“It can’t have escaped your notice that all four of us are interested in you,” Nicholas said. “Part of the prophecy did say that you should be—matched, let’s say—to someone in our family.”
“And this is you putting in your bid?” Nicholas shook his head again.
“This is me telling you that you shouldn’t be surprised that we’re going to keep kissing your ass—metaphorically, at least—the entire week you’re here,” he said. “And that if you were interested in not being single anymore, any one of us would be willing to meet whatever requirements you have for you to choose one of us.”
“So, this whole week is going to basically be an un-televised production of The Bachelorette?” Cami picked up her cup of coffee and sighed.
“Of course, we’re going to be testing and making sure that you have the traits you’re supposed to have,” Nicholas said, raising one shoulder in a half-shrug. “But even without the testing, we’re all pretty sure that you do.”
“What if I don’t want to choose one of you?” Cami asked, sipping her coffee.
Nicholas wondered how it was possible that she managed to do even that in an appealing way. “Do you mean that as in: you decide you don’t want any of us? Or as in: you can’t decide which one of us you want?” Nicholas set his coffee cup down and picked up a piece of bread, slathered richly with fig preserves, that he’d left aside long before Cami had come into the kitchen.
“Either one,” Cami said.
Nicholas smiled. “In the first case, we’ll probably continue working very hard to convince you that one of us should be your partner,” Nicholas said. “Failing that, we’ll probably introduce you to other people in our clan, hoping you’ll choose someone from that group.”
“And in the second case?”
Nicholas took a bite of fresh bread and syrupy fig, letting the question hang in the air for as long as he could. “In the second case, I’m sure we could come to an agreement,” Nicholas said. He watched the color rise up into Cami’s cheeks once more, watched her carefully regain her composure.
“Are you saying you’d all share me, if I couldn’t decide?”
Nicholas could hear the mixture of emotions in her voice: intrigue, faint disturbance, and underneath it, something close to desire. “I told you before, women have power in our society,” Nicholas said. He reminded himself to speak very carefully; there were still things that Cami didn’t know, would need to be told about in steps. “If a woman wants two partners, or five—however many, really—nobody among our kind would raise an objection. Of course, there’s the issue of how kids will be raised, maintaining the secrecy, but we’re already fairly secretive.”
“So basically, if I said tonight that I wanted to have a giant orgy with all four of you, no holds barred, you’d all be on board?”
Nicholas set his bread aside and took another sip of his coffee. “Do you want a giant orgy with all four of us?” he asked, keeping his voice as mild as possible.
“It’s completely hypothetical,” Cami said firmly.
“If you announced over dinner that you wanted all four of us to spend the night in your room, worshipping you like a goddess, until you had so many orgasms you couldn’t feel your legs anymore” Nicholas smiled slowly. “You would have four men very eager to make that happen.”
For a few moments, Cami looked down at her plate, into her coffee cup, and Nicholas watched as she processed what he’d said, her cheeks alternately pink, then pale, then beet-red, then pink once more. He watched her close her eyes and exhale slowly, then open them again and finally summon the courage to look across the table at him.
“Let’s change the subject,” she said.
“Of course,” Nicholas agreed. “What did you want to talk about?”
“The ‘traits’ thing you’ve mentioned,” Cami said. “I already know about Alistair’s hypnosis trick, and obviously, Dylan can summon up fire. You weren’t really clear on whether all of you can do that. Also, what is the trait I’m supposed to have, and what is your trait?”
Nicholas chuckled. “That is, as you said before, kind of a lot,” he said playfully. “We can all summon fire, to varying degrees. We’re also resistant to heat and fire; it kind of follows that if you can make fire in your hand, your skin should be fairly burn-proof.”
“Yeah, I can see where being able to summon fire would have limited use if you got burned every time you did it,” Cami agreed.
“The specific nature of your abilities is something I’d have to show you rather than tell you,” Nicholas said, hedging on that topic. “When it comes to the rest of us, Dylan has a secondary ability of being able to communicate telepathically.”
“What?” Cami’s eyes went wide. “He can read minds?”
Nicholas shook his head. “Only in a very limited sense,” he said. “He can communicate with people. And those he’s close to, he can hear their thoughts to varying degrees, and at various distances.”
“And you?”
Nicholas shrugged. “I can influence people’s dreams,” Nicholas said. “All of the Overton family secondary traits have to do with the mind. Elijah can sense people’s emotions, and to different degrees, he can influence them with his own emotions.”
“Hold on,” Cami said, putting both hands flat on the table. “You can influence people’s dreams?” She raised both eyebrows slowly, her head tilting slightly to the side.
“Oh, yes,” Nicholas said, feeling the smile tug at the corners of his lips. “Does that worry you?”
“It worries me that I could have my dreams invaded, yes,” Cami replied, her voice tart.
Nicholas sat back slightly in his chair, watching her looking at him for a moment. “Does that worry you more than knowing Alistair can make you fall asleep? Or Dylan could read your thoughts as you sit in a room with him? Or Elijah could make you feel a particular way, if he really wanted to?”
Cami’s surprised expression twisted into a scowl. “So basically, you’re all set to manipulate me into doing whatever you want,” she said.
Nicholas shook his head. “We wouldn’t do that,” Nicholas said.
“Oh, really? And how would I know if you were or were not? Alistair did the whammy on me the first night he met me,” Cami pointed out.
“Camille, I want you to listen to me carefully,” Nicholas said. He lowered his voice, letting some of the draconic rasp enter. “You are one of us. You are a member of our kind. You are an extremely special member of our species. We will never do anything to harm you, and in fact, if anyone else ever tries to harm you, we will do whatever we can, up to and including give our lives, to make sure you are safe.”
Cami stared at him in silence for a few moments, and Nicholas wondered if he had overplayed his hand. “Why do you need me to stay here for a week if you’re already convinced that I’m one of you? Is it all about convincing me to pick one of you—or someone in your clan—to get together with?” Cami asked, her voice quiet.
Nicholas pressed his lips together. “Before you can choose, we have to get you ‘up to speed,’ so to speak,” he said. “Being around us, around your own kind, will begin to activate the latent genes your father gave you.”
“And you couldn’t tell me about this from the beginning?” Cami’s scowl came back.
“You were having a hard time even grasping the idea that we weren’t some white supremacist cult,” Nicholas pointed out. “Would you have really gone with the flow on the idea of being around us to activate abilities you’d probably consider magical?”
Cami exhaled sharply and pushed her plate away, sitting back in her chair and looking at Nicholas sullenly. “Just what kind of ‘activating’ are we talking about? And what’s this about ‘species’?”
Nicholas heard movement from upstairs, where his cousins’ rooms were. “The others are waking up,” he told Cami. “I should wait for them to give you the full details.”
“You’ll start telling me about it now, or I’ll get my phone and
leave,” Cami said. “And so help me, if one of you tries to whammy me, I’ll—I’ll figure out some way to make your lives hell.” Nicholas resisted the urge to smile; it wasn’t that he doubted for a second that Cami meant it, but the presence of her, small as she was, and the imperious tone of her voice, stirred even more of his desire to have her all to himself, for at least a few hours—to show her in detail just how willing he was to treat her like a goddess.
“Because you weren’t raised around your father’s kind, and he was never around you, the genes he was able to give you are dormant,” Nicholas explained. “Being around us, even for a week, will be long enough for them to start activating. You’ll begin to change.”
“Change?” Cami’s eyebrows went up again, her eyes widening.
“You aren’t, strictly speaking, human,” Nicholas said. He heard the telltale sounds of Dylan and Elijah and Alistair coming down the stairs, headed for the kitchen.
So, I take it the cat is out of the bag, he heard Dylan’s voice say, in his mind. Nicholas held Cami’s gaze.
“Just what do you mean, I’m not human?”
CHAPTER NINE
Elijah
Before he even reached the kitchen, with Dylan and Alistair maybe two steps behind, Elijah could feel it: a burst of shock, anger, distress, bright as a fog light in his mind. He glanced at Dylan, whose expression was wry.
“Too much, too soon?” Elijah asked. Dylan nodded, and Alistair looked at both of them askance. Elijah shrugged and continued into the kitchen, his two cousins hurrying to get into the room as well.
“You can’t just tell someone they’re not ‘strictly speaking’ human and leave it at that,” Cami said, and Elijah resisted the temptation to snicker.
Dylan had no such scruples. “You saw me create and hold fire in my hands yesterday,” Dylan pointed out, making a beeline for the coffee pot. “It had to occur to you that if you were one of us, you weren’t completely human.” Elijah could feel the tension rolling off of Cami in waves, accompanied by fear, anger, and something akin to disgust.
“Before any of you tries anything on me,” Cami said, looking at the three of them, “I already know your secondary abilities, and I’m going to be especially on alert to anything that even remotely feels like I’m being manipulated.”
Elijah grabbed a chocolate croissant from the big display of baked goods that he was sure Nicholas had been solely responsible for and moved to the table.
“If you’ve already come clean on those things and the fact that supernatural creatures are, well, supernatural,” Dylan said, pausing to grab a few slices of bread on his way to the table, “we probably might as well come fully clean to her.”
“Yes, I would appreciate that,” Cami said dryly.
Elijah sat down, looking from his cousin to Cami as Alistair finished preparing his cup of coffee and Dylan chose a seat on the opposite side of the table, savoring a long sip of his coffee.
“She’s not going to believe it,” Elijah said, meeting Nicholas’s gaze.
Nicholas shrugged. “She believed the fire,” Nicholas pointed out.
“Hard to not believe something you see right in front of you,” Dylan observed.
“So, you’re suggesting one of us shows her?” Elijah took a bite of his croissant and turned his attention onto Cami. He inhaled slowly and opened up his mind more fully to take in the landscape of Cami’s feelings. Her mental state was a roiling storm of different emotions, lighting up and extinguishing in bursts.
“You don’t have to be afraid of us,” Elijah said quietly. “None of us would ever harm you.”
“Didn’t I say something about manipulation? Reading my emotions is manipulation,” Cami said defensively.
“I’m not manipulating,” Elijah protested. “I’m checking in. And I’m telling you that you don’t have anything to be afraid of from us.”
“I just want to hear the full truth, everything I should know about what’s going on: what ‘activating’ me will mean, what species I apparently am—the full rundown,” Cami said.
Elijah looked at Nicholas as Alistair finally joined the table and sat down. “She needs to know all of it,” Elijah said. Nicholas glanced at Dylan, who—in spite of his amused expression—nodded his agreement with Elijah’s assessment.
“Can we get with me knowing all of it already?”
Elijah was careful not to stare at Cami as she spoke. I don’t need the ability to read emotions to know what she’s feeling right now, he thought blandly.
“We, including you, are dragons,” Nicholas said. Cami’s eyes closed for a moment and then opened again, but instead of looking at Nicholas, or any of the other Overton cousins, she stared at the tabletop.
“Dragons,” she said slowly.
“Yes,” Elijah said.
“As in fire-breathing, wings, scales, tail?” Cami glanced at Elijah in disbelief.
“Fire-breathing, wings, tail: yes,” Dylan said. “Not all of us are scaly.”
“I’m noticing a distinct lack of wings or tail,” Cami pointed out, looking around the table.
“Our ancestors, hundreds of years ago, learned how to harness our magic to create human bodies to hide in,” Alistair explained. “We were being hunted, killed. So, our kind took on human forms, and dragons became a myth instead of a fact.”
“I’m sorry, but do you really expect me to believe this?” Cami sat up in the chair and crossed her arms over her chest. “I mean, I’m almost sold on the idea of magic generally, but dragons? In human bodies?”
Seeing is believing, Elijah heard Dylan’s voice in his head say. He smiled involuntarily.
“Here,” he said, finishing off his croissant and pushing his chair back from the table. The kitchen was too small a space to fully transform in, but he could at least show her enough to convince her. Elijah took a slow, deep breath and focused inward. He stretched against the tight muscles in his back and neck and closed his eyes, seeing the other part of himself in his mind. He heard the cracking, the rearranging of bones in his spine and ribs as his human body began to shift, and groaned at the sensation; it wasn’t painful exactly, but unpleasant nonetheless, which was why few dragons shifted between their forms often.
“Careful, Eli,” Nicholas warned.
Elijah turned his head slightly and opened his eyes to give his cousin a warning glance. What he was trying required focus; he had to stop the transformation at exactly the right point, before he lost control over it. Nicholas subsided, and Elijah concentrated entirely on what his body was doing. He called up the wings, feeling them between his shoulder blades, the strength of them. Elijah shuddered as they began to emerge, pushing through his skin, the muscles tightening once more along his spine to support them.
Elijah heard Cami gasp as his wings broke through the fabric of his tee shirt, ripping the material as they opened out. There was just enough room in the kitchen to contain them while the rest of his body remained human, and Elijah groaned with a mixture of pain and relief as he spread them fully. The draconic part of him savored the sensation, singing in his blood, filling him with the impulse to give into the transformation completely. The room is too small. Wait until you can go outside. Elijah took a slow, deep breath and opened his eyes, looking at Cami.
“You wanted wings, right?” he asked, hearing the draconic rasp in his voice. The transformation had gone farther than he had tried for; he could feel the bones in his face starting to shift and change, sharpening. His vision began to alter, taking on the broader color spectrum of dragon-sight. For a few moments, Cami simply stared at him, and Elijah met her gaze steadily, feeling the emotions roll through and out of her as she reacted: fear transitioned into awe, then curiosity. At least there’s no disgust, Elijah thought.
I think she’s a little too stunned to be disgusted, Cuz, Dylan said in his mind.
“You—you can all do this?” Cami looked from Elijah to the other three men, who all nodded.
“Do you mind if I change back? Ho
lding the transformation at this exact spot is hard and kind of tiring,” Elijah said.
“Oh, yeah. Absolutely,” Cami said.
Elijah felt her chagrin. “It’s okay,” he told her, before calling on the reserves of energy it would take to pull the wings back into his human form. He closed his eyes and focused on himself, ignoring the rest of the people in the room. The part of his mind and soul that were dragon rebelled at the way he suppressed them, and Elijah struggled to get the animalistic part of his consciousness under complete control, clenching his hands into fists and bringing all of his will to bear. It only took a few moments, but it felt like an eternity before the dragon inside subsided, the wing muscles in his back fading to normal, and then the wings folding down, pulling back into his human body.
Elijah opened his eyes to find that the conversation had continued while he worked to change back; he could feel Cami’s uncertainty and fear and anger wash through him. The ripped remains of his tee shirt tickled his back, annoying him, and Elijah hauled the material over his head, balling it up and putting it down on the table.
“So, you’re telling me that once I’m‘activated’, I’ll be able to turn into a dragon? Like, a full on, wings-tail-fire-breathing dragon?” Cami said, as Elijah sat down and stole a few slices of bread off of Nicholas’s plate.
“It will take some time, but the genes being activated will start the process,” Alistair explained.
“You have to learn to transform,” Elijah added. “For us, since we were raised as dragons, we started changing when we went into puberty. Much easier, since your bones don’t fully harden until you’re an adult.”
“That sounds like it’s going to be painful,” Cami said, fear of a different kind creeping into her voice and energy.
Elijah gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “The first few times, it probably won’t be all that pleasant,” he said. “But believe me: it’s worth it. Especially when you start flying.”
“I’ll get to fly?”
Dylan snickered. “We probably should have gone with that, rather than focusing on the painful transformation part,” Dylan pointed out.
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