Legend Of The Highland Dragon

by Cooper Isabel

  “It’s kind of you to say,” Stephen replied. He stood facing one of the bookshelves, his face turned away from her and his hands clasped behind his back.

  Avoiding temptation, Mina thought. With his example to prompt her, she pulled her skirts back down and tugged her dress back into order. She watched her hands while she rearranged herself. Her hands were safe and familiar.

  During the process, a sense of duty crept up upon her, even as she winced away. She didn’t want to say what came next. She wanted to avoid that conversation almost as much as she’d wanted to feel Stephen’s hand between her thighs or his lips on her breast.

  The comparison only made the conversation more necessary.

  “I don’t think we can ignore this”—she waved a hand, unsure of what to call the situation and unwilling to put it into more specific words—“any longer.”

  “I’d not have said we were ignoring it just now,” Stephen said. “But aye, you’re right. Though I’m not at all sure what else is to be done about it.”

  “You could lock me in my room, couldn’t you?” Mina couldn’t help saying it, or laughing as she did—and the whole state of affairs was funny, really. “Or I could lock myself in, but that wouldn’t be half as dramatic.”

  “No. If we’re going to overreact, we’d best not do it by halves. I’d have to find a dungeon somewhere.”

  “There’s always the wine cellar.”

  “Baldwin would never forgive me. Besides,” Stephen said, and glanced back over his shoulder, “I’d not want to be hunting Ward without your help, not if I had a choice in it.”

  “Go on with you,” said Mina. A spot of warmth started up in her chest, though, and she smiled despite herself. He’d come to tell her about the thieves, too. Another man might have kept it from her, worried about feminine nerves.

  Stephen smiled. “Truly. It’s a hard enough business as it is. Going it alone would be even worse.”

  “Could be the problem,” she said. “Us being alone in this, I mean. Except for Professor Carter, and he doesn’t live here, and he doesn’t know what you really are. Maybe we’ve been…impulsive…because neither of us exactly has another, um—”

  “Outlet?” She couldn’t hear anything in Stephen’s voice but polite contribution. He’d turned his head and was looking at the bookcase again.

  “Right. Especially you. I mean, we both know I’m not exactly the sort of…of person you’d associate with normally.” She would press on ruthlessly, though saying the words out loud made her hurt in a dull and foolish way, but she couldn’t make herself say woman, or kiss, or anything of the sort. “Under normal circumstances. And certainly not the kind who’d know anything secret about you.”

  “Outside my family,” Stephen said, still in that politely remote voice, “I can count on one hand those who know my other form. You’re the only full human among them—the only one living, at least.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Mina. She looked up from her hands at the straight line of his back, at his squared shoulders. “Our lives must go by pretty quickly, for you.”

  “Very quickly. If—” he started to say, and then shook his head. “One grows accustomed.”

  The air between them felt heavy with the things Mina didn’t ask. She settled on a relatively safe question, one that didn’t bring up the sort of people who did know Stephen well, or the identity of anyone in particular he might have lost. “You still have friends, though, don’t you?”

  “Friends, aye. Some.”

  “Oh. Well. That’s what I was saying, really,” she said. Stopping to think about the implications of being the only mortal to know his secret—or to wonder if he thought of her as some sort of more intelligent and more, er, eligible pet—would have been a disaster, so Mina pressed on, heedless of whether one sentence really led into another.

  “You don’t really get to see your friends right now. Or your own sort. And I’m about the place, being helpful, and I already know a few things, so—well, so it makes sense that you’d, um, turn to me.”

  His dark head moved, the merest suggestion of a nod. “I suppose that would be an explanation. And for you?”

  Just as well that Stephen was facing the other way. Mina was blushing before she’d even begun to answer. “I’m not exactly at home myself, am I? Nobody else here knows what’s going on. Until the servants got used to me, I didn’t talk much with anyone but you, and even now I can’t tell them everything we’re doing. I’m out of my depth by half, and you’re a handsome man.”

  “You’re a lovely woman,” said Stephen. “I’d rather assumed that was the main cause of what’s between us.”

  “Polly’s just as pretty as I am, and you’ve never kissed her. But thank you.”

  Stephen turned to face her, laughing and surprised. “You’re far from the usual sort of woman, Cerberus. I hope you know that. And how do you know I’ve never kissed Polly?”

  “She would’ve said. And you’re a gentleman.”

  “It’s nice to know how you weigh the evidence,” he said wryly. “And now what? Assuming you’re correct, what do you propose doing about the situation?”

  Mina shrugged. “Be around other people, even if we can’t tell them everything? Spend more time apart? Just knowing will help, I hope. Knowing why we feel the way we do. And that it’s irrational. And that nothing would work between us,” she made herself add.

  It was painful, and it was true. Even if Stephen’s blood had been only human, it would still have been blue. If they gave in to their passion and the worst happened, she could be his pet, if he took her as a mistress, or his obligation, if he did the gentlemanly thing. She could never be his equal. She doubted if she’d ever come as close as she was now.

  All she could do was throw away the last five years of her life. All she could do was discard independence and ambition and training in exchange for physical satisfaction and a connection that would disappear as soon as the situation changed.

  Stephen must have known something similar, to pull away when he did. Now, however, he didn’t speak either to confirm or deny Mina’s assertion. He only watched her, and the shadows from the bookcase slanted across his face, hiding his expression more than his will already did.

  “They say knowledge is power,” Mina added, trying to speak lightly.

  “That they do,” said Stephen. “They might even be right now and then.”

  “We’ll have to hope,” said Mina. “And who knows? The Yard might bring Ward in tomorrow, and I’ll go home, and we can both get back into our right minds.”

  She didn’t say everything can be like it was before, because it wouldn’t be true for her. Dragons and demons and magic weren’t the sort of thing she could unknow. For Stephen, nothing would have really changed: he would get on with whatever lords and dragons did. Later perhaps he’d tell his family about the weeks he’d had to spend hunting a sorcerer with a stubborn mortal girl. She would be a story for some winter evening, a tale that went well with brandy.

  Around the tightness in her throat, she spoke again. “You should go off and do something useful. I’ll be working in here.”

  “I’ll find you if I’ve need,” said Stephen.

  “Do that,” said Mina, and turned back to the books. She didn’t want to watch him leave.

  Twenty-two

  Lord and typewriter girl, human and dragon-blooded, Stephen and Mina had at least this much in common: at some point, each of them had learned that keeping busy was the best way to handle trouble. For once, that lesson had not come down to Stephen from his father, but rather from Campbell, the man who’d herded cattle and done a hundred other odd jobs when Stephen had been a boy.

  He couldn’t mend fences now or stack wood. He could still work. Moreover, he could work to hasten the day when Ward was no longer a threat. If that was also the day when Mina left his house, then that was also for the best.

  The shard of “John Smith” would help him. He couldn’t do much with it as a man since the huma
n senses didn’t attune themselves very well to magic.

  As a dragon, he could see much more.

  When he’d sought Mina’s company, he’d taken the shard with him. It was still in his pocket when he left the library, aching in both body and spirit, and strode down the hallway to what had once been a dining room.

  The chairs and table were gone these days—the idea of holding a dinner party in this house now had seemed comically insane—and the floor stretched wide and bare beneath Stephen’s feet. The door was locked and chained, the walls engraved with silver sigils, and silver shutters covered a huge window on the western wall. Over the last year or so, Stephen had come to know the room well.

  For the first time since he’d had the room built, Stephen turned from the locked door and opened both the shutters and the window. He placed the shard carefully in one corner of the room, then sat in the last red-gold rays of sunset and waited.

  He tried not to think of Mina.

  This was probably the only room in the house, aside from the servants’ bedrooms, that she’d never entered. Watching the sun sink behind the roofs of London, Stephen wished for an absurd and painful second that he could have showed it to Mina, that he could have seen more amazed joy in her face or danced across the smooth floor with her.

  It wouldn’t be possible. She might have been more curious than afraid at the sigils on the walls, but the claw marks on the floor were another story. He would see nothing but horror in Mina’s face once those caught her eye.

  Before Bavaria, changing shape had never been painful. Now the curse yanked him into dragon form, twisting bones and muscles like an impatient maid wringing out clothes, and for once, Stephen welcomed the pain. It was a distraction; it was also a prelude. That night, his other form would be useful.

  As dusk fell over London, Stephen’s body grew and twisted. Wings unfurled from his back, filling the room; claws dug more deep gouges in the floor. He threw back his head and lashed a scaled, spined tail, feeling the room and the house and the city around him far too close for his liking. He wanted to fly. He wanted to hunt.

  He turned his eye to the corner, to the shard he’d placed there. Now it shone burnt orange, and a trail of the same color rose off it, climbing into the air and out the window. Stephen looked for a long moment, drew a deep breath—there was a hint of the sharp smell of the gas, though no such thing could hurt him in this form—and sprang upward.

  There were no deer in this city to chase, nor gullies to soar through, but at least tonight there would be hunting of a sort.

  Stephen launched himself through the window and into the spring night. The fog hid him well. For once, he was thankful for the modern world and its coal-shrouded cities. Perhaps someone would see a mysterious shape in the sky. Most would put it down to drink or weariness or the fog itself warping the silhouette of some bird. Besides, they were only human. Stephen’s other form might have worried.

  When he was the dragon, those concerns were very much at the back of his mind.

  He spread his wings and caught an updraft, following the trail of the shard. It led across London, occasionally crossing paths with the tracks of air sprites and other creatures, but Stephen found it easy enough to follow. He watched the lights of the city below him as they flickered and shifted, and knew pity for the people who lit them, penned in their little houses and watching the night as if it was an enemy.

  He had been one of them until a few minutes ago. He knew this, but the mind of the dragon was both eternal and immediate. Now he was soaring, free and strong, with the world beneath him and the sky open above him. If he’d spent the last year as a prisoner—well, what was a year? He laughed and heard the rumble of it around him.

  On the streets below, people would glance upward and mutter about coming thunderstorms.

  The trail he followed led across the Serpentine, and Stephen banked sharply to stay with it, descending as far as he dared. The orange color spread out ahead of him into a nebulous cloud around a clump of tall, white buildings adorned with complicated ironwork. Stephen didn’t recognize them, and he was still too high up to read signs, but his human self knew that they were the abodes of wealthy men.

  Without being seen, he could go no closer, but he knew that the trail stopped here in one of these buildings. There was more, too: a presence that he’d encountered before, though he couldn’t see it as clearly as he could the shard’s trail. In this shape, though, he could tell that it wasn’t entirely human.

  Then, below Stephen, a figure emerged from one of the houses. The light around it shone very brightly to him, almost too brightly to see many physical details, and in a few moments, the figure got into a carriage and drove away, becoming quickly lost in the crowds. Stephen had a momentary glimpse, though, enough to see a thin male body and long red hair.

  Stephen hadn’t met the man before, but he had seen him, and he knew where to find out more.

  That was as much as he could achieve in dragon form. He beat his wings again and headed upward, then reluctantly back toward his home, aware that such nights of hunting would be infrequent for quite a while longer. It was a very human thought to have in this shape; repression was obviously taking its toll.

  To distract himself, Stephen flew upward, above the fog, until the stars spread themselves up above him and the wind was cool around him. From high enough, even nights over London were lovely.

  He wished that Mina could have seen the view.

  He could almost hear her voice, marveling, and feel her slight weight on his back, her arms around his neck. She’d be brave enough for flight, Stephen knew; she’d take to it eagerly. She’d have a hundred things to say about the stars or the city from above.

  It wasn’t wise to dream of her. If anything, being in dragon shape should have made the differences between them all the more apparent. Mina had stated her wishes very clearly that afternoon. She’d been very sensible about it, and perhaps her plan would even work. She was a modern woman, she had a mortal family, and she hadn’t asked to be any part of Stephen’s world.

  All the same, he looked up at the stars and saw her face.

  Twenty-three

  “Not hardly,” said Polly, laying teaspoon in saucer with a percussive click. “I’ve been to the country. Our whole Sunday school class went when I was twelve. A treat, they said. Not much of one, I say. It rained the whole time, and there was mud everywhere.”

  “Not like here, then,” said Mrs. Hennings.

  Polly laughed. “Oh, I suppose you’ve a point. Mud just seems muddier outside the city, though, without the paved streets and that. And I suppose the flowers are pretty, but you do get pigs. And cows,” she added, with a shudder that might have mostly been exaggeration.

  “You wouldn’t have beef for dinner if you didn’t,” said Mrs. Baldwin.

  “But she’s right,” Mrs. Hennings said. “They’re unsettling beasts, alive and up close. And as for pigs, they’re much better in sausage form.”

  Mina grinned over the top of her letter. “I might agree if I’d ever met them,” she said, “but I hadn’t had the chance. We always went to the seaside. I think Florrie will like a few days in the country, though, and Bert too.”

  “It’ll do them good, anyhow,” said Polly.

  “Even with the mud?” Mina teased her.

  “Even with. The doctors say fresh air’s healthy, and I’m not one to go against their advice. I’m just glad I’m grown now and strong enough that there’s no need.”

  “Better hope you stay that way, then,” said Emily.

  At midday on a Sunday, the rest of the house was quiet and clean. Stephen was out.

  He’d often been out since the afternoon when they’d found out about the thieves. He and Mina still had breakfast together and still talked over the newspaper. He still kept her aware of what little progress he was making, but he made sure to stay at more than arm’s length. Serious and businesslike, they talked about scrying and occult clubs; abstract and scholarly, they sp
oke of museums and politics, and neither of them touched on anything personal.

  She didn’t tease him. He didn’t call her “Cerberus.” In the daytime, he went out, and he stayed out until he had to come home and transform. Then, often enough, he went out again.

  For Mina’s part, there was the kitchen: tea and cake, as often as not, and the company of the servants. The pain that became alarmingly sharp when Mina was by herself was at least duller in company, and she was coming to enjoy the servants for their own sake, as well.

  From a sensible perspective, everything was going very well. Mina wished she could have felt happier about it. That would probably take time.

  “Speaking of doctors,” she said into the silence, with a quick glance back at her letter to refresh what she already knew, “Mum says they’re putting in one of those charity clinics a few streets down from us. She also says—heavily underlined, I might add—that one of the doctors there is a lady.”

  “I’ve heard of those,” said Mrs. Hennings, cutting herself a slice of cake. “No wonder she’s practicing at a charity, though. Can you imagine anyone with a choice going to a woman?”

  “Especially a gentleman,” said Emily, and bit back a giggle under Mrs. Baldwin’s stern expression.

  “My father’s of the same opinion,” said Mina. She glanced back at the letter, read between the lines, and smiled. “My mother isn’t going to contradict him openly, but I suspect she’s mostly glad to have a doctor nearby, whatever her sex. Florrie thinks it’s a wonderful idea, though. I’d imagine she’s already started dissecting her old dolls.”

  That got a laugh.

  “I think it’s a splendid notion,” said Polly, and tossed her champagne curls. “I’ve had quite enough of having to”—she glanced around to make sure Mr. Baldwin was nowhere on the premises and lowered her voice—“to undress in front of some strange bloke. And his assistant, like as not. I know they’re not supposed to care, but they’re men, aren’t they? Sometimes I think I might as well go on the halls and get paid for it, instead of handing over half a week’s wages.”