by Amy Faye
"How's it going?" he asked, shifting only momentarily into a human appearance.
"You know you're not supposed to be going around like that," said one. "You'll be seen."
"Hardly, and if I were, then so what? It's not a big deal, either way."
The female scowled at him, her features darkening until she looked like she might lose more than just her composure. "You know better, 'Alex Blume.'"
"I know I do, Cyanora. And you know full well that I don't much care, regardless of what the rules say."
She sneered at him and hissed out a warning that carried with it a subtle charge of electricity that tugged at the hairs on his arm. Then he stepped towards the hill and through the illusion of ground and into the lair. It had been a long way. Exceedingly long, even for a Dragon. To have two homes, two proper homes, was odd. To live in his human form, Alex thought... that was even odder.
Then again, he knew a certain amount about that life. He knew what it was like to be strange, to do things his own way. To do things the wrong way, if the three outside were to be believed. They were not unique in their estimation of things, but when one of their kind died, it wasn't something that they took lightly.
The fact that he'd let it happen to himself, that was another story altogether.
Killing a dragon was hard to do, by any stretch of the imagination. Killing one with his glamour up made it easier. It was hard to fly properly. Hard to hunt. When you looked like a human, it was far, far too easy to slip into the habits of humans. To think like a human, to act like a human. To feel like a human.
Alex knew the feeling too well. In the room with the daughter, he'd been overtaken by too many human emotions. There was the greed, the same as always. The feeling of want. But he didn't want her as any status symbol, or as a tool. He wanted her the way that a man wanted a woman. A human man.
Was it a mistake? He didn't know. But he knew one thing. If there was going to be anyone who could take down Alvin... no, he corrected himself, who could take down Keleth, then Alex would correct that mistake immediately. More than immediately. He started with the options. The three outside were out. Cyanora was the strongest of the three, and she looked like she'd seen death's face herself at the very idea that Keleth's territory was up for grabs.
Alex wasn't startled by it in the least. Cyanora was young, yet. She didn't know the way of the world. Didn't know the kind of threats that were out there. There had been wars, literal wars, fought between their kind in the past. He'd lost more friends in those days than were still alive today. Which was a big part of why they'd been able to put their differences aside.
He pushed the thoughts out of his mind. There was something here, there had to be. Something that would allow him to claim the territory, for one. Territory he'd long since promised that he would take. It put him directly in the cross-hairs of anyone who wanted to find Keleth's killer.
There had to be some clue to who the killer was, as well. The fact that he wasn't it didn't matter to anyone but him, Alex knew. He had been too interested in Human society, though. Lost interest in his native people. Lost interest in their petty squabbles, lost interest in their politicking. Lost interest in their hoards. There would be time to claim those things from them.
Eventually, he would lose interest, as they always did. As everyone always did. The Human world moved faster than their own, fast enough to provide a little bit of entertainment for anyone who had grown tired of their hidden lives. But even then, Alex thought, there was supposed to be something for him to come back to. Politics of his own to settle. Rivalries to be fought.
To have Keleth taken from him should have been a relief. Someone had taken it upon themselves to settle the dispute once and for all, and Alex hadn't had to lift one single finger. He grit his teeth together and looked around the room. He had to hurry, if he was going to meet the daughter.
But first, he had to figure something out, had to understand what had happened here. As he looked around, smelling for the scent of gold, for the scent of magic, for the scent of any sort of power at all, he started to grow pale.
There was nothing to be found, he was starting to realize, and there was much to be done before he could begin to absorb the territory. There would be challengers, as well, but those were no worry of his. He could manage with those.
The problem was the power, and the proof. If he could absorb Keleth's horde, then he could make that into an effective claim to the territory. To his seat at the council, a seat that had remained empty for almost thirty years.
The problem was that wherever that horde was, it wasn't here. And worse, it hadn't been here in a very, very long time.
5
Diana Kramer was the exact distraction that Alex Blume, multi-billionaire and occasional Human Being, couldn't afford. He glowered at her as she stepped out the front doors of the high-rise office building, furious with her for being who she was and looking the way that she did. Then he eased the car into gear and pulled out, turning at the last moment to line the car up perfectly with the sidewalk.
Cars these days perform quite a bit better than they did at their inception. In the beginning there was barely enough power in them to equal to a fast run. Horses were faster, and flying faster still. It wasn't until decades after that, that humans invented their own flying machines, and soaring through the sky became a little bit less safe. Still, it was the fastest way to go short of buying an actual race car, and then it was only a little bit faster, and only in a straight line.
He let out a long breath and then forced himself back under control, threatening to lose it again as she slipped in beside him and he smelled the scent of her perfume, thick and heady and womanish. It had been a long time since he'd cared to indulge that part of him. It wasn't something that Dragons did often, and certainly, when they did it, not generally with humans.
There was some amusement to be found there, of course, same as with anyone and with anything, but it was like eating popcorn as a meal. There was fun to be had but it didn't last, wasn't filling, and wasn't satisfying.
No, most of his kind preferred the company of nobody at all; the few who did prefer company preferred the company of a fellow dragon, and then only from a considerable distance. Keleth had done something few others had. He'd taken a human wife. More than that, he'd sired a human daughter, as well.
"How was work?" Alex slipped the car out of neutral again and eased off the clutch. They started slowly, which was his preference, in spite of the car's natural speed. It had more than enough power to spare, more than he ever really would need. If he were in that much of a hurry, it would be easier to climb out and start flying. But something about the car attracted him. The same thing that attracted dragons to all sorts of things. He wasn't a collector, not of cars, but even he could see the attraction.
She looked over at him. "Fine, I guess. If you don't mind my asking..." Diana trailed off and he looked over at her. He should have been looking past her, watching for oncoming cars, or looking for a place to turn. But he indulged himself for a moment, regardless.
"Go ahead."
"Why are you doing this?"
"Taking you to dinner?"
"Any of it," she asked. "The trust, the dinner. Why were you at my Dad's funeral?"
"I don't suppose you know anything about your father's life as a younger man, would you?"
She seemed to scan her thoughts. "I mean, he didn't talk about it much," she said finally. "I get the impression he came from California, close to Nevada, and that he met my Mom there and moved out to the middle of the country. Why?"
"You could have learned that just looking him up on the internet."
"Well, I didn't want to sound like I knew," she said, shrugging and looking out the window. "Because, like I said. He didn't talk much to me about it."
"Well, they got that part right, at least," he said. The smile on his face wasn't for her, he realized, though he'd thought that the whole thing was an act he was putting on. And yet, when
she wasn't looking, he still had that wistful grin. "He's from California, sure as can be."
"And how do you know that?"
"Because I knew him when I was a younger man, myself."
She looked over at him and raised an eyebrow. "I thought you two hadn't met?"
He let out a breath. Damn; he had said that. "Well, I mean. I didn't mean it like that. I knew of him. He and I ran in... not the same circles, but similar."
"Oh yeah?" She didn't look particularly like she bought it, but simultaneously he couldn't say that he thought she was going to doubt him, either.
"More or less," Alex confirmed. "He left, got married, and I sort of lost track of him."
"That seems to be how he wanted it," Diana agreed. "He was an independent sort of man."
"And you?"
"You might be surprised to learn I'm not any sort of man at all," she said. He chanced a glance in her direction and caught the smile on her face.
"I'd noticed," he said. He looked her up and down. She wasn't his kind. They were fundamentally different beings altogether, and yet... the human part of him reacted. Her shirt was cut low and revealed just enough flesh to be tempting, and her skirt was high enough to show just a hint of thigh above the knee. He put his eyes back on the road before he could look any closer.
"But I mean, I'm sure that you could get this all done from Washington."
"True," Alex said. He eased the car into the left turn lane when the light changed, and the car turned around the corner without the need to slow down, the centrifugal force pulling him towards her. Diana gasped nervously and clutched at the wall, and Alex could feel the stress building up in her. He enjoyed the feeling, enjoyed seeing her squirm. It would be wonderfully interesting to experience it for himself, closer and more personal. Another of Keleth's hoard to be claimed. Perhaps the most desirable piece.
"And yet you're here."
"And yet, I'm here. Thirty years is a long time to not be able to meet a man from your home town, you know? And now the chance is gone forever."
The lies built up on themselves until he didn't know where they were going, but he couldn't stop now. If he tried to explain, it would mean unraveling the whole sweater, and unless it was meant very literally he wasn't interested in going down that path.
"And dinner?"
"I wish I could say that I had some sort of clever plan," he confessed. "But I don't."
"So what, then?"
"You're interested in men, right?"
In the corner of his vision he could see her look over at him, and he allowed himself the opportunity to look at her expression, which held amusement. Her eyebrow was raised in incredulity. "What's that got to do with anything?"
"Well, I'm interested in women. One in particular, at the moment."
"I think there are plenty of pretty girls in Seattle who would be interested in you."
He smiled at that and fixed his eyes back on the street in front of him. "None that I'm interested in myself, though," he said.
That was the truth. The number of human women who interested him could be counted on his fingers, and he was surprised to have run into one of them by accident. Her flesh was shaped about right, but it took more than that. The whiff of danger mixed with value.
Under most circumstances, there was no need to indulge any sexual desire. He felt it in the same way that someone felt any kind of hunger. It would start far away, and if he wanted to then he could choose to ignore it, as long as he kept busy. Turning it off had been easy the past hundred years or more.
That was, of course, right up until you started to collect them. Dragons had a tendency to collect things. It was like a status symbol, and once you started the collection there was no stopping. Letting your hoard go was like admitting defeat, and there was no dragon he knew who was willing to let it go any longer than necessary.
All of that made Keleth a strange specimen, to say the least. Nobody had seen his hoard, not as long as he'd been living his human life. There ought to have been some camaraderie between Alex and Keleth, both of them living false Human lives. Both of them roosting in the same area for quite a long time.
Instead, he wanted nothing more than to take everything that 'Alvin Kramer' had in life, and make it his, and the first step along that route was to claim his daughter. The fact that she had a body shaped for lovemaking only made it that much sweeter, but regardless, he knew, he had to have her, and it was only a matter of time until he did.
6
After almost a thousand years of life, Alex Blume had hoarded a great many things. His collection of Roman philosophy was as complete as it could be. There were dragons much older than he, those who had lived through it, and he still had the most complete collection in the world.
Humans had a tendency to get offended when people amassed such a collection. They thought that things were designed to be shared, to be consumed by other people. So that everyone could know the full text of everything that was known. There were a lot of people who felt that way.
Dragons didn't tend to feel that way; Alex Blume didn't feel that way, either. He was an exception to the rule on a great many subjects, and when it came to someone else's hoard there was a delightful pleasure that he got out of trying to share it with the world. One of his kin had a collection of unreleased albums from several notable rock bands, and it had been a particular pleasure to leak them onto the internet. To see Corinth fall from grace, even just a little bit. It was like a fine wine, almost. Or a fine woman, not unlike the one across the table.
Though few women interested him, or interested most dragons, the few who managed it were like everything in the draconic social existence. The need quickly expanded past an idle interest, and moved into the realm of all-encompassing obsessions. It was something to behold to see her, the way that her body moved. The way that every little thing seemed to be designed by some higher power to attract a man's attention.
In a strange way, she might have been a hoard all by herself. Whoever had designed her, whatever God was out there who created these fleshy humans, he had created this one to hoard men's attention, and even though he was more than a millennium her elder, he couldn't resist her pull any more than any mortal man.
"So what is it that you are studying, if you're not going into law?"
He asked her so that she would continue paying attention to him; if she could so completely claim his attention then he would have nothing less than all of hers. He wasn't going to allow himself to be outdone, no matter what.
"I'm currently in school for art history, with a minor in museum studies."
"Working at a museum? How fitting."
She made a face at him. There was no way that she could understand what he really meant, of course. That would mean explaining too much. But it was fitting on sufficiently many levels that he didn't mind the slip.
"How's that?"
"Your father was an artist," Alex offered. "And now you're going into a field where you might show off that very same art. Why, if I didn't know better, I'd guess that people might accuse you of having a conflict of interest."
"Dad didn't like the fame," she said. He doubted if that were the case, but then again, there were a great many things about Keleth that few dragons could really understand. Perhaps that was why he had left. Perhaps that was why he had died.
"So you wouldn't show his paintings off to the world?"
"No," she said, thinking. "I didn't say that, either."
"So, what, then?"
"I don't know. I haven't given it that much thought." He could sense the lie even as she said it. The expression on her face told him that she'd given it considerable thought. It also told him that she didn't know what she was supposed to think about it, so she pretended to think nothing.
"Of course," he agreed. There was no use in pressing it. "If you don't think it too forward of me, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?"
She looked at him and leaned onto the table. "You'd better make it juic
y."
The view he got down her blouse played at his mind, and he knew that she saw him looking. He knew, further, that the fact that she did nothing to stop him looking was something that he should be reading into.
"Are you seeing anyone currently?"
"No," she said. She did nothing to adjust herself, nothing to hide the deep valley between her breasts, did nothing to cover herself at all. "I'm not. Why?"
"I'd like to see a little bit more of you," he answered.
"And you think you need to ask my permission?"
"I thought it might be polite," he answered. It was a dodge, but it was a dodge right into 'no, I don't.' He watched the smile cross her face, and he suddenly realized what was happening. It gave him a thrill.
She thought for all the world that she was going to catch him out. That she was going to 'collect' him. She was enjoying the attention of a man far above her station, and there was a thrill to it. Not quite sexual, but it could certainly have leaned that way. It was the same thrill that he felt looking at her. He eased his jaw loose of itself, willing the arousal under control.
"Who says I need you to be polite?"
He eased his jaw from side to side again, the tension rising in his gut. She didn't need to be quite this direct about it, but there was something delicious about it. He realized that even if she weren't Keleth's, he might have wanted her, regardless. The hunger in her eyes lit something in his belly. A need that he hadn't felt in a long time.
He needed to take her because if he didn't, someone else would, and that was unacceptable. Not because she was Keleth's possession, part of his horde. Not to take her away from someone else, to humiliate them even in death. Not because she was attractive, even, though she most certainly was.
He needed her because she had value. Unknown, unknowable value. All he knew was that it was high and it was enough to start a stirring in his chest. He couldn't let her go, not any more. That ship, he thought, staring at her, had sailed.
