Dragon Dilemma

by Mell Eight

  Dane turned to Henri and couldn't stop the cold grin from showing on his lips. "For your attempt on my kits' lives, I banish you from my territory. You have six hours to get across the border before I take action. I suggest you hurry if you want to actually stay in power," Dane added frostily. "And, territory leader or not, if you step inside my territory again I will end your existence."

  "You dare threaten me?" Henri snarled. "I'll call the whole territory leader council and have you removed!"

  Dane just let his smile grow at the threat. "Since you won't be a territory leader in a few hours, I'm not worried. Now go away." Dane waved his hand at Henri even though his magic didn't need the direction. Magic swirled around Henri for a brief moment, then sent him away with a pop of displaced air. Dane felt Henri land in the snow just outside of the wards around his house.

  Lumie yawned again and slipped down from the armchair. He wandered down the hall, stopping in front of Copper and Alloy's door.

  "Lumie," Dane called. "I'm going to make sure Chrome cleans his room. You don't have to help him with any chores tomorrow, because he didn't complete the chores he was assigned today either." Lumie grinned at Dane, no doubt he already knew that Chrome would face consequences for the disaster he had left, and let himself into Alloy's bedroom.

  Mercury waited until the door was closed before letting out a sigh. "That was interesting," he grumbled.

  Dane couldn't help agreeing. "I'm wondering if Henri made up the whole thing with getting his maps mixed up just so he had an excuse to get inside my wards and attack our kits. I haven't kept it a secret from the territory leaders council that I'm raising some very powerful dragons." Dane paused to think that through before continuing. "I'll bet he was going to be facing some serious challenges for territory leader in the near future, more than just the dhampir that's taking over his territory right now. Since he was able to absorb the dhampir's power, maybe he thought he could absorb Lumie's as well? I'm glad we stopped Henri before he could try to touch Lumie."

  They shared a grin, both knowing how poorly that would have gone for Henri. Henri should consider being banished from Dane's territory and dumped outside in the snow as lucky in comparison.

  Dane was about to settle back onto the couch with Mercury when one of the doors down his wing of the house slammed open. William rushed into the hall, saw Dane standing in the sitting area, and ran to him.

  "The wards around my compound just fell. I need to get home now. Let me out of your wards," William gasped. His jeans weren't buttoned and the shirt he had thrown on was inside out.

  "You need any help?" Dane asked immediately.

  "Of course not," William scoffed. "Now let me out." Dane nodded and let his magic fly. William vanished from sight a second later.

  "Two territory leaders under attack on the same night?" Mercury mused aloud.

  Dane nodded his agreement. Something fishy was definitely going on. Dane sent a little more magic into his own shields, just in case someone thought to try him as well. Someone taking over Henri's territory wasn't too odd. Henri was very powerful for a vampire, but most territory leaders were closer to the caliber of Dane and William. Henri might have thought he fit in, but he really didn't compare. It was only a matter of time before someone stronger stepped in.

  Someone attacking William was serious and also worrying however, which was why Dane had offered his help. It was William's territory, though, and his problem to deal with, so once the offer was denied Dane had to accept that fact. Still, someone with enough power to attack William would have no qualms going after Dane. He would need to keep an extra pair of ears open to any possible chatter about an attack on his own territory and make certain he spoke to William about it after William had finished stopping the attackers.

  "Jessica doesn't seem to be having a problem," Mercury continued thoughtfully.

  "Whoever's attacking might only be going after the leaders of the eastern seaboard," Dane answered. Or the two attacks had nothing to do with each other. Henri's dhampir might have simply escaped his confinement and decided to take power instead of running and it might simply be a coincidence that someone else was trying to attack William on the same night.

  Dane hated coincidences.

  "Let's hang out here for a few more hours, see if Jessica or my mother have similar issues," Dane sighed.

  Dane retrieved his computer from his office so he could start double checking anything he could access about his territory via the internet and Mercury returned to his book. As the hours passed, they took turns dozing on each other's shoulders. When the sun started peeking out above the horizon, Mercury left to start getting ready for the day. It was the weekend; the kits would be up soon. Dane and Mercury couldn't get them up on weekdays when they had to be ready in time for the tutor, yet on the weekend they were up at least an hour earlier than their weekday alarms. The kits made no sense to Dane. Instead he was just glad to find a pattern of behavior he could follow. Although, with Copper, Zinc, and Nickel hitting puberty now, there was no telling what might happen.

  He resolutely pushed that terrible thought from his mind and refocused on the report he was writing for one of his cases at his detective agency while a territory search ran in the background. A woman's husband had gone missing. The woman was more interested in retrieving the three million dollars her husband had also taken than in finding the man himself, which meant Dane was crunching numbers and talking to offshore banks. It was taking much longer than usual to close the case, but that meant he could charge her more for his time. He had to keep the candy basket full or face a mutiny, which meant the woman would be paying through the nose for his troubles. She could afford it, of course. He only charged what his customers could afford to pay.

  He got in another twenty minutes of work before the first kits woke up.

  "Wow! More snow!" 'Ron cheered. Cold air blew through the hallway a few seconds later, followed by Zinc's yelp.

  "Close the window!" Zinc yelled. There were the sounds of a scuffle and then the breeze abruptly vanished. 'Ron came rushing out of her room. She dashed past Dane and headed straight for the stairs and the front door that would let her out into the snow. Her thin sleeping pants and T-shirt—which looked like it had been stolen from Chrome at one point—were entirely inadequate for the weather.

  Dane sent out a lasso of magic and caught 'Ron before she could get too far down the stairs. He pulled her back to the sitting area and sternly pointed back to her room.

  "Pants and a sweatshirt first," he admonished. "Then find your coat, scarf, and gloves."

  "But I'm going to change shape to play," she whined immediately. Her scales in her dragon form would protect her from the cold, but it was very possible that she would want opposable thumbs or hands in general to fling snow around and shift to her underdressed human form without thinking about how little she was wearing. Dane continued sternly pointing towards her room until she growled and slunk off to get changed.

  Nickel emerged next, fully dressed in warm clothes and looking ready to go outside. Apparently Nickel had decided that if the kits were going out to play in the snow before breakfast, he was going to be their guard for as long as their visitors were still on the premises.

  Dane quickly filled Nickel in on Henri and William's absences while the rest of the awake kits got dressed.

  "I can't believe you made me miss all that!" Nickel grumbled, his face twisting into an unhappy pout.

  "But now if something happens today, you'll be better prepared than Mercury or I to handle it. We need someone to always stay sharp, you know that."

  Nickel didn't look the least bit placated by Dane's explanation. He growled lowly as he stalked past Dane and headed down the stairs. Dane heard the hall closet open and close as Nickel got his coat and then watched over the balcony as Nickel walked out the front door. Seconds later, a blue dragon slunk through the snow, quickly vanishing from sight as Nickel called on his magic to use the wet snow as cover. He would be extra vigil
ant thanks to Dane's warning about someone daring to attack William that might eventually turn their attention towards Dane as well.

  'Ron reappeared properly dressed this time with Chrome, Zinc, and Alloy hot on her heels. Copper and Lumie weren't as interested in the snow as the rest unless they got to melt it, so Dane wasn't surprised when they decided to stay in bed instead.

  Mercury laughed when he emerged from their bedroom and saw the snow fight going on outside. The kits were being loud enough that their remaining guests wouldn't be able to sleep through it. Oh well.

  "You go get dressed. I'll get breakfast started. When you're done, go wrangle the kits who are supposed to be helping me," Mercury said. He bent down and pressed a lingering kiss to Dane's lips before heading downstairs.

  Dane was grinning to himself as he put his laptop away and went to go shower and get ready for the day.

  *~*~*

  Jessica didn't seem to be in any hurry to leave. When Mercury asked her about it, she said she was waiting for William to return and wanted to see if Henri's usurper would send a representative. She seemed to think there was more for the leaders to talk about, although Dane had assumed they would all be leaving after breakfast. Dane would have thought she would be more concerned than she was acting after hearing that two territories had been attacked overnight and would rush home to ensure hers was still okay. It was what Dane would have done before he had Mercury at home to reassure him over the phone that the territory was still in his control. Perhaps Jessica also had someone at home? Or she had some other plan in mind that required she stay put. Not knowing what was going on in her head was starting to become infuriating, but at the same time Dane didn't quite dare to send out feelers into her territory to see if he could find anything out. He had already been accused of overstepping his boundaries once; he didn't want to give her an opening to accuse him again.

  Mother was also an enigma. She got up when the kits' noise couldn't be ignored any longer, didn't complain about the unusual wakeup call, and then placidly went downstairs. That was not normal and it was making Dane feel a bit twitchy.

  Dane walked outside into the snow fight that even Copper and Lumie had been coerced into participating in. Snowballs, wind-whipped snow banks, tree branches, and anything else the kits decided was usable as a projectile were flying through the air. Dane let his magic flare and anything that was airborne froze in place.

  "Any kits who are supposed to be helping Mercury with breakfast need to go inside now," he called.

  A series of groans met his pronouncement and the kits slunk out of the snowy forest towards the house. Even the ones who didn't have chores decided to come inside. The last thing they would want was to be late for breakfast.

  Dane let everything he had caught in the air drop to the ground as the kits filed inside. Nickel slipped in after them, but Dane doubted he had participated in the fun of the battle. Another shame; Nickel needed to relax and playing in the snow was one of the best ways for that to happen. Until their visitors finally left, Nickel wouldn't allow himself to let go like Dane knew any kit his age really needed to. It wasn't fair and Dane hated the necessity of it, but he also knew Nickel wouldn't be happy living as carefree as the rest of the kits. He needed the responsibility just as much as he needed a chance to let loose.

  Mercury had breakfast well in hand, especially now that his help had arrived. Dane headed into the dining room where Mother was enjoying a cup of tea on her own. Mother would yell if he didn't act like a good host and entertain her, although she hadn't actually griped much at all since meeting his kits. He took the seat next her.

  "How are you?" he asked tentatively.

  Mother took a long sip of tea, carefully arranged the cup on the saucer, and then turned to look at Dane.

  "I am feeling my age, I'm afraid," she sighed.

  Dane had no idea how to respond to that. She was almost four-hundred years old. Carrying the son of a god had changed her somehow, mostly by slowing her aging process greatly. Only in the last fifty years had she started looking like she was in her seventies. Dane's estimation was that she aged ten years for every hundred she lived, which did mean she was starting to actually get old.

  "I usually have a skilled apprentice with me when I do spell work these days, Dane," she continued. Her voice sounded bland, but Dane could infer from the context that she was hiding a great deal of pain. "I found a young man who is particularly strong at the craft. I was planning to introduce you two and entice you to leave your territory and take over mine with him. I would have spoken to your father about helping the young man stay young and powerful if you had liked him too, but obviously that is moot now."

  She had probably made a lot of extravagant plans to trick Dane into leaving his territory and taking over her own. Except she would only really relinquish her power upon her death, which meant her replacement could never actually say they were a territory leader. Mother would rule from behind the curtain instead of in front of it. Dane wouldn't have been able to abide that, not after running his own territory for so long. He had left her side with the ships to the New World at his first opportunity and hadn't looked back.

  He had only been territory leader for about a hundred and fifty years, waiting until after the Native American leaders of old had passed on and a new one hadn't been able to take their place. The territory borders had been redrawn as the United States subsumed the old Native American boundaries and Dane had carved out his niche and was sticking to it no matter what his mother insisted.

  "Dragons usually die young," Mother said after the silence between them had gone on too long. "St. George killed all the dragons in England before you were born and everything I have heard since indicated that most dragons do not even reach adulthood."

  Dane opened his mouth to explain the territory urges that forced dragon parents in the wild to abandon their kits for fear of accidentally killing them. He also wanted to tell her that he was working to change that by building a village where dragons and kits were learning about homes instead of territories and that sharing was more than possible. Dragons weren't always controlled by their bestial nature. It wasn't something that came naturally to them, but once they were shown the alternative, every single dragon Dane had ever met had eagerly embraced it.

  She didn't give him the opportunity to speak, talking over him quickly before he could formulate the words he wanted.

  "Have you asked your Mercury how old he actually is?" Mother asked him softly, almost as if she didn't want to cause problems. Since Mother usually loved to cause problems, Dane decided it was better not to answer. Apparently it was a rhetorical question anyway, because Mother went ahead and answered it for him. "I would put your Mercury at somewhere near a hundred."

  Dane gaped at her in shock. Mercury didn't look a day over thirty and that was if Dane was being ungenerous. He had always known that dragons were a long-lived species, despite the fact that so many died young, and Mercury had said over and over again that dragons didn't die unless they were killed, but Dane had never put two and two together. Sure, Dane was almost four-hundred years old and, unlike his mother, didn't look a day over twenty-five. While he could be killed, he wouldn't die until the day he asked his father to take him to the other realm.

  Mercury didn't know when he was born. Dane did know that. After being abandoned by his mother around ten years old, when he had first started to fly, Mercury had lived in the wild for a long time. For some reason Dane had always assumed that a long time meant five years; Mercury hadn't had a calendar to keep track of the days so he couldn't say for certain how long. He had still looked young enough to be considered a child when he had emerged from the wild in Chicago and had been placed in the foster system. But what if Mercury had only looked young? What if he had been in the wild for ten or even twenty years and the humans' inexperienced eyes saw an early blooming teenager? Certainly Mercury's ignorance of how the human world worked would have played in his favor with his inexperience making him seem
younger.

  After the foster system, Mercury had put himself through college and then lived in Chicago for a while before being kidnapped by the enemy and getting embroiled in saving the dragons from the scientists bent on experimenting on them. Dane did the math of just Chicago: at least five years in the foster system, another five to finish college, and approximately five of living on his own. That, plus the past six years living together combined with at least fifteen years of living in the wild told Dane that Mercury must be pushing forty even though he looked much younger. A hundred wasn't possible.

  "Are you sure?" Dane finally asked Mother.

  She nodded curtly. "I had a quick look at one of his memories after lunch yesterday and by the end of it he had retaken the spell from me. I made a second attempt yesterday evening and couldn't even entice him into his memories. He's far stronger than you or I originally believed and, to be quite honest, I can't help thinking that he might actually be a suitable partner for you. Now, your kits, on the other hand…" She sighed with an exasperated shake of her head.

  "They're kits," Dane replied with a shrug.

  "Some of them are," she agreed, but her look was sharp and pointed as she spoke. "Copper, Zinc, 'Ron, and Chrome are perfectly normal. Alloy, well, even I can see that something isn't quite right with him, but he is a normal kit in comparison to Lumie and Nickel. There is something severely wrong with Lumie and Nickel."

  "I know, Mother," Dane said.

  "No, I don't believe you quite do," she snapped. "They're not dragons like you or I would think of dragons any longer. They're different; their power is different. Your Mercury might be long-lived and very powerful, but they are different even from him. Most of your kits are regular elemental dragons. Mercury is a normal precious dragon. Lumie and Nickel are a strange hybrid of both with something else also running through their veins."