Naked Dragon

by Annette Blair

  Watching Bastian, and going weak at the knees, McKenna sat beside Lizzie. “Look at him stooping down in the grass to play make-believe with a three-year-old as if her imaginary faery is real.”

  Lizzie wiped the corner of her eye with her apron. “She never had an imaginary friend before.”

  “It’s normal, isn’t it? At her age, I mean.”

  “I don’t know, but I’m afraid she’s withdrawing into her own world because we have to move and she’s about to lose the only home she’s ever known.”

  “Oh, Lizzie, you really are going to lose your house?”

  “Done deal. It’s not ours anymore. Steve hadn’t told me the whole truth, because he didn’t want me to worry. Bad for the twins here,” she said, rubbing her belly. “Makes me wonder what else he hasn’t told me. Anyway, he finally admitted he’s been hoping for a miracle, but we didn’t get one. We have four weeks to get out.”

  “You’ll move in here with me and Bastian, then.”

  “And take two bedrooms away from your bed-and-breakfast guests? That would be lost income to you, my generous friend, at a time when you have taxes and mortgage payments hanging over you.”

  “We’ll manage.”

  “I’m not taking your family legacy down with us. No, sweetie, I don’t think so.”

  “So you’ll go where?”

  Lizzie shrugged. “Steve’s mother lives in senior housing, so that’s out.”

  “Any distant relatives I don’t know about?”

  “Not by location or kinship.” Lizzie leaned against McKenna, shoulder to shoulder, and stayed that way.

  McKenna hugged her. “LizBeth, I know you’re stubborn, but if you don’t find an affordable, and decent, place in the next month, I’ll send Bastian to abduct the four of you, unless it’s six of you by then.”

  “You’d get the hunk arrested?”

  “I’d do it before I let you move into some dilapidated old—” McKenna chuckled. “Okay, so I’d rather have you living in my dilapidated old ruin than one up four flights of stairs with neighbors you don’t know. And your kids, all four, would be better off here on the farm with people who love them, than in the city with people they know nothing about.”

  Lizzie’s eyes filled. “You think I don’t know that?”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Bastian left Dewcup in Whitney’s care, Steve in Wyatt’s, and hefted a load of shingles to bring up the ladder to the roof, though he would rather have jumped than climbed. From the multigabled roof, he enjoyed the view. Swooping bustard, he missed his wings and the exhilaration of flying above the world. He loved this being able to see beyond his nest.

  He admired McKenna’s property to the sea, while the spirits of her ancestors came out of hiding, all but glowing as they looked toward the porch. McKenna must be coming outside.

  Ah, there she was, stopping to talk with Whitney, unaware of the protection and love surrounding her.

  He should not be surprised that she brightened their spirit lights. On the inside, he, too, glowed brighter in her presence. Did he?

  Making her quest his own was one thing, but did having a heart mate mean giving away his heart? For some reason, he fought the notion, though he surely wanted to give her his body. He wished he had asked Andra more questions about his role, and the rules, where a heart mate was concerned.

  McKenna’s ancestors surrounded her. A few he had seen when he breached the veil, and others on the day he arrived and rode Toffee for the first time, but right now, when McKenna looked up at him and waved, generations looked up at him as well, as if they expected him to right McKenna’s world.

  Jock ran interference by swooping down among them and making them smile, as he danced around and smoke-tested each with bright puffs of yellow.

  Good people. Not a surprise.

  Dewcup came up for a spin around his head. “I’m glad I can’t get old,” she said, watching them. “I don’t like wrinkles.”

  “They’re beautiful. Don’t look at their faces; look at their hearts.”

  Dewcup’s wings hummed as she hovered in the air, face-to-face with him. “They don’t all have beautiful hearts. Look again.”

  He looked with a more discerning eye this time. A cloaked woman stood back, away from the rest, her heart hidden by the dark shadowy funnel cloud swirling about her. Had she died in a storm and carried her torment to the grave?

  Jock flew her way, but she disappeared before he reached her. Spirits did that. Nothing to worry about. She could have misunderstood Jock’s intention.

  Bastian equated Killian with storms, since she used them as weapons, and McKenna did not need his enemy making life more difficult.

  Jock tested the air where the funnel-cloud spirit had stood, and the smoke turned a bright blue green, which did not imply evil, but different. If she had remained, the test would have been more accurate. A putrid green signified evil.

  He should read more of McKenna’s family history, given her ancestors’ presence. He had started with the latest journal to learn about McKenna, her parents, and grandparents. Every night, he took lessons and learned something more about McKenna and her clan.

  She disappeared beneath the porch roof and the porch door bounced shut. If he did not know himself that she went inside, the expressions on the faces of her ancestors would tell him. They sobered. The lights went out in their eyes.

  How had she become the central figure in a centuries-old family?

  They waited for her return with bated breaths.

  The shed and barn must have been living quarters at one time or another, given the spirits gathered there, their clothes reflecting the centuries in which each family lived. Women’s dresses had risen, and later even the women wore trousers.

  Some of McKenna’s male ancestors wore swords at their sides, and skirts with crossed colors, purses over them in the general area of their privates. Odd dress for men, skirts.

  Closer to the house, McKenna’s grandmother looked up at him, and beside her, McKenna’s mother, the youngest and most vibrant spirit, likely because she had walked this earth not that long ago.

  Overall, the women stood forward in the way of the alpha, as leaders, their men behind them as staunch supporters. McKenna came from strong female stock.

  Again he wondered whether being the heart mate of McKenna Greylock called for burying his alpha tendencies. Could he do that? He did not know her well enough to answer yet, but he would help her keep her land to save Andra’s magick and his brother dragons’ lives. Where McKenna herself was concerned, he would let time give him answers.

  As McKenna came out, the spirits cheered like spectators at a joust. Had they remained earthbound only to watch over her? The question unsettled him, as did his odd ability to see them and feel McKenna’s pain. Though he did not feel unsettled enough to leave her.

  “Bastian,” Steve called from his comfortable chair. “How’s it going?”

  “It is going,” Bastian shouted back, kicking a stack of shingles. He supposed he should act like a handyman roofer, or be fired by the woman he sought to tame, protect, help, give hope to . . . and care for?

  Taking into account his strength and speed, and the size of his work area, he would finish before the day ended. But given Steve’s estimated time frame, he could not let anyone know that he finished until tomorrow afternoon at the earliest.

  He went to work, glad he read those books on roofing. He got to the point where he thought he had nearly finished when he saw an unexpected extension to McKenna’s home off the back.

  She had not shown him this part of her house. He wondered why as he lowered himself to the addition’s long porch roof, from which he could reach a top-floor window. He slid it open and, with his hands on the window’s top edge, raised himself to climb in.

  There he found not a shed full of junk, nor a half finished shell, but a room with an ancient bed, more bedrooms, a hall, a bathroom, stairs that split a parlor from a dining room and kitchen. An entire house in better
condition than McKenna’s. Though, strictly speaking, this, too, must belong to her.

  Two spirits appeared at the bottom of the stairs, and Bastian inadvertently roared his surprise, but he held his fire. An older couple, holding hands, faces marked with scars, nodded in greeting. “I am Esther,” the woman said. “And this is my husband, Caleb.”

  “I have never seen you before. Why do you not gather with the rest of your family?”

  Esther indicated the lock on the door.

  “Did your family lock you in?”

  “We were contagious,” Esther said. “We locked ourselves in to keep from giving our family the sickness, but we broke their hearts, instead, by cutting ourselves off from them. No one has lived in this house since.”

  “They never forgave us,” Caleb said, “so we stay out of sight like they want.”

  Bastian’s growing understanding of humanity, if not of their language, surprised him. “They wanted to help you, but you wanted to keep them safe. Both good deeds, which I cannot think need forgiving. I will ask McKenna why no one has lived here.”

  The woman nodded. “Thank you for coming to help her.”

  Bastian scratched his head. “Did everyone know I was coming?”

  “Ciarra, our ancestor, said you would come, that you alone could save McKenna. We spirits watch over her. When she completes her task and is saved, we can all move on.”

  “My task grows in magnitude and consequence,” Bastian said, but the more people who needed him, the more out of reach his own goal appeared. “Without knowing why or how, I seem fated to saving McKenna; you, her ancestors; Andra’s magick; and my legion of—”

  “Dragons. We know. How can we help?”

  A weight lifted from his shoulders at Esther’s offer. “If you want to help, look for the spirit among you whose heart is shadowed by a funnel cloud. Tell me if she is one of you. If not, she may plan to hamper my mission, which would by default hamper McKenna’s. Put fear into the developer trying to steal your heritage when he comes here. Scare him witless. Have some fun and help McKenna in the process.”

  Bastian recognized a hint of McKenna’s twinkle in the couple’s mischievous eyes and, of course, in their beautiful hearts. Like her mother, they, too, had died young.

  “We haven’t considered fun in a century,” Caleb said.

  Bastian bowed, a habit from his first human life, he guessed. “I would be in your debt. Can I do anything for you?”

  “Get her to use this part of the house. We feel as if we’ve taken it away from her.”

  “I will,” Bastian said. “She could enlarge her bed-and-breakfast and earn more money to pay her mortgage, whatever that is.”

  Esther smiled. “Or she could turn it into an apartment for the two of you.”

  Bastian faltered in his understanding. True, he and McKenna lived beneath the same roof, but their current arrangement was not what the hearts or expressions of these spirits conveyed. “Explain, please.”

  Caleb rocked on his heels. “We know what is possible.”

  “And I know,” Bastian warned, “that the likelihood of a perfect outcome for any of us has already been compromised by a crone with dark magick. I will do my best, though it could already be too late. Go to your family. I believe you will be welcome.” Bastian opened the door to the outside and indicated their way out.

  As Caleb and Esther stepped into the sunlight, ancestors and descendents appeared to welcome them, and the funnel cloud around the woman who stood back and apart from the rest darkened. She gave him a nod, like an affirmative answer to his question, raised her hand, and shot lightning into the air from her fingertips.

  Killian. Not dangerous yet. But biding her time.

  If his being turned back into a man had weakened her, he would not want to see her with her full powers. Killian, the Crone of Chaos, would not make her move until she could strike the blow that would cause his inner dragon to take over his being. That was all she wanted, a vengeance that would destroy Andra’s magick, and with that, him and his brother dragons.

  Nothing more, nothing less.

  McKenna and her family, everyone around him was safe. Only he had reason to fear Killian.

  When Bastian heard McKenna calling him, he relocked the addition’s outside door, ran up the stairs, climbed out the window, and leapt across the adjoining roof toward the front of the house.

  As he neared it, he slowed and followed McKenna’s call toward the edge. He looked down at her. “Yes, McKenna?”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Relentlessly.”

  Her rare smile pushed her a bit deeper into his heart.

  It would be easier to jump to the ground from here, but he put on a show of walking carefully toward the ladder, which meant climbing up and over gabled peaks of all sizes.

  As he began his trek, the air cooled, a lightning bolt split the ladder, and a quick and sudden hailstorm covered the roof with a glistening carpet of ice.

  Bastian lost his footing.

  Steve shouted and McKenna screamed.

  Headfirst, he slid toward the edge of the roof, saw his brothers dying in bursts of fiery lava, begged Andra’s forgiveness, and called McKenna’s name.

  There would be no landing on his feet this time.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The ground hit him fast.

  And hard. So hard, he wished for a sword bush.

  He landed on his side, but the impact broke him.

  He saw Steve sitting forward in his chair, but Lizzie and the children were not to be seen. Small blessing.

  The sun came out as McKenna knelt beside him despite the carpet of hail. “I’ll call an ambulance.”

  “No! Take my hands, bend my arms so as to rest my hands on my back, and hold them there.”

  “Are you crazy? That’ll hurt like hell. Did you break your brain, too? It looks like your arms are broken.”

  Steve called Lizzie in the distance as the trees and clouds seemed to spin above him. “Come close, McKenna, and listen.”

  She came kissing close. He wished he could oblige. “I can heal myself,” he said so only she could hear.

  She paled. “Sure you can.” Her face did not agree with her words.

  “Check my hands for the fingers I dipped in hot French fry oil.”

  McKenna looked at the fingers on both his hands, the movement a painful experience. “I can’t tell which ones you burned, except that two of them are pink with new skin.”

  “I healed them. Help me heal my back so I can move my arms and use my hands to heal my other breaks. Keep my secret?”

  “You mean you want to forget that you tried to fly? Were you born in a cuckoo nest?”

  “Do as I say!” he shouted through gritted teeth, pain radiating through him, his inner dragon clamoring to overcome his weaker self. “McKenna, just do it. Or all will be lost.”

  “What do you mean, lost?”

  “Do. It. Now!” A roar accompanied the order.

  McKenna firmed her spine defensively, but she complied, and as he fought the raging dragon inside him, his crown of horns rose, wings sprouted beneath the hands at his back, and McKenna’s tears fell.

  Time seemed to stop. Bastian began to lose the battle, because the more he hurt, the stronger and angrier his dragon.

  Eventually he realized that the more he focused on McKenna’s face, the more he worried about her, the calmer his dragon became.

  McKenna was already the center of his heart, he admitted to himself. If he had not fallen, he would never have known that worrying about her was a bit like carrying a shield into battle. A shield against his inner beast.

  A shield against Killian.

  An unexpected but weak clap of thunder told him that Killian knew it, too, but she would not give up. The crone’s feeble response confirmed that having McKenna beside him made him strong and his greatest enemy weak.

  He might best Killian yet, except that McKenna’s power had just made her the crone’s enemy as well. />
  Killian did not agree or disagree, which he should not take as false hope.

  His heart mate had already become his helpmate without either of them realizing it. McKenna’s hands soothed him as he healed, soothed his pain in a spiritual way. She had the power to heal his heart and his soul as well.

  Time no longer seemed important.

  When the pain in his back began to recede, so did his wings, horns, spines, and claws. “Enough,” he said with unabashed relief. “Remove my hands from my back.”

  The pain from that move made him roar inwardly, while she sobbed openly.

  As he palmed the break in his left arm, held, and held longer, another fight with his inner dragon ensued, until he could flex that first hand to use on his other arm. When both arms were healed, he reached around to his back again for a slight adjustment, given his renewed range of reach and the renewed loss of his wings.

  After a satisfactory modification, Bastian sat up.

  Steve sat forward, his expression one of stunned and silent shock.

  Bastian placed his hands on his knees.

  McKenna, her expression like Steve’s, watched him and calmed. Disbelief fluttered across her own brow to be followed by a range of unspoken questions.

  “We will talk later,” he said. “After Steve and Lizzie go home. Keep my secret, I beg you. For both our sakes.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I am the grunt. You are the boss.” He stood and brushed himself off.

  Sirens, he heard getting closer. Crazy men jumped from trucks with circling lights of red and orange. McKenna made them examine him.

  “Nothing wrong with this guy,” the man with the Y-shaped wires hanging from his ears said, removing a hurtful cuff from his arm. “Healthy as a horse. You sure he fell?”

  “He fell,” Bastian snapped. “But he did not get hurt.”

  “I apologize for his rudeness,” McKenna told them. “Flying makes him cranky.”

  Flying made him happy. Someday he would tell her so.

  The truck with the bubble light backed down the drive as if nothing had happened. Because he did not want to talk about the fall, Bastian lifted Steve from his chair, carried him into the house, and sat him at the table where Lizzie and the children waited. “I am sorry we are late to lunch.”