“You sound disapproving. Well, I can’t say I am very impressed that you would run around in a bra. When I was young women bothered to dress up.”
“This is for jogging! I dress up all the time! I spend too much money on it, in fact! Where did you even get that outfit?” I asked him. “The ‘dads on vacation’ sale? And…how…old are you?”
“We’re still of a good breeding age for dragons,” Xado said. “The proper age to mate a human so that we will not have to mourn your death for long before we join you.”
“Seventy-five,” Rafe said, in a tone that seemed aggravated.
“Seventy-five? I—“ I started tearing up. “You’re—you’re older than my mom—“
“Why did you send that message if you didn’t really want Sinistral mates?” Hiron asked. “Surely you know that many demons have longer life spans than you?”
“I—I just— My mom is sick,” I exploded.
They all got very quiet, and I started to cry.
Chapter Three
Dakota
Yeah, that was how this whole stupid thing started. With a call from my mom that started with, “Babe, we need to have a talk. I’m okay. But we need to talk.”
I had just gotten off work and climbed into my Passat, which Mom had paid for. I thought she was going to hassle me about money again. “Sure.”
Then she dropped the bomb on me. Cancer. I totally missed a few sentences because all I could hear in my brain was this horrible ominous word pulsing like a heartbeat. Cancer. Cancer. Cancer.
Then she said, “Dakota? Are you still with me? It’s fine. The prognosis is really good. They caught it early. I’m checking in at the Celestial Path Center. I went there today to check it out and they are just wonderful there. It’s a wakeup call, you know? I need to get myself together. I’m working too hard.” She sighed.
Yeah. You are working too hard.
I had never heard of the Celestial Path Center, but this was my mom, so I could guess it was a holistic medicine place for rich Palm Beach people that hopefully wasn’t too wacky. I was even more of a hippie than my mom in a lot of ways, but this was not the time to experiment. “Are you getting chemo or anything? Do you need surgery?”
“You know what? I’m seventy-two. I’m not into that. I’ve always said, if it’s my time, it’s my time. But I think it’ll be fine. I’ve been doing a lot of research and I talked to Maria for a while; you know she had a breast cancer scare ten years ago?” Maria was her masseuse. She sounded like she was walking somewhere. After another long moment of silence from me, she said, “Dakota…are you crying? Honey, it’s going to be okay. I’m fine. I don’t think it’s my time. I’m going to detox and I don’t know, maybe even retire. I might live another thirty years. I met this lady the other day—”
“You’re old,” I sobbed. I’d had a really good day at work, and now it was all forgotten and I was sniffling into a curtain of my own hair because I had like, no napkins or tissues in sight. “What if you die?”
“Well,” she said. “At some point, it is our time.”
“Why are you being so chill about this?”
“Because it’s getting so easy to buy pot now.” She laughed. “No, really, I’m trying to be really calm because I knew you’d be scared,” she said. “But you know…even when I die, you’re not going to be alone. You have great friends.”
“But I don’t have a husband or kids and if you’re old that means I’ll be old soon and I want you to have grandchildren and I’m not ready for this! I’m sorry I didn’t give you grandchildren!” I started bawling.
“Oh…no. No. I’m sorry I kept asking you about grandchildren. That’s on me. I don’t have to have grandchildren. I just want you to be taken care of when I’m gone, that’s all.”
“I wanted to have grandchildren and I wanted them to go to your house and swim in the pool and make ice cream sundaes and…”
“Don’t worry. Babe, my clients are here. I’ll call you back tonight, okay? I’ll have more time to talk.”
We hung up and I just stared at my phone a while.
My mom had me late in life, but she always seemed much younger than she was, so it was easy for me to forget that she was like…old. All my life, she had been the person I leaned on. I was one of those “let’s have a baby to save the marriage” kids, and as soon as I was born, my parents’ marriage dissolved for good. My dad had been cheating on her with one of her own friends. Now he lived in California and had a second wife (yet another woman, I don’t know how she could trust him) and stepkids; I barely knew him. I didn’t have any siblings, and all my grandparents were dead. But that hardly seemed to matter, because I had Mom and she was a great combination of fun parent and fierce businesswoman. In her early twenties she was a sexy swinging sixties model, but in my lifetime she was a top real estate agent in Palm Beach, selling million dollar beachfront homes to celebrities. (Usually celebrities that I had barely heard of, but still.)
She could be tough, and she worked way too hard, but she also spoiled me. She made me go to college and she insisted I had to have a job, but beyond that, she was pretty willing to throw cash my way. Unlike my roommates, I didn’t have student loan bills or car payments, and I had quit my stressful job in an office to go work at a super chill cafe where I could play any music I wanted during my assistant manager shift and make myself organic lattes. My lack of ambition frustrated her. It was also true that I was addicted to buying clothes and she would always tell me to rein it in one moment and then send me a dress photo the next moment and totally enable.
I took pride in being a “live in the moment” kind of girl. I didn’t worry about anything much.
Maybe I should have lived outside of the moment more.
I was flat out sobbing when I got home. I dabbed my eyes with my shirt and tried to pull myself together. I didn’t want Nicole to see me looking like a mess. Since Edie moved out, Nicole and I kept renting the same house, even though we had to split the bills two ways instead of three. The 1950s brick ranch was still a good deal for the area, in a convenient location with nice mature trees and an updated kitchen. (The real estate agent’s daughter in me was always aware of such things.) I opened the fridge and took out a package of cold Kit Kat bars and started just inhaling them. Despite guilt. Former-model Mom was always reminding me of the importance of staying fit and healthy and groomed and blah blah.
“Hey.” Nicole wandered in, chopsticks jammed through her unruly black hair, in a super ancient Harry Potter shirt and cutoff denim shorts. “How was your day? Bad? I thought you were trying to lose weight. Not that I care, but I could have been a personal trainer in another life, so if you want me to crack the whip, just say the word.”
“I know. It’s my mom…”
I sniffled out an explanation. Nicole looked like she was going to lose her mind over the idea of the Celestial Path Center—she used to be a nurse and was very much not into alternative medicine—but I could see her forcing composure to comfort me. I wished Edie was still around. Nicole was like, all Aries and Virgo. Fire and analysis. Right now, I didn’t want that kind of energy. Edie would’ve been crying with me.
Still, Nicole was good at moving forward. “Here, grab the Kit Kats and let’s sit on the couch,” she said. “If your mom sounded pretty confident, then maybe it’s fine. They caught it early. I get it, though, just being afraid of losing her, even if it’s ten years from now.”
“Sometimes my mom doesn’t have the best grasp of reality. Like, I can see her not believing it was bad even if it was.”
“If it’s like, ‘you have three months to live’ bad, I think she’d tell you,” Nicole said. “Try not to spiral into panic. You always make things out to be worse than they are.” She put both hands on my shoulders and gave me a soothing squeeze. “Remember when you got your wisdom teeth out? I’ve seen people go in for open heart surgery with less panic than you.”
“Yeah… Let me change out of my work clothes…”
&nbs
p; I came back in pajamas, still munching the candy, while Nicole had grabbed a notebook.
“I don’t want to make a list,” I groaned.
“I’m going to make the list. Let’s just talk it out. I promise it helps. Last year, when I was going through that little thing—“ (She meant Edie marrying three denizens of the supernatural world and magic being real. She still had some issues with talking about it head-on.) “I had to figure out the root of what was bothering me. I mean, this is about more than just your mom being sick, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, pouting. “I guess I’m having my ‘little thing’ now. I’ve relied on my mom so much my whole life. Emotionally and financially. I’m happy. I thought I was okay with that, but maybe I’m not completely okay with it. I…I really envy Edie. I want a happily ever after with a unicorn on top.”
“Well, we live in the real world,” Nicole said. “And it’s really not that bad. Maybe you need to meet some new people.”
“Yeah…but sometimes I wonder why I have to live in the real world.”
Nicole smacked her notebook into her face. “Come on. You don’t need three magical husbands.”
“Edie didn’t think she needed that either, but…she seems so happy.” I frowned. “It was like all her problems were just solved.”
“We haven’t seen how it works out long term.”
“You’ve really been a downer about it, Nicole. I’m not sure your lists helped you at all.”
“Well, most of us just have to find a regular man and work a regular job.” Nicole kneaded her temple. “I don’t know. I miss her. We still see her, but she lives in such a different world now, and it’s a world I just can’t even deal with. I admit that magic is real but I don’t like it.”
“I always wanted to believe in magic… I used to pretend I was a warrior princess with a pegasus, even into middle school. The balcony was where I would address the peasants and when I went into the pool I could turn into a mermaid. My friend Kayleigh was the Mermaid Queen.”
“Uh-huh. So how could you apply that to now?”
“I wish I was still in middle school.”
“You are the only person I have ever heard say they want to go back to the stew of raging hormones that is junior high.”
“Yeah…”
“I’m not putting ‘go back to 7th grade’ on the list. Gimme something to work with that doesn’t involve finding a genie.”
So Nicole helped me make up a list of Realistic Things To Do. Like get a massage and ask this guy I thought was too cool for me out on a date and get into a regular exercise routine. Self-care blah blah. She was as bad as Mom, just in a different way. She suggested some books to read on grief that helped her when her grandma died. She was trying so hard to help but it was way too much busywork when I just wanted to cry.
Then Mom called back. Mom was often too busy to talk when I called her but once she staked out some time, she would talk for hours. I felt a little better as she assured me in more detail, right up until she said, “Still, it really makes me realize that you can’t put things off forever. You always wanted us to go to Disney World and I always said I was too busy. So…guess what? We’re doing it. I booked the Contemporary. That’s the one with the monorail in the middle of it. You can get off work next month, right?”
“What?”
“You heard me! I’ll get your plane ticket as soon as we hash out the details.”
My throat closed up. I choked, “You’re doing this just in case…”
“I’m doing this because it’s something we need to do. And yeah, just in case. There’s always a just in case. I could fall off a balcony tomorrow.”
“I’m not ready to lose you.”
“Don’t get sad, okay. You’re a fighter like your mama.”
Was I, though?
I had never fought for anything. I never had to. Mom fought for me.
It was in that state, crying to myself around midnight and on my third glass of wine, that I decided I needed some hot demon husbands of my own to remind me that magic was real and to love me no matter what. I had no idea how to find them. I ended up on some primitive looking message board typing out my plea to the universe. I burned a candle to try and make a ritual out of it. But I burned candles all the time.
I guess I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy to solve my problems, but I certainly didn’t expect to make them way worse.
I did my best to tell this whole sob story to the guys. Once I got talking, I couldn’t stop. I barely even looked at them; I just had to spill it all out.
I jumped when a hand went to my back.
“I’m sorry, lass,” Hiron said. “We’ve had our fair share of funerals to attend, haven’t we?” The other guys nodded. “We live much longer than some of the other Sinistrals. It never stops being strange that some beings are granted so much more time than others. You get used to it, but not really. Still, there is no fighting fate and I do believe all of our souls will cross paths in the stream of life, time and time again.”
“That must be hard,” I said, wiping tears. Their sympathy felt nice. I started to relax a little, but then I caught myself. “So…you see why I need to find some way to be home,” I said. “For my mom.”
“We can take you home to visit your mom,” Rafe said.
“I need to go on this trip to Disney World.”
“Sure. Fine. Disney World, even.”
“And we need to send a message to Nicole. She’s my housemate and one of my best friends. She’ll be worried sick. And really…disappointed.” I didn’t even want to think about how to handle that or the ramifications it would have for Nicole, to be abandoned by both of her best friends. She wouldn’t be able to afford that house on her own, either.
“Of course, I will get a message to your dear friend,” Hiron said. He opened a drawer and took out some paper and a fountain pen.
I gave him the faintest smile. It was sweet how he called her my ‘dear’ friend.
“But as for the rest of the time, I’m sorry to say, you belong to us now. And you’d be wise not to fight it. We’d be crazy to give you up, even if we could.”
So, that was that. The stupidest thing I had ever done on the internet in the middle of the night was no longer buying a waffle maker. I was a prisoner in the world of demons.
Chapter Four
Hiron
This was the girl.
Our girl.
We knew we would have no choice when the girl came, but I must admit I was pleased. Dakota was beautiful in a way I could appreciate. She was healthy-looking and curvy, with long blonde locks. There was something earthy about her that made me think she could handle three dragons, and she took to her new surroundings with relative ease, considering what a shock this world was to a human. Despite her protests, I caught appreciation in her eyes as she looked at us and the warm glow of the fire and the treasured tapestries and carved furniture, heirlooms of my clan.
We had been waiting for this moment for fifty years. I would never forget the day we made the pact. I had not seen Rafe for six years, but on that rainy night, as the walls of my castle were crumbling around me, he showed up at my father’s holding.
“I’m in!” he shouted over the driving rain. He was soaked to the skin. He dropped his guitar case in the dirt. “Are you and Xado still in?”
I held out my hand. I had never seen such a welcome sight. Rafe, my best friend since childhood, was the only man I could imagine completing our trio.
Even though he had seemed so different after six years in the Fixed Plane, surviving in a world without magic. And he still seemed different now.
I had known from childhood that the magic of my bloodline was waning. I had no humans in my bloodline until one reached back to my great-great grandparents, and my mother always blamed my frequent childhood sicknesses on this long span. And my parents had both died within a year of one another, too soon at the age of one hundred and twenty. Our castle was crumbling, our magic weakening.
Something had to be done.
But to elect for a human mate was an arduous path, especially for dragons and other long-lived demons. First, I had to be willing to swear bonds with two other men. And then, the Symposium would not approve a match until we had reached our seventieth year. Dragons had a “long spring” as it was called, where we seemed not to age at all for some fifty years. It had always caused misery to take a human mate during the long spring. When she died, the dragons left behind would often take their own lives, as my mother had taken her own upon my father’s death. Dragons were very close to their mates.
It was better to grow old together. We knew this. And yet, what a long path it had been. During the long spring of our lives, we had nowhere for our lust to go. While lesser demons might satisfy themselves with nymphs waiting for a human mate, even in human form, dragon demons were forbidden from idly mating with most other Sinistrals. Only after the binding ceremony could we safely mate with a human, or we risked losing control of our forms in the heat of the moment, and tearing her apart. Occasionally a dragon woman was up for a dalliance, and we used these encounters as practice for how to please a woman.
But human women and dragon women were quite different. This lass protested our advances even though she was obvious aroused by our presence. She didn’t even want the respect of being called our mate?
“Dakota, excuse us for a moment,” I said, while she was eating the meal and obviously enjoying it. “I need to confer with my bond-fellows.”
“About me?”
“Of course.”
She crossed her arms. “What do you need to say about me that you can’t say here?”
This human put up a fight at every turn. I made a small grunt of barely restrained frustration.
“It isn’t to say things about you. I want to confer with them as to how to best make you happy,” I said.
Captured by Dragons: A Reverse Harem Paranormal (Brides of the Sinistral Realms Book 2) Page 3