One True Mate 2: Dragon's Heat

by Ladew, Lisa

  She focused her thoughts into a stream and imagined Graeme’s little cottage right where they both were looking. She felt something happening, a shimmering of the air, a converging of energies.

  It appeared. A cottage like Graeme’s in some ways, but so different it startled her. She jumped backwards and ran into her dragon.

  She turned to him, wondering if he was going to transform or not. “Did you make it appear?”

  No, leannan, that was all you.

  She nodded and studied it. The cottage itself looked proud, if a building could look that way, even in its state of disrepair. The beams for the roof shot straight up into the sky, scooping in a way that wasn’t practical and she knew was all for show. No sort of roof covered it though, it had been destroyed by the weather years and years ago. The windows and doors of the place had likewise worn away a long time before, but the beams and walls of the cottage itself held. It was bigger than Graeme’s, and something about it set Heather’s teeth on edge. Her eyes ran over the corners of the building until she realized what it was that bothered her. Gleaming white bones lined the eaves of the house. She gasped and walked to her left to see the walls she couldn’t see from her vantage point and, as she approached the back of the house, she found more bones, a pile of them. Heather shuddered, knowing what she would find before she did. Human skulls visible in the pile here and there, the empty eye sockets and toothy stares unnerving her. She ran back to her dragon and pushed close to him.

  “What are we doing here?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer, only stared, and she tried to catch his feelings, which she thought she could, at least a bit. Sadness. Bitterness. Loneliness. Regret.

  He peered into the trees, then back. What does this place feel like to you?

  She chose her words carefully, as they seemed to mean something important to her dragon. “Bad. Like there’s been a lot of suffering here.”

  Aye, it’s in the ground and air here, even after all these years. This was the home of my oldest brother, Keir. He killed our mother and brother on this very spot we are standing on.

  Heather shuddered. Her dragon’s voice in her head held a note of melancholy that made her heart ache.

  In her pocket, her phone began to ring. She reached in and silenced it, glad for the pull back into the present, but not wanting to talk to anyone. She looked around, surprised she even got a signal at the top of the mountain.

  My brother Keir was ten years older than I was. He and Kendric were doublets, but Keir was the one everyone noticed. The one I idolized.

  “Do you mean twins?”

  Aye, twins. They looked the same, but in personality they were as different as night and day. Kendric was not very smart. He was a bit of a follower and relied on Keir to do his thinking for him. Keir was strong, commanding, a natural leader. He could get anyone to do anything, and if they didn’t do what he wanted, he massacred them. Under Keir’s tutelage, I unleashed my share of carnage upon the people of this land and other lands we traveled to in search of gold, fine food, and women.

  His voice dropped on the last word and Heather felt her heart seize up. What was he telling her? Would her barely-acknowledged love for him survive this story?

  Kendric and I traveled with Keir on his missions. I sometimes helped with the conquests, only because he wanted me to, not because he needed my help. As an adult, I learned that dragonslayers were mostly a myth. No knight could fight us in dragon form. We were too powerful. The only beings that even tried to stop our destruction and save the humans from us was the shiften. It’s been so long since most of them have seen a dragen that they may not even remember we used to be mortal enemies. Most dragen only joined in the fight against Khain if it gained them something personally.

  Inside her head, Heather heard the pain in her dragon’s voice. She maneuvered herself so she faced him directly and lifted a hand to his cool cheek, her heart resolute. No matter what he told her, she knew him now. He was no brute, no killer. He was the kindest, most thoughtful man she’d ever met, and the fact that he was much more than just a man didn’t change that one bit.

  His red and yellow dragon eyes stared at her, the colors shifting liquidly until she saw purple, then more shifting until she saw fire again. She felt a new connection with him, making her want to open up to him. She would take on his pain if she could. Some of it, all of it, it didn’t matter.

  I was never a bloodthirsty dragon. I had never had it in me, even in our make-believe fights at home. Keir would always go for the throat, and so would Kendric, encouraged by Keir. I would go for a leg, or an arm, until teased and pushed to my limit by my brothers, and only then would I ‘behave like a dragen’, in their eyes. It may have been my age, because I was much younger than them, or it may have been a temperament I was born with. I did not, however, begrudge my family and the others of my kind of what did seem to be natural dragon tendencies. They killed and maimed humans with no more thought than the humans themselves seemed to give to taking out those of their kind. It was a bloody, savage time, Heather, not good for women, or children, or anyone, really.

  He broke their eye contact and looked up at the sky, then back at his brother’s cottage, then pulled in a deep breath and went on.

  Our mother was the last female dragen, so we all knew our time was running short. Even at our highest population, there were only three hundred or so of us, and dragen bairn were not easy to conceive, birth, or raise. Over the millennia, that number dwindled extensively, which might have been one reason why dragen felt so entitled to take what we wanted. My brothers and I never had mates. Never even had chances for mates. There were occasionally rumors of females, supposedly witches, who could withstand mating with a dragen, and this was one reason we traveled, bursting into a village from the sky and taking their best gold and food, killing the men and raping the women, witches or not.

  Heather gasped, making Graeme stop. He stared directly into her eyes.

  You see, Heather, dragen and humans were not meant to be together.

  She took a step backwards, shaking her head. No, she wouldn’t believe it. She couldn’t. The man─ dragen she knew would never have done that. And suddenly she knew. She could hear it in the tone of his story. He hadn’t.

  “Did you ever rape anyone?”

  He didn’t answer for a long time and she wondered if he was going to lie. But why?

  He unfurled his wings suddenly, stretching them out, lifting his neck to the sky, and then curling back in on himself. No. I did not. But I stood by while my brothers did so to all the maidens in the village that caught their eye.

  She walked closer to him, reaching her hand up to touch his neck. “Is that why you’re so scared to be with me? Have you seen many women die that way?”

  He snorted hard and shook his scaly head into the sky, then calmed. I used to hypnotize them so they wouldn’t feel the pain of their death.

  Heather bit her lip, wondering at the life he had led. So much experience and knowledge there. So much wisdom and goodness, and he didn’t even know it, wouldn’t acknowledge it.

  “You killed Keir, didn’t you?”

  He transformed then, into a man. Into Graeme, his eyes intense, burning with some emotion she couldn’t quite place. He grabbed her hand. “How do you know that?”

  She stared at him. “You couldn’t take it anymore. Even if people were killing each other, that didn’t give your brother a right to do what he was doing to beings who couldn’t possibly defend themselves from him. He wasn’t searching for a female who could mate with him. He was destroying people for fun. That wasn’t you. That was never you, even if you participated for a while out of loyalty, or just misguided youth. Eventually you couldn’t take it anymore, so you killed him.”

  He took a deep breath, pulling the air into his lungs like he was drowning, then squeezed her hand so hard her bones rubbed together, but she didn’t give an inch and kept her face carefully neutral and her energy accepting.

  He opened
his mouth to say something, then shut it again, then opened it, then ripped his hand out of hers and began walking in a straight line, away from the cottage. She followed, having to run to do so.

  He stopped so suddenly she almost ran into his back, then turned, his expression bitter.

  “I killed people, Heather. Humans. Your kind. Shiften, too, probably, I have no way of knowing. I did it for no good reason, none at all. No amount of wishing it wasn’t true will make up for that.”

  This time, she took his hand, gently. She pulled it into her chest. “And how many years have you been trying to atone for that?”

  He dropped his head, his hand limp in hers.

  “It’s not possible. I can’t ever make up for it.”

  Chapter 27

  Heather’s eyes narrowed and her heart dropped. If he really believed that, most of what she’d seen of him so far was a smokescreen, an external personality that very effectively hid the depression within. “What have you been doing since you killed your brother?”

  His head hung at his chest. “I killed some other dragen, too. Others who were raping and killing like Keir. All of them, I thought.”

  Heather nodded. “Uh huh, and then what? How long ago did you kill the last dragen besides yourself?”

  “Six hundred and fifty-two years ago.” His answer came easily, like he wanted her to know this, at least.

  “Ok, so you killed the last dragen. Then what did you do?”

  His shoulders sagged, making him look smaller, less alive. Like he had looked when she first saw him. Something dangerous seemed to coalesce around him, like electricity crackling in a lightning storm.

  She pulled his hand closer and stepped into his space. If he was going to do something to himself, he would have to get through her. She reached up and took his chin in her free hand, encouraging him to look at her. “Graeme, tell me. Tell me what you did after.”

  His voice was dull. Dead. “I tried to kill myself.”

  It couldn’t get much worse than that. “How?”

  “I tried to drown myself in a loch. I tied a great anchor to my body and dumped myself over the side of a boat.”

  Heather’s heart sped up as she tried to imagine the depths of her dragon’s pain, but she couldn’t do it. “That didn’t work?” she asked gently.

  His head hung lower still, but he seemed willing to talk, if not exactly eager. “Dragen are hard to kill. I thought drowning would do it, or at least put out my fire, which would weaken me, but apparently only taking the head clean off will do it. That’s how I killed Keir and the other dragen.”

  Heather’s breath shook, but she pushed on. Graeme needed to tell this and she needed to hear it. What happened between them when it was all out, she had no idea. Her phone rang again in her pocket and she pushed the button hard to silence it before she touched Graeme again. “How long did you spend under the water?”

  “A hundred and two years, the first time. It’s pleasant under the water. Almost like a hibernation. Everything slows down. I don’t think. That’s almost as good as death.”

  “The first time?”

  “Aye. I’ve gone back in every time I’ve come out, so far. I seem to have a built-in alarm clock that wakes me around every fifty years or so.”

  “So you’ve missed the last six hundred and fifty-two years? Don’t… Can’t… Isn’t there anything that you want to live for these days? Can’t you see the world has changed? Nobody is like they used to be. Life is not how it used to be, all hard scrabble and constant vigilance. There’s comfort now. There’s joy and laughter and love. Maybe you could find a good life today?”

  He raised his head and stared at her and she saw that he wanted to believe, he really wanted to, but he wouldn’t quite let himself. “As much as the world has changed, it’s also still the same.”

  Heather shook her head emphatically. “That’s not true! You give a person a loving upbringing and provide them with comfort and their basic needs, and they end up a good and kind being who chooses to help others.”

  He laughed once, a sharp, sad sound. “People, maybe. Dragen, no. I am still a dragen, leannan, no matter what you want to believe. There is no place in this world for my kind. Better to let the humans evolve as they will. They don’t need dragen.”

  She bounced on the balls of her feet, trying to command his attention, unable to keep still. “Then why did you go to Serenity? Why am I here? Why did the cops there seem so willing to deal with you, to call you one of their own? The ones you weren’t trying to kill even seemed to like you.”

  He put his hand on her shoulder and stared directly into her face. “I went to Serenity for one reason only, leannan, and you are not going to want to hear this, but you need to believe it. I went because I heard Khain, the demon, had resurfaced, and if there is one being on this planet left who can kill a dragen, it’s Khain. I went hoping to finally finish the job. You, my sweet one, are a distraction, nothing more. Eventually, I will find my way back into the loch, or back to Khain’s home.” He pressed his lips against his teeth, all the blood pushing out of them and making them look white, like what he was about to say was hard for him, but he said it anyway, looking her directly in the eye while he said it. “You can take a shiften mate. There are thousands of strong, handsome shiften males out there who would sell their canines to have you notice them. You don’t need me.”

  He stood straight and transformed, heaving a great roar as a dragon that sounded like an explosion, then leapt into the air and unfurled his wings. He waited until he was a thousand feet away before the burning began.

  Heather watched him, her heart incinerated. Destroyed. She sank to the ground and stared at the dirt as tears fought to fall from her eyes, but she would not let them come.

  “I don’t want them,” she whispered to no one. “I want you.”

  ***

  Heather didn’t know how long she knelt there in the dirt as her dragon burned the forest. Her dragon? Really? He’d done everything possible to tell her he would never belong to her. Even told her to look for someone else. Her heart still seared from his final statements.

  She tried to think of what to do. How to get home. Would he take her there? Why had he brought her all the way to Scotland if he had never planned on being with her?

  As she knelt, crumpled on the forest leaves and needles, the hairs on the back of her neck stood up. She whipped her head around, looking behind her. She saw nothing at first, but as her eyes adjusted, a large, dark shape appeared in the forest. She stared hard at it. Was it her imagination? It was bigger than a horse but she couldn’t make out any limbs or a head. She got slowly to her feet, staring, tracing the shape again and again with her eyes.

  She took a step backwards, towards where Graeme had gone. The evil of the place sank into her bones, threatening to overwhelm her with sensation, with thoughts that didn’t belong to her. Images of a mighty, scaly being killing a knight flitted through her mind. Remnants of some movie she watched? Or history she was absorbing through the air?

  Heather took another step backwards and another, when a small snorting sound, almost derisive, came from the woods. The dark shape she’d been watching shook slightly. Her eyes widened. Oh, God, this was not good. As she watched, the shape moved again, stepping halfway into the clearing. She got a partial look at a golden shimmer down a bronze flank and big eyes over a hooked nose before she turned and ran.

  GRAEME! She screamed in her mind as loud as she could, even as she tucked her elbows and her head, her feet pounding as fast as she could push them.

  He was there immediately, swooping down to her, landing directly in front of her so hard the mountain shook. What is it? What is wrong?

  “There, there,” she screamed, running into the protection of his scaly chest and pointing behind her. She looked, but nothing was there. The weight of a stone dropped in her middle. Had she imagined it? “I─I thought I saw something there.”

  Graeme spewed fire where she was pointing, a massiv
e stream that lit up the cottage, the clearing, the woods, everything. She saw nothing. Certainly, no shape. She hated looking like a fool more than anything, but that’s where this was heading.

  What was it? What did it look like?

  “I don’t know. It was big. Like, like a horse or a monster bear, maybe.”

  There are no bears in these woods.

  “Oh.”

  Her face heated, but she knew she hadn’t imagined it. She could still feel it watching her, whatever it was. Her phone rang in her pocket again and she pulled it out and swiped it, glad for once at the interruption. “Hello?”

  “Is this Heather Herrin?” A male voice, official-sounding.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you in the company of Graeme Kynock?”

  She shifted her eyes from the forest to Graeme, wondering who could possibly know that. Then she realized. The police. Oh, crud, what if they had called her mother to get her phone number? Even as she thought it, her heart hardened. Who cared what her mother thought. She was never going to speak to her mother again.

  “Yes, he’s here,” she said and held out the phone to the dragon.

  He transformed and didn’t look at her, but took the phone delicately from her fingers, holding it to his head like he’d never done it before.

  “Aye.”

  He listened and Heather stood close to him, not quite daring to touch him, but knowing she was safe in the circle of his protection, no matter what had been in the woods. She could hear the male voice on the phone speaking to him, but couldn’t tell what he was saying. She let her mind wander, the part of her that never, ever said die, wondering if there was still some way she could get Graeme to change his mind, to realize that she could change everything for him.

  “Aye,” he said again. “It will take me twenty minutes to get there. Is it safe to bring the woman with me?”

  Heather’s mouth dried up. The woman? He wouldn’t even say her name? And how were they going to get to Serenity in twenty minutes? Their flight here had taken longer than that just to get to the Atlantic Ocean.