the box to heat immensely. The egg inside would change from it's soft leathery state into a hard stone like material. The heat would also trigger the embryo to begin to grow and slowly form into a small dragon. After weeks of intense heat the egg would crack and a hatchling dragon would emerge.
    " Whoever is stealing the eggs must be hatching them." Davin said as he placed a hand up towards his face and began to scratch his head. "I wonder what they do with them?"
    He looked to Chloe who had been examining the pages that had fallen to the floor. She stood completely mesmerized by whatever she was looking at. Davin reached over and pulled the pages from her hands. The page she had been looking at, had another image along with notes and scribbles. It was a rough image of a man. He was holding a knife in one hand and what appeared to be a hatchling dragon in the other. The man had the hatchling lifted above his head and blood was dripping from the dragon down to the man's mouth.
    Chloe snatched the pages back from Davin. "We have to show these to someone. My brother or your dad. Somebody."
    They both began to feel uneasy about the situation they had come to find themselves in. They rushed out of the room closing the door behind them. They ran as fast as the could back to the small passageway that lead back to the chamber.
    Davin peered out of the opening and saw that the chamber was still empty, other than the eggs. He stepped out into the room with Chloe close behind. As they crossed the room, Chloe's eyes lit in amazement as the eggs lit up following Davin's position as he crossed the room. When they got back to the rope, Davin hurried up and held out a hand to assist Chloe up into the vent. Chloe pulled up the rope behind her and replaced the grate that covered the vent. They quietly passed by the guards once more, who had not even detected the hint of disturbance in the chamber behind them.
    The two children climbed out from the vent and back into the closet. Chloe grabbed Davin's hand. "Don't say anything to anyone. I will take care of it. If you say something they might just accuse you of being the thief."
    Davin once again agreed not to say anything to anyone. Really he wanted to forget all about it. When he got back to his room and got into his bed it was late, but he did not have school the next day. So he wasn't worried about being exhausted and would have the leisure of a late morning. As he lay there halfway into sleep, he felt his stomach begin to turn again at the thought of the image on the page Chloe had picked up. Why would anyone want to drink the blood of a hatchling dragon. The thought alone made Davin sick to his stomach. He squirmed a bit in his bed and fought the images in his head as he drifted to sleep.
    Little did Davin know that Chloe had no intentions of revealing their secret. Even though she did not show it, she was as terrified of the situation as Davin. She too had been sickened by the thought of the image. She glanced over to a trunk at the foot of her bed. She had tucked the pages in a small diary and stuffed it in the trunk as soon as she