Silence filled the cave. She couldn’t even hear the birds outside as if by agreement, nature had decided to stop and stare at them wide-eyed. And though she couldn’t see his face, she could feel the rage radiating off him. Huge and killing, to the point that she wondered if his next action would be to grab her by the neck and hurl her wingless body out of the cave. Leaving her to die a broken death on the rocks below.
But once again, he surprised her. “What mean you by this accusation? That I ruined your life before you came? No, do not look away, Female 7-133. I would have your eyes upon me so I may assess the truth of your next words. I would like to see if they burn as bright as the anger you have somehow been keeping from me this entire time.”
Her eyes lifted but only slightly. “Not the entire time,” she mumbled, feeling not nearly as self-righteous now that he’d effectively taken the wind out of her sails. “My original plan was to move somewhere warmer where the Group 7 wolves could thrive. I didn’t even know if I could find the Arizona gate without a real map. But then your fight with the red dragon happened.”
His rage didn’t ebb so much as become muted by his confusion. “I understand not what this fight has to do with your anger. For had it not occurred, I never would have granted your wish to come here.”
Fensa clamped her lips again, folding her arms tightly over her naked breasts. It was so hard to decide what to do, what to say. She could feel her own confusion offsetting her anger. But in the end, it became clear she owed him…something. And the truth was all she had to give. “The stories the Far Travelers tell about your fight with the other dragon—he was red.”
“Yes, this is true,” he answered carefully, confusion muting his rage even further.
“This means your kind…dragons…they’re not all blue like you?” she asked him, just as carefully.
“Yes,” he answered. “This is correct. My species comes in many colors. Blue is the current royal color, and the one most associated with the upper strata of Drakkon society. Yellow belongs to that of the lowest class. But since the introduction of the fated matching system, we have enjoyed more color diversity. My father was a blue drakkon, and my mother black. There are more dark blues in our family, also a few purples, and even some greens.”
“But how many—?” She stopped and swallowed hard, even though she wasn’t using her voice box to speak. “How many blue dragons are here with you, on this mission?”
“Three,” he answered. “The Royal Overlord, who is my uncle. His son, the Royal Huntmaster, who is my cousin, and me. The rest are red, black, and green—” He suddenly cut off, noting, “Your flame has iced over, Female 7-133. Why do my words upset you so?”
“What color are your cousin and uncle’s eyes? Are their eyes red, too?”
A ripple of irritation came over their mate bond, but then he replied, “No. I have my mother’s eyes. They, like my father and brother, have eyes the color of aurum. Slightly darker than Golden Son’s scales.”
And at that moment any last shreds of hope Fensa had been clinging to vanished. “Oh, God. I told myself it wasn’t you. That’s what I said before the red dragon. It couldn’t be you because you were so polite and reverent. Because we’ve only ever gotten into one real argument. And you’re the only person other than the sister I freaking made up who believes I’m not crazy.”
She looked up at him sorrowfully. “You think trying to leave you was easy. But it wasn’t. I made plans to leave, but all the while I felt so guilty. Because maybe it wasn’t you—that’s what I kept telling myself. Maybe it wasn’t you at all. But I guess in the back of my brain, I knew. I think I knew all along what was lurking beneath that super formal, one-eyed shell of yours. I just didn’t want to admit it to myself…”
Fensa trailed off and dropped her face into her hands as a flood of overwhelming emotions rushed through her, threatening to collapse her mind again. Threatening to drive her just as crazy as she used to be.
“You require holding.”
She shook her head, inside her hands. Refusing to cry. Refusing to lose her mind again as she had with the two moons. And for most of her life before that.
But his arms came around her anyway. And he held her. He held her in that quiet cave until the feelings stopped battering her, and it felt like she was once again standing on solid ground.
Then he said into her head, “Reverence, I believe the time has come for you to tell me everything.”
26
Xenon would wish afterward that he had not asked.
In halting breaths, she told him the story of her father’s Viking village. How one morning, thousands of years from now, when the sky had been lit purple by what the people in her time called The Northern Lights, three drakkon attacked her father’s village. Three “blue dragons—one with eyes of red, and two with eyes of gold.” Three drakkon so powerful, they slaughtered all but her father, who’d only escaped with his life because he was in wolf form and because his father had told him the spell needed to make use of the fated mate portal device. He’d escaped forward to her time, but the drakkon attack had its effect.
According to Fated Mate, her father had never fully recovered from his family’s death, and thus had become “a drunk.” He had what Fated Mate called “an undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder with a shitload of survivor’s guilt on top—which he treated with a fuck ton of drinking.”
Her father felt he should have been slaughtered with his family, and that it had been both wrong, and cowardly of him to use the fating portal to escape his true destiny. Eventually, her mother could not take it anymore and did something that had no translation in the drakkon language. Divorced—or left the mating—without permission from her mate. Two months later, while high on the liquid chemical called alcohol, her father had walked into a path of moving vehicles called traffic and had been struck dead, thus ending a life that had supposedly been saved by his escape through the fated matching portal.
By the time Fated Mate finished her tale, tears shown in her eyes. But not for the reason he thought.
“All this time, I told myself you were different. You had to be different. You couldn’t be like those dragons who attacked my father’s village. Maybe you were from a different group. But here’s what I know for sure. We do not have two moons in my time. And there were never two moons during my father’s time. In fact, there is zero evidence of two moons in my civilization’s recorded time. And…there really, really isn’t any life on the planet Mercury.”
Mercury. That is how she referred to Drakkon in her civil tongue.
Xenon stopped trying to “process”—as Fated Mate would say—all she had told him. Yes, he and his two relatives were the only blue drakkon on the trip. But… “Perhaps your civilization’s telescopes are not strong enough,” he proposed.
“No, that’s not it. We sent a probe to your planet. More than one, in fact, and from all the evidence we could gather, your planet is not only uninhabited, it’s virtually uninhabitable without space suits because it doesn’t have an atmosphere.”
Fated Mate tilted her head in a way that somehow conveyed sympathy even as her flame continued to burn with anger and sorrow. “Do you understand what I’m saying, Xenon? Something is going to happen. Something that makes it impossible for you to return to Mercury. Something that’s going to make you want to kill every man, woman, and child in my father’s village.”
She spoke in such riddles, and he could understand little of what she told him. However, one unspoken confession did come through. “You hate me. You have hated me from the beginning of this journey for this murder you think I will commit.”
“For the murders I know three blue dragons with eyes matching you and your family will commit.”
“But it could be anyone!” He scrambled for an alternative hypothesis. “Once every Drakkon millennium, we have a royal hunt. Mayhap it was my brother who did this to your father’s village. Perhaps he brought with him another red-eyed blue for the hunt.”
She shook her head again, her chest flame sparking with pain. “As much as I want to believe those three blue dragons are your brother and his cronies, or three other blue assholes, I can’t shake this terrible feeling. I don’t…I don’t think you’re going home like you think you are. And judging by the lack of evidence that dragons even exist, I don’t think any more of you are coming back here. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the years between now and when you guys attack Papa’s village, but my gut tells me this: you will be one of the dragons who slaughter my Viking family.”
Xenon could see her logic. The combined evidence, if not damning, was suspect. And indeed, that explained her mood during this journey. Why she accepted, but no longer initiated congress with him. Why she seemed unable to so much as glance at him in drakkon form, without having to look away.
“Then why not kill me? If you have been dreading what I might do to your father’s people, why did you not kill me in my sleep while we traveled?”
Fated Mate stilled and without warning, her flame turned a bright yellow. Much like the happy yellow she burned upon seeing Eos first thing after a long hunt, only richer and more vibrant.
It was a beautiful color, unlike any he had ever beheld. Yet inside his head she said, “I should. As the daughter of a Viking you have wronged, I should kill you as you killed everyone my father held dear.”
She said this, yet her flame continued to burn a rich yellow.
“So why not kill me now? Perhaps stab a spear in my other eye the next time I am in drakkon form?”
She looked away from him. “I’m still Eos’s mother,” she answered. “I can’t hurt him by killing his father.”
A half-truth at best, he decided, studying her rich yellow burn. But he decided to accept it if only so he might gaze upon her flame a little longer. The color, so unlike any he had ever beheld, mesmerized him.
Do you want me to survive? Okay then… let’s go with that option,”
Remembering her promise to him, he cupped her face. “Fated Mate. You honor me with the decision to spare my life,” he informed her in a grave voice. “And for this, I will vow to never lay claw or fire upon you, or any other member of your family. You have my sworn oath.”
He thought the words would assuage her, but instead, her flame darkened back to orange, and she pulled his hand from her face. Flinging it like entrails from her body. What had he said to upset her? The answer came to him swiftly, obvious as a burn.
“Ah. You do not believe my words.”
Fated Mate’s flame darkened even further. “I can’t believe your words,” she answered. “I tried to forget. But that fight…this conversation…I can’t ignore it anymore! You’re a dragon. No matter how much I lo—” She broke off with a sharp shake of her head as if reprimanding herself for something she was about to say. “I can’t ignore it anymore. I can’t forget if anything happens between us, you stop being polite, and start making very real threats against my freedom, my motherhood, nearly everything I hold dear. I wonder what you’ll say to get me to talk the next time I make you mad? What will it take to turn your solemn vow into some sort of sick revenge against me when you attack my father’s village? His family? How can I believe you won’t try to finish the job this time and make sure my dad dies, too?”
Her words chilled him to the bone, and at the same time, he felt his flame spark with such rage he had to take a step back.
She did not know, he told himself. She could not know. About his family. Or its reputation for cruelty. That what she accused him of was exactly what his father or brother would have done if betrayed by their fated mates.
The Even-Flamed Prince. He pondered his title. He was not called this because he was especially temperate, but because he didn’t completely lack a moral compass like his brother and father, and many of the blue kings who came before them. And yet despite his even-flamed reputation, Xenon’s deepest and most secret fear was that his family’s cruel streak lurked deep inside him as well. Embedded in his genes, waiting for the right circumstance or opportunity to switch it on and unleash itself on him, like some lethal and irreversible poison.
“No, no. You will not turn the direction of this fire,” he said more to himself than her. “You started this. You pushed for me to bring you here. And then you did attempt to abscond with our son!”
“’Attempted’ being the main word,” she answered, her voice weary but unapologetic. “Tracking down the Arizona gate was a long shot at best. I always knew it, even if I let myself put too much faith in it. You might have lost the argument in Siberia, but you were always going to win this war.”
He did not answer her this time. Instead, he took another step back. And then without another word, he leaped from the cave’s ledge.
Xenon had won this war, had he not? But it was as if his three-chambered heart had turned to stone, the heavy weight dragging him down to the rocky outcrop below before he finally unshelled and his wings found good current.
He had won. And Fated Mate had lost. He was a practical drakkon, and he knew she would but occupy only a speck of his life. And likely the life of their only child, too. Fated Mate could rot in that cave for her crimes. He could lead the Far Travelers to a different mountain, and in a thousand years or so, Golden Son would have eventually forgotten she even existed.
So why did he not feel victorious?
27
Xenon flew away.
He flew away. And he did not come back.
It took only two seconds or so after he disappeared over the horizon for Fensa to feel like she’d lost everything.
Stupid mate bond. “The love gets deeper and deeper,” her ever-cheery Aunt Janelle had often told her. But now Fensa figured her mom had gotten it right when she used the word “worse” to describe the impact of the bond.
Watching Xenon go felt like suddenly coming down with a bad case of food poisoning. But in her heart, rather than her stomach. And it only took a few hours before she quite literally felt like she was dying. Not from hunger. Or even thirst. Honestly, Fensa found she could no longer feel the urge for food and drink that should be nagging her by the time night fell. All she felt was heartbreak. Only heartbreak.
Eventually, Fensa shifted into her wolf to curl up on the hard cave floor. This was the natural healing instinct for her kind. Also, wolves didn’t cry.
Her wolf kept her comfortable throughout the night. Arizona, as it turned out, was nowhere near as dry and hot during the ice age as it had been in her time. The current Arizona climate reminded her of that time she and her parents had gone to Florida for a week in February. Ostensibly to escape the bleak winter of their Michigan home, but most likely a last-ditch attempt by her parents to save a rapidly failing marriage by throwing Disneyworld at it. Hey, if Disney couldn’t fix it, nothing could! The trip had been a bust as far as her parents’ marriage was concerned…but Fensa could still remember the relative strangeness of the Florida winter climate: way warmer than Michigan; way wetter, the air heavy with humidity…like stepping out of a hot shower into a steam-filled bathroom. And yet surprisingly cool at night. It was the same here in prehistoric Arizona. At night the temperatures dropped significantly, so much so that for most of the journey, she and Eos often slept in wolf-form, snuggled together beneath Xenon’s ever-warm arm.
Don’t think about him.
Or the argument.
Or that he left you here, and most likely won’t be coming back.
That’s what she told herself as she fell into a restless sleep.
28
“GOOD MORNING, FENSA. HA
PPY BIRTHDAY!” She woke to the sound of her usually dormant bioware bleating inside her furry head. “You have…ZERO events scheduled for today!”
By the Fenrir Wolf, was it really her birthday? How old was she now?
26, the answer came back, dark and depressing.
She must have slept way past sunrise because the day was already damp and hot. So warm, she shifted as she sat up and put on the loose hide dress she had tossed aside last night before inviting Xenon to fuck her. Definitely not the Arizona she remembered, she thought as she swung her feet to dangle her long legs over the cave’s small bottom lip.
Lush green vegetation covered the mountains. Mostly inedible, she presumed, but the huge leaves might make for good makeshift umbrellas when it rained. Also, instead of the dry valley floor she remembered, the ground below was snaked through by a generous river. Raging so noisily, she could almost hear it from here. Almost.
Fensa wondered if the people camped out beside it would be able to hear her if she called out to them—
Wait a minute, she thought, a penny dropping through her usual morning fuzz. There were people below. Actual specks moving about! Another tribe? Or were these the Group 7 wolves Xenon had threatened to lead to another mountain?
As if in answer, the air filled with the familiar smell of a burning fire. And then with a suddenness that nearly knocked her onto her back, Xenon’s drakkon appeared in front of her, flapping his insanely large wings to stay aloft.
NAGO, His Mississippi Queen: 50 Loving States, Mississippi (The Brothers Nightwolf Trilogy, Book 1) Page 34
