No matter what happened, we must protect her.
89
Kaitlyn
Ari stayed with me for quite a long time but then Jalli and Saint came to the door saying that he was wanted in a conference with his father and mother. I was very pointedly not invited but Saint said he would stay with me when Ari was reluctant to leave me. Jalli went with her big brother, which left me alone with his dark cousin pacing in front of the door like a guard doing sentry duty.
“So I heard you stirred up more trouble,” he remarked sardonically, after Ari and Jalli had left.
“No, I didn’t!” I denied at once. “It was that old lady—the Blind Crone. She was the one who made the trouble by claiming I have a Drake inside me.”
“Do you?” He raised an eyebrow at me, as though it was a real possibility.
“Of course not!” I exclaimed impatiently. “How could such a thing even be possible?”
He shrugged. “Stranger things have happened. How did men and dragons merge in the first place to become Drakes?”
“Well, I didn’t merge with anybody,” I told him. “I don’t know why that woman said what she did.”
“Whatever the reason for the prophecy, speaking it seems to have killed her,” he pointed out. “Which unfortunately doesn’t allow anyone to question her word or ask why she would make such a claim on your behalf in the first place.”
“I don’t know what to do.” I sat down on the bed and put my head in my hands. “I never wanted this—any of this.” I made a motion, indicating the whole of the Sky Lands. “I mean the power of being a Drake’s L’lorna or becoming queen someday—that all seems crazy to me. I only wanted Ari and his Drake—that’s all.”
Saint laughed bitterly.
“Don’t you know, L’lorna of my cousin, that having a Drake—in whatever capacity you have him—never comes without complications?”
“Are you talking about your own Drake?” I asked, glad to get off the subject of my own crazy situation. “Having him is complicated?”
“Being tied to a Blood Drake? Hell yes, it’s complicated.” He raked a hand through his thick black hair, the black and red scales on the back of his arm glinting in the golden lamp light with the motion.
“Because it’s considered bad luck?” I asked timidly. That seemed to be the prevailing superstition about anything out of the ordinary here in the Sky Lands. Born with a birth defect? You’ll cause bad luck. Disfigured by some horrible accident? Again, bad luck. Anything strange or unusual about you at all? Bad luck.
But Saint only shrugged.
“That’s only part of it. You’re not the only one with a prophecy about you, you know.”
“What? Did the Blind Crone say something about you too?” I asked excitedly.
Saint shook his head. “Not her. But someone who matters did. Look, I’d rather not talk about it, if you don’t mind.”
“Well I don’t want to talk about my situation either,” I pointed out. “But you know all about it, even though you weren’t in the Feasting Hall.”
He nodded.
“Yes, I try to make myself scarce at public banquets and the like. Especially happy occasions like ones to welcome the Alpha-to-be’s new L’lorna. I don’t want to cast a pall over the celebration by tainting it with my presence.”
I didn’t think that he could have done much worse than the Blind Crone, who had shouted a totally untrue prophecy about me and then capped it off by dying dramatically in the middle of the floor. I mean, don’t get me wrong—I was sorry she was dead. But dead or not, it really seemed like she could have been more careful with her predictions.
“Well, the ‘festivities’ weren’t very festive anyway,” I told Saint. “I don’t think anyone liked the idea of me being Ari’s L’lorna. I know Pedro Sanchez’s mother didn’t. She absolutely hates me.”
“Oh, yes—I heard about that.” He leaned back against the door and crossed his arms over his broad chest. “You got her son shame-marked and thrown out of the Nocturne Academy, right?”
“I didn’t do any of that on purpose!” I protested. “What happened was, he hit me and then my friend, who’s a Sister—a witch, I mean—slapped him and marked him by accident because she was so angry and just learning to control her magic. When he went to complain to the Headmistress about it, she found out what he’d done and expelled him. I didn’t ask for any of that to happen, really.”
“Well, sometimes we get things we don’t ask for, whether we want them or not,” Saint said darkly. “I didn’t ask to be cursed with a Blood Drake inside me, after all.”
“What’s so bad about a Blood Drake, though?” I asked, glad once more to switch the conversation away from my own past and current predicament. “You never told me. Is it just that he’s unusual looking so people think he’s bad luck?”
Saint shook his head and sighed.
“You might as well know—Ari will tell you anyway. My Drake is completely savage—he can’t be tamed by any female. Though that’s not to say none have tried,” he added darkly.
“They did? Why? How?” Despite the situation I found myself in, I was fascinated. Or maybe I was just desperate to focus on anything else but what was happening at the moment. Either way, I wanted to know more.
Saint sighed again.
“To understand you have to know the whole story. A Blood Drake never comes about by accident, you see—it is the result of a curse—a Blood Curse laid upon the Sire of the one who bears it. For the sins of the Sires shall be visited upon their sons,” he said, which sounded like a quote from the Bible, I thought.
“Before I was born, my Sire killed one of his lieutenants in cold blood.” Saint began to pace again as he spoke. “The man committed a minor infraction but my Sire—whose temper has always been quick—killed him for it unjustly. Now, it just so happened that the man’s L’lorna was a bruja.”
I didn’t have much Spanish but I knew that word.
“A witch,” I whispered.
Saint nodded.
“But not like the Sisters and Warlocks you have back in your human world. The brujas of the Sky Lands work with Black Magic—the kind that stains your very soul.” He ran a hand through his hair again. “And so, she cursed my Sire—she told him that his only son—me—would be the last of his line. For my Drake—when he manifested—would be a Blood Drake that no woman could ever tame or conquer. And sure enough…” he shrugged unhappily. “When my Drake came out at the age of nine, he was black with the blood-red sheen on his scales that denotes a Blood Drake. And so the curse has followed me my whole life and tainted my very existence.”
“But…can’t anyone break it?” I asked, thinking about what I had learned about witchcraft from Megan and Avery. “I mean if it’s just a spell…”
“Oh, my Sire has tried, believe me,” Saint said flatly. “Tried and failed most spectacularly.”
“How so?” I asked.
He looked away.
“You don’t really want to know. It was…a tragedy.”
“Please tell me.” I could tell he both did and didn’t want to talk about it. Maybe I was the first person he’d been able to tell outside his family. Or maybe just the first unbiased listener he’d ever found, since everything from the Sky Lands was new to me.
Saint ran a hand through his thick black hair again, rumpling it up into a dark halo around his head.
“My Sire was determined that my Drake should be tamed and should claim a L’lorna. I tried to tell him it was a bad idea, but he insisted. He gathered the daughters of the noblemen of our province, as is often done for a male of high rank to choose from. The idea was that one of them would catch the fancy of my Drake and tame him with her feminine charms. He would claim her as his L’lorna and the curse would be broken.”
“I’m guessing that’s not what happened, though,” I said. I could tell as much by the bitter, unhappy look on his dark face.
“No.” Saint shook his head. “I held out—held him back—fo
r as long as I could. But the presence of the females who had come to tame him enraged my wild Drake.” He looked away from me and his voice dropped to a rough whisper. “Two died and three more were mortally wounded before the rest could be gotten to safety.”
“Oh, no!” I said, putting a hand to my mouth. “Oh, Saint, that’s…” Words failed me.
“Horrifying? Sadistic? Murder?” he growled, glaring at me. “Yes, all that and more, L’lorna of my cousin. I bear their blood on my soul and I will forever. To see what my Drake was doing and not be able to stop him—” He broke off and shrugged, abruptly returning to his former nonchalance. “Well, at least now my Sire no longer tries to make me learn the proper way to rule a province. He has his hopes pinned on the male my oldest sister is to marry. Though he is not royal and does not have the two-toned scales which Alphas are supposed to have, he has an even, easy temperament and his Drake was tamed to her hand the very first moment they met. So my Sire has his heir, even without me.”
His apparent indifference about the situation didn’t fool me a bit. I had spent too long living with my own outer scars not to recognize the inner scars of another.
“Saint,” I said softly. “I’m so sorry. But what happened wasn’t your fault.”
“Try telling that to the families of the girls my Drake killed,” he said and I heard the bitterness creeping into his voice again. “Try telling them it isn’t my fault. I cannot bear to go to our court in the Western Province and meet their eyes.” He sighed and looked away. “It’s why I spend so much time flying—so much time in my Drake form. Though it sounds strange, it’s easier to forget what he’s done when I’m one with him. Maybe because his mind is savage and strange—not like the thinking, reasoning Drakes of other males. His thoughts are…snarled. Tangled like a ball of twine I cannot unravel.”
It sounded to me like his Drake might have some kind of mental disorder or chemical imbalance. I wondered if maybe modern medicine could help. Would Prozac or Zoloft or one of those other depression drugs—I had been on a few of them after my parents died—help a magical being like a Drake?
“Have you thought about coming to the human world and going to the doctor?” I asked frankly. “We have medicine there…”
“Medicine to break a curse?” Saint demanded, rounding on me. He laughed and it was a wild, angry, unhappy sound.
I shrank back from his sudden outburst, even though he was still over by the door and I was sitting on the bed. Saint saw my gesture and sighed unhappily.
“Don’t worry,” he told me. “I know what you’re thinking but you’re safe with me. Even if my Drake came out, you’d be safe. You’ve been claimed by another Drake—you’re someone else’s L’lorna which means you would never try to tame him. So he’d leave you alone.” He shrugged. “He really does have no interest in females, you know. Maybe because I have no interest in them myself.”
“Oh,” I said faintly. “Well…that’s good.” I had another thought and dared to speak it. “You should still think of coming to the human world, Saint,” I told him. “Even if you don’t think medicine could help your Drake.”
“Why?” he demanded. “Assuming that Nocturne Academy you all go to would even have me.”
“Well…because,” I said carefully. “We also have this thing called ‘therapy.’ It’s where you talk to someone about your past and the things that happened to you and all the guilt and anger and sorrow it caused. I had lots of therapy after my parents died in The Fire,” I went on candidly. “And it helped—it really did.”
“Therapy, you say?” Saint looked skeptical but I thought there was a note of hope in his voice. “But how can talking about your past help make anything better?”
“Don’t you feel at least a little better after telling me your past?” I asked him gently. “Sometimes it helps to just have someone listen.”
“You know…” He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “I didn’t think it would but…it did. A little, I think.”
“See?” I asked. “And I’m not any kind of a trained therapist. But talking helps.” I thought of how I had talked and cried with my Coven-mates—especially Megan—about the pain of losing my parents. My heart went out to Saint. What a terrible load of guilt he was carrying! I wished I could get him an appointment with my old therapist back home. She had been such a wonderful listener.
The people of the Sky Lands might have magic and the wonderment of dragons merged with humans, but they were living in the Dark Ages. They needed things from the human world they couldn’t or wouldn’t take. It was like poor little Jalli, going around with a club foot which could be fixed by surgery if only Ari’s parents would let her have it.
I resolved right then and there that if I ever did get to be Queen of the Sky Lands, I would make some big changes. People who needed medical help would get it and all this nonsensical insistence that anyone who was born or looked different from the norm was “bad luck” would have to stop. Diversity was an integral piece of a successful society where people had sympathy and empathy for each other and the Sky Lands badly needed it.
Then I realized I was planning for a future which was most likely never going to happen—not now that the Blind Crone had given everyone such crazy, unrealistic expectations of me. When the Drake people found out I wasn’t the mother of a new race they had been waiting for ever since the first dragon merged with the first man, they would reject me. They might even want to kill me.
No, it was never going to happen.
At that moment there was a knocking at the door and Ari’s voice called my name.
Saint opened the door at once and Ari came in. He looked at me and nodded.
“Well,” he said, “We’ve come up with a plan.”
90
Kaitlyn
“So…we’re going to sneak away, back to Nocturne Academy in the middle of the night and not come back for a couple of years until the rumors have died down?” I looked at Ari skeptically. “That’s the whole plan?”
Saint had gone back to his own room and Ari and I were alone in mine, sitting on the bed while he explained what we were going to do.
It wasn’t much of a plan, in my opinion. I still preferred the idea of telling everyone the truth right away—tonight—before they could start spreading the crazy lies the Blind Crone had said. But Ari’s parents were in agreement—they couldn’t challenge the wisdom of the local Oracle, even if she was now deceased.
“This is ridiculous!” I exclaimed, getting off the bed and starting to pace as Ari watched me in surprise. He was probably expecting the old Kaitlyn—the quiet, timid girl who was too afraid to stand up for herself. But the deeper into this crisis we got, the more I felt myself changing—becoming more than that—more than I used to be in the past.
“This whole place is ruled by superstition,” I told Ari as he watched me pace. “Everything and everyone that looks a little bit different is just ‘bad luck’ or ‘under a curse’ or some nonsense like that. Look at Saint and what happened to him,” I continued and saw the look of surprise in Ari’s face.
“He told you his past?” he asked, his eyebrows rising high. “But he never speaks of that to anyone.”
“Well, he spoke of it to me,” I said firmly. “And what he needs isn’t magic—it’s medicine and therapy. And your little sister, Jalli—why can’t she come back to the human world with us and have an operation to cure her club foot?”
Ari sighed unhappily.
“Dios, Kaitlyn, I’ve told you—my Sire won’t allow it. The older Drakes don’t trust anything from the human world.”
“But they came from the human world—at least half of them did,” I pointed out.
“Yes, but that was centuries ago,” Ari told me. “If the records in our oldest archives are correct, the first brave farmer who came through the rift in Spain did so sometime back during Medieval Times.”
“And that’s the mentality your people still have,” I told him. “You’re talking about witchcraft and
bad luck and magic and you’ve completely ignored any kind of science.”
“But witchcraft is real,” he reminded me. “And magic truly works. It’s not just superstition, like most humans believe.”
All right—he had a point, I had to admit. But still…
“Just because magic works doesn’t mean it’s the only way to solve any given problem,” I argued. “Why can’t we find a way for magic and science to coexist?”
“That, my L’lorna, is the question the various groups of Others have been asking themselves for as long as they have been interacting with the human world.” Ari sighed and shook his head. “Come—can we please not fight right now? Aren’t you thirsty?” He bared his throat for me, pulling down the collar of the rich satin robe he was wearing to expose the pulsing blue vein at the side of his neck. “Don’t you need to drink?” he asked.
His low, seductive tone and the sight of that vein pulsing under his smooth, caramel-colored skin made my fangs feel itchy and my throat feel dry. But I was in no mood to be manipulated or appeased right then.
I felt like what we were doing—running away in the middle of the night and letting Ari’s people continue to believe the blatant lies about me—was wrong. And while I couldn’t stop him or his parents from doing it, I could at least be what my mom would have called “a conscientious objector.”
“No, thank you,” I said, looking pointedly away from him and trying to think about anything but my dry-as-a-desert-throat. “I’m not thirsty right now.”
Ari seemed to understand that I was mad at him—mad at all of them—because he didn’t push me. Instead, he rose from the bed and came to me. He put out a hand as though he wanted to touch my shoulder…and then drew back as though he wasn’t sure how I would react.
“Kaitlyn,” he murmured, “L’lorna…please don’t be angry. My parents and I are only acting for your safety.”
Fang and Claw: Nocturne Academy, Book 2 Page 35