by Jaime Samms
The pixie-dragon crossed scaled arms, showing off spiked forearms and lime green feather ruffs along his shoulders. His face took on a defiant pout, and he still clutched his tiny spears in clenched fists.
“As I thought.” Emile quirked an indulgent smile. “Go find him. Be nice.”
He’s not that bright.
“He’s a dog.” Emile straightened, sensing Sunny’s approach without having to look. His magic undulated, reaching for the comfort of Sunny’s presence. As he turned, keeping the magical creature behind him, he felt the disturbance of the weave of magic that happened when someone shifted, the sharp dig of claws into his palm. He managed not to grimace as the pixie-dragon, now in a tiny dragon form, fluttered off into the night.
“What was it?” Sunny peered around him.
“A robin. He didn’t hurt it. He was playing, I guess, but it flew off.”
“What if he doesn’t come back?” Sunny glanced once more at the now-black wall of leafy darkness.
“He will. Don’t worry. Let’s go inside. We can leave the door open for him.” He wrapped an arm over Sunny’s shoulders and turned him for the house. He hadn’t had time to quiz the pixie-dragon about where it had come from or how it crossed the Fold, or why, but the feisty little creatures rarely travelled alone. Where one went, dozens more were sure to follow.
Emile was fairly certain there was nothing like a flying lizardlike creature on this side of the Fold. It would be best not to have to try to explain it if he could avoid it. If things kept on like this, he worried he wasn’t going to have a choice. Sunny wasn’t blind. He was going to start noticing things, and Emile didn’t think he’d be able to play dumb for very long, once that happened.
SUPPER WAS easy—fried eggs and toast—cooked up and plated as soon as Fernforest reappeared. Sunny’s relief at having the dog safely inside went a long way to calming the extra energy he’d had all day. When they turned in, there was no real conversation about both of them cuddling into Sunny’s bed. Their lovemaking was long and tender. As Emile lay in Sunny’s bed, arms around his lover and night whispering over his bare skin, he fell asleep to the sensation of his very personal magic seeping through the bones of the building to the land beneath, anchoring itself in bedrock, tree roots, and rich, dark soil.
He should be concerned about that. When dragon magic soaked into the land, it woke things. It reminded the weaker magics how to flow and nudged deep, sleeping currents back to life.
That should be worrisome.
Sunny shifted, mumbled something, twisting restlessly, and Emile heard a snatched whisper of pain and loss. He held Sunny tighter, stroked his back. After some time, Sunny settled. Emile’s magic curled around them, lending warmth to the cool room, soothing Sunny’s distress.
There was going to be no disentangling himself from this place. This man. Emile felt it in his marrow. His magic had chosen, and he could not find it in his heart to argue. An anchor was not a cage, after all.
Chapter 17
SUNNY WASN’T at all surprised when Daisy called a week later to remind him of his pseudopromise to have lunch with her.
“You did promise.”
“More like I didn’t say no.”
“Close enough.” He could hear the grin in her voice. “Why do you want to hang out there all alone, anyway?”
“I can come into town if you need me.” He descended the porch steps, kicked off his flip-flops, and dug his toes into the grass. He would go if she needed him. Turning his face up to the sunshine beaming onto the lawn, he tried not to hope she wouldn’t ask. He wasn’t ready to tell her about Emile. He wasn’t sure why.
“No.” There was a long pause. “Sunny?”
“Yeah?”
“I worry about you.”
Sunny glanced to where Emile nested on the swing on the front porch, a book in hand, a few more sticking out from under the cushions, and Ferny curled against his thigh. Long magenta hair cascaded over his shoulder and glinted in the sun. No doubt his original darker dye had faded in the sun until it was rosy pink at the tips, setting off his perfect pale skin. Though he couldn’t see the soft pink freckles from here, he knew they were there, and imagined the delicate splash across the bridge of his nose, across his pectorals….
“Um. Yeah.” He shook himself. “I—guess we have a lot to talk about.”
“We do?” Her tone was an odd mix of interested, and trepidatious. “Do I get a preview?”
“Patience, Daisychain.”
“Something is going on and you haven’t told me. Why not?”
“It’s new.”
“Oh?”
“I wanted to tell you in person, I guess.”
“When do I get to meet him?”
As usual, Daisy made a leap Sunny hadn’t expected.
“More to the point,” she said, not giving him a chance to reply, “when did you meet him?”
As if knowing he was being talked about, Emile glanced up. His sapphire eyes shone, an inner fire sparking when he met Sunny’s gaze. He looked curious, but there was a hard edge to his features, defensive almost, and Sunny offered a smile.
Emile cocked his head but didn’t smile back.
“I have to go, Daisychain. I’ll call you later. Or you call me, if you need anything.” He hung up even as her voice rose in a demanding spike, asking again about Emile. He wasn’t ready to tell her—or anyone—about Emile. Daisy wouldn’t understand him keeping a man who’d just wandered out of the forest with no history and no discernible plans for the future. He was perfectly happy to keep Emile to himself—to keep them to himself.
“Eess everything okay?” Emile asked. His accent, which had smoothed out so much Sunny had all but forgotten about it, thickened to a hot hiss.
“Fine.” Sunny frowned. “It’s just Daisy being curious.”
Emile set his book down and flowed to his feet. There was something preternatural about the way he moved, something too sharp in his eyes as he approached. Sunny ought to feel nervous about that, but all he felt was turned on.
“Trouble?”
“No. Not at all. She’s just curious. And worried. We haven’t seen each other in a while. I guess I sort of… ran away.” Sunny was suddenly tired and sad. His mother would have known what he should do. Go to Daisy? Bring Emile and introduce them? Keep to himself? Keep Emile to himself?
Emile’s nostrils flared. His eyes darkened as he stepped off the porch onto the grass.
A distinct rumble vibrated up through the soles of Sunny’s feet, and he gasped. “Did you feel that?”
A slight wisp of scent caught Sunny’s attention, like the faint hint of coals and woodsmoke, there and gone so fast he knew it had to be his imagination. At the bottom of the yard, the sharp crack of a branch breaking shattered the tense quiet between them, and they both turned to the forest.
Branches rattled and swayed, but only for a moment before stilling again. There was no breeze. Something big had moved in the bushes, and Sunny’s heart skipped. “Wait here,” he ordered and hurried to the bridge and over its gentle hump.
Ferns and asters crowded the bridge’s railing at the far side. Moss curled over the bank of the stream, and the water itself burbled and splashed, wetting the greying wood under his feet. The gentle aspens reached over the arch of the bridge as though stretching to protect his gateway into the woods. Sunny didn’t remember the forest hovering like this. He’d have to pay more attention to keeping it trimmed back from the path and the yard.
Now, he batted an outslung pine branch aside to take a few steps down the well-trod path. He had walked it often over the past weeks, pleased with the dapple of sun and shade the aspens provided on hot afternoons. Today, despite the sun, the shadows were deep, shading towards pine greens and twilight purple under the trees. He squinted into the gloom from his more sunlit spot on the path head.
“Who’s there?” He didn’t expect an answer and wasn’t disappointed. Silence greeted his call, and after a few minutes, he took a step b
ack, then another, until one foot rested on the smooth planks of the bridge.
He almost jumped when Emile placed a hand on his shoulder. Standing behind Sunny, on a higher part of the bridge’s arch, he towered over Sunny’s shoulder, brilliant blue gaze seeming to pierce the darkness under the trees much better than Sunny had managed. His face was set in a frown, and his fingers gripped Sunny’s shoulder with near-bruising force.
“Come away,” Emile whispered, and there was more of his accent, a spiced, flowing undercurrent to the words at odds with the gentle man Sunny knew. Or thought he knew.
Sunny didn’t argue. The shimmering shadows behind the leaves moved too much at odds with the barely there breeze. Below their feet, the stream splashed along, a tumble of agitated sound. When Sunny glanced into the water, the flashes of silver and rainbow iridescence he would normally have attributed to tiny fish scales blinked at him from below the waves in a decidedly unfishlike manner.
“What’s going on?”
“Come away,” Emile repeated, and this time his tone rumbled under Sunny’s skin, and Sunny followed without thought.
Chapter 18
“SOMETHING IS out there.” Sunny hugged himself. They sat on the porch swing, Sunny crushing Emile’s carefully built nest, displacing the pile of favourite books he’d brought out with him, and Emile next to him, bones aching against the hard wooden seat. Carefully, he squirmed, trying to get more comfortable as he followed Sunny’s gaze to the bottom of the yard.
Something was out there. He was right about that. The small patch of wilderness felt more and more wild, more and more like Emile’s home, and less like the alien, dry, magicless place he had entered on first breaching the Fold.
It was unnerving.
“Maybe hunters,” Sunny rambled.
That made Emile shiver because his experience of hunters was probably not the same as Sunny’s. Where a few weeks ago, he had felt the urge to move on, to keep from caging himself here, now he was torn. If he moved on, the land might return to sleep, with Sunny none the wiser. Or, he would leave Sunny exposed to whatever had followed him through, with no means of protecting himself against magic he wouldn’t understand.
“It’s like the forest is trying to tell me something.” Sunny stood and wandered to the porch railing. “Look at the nightshade.” Vines of it had crawled up the railing of the bridge, tiny purple flowers blooming prettily in the afternoon sun. “That isn’t the really poisonous kind, but still. I’ve never seen it grow so fast. There was none on the bridge two days ago.” It had twined itself halfway across the wooden expanse like it was deliberately covering and engulfing the man-made structure, trying to meld it into the woods and make it a part of the landscape.
Sunny’s dreamy, distracted tone worried Emile. Humans had been known to fall into thrall to the constant, unyielding persistence of nature’s force when it woke and decided to reclaim its own. Sunny’s vacant demeanour stirred Emile’s magic to a foaming froth, not violently agitated, but bubbling through the holes in its confines with gentle persistence. He could feel his scales shimmering just under his skin, and worried if he stepped into the direct sunlight, their sharp reflection would make him glow.
The forest was calling to them. There was no doubt about that. The fact that Sunny felt it was unsettling. “Maybe we should leave,” Emile blurted. We? That is unexpected, Emikku. Just where do you intend on taking him? He wasn’t sure he could outrun his dragon’s need to answer the strong pull of the forest. Answer it? Or battle it?
If only he knew exactly what was prowling out there.
Sunny turned to look at him. His golden eyes, shaded under the house’s overhang, seemed like extensions of the shadows under the trees. His hair, falling in corkscrew curls past his shoulders, reminded Emile of his home, wild and inexorable. With his bare feet, dirt-smudged shirt and shorts, and that hair, Sunny appeared as uncultivated a part of the landscape as any ephemeral dryad. Even the suggestion he should leave this place suddenly felt ludicrous.
“To see Daisy?” Sunny asked, voice firming, eyes sharpening. His expression lost the vague distance, and a smile curved the outer corners of his mouth. “You think?” He took a step away from the edge of the porch, towards Emile, and this time there was no need for direct contact. Magic arched between them, a feral surge that made Emile gasp and Sunny laugh out loud.
A sharp breeze and a burst of sunlight burning through thin clouds accompanied the spurt of energy. Sunny grabbed Emile’s hand. “Yes,” he agreed. “I like that idea. Now?” He nodded. “We should go now. I’ll find shoes.” He headed for the door, dragging Emile after him. “And keys. I’ll need car keys. Come on. I want to see Daisychain. She needs to….”
Emile followed, the change in mood making his head spin. Whatever Sunny thought his sister needed, he didn’t elaborate. His thoughts, though they had trailed off in words, were clearly racing. He skittered around the house, collecting things that made no sense to Emile.
Metal jingled to the sound of a triumphant “Aha!” from Sunny; then a square of folded leather disappeared into the pocket of his baggy shorts. He grabbed a metal vessel he called his “to-go” mug from a cupboard, and filled it with black, untreated coffee, as Emile had come to prefer. Another he filled with coffee dressed the way he liked, and he thrust them both at Emile.
The smooth metal surface was cool to the touch, a hard line up against which his magic stopped abruptly. Emile wondered at that, but there was no time to question. Sunny kicked a pair of leather sandals at him and a stretchy bit of cloth tied into a loop.
“You’ll want to tie up your hair,” he said. “I’m taking the top off the Rover. Could get windy.”
It took Emile a few minutes to plait his hair and wrap the loop around the end of the queue. By the time he had, Sunny had rolled the sides of his vehicle up, leaving the back exposed. Fernforest sat behind the seats, tongue lolling, a happy grin on his face.
Sunny grunted when Emile came to stand beside him. “Cheekbones,” he whispered, then shook himself. “Get in.” He opened the door and hopped into the car. When he didn’t move over to make room for Emile, Emile put a hand on the side, ready to climb in the back, next to Fernforest.
“What are you doing?” There was amused confusion in Sunny’s voice. “Get in beside me.” He motioned to the seat next to him, then leaned over to open the other door.
Flushing with his ignorance, Emile hurried around behind the vehicle to the other side so he could clamber in next to Sunny. He pulled the door closed after him, set his mug in a spot next to Sunny’s, and sat, hands in his lap, waiting.
“Seat belt?” Sunny asked and reached over his shoulder to pull a strap out of an opening. He clicked the metal end into a slot next to his hip, and Emile emulated him.
Sunny narrowed his eyes. “Have you ever been in a car before?”
Emile’s flush deepened. “It’s been… some time… since I travelled under any power other than my own.” Dragons, after all, had no need for any method of travel other than their own two wings or the muscled undulations of their bodies, for those who didn’t have wings. Very few ways to travel outpaced them.
Emile had learned, since crossing the Fold, the disadvantages of only two feet for transport.
“Some time,” Sunny repeated, cocking his head. “More questions than answers with you.” But he didn’t seem inclined to ask any of those questions. Instead he slipped one of the metal shards he’d taken from the house into a slot in the car and turned. The vehicle rumbled to life, and Emile grabbed hold of the seat, barely managing not to spring claws to dig into the soft leather as the vehicle began to move backwards.
Chapter 19
AUTOS WERE faster than Emile had anticipated. Much faster. He clutched the armrest of the door with the strength of ten dragons as Sunny spun them around another bend in the loose-gravelled road. Stones spattered up under the vehicle, the small pops and clacks of rocks hitting metal making Emile’s ears twitch.
He gave
his head a shake and focused on the uneasy roil of magic in his gut. The hard metal that surrounded him and the synthetic oiliness of what he now understood to be plastic jarred with his attempts to find a grounding force to steady his magical being.
“Doing okay?” Sunny asked.
Emile swallowed and nodded the lie.
“You look a little pale,” Sunny said. “Should we go back?”
“No!” Emile flashed a wobbly smile. “It’s fine. Just not used to this.” He would have to get used to it. This was his home now, and Sunny wasn’t going to suffer his ignorance forever.
“Sorry.” Sunny shifted, moved the long metal stick between them around, and the vehicle slowed. “Better?”
It was, but at the same time, it wasn’t. Nothing but setting bare feet on raw earth would satisfy Emile’s need to connect the magic to its source. That wouldn’t happen until he was out of this contraption. At least the slower pace eased the liquid defiance in his stomach.
“It’s going to be a long drive at this speed,” Sunny said, setting a palm on Emile’s thigh. He tightened his fingers, and the prick of each fingertip against Emile’s skin where his borrowed shorts left his leg bare sent a tendril of heat winding through him.
His stomach’s disquiet eased. Even the magic wound itself around inside Emile, nesting down into a tight knot in his core, gathering some of the faint strands of energy from Sunny into the tangle.
“Now that is a much better colour.” Sunny patted his cheek and winked. “That paleness wasn’t doing you any favours. Really.” Sunny’s voice dipped to a sand-scratched huskiness. “Much prettier—er—better.”
He jerked his hand away, but Emile caught it before it got far and set it back on his leg. “Please,” he muttered when Sunny shot him a curious glance. “It—” He drew in a breath and let it out, long and centring. “Settles me.”