Dragon's Melody

by Bell, Ophelia

  Alec sighed and rested his head on the back of the deck chair he sat in. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure her mother wasn’t within earshot. “When I met your mother, she was already pregnant with you. I don’t think she even knew she was pregnant yet, but suspected. She was honest with me about it when she found out—she’d been with your biological dad not long before she met me—so she wanted a paternity test. I told her I knew you couldn’t be mine because I couldn’t have kids. It was a lie, but I didn’t want her believing, or letting you believe, that you really were mine. I owed that much honesty to her since I had to lie about what I was. She was alone and desperate and so, so beautiful. I couldn’t imagine life without her, even though by our laws I had very little time left. I hadn’t yet decided I wouldn’t go through with it, though ….” He finished off his beer and reached for another from the six-pack between them.

  “Are there a lot of these laws? I had to sign a contract, but I never would have told anyone what I knew.”

  “A contract?” he asked, sounding concerned. “I suppose that’s not surprising. You were working for Kol Magnus, I knew that much. He’s a very cautious man. And there have always been a lot of laws, but they’re changing now, which is why I came back.”

  She felt her cheeks flush at her obfuscation of the truth about her relationship to Kol. He turned his golden-eyed gaze on her and furrowed his brows.

  “What aren’t you telling me, Melody?”

  “The contract wasn’t exactly for non-disclosure, though that was a clause in it. It was for …” She cleared her throat and quirked her mouth as she glanced at him, still too modest to say the words but remembering an alternative he’d understand. “It was for laughter. All of mine, just for one man.”

  He frowned. “For Kol? He shouldn’t have needed …”

  Her face heated further but she found the will to cut him off. “Not him! Though he was my first experience … and after him things got really complicated.”

  “Melody,” he said softly, “I’m not a stranger to the way we work. You can be honest with me.”

  “You first,” she said.

  He nodded. “Fair enough. Your mother never knew what kinds of resources I had, and I didn’t tell her because I was afraid I’d be forced to go through with the Renunciation and leave her behind. One of our laws is that we have to mark our partner when they learn our true nature—preferably before. The mark can be a gift, but at the ends of our lives it means our mates go with us. If I’d done that, and then went through with my own Renunciation—giving up my life’s essence to the next generation—you would have been an orphan. You weren’t my child, so you weren’t like me and wouldn’t have had the care of my kind if that had happened. The alternative wasn’t much better. If I didn’t go through with it I would have to hide—there are other races like us, who harbor members of our race sometimes, and allow us to live in hiding. I could join one of these groups—and hope that the new Court were as open minded as they turned out to be. But I knew I couldn’t leave you entirely without protection. Even before you were born I loved you, Melody, as much as if you had truly been my own. I gave you the Blessing you carry the second I knew I’d never love another woman but your mother.”

  “What is it?” she asked softly. “Because it’s kinda tortured me my whole life.” She gave him a shaky laugh. “I mean … I never liked many boys growing up. I did like laughing, though,” she gave him a sly grin that provoked a chuckle from him. She grew serious again. “But I never fell in love like all the girls I knew kept doing.”

  “You weren’t meant to love anyone but one of us. Perhaps it was unfair of me to control your life to that degree, but it was the only way I knew you’d be safe and healthy and cared for, once your Blessing was recognized by the right male and he managed to supersede it with his own bond and his mark.”

  “Nobody would have measured up to my memory of you, anyway,” she said. “But I don’t think it worked the way you meant for it to. I pretty much threw myself at Kol after an incredibly funny encounter with him and his wife because I couldn’t imagine life without him. The man’s a regular comedian.”

  She meant the last part to be a joke, but Alec didn’t laugh. His jaw clenched and he set down his beer. “I didn’t expect it to be a Court dragon you found first,” he said softly. “They’re far too powerful for the magic of my Blessing to stand up to. I created it to ensure you always had a choice in the matter, but if his magic got to you first, it would have affected the Blessing—taken that choice away from you depending on how he channeled his energy the first time.”

  “He was pretty damn intense,” Melody said, her pulse increasing at the mere memory of that afternoon with Kol and Hallie. “And he’s definitely the boss for a reason.”

  “He’s more than just the boss to the rest of us, but if he didn’t mate you I have to assume he had a good reason.” He paused and glanced at her. “I wish you would tell me why you’re here … alone … when I can sense very clearly that you’ve left something behind, and that it wasn’t Kol Magnus. Your aura’s all wrong for it to be him.”

  “Did your blessing account for there being two men?” she said, unable to suppress the bitterness in her tone.

  Alec went very still for a second. She wished she were like him and could see things the way he did. But his shift in demeanor told her just enough to know he hadn’t been prepared for that statement. After a second he relaxed again and looked at her.

  “The two of them, they were kind to you?” he asked.

  “Mostly, yes.” Her stomach knotted at the memory of the last day when they’d both chosen to desert her, one after the other, after making love to her in the best possible way either of them could. Then retreating as though being too amazing was against some law of theirs.

  “How were they not?” he asked, his voice gruff and commanding, his jaw muscles twitching. In that moment he looked a lot like Kol at his most imperious.

  “They were perfect gentlemen, until they couldn’t be. Dad, it all happened very fast.”

  Her mouth snapped shut the second the word came out. She hadn’t called him “Dad” to his face in over twenty years. She’d been told not to by both him and her mother—because he wasn’t her father, but that didn’t mean she didn’t love him like one. She’d somehow understood why without asking, yet in her head she’d always thought of him that way.

  She still did, even knowing what he was finally and having her fantasy shattered that there might be a possibility that he really was her dad.

  She started to rise and take their empties inside, but his hand lashed out and grabbed her by the wrist.

  “Do you love them? Both of them?”

  The need to confess it made her want to cry. “God yes. But they have their own issues. I couldn’t sit there and wait for them to work things out.”

  She wrested her arm from his grip when he didn’t say anything else. He retrieved the last beer in time for her to slot the empties back into the cardboard holder. As she headed back through the French doors into her mother’s dining room he called to her.

  “They’ll be here. If they’re worth their horns, they’ll come find you.”

  “They know where I am, I wasn’t exactly secretive about it. Let’s just say I’m not holding my breath, Dad.”

  She loved saying that word and not having him object. With the odd glow he got afterward, she suspected he liked it, too.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  “Holding her breath would have been a disaster, as it turned out. Some part of her kept hoping over the next few days that one or the other of them would show up on her mother’s doorstep and confess his love, begging her to marry him. Mate him, that’s what they call it, she reminded herself, and the thought gave her a little quiver of excitement.

  Except she hadn’t lied in her letter to them, beseeching them to work things out between them. The l
ast thing she wanted was to be a wedge in the middle of their love for each other. Garen’s misery had grown ever more apparent the last day, and Skye had left her with a hunted look, giving her the impression that he believed he’d committed some sin by daring to have true feelings for her.

  “I can’t love you.” Garen had said. She supposed the words implied that he almost did. That was what had hurt the most—believing he’d been on the edge of actually feeling that way and rejected it. Both of them had fled from her with the exact same look in their eyes. And so she had fled from them.

  “It’s better this way,” she said to herself, immersed in the sweaty task of pulling weeds in her mother’s garden.

  “What did you say, honey?” her mom asked, tilting her head up and peering at her from beneath the wide brim of her straw hat. A geometric smattering of sunlight freckled her face, reminding her with a pang of sadness of the way Garen’s skin had displayed its odd pattern to her in the sun that first day they’d met.

  Melody sighed. “Better that I’m home. I missed you and Alec. You seem so happy now.”

  Her mother beamed at her. “Somehow I knew he’d be back. I’ve spent the last twenty years feeling like I was in some kind of holding pattern. Like a chrysallis. I wish I could have been more present for you growing up.”

  “You did fine, Mom. I’m just happy you’re not alone anymore.”

  Her mother nodded and shifted down the row of pepper plants, frowning into her work and carefully avoiding crushing a ladybug before she went to work again. Her posture remained tense, however, making it clear to Melody that she was working on some kind of lecture that she wasn’t looking forward to saying.

  “Spit it out, whatever it is. I can tell you’ve got something on your mind.”

  Her mother’s lips tightened into a thin line. “You don’t seem happy, sweetie, and it breaks my heart to see you this way. You never were very forthcoming about your love life with me, but I wish you would talk to me now.”

  “My love life?” Melody asked, laughing. “I never really had one to speak of before. I guess it just seemed weird to start talking about it now that I do, especially because the love life I had managed to prematurely abort in a matter of days. Why bother you with the gory details? Can’t I just be vicariously happy for your love life?”

  Her mother grimaced at her macabre metaphor but didn’t reprimand her for it like she might have done when she was younger.

  “But you talked to Alec about it, didn’t you?” she asked softly. Her tone wasn’t accusatory or hurt, simply curious, concerned.

  “I guess I just needed his perspective—as a man, you know. He’s more hopeful than I am. Or he was when I first talked about it.”

  “I waited for twenty years,” she said. “And I would have waited forever for him.”

  Melody sat back on her heels and looked at her mother, who glanced up at her with a direct blue gaze. She shifted her shoulder slightly and gave Melody a soft smile. “Sometimes you just know he’ll be worth it. Is he worth it for you—the man you left behind?”

  Melody tried to come up with an answer that wasn’t an outright lie. She wasn’t sure if her mother would understand the crazy situation she’d gotten herself into.

  “I didn’t leave because I was afraid of commitment or anything. I did it because my presence was a complication for him.” In her head she amended “him” to “them”—no sense complicating the conversation with the convoluted details.

  “You didn’t answer my question, honey.”

  Melody’s chest tightened, her true feelings far too volatile a thing to admit out loud, but she did owe her mother an answer. Getting the actual words past the strangling sensation in her throat was another issue entirely, however.

  The tears preceded the words by about a mile and her mother surged over the row and pulled Melody into her arms, oblivious of the plants she crushed between them.

  “Oh God, Mama. I would. I would wait forever, too.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  He isn’t dead?” Skye asked, incredulous. “How is that even possible?”

  Kol shook his head and looked between Garen and Skye, scrutinizing them both. Garen wasn’t surprised, either by the revelation or by Kol’s constant study of them since Melody had left. The man was intuitive and very critical of dragon behavior.

  They hadn’t come clean about all the details of their situation, including Melody’s wish for he and Skye to work on their own relationship. And they had. The intervening weeks had involved a lot of soul searching, and they’d finally openly admitted their own true feelings about each other, but Melody’s absence was like a dark cloud that refused to leave. The longer they took tracking down the man who had Blessed Melody to begin with, the more agitated Skye became.

  “He was one of the rare few without a mate or progeny when the time for our generation’s ascension came. Our laws have always required the old generation to give the world up to the new brood. And the old generation has always done so willingly. The Ultiori threat is the biggest piece of it. Our parents have a vested interest in our success—sacrificing their entire essence to see us succeed was one way they ensured we had ample resources to protect ourselves from our enemy.”

  “But Alec had no one, so who would he give it to?” Skye asked, his hand reaching for the pocket where he’d kept his mother’s box for so long, until the day he’d thrown it in the bay.

  The box itself now lay in the darkness of Garen’s pocket. He had found his way back to the inlet where Skye had discarded it. Power that strong hadn’t been hard to pinpoint, and he’d spent a night of cold swimming to retrieve the object. When he’d found it, deep under water, the tiny cube had vibrated under his touch, and sprung open, surprising Garen enough that he’d dropped it and had to swim down again to retrieve it. He still didn’t know exactly what it meant, but hoped when the time came, he would understand. Either way, he needed to ensure Skye and Melody wound up together before returning the box to his friend.

  Skye pulled his hand back out of his pocket and left it resting on his knee, fingers tapping in impatience.

  “Most bachelor dragons have loyalty to a Court dragon and offer their power to a dragonling’s legacy via his or her parents.”

  “Are there never females with this issue?” Garen asked, sure he knew the answer already.

  Kol eyed him steadily. “Not in my recollection, no. Females almost never have an issue finding a suitable mate, at least for the purposes of breeding. Males with the issue are frequently unable to perform until they find the right woman. Sometimes it takes so long it’s too late by the time they find a woman that they refuse to mate her at all—but they can always give their power to another dragon, and so they opt to do that instead. Thankfully with the change in our laws we have more choices now, but Alec would have had limited options. Legally, he should have given his power to either the former Queen or the new Queen’s parents if he had no other options. It seems he did neither, however.”

  “Where the hell has he been all this time?”

  “He did what many do who break our laws—he found sanctuary with an enclave of one of our sister races—the Turul. He’s been with them for the last twenty years and enlisted the Turul’s help with keeping guard over Melody’s mother. He only just showed his face again, once our sister races got word of the amnesty we’ve granted to dragons in hiding.”

  “So there is no legacy for Melody to inherit, or her mother,” Garen said, trying to decide if he admired the man or hated him for withholding that kind of benefit from Melody and her mother. The truth was, if he had a lover or a daughter—even one not by blood—he would have given everything he could even while still alive.

  “No, but there is a powerful Gold still protecting them, which he’s done for Melody and her mother since before her birth. I haven’t spoken with the man—we’ve kept it secret that we’ve found hi
m, too, but I’m willing to bet that he’s been supporting them both in some way from afar. We all have ways to bypass human customs.”

  “Is he with her now? Of course, he must be,” Garen said, unable to imagine any other scenario if he’d been away from a lover for decades. Had Alec been with Melody’s mother in the intervening years or had he stayed away rather than risk being discovered by the Council? He could understand how Alec had fallen through the cracks if he’d had no children of his own. The Council tended not to criticize or scrutinize dragons who were unfortunate enough to not find a mate. Most of them never had that issue, but Garen felt some sympathy for the man, considering he was faced with a similar life himself if Melody didn’t choose him.

  “He is. How you two deal with your personal lives going forward is up to you, however. By standing law you still should mate her.”

  “Which of us, though? She rejected us both when she left.”

  Kol expelled an exasperated sigh. “You two fools need to go to her and work it out. I’ve been lenient because I know how close you two are, but you forget I’ve been with her before. I understand her essence as well as my own mate’s. If she had even the glimmer of a bond with either of you, she didn’t leave because she doesn’t love you. She’d have been back in my office if that were the case.”

  “What of Alec?” Skye asked. “Perhaps he’s decided to mate both Melody and her mother.”

  “The Shadows who reported said he treats her as a daughter, and that he shows every sign of being close to mating the mother, though he hasn’t done so yet. I don’t think Melody’s shared her knowledge with anyone, but you shouldn’t wait.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Within another couple weeks the comfortable routines of a rural southern autumn drowned out most of the ache in Melody’s belly until even that started to feel commonplace. Her mother had waited two decades for Alec. If she could do it, Melody could manage for the short term.