Pia Saves the Day

by Thea Harrison

  And, like her, he had a human form.

  Instinctively, he reached for his other form. It felt like flexing a familiar, well-toned muscle… and he shifted.

  After the change, he regarded his body. In his human form, he was still much larger than she, taller and broader, and more heavily muscled. He was clad in jeans and a T-shirt, and sturdy boots, all of which were grimed with dirt and blood—his blood.

  On his left hand, he wore a plain gold ring. As he stared at it curiously, he realized there was something attached to his wrist.

  Holding up his hand, he inspected the thing on his wrist in the fading light.

  It was a braid of gleaming, pale gold hair.

  He sucked in a breath. No matter how suspiciously he might inspect the braid, the only touch of Power he felt on it was his own, and that felt like a protection spell. The braid of hair was just that, a simple braid.

  And he had wanted to protect it.

  The gold hair looked quite familiar. In fact, it looked like the exact shade of hair on the head of the woman who was even now stubbornly climbing around the steep mountainside in the growing dark.

  Galvanized, he leaped after her. She had managed to travel much farther away from the clearing than he had expected. His gaze adjusting to the darker shadows under the trees, he tracked her by scent and instinct.

  She crouched beside some deadfall, stacking sticks into the crook of one arm. As he approached, she pointed one stick toward him like a sword without looking up.

  “Stay back,” she said. Her voice sounded strange, clogged with emotion. “Leave me alone for a few minutes.”

  Distress seemed to bruise the air around her, and he could smell the tiny, telltale salt of tears. Scowling, Dragos folded his arms. He disliked the scent of her tears, and he had no intention of going anywhere just because she told him to.

  “You’re wasting your time,” he told her abruptly. “Those little twigs you’re gathering will burn to ash within a half an hour.”

  She snapped, “It’ll be better than nothing.”

  Brushing past the useless barrier of the stick she brandished and bending over her, he closed his hand carefully around the tense curve of her slender shoulder. She shuddered at his touch, her head tilting sideways as if she might lay her cheek against the back of his hand.

  He waited for her to do it, and in the process discovered he savored the anticipation, but she didn’t follow through with the gesture. Disappointment darkened his thoughts.

  “Go back up to the clearing,” he said. “I’ll bring firewood.”

  Carefully, she pulled away from his touch and straightened. Still without looking at him, she told him stiltedly, “Thank you.”

  He lowered his head, watching her shadowed figure as she climbed back up to the ledge, still carrying her useless bundle of twigs. If he didn’t like her walking away from him, he liked her pulling away from his touch even less.

  They would have words about that. They would most definitely have words.

  For now, he turned his attention back to the pile of deadfall. The frame of the fallen tree lay underneath a scatter of forest debris. With a few strong kicks, he splintered the dry wood and gathered several sturdy pieces. When he carried his load back to the clearing, he found that she had gathered rocks into a circle for a makeshift campfire ring.

  Wordlessly, he stacked his load a few feet away from the ring, and went back for another load. When he returned and added the second armful to the stack, he found her squatting in front of the ring. She had stacked the sticks she had gathered, and she worked at lighting a handful of dry leaves with a small, handheld lighter.

  Folding his arms, he watched. Even though he could have lit the fire with a single glance, she didn’t ask for his help, and he didn’t offer it. If she wanted to do it by herself, so be it.

  After a few minutes, she had a small fire started. Tiny flames licked eagerly at the sticks, and the growing circle of light contrasted with the darkness around them.

  Only then did she look up at him. She appeared calmer, more composed. She said, “It’s a good sign that you remembered your human form. It’s promising.”

  “Is it?” He tucked his chin and considered her from underneath lowered brows. “I suppose it is.”

  A powerful cascade of emotions made his mood uncertain, and apparently she picked up on it, for her gaze turned wary. “Don’t you think so?”

  The delicate skin around her eyes was shadowed with dark smudges, and she looked exhausted. Still, the firelight loved her, burnishing the warm, healthy tan of her skin. The pale gold of her hair shone.

  Her hair.

  He didn’t look at his wrist.

  “Perhaps it is a good sign,” he conceded. “I find I have more questions as time goes on, thus more frustrations.”

  Feeding another stick to the fire, she nodded. In profile, her expression was grim, settled. She looked as though she were set upon a long journey requiring endurance.

  Deciding to test her, he said, “I’m surprised you’re still here. Once you realized I had no knowledge of your mate, I would have thought you’d have given up by now and left.”

  Anger flashed in her eyes, a deep, pure sapphire violet. The very best sapphires had that same intense, almost purple blue. “If you think I would give up searching for my mate, just because I’ve had a bad couple of days and a few setbacks, you’re badly mistaken. I didn’t mate for those times when it was convenient or easy for me—because, believe me, none of it has been convenient or easy. Not since the very first day.”

  The fire in her response was delicious. He wanted to bask in it, to eat it all up. And not once, since she had arrived, had she ever spoken a lie. Everything she had told him was the truth.

  Still standing with his arms crossed, holding himself at a distance, he heard himself ask, “Tell me of this time before, when you claimed to have healed me.”

  There was a slight pause, as she adjusted to his change in focus. She lifted a shoulder. “I don’t just claim to have healed you—I have healed you, three times now. The first time, last year, you were poisoned.”

  He didn’t know what he had been expecting, but whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t that. He drew in a breath between his teeth, on a slow hiss. “How?”

  She paused, clearly searching for words. “It was a complicated situation, and I take a lot of responsibility for it. It was when we had first met, before we had grown to trust one another. Essentially, I provoked you into breaking some border treaties with the Elven demesne. They shot you with a poisoned arrow so that you couldn’t shapeshift into the dragon while in their territory. You still have a scar on your chest where the arrow struck.”

  Reflexively, he rubbed the broad flat, muscled area of his right pectoral. Immediately, as if his fingers remembered more than he, they found a small indentation in the flesh. “And the second time?”

  A dark expression shadowed her delicate, triangular face. “The second time you almost died. Again, the story is complicated, but basically you, along with some allies, fought a battle against an invader, one of the elder Elves who had come from a place called Numenlaur. You had several broken bones, and probably sustained other internal injuries. You couldn’t defend yourself against the attacking army. Luckily, I was able to get to you in time.”

  The Elves again. Always, so many of his problems seemed to come down to the bloody Elves.

  Going down on one knee, he added larger pieces of wood to the fire. The dry wood caught almost instantly, and the flames leaped higher, bringing light and heat to the cold night air.

  “Now you’ve healed me again,” he said. “It seems to have become something of a habit.”

  The shadow crossed across her expression again. “I wasn’t able to heal you as much this time as I had hoped.”

  Lifting his head, he pinned her with his gaze. “What interesting stories you tell,” he said softly. “But there is a notable lack of information in each one.”

  She l
ifted her chin. “Everything I’ve told you is true.”

  “I can tell that,” Dragos said. “But what I want to know is, when were you going to tell me that I am your mate?”

  Surprise visibly shook her, along with a resurgence of hope so palpable it was painful to witness. “You remembered?”

  Earlier, when he’d looked at the gold ring he wore and the braided bracelet of hair, he had pieced the facts together. He was the destination, not part of her journey. He was the reason why she had climbed the mountain to face him.

  He thought again of the broken voice in the night.

  Come back. Come back to me.

  That had been her voice, calling to him. Astonishment came over him. Realizing the truth had been a matter of logical deduction, but he hadn’t counted on the depth of emotion that had driven her to confront the dragon. She carried so much passion, so much light.

  For him.

  I miss my mate with all my heart, and I would do anything or give anything to get him back again.

  She had been talking about him. No one had ever given him such devotion before—no one that he could remember. Over centuries uncounted, they had given him fear and hatred, and sometimes obeisance, and he had considered all of that his due.

  And she had brought him diamonds, sapphires and gold. He stared at the sapphire color of her eyes and the gold of her hair. His favorite things.

  He didn’t know he was capable of compassion, until that moment. He said, as gently as he could, “No, I still haven’t remembered.”

  Her gaze widened and drifted away, as if not knowing where to land, because wherever she looked, all she saw was the same horror.

  That look drove through him like a spike.

  He stepped over the fire, commanding it not to burn, and obedient to his will, the flames drew aside. Crouching in front of her, he put a hand underneath her chin, forcing her to look at him. He asked, “Why didn’t you say something before now?”

  She put a hand lightly against his forearm, stroking him, and even amidst his heat and anger, the action soothed him.

  “How on earth could I tell you something like that, and hope you would possibly believe me?” she asked. “I mean, think a minute—you had a difficult time accepting the fact that I brought the gifts in good faith. How do you think it would have gone down if a total stranger had walked up to you and said, ‘Oh hi, sorry about your head injury, by the way, I’m your mate’?”

  He had pinned her underneath one claw. He had been fully prepared to kill her as she drew close to him. He demanded, “When did it happen?”

  “Last year. We’ve been together fourteen months.”

  “And the building that’s under construction?”

  She moistened her lips. “It’s a—that’s another complicated concept.”

  He growled under his breath. “That response is not acceptable any longer.”

  “Sometimes that response is all I can give you,” she told him. “Your loss of memory is not just about me, Dragos. There is a lot you can’t recall, and I can’t just tell you in a sentence or two about things that are based on years of emotions, commitments, and understandings.” She gripped his wrist. “You’ve lost memories of an entire life, involving a lot of people. Do you remember what I said about enemies earlier? Not only is that true, but it’s also true about friends. You have friends. You have people who care about you.”

  He stared at her.

  Widening her eyes, she lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “I know, go figure. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?”

  “We’ve built a life for ourselves,” he said slowly, experimenting with the words.

  “We are building a life for ourselves,” she whispered. “And we’re not going to give up on it, just because we’ve had a bad couple of days. Or when one of us loses his memories for a while and gets a little bitey.”

  His eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”

  “Never mind,” she muttered.

  The whole conversation was bizarre, and part of him wanted to reject it out of hand. He was a loner by nature, and suspicious for many centuries-old reasons.

  It crossed his mind again that she could still be manipulating him, somehow, for her own gain. Setting aside the question of why she would do so, he thought of how she could have done it.

  Perhaps she had found a way to cloak all of her lies in some sort of truthspell. Perhaps she was trying to lure him into some kind of trap. Perhaps she was the trap.

  His gaze traveled again to the braid of hair at his wrist, and the gold ring on his finger. As much as he loved owning jewelry, he had never worn any, until apparently now. And that ring was a wedding ring.

  For any kind of subterfuge to be employed at this sophisticated level, she would have needed to slip both wedding ring and braid onto his human form before he had been injured, and somehow gotten him to put a protection spell on the braid.

  Really, that entire scenario strained his credulity.

  But on the other hand, so did the thought of having a mate.

  A wife.

  A life full of complicated concepts, involving friendships.

  Letting all of those thoughts go, he concentrated on the reality at hand.

  The reality was, he held her life literally in one hand, his long fingers resting against the warm, soft skin underneath her chin. Her pulse beat delicately against his hand, and there was no fear anywhere in her eyes, or in her scent. She leaned forward into his touch, as if she wanted his hands on her skin.

  She had no weapons or barriers of any kind. She had no magic spells, just her own wild, inherent Power that brushed with such a tantalizing coolness against the heat of his own.

  “So we were building a life together,” he said in a husky voice into her upturned face, as he stroked his fingers along her petal-soft skin. “Fine. I want to see it for myself.”

  With a growing predatory hunger, he watched her lovely mouth shape her words. “What do you mean?”

  “I presume we have a home somewhere. Take me there. Show it to me.” Lifting one shoulder, he added a touch of persuasion to his voice. “Maybe if I see it in person, it could jog my memory.”

  The painful, excruciatingly bright hope came back to life in her eyes, along with a multitude of other, more complex emotions that he couldn’t decipher.

  Complex emotions, no doubt, that went along with their complex life.

  He didn’t care about any of it. He only cared about one thing.

  The other Dragos—the one with his memories intact—had somehow won this remarkable creature’s heart and soul. Perhaps it was more than a touch insane to be jealous of himself, but he was.

  He wanted what that other Dragos had. She was the real treasure, more precious than sapphires, diamonds and gold.

  At the core of his ancient, cynical heart, he was an acquisitive creature, after all.

  Chapter Six

  “I think going home is a great idea,” Pia said slowly.

  For such an unbearable nightmare, things were actually beginning to look up. Dragos had shapeshifted into his human form, and he was talking to her. Really talking, not growling or roaring (or biting), or barking orders.

  Also, she was intensely relieved that he had figured out the nature of their relationship for himself. He didn’t feel any of the emotions, and that hurt like a burning knife had been thrust into her chest, but at least she didn’t have to try to find some way to tell him and watch any possible disbelief cross his expression.

  Her lips were dry. She hadn’t hydrated enough after her climb, and she moistened them with the tip of her tongue. His gaze dropped to the small movement and grew intent, although his hard expression remained closed to her scrutiny.

  He was still so suspicious, and that hurt too. Her own logic scolded her. Of course he would be suspicious. Suspicion was part of the dragon’s nature. He had been a solitary creature for so long, with a predatory nature and an ancient, primitive past, and he was quick to war. He had a histor
y of enemies that went back millennia.

  This present mess wasn’t his fault. None of this was anybody’s damned fault. It was just a random, horrible accident that had happened, but it was still hard for her not to take things personally.

  She had to stay braced. Seeing their house might not help his memories to return, but it might just help him to relax and learn to trust her a bit more. Anything would be better than the cold, confrontational attitude with which he had greeted her earlier.

  He still touched her, the hard fingers of his hand curled under her chin. She still touched him, her own hand curled around his muscled forearm.

  He would never let an enemy remain in such intimate contact with him. The realization fed the stubborn hope of hers that refused to die.

  She gave him a tentative smile. “When would you like to leave?”

  He didn’t return the smile. That fierce gold gaze of his never left her mouth. “Now.”

  Nodding, she stood and glanced down at the fire. “I guess we didn’t need to build this after all.”

  He straightened when she did, with that quick, lithe grace of his that belied his muscular bulk. “That remains to be seen,” he said shortly. He passed a hand over the fire, and his Power flexed, dampening the flames. “It will still be here if needed.”

  Clenching her muscles, she forced herself not to flinch. Of course, just because he wanted to see their home didn’t mean he was committed to staying there.

  At least, not yet.

  Walking to her pack, she dug in the side pocket for the satellite phone. As Dragos watched, she punched in Graydon’s number. When Graydon answered, she told him, “We’re going back to the house now.”

  Graydon said carefully, “That sounds promising.”

  She could tell by the neutrality in his voice and words that Graydon knew very well Dragos could hear everything he said. Pia glanced at Dragos, who watched her every move with a sharp frown.

  She told Graydon, “It’s great news. I didn’t want you to worry. I’ll call when I can.”

  “Make it soon, okay?”