The DRAGON Gene: A Sensational Paranormal Shapeshifter Romance (WereGenes Book 1) Read online

  I agreed that it would be. “But what are the chances of that in a relationship where two people are just blindly matched?”

  I was now seriously thinking about this myself.

  Still looking out at the snow flurries, Amy sighed. “Exactly. At first, I guess I was thinking that you and I both have at least a chance at finding love, and I think we still do…but then yesterday, while I was getting my hair cut, I started to think a little more realistically when I overheard this lady talking to her hairdresser next to me. She was saying that her niece was one of the first women in the nation to test positive for the shifter gene, and she was matched up with a shifter in a community somewhere down in Indiana. Long story short, the niece went down there a few weeks ago; she got married to her shifter husband right away; they fought like cats and dogs for a solid week; they never consummated the marriage; and the niece came right back home to Michigan. Now, she has to wait for an annulment before she can be ‘reassigned’ to a new shifter and a new community, which…good for her, I guess, because I don’t know if I’d even have the heart to. I’d probably at least need a little time to recover from the disappointment of the first marriage not working out.”

  I agreed that I probably would, too. “Let’s hope that won’t happen to us, though. Let’s hope that the vast majority of men in Greenwood are good, quality men who are easy to get along with, so that no matter who we’re matched up with, we’ll be happy.”

  “Yeah. I know we should just think positively. It’s just that I’d probably have a much easier time doing this if our matchups were the result of something other than just complete random, computerized chance. Like, maybe if we’d had to fill out a personality questionnaire or something, and the shifters did, too, and then we were matched up based on that.”

  I had to agree about this. Having the matchups be based on something other than complete chance would have seemed to make a lot more sense, but as a woman from the Genetic Testing Commission had brusquely told me on the phone, “We’re not a dating service. We believe that people in a Mating Union who are randomly matched by a computer program have just as good of a chance at successfully producing offspring as those who meet in a more traditional way.”

  She’d spoken so dispassionately and curtly, and in such a monotone voice, that I’d had to wonder if she was the random-matching “computer program” she’d spoken of.

  Amy and I talked about the chances of finding true love in a “Mating Union” relationship a little while longer, then both of us fell silent. After just a minute or two, though, I spoke again, now kind of fixated on wondering who my shifter husband was going to be.

  “Not to bug you about this again, but can you please check our emails one more time?”

  I’d already asked Amy to check both our email inboxes three times so far during the drive because we were both supposed to be receiving emails containing the names of the shifters we’d been matched with. If those emails didn’t arrive by the time we reached Greenwood, I wasn’t sure what we’d do.

  I supposed we’d just have to awkwardly hang around town, waiting, which would be made all the more awkward by the fact that the movers would be meeting us there, ready to unload our boxes at the homes of whatever shifters we were matched with.

  Amy got out her phone, saying she’d check my email again first. And just a few seconds later, she told me that my email from the Genetic Testing Commission had finally arrived. “It’s short and sweet. ‘Miss Donovan, for the purposes of a Mating Union, you have been paired with Commander Matthew Grant, of Greenwood. Best wishes on your union. Sincerely,

  Gloria Jones on behalf of the Genetic Testing Commission for the United States Government, region one-thirty-one.’”

  Matthew Grant. I kind of liked the name, and I told Amy this. “I’m also kind of relieved that whoever he is, his name isn’t ‘Seth, junior.’”

  Amy laughed. “Yeah, or just plain Seth. That wouldn’t have been an awkward introduction to your bio dad at all, would it?”

  I snorted, half-laughing. “Nope, not at all.”

  I actually had been briefly afraid of this, of being matched up with my own bio dad, until the commission lady I’d spoken to on the phone had told me that although partners in a Mating Union were randomly paired, the partners’ ages were taken into consideration, with shifters and women who had the shifter gene being put into different “age pools.”

  For example, women in their early twenties were put in a pool with men in their early twenties to late twenties; women in their mid-twenties were put into a pool with men in their mid-twenties to early thirties, and so on, so that women would be matched with men either their own age or no more than eight years older.

  These “age brackets” continued all the way up to shifter-gene-positive women in their late thirties and single shifter men in their late thirties to mid-forties.

  “Although why anyone would want to become a parent in their mid-forties is beyond me,” the commission lady I’d spoken to on the phone had sniffed.

  As long as the person was healthy and didn’t have a long family medical history of premature death or something, I personally didn’t see anything wrong with it, despite the fact that my own not-incredibly-adept-at-parenting adoptive parents had been in their mid-forties when they’d adopted me. I had the feeling that they would have been the same kind of parents, no matter what age they’d been at the time of my adoption.

  In addition to the different “age pools” for Mating Union random matchups, some people were put into sub-categories if they’d been divorced, widowed, or already had children. This was so that “clean slate folks” didn’t have to be paired up with “baggage folks,” the commission lady had told me, displaying what I thought was outrageous rudeness and insensitivity, although I took her general point. As a person who’d never been married and who didn’t have any kids, I wasn’t sure that I’d be emotionally prepared to be partnered with someone who had been married and did have kids.

  After Amy and I talked for a little while about my plan to immediately ask my husband-to-be if he had any relatives at all named Seth, no matter how distant, I asked Amy if she thought that the title of Commander before Matthew Grant’s name meant that he was probably the chief commander of Greenwood, or if she thought there could be several commanders.

  I asked this because I really had no idea about military rank, let alone rank in a shifter community that wasn’t part of the actual American military, and Amy did, at least somewhat. This was because her dad, who lived in Illinois, was an army major who’d worked closely with different shifter groups during the first year or two of the war, when the military had essentially thrown up their hands and passed off all defense operations to the different USSA shifter groups all over the country.

  In response to my question, Amy said that she was pretty sure that the title of Commander in front of Matthew Grant’s name indicated that he was the commander in Greenwood. “From what my dad has told me, that’s how it works in most USSA shifter communities, anyway. A commander is the very highest in the chain of command, responsible for giving all orders, authorizing all attacks, and so on. Apparently, USSA shifters don’t do colonel, or general, or anything like that. It’s just a commander at the top, maybe a dozen or two dozen high-ranking lieutenants, and then soldiers.

  And maybe there are more sub-categories than that, or a little more nuance in the soldiers’ ranks, but that’s just what I’ve picked up from my dad. So….” With her large green eyes twinkling, Amy glanced over at me. “It sounds like you drew the ‘top dog’ in Greenwood. Or…well, the ‘top dragon,’ I should say.”

  For some reason, this gave me a little thrill as I continued driving down the road.

  Soon, Amy checked her own inbox, found that her email from the commission had also arrived, and told me that her husband-to-be’s name was Third Lieutenant Trent Mackenzie. I asked her if she liked the name, and she didn’t answer right away, staring at her phone screen with a frown.

>   “I don’t know. I mean, I do like the name, but….”

  “‘But’ what?”

  After another moment spent staring at her phone, still frowning, Amy looked over at me. “It’s just with these commanders and lieutenants, I’m starting to get the feeling that we’re either going to really like our new husbands or really dislike them. See, men don’t become commanders and lieutenants for nothing. They’re usually extremely ambitious, authoritative, and rigid-type men, and this was the entire reason my parents got divorced. My mom just couldn’t stand my dad ‘barking orders’ at her all the time. On the other hand, though, one of my cousins has been married to a high-ranking navy admiral or something for ten years now, and she says that his ‘commanding presence’ is one of the things she loves most about him. Which makes me think that we’re really going to like or dislike our husbands. Maybe it’s just going to depend on how ‘barky’ they are.”

  Stifling a laugh at Amy’s use of the word barky, I glanced over at her. “Or how hot.”

  “Oh, I’ve been wanting to bring up the ‘hot factor,’ but I didn’t want to seem shallow. Not that Kendra’s even around right now, but still.”

  A year or so earlier, one of our mutual friends, Kendra, had accused Amy of being “too picky about looks” and “shallow” when deciding whether to date a man, and even though Kendra had later claimed to have been only joking, Amy had been a little stung. Since then, she’d seemed to go out of her way to “rate” men on personality traits alone, not on physical characteristics.

  Glancing over at her, I told her that there was absolutely nothing wrong with hoping for a husband who was “hot,” and I meant it. I was hoping for a husband who was “hot.” I assumed the vast majority of women would be. This wasn’t to say that looks were absolutely everything to me or even a large part of “everything.”

  In fact, over the course of the previous ten or eleven years since I’d started dating at about age sixteen, I’d gone out with more than a few teenaged boys and men who would have probably been deemed subpar in the looks category. However, with each of these less-than-model-perfect guys, there was something non-physical that had attracted me to them, whether that was a sense of humor, kindness, or just general personality.

  So, I’d given each of them a chance. Besides, even though I’d always had what I thought was a fairly healthy sense of self-esteem about my looks, I’d always considered my own self to be less-than-model perfect. I’d always liked my face well enough, but as far as my body, I was decidedly on the shorter side.

  And even though I’d always been very physically active, first as a club team gymnast and then as a coach, I’d always been probably a bit heavier than most fashion designers would have liked. And a bit heavier than most gymnastics coaches and dance teachers I’d had would have liked, for that matter, although no one had ever said anything rude or negative to me.

  In fact, during our teenage years, Amy and many of the other girls on our club team had frequently complimented me on my “nice boobs” and my “awesomely curvy hips,” as Amy had once described these parts of my body. “Flat as a board” until we were about eighteen, she’d been perpetually envious of girls with “nice boobs” or even any “boobs” at all.

  Even in present day, she wasn’t really happy with how things had developed for her, being an A-cup bra size. “And now that I’m well into my twenties, it’s probably safe to assume that I’m done ‘growing,’” Amy was fond of saying whenever lamenting her lack of “curves,” which was frequently.

  The bottom line was that because I realized that I might not be someone’s ideal in the looks department, I was willing to cut a man some slack if he wasn’t my ideal, as long as I liked his personality and everything else about him well enough. That being said, though, I was kind of hoping that I would find Matthew Grant “hot.” I was kind of hoping that he would find me “hot.”

  In response to what I’d said about there being nothing wrong with us wanting to find our husbands “hot,” Amy said good. “Then, we can just go ahead and spell it out. We want husbands who we generally like, at the very least, and husbands who aren’t barky. And if they’re hot, that’s a major bonus, and we don’t need to feel ‘shallow’ about saying that.”

  “Right.”

  “Besides, I think we have a good shot of our husbands being hot anyway. I’ve heard that a lot of the shifters in Greenwood are.”

  “Well…we’re about to find out.” Realizing I was becoming little nervous, I took a slow, deep breath before speaking again. “Two minutes, and we’ll be there.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Even though it wasn’t that far away from Moxon, where I’d lived all my life, I’d never been to Greenwood. I’d never had any reason to go. Before the dragon war, it had just been a tiny, sleepy little village of several hundred people, kind of out in the middle of nowhere, about a half-mile off of US-12.

  From what I’d heard, in the nineteen-fifties it had been something of a picturesque “closet community” for people who’d worked further up the highway at various mills and manufacturing plants. By the nineties, though, all the mills and plants had closed, leading to a mass exodus of young people from Greenwood. When the war began, it was said that mostly elderly folks remained. Elderly folks, one stoplight, a post office, and one tiny restaurant, that is.

  Then, in the first year of the war, the village had just emptied, with most residents moving to live closer to family or heading down south to states where there hadn’t been so much Bloodborn activity. By the time the government decided that Greenwood would be a great location to install a permanent division of the Michigan USSA dragons, only two Greenwood residents had remained, and they’d gladly accepted government payouts to move.

  From that point on, Greenwood had become a “USSA-controlled territory,” meaning that regular citizens weren’t allowed to just move on in. Regular citizens couldn’t even visit Greenwood without a specific reason and some sort of a special government-issued permit.

  This was why, after I’d turned off US-12 and had been driving for about a half-mile, I wasn’t very surprised to see a roadblock barring me from driving any further. I was more surprised by what I didn’t see, which was anyone guarding the roadblock. I would have thought that there would have been “checkpoint” guards or something.

  Without them, any person who wanted to just drive right through could easily do so after getting out of their vehicle, picking up one side of the roadblock, and simply moving it. Made of what appeared to be neon orange-painted wood, and constructed in a long sawhorse type of shape, the roadblock didn’t look that heavy. I’d probably moved balance beams in my day that were heavier.

  After stopping the car and putting it in park just a short distance away from the roadblock, I was just turning my head to look at Amy and ask her what she thought we should do when something caught my eye. That something was the sight of two dark shapes in the gray sky far beyond my windshield, although these dark shapes were becoming closer every second. And within three or four seconds, it was clear what they were. Dragons.

  I’d seen a few USSA dragons during the war years, but they’d always been high in the sky, almost looking like dots, as they patrolled the state. I hadn’t seen any up close during Bloodborn attacks, either, because of course, I’d always taken shelter in either the cement-walled storage level beneath the gym or in my apartment building’s basement with all the other residents.

  Now, though, it looked like I was finally going to get to see dragons up close, and not just “up close” in news footage of fighting.

  Beating their massive dark wings against currents of snow flurries in the air, the two dragons descended quickly while Amy and I watched them. Mentally admonishing myself, I realized I should have known that “checkpoint guards” in USSA territory wouldn’t be just monitoring a roadblock from the ground, maybe strolling up and down the length of it with automatic weapons at the ready or something.

  After all, I couldn’t think of a
ny better way to monitor an area than from the sky, which dragons could obviously easily do. And as far as the stereotypical military-style guns that I associated with checkpoint guards just from watching movies, I was pretty sure that dragon fire was probably even more lethal.

  After landing maybe thirty feet from my car, the two dragons shifted into human form and began walking over, both dressed in all black, from pants to shirts to coats, right down to their heavy black boots. As they got closer, I could see that both men were probably in their late twenties or early thirties, and both were tall and well-built. One had sandy blond hair, and the other had red hair, although the shade was a deep, dark red, much closer to auburn than flame red.

  Amy exhaled a fluttery little breath, then spoke in an equally-fluttery sort of voice. “Please let him be mine. Oh, please let him be mine.”

  I didn’t even need to ask which man she wanted to be “hers.” Although she’d dated men with brown hair and blond hair, she’d always had a “thing” for red-haired men. However, unfortunately, she’d just never had the chance to have a relationship with a red-haired man. Until now. Maybe. If the auburn-haired man approaching the car now was even “hers,” which I considered to be a long shot, considering that there were hundreds of shifters in Greenwood.

  Actually clasping her hands in her lap, as if unconsciously praying, Amy had her gaze locked on him. “Oh, dear God…I’ll do anything if you let that man be Lieutenant Trent Mackenzie. Please just let that unbelievably hot red-haired man be mine. Please let him have at least a halfway-decent personality, too, and please let him think that my personality is at least halfway-decent. Oh, and also, please make it so that he somehow has a thing for women with hair the mousiest, ugliest brown imaginable.”