A long moment of numb silence before he answers, “As I told you before…” he starts to say.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re not him,” I finish for him. Then I say into his head, “You don’t want to forgive anybody or fall in love or even let me in just a little bit. All you want to do now that you have me is confuse me.”
His jaw sets, but other than that he doesn’t give any indication that he heard what I said. Unamused face emoji. It’s like trying to get blood from a Greek statue.
Agda appears with a huge platter of mezes, small Greek appetizers that all three of us can easily eat. Though Damianos only bothers with the meat-based ones and leaves Bazzi and me to the cheese. And dinner only gets slightly less awkward after that.
The tongue cap is back, but Damianos doesn’t offer up much more conversation. Frankly, I’m too weirded out by the sight of my two-week-old eating to offer much conversation myself.
But eventually, during the main course, I tear my eyes away from the sight of Bazzi demolishing the lamb chunks Damianos cut up for him. “So what did you do all day before you started teaching our kid how to be a kick-ass dragon.”
“My days were filled mostly monitoring my vast array of holdings. There were also occasional meetings for deals only I could handle.”
“Sounds boring,” I say.
“It was very boring,” he answers. “But not so much as of late.”
A joke? A compliment? I have no idea. The only thing coming from his side of the mate bond is a whole bunch of numb. Real talk 100, I’m not sure how to feel as we finish our mostly silent dinner.
He’s trying and I’m trying. Our relationship is so civil now, and technically drama-free. Just like I thought I used to want. But it feels like Damianos is drifting further away from me. So far away, I wonder if I’ll ever be able to reach him.
“Basileios and I have some more training to do, then I will put him down in his nursery,” Damianos says later during the dessert course as if to prove my point.
Then he stands up from the table and takes Bazzi out of his seat, even though I’m not even done with my baklava. “Good night, Ola.”
It’s just more father and son time, but it feels like he’s slipping away from me.
Maybe that’s why I jump up and call after him with my mouth full of flaky deliciousness. “Wait, Damianos!”
He could have kept walking, but he immediately comes to a stop and turns around.
“You said you’re not him, well, you should know I’m not her either.”
“Her?” Damianos repeats, his face twisting into a frown.
“Yeah, I’m not her. I’m not the drakki you would have mated if your planet hadn’t been destroyed.”
I take a step toward him and Bazzi. “You don’t want to revere me like you would a drakki? Well, I don’t want you to parent without me like a male drakkon would. I meant what I said. Every word I said. You plus me. And I want to do this parenting stuff together.”
The frown has fallen away, but the blank granite face he’s wearing now isn’t much better. He gives me nothing over our mate bond or with his expression, so I can’t tell how he’s responding to any of this. And that makes me feel all the awkward emoji faces float up from my stomach.
But I’m still Leroy Greenwolf’s great-granddaughter. Not afraid of anything or anyone. At least on the outside.
So I close the distance between us. I raise a hand to cup his face before looking up into the golden eyes of my beautiful monster.
And I say, “Wherever you’re going right now with our son, take me with you.”
Chapter Eighteen
DAMIANOS
I cannot deny Ola her request.
As we walk down to the beach together, I tell myself I am only doing what I would have done regardless of whether she’d lived or died. Training our son to be a true drakkon is an essential duty of fatherhood. If Ola wishes to be present while I do so, fine.
It changes nothing, I assure myself as I take Basileios out of his suit. This temporary peace between us will still end in much death and repudiation.
“You may stand of there. Quietly.” I tell Ola, handing her our hatchling’s clothes and pointing toward a collection of rocks along the shoreline.
“Thumbs up emoji face,” she answers. Only to stay right where she is and ask, “So what are we doing out here anyway?”
“Tonight I will teach Basileios to unshell as my father taught me,” I answer as I outfit our hatchling in a pair of training pants.
“Unshell…that means shift into a dragon, right?”
“We drakkon do not shift. While you wolf mutations are humans who reconfigure your cells into wolves, our human appearance is merely a shell.”
“But Bazzi’s a hybrid. Something else. Like you said, right? So maybe he’s really shifting.”
I throw her a consternated look. Then I take Basileios by the scruff of his neck. “You will unshell now,” I command before drawing my arm back and launching him out toward the sea.
Beside me, Ola lets out an earsplitting scream as he flies through the air before landing with a splashy plop in the dark water beyond.
“WTF emoji! You just threw our baby into the ocean!” she yells at me before running toward the sea.
But just as she reaches the shoreline, Basileios breaks the water’s surface, bursting into the air before zooming back to hover above us.
“Oh, thank the Fenrir wolf you’re alright!” Ola cries out.
However, I merely frown. Basileios has flown back to meet me, but save for his wings, he remains shelled.
“I can’t believe you pulled off that boomerang!” Ola says, reaching her arms up for what I presume will be yet another unwarranted hug.
But before Basileios can rush to his mother, I tell him in our language. “You have failed. Return to my hand, so that we may try again.”
Basileios instantly reverses course to fly to me instead of Ola.
“Wait, you’re not going to—” she starts to say.
I once more launch him into the ocean before she can finish that sentence.
And Ola once again screams. “What the hell is wrong with you?” she asks, even though Basileios pops back up out of the water even faster than the last time.
However, when he rises into the air, he is once again still shelled.
“We must drill this over and over again until he acquires this much-needed skill,” I inform Ola.
I am hoping this warning will calm her outsized reactions to this exercise. However, she steps in front of me before I can call Basileios back.
“Wait!” she says, waving her arms above her head. “I can’t take watching you throw him into the ocean again.”
The command to call Basileios back bangs against my capped tongue, which I really should have taken off before this lesson. The only reason it remains on is to make conversation with Ola easier.
But ironically the decision not to uncap my tongue is making his lesson all that much harder. And this is not the first time the she-wolf has made what I must do much more difficult than it should be.
“If this necessary training disturbs you, perhaps you should retire to your room,” I say, gritting my shaved teeth.
She suddenly stops waving her arms and her head flame flares with what must be a significant thought. The light of it is as bright as Ao Quong’s head flame had been a few months ago when he appeared on my smart wall with the news that he and his team had finally decompiled the Betrayer King’s code for using objects to make backward portal trips—or as some of the more whimsical anthros on his team referred to it, time travel into the past.
Whatever could have made her mind flare so?
“Maybe you should let me talk to him?” she says. “And if that doesn’t work, I’ll leave you to it, okay?”
Her hesitant tone doesn’t match the brightness of her head flame, I note. Nor is it like her to offer such a conciliatory option. I nod my assent, nonetheless, curious about this apparent idea of
hers.
“Okay, he doesn’t speak English yet like he does your language, but it feels like he understands me when I talk to him. Is that right?”
“That is correct,” I answer. “It will most likely take another few months or so before he develops the tongue and voice control required to speak human languages. But he understands you well enough.”
“Great.” She holds out her arms to the hatchling still hovering above us. “Okay, Bazzi-Baz, come down for a talk with your mama.”
Basileios does not hesitate to race into his mother’s arms and he immediately starts telling her about how he’s trying his best but can’t figure out how to unshell.
Ola couldn’t possibly understand his words. Yet she makes several soothing sounds as he laments his poor performance.
Then she says, “You know, our Auntie Fensa once told me the original Ice Age werewolves didn’t know how to shift outside of a full moon. That was something we had to learn as a new species apparently. You’re a new species too, so there’s a lot of stuff you’re going to have to figure out that your dad and me won’t necessarily be able to help you with because neither of us are exactly what you are. But do this for me. Close your eyes and don’t just try to take off your human suit. Find your dragon like I find my wolf. It’s a spirit inside of you, and I know it’s there. But you don’t go looking for it, you go feeling for it. I hope that makes sense.”
“That doesn’t make sense, Wolf Mother,” Basileios answers her in our language, his tone quite sober. “But I’ll try.”
“I have no idea what you’re saying, but I believe in you!” she tells him. “Now, I’m going to throw you up above my head and when you come back down, I want you to be a dragon. That’s a game your grandfathers used to play with me when they were teaching me to control my wolf as well as they can control theirs.”
With that explanation given, she heaves him up into the air.
I watch Basileios go up, very much doubting this plan of hers will work….only to let out a surprised hiss when a golden dragon drops down to hover above us.
Ola responds in an even more dramatic way. She jumps up and down then runs around in circles, yelling out to an imaginary audience, “That’s what’s up, Greece! Check out your boy, the Prince of Drakkon G-O-A-T, baby! Insert all the party popper emojis here with praise hands on top.”
After all this shouting, she insists she must teach Basileios “the most much-needed skill,” and proceeds to instruct him in the execution of a high-five.
Then just when I think the unnecessary jubliation might be over, she starts doing a dance she refers to as “The Space Elevator” while singing what sounds like a trap metal hook. “We are them stars! We made them stars! We fuck them stars! What? What? What? WHAT!”
And no, Basileios doesn’t have the throat control to sing along, but he does dance along with his mother, easily shelling and unshelling at the bottom and top of the silly movements.
Or perhaps he is shifting.
I watch them with a strange flare of feelings corrupting my flame. Blue disquiet. And yellow pride.
“C’mon, Triple D!” Ola insists, tugging on my arm. “Maybe you should dance with us, too. We did this! Together, just like I said.”
Yes, just like she said.
So instead of destroying my father’s murderers, I somehow end up dancing with their daughter on the beach.
And the next day Ola joins us in the library for our hatchling’s first reading lesson, instead of leaving the task to me alone. Though she seems more interested in exploring the room where I store my books and a few treasured items than sitting at the table with Basileios and me.
“What’s up with this tooth you’ve got on display?” she asks after moving on from oohing and aahing over my Gutenberg Press bible and first edition of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.
She sniffs at the only display case that doesn’t house a book. “Does it belong to a bear? I can’t smell it through the glass.”
“Yes, it belonged to a polar bear,” I answer, careful to keep my tone as blank as my side of our mating bond.
“Okay, that sounds like a story. Maybe you should tell me why you have a polar bear tooth on display in your Beauty and the Beast reboot of a library.”
“If my reading lesson with Basileios bores you, perhaps you would enjoy some time in the garden with Thalia.”
“Nope, not missing anymore milestones,” she answers, racing back to the table. “Let’s do this!”
And so we do.
I come to know that odd blue and yellow flare of disquiet and pride well over the next few days.
It erupts once again on Wednesday while resisting the urge to laugh at Ola’s antics during what should have been a simple drill to teach Basileios to aim his flame. She insists on anthropomorphizing every object he hits, using ridiculous voices to express their upset at having their lives ended so soon by “that bomb emoji dragon prince.”
I quickly suppress the laughter and the strange feelings, but over the next few days my chest flame continues to flare much too often while overseeing lessons that start out serious but end in cheers and laughter. It also flares that Thursday when while watching Agda direct all the workers I allowed her to hire to the ballroom, I make an impromptu decision. Before I know it, I am calling the mayor of Lukos to ask for certain documents and also extend an uncharacteristic invite.
But it flares brightest of all that night while flying around the castle with Ola upon my back and Basileios at my side in his drakkon form. That is when I realize this togetherness of the past week, this feeling of absolute content. It is the opposite of the itch I used to feel.
Perhaps that is why I decide to escort Ola to her room after our night flight, as opposed to parting ways at the stairs and taking Basileios directly to his nursery as I usually do.
I immediately realize my mistake when instead of saying good night, she tells me, “You know, Other You used to walk me to my door too. Said it was the reverent thing to do. Though later we switched to walking each other into his room…together.”
Together…
I try and fail not to look down and immediately regret it. For the flame above her female works is burning bright with her arousal.
I can also feel how much more she wants from me over our mate bond.
But I did not lie to her on my drone. I am not him. I cannot be if I’ve any hope of paying my father his reverent due.
“Good night, Ola,” I say again before leaving her there at the door.
“Wolf Mother’s chest flame is sad,” Basileios observes as we head toward the stairs at the end of the hallway. “I should fly back to her. Mayhap she needs a hug.”
I pick him out of the air, and pull him into my arms, carrying him in the same manner I do when he is dressed for dinner and without access to his wings. “No, Golden Son, stay with me.”
Basileios does as I say, settling into my hold. But when I place him in his crib later on, I see that his chest flame is burning as blue as his mother’s.
His reverence instinct is kicking in, I realize after closing the door of his nursery behind me. I recall how hard it was to see my father in distress. Even during my churlish early thousands when I thought him too overdemanding, I could deny him nothing that pleased his flame.
I can only imagine what it would have been like to also have a mother pulling me in another direction. Especially one who acted in such an encouraging and affectionate manner as Ola.
That night, I lie awake in bed, once again unable to sleep for the itch in my belly. Though, in this case, the object of my itch is now but a few floors away. My flame flares with the memory of the bright yellow burning between her legs. How eagerly might she receive me if I were to make my way down the stairs and into her—
No…no…I cannot do that. I ruthlessly suppress that flare of an idea, just as surely as I mute my mate bond when I am with her.
This indulgent week I’ve allowed myself…allowed Ola. It is confusing to the
both of us and also to Basileios. And it will only become more confusing if I allow myself the pleasure of mating with her outside of procreation.
I cannot think when we engage in such acts. Cannot scheme as I ought toward my ultimate goal.
I think upon the problem of the she-wolf who wants us to be a family. A happy ever after as in so many of the upright primates silly tales.
Our week of togetherness…the celebration along with the invitation I extended through the mayor….my forgetting for a time of my ultimate goal—those are all symptoms of the thing I fear most. I’ve thought about destroying whatever this is I have with Ola every day of this week, but instead I’ve end up falling even further into her rabbit hole.
And now I lie in bed itching for things I can’t have. Things I shouldn’t have.
I must do something to reestablish my dominance, I decide. And slowly a plan forms. One that finally allows me to fall asleep.
Chapter Nineteen
OLA
It’s working! It’s actually working. That past week has been nothing short of everything I tentatively hoped for when I YOLO 100ed out that window with Damianos.
I mean, no, everything’s not perfect. The “big day” is tomorrow and I’m still not sure what it’s all about. I’m also still waking up in my own over-fancy bedroom alone every morning because Damianos hasn’t touched me. And my biosystem’s still off, and this time it’s not because I don’t want anyone to find me. My people know where I am, they’re just done with me, and I don’t have the heart to look at any of the messages they’ve sent me since I flew away.
Real talk 100, it’s going to take a while for me to reconcile leaving my family and kingdom behind.
Luckily, the dragon king’s castle is huge. It makes it easier to pretend I don’t see all those elephants creeping around the happy and drama-free relationship I’ve managed to cobble together with Damianos over the last week.
At least I thought we were happy and drama-free.
The morning before my “big day,” Damianos coldly announces he and Bazzi are going on a long distance day flight to learn about plane and drone avoidance, and it would be too much of an inconvenience for me to come along. Okay, I get that. Kinda hard to dodge flying vehicles with a she-wolf on your back. But he barely has anything to say at dinner. And right after dessert, he stands up from the table and announces, “There will be no after-dinner family activities tonight, so I will take Basileios directly to his nursery.”
Her Dragon King (Her Dragon King Duet Book 2): 50 Loving States, North Dakota Pt. 2 Page 12
