by Selena Kitt
“You’re a shifter?” She slowly lifted her head to stare at him, incredulous.
“I was,” he corrected. “I can’t shift anymore.”
“So... you’re not a shifter?” She cocked her head, looking confused.
“It’s complicated.” He sighed. “I haven’t been able to shift in about a thousand years.”
Her eyes widened as what he’d told her finally registered.
“You’re... a thousand years old?” Her words were almost a whisper.
“Thereabouts.” He cleared his throat, deciding it was now or never. “I don’t remember exactly when I was born.”
“Well...” She stared at him in wonder, as if seeing him for the first time. “What happened?”
“My last selfless act,” Kai said bitterly. He didn’t like to talk about it. He didn’t even like to remember it. “Scotland had many kings when I lived there. But there was a wolf king they said was destined to rule everything—what we’d now call the British Isles.”
“A wolf king? Like, a shifter?”
“Similar,” he agreed. “They call them wulvers in Scotland, but they’re a race of shifters, yes. The stories of how he came under the necromancer’s control vary, but the fact is, whether he simply let the wizard in or was bewitched, the outcome remained the same.”
“A wizard—are we talking about magic?” She looked doubtful.
“You accept that shifters exist, but you don’t know about magic?” He chuckled. Then his smile faded. “But you’re right—real magic is dead. It died with the dragons. And with the necromancer himself.”
“How?”
“The wulver king realized his mistake too late,” Kai said. “He was already under the necromancer’s control. So, he secretly sent for me. He knew the only thing that could kill a lich was dragon fire.”
“A lich?”
“Necromancer, wizard, lich. They’re mostly the same thing.” He touched her cheek, smiling at the thought that this woman lived in a world with advancements the one he was born into had never dreamed of, but she had never seen a bit of real magic. “I knew the wulver king well—Eoin was a friend—but when I tried slipping into the kingdom in human form, somehow the lich knew I was coming.”
“He caught you?”
He nodded. “I shifted, but it was too late. He’d imprisoned me. Mystical bonds.”
“Mystical?”
“Dragons are, unfortunately, particularly susceptible to magic,” he admitted a little ruefully. “We’re immortal beings with the ability to fly and breathe fire, so I suppose that’s our trade-off.”
“So, you didn’t get to roast him like a marshmallow?”
“Ha. No, the joke was on me.” Kai shook his head sadly. “The lich was more than ready for me. And he had plans.”
“I assume his plans didn’t involve dinner and a movie.”
“Hardly,” Kai replied dryly, but she’d made him smile. “He wanted to make sure no dragon ever shifted again. And he decided to use me to do it.”
“How?” she breathed, eyes wide.
“He needed a dragon’s heart. And he knew I would give mine to him.”
“But... why?”
“Because he had my Fireborne.”
“Okay, you had me, and then you just lost me.” She wrinkled her adorable nose and Kai kissed it.
“Dragon shifters had riders. They were our mates and came from a long line of priestesses called Fireborne,” he explained. “And the lich had kidnapped mine.”
“Oh no.”
“Oh yes.” Kai closed his eyes for a moment, and he could see Nia’s face, see the fear in her eyes. “I knew giving him my heart would keep me from shifting ever again. What I didn’t know was it would prevent every dragon shifter from ever shifting again.”
“Oh my God,” she whispered, a hand to her mouth. “Was he going to kill her?”
“Worse.”
“Worse? What could be worse?”
“Fireborne are immortal, like we dragon shifters are,” he explained. “Very few things can kill us. If a dragon ever died, his body would be burned and his Fireborne would walk into the flames to join him.”
“Whoa,” Jules exclaimed. “That’s commitment.”
He laughed. “She wouldn’t be going to her death. She would be reborn in the fire.”
“All Game of Thrones-like? She’d just walk back out?”
“That show. The way they depict dragons. Ugh.” Kai rolled his eyes. “No. Once the flames died down, there would be two eggs. Inside one, a Fireborne. The other, a dragon shifter.”
“The same people—I mean, shifters or whatever?”
He nodded. “In spirit, yes, they were the same beings. They wouldn’t remember their lives before, though. And they’d be raised apart until they were ready to be paired.”
“So, she couldn’t die...” Jules mused. “What was he going to do to her?”
“He had a potion he was going to make her drink.” Kai felt his chest filling with anger at the memory. “That would paralyze her. Not temporarily—for eternity. But she would still be able to feel... everything. And then, he told me, he was going to have her drawn and quartered. And bury the pieces in a mystical tomb he’d constructed that she could never escape from.”
“This guy makes Darth Vader sound like a big kitten.”
“He was the most powerful necromancer the world had ever known. He’d enslaved the king of the wulvers and the king of the dragons, and he probably would have enslaved all of humankind if Nia hadn’t stopped him.”
“Nia...” Jules sat up, turning to face him, the covers pooling in her lap. “Nia was your... mate? The Fireborne woman?”
“Yes.” He saw the slight flicker of jealousy in her eyes and suppressed a smile. “Do you want me to finish the story?”
She pouted for a minute, arms crossed over her bare breasts. Then she relented. “Go on.”
“There’s not a lot more to tell,” he said. “I don’t remember any of the spell he put on me to take my heart. I just remember seeing Nia’s face—she was pleading with me not to do it, but I couldn’t let him hurt her—and then I told him he could do anything to me, as long as he let her go.”
“Did he? Let her go?”
“I saw him push her out of the circle.” Kai made a rotation with his finger. “He’d created a magical boundary.”
“I get the picture.”
“I don’t remember much after that. A lot of magic, I assume. I don’t know how it works. Dragons avoid magic like Frankenstein avoids fire. Bad!”
“But what happened?” Jules nudged him, bouncing a little on the bed like a child insisting the story go on just a little longer.
“The lich got what he wanted. He trapped my heart in a stone, which effectively put all dragons back into human form—and made them powerless to shift.”
“I thought Nia stopped him?”
“Not quite in time.” Kai sighed. “It had already been done and couldn’t be undone. But she did stab him. And then she poured that potion down his throat.”
“The paralyzing one?”
“Yes. She couldn’t kill him—not without dragon fire—so she put him in the mystical tomb he’d made for her.”
“And then what happened?”
He shrugged. “The next thousand years or so.”
“You weren’t a shifter anymore, but you were still immortal?” she mused. “What about your... mate? Nia?”
“All of the Fireborne found themselves suddenly very mortal.”
“Oh, Kai.” She put her hand on his arm. “I’m so sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.” Despite this fact, he still felt a pain in his chest at the memory.
“This all really happened?” She sounded incredulous.
Of course, she did. It was something out of some fairy tale and had happened so long ago no one else could have remembered.
“It did,” he agreed. “The question is—do you believe me?”
Jules sat quietly f
or a moment, considering this.
Then, slowly, she nodded her head. “I do.”
Kai let out a breath he didn’t even know he’d been holding.
“But... what does this mean?” she mused out loud, meeting his eyes. “For us?”
If he thought telling her his tale of woe had been hard, he knew this was going to be even harder.
“I think you can guess.”
Jules nodded, looking about as miserable as he felt. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. The natural order of things—at least, in his world, had been disrupted a millennium ago. But in that whole time, he’d never felt about a woman the way he now felt about Jules. And that could only mean one thing.
“Will you tell me what happened to Nia?” she asked.
“I hope you can make sense of this.” Kai took a deep breath, reaching over to take her hand. “Jules, you have to understand... once we understood the Fireborne were mortal... once I realized Nia was going to die, but I wasn’t... I couldn’t bear it.”
“What did you do?” she whispered, her face pale.
“I had to leave.” He felt her hand start to pull away, saw the anger flash in her eyes. “Don’t you understand? I loved her too much to stand by and do nothing, to just watch her grow old and die. If I couldn’t fully be her mate—I wanted her to have all the things a mortal woman should have. A full life with a... a husband and children. I couldn’t give her those things. We were suddenly from different worlds.”
“And here I thought you’d lost her.” Jules gasped. “But you left her.”
“If it means anything, I regret that decision more than any I’ve ever made.” Kai watched, miserably, as Jules scrambled out of the bed, gathering up her clothes. He didn’t make a move to stop her.
“So, you tell me this crazy story about dragon shifters and fire riders or whatever, and I’m sitting here feeling horrible for you.” She pulled her dress over her head, struggling to get it fully zipped. She managed to get it about three-quarters there. “I’m thinking, poor Kai, he made this awful sacrifice for the woman he loved, it’s no wonder he refuses to be selfless anymore.”
“Jules...” He wanted to say something, anything, to make it better, but he couldn’t. He knew what it sounded like to her. He’d been young and foolish and, back then, had no idea how much the time he’d missed with Nia would mean to him later.
“No.” Her voice shook, and he saw tears in her eyes. “You think your last selfless act was leaving her, don’t you? You really believe that! But you know something? That was the most selfish thing you could have done.”
I know, he thought but didn’t say. There was something stuck in his throat.
“Now it’s my turn to be selfish.” She turned and headed toward the door. “I’m not sticking around long enough to find out when you’re going to leave me. Goodbye, Kai.”
She walked out the door and he heard the elevator going upstairs. Instead of forcing her to call an Uber or a cab, he made sure his driver was ready and waiting with the limo out front. It took everything in him to not go after her. He sat on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands, feeling more lost and alone than he’d ever been in his entirely too-long life.
He’d left Nia, believing it was the right thing to do, but he’d been wrong.
And Jules had left him before he’d gotten a chance to tell her—that she was Nia, his beloved, finally returned to him.
CHAPTER EIGHT—Jules
“You did such an excellent job, Evan.” Jules praised him, ruffling his carrot top head with a smile. He beamed back at her. She was so proud of him, getting up in front of all those people—the grandstands were literally packed—and helping her show them how valuable equine therapy really could be. He’d been a little scared before the performance, but Francis Bacon had given him the confidence he needed to lead the horse out into the middle of the polo field.
“I’m so proud of you, baby.” Carolyn leaned over to kiss his cheek, which Evan wiped off, but he was still grinning from ear-to-ear.
“You did good, too, Jewel.” He gave her a thumbs-up as they walked toward the house. Jules had promised him cookies and she’d left the package she bought just for him on the kitchen table. There were plenty of refreshments on the tables, but that was all upscale food Kai had catered, and Evan wanted Oreos.
Just thinking of Kai made the hole in her chest gape even wider and she swallowed, trying to ease the ache.
“I couldn’t have done it without you,” Jules assured Evan as they walked up the porch steps and she opened the door, waving them in.
“Cookies!” Evan saw the Oreos sitting on the table and immediately sat, bouncing in his chair impatiently while Jules opened the package.
“How many?” she mused, tilting her head at him “One, two?”
“A zillion!” He spread his arms, his eyes impossibly wide behind his glasses.
“Okay, three,” Jules conceded, putting three in front of him. He’d truly eat the whole package if they let him. “And one more because you’re awesomesauce.”
Evan gave her a grin with teeth already full of black cookie crumbs. Carolyn looked at him with so much motherly love it threatened to crack Jules’s heart in half. It had only been two days since she’d stormed out on Kai, and they had been the longest days of her entire life. She thought not seeing him had been hard—but seeing him today, even if only from a distance, had been harder.
She’d given a lot of thought to his fairy tale—it was still hard to believe it was all true, even if, in her heart, she knew it was—and to his precious Nia. She knew it was silly to be jealous of a woman he had loved over a thousand years ago, but she was. And still, she couldn’t help feeling what Nia must have felt when Kai had turned and left her after discovering she was mortal. What must Nia have gone through after losing her mate? She could only imagine. She’d only spent two days without Kai and it was killing her. What would a lifetime have been like?
But then, Kai had been without his mate for a millennium. That, she truly couldn’t imagine.
“One more?” Evan pleaded through a mouthful of cookie, looking longingly at the bag of Oreos.
“Okay, one more.” Jules relented, handing it over and closing the bag. “I guess if I give an Evan a cookie, I’m gonna have to give him a glass of milk.”
Evan snorted a laugh, looking delighted that Jules had referenced one of his favorite books—If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.
She put the Oreos away in the pantry and poured him a glass of milk, bringing it back to the table.
“Thanks,” he said, gulping it down. “That hits the spot.”
That made Jules and Carolyn both laugh.
“What’s been your favorite part so far?” Jules asked Evan as she sat down at the table, nudging a chair toward Carolyn, who sat, too.
“Cookies.”
Jules laughed again, shaking her head.
“And when they clapped for me and Francis Bacon,” he added, licking at his milk mustache. Jules handed him a napkin from the container sitting on the lazy-susan in the middle of the table. “And they all loved it when Francis Bacon bowed! I taught him that, Jewel!”
“You sure did.” She smiled, meeting Carolyn’s eyes and seeing they were wet with tears. “You’re a star, little man.”
Jules slid another napkin across the table, this time to Carolyn, who took it, sniffing and dabbing at her eyes. Jules loved Evan dearly, but not nearly as much as this woman did. A mother’s love was something Jules longed for—both from her own mother, who had been taken from her too soon, and, she had to admit, part of her wanted to be a mother as well.
If I couldn’t fully be her mate—I wanted her to have all the things a mortal woman should have. A full life with a husband and children.
Maybe what Kai had done in leaving had been a selfless act after all, Jules thought, gazing longingly at Evan.
“You excited to go back to school?” Jules asked. “Only another few weeks.”
Evan nodded,
drinking the last of his milk
“He can’t wait to see all his friends again,” Carolyn said. “And I can’t wait to have some peace and quiet in the house.”
That made Jules laugh.
“I made a fort in my backyard,” Evan announced. “So me and my dad can sleep outside.”
“Your... dad?” Jules raised an eyebrow questioningly at Carolyn. Evan’s father had died soon after he was born—pancreatic cancer.
“Imaginary friend thing,” Carolyn told her. “Therapist says it’s normal. Coping mechanism at this age.”
“He is not imaginary.” Evan’s face turned into a little storm cloud. “He comes into the backyard to play with me and sit in my fort.”
“I let him have Ray’s old tent,” Carolyn explained. “It had a few holes in it but, well, why not? He’s having fun out there.”
“With my dad,” Evan added, looking askance at his mother. Then he turned to Jules. “She doesn’t believe it’s my dad, but it is. She just hasn’t seen him yet when he comes. But you believe me, don’t you, Jules?”
“Oh... yes, sure.” She glanced at Carolyn, not knowing if she should play into his fantasy or not. But something about Evan’s vehemence had given her goosebumps. “I’d like to see him. Is he here now?”
He scoffed. “No. He’s real. I told you!”
Carolyn shook her head, using the napkin again to dab her eyes.
“What do you talk about?” Jules asked.
“Oh, he can’t talk.” Evan frowned at that. “But he likes to look through my books. I have to turn the pages for him, though. He can’t do it very well.”
“I see.” Jules literally had to rub her arms to try to dispel the chill she had.
“I tried to wash him off. His white clothes got real dirty. And he smells bad. But it didn’t work so good.” Evan wrinkled his nose.
“White clothes?” Jules asked, glancing at Carolyn, who was so pale she looked like she’d seen a ghost.
“Yeah, like pants and a jacket with these cool pins on it,” Evan said, pointing to the left pocket of his shirt. “And a hat he lets me wear.”
“Ray was buried in his uniform,” Carolyn whispered, so softly Jules barely heard her.
