by Lola Gabriel
Snapping back to the moment they were in, Boden followed her eyes. “Oh,” he said, “no, that’s human stuff. They’ve found a lot of workarounds in the last few years. Interesting, isn’t it?”
Jane seemed shaken. She couldn’t seem to pull her eyes away from the landscape around them. Fair enough, he thought. It really had been a long time, after all.
“You’ll get used to it,” Boden managed, in what he meant to be a light tone but came out as sort of dismissive. “Shall we head to the heath to shift? Jane can stretch her wings. If she remembers how to use them.”
“I do,” Jane said in a particularly matter-of-fact tone.
“Well…” Aaron was almost puce this time. His voice fell to a whisper as he managed, “I’m afraid of heights.” Boden didn’t act quickly enough to swallow his laugh, and it boomed out. Aaron wilted further.
“Sorry,” Boden said, “just, you’re a dragon shifter, mate. How do you have a fear of heights?”
Aaron looked like he might cry. His lip wobbled, and looking up at Boden, he had the air of a particularly sad beagle puppy. “I fell out of a tree as a child.”
Drucilla put a hand on Aaron’s arm. “We’ll find some fire, Aaron, and I’ll take you back. It’s fine. Maybe Boden would be kind enough to organize some training for you soon, as you are in his employ?” Aaron tried to smile at this. His puppy look was almost hopeful for a moment, but Boden was still trying not to laugh. It must have shown, because Aaron’s shoulders were slumped as he turned to Drucilla. She looked at Boden with eyes that would sour milk.
“You two will want to stretch your wings?” she suggested.
Jane nodded, hard. “Absolutely,” she said, “of course.”
“Don’t let her escape, Boden. In case she really is a blood-thirsty criminal. And don’t let her kill you either. Well, what do I care about that, actually?”
“Ha bloody ha,” Boden spat. “We’ll go and find some cover. See you back at the palace.”
Boden indicated a direction, the way to the heath, and Jane strode a few paces ahead of him immediately. He had to do an embarrassing run thingy to catch up.
“You don’t know where you’re going,” he said. He thought he might be sick.
“That was unkind,” Jane said, not looking at him. “Are you always cruel? Did the work we were doing three hundred years ago mean nothing?”
She was shorter than him, considerably so, but she was so fast, he was having to repeat the stupid little run to keep up with her.
“I’m not cruel. I mean, I’m not a murderer! I don’t have my enemies flogged, or even really locked up. I’m fine. I’m—”
Jane stopped quite suddenly. The heath was in view now, but she didn’t seem to care. Boden couldn’t halt his silly run in time, and smacked right into her. She fell back, and he caught her. There was the fizz he had felt in the prison when they touched. The warmth. He forgot what he’d been saying as he held her, looked into her green eyes. She had freckles, light ones he hadn’t noticed before.
Jane righted herself and shook him off. She gathered her hair and twisted it back over her shoulder where it had gotten into her face and down her t-shirt.
“You think fine is good enough for a leader?” She leveled her gaze at him, her eyes seeming to coax his to stay on them.
Boden cleared his throat. “In peace time, fine is good enough.” He sounded like a moron. Such a moron.
Jane scoffed. “Fine is not what I fought for. And it’s never really peace time, is it?”
Boden felt like an idiot. How was this woman making him feel so stupid so quickly? He wanted to punch something, but there was nothing to punch. His fists clenched anyway.
Jane pointed at his right hand. “Neither violence nor laughter at the expense of others will make you a good leader.”
She was also too damn perceptive. He relaxed one hand, and then the other. He took a breath. Jane smiled at him. Why?
“Light returns to your eyes when you’re calm,” she said, “like a sky clearing.”
Boden wanted to laugh at this, but he didn’t. Clearly, her judgment was already having an effect on him.
“That scroll was stolen, Boden, and you were supposed to know about it. That means it’s definitely not peace time now. Are you going to be good enough?”
Heavy. Was everyone this heavy three hundred years ago? Boden wondered. What a world that would be. Well, he’d been there but like she’d said, he’d been so young.
Jane cut off his thoughts with her next question, and he felt he would never get back to them.
“And do you,” she asked, “want to have sex in those trees over there?”
For a moment, he thought he must have misheard her.
“Do I—”
“I understand,” Jane said, briefly looking at the chewing-gum-spotted pavement, gathering herself, maybe just slightly embarrassed, “that we just met, and I largely think you are a fool. Whatever we are doing is important, and I understand that, but if we clear this tension that I know you feel also, we might get more done. I have been incarcerated for centuries. And…well…you’re a very attractive man. And you must know that. I mean, I’ve never been shy, but I feel—”
A grin crept across Boden’s face as Jane began to wane. He shrugged his shoulders. Cocked his head. “Maybe,” he said.
“I might have been locked up for years,” Jane shot back, “but that’s a yes, I believe. This bit doesn’t change.”
8
Jane
The question had just leaped from her, but she wasn’t sorry really. They ran across the road, him just slightly behind her as he had been the whole time. Maybe people had gotten slower in the last three hundred years?
On the green, she could feel his breath on her back. It wasn’t that she was attracted to him, not as a person, but clearly there had been chemistry when they touched. And that stuff, you couldn’t conjure it up. It was there or it wasn’t. She might never like him much, but she would have great sex with him. It was written in the stars, or their cells, or the mixture their breath made in the cold air.
“Are you sure?” Boden was almost sweet. In fact, his hovering hands were practically a marriage proposal by the standards of many of the men she had encountered before she had been locked away. But his father had been the one to lock her away, she supposed. Give the order, anyway.
Jane moved his hands to her hips and twisted his rough and lightly curled hair in a fist. The word surfer came to her again. She bit his fat, red bottom lip. Boden groaned.
“That was easy,” she said and pulled them further into the shade of the copse of trees they were entering. Both of them were wearing puffy jackets. They made a ‘shh’, ‘shh’, ‘shh’, noise against one another. Jane thought it was like wearing a nest, or the skin of a snake.
“Are you sure?” Boden managed to gasp, and she couldn’t help but laugh.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” Boden said, pushing her off him, so he was a wall and she was leaning against that wall, “are you sure you want to fuck me right now, on this bed of pine needles and mulch? I mean, you just got out of prison. Are you in the right place?”
“Forest is as good as anywhere,” Jane said. And his breath on her mouth… wow… she pushed his face to her neck. Her collarbone, and then further, so he was kissing her stomach and undoing these stupid tight trousers with their dangerous metal teeth and his tongue was cold…
His face came into view again at some point, though time had disappeared for a moment. He was so warm on her, so alive. So lively, and so, seemingly, pleased to be there. She wanted his skin against hers in a way she hadn’t anticipated, and kept trying to tell herself that this was a means to an end and just the fulfilling of a base desire, yet there was that zing, that something, that electric whisper every time they were skin to skin. And when his mouth was on her, his tongue cold from breathing, the contrast between the cold and the hot, and their wetnesses mixing.
When he next e
merged, Jane pulled Boden’s face up to hers. “You taste amazing,” he murmured. No one had ever said that to her before.
Jane leaned in to smell Boden’s neck, and then, overcome by the zing, she bit him, and at first he shied away but after a moment leaned in. Murmured about it being good, leaving him bruises. She flipped on top of him, and he lifted her shirt and cupped her breasts, one at a time, pinched, leaned up to take her mouth in his, and pushed down those jeans, the underwear beneath them, and again asked for her yes before he took ahold of himself and stroked her a little and then guided himself in. He was slow for a moment, and moved to look at her. She couldn’t have looked good, eyes closed, mouth open. “Thank you,” she said, trying to show that yes, this was what she had asked for, but then ropes of pleasure were tying her there, tying her right where she was on the forest floor in the middle of London if it was even still London or whatever and his mouth was on her skin too like no man had ever been before, was this a new thing? And his thumb right on a place only she had known, and moving it in ways even she hadn’t known, and oh…oh…oh...
There was a loud noise on the street. Boden tensed. His muscular stomach, below her, became a solid thing. She laid a hand on it, and for a moment his eyes looked like a clear lake, and he almost smiled. Then he laid his head back. It was just for a second, and afterwards he lifted himself up, so that his face was to her face, and he pressed his stubbled chin to her shoulder and he said, “I am enjoying this so much, Jane, but we have to find the scroll and—” Here, he moved his hand under her, and she shivered, and she wished she hadn’t but she couldn’t help it. And Boden twisted her hair in his fist, and then he gently bit it.
“Right,” Jane said, and she shook him off. “Okay, sure. Well, we tried.” She pulled one leg back, and then the other, stood up and righted her clothes, and her thumb got sore pushing the button of the stupid jeans through the stupid hole. “Do you have a carrier?” she said, and then realized she would have to undo the stupid jeans. “At least we aren’t embarrassed naked now!” she said as she stripped off for the shift into their dragon forms. Boden proffered the bag he had under his clothes.
“Enchanted,” he said, “will hold it all.”
“Yes,” Jane said, “always been like that.”
Boden nodded. Was she the bad one now? He had been such a horrible specimen to his boy. And the witch, what was that relationship? And he was clearly an incompetent leader. Jane shoved everything from her top half, coat and shirt, into his satchel-like carrier.
“Do you need help?” he asked when she started at her trouser button again. He went for it before she said yes, but he was right. She lifted both hands and let him undo the trousers and peel them off, stick them in the sack with everything else. And to avoid discussion of the warm tingles throughout her legs, she rolled her eyes up and looked at the branch-dappled sky. She closed them. And for the first time in so, so many years her human muscles stretched out of shape into something new. Every bone exploded, pushed her into shapes she had so nearly forgotten. Her skin cells multiplied, her muscles thickened. And it hurt, but it hurt in a way she had so very, very badly missed.
9
Boden
They shifted. She was this mad blue-green. He wanted to say, you look like sea glass, but he could no longer use words. Also, that was a ridiculous thing to say.
Boden had to lead the way, he supposed, and so he lumbered to a clearing and took off. Strictly, he shouldn’t be doing this. But he shouldn’t have done it this morning either. The clearing was there because he had done it before. He turned to her. Her eyes were just as fecund, as green and rich, as a dragon as they were in her human form. Why was she here; why was she doing this? Was she really eager to help, or just to be out of prison? Then the dragon part of him really took hold, and he had to squat and leap and be in the air.
Boden tried to fly fast, but Jane was just as quick. Faster, maybe. Good job, really. He’d be in a hell of a lot of trouble if he lost her. In the air, he kept looking behind one shoulder and usually she was behind the other. The back and forth sent him wobbling more than once.
She liked to dip through clouds. At first, she’d been beating her wings hard. She’d been unsure. But her wings were broad, and she could balance herself in the air, no problem. Often, her mouth was a little open as though she were tasting it.
When Boden began to cut altitude, he looked around, but Jane was on his tail. She was no fool. He wanted to smile, but he was still a dragon. Dragons didn’t really show emotion.
And then they were on the great lawn. He landed and turned all at once. He found himself running into the orchard beside the kitchen garden. The landing he had been practicing, performing even, since he was a boy.
Jane hurtled head-first into his back, still partially scaled, grazing the skin from beneath his right armpit.
“Ouch!” he said, jumping far more than he needed to.
She finished her shift, stood up tall in front of him, all woman, all confidence.
“Yeah?” she asked. “Terrible, was it? Too awful to give me my flipping clothes back?”
Boden was shaking. From the flight? He grabbed the bottom of his pack and flipped it over. Clothes shot out.
“How many outfits are in there?”
Boden shook his head. “Sorry,” he said, “it’s bottomless.” He hoped, really hoped surprisingly hard, that she wouldn’t notice the two bras and three panties he’d seen tumble out. So, that was a minimum. Shit.
Jane held up something lacy, screwed her face into a contortion of disgust, and lobbed the lacy whatever to the side.
“Really, any clothes,” Jane managed. Boden started to worry. He had clearly been disorganized, and this was an important duty. Life or death stuff. Eventually, he found a pair of sweatpants, and the big striped T-shirt she had been wearing when they met. When she was warm enough for the frigid January air, Jane finally said, “Shall we? Where the hell is this palace or whatever, anyway?”
Boden once again felt nonplussed. He was deeply out of his element. He pointed towards the, to his mind, pretty obvious grey wall to the left of them. Jane squinted. “Well,” she said, “those haven’t changed. Elitism lives!” Boden’s shoulders tightened.
“I was just born here,” he said.
Jane chewed her nail. Spit a bit of it out. “I was born on a pig farm.”
“Really?” Boden asked, sounding surprised.
Again, Jane spat out a nail. Then she snorted. “No, bozo, I just want to feel superior. Just make sure you aren’t too into bossing women about. Also, are we going in to find this dumb scroll or what?”
Boden’s eyebrows got tight.
She noticed. Sighed. “I’m trying to sound normal. Is it working?”
He shook his head. “Tone it down, maybe?”
Jane shrugged. She looked smaller in the sweatpants, her feet shoved into unlaced shoes. But still she held herself proudly. She pushed the hair out of her eyes.
“It’ll be the same usurpers, you know,” she said, her head cocked slightly to the side. “Your father’s brother, Peter—the one they said I killed. He knew everything. I just had bits and pieces. How did your father die, Boden?”
He hadn’t been expecting this now. Not after he’d embarrassed himself with his bag of clothes, as they stood in the cold. But maybe she wanted him off guard. She was smart, very smart. It should make him suspicious, perhaps, but it just made him like her more. Admire her for reading him so well, so quickly.
“He got caught up in a hunting accident,” Boden said. Jane looked surprised.
“That’s so lazy, maybe it wasn’t part of the plan. I mean, a hunting accident that took off his head? What were they even hunting?” she said. “You believed it?”
Boden couldn’t quite move. His breath rose like ghosts, like memories he had tried to forget. “I don’t know; I was young. There was some protesting, and I was drinking a lot.”
Jane’s coral-colored lips twitched at their corners. “Still
are, it looks like.”
He looked down at his hands. At the frosted grass. “In a different way. Not like that. Can we do this one thing at a time?”
Jane was beside him all of a sudden. Her palm was on his shoulder. “Sorry,” she said. “As you may have gathered, tact isn’t my thing. Plus, I’m rusty. You were a kid, really. Not ready to be leader. They knew that. Still know it, probably.”
Boden tensed at this. Still? Like, he still wasn’t ready to do the job he had held down for three centuries, while she had been, what, doing prison workouts? Reading books? Napping on her bunk? Taking cold showers with the girls? He shook her off him. The grass needed to be cut, and it swish-swished against his calves as he strode toward the door to the kitchen. To his home.
“I’m hungry,” he said, “do you want anything?”
Boden pushed open the low wooden door. They both had to duck to get into the big room, and before they had stepped inside, the warmth hit them. It smelled of baking and of wood smoke, and there was an alive bustle to the place.
“Yes,” Jane said, “I’m really hungry. What have you got?”
Did she not see his annoyance, or was she ignoring it? He was feeling petty. Silly. This was her being canny again, maybe, making a statement and then making him feel all the ways that it was true. He went into the larder, a whole second room off the kitchen, and got a loaf of bread. It was still warm. There was butter, cheese, and jam too. Bringing it to the large wooden table in the middle of the kitchen reminded him of midnight feasts, as a child and then when he was older and had been out and believed he’d gotten back unnoticed. The next day, though, his father would lean over and brush the crumbs of night-time toast from his chin, or say, knowingly, “Up late reading, were you, son? You look exhausted.”
