Chapter One

The shopping cart wobbled and weaved as I tried to avoid the meat section at the local market. My cart already contained what I could afford until my next paycheck. A twelve-pack of ramen. Peanut butter and jelly. Bread. Hot dogs. That was going to have to see me through the week.

My animal had other ideas. Always. Every chance my dragon got, he tried to dominate. That didn't work well at all in the human world because he didn't care about money, rent, or car payments. Like a child, he simply wanted what he wanted.

Meat.

I mumbled under my breath. "I'll get us a whole chicken on Friday when my paycheck comes, okay?"

I steered the cart away from the steaks, chicken, and pork, and headed toward the cheap toilet paper.

He growled deep inside me, and the cart veered at a sharp angle, nearly hitting a shelf of paper towels.

Meat. Now.

My stomach rumbled. I wanted it, too. The eight-pack of hot dogs was the best I could afford right now. My account was quickly heading toward single digits.

Through gritted teeth, I said, "You'll have to wait."

I grabbed the front of the cart hard, my knuckles turning white, and pushed against my dragon's will, moving quickly down another aisle.

Immediately, I saw the mistake I'd made as I entered a small office supply section and suddenly felt a little dizzy. Amid the little flowered notebooks, packs of stickers, and colorful erasers hung the pens. Glorious, shining, lovely pens. There were the ten-packs of blue and black, which were the cheapest, all the way up to a rainbow assortment of gel pens, some with actual glitter. Some packages held only one special pen. Those were the good ones for signing important papers or writing slow love poems in a spiral-bound diary.

To make matters worse, everything in this section was on sale!

My dragon said, Rarroar!

He immediately screeched like a lost child in my mind. All because of the pens.

Yes. Pens. It made no sense, and I had stopped questioning it after I left my flight, where I'd never fit in, to scout my own life.

Pens made up my—our—hoard, and there was nothing we could do about it. The desire to hoard pens was like the need to breathe. Trying to rationalize such a unique need always ended up in frustration. I—we—simply needed to collect them. It didn't matter if they were freebies from insurance companies or expensive designer jeweled ones. We wanted them all. Pocket pens, flashlight pens, glow-in-the-dark pens, quill pens, pens shaped like animals or candy canes or topped with fake flowers.

I took a deep breath, trying to control the urge. It was no use. My dragon was practically crying. I grabbed a six-pack of clear red and blue plastic pens on sale for ninety-nine cents and threw it into the front basket. We could afford that much. At least they were pretty.

"That's it," I mumbled softly. "That's all we can pay for right now."

My dragon quieted and curled contentedly within my thoughts. The meat was forgotten. For a little while.

As I walked away from the office supplies, I had to suppress the urge to look over my shoulder one last time at the beautiful pen selection. It wasn't like I didn't already have a lot of pens, but the impulse to add to the hoard was irresistible. If only my inclination had been to hoard something worthwhile, like coins or silver. As it was, my hoard was worthless, but it was mine.

When I got home, Dez, my roommate, was out. I quickly put away my groceries, added the pens to my hoard hidden in a big toy chest in my closet, and wolfed down a peanut butter and jelly sandwich before heading off to my second job.

I worked nights bussing tables and doing dishes at a local bar from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. By day, I worked the register at a gift shop in Old Town. Between the hours of 2 and 10 a.m. I managed to snatch as much sleep as I could. And when I had a day off one job or the other, I used that extra time to catch up on sleep, pay some bills and, if I was lucky enough, watch a little TV.

I dreamed of a different life. Didn't everyone?

I wanted a mate. A family. Someone to care about, to love. It didn't seem impossible. Other people had that sort of life. Why not me? But the situation I was in gave me absolutely zero extra time to even look for someone, let alone time to date. It was like being backed into a corner with no option but to hunker down and wait for the storm to pass.

But this wasn't a storm. This was worse. It was like I was wearing a mask over my eyes that I couldn't take off, and I couldn't see a way out.

With that feeling came useless and negative thoughts. I felt like a loser. I told myself there was a reason I didn't fit in and had left my flight. Something must be wrong with me. Even if I had time to date, who would want me? I had minimum wage jobs and a worthless hoard. No other dragon would have me in this state. I could offer nothing to any potential mate.

My only consolation: I was still young. Dragon shifters tended to live pretty long lives. But how long was I going to have to wait? My dragon was restless. He wanted to soar. He wanted a mate.

One day at a time, I told myself.

I felt bad because I hadn't had time to shift for months. I'd ignored our need to stretch our wings. My shifter life had gotten buried under other more pressing needs. Like paying rent and eating. Come Friday, I totally owed my dragon that whole baked chicken.

I arrived at my night job right on time.

Three hours into my shift, as luck would have it, the bar cook had made an order of hot wings when the customer had ordered plain. Instead of throwing them away, he gave them to me on my break. So my dragon had a few bites of spicy chicken. We weren't all that keen on spicy food, but we didn't complain for one second. Plus, dousing them in ranch dressing helped curb the burn.

I sat on a milk crate in the back room enjoying my food. That sort of boon didn't happen every day. We busboys weren't supposed to eat kitchen food. But sometimes the cooks pushed leftovers at us and looked the other way. They knew the wage we made per hour.

When my break was over, I went back to work cleaning tables and putting glassware in the dishwasher.

As I cleared the last table for the night, another boon happened. Someone had left behind an amazingly beautiful, thick green pen with a metal base. It even wrote in green ink. I looked around to see if the customers at the table were actually gone. There was no sign of them.

I pocketed the pen. My dragon made a happy little rarroar deep inside me.

It wasn't stealing. The bar had a box behind the counter for lost phones and wallets—no one who didn't work here would believe how many people left behind those expensive items. But for pens, well, if I'd thrown one in the box, I would've been laughed at. Plus, as beautiful as this pen was, I'd seen it before and knew its price. It retailed for five bucks, less if you could find it on sale.

Anyway, nobody at the bar thought about pens being worth anything. Not unless they were dragon shifters who added them to their hoard as if they were made of pure gold. So no, it wasn't stealing.

I went home full of chicken wings and happy about the pretty green pen. In my life, you had to take your wins as they came. This was a win.

For now.