by Chant, Zoe
He was a steady and reliable constant, no matter how much she was in flux. He was there. He was hers.
When you were part of a team, you never had control over everything. You never needed to. She could trust him to have her back, just like he could trust her to have his. They were both strong, and they were both allowed to need each other, totally and completely.
He was the still center of her universe.
Her return to human form was almost painless. There was a little bit of sadness mixed in with the relief, just because she could see some of that intoxicating simplicity slipping away from her. She could see some of her old fragilities coming back home. It looked like a lot of them had just gone into hiding, incompatible with the rush of being a dragon, but now they were back.
But not all of them. She was better now. She was better for having her dragon, just like she was better for having Boone.
She was shrinking in stature but not in significance. She was losing a natural coat of armor, but she wasn’t losing her closest protector. She was losing her claws, but not her strength.
She rested for a moment in Boone’s embrace. There was a clarity and a power here, too, and one she maybe liked even more than being a dragon. She couldn’t imagine how she’d ever lived without the gentle press of his lips to her forehead, welcoming her home to him.
“I love you,” Lindsay said.
He still returned the words without hesitation: “I love you too.”
“And,” she said, “we have work to do.”
She’d half-expected a playful rebuff to that, like he wouldn’t want to dive right back into their troubles when they could finally pause and unwind a little, but Boone just nodded.
He said, “If you can start the research, I’ll start dinner.”
Chapter Sixteen
In the end, it didn’t happen quite that fast or quite that professionally. What happened was Boone dug up the ingredients to make a decent fried rice with egg and vegetables—he figured they were both in need of some comfort food—and Lindsay hovered around him in the kitchen. It was like they were dancing with different partners: he had a spatula and she had an iPad. But they were both more interested in each other than what they were doing, and that was what shaped their dance steps. Boone would move towards the stove, and Lindsay would move with him; she would lean against the counter, and he would drift her way.
Neither one of them wanted to leave the other alone.
Research, he decided, could wait until after dinner.
When the rice was done, he was tempted by the idea of opening a couple of beers for them—he’d always found that a cold, crisp beer went great with the hot, eggy sweetness of the fried rice—but he reluctantly decided that they probably shouldn’t risk it. One beer shouldn’t hit either of them too hard, but all the same, they needed to be at their sharpest. Even the difference between being at a hundred percent and being at ninety-eight could wind up mattering.
He ran it by Lindsay, who agreed with him and grabbed a Coke instead.
“Besides,” she said, popping the tab, “I still feel like I’m half-drunk from just—being a dragon. Do you know what I mean?”
Did he ever.
“It was like being in the middle of a war zone and feeling invincible,” Boone said. He dished out the rice. “I wish we had egg rolls to go with this... No, I think it was more like I was the war zone. Everything was flying around, total chaos, but it didn’t change what I was. I know that doesn’t make sense, when I was what changed, but it felt like I was still me and everything else had gotten crazy. The colors alone...”
“They were so intense,” Lindsay said.
“And the smells.”
“Everything.” She shook her head like she still couldn’t believe it and took a bite of her rice. “Oh my God, Boone, this is incredible.”
“It’s okay,” Boone said. He couldn’t keep himself from grinning at the compliment, though. “You’re just starving. Incredible would be if we had egg rolls.”
“You’re hung up on this egg roll thing.”
He shrugged and forked some rice into his mouth. “A little, yeah. It’s not Chinese food without egg rolls. Not in America, anyway. And speaking of things making you feel tipsy, by the way, look at the clock.”
He saw her eyes flit over to the glowing green dial of the microwave. “Eight-thirty. Okay, no wonder I’m hungry. We never even had lunch.”
“Right, but think about it. The first meal we had together, the first time we met, was lunch. Brunch, I guess, technically. And that was yesterday.”
Lindsay put her fork down. “That feels like half a lifetime ago.”
“I know.” It almost made him dizzy.
He’d met her yesterday. Yesterday. And he couldn’t imagine living without her now. And no matter how much they had packed into these hours, no matter how long many years it would have taken to have those experiences together normally, nothing could change the fact that he had met her yesterday and he loved her. Unquestionably. Without a single shred of doubt.
He said, “When it comes to you, though—I’ll take the lifetime. The whole rest of my lifetime.”
She had said she loved him, and he believed her, but he still knew he might be offering her too much too soon. This might not be what she wanted, or she might not know yet what she wanted. It was exactly what he’d told himself earlier he’d keep himself from doing—but that felt like half a lifetime ago, too. That was before they’d made love. Before they’d run from Mullen. Before he had felt her turn human again in his arms.
He couldn’t keep himself from holding his breath while he waited for her answer.
Which, as it turned out, he couldn’t have predicted, because what she said was, “Ever since Eleanor, have you been hearing a little voice in your head?”
Yes, the little voice in Boone’s head affirmed.
Okay, so were they completely changing the subject, then? He’d just have to roll with it. It was his fault for pushing things too far. The last thing he wanted to do was make her uncomfortable.
“Yeah,” he said. “It sounds like me, but not entirely like me. I was kind of chalking it up to stress, something I’d have to have looked at someday.”
If I live through all this.
“But I’m hearing it too,” Lindsay said. “Another version of me, like you said. I think—I’m ninety-nine percent sure, actually—that it’s our dragons.”
She looked more comfortable than he was with saying impossible, unheard-of sentences. He respected that.
His dragon. That made a kind of sense. And in big picture terms, it was way more important to talk about that than to talk about their relationship, even if it was killing him to think that she didn’t feel the same way.
Focus, Boone told himself. If she doesn’t, she doesn’t, and she still said she loves you. She still might feel the same way someday. And that’s not what she’s interested in talking about right now, so just focus.
Okay. The voice of the dragon. No: the voice of his dragon, the dragon that was as much a part of him as his art or his war days, as much a part of him as his past or his present.
Are you me?
We’re us, the dragon voice said. It seemed to echo through him, reverberating through his whole life.
“I believe you,” Boone said. “That’s what it feels like to me too.”
Her smile was effervescent, so full of life that it felt like flowers would start spontaneously blooming in the air around her. Like a comic book illustration. Boone knew he was biased, but it felt like it would have been impossible to see that smile without falling in love with her.
“Well,” Lindsay said, “my dragon—I feel like it’s tapped into my instincts in a way that I’m not. It doesn’t have any information that I don’t, but it processes differently. Better, in some ways. There are things that I could debate forever, but what my dragon knows, it knows. And—one of the things it knows, one of the things it said about you, that my heart said about yo
u, was that you were...”
It was the first time he’d seen her blush like that in a while. This still made her face turn pink, even though they were mostly past embarrassment with each other. Huh.
She took a deep breath. “It said that you were my ‘mate.’”
MATE, Boone’s dragon agreed in what was almost a bellow.
Mate? And here he had been worried he was pushing her into too much too soon by wanting to propose to her. To be someone’s mate felt—to the dragon part of him, anyway—even more permanent and inarguable. It felt like fate and, at the same time, more than fate.
His genetics had locked into hers—and their choices had led them to each other and they had embraced each other. Every part of them was right for each other. Every part of them had chosen each other.
“Mates,” Boone said. He could feel his smile spreading out, getting wide enough to match hers. “And what do you think that means? What does your dragon think?”
Lindsay met his eyes. He had seen the gold flecks in the deep brown of her irises before, but now he saw something that he thought was new: a fine circle of silver around her pupils, the exact color of some of her dragon scales.
Lindsay said, “I think it means that we’re forever. And I like that.”
Boone suddenly felt like he was having trouble swallowing around the lump in his throat.
He said, “I like that too. Forever sounds good to me.”
They held hands across the table. For the moment, it felt like there was nothing else they needed to say. They ate one-handed so they wouldn’t have to let go of each other.
*
He’d been right. The research waited until they were done with dinner. But it wasn’t anxiety tying them close together, making it hard for them to break apart right now to focus on different things. It was a honeymoon-like rush, the drive to not be away from each other when they’d only just found each other.
He was going to cut himself a lot of slack for how much his thoughts had started sounding like greeting cards. He was an artist too busy to paint; those kinds of flourishes had to come out somewhere.
Boone put the dishes in the sink to soak and joined Lindsay at the kitchen table. This time, it was immediately apparent that she was all business. She already had her notebook and his iPad laid out in front of her, and she’d stuck an extra pen behind her ear, where the tip nudged against her ponytail. She looked like a cross between a sexy librarian and a Latina Nancy Drew, and he decided he was very into it.
Or he would have been if the attraction hadn’t been warring with a severe lack of sleep. Last night had been touch-and-go at best, and today had been such a rollercoaster ride that all he wanted to do was crawl into bed with her.
And, against all odds and nature, actually sleep.
Just as he was thinking that, he heard Lindsay yawn against her hand.
“I don’t know about you,” she said, “but I’m exhausted. Maybe research adrenaline will carry me through, but I don’t know for how long.”
Research adrenaline. He grinned. So running for her life today had been one thing, sure, but it hadn’t been quite as exciting for her as cracking the books.
“I’m tired too,” he admitted. “And you’re the one who knows what you’re doing. My main information-gathering is finding stock photos to use when I’m making something digitally, and somehow I doubt that’s going to come in handy. So whenever you’re done, we’re done, and in the meantime, whatever you need me to do, I’ll do. Like make coffee or admire you.”
“Either of those sounds good. Do you have a laptop? The typing’s easier.”
“I do.” He fetched it for her, glad to feel somewhat useful. Maybe he should go ahead and put the coffee on.
Lindsay cracked her knuckles before she got started, like a baseball player coming up to the pitcher’s mound. She looked down at his keyboard, and the corners of her mouth fell slightly.
“I’m used to mine,” she said quietly. “Or my work computer. Your keyboard’s flatter.”
He almost said that he was sorry, but he knew it wasn’t really a complaint. He took her hand and stroked his thumb along her knuckles.
He could tell she was thinking of her trashed apartment. Her missing laptop. Boone knew how much of his own life was tied up with his computer—how many projects he’d created on it—and how much of his history was lying around his house.
Lindsay had lost all of that, and she hadn’t even had any time to process it.
She touched her eyes with her free hand, delicately dabbing away tears before Boone could even see them.
“We’ll get your computer back,” Boone said firmly.
He just wished he could promise they’d get back everything Mullen had stolen from her. But there was no way to retrieve her peace of mind, and no way to mend all those broken things.
“I know,” Lindsay said. “I know we will. And I know that’s not even the most important thing. It’s ridiculous to be upset about this in the grand scheme of everything.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Research!” she said loudly, clearly choosing to tunnel into a single-minded focus. “I do so much of this as part of my job—”
Boone couldn’t help but interrupt. “You do so much researching of dragons as part of your job?”
“No, smartass. I do so much researching in general as part of my job. Water tables, soil samples, zoning laws, public opinion surveys, records of businesses competing to offer on a storefront... And I’ve seen this movie. Where the girl goes to look up vampires and she just types in ‘vampires’ and gets back exactly everything you already knew about vampires, with no way of knowing whether or not the stuff is legit or just reheated Dracula.”
“You’ve clearly spent more time watching Googling sequences in movies than I have.”
“They’re my pet peeve.”
She went on to explain why they were her pet peeve. In detail.
Boone briefly considered sketching himself sitting there listening to her, cartoon hearts drifting out of his head. It was what he felt like. And it would have been a reasonable use of his time, really, because he definitely didn’t understand anything she was talking about.
“—Boolean search terms,” Lindsay was saying. “But when you think about the metadata... Well, it’s just ridiculous.”
She looked at him, clearly waiting for some kind of response.
Boone gambled and scoffed a little and said, “Yeah, you’re completely right.”
“Thank you,” Lindsay said. She seemed satisfied by that answer. “Okay, so here we go. I’m going to look for Henry and Ursula first, but I don’t think it’s going to work.”
“Why not?”
She frowned at the screen, like she suspected it was hiding information from her. “Because we don’t even know their last names. I can search for people with those first names living in San Marco, but I don’t even know for sure that they’re within town limits. And Ursula is a little unusual, but there are going to be dozens of guys named Henry. And that’s assuming they’re on the public record at all—it doesn’t look like Eleanor was, not according to the news.”
Still, she tried. He watched her irritably run through a couple different searches, focusing mostly on Ursula’s more distinctive name, but she couldn’t turn up anything.
“I can’t exactly blame Eleanor for not providing us with business cards for these people,” Lindsay muttered, “but think of how handy that would have been. All right, enough futility for the night. This should be a little better. Dragons and Boolean search terms.”
She bent over the keyboard again.
So far as Boone could tell, Boolean search terms seemed to involve getting the search engine to exclude anything with certain words in it. So Lindsay would enter something like “dragons NOT fantasy” and immediately cut down all the book and movie descriptions she would otherwise have to wade through. Her fingers flew over the keyboard, and in under a minute, she had a whole browser’s worth of tabs
opened up.
Seeing that her attention was totally absorbed in her work and that it had made a spark of energy creep back into her face, Boone stood and went back to the kitchen, determined to make himself useful. He could still admire her from a distance, after all.
He went ahead and did the dishes. With everything so complicated, it was soothing to do something simple, to take a dirty skillet and make it clean again. He dried each fork until the steel tines shone like silver.
He could feel himself falling asleep on his feet, but it wasn’t unpleasant. For right now, he and his dragon—his instincts—were in agreement. They were safe for a little while. They could afford this moment of stillness. He decided to make a pot of coffee after all, just in case Lindsay would want some, and when it was ready, he brought her out a cup of it, sweet and milky, the way he remembered her taking it at the diner.
She had brought her legs up onto her chair and was sitting cross-legged facing him, her face luminescent in the pale glow of the laptop. She seized upon the coffee mug gratefully and thanked him at length.
When she’d gulped down half of it, she said, “Here’s what I’ve got.”
“Already?” Boone whistled.
She tried to look modest, but he could tell she was genuinely pleased at the compliment. “It’s what I do. And just picture a giant asterisk by everything I’m about to say, pointing you towards very small print that adds that, oh yeah, I don’t really know whether or not any of this is accurate.”
He laughed. “Duly noted.”
“I’ve found a couple of things that look legitimate. They’re posted by people who have a social media/screen name presence that isn’t entirely devoted to Loch Ness Monster sightings and UFO abductions.” She pushed her glasses up. “Although for all we know, Nessie’s real too, and so are little green men. It’s not like we would have said dragons were real. Anyway. All that aside, I found some people who were talking about dragons but not talking about anything else out of the ordinary—and a couple of them seem to be from around here.”
