She released his hand and crossed over her heart. “I’ll do my best, I promise. Now, here’s what we need to gather before we explore the first few locations…”
As Daisy went into detail about supplies, Freddie helped her narrow down the list.
Judging from her choices, Freddie thought maybe she and the human children needed survival training, too. He’d suggest it to the teachers later. Even if they couldn’t change into dragons, they needed to know how to escape if the dragon hunters attacked.
Soon they had a plan, and a schedule, and Freddie couldn’t help smiling as they walked toward their two homes. As muchas he liked growing and learning more about being a dragon-shifter, he’d missed these times with Daisy.
And even if they never found any treasure, he wouldn’t care.
Chapter Three
Daisy tightened the hood of her waterproof coat and followed Freddie to their next location, which meant walking through overgrown fields full of mud. She was cold and wet, but she refused to give up.
This was their third day of searching. The other two times hadn’t revealed any treasure, or even a hidden bunker. They’d just walked through loads of vegetation and mud, and had only found a few stone cottages that had seen better days.
But the cottage ruins had matched the ones on the old map from the history book, which gave her hope that they were on the right track.
Freddie stopped, and she nearly bumped into him. She whispered, “What is it?”
“I hear something, like water dripping underground.”
She gripped his arm. “Maybe it’s one of the cisterns! They were built close to the bunkers, at least according to the old map.”
He glanced at her, his pupils flashing to slits in the faint light from their LED lantern. “If it is, and it’s full of water, then we’re definitely not going into it.”
“Maybe if there’s only a puddle, we can. I mean, thisisEngland. We don’t often get giant amounts of rain at a time, just drizzles. So it shouldn’t fill up super fast or anything.”
Freddie sighed. “We’ll see. But if I say it looks dangerous, will you listen?”
“I always try to listen to you, Freddie. But if it’s a puddle, I mean, that’s not too bad.”
“Fine,” he growled and walked a few more feet away before crouching. “Come shine your light over here.”
Daisy rushed over and did as he asked. The light revealed a deep, tank-like thing—meaning it was probably a cistern—and less than an inch of water sat on the bottom, along with some really old-looking bricks. Oh, and some rocks and plants, and was that an animal’s skeleton of some sort?
He lay on the ground and put his head partway into the opening. “It’s small, maybe two meters across, and I don’t see anything worth looking at.” She opened her mouth to protest about a possible hidden compartment, but he beat her to it. “First, we’ll look for the secret bunker before thinking about going into this thing. Because there was supposed to be one here, right, near the cistern? It’d be easier to search in the rain.”
As much as she wanted to argue, he was right. A dry bunker would be easier than a soggy cistern.
She took out the map—she’d put it inside a waterproof thing hikers used—and shined her torch on it. She tapped the old bunker on the map. “Yes, it can’t be more than a few meters from here. Or, feet, as the old map says.” She moved her light around the area. “It looks bigger than the others on the map, so it might have a partially aboveground entrance. I saw one of those on the telly once.”
“Hmm. Maybe. Let’s search the area separately and tell me if you find anything. But under no circumstances should you enter by yourself. We stick together, Daisy. It’s safer that way.”
She bit back a smile. “You’re sounding more and more like a Protector, Freddie.”
He stood a little taller. “Well, that’s the goal. Eventually.”
She quickly patted his shoulder and then scanned the area. “Right, then let’s get searching.”
And as she looked for any sign of the bunker, her heart raced. They hadn’t found any so far, and they were running out of places to look.
So there had to be one here, there just had to.
Since Freddie had better vision—dragon-shifterscould see just as well at night as during the day—he looked for the hard-to-spot clues that might reveal an old bunker.
Given what he knew of dragon-shifter history from school, the dragons had been more discreet about their bunkers than the humans. Because early on in World War II, some dragons in the south had made more visible bunkers, kind of like the human ones. But whenever the air raid sirens went off, the dragon haters had easily hunted them down and killed them.
He’d like to think that Stonefire had been smarter and had hidden them better. Since it had taken a little longer for the war to reach the northern dragon clan, they should’ve learned from the mistakes in the South.
