"What? Oh, I don't know. Just tell me where you are." Ben didn't mean to snap, but he couldn't turn his anger off like a light.
"So glad you're happy to hear from us," drawled Alison, unimpressed. "If you're not ready, bad luck. We caught an early train and the London transfer went smoothly. We're just coming into Eastbourne station, and we'll be getting a cab straight to you. It's too miserable to go down the beach this morning, though I've promised the girls we'll go rock-pooling if it brightens up."
"Lovely," said Ben, trying to sound like he meant it. The prospect of an irate Alison scared him a thousand times more than Cully ever could. After all, Cully had never given him a Chinese burn that'd left him nursing bruises for weeks. "I can't wait to see you all."
"The girls are excited, that's for sure," said Alison. "And I can't wait to meet this fiancé of yours. Byee!"
Ben placed the phone down, too frazzled for panic. "She's nearly here," he said to Cully, who'd shown no sign of shifting from the sofa. "This is so typical of her. I asked her to get here four o'clock at the earliest. I've not even got anything for lunch."
"What do they like to eat?" asked Cully.
"I-I'm not sure." Ben raked his hair from his brow. "Alison has gone, uh, gluten-free, and I've no idea what seven-year-old girls enjoy. She sent me an email, but I never got round to reading it properly."
"Don't fret. I can deal."
Cully closed her eyes and sucked air through her nose, as if enjoying a particularly succulent scent. A green tablecloth appeared on the breakfast bar, and then several colourful platters of salad exploded into existence, scattered with expensive-looking prawns, salmon and… goodness, were those quails' eggs? A big bowlful of thick-cut seasoned chips arrived next, followed by a plate of chicken goujons, a jug of pink lemonade, and finally, a castle.
Yes, a cake shaped like a castle, complete with four turrets, a moat, a drawbridge and a collection of little knights, some of which were on horseback. Ben gritted his teeth to stop himself from gaping.
Cully jumped up and plucked off one of the knights. "They're girl knights," she explained. "Knightesses. It's difficult to tell because of the icing sugar armour, but just in case you wondered."
"Uh, good to know." He was still pissed off, but couldn't deny that Cully had suddenly become his knightess in shining armour. He wondered how nutritional the magic food was, but he could always grab supplies from a supermarket or take them to a café later, so he wasn't too worried. "Thank you," he said.
"My pleasure." A smile tugged the corners of her mouth. "Sorry for lashing out just now. You're right, in that I'm hardly in a position to lecture you, and maybe it wasn't so funny, leaving Lyle how I did. I feel a bit bad about it now, and I'll do better in the future. Would you like me to finish your washing up, by the way?"
She clicked her fingers. The remainder of the dirty dishes vanished from the kitchen sink, which shone as if he'd been scouring for half a week.
Ben refused to look impressed. That trick felt a tad too Mary Poppins for his liking. "Now conjure up Lyle and solve all our problems, will you?"
Chapter Ten
The fifth time Ben peeped anxiously through the slats in the blind, a silver Skoda saloon drew up outside. The cab door opened, and Alison climbed out, followed by her two daughters, Lucy and Raven.
"They're here," said Ben. Cully was fiddling with a vase filled with pink and orange flowers she'd materialized, far more exotic than anything Ben could afford. "I still don't know what to tell them about Lyle."
"Tell them the truth," said Cully, hurrying to stand by Ben and peer out. "Lyle went to visit some relatives in the West Country and he'll be back tomorrow. He honestly will be! If it's any consolation, I didn't actually leave the cove until nearly dawn, and Lyle was safely tucked up with the rest of them. A jaunt back along the coast at a moderate pace is well within his powers, and I'll head out to meet him tonight. He'll be fine."
"If you say so," said Ben.
Cully disappeared into the bathroom, leaving him to ponder the alleged timings of Cully's journey up the coast, which troubled him. He wasn't sure how far west they'd gone, but if Lyle's phone call was anything to judge by, it'd taken at least twelve hours to reach their destination, probably longer. Granted, Cully could travel faster without Lyle, but she'd informed Ben she'd not left until just before dawn. That had to be seven o'clock that morning, if not later.
Yet she'd been on his doorstep before eleven.
That was pretty damned quick. Perhaps she'd used some kind of transportation enchantment. It all made Ben's head spin, but he'd no time to interrogate her about it.
A sharp knock sounded, echoed by excited giggles. "No fins, no magic," hissed Ben to Cully, as she emerged from the bathroom with… sweet heavens, pearly highlights in her hair that sparkled like moonshine. Cully rolled her eyes.
"Welcome!" Ben threw open the door and pasted his friendliest grin on for Alison and the kids. Lucy gawped up at him, twiddling with the pink bobble that tied back her light brown hair. Her twin Raven, the timid of the pair, wore her blonde hair loose and hid behind Alison's legs.
"Ben!" Alison fixed him with that disapproving, pursed-lipped expression she'd inherited from their mother. "You look… stressed. Please, don’t be. We won't be any trouble. Come on girls, in we go. Don't be shy, Raven, you know your uncle well enough… Oh, hello there!"
Alison spotted Cully, who perched on the back of the sofa. "Ben," prompted Alison. "Are you going to introduce us?"
"I thought Uncle Ben was marrying a man, Mummy?" said Lucy. "That looks like a lady."
"Lucy!" scolded Alison, smoothing her mousy curls. "I've explained how you mustn't assume—"
"It's fine, don't worry." Cully offered Alison a hand. "I'm Lyle's sister, Cully. Lyle's been held up a bit, but I thought I'd swing by anyway. I've been dying to get to know you all."
Despite Cully's overpowering handshake, which rocked Alison so her spectacles slipped down her nose, Alison seemed happy to meet Cully. To Ben's relief, any further interrogations about Lyle's absence were forgotten amid the bustle of bringing in baggage and removing hats, coats, and scarfs. Then all attention turned to the spread of food on the breakfast bar, and particularly the castle cake. Lucy squealed with delight.
"Ben, it's beautiful," breathed Alison, then she pulled a knowing expression at Cully. "This was you, wasn't it? So many gluten-free options—amazing! Are you a chef?"
Despite the matter that she'd put less effort into creating the food than Ben did in sneezing, Cully entered into an in-depth conversation about the virtues of quails' eggs and the best length of time to cook them. Ben sidled shyly to where the girls were poking at the cake.
"Those are girl knights," he told Lucy, when she picked one up.
"Girls taste good then," said Lucy, as she ate it.
"Mummy," said Raven, staring straight through Ben as if he were a ghost. "I don't like chicken goujons. They've got meat in them."
Ben winced. Raven didn't eat meat. So that'd been what else Alison's email had said.
"Oh gosh, Ben, really?" chided Alison. "Did you overlook telling poor Cully that Raven's gone veggie? She won't like the salad—"
"Don't fret, he remembered," said Cully, squeezing Alison's arm as if they were already best friends forever. "Ben's homemade veggie goujons are getting toasty in the oven. Finest I ever tasted, I'll have you know, and his own recipe."
Ben shot Cully a vexed look as he hurried round to the stove, which had magically heated to one-hundred-and-eighty degrees and indeed held a tray of delicious-smelling cheese-and-nutty goujons.
He shook his head. Cully's machinations were scaring him now. Yet he couldn't exactly complain, especially while Cully enchanted the girls through naming each of the knightesses with them. Or at least, all the knightesses that Lucy hadn't yet eaten. Cully relieved Ben from the pressure of hosting, leaving him to pick at the chips and fret about Lyle. Cully soon coaxed even Raven into animated conversation, and Alison m
ade a series of satisfied noises as she forked salad into her mouth.
After much of the lunch had been consumed, Alison touched Ben's shoulder, having crept up silently behind. Ben started. He expected to be scolded for being antisocial. Instead, she looked impressed. "Thank you for bringing such a wonderful woman into our family," she said quietly. "I'm certain we're going to love Lyle also. I wasn't expecting…"
Alison trailed off. Ben guessed she'd been going to say something about not expecting to have such a great time with her socially awkward brother, but had thought better of it. Then she plied him with the real shocker—a peck on his cheek.
"Thanks for having us, Ben." Alison turned around and clapped brusquely. "Come on, girls. It's stopped drizzling. If you wrap up warmly, we can go rock-pooling."
*~*~*
By three o'clock, when Alison picked up her bags from the flat to go check in at the hotel, Ben's worries about Lyle had grown unbearable. He closed the door behind his sister and nieces and leaned back against it, dropping his aura of forced cheer. "Bloody hell!"
"What's wrong?" asked Cully, who was picking at the leftovers on the breakfast bar. "I thought that went well. Alison's a scream and your nieces are so cute."
"How can you act as if nothing is wrong?" Ben felt like tearing his hair out. He stalked over to the windowsill, where he'd left his tablet. "I thought I could handle this, but I can't. You come in here, tell me you dumped my fiancé miles away in order to come back and give me the third degree… Oh, and then drop the bombshell that Lyle could be seriously ill. Forgive me, but I'm worried sick!"
"Don't fret," said Cully, still far too laid back for Ben's liking. "Lyle's not even due back until tomorrow, remember."
"Neither were you." Ben slammed her with a questioning glare, and loaded up a map of the south coast. "Look, just tell me where you went. It would help if I knew where he was."
Shrugging, Cully made her way over. "The cove is in Dorset, I think. Actually, no. You cross the mouth of the River Tamar before you get there, so it must be Cornwall."
"That's hundreds of miles away! No wonder you tired Lyle out." Ben scrolled westward along the map, skimming across East and West Sussex, Hampshire, Dorset, and Devon before finally reaching Cornwall. His brow sweated, and a leaden sense of foreboding weighted his guts.
"I can't sit here waiting. I have to know he's okay. Surely there's some way you can contact your people—something you can do?"
Cully glanced at the clock on the oven. "It's 3:15 p.m.," she said. "Your parents are checking into the same hotel as Alison around 7:30, right?"
"Yeah." Ben scratched his head, exasperated. "I want to go fetch Lyle, but it's going to look rude if Mum and Dad have come all this way to spend time with us and I'm not even there to greet them."
"I can take care of that," said Cully. "In fact, I've got a fabulous idea that'll solve several of your troubles in one fell swoop. How long will it take you to get up onto Beachy Head?"
"From here? About half an hour." Ben's inner alarm bells began chiming. "What are you plotting?"
"Half an hour is way too long," she said, ignoring his query. "Forgive me, Ben, this might feel a bit odd."
"What might?" She winked mischievously, and it dawned on Ben something magical was imminent. "Oh… Oh God!"
Darkness slammed down around him, and Ben's stomach did a flip. His brain reminded his horror-stricken senses that he'd experienced this before, when Lyle magically transported him after they'd first met in Shanty Wood. Then he screamed.
Cully's magic flung him into the wide open air between the chalk cliffs of Beachy Head and the lighthouse. But now gravity seized control, and he plummeted at a breakneck speed toward the rocks. His cries jammed in his throat as the wind whistled past his ears, and he braced himself for the deathblow. He thought of Lyle, then his poor parents, and then Lyle again… how much Ben had loved him.
Yet… was that a giant dolphin leaping up from the sea, or maybe… a huge blue dragon?
The dragon exploded upward in a cloud of spray, snared him gently with an outstretched claw, and plopped him on its back. Acting without thinking—his mind had yet to regroup after giving itself up to the afterlife—Ben clung about the base of the beast's neck and dug his knees into its flanks. He buried his face in its scaly skin.
Ben sensed the dragon beat its wings. A gale whipped his cold neck and rattled through his hair. One thing he felt for sure: this dragon wasn't Lyle, or even the dragon he'd encountered in Lyle's head. That dragon, although large enough, had been smaller and its metallic scales glittered in the full spectrum of the rainbow, rather than just greens and blues. Anyhow, Ben's instincts concerning his current saviour shouted otherwise.
"C-Cully?" he whimpered. He still didn't dare look up.
"Naturally," said the sparkling aquamarine dragon, in a booming variant on Cully's silvery voice. She sounded far too amused by the whole situation.
Ben dared to peep down. The cliffs were a white ribbon far below, and the sea glistened like tin foil beneath a blast of winter sunshine. He clung a little tighter.
"I should've seen this one coming," he muttered, and resigned himself to weathering the ride.
Chapter Eleven
They hugged the coastline at an elevation of around a thousand feet, streaking over Brighton pier in mere minutes. Ben recognized the peninsula of Portland Bill jutting out into the ocean, and soon the Isle of Wight emerged in the late afternoon haze. He'd taken this voyage a couple of months ago, by what he'd named "Albatross Air" with a large bird holding him by his straining clothes. Ben decided "Dragon Air" offered the better ride.
He wasn't going to let Cully know that, mind. She was a beautiful creature, longer than a double-decker bus, from her slender snout to the tip of her forked tail, almost snakelike in her slimness. Her back wasn't much broader than a horse's, which made for relatively easy riding. Ben was still petrified, and through chill, terror, or both, his fingertips soon lost all feeling.
Cully swept up the Solent, the channel that carved between the English mainland and the Isle of Wight, before banking low over The Needles at the western tip of the smaller island. "What are you doing?" hollered Ben, momentarily scared she might tip him off.
"I thought you might like a peep at where Lyle and I grew up," said Cully, in her deep tones. "Look east and you can see the mouth of the cave. Oh, and the landslip Lyle caused when you two were last here. I heard all about that. Dead proud of him, I was."
Ben squinted at the undulating shore, but he couldn't really judge where she meant. Tucked among the trees on the mainland side of the Solent, however, he glimpsed the gothic turrets Highsands Castle, where he and Lyle were due to be wed. A lump formed in his throat, and he found himself nervous that it was never going to happen. If Lyle needed a world of magic to survive, how could somebody as ordinary as Ben ever suffice? Lyle really would be better off with his awesome sister…
Shaking himself mentally, Ben focused on the view, though the stressful thoughts kept coming.
"What about that gang that drove your family out?" asked Ben. "Aren't you scared you'll be seen by them? Also, I'm surprised the RAF haven't scrambled." Ben had wondered if they'd turn up on coastal radar when he'd been hauled up channel by the albatross, and they'd made a smaller target back then.
"Humans can't see me in this guise unless I want them to, and I can deal with my own kind, easy." She twisted her long neck around and fluttered two-inch-long sapphire eyelashes. "Trust me, Ben."
"Hmph," said Ben. Her back quaked with a dragonish chortle. "I'd trust you better if I had a crash helmet and a parachute."
Something hard latched onto his scalp, subduing the throb of the wind in his ears. He didn't need to risk letting go of Cully to confirm his suspicion she'd magicked up some kind of headgear. The strap that fastened itself beneath his chin made him sure enough. "Very impressive," he said, begrudging.
"You're not getting a parachute," said Cully. "That would be beneath my dignity. If
you're daft enough to fall, I'll catch you."
He couldn't help laughing, and soon grew more relaxed. "You realize, about a year ago from now, I was sat in a dreary office writing a risk assessment for a skateboard park," he mused. "I advised against constructing a ramp that was over six feet high because the skaters might've got hurt. Now here I am, hundreds of feet above the English Channel with my life in the claws of a creature from legend. How did it come to this?"
"Frickin' awesome, isn't it?" boomed Cully.
"That's a matter of opinion."
She cracked her wings emphatically and surged upward before levelling out at the same elevation as a wispy strip of cloud. Ben's heart lurched to the rhythm of her beating wings, thrill briefly outstripping all other feelings. Despite his scathing words, he was lost in a dream. He was flying a dragon down the southern coast of England, off to reunite with the merman love of his life.
Or at least, he hoped he was.
To enjoy dragon riding to the max, Ben needed be convinced Lyle was safe—and know that their future together was secure. Cully had assured Ben early on she wouldn't just fly straight over Lyle if he had started the journey back, and that her keen dragon senses would spot Lyle. Ben opted to trust her on that one too, though the more he speculated on the situation, the more his concerns regrouped.
"Did you happen to tell Lyle that you could dragon-shift?" asked Ben.
Cully didn't answer.
"Why not?" demanded Ben. "You could at least help him find out if he can do it too." Not that Ben relished the idea of Lyle becoming a dragon, but if it was going to happen one day, it would be helpful to have guidance.
"I'm not sure I can offer much aid there," said Cully. "The first time it happened to me, I was asleep. I felt this amazing rush of power… then poof! I woke up and I was like this. Since then, I've simply willed my dragon form into existence. But from what I've seen, Lyle can't summon even a fraction of the magic required for such a huge shift."
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