“We’ll be on alert to make sure we don’t invade your mind,” Elijah promised her.
“Elijah’s actually been doing that already,” Dylan pointed out. “I can hear him specifically not tampering with your emotions.”
“Thank you for that,” Cami said, and if her tone was sharp, Elijah could feel her sincerity.
“I want you to make your choices on this whole thing freely,” Elijah said. “I get that, for our family, it’s a big deal to find you, and it’s really important that we deal with the prophecy, but if you’re coerced into it or tricked into it—more than we’ve already done, I guess—it’s just going to screw things up later on.”
“He’s right,” Alistair said. “It’s harder for me to do it now without you realizing I’m using my ability, but for what it’s worth, I’m not going to try.”
“I won’t enter your dreams unless you reach out for me in them,” Nicholas said.
Cami turned her attention onto Dylan, and Elijah gave his cousin a look; it was not a good time for Dylan to make light of the situation or be sarcastic, but he had to think that his cousin knew that.
“It’s harder for me not to hear you on accident,” Dylan said. “But I will do my best not to listen in, and if I hear something that seems private and you haven’t actually invited me to listen, I’ll go put on music or something to tune you out.”
“Thank you,” Cami said, sitting down at the kitchen table.
Elijah went back to work, checking the temperature on the fry oil, taking the burgers out of the fridge to get them up to temperature for the grill.
“I will say—if you won’t get pissed at me for it—that your sex dream was one of the most inventive ones I’ve encountered,” Nicholas said. “You’ve got a delightfully dirty mind and a voracious appetite.”
“Generally, I wait at least two dates before I let a guy know that about me,” Cami said tartly. Elijah snickered.
“Well, you’ve been here a while,” Dylan pointed out. “It’s got to at least be the equivalent of two dates by now.”
“I haven’t actually gone on any dates with any of you,” Cami countered. “Which does kind of make the idea of choosing any of you to have a baby with a little tough.”
“If you want to have dates with us, we can do that,” Alistair suggested. “After the week is over, at least.”
“Okay, so I’m sensing that you really don’t want me out of the house that much this week,” Cami said after a moment. Elijah looked at Nicholas. She was right, but not for the reasons he thought she probably had.
“We want to spend as much time with you—all four of us—as possible,” Nicholas said.
“We need to tell her,” Alistair interjected.
“Every time I turn around, there’s some other thing you haven’t told me,” Cami said with a sigh. “What is it this time? I’m guessing here: does it have to do with the hasty exit Alistair and I made earlier?”
“It does,” Nicholas admitted. “Representatives of the Elders—powerful, political members of our kind—came to the house on a tip that we were holding a dragon heir hostage.”
“Which you kind of technically were,” Cami pointed out.
“We’re paying you, and you consented,” Dylan countered.
“You also kidnapped me,” Cami said. “Anyway. What would happen if they’d found me?”
Elijah dropped the fries into the oil and activated the timer, turning to face the rest of the group. “We’d be in big trouble,” Elijah said. “And before you think that this is all selfishness on our part, you’d be thrown into the deep end on dragon politics before you can even change.”
“Okay,” Cami said. “So, I’m guessing dragon politics is a little more complicated than DC politics.”
“It’s international, involves complicated familial hierarchies, a ruling group of old dragons, and some judges and other officials,” Alistair said. “I’m the family’s representative to the Elders, and even if we hadn’t kidnapped you, I wouldn’t want you to meet them right away.”
“The short version is that there’s a rival family,” Nicholas said. “The Egans. They’re trying to put an end to our line, however they can do it.”
“And if they knew for sure that we had you, they’d probably demand a tribunal,” Elijah said. “You don’t want to be involved in a dragon tribunal. Especially before you’re activated.”
“And after I’m activated?” Cami looked around the room.
“Even then, they’re not a lot of fun,” Dylan said. “The important thing right now is to get you active. Maybe—if you’re interested—start to teach you how to change. Then we can tell the Elders we found you.”
“And what happens then?” Elijah could feel the curiosity, the concern, rolling off of Cami.
“Then, you’re going to need to be ready to deal with the prophecy,” Alistair replied. “And we’re going to have to be ready to deal with the Egans.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Nicholas
Nicholas woke up out of a fitful sleep and took a moment to orient himself; he had drifted off on the couch in the living room because he slept more lightly there—and if he slept lightly, he wasn’t as likely to accidentally go dream walking. With Cami’s boundaries firmly set, it was better for him to deal with less-than-ideal sleep for a few nights than to risk upsetting her again.
After a moment, he realized what had awakened him: he could hear Cami—her light-footed tread wasn’t like any of his cousins’—coming down the hall in his direction. Things had been awkward over dinner; Nicholas had anticipated Cami’s anger, based on her comments in the dream, but he hadn’t anticipated her embarrassment, her sense of her privacy being violated. I’m an idiot, he thought, sitting up to be ready if she came into the living room. Maybe she just got hungry. Maybe she’s just going to the kitchen for a snack.
“Nicholas? What are you doing?”
Nicholas looked up to see Cami in the doorway to the living room, and for a moment, he had to double-check to make sure he wasn’t dreaming himself: she looked absolutely delectable, her dark hair rumpled from sleep, her pajama bottoms hanging from her hips, an oversized cardigan they’d loaned her the first day of her stay draped around her—but not so heavily draped that he couldn’t tell that she had nothing on under the tight, thin cotton tee shirt she was wearing.
“I was sleeping,” Nicholas replied. “Something wrong?”
Cami looked at her toes, which drew Nicholas’s attention to her barefoot state. God, her feet are so tiny, he thought absently. Her hands are small too. You don’t really notice when she’s moving around, scolding you.
“I don’t know,” Cami admitted finally. “Something weird happened.”
“What happened?” Nicholas shifted over to one side of the couch and gestured for Cami to join him.
She came into the room and paused, looking at the couch more intently. “Wait, you didn’t just fall asleep out here,” she said, gesturing to the pillow and blankets he’d brought to make the couch more comfortable.
“No, I was sleeping out here on purpose,” he agreed.
“To make sure I didn’t escape or something?” Cami asked with an edge in her voice.
Nicholas couldn’t blame her. “No,” he said gently. “I knew that if I slept out here, I would have better control over my abilities. I wouldn’t sleep so deeply, so I wouldn’t even accidentally end up walking in on you, so to speak.”
“Oh,” Cami said. She looked at him for a moment in silence. “Thank you.”
“You can sit down,” Nicholas said, starting to feel amused. “I’m not going to bite you or grope you.”
Cami raised an eyebrow, and for a moment, Nicholas could tell that she was considering a tart rejoinder, but instead she pushed the blankets further to the side and sat down.
“I appreciate you being considerate,” Cami said.
Nicholas snorted. “It just makes good sense to respect the boundaries of someone you want to side with you,” h
e pointed out. “You were right; I shouldn’t have intruded. It was selfish of me.”
“I appreciate the real apology too,” Cami said with a smile.
“So, what’s bothering you?” Nicholas turned to face Cami more fully, putting his entire attention on her.
“It’s hard to explain,” Cami said, frowning slightly. “I was sleeping, obviously. And I guess I must have been dreaming, but I started feelingnon-dream things.”
Nicholas raised an eyebrow at that. “What kind of non-dream things? And how do you know they weren’t part of the dream?”
Cami shrugged. “It felt like my bones were—like—moving around,” Cami said. “Not painful, just really, really weird. And then, I had this feeling like my whole body was on fire; again, not painful, but just this sense that there was crackling, live fire inside of me.”
Nicholas pressed his lips together at the description, trying to think of how to explain to Cami what was happening without the risk of upsetting her or scaring her. Elijah would be able to do it. Dylan might even be better suited to this; he’d just tell her about it, make a joke, get her laughing.
“It’s part of your dragon genetics activating,” Nicholas said slowly. “Your body is starting to change.”
“I guess I kind of figured that would be the answer,” Cami said, her lips twisting into a wry expression somewhere between a smile and a frown. “Did you go through something like that?”
Nicholas shook his head. “All of us have been around dragons our entire lives,” he pointed out. “We were activated when we were born, practically. It’s different for you because you haven’t been in close quarters with any dragons since before you were born.”
“So, I have several more days of this to look forward to?”
Nicholas smiled wryly at Cami’s question. “If it makes you feel better, we would have expected you to hit this point right about at the end of the week,” he said. “Usually, it takes a full week to start activating.”
“So, wait,” Cami said, her expression settling into a more definitive frown. “You were going to activate me and then let me leave without any knowledge of what was going to happen next?”
Nicholas pressed his lips together again. “Our hope was that you’d want to stay longer,” he admitted. “I think we went over that? But we planned—no matter what—to make sure you were prepared for the transition when it came. None of us expected you to hit it so soon.”
“Good to know I’m exceptional, I guess,” Cami said, and Nicholas chuckled.
“It probably should have occurred to us that you would be,” Nicholas admitted. He thought for a moment. “What did you decide to do about your job?”
Cami shrugged. “I told them I had a family emergency, and while I regretted that I couldn’t give notice, I needed to take care of it immediately,” she said. “I mean, it wasn’t even that great a job. I’m not going to miss the work itself. But I had a couple of coworkers who were nice, and I do kind of feel bad that they’re probably going to have to take over my work.”
“If you no-showed, you’d get fired, and they’d have to take it over anyway,” Nicholas pointed out.
“And if I didn’t decide to stay here, I wouldn’t be missing work,” Cami countered. “I keep telling myself that if they could earn a year’s salary or more in a week without really having to do anything, they’d jump at the chance too.”
“They probably would,” Nicholas said. “And now you know that you might be in line to get more than that, much more.”
Even beyond what Alistair had put together about the state of the Keane clan’s finances—money and resources that Cami would essentially be the sole heir to—there would be tributes, gifts, and more from the rest of their kind once she became fully active.
“Yeah,” Cami agreed. “It’s just weird to think of myself as a wealthy person when I’ve never really thought of things that way or even thought of, like, marrying a rich guy.”
Nicholas chuckled. “If you were to choose one of us,” he said, keeping his tone carefully light, “you’d be even more wealthy.”
Cami sighed, rolling her eyes. “Everything comes back to that,” she said.
“I’ll admit, since we’ve been looking for you for a while now, we’ve all developed a kind of one-track mind,” Nicholas said. “And given what you’re set to activate into”
“Yeah, I guess I get it,” Cami acknowledged. “If a Christian man had the chance to get the next Virgin Mary or whatever, it would be the same thing.”
“Fortunately, you don’t have to be a virgin,” Nicholas said playfully. “Equally fortunate, if you don’t want to choose, you don’t have to.”
“I’m curious how you expect that would play out,” Cami said, sitting back slightly among the blankets.
Nicholas took a moment to once more silently appreciate the petite, curvy shape of her body—and privately remember what he had seen of it in her dreams—before he considered her question. “If you decided that you wanted all of us?” Cami nodded. “I’m assuming you don’t mean in terms of sex.”
“I got something of a taste of that already,” she said.
Nicholas chuckled. “On a practical level, the Keane clan—represented by you—would mingle with the Overton clan. You would, of course, retain control of any money and property you inherited; we don’t just hand over our gold, so to speak, when we get married.”
“Very progressive for such an ancient race,” Cami said dryly.
Nicholas smiled. “Thank you,” he said. “In any case, it would be like a marriage, in some respects. In the eyes of our culture, it doesn’t matter if you married one of us or all of us; marriage is about bringing clans together.”
“That’s a very old-school rule,” Cami observed.
Nicholas nodded. “Since you’re the only living heir for the Keane clan, you’d be that clan’s representative to the Elders,” Nicholas said. “But you could lean on Alistair for support in things, and nobody would question it because you’re aligned with our clan. As your clan of alliance, we’d have first call on certain rights and responsibilities, we’d be expected to side with you—and you with us—on any political issues, things like that.”
“I’m not even going to ask about political issues affecting the dragon population,” Cami said, shaking her head.
Nicholas snorted. “We’re an ancient species living in the human world, and most of us are very wealthy,” he said. “The politics get pretty cutthroat and contentious.”
“Yeah, definitely going to put off learning about that as long as possible,” Cami confirmed. “Do all dragons have tattoos like yours?”
Nicholas nodded. “They’re markers identifying us to anyone else in the know, basically,” he said. “Of course, the form the tattoo takes depends on the culture you come from; Asian dragons have different tattoos, African dragons have their own version of the markings, Polynesian, South American—you get the picture.”
“So, I’m guessing that I’m going to need to get a tattoo at some point,” Cami said.
Nicholas shrugged. “No one is going to exactly pressure you into it,” he said. “But it’s a social convention.”
“So, I’m assuming there’s a specific Keane family one?” Cami asked.
Nicholas nodded. “It’s based on alchemy, like ours,” Nicholas said. “It’s a transmutation square, instead of a circle, so it looks like a diamond shape. I can find a picture of it somewhere.”
“Why is it a square?” Cami asked, frowning.
“Your family is pretty important; I think we’ve already gotten that point across to you,” Nicholas explained. He paused. She needs the explanation behind the explanation, he thought. “Dragons from Europe and a few other places use alchemical symbols because humans got alchemy—at least the idea behind it—from us. Dragons learned how to transmute ourselves into humans for our own survival, and we developed the language of alchemy to cover discussions of who we are. It turned into a whole thing, obviously, a
nd human alchemy diverged and then got disproven because, without a certain amount of magic, you can’t transfigure anything.”
“Okay,” Cami said, nodding slowly. “That makes sense, I guess.”
“The Keane clan, being sort of essential to our continued existence, has a four-sided emblem because they—you—represent the fusion of the four classical elements.”
“I would think dragons would be fire and air,” Cami pointed out.
“Asian dragons are typically tied to water,” Nicholas explained. “South American dragons are tied to earth. Not in some like, ‘Asian dragons can manipulate water’ kind of way, just in the language of alchemy. The Keane dragons, since you’re in control of the different secondary abilities and so on, represent that union between all elements. The center of the emblem is the symbol that alchemists used—mistakenly—for the philosopher’s stone.”
“This sounds like Harry Potter stuff,” Cami observed.
“Through a mirror darkly,” Nicholas said lightly. “Humans didn’t really understand what we were passing around; that was the whole point. But to earlier humans, it seemed like arcane, magical stuff. We sort of just let them have it, come up with their own meanings, the same way that we let them come up with their own myths and ideas about dragons.”
“But magic is real,” Cami mused. “At least, certain kinds of magic.”
Nicholas shrugged. “Draconic abilities are real,” he said. “Werewolves, bears, the other shapeshifters—they all have different abilities alongside their shapeshifting too.”
“So, werewolves are real too?” Cami stared at Nicholas in surprise.
“You’re willing to believe in one kind of shapeshifter but not others?” Nicholas asked playfully.
“It just didn’t occur to me,” Cami replied.
“Generally speaking, we’re top of the food chain,” Nicholas said dismissively.
“Well, you’re dragons,” Cami pointed out. “I would sure as hell hope you’re at the top.”
Nicholas chuckled. “Part of our problem over the generations has been that the other types of shapeshifters have grown more numerous; our ability to sort of police things is getting compromised.”
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