Unfortunately, as soon as she cleared the landing of the third floor, she knew he had been telling the truth.
There came the sound of a blaring TV, and then a stench hit her with the force of a slap to the face. Foul and rancid. Like something that hadn’t been properly washed in weeks…possibly years. Her stomach pitched, and not because of the smell. Like most wolves, she didn’t necessarily distinguish between good or bad smells unless food was involved. She flinched because of what the smell contained at its bottom most layer.
Her mate. The acrid burning scent she still associated with him faint and weak.
Fensa rushed forward past the human escort to the door where the strong smells emanated like wafts of green smoke. It wasn’t locked.
But she had only a moment to appreciate the easy access before she flipped the switch next to the door…
Because there was Xenon. In his human-like shell, but little more than a tall skeleton with sunken cheeks and eyes, sitting on the floor. He was naked and attached to the wall at the farthest reach of the room with a manacle. One made of steel, she guessed. The only substance on earth that could slice through a dragon’s skin.
One would think he would have immediately looked up when she crashed into the room, but no…
Xenon seemed to be in the midst of a full-blown argument. His face wretched underneath a wild beard and his hair, oh God, his hair.
The silken waves she remembered had been replaced with a tangled rat’s nest of knotted hair that extended all the way down his waist.
Prehistoric Keanu dragon had turned post-apocalyptic.
For some reason Fensa would never be able to explain, the first thing she did was go over to the TV and calmly turn it off.
She could hear what he was saying more clearly after that. But she still could not understand it. It was in his dragon language. Hissing and clicking over syllables that only had a passing resemblance to what she knew as words. And he still didn’t look up at her. Just kept talking. To the invisible person…
How long? How long had he been here? Hundreds of years? Thousands? Ever since the Viking-Dragon War?
She shuddered. Oh, God. Oh, Fenrir Wolf.
For a moment, Fensa was overwhelmed with the feeling she’d arrived too late. That though she’d circumnavigated the world, and gone into the dragon’s den to find him here, against all odds, she was too late.
Because it was very, very obvious that the father of her children was gone.
Gone, and replaced with a stark, raving madman she barely recognized.
47
Xenon was fighting with Fensa again. Pleading with her to understand why he’d sent her away. Imploring her for the forgiveness she hadn’t granted him in nearly a thousand years of entreaty.
“I am begging you, Fensa.”
“Begging me?” she answered with a hissing scoff. “Begging me as I begged you before you spoke the words to send me back?”
“Reverence?” A voice appeared inside his mind, along with a cherished memory of how his title had sounded upon her tongue. The voice almost sounded like…
He shook his head. It could not be. Fensa had learned his drakkon language, and even if she hadn’t, she hated him too much to engage in mind speak with him.
“I sent you back because I loved you,” he continued out loud. “Because I needed to give you and our son the best chance of survival.”
“Reverence!” The voice-memory said again.
But then Fensa interrupted the voice-memory with her sneering reply, “Hmm, was it that you wanted me to live, or were you just too cowardly to watch me die? For all you know, I’m locked away in a mental asylum now. If I survived the birthing of twins—and that’s a big “if”—my babies were probably taken from me. You’re not even sure what year I returned to, or what year it is right now. For all you know, I could already be back, living in a hell you consigned me to!”
“REVERENCE!” This time the call was accompanied by a fierce shaking of his shoulders.
The feel of another’s skin on his startled him more than the shaking. Fensa sat on him. Often, she’d let her lips hover over his, mercilessly taunting him. But she never touched him in any real or unnecessary way. However, these were hands. Real hands, which he hadn’t felt in hundreds of years.
Inside his mind, the voice-memory said, “Look at me, Reverence. Look at me!”
Xenon looked at her. Only to start. Because he found a woman squatting down in front of him. A woman he might have mistaken for Fensa, except she had long, flowing curls and was not nearly as thin as Fensa had been when he saw her last.
“You mean when you sent me away!” Fensa corrected, still standing her ground in her favorite place to argue with him. Close enough so he could see every line of her face, but not close enough to touch. “Don’t act like parting was such sweet sorrow when you’re the one who sent me away!”
“I did it in the hopes that you might live! Please forgive me!” He turned his head to plead with her again—but a hand gripped his chin, yanking his head back to face the woman squatting in front of him.
The woman’s head came forward and rested against his in reverent greeting, as the voice in his mind said, “Reverence, it’s me, Fensa. Do you remember me? Know who I am?”
Of course, he remembered Fensa. But this woman could not be her. Fensa hated him and spent all his waking hours telling him so. This woman was looking upon him with shining eyes, her yellow flame sparking with both fear and pity.
“No, you are not her,” Xenon informed the woman. “You are but a cruel trick. An actress my cousin has paid to torture me further.”
“I don’t understand your dragon language. For me, it’s only been three months since I saw you last. You’ve got to speak into my mind. Who are you talking to, Reverence? Tell me. Let me help you!”
Fensa’s chortling laugh sounded then. “Oh, isn’t this fun? Now you will have two of us to help you remember what a terrible acolyte you were.”
He turned back to the angry Fensa. “I tried to be a good acolyte to you, Fensa. I wanted your happiness more than my own. I loved you above all others. Don’t you see?”
The woman squatting in front of him jerked, her flame flickering with confusion. “What that my name you just said? In Drakkon? Do you think there’s more than one of me in this room?”
“Y-yes. Two of you. But you are new. The other Fensa has been with me in this chamber for centuries,” he answered in Drakkon.
But despite her claims not to understand his language, her head flame flooded with sudden understanding.
“Widower’s madness…” she whispered inside his mind. “Is this what’s going on, Reverence? You have the same thing your father had?”
Xenon hadn’t heard the term in so long, it took him several moments to remember back to that time. When he and Fensa had spoken of his father’s suffering.
Which was not the same as his own…was it? “Fensa hates me. She has hated me for 15,000 years,” told the newcomer in Drakkon. “Maybe more.”
“Yes, exactly!” Angry Fensa hissed in his language. “You wish I could ever forgive you! But I will never forgive you for what you did. Do you hear me? I will never forgive—”
“Is she real?” the voice inside his head abruptly cut Angry Fensa off.
And he found himself once again looking at the woman in front of him. Her flame burned so prettily. Exactly as he’d remembered from that fateful morning…before his announcement had turned it red with anger and reproach. His cousin had chosen well. He much preferred this pretender to the Fensa who had been haunting him for centuries.
“You don’t think I’m real,” she observed, looking deep into his eyes. “But is she real? Did you ask her? Like, actually ask her?”
This question gave Xenon pause as he realized he never had.
“Ask her,” the woman demanded now. “Ask her if she’s real.”
He shook his head. He couldn’t trust this pretender. Didn’t know how long his cousin w
ould allow this cruel trick to play out. But he’d rather be haunted by the ghost of Fensa than left alone in this room by the one pretending to be her.
“Oh, Reverence…” the voice said inside his head. But then a note as hard as the steel that bound his wrist entered her tone as she asked, “Where is she? Point her out to me. I want to talk to her.”
Xenon thought about this. Then raised his free arm to where Fensa always lingered.
The woman stood. Pointed. “Over here?” she asked, coming to a stop directly in front of his tormentor.
Angry Fensa gave the pretender a wide smile that in no way matched her cold blue flame. “Isn’t this priceless? He thinks you’re real! Like, you would ever come back to him after what he did—”
Fensa ceased speaking when the pretender suddenly produced a sharp knife. A women’s dagger from the Viking era, Xenon vaguely recognized from a time when he still walked free upon the earth.
“I’m confronting you,” was all the warning his tormentor got before the pretender stabbed her in the gut. Again and again and again, like a movie about prisoners he’d once watched on the box Damianos brought him.
Fensa shrieked in what sounded like abject pain. But then she was gone as if she’d never been there at all.
“Something you told me once before,” the voice said inside his head as the woman who’d stabbed Angry Fensa walked back over to where he was sitting. “You have to confront delusions. I mean, not necessarily stab them, but I happened to have my grandmother’s knife, and I figured why not give it a try while she stood there, trying to talk greasy, as my Michigan grandpa says. Speaking of grandparents…”
Fensa reached up to a medallion around her neck. What appeared to be half a wolf and half a man, cut at a jagged angle. He soon found out why when she manipulated both the wolf and the man, and broke the circle into two distinct pieces. “False key disguised as a necklace. This is what my grandfather used to break out of a jail cell when he came forward in time. Nowadays, most changing cells are on electronic locks, but if this manacle is as old as I think it is…”
A muted clank sounded then. It was the sound of the lock disengaging. A wingbeat later, for the first time in years, his arm fell to the side of his body, limp with atrophy.
The pretender took his arm and immediately began to massage it. In a way that felt so good, he didn’t have the heart to remind her as he had once or twice back in the ice age that his shell was also his medical suit. With a few sleep hours, his shell would take care of all healing, including the muscle atrophy.
Remind her…he shook his head. The confusion beginning to fade, now that Angry Fensa had been stabbed out of the room. And maybe out of existence.
He began pushing words into another mind for the first time in thousands of years. “Are you…? Are you real? Really my Fensa?”
A beat passed. And she once again filled up his vision. Though her eyes were shining bright with tears, the voice inside his head somehow sounded sunny and bright as it answered, “Reverence.”
He stared back at her, confused by her answer.
“You may call me by any of my titles: Reverence, Fated Mate, Great Wolf Mother—even Female 7-133. Because I am real. I am not a delusion. I am your wolf, and you are my dragon. And I will not hear my given name upon your lips ever again. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” he pushed into her head after a long, confused moment. “I understand.”
“Good,” she said, cupping his cheek. “And are you still my dragon?”
He nodded and used his non-atrophied arm to cup her cheek as best he could.
And just like the mate he remembered, she nuzzled into it, giving his palm a soft kiss, before placing it over her heart. “Good,” she said again. But now her throat flame, like the one in her chest, burned yellow with emotion.
They kept this position for several minutes. Him sitting, her squatting, neither of them wanting to look away for fear of losing each other again.
Then she said, “Next question. Can you still fly?”
“Yes…yes, I can,” he replied in her head. “This is but a shell, remember? It is also a medical suit of sorts. While my arms, legs, and wings atrophied over the centuries, this suit has been busily repairing those muscles, making them good as new.”
“Okay, good, good, good,” Fensa said with a nod. “Now last but definitely not least important question: what are we going to do about him?”
Fensa turned, and Xenon followed her gaze to where his cousin’s elderly manservant stood in the doorway, mouth hanging open.
48
The biomessage appeared on Ola’s mind screen just as Damianos was escorting her and Eos into his parlor. After six weeks of bio-silence, the message came as a shock. No offense, but Fensa hadn’t exactly been the Fensa she remembered. For one thing, she’d tripled the number of nephews and nieces Ola had in less than two weeks. For another, she had a feral look in her eye. Like she’d let go of the cave, but the cave hadn’t let go of her.
Ola hadn’t been certain Fensa still knew how to bio. She never wore her Bluetooth rings to receive ells, and back in Michigan, Ola often watched her outside with children. They stayed in the forested backyard from sun up to sun down, as if the house was a prison they’d escaped. Bio-messaging seemed like one of those skills that might have been lost in the winds of her weird four year-two week time travel adventure.
But then came the message inside her head. A request written in all caps.
Jesus. Was she serious?
“When Colby returns, he will make us tea,” Damianos informed them.
He glanced at Ola, but then his eyes bounced right back to Eos. Like Ola made him nervous.
Which was strange. As mafia as he’d been in the foyer, in this smaller receiving room he seemed twice as big but way more nervous than she would have suspected, given they were in his home. And technically at his mercy.
“Until he returns, we’ll discuss how you came to exist, young drakkon. I have many questions for you. Questions I fear your father is no longer mentally stable enough to answer…”
Fensa’s message flashed in Ola’s memory, even though it had faded from the mind screen.
Okay, okay, you’re the wild one. Earn your rep, twin. Earn your rep! she thought to herself. Then with a deep breath, she crossed the room.
“Cover your eyes, Eos!“ She would have told him to close his eyes, but real talk, she wasn’t even a little percent sure he could, given how he’d yet to blink in the entire three months they’d been living under the same roof together.
Eos obeyed without question, which was a good thing. Because in the next moment, Ola grabbed Damianos by his Ken doll…
“Actually, I was thinking we’d talk about this—”
She abruptly cut off. Because what was supposed to be as smooth and flat as an animatronic park sex bot, swelled beneath her hard grip.
In fact, it felt like two somethings. Two extremely hard somethings that were caught in her grip.
“What. Are. You. Doing?” came an icy voice above her.
“Ah…” She forced herself to stay right where she was, while she scrambled for an answer. “My sister told me you guys were all Ken dolls down below unless you were mating. I was curious to see if it was true.”
“You were curious…” he repeated, his voice laced through with what she suspected was base contempt. Like some girls had resting bitch face, this guy seemed to have his tone permanently set on “I’m better than you.”
Which made her put some extra brass into her answer. “Yeah, I was curious. So, I decided to check it out.”
“And are you still?”
“Excuse me?”
“Are you still curious about what you’ve found?”
Ola never got embarrassed. Ola not giving a fuck with an extra side of YOLO was like Ola 101, and would be a class taught in college if it were up to her.
But standing here, holding what felt like two dicks in her hand, she felt her face heat, starting wi
th the cheeks. “Yeah, I guess I’m going to have to confess to feeling a little surprised,” she answered, keeping her voice casual as possible.
“A little surprised,” he repeated.
“Just a very, very little,” she answered. Lying through her fucking teeth because good effing God! What was she feeling?!?! It was pulsing so hard it almost felt like it was moving. Was it moving? Jesus—
“I would have your eyes now, Princess of Michigan, Crown Princess of North Dakota.”
His use of her titles surprised her. And she found herself lifting her eyes like a thing commanded.
This one knew how to blink. She’d seen it and made a note of it in the foyer.
But he didn’t blink now. Just stared at her in a way that made Ola feel like his gaze was swallowing her whole.
Then the moment was interrupted by a thunderous BOOM, followed by a huge crash of what sound like a whole bunch of glass exploding above them.
49
Damianos pushed the she-wolf away and ran from the room. His wings ripping through the back of his shirt to get him extra lift and speed as he bounded up the steps.
What the hell had that sound been?
He found the third floor landing a mess of open doors. And Colby sagged against the wall. Stunned but not dead. Not that Damianos cared.
What had passed here?
He looked around at all the empty rooms and went straight to the one that housed his cousin. It was empty now, naught but a chain on the wall, and the lingering stench of unwashed drakkon on his tongue, to let him know his cousin had ever been there.
The sound of glass.
He immediately ran to the solarium. The one he hadn’t used for hundreds of years due to the overwhelming noise of first his cousin’s constant lament, and then of the television he’d had installed to drown him out.
The solarium now played host to a freezing wind.
And a drakkon-sized hole where the panoramic window used to be.
NAGO, His Mississippi Queen: 50 Loving States, Mississippi (The Brothers Nightwolf Trilogy, Book 1) Page 45
