by Aiden Bates
“Four hours,” he pressed.
“Yeah, Rez, I know,” I breathed. “I forgot to set a timer. It’s no big deal. Next time I will, it’ll be a few days.” I hoped, anyway. For years I’d been careful about my time. Was I somehow more enthralled now? Would I find that the window had shrunk even smaller?
“I’m just looking out for you,” he said softly, then glanced in Amy’s direction furtively before he reached for my hand.
I let him take it. It wasn’t like Amy didn’t know. And not like we were about to screw in front of her. Again.
“I know,” I said, trying to smooth out my annoyance. If I hadn’t been so irritated with myself, I probably wouldn’t have been so touchy toward him. I tried to smile, but knew he wasn’t fooled. “It’s good. I’m okay. And I might get some time off.”
“No divine whispers or revelations?” he wondered.
I shrugged at that. “I mean… it is just the first day. Maybe that’s like a… day forty thing, or something.”
He grimaced. “Let’s hope not. But if that’s what it takes…” he smiled up at me. “I’ve been smelling something upwind. Gamey. Something up in the hills, maybe. We could make it out here for a while the old-fashioned way.”
Honestly, there was something very attractive about that. Not that I didn’t want to learn to have some control over my magic but… looking around, there was very little out here that would catch fire and burn. No one to put in danger, no buildings to hollow out because I got a little anxious.
And with Rez out here with me… we could make love on the hard earth, go as wild as we wanted. I could burn bright without worrying. Burn with him.
“I’m mostly kidding,” he assured me, as if the look on my face made him worried that I was against the idea. “But if we’re out here a while, I just mean—we won’t starve. And, hey—I can even cook your food for you. If you don’t mind it char-grilled.”
“I don’t,” I said. I dipped in to give him a quick kiss, then jerked my head toward the dummy tent. “I’m gonna go sort this out.”
“Don’t you need your… uh, magic chalk or something?” he asked. “Do we need to make you more?”
I shook my head. “Not out here. That’s for places where there isn’t a natural current of magic. The ground here is pretty hard, I’ll just carve it out with a rock and that’ll do fine. The way they did it in the old days.”
“Oh, yeah?” he wondered.
I blinked. “Yeah,” I muttered, and stepped back. “I better get started.”
I smiled stiffly, turned away, and went to the tent to find a patch of flat ground and a rock with an edge to start working with, my heart thudding.
Because, I knew that this was how this magic was used, eons ago. I just wasn’t quite sure how I knew that.
What the hell was the book doing to me now?
21
Rez
It took a while for Daniel to finish setting up the trap. More than an hour, as he crawled around the earth on his hands and knees, scratching out this and that symbol on the hard dirt. I checked on him once, and he didn’t seem to like me interrupting his concentration, so I backed off, and focused instead on making us lunch.
And by ‘us,’ I mean all three of us. Amy was content to sun herself, her shirt tied up to expose her midriff. She really didn’t look over fifty years old. “Sure you don’t have some fae in your family tree or something?” I asked.
Amy only shrugged. “Who knows. I know a few of them. They think everyone has a little if you go back far enough. Claim they were around before us, before djinn—even before your folk.”
For all anyone knew, that was true. Then again, djinn claimed to be as old as time. And dragon history went a long, long way back. Well before humans started writing things down. I’d never met one of the fae before. We weren’t far from where they tended to congregate, though. Since the enlightenment, a lot of them had moved west to California, where they could be on screen, or into the northeast to New York, where they could be on stage. Once in a while you found one on a stripper pole, so I’d been told, or in a brothel. “What are they like?” I asked.
“The fae?” Amy wondered, craning her head and shielding her eyes from the sun to peer at me.
I nodded.
She lay back down, shrugged. “Oh, you know. Painfully beautiful. Aloof. Smarter than you, faster than you, more clever, better in bed. Just generally, overall, better than the rest of us. At least, they seem to think so. And they’re not shy about letting you know it.”
“They sound delightful,” I muttered.
“Oh, they are,” she breathed. “Endlessly entertaining, always have the best parties. Plus, Fairy-Dust will knock your socks off. And your pants. And your shirt, and everything else.”
I grunted at that. A lot of shifters enjoyed the stuff. We had a metabolism that could handle it. Not that I’d tried, of course. Nor had anyone in the weyr. Humans, though—it was bad news for them. For a while, the government had pushed to make it illegal, but that was shot down in the US Supreme Court on the basis that it was of significance to the native culture of the fae. They’d been using it for millennia to lure humans into their odd little half-realms in the woods or underground.
Amy sounded like she might have some experience with that.
“All set,” Daniel said as he returned to us, dusting his hands. He looked them over, grimaced, and examined a nail. “Using rocks is bullshit.”
I reached up for it, saw where he’d cracked a nail down the side to expose a bit of the bed underneath. I winced for him, and grabbed the canteen, and poured a little water on it. “There’s a first aid kid in the tent,” I said as he scrubbed his hands a bit. I stood to get it.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Just a little scrape. It’s fine, Rez.”
I ignored him and went to fetch it, and came back with the little box. “Sit,” I ordered, and he grudgingly obeyed so I could spray the minor wound with the antibacterial, then wipe it down and wrap it in one of the small Band-Aids inside. When I was finished, I kissed the tip of his finger and gave it back to him. “There you go. All better.”
Although his jaw was a little tense, he rolled his eyes and allowed a small smile. “Mm,” he said, and lowered his voice almost to a whisper, “much better. Thanks. Daddy.”
It made my heart beat harder, faster. And now I couldn’t stand up when he rose and went to Amy, glancing over his shoulder at me with a coy look that made me kind of wish Amy would just go home.
“I’m ready if you are,” he told her.
She seemed disappointed, but she sat up from her sleeping bag and pulled her boots on. “Come, padawan,” she said, patting him on the back. “Much to teach you, I have.”
“You could at least do the voice,” I called.
She shot me the bird, and the two of them wandered off into the desert.
Which left me with… not a lot to do.
I finished lunch, cleaned out the coals from the camp grill, packaged up their food for when they were finished and ate mine. The sky was broad, blue, and clear.
It’s not that there’s a lot to do at the weyr, but at least back home there was internet, television, video games, the privacy of a home to jerk off in, and most of the time ample partners who are more than happy to help a buddy out. Not to mention being Nix’s right hand, of course—not the way I had been when we were younger, now that he had a mate, obviously, but in the more political way. There was always something that needed building, or repairing, or sorting out.
The desert, by contrast, was fucking boring. Pretty, yes. But that didn’t entertain for very long.
About a half hour into Amy and Daniel’s training session—which so far consisted of them standing in the desert while Amy talked at him—I wished that I was tired enough to take a nap, but I wasn’t. And I was still on edge, hyper-vigilant about being in the open even if we were more likely to get an attack in the night.
So, I did what Basri often did when he was bored. I patrolled. Not on foot
, though.
In the weyr, and in populated places, it was always kind of a chore to make a full shift. A twenty-five-foot dragon just didn’t fit anywhere, even in communities that we built for ourselves. There was a park, of course, especially for younger dragons that couldn’t quite control just how big they got. I rarely had the opportunity to really let my dragon loose. But while the desert may be boring, it is very large.
I gave Daniel and Amy a reassuring hrack as they noticed me, and took a running leap to catch the air, then beat my wings hard as I climbed the air to find the sweet spot above us where cool, low pressure air from the upper atmosphere met the hot, baked air from below, and skated the border between them in a long, wide arc. Up here, the wind was different. It carried different scents and from different directions. An electric tang was a thunderstorm far off to the east where we’d come from. Air from above pushed down, heady with ionization where the sun had recently pounded down on it. Wisps of smoke that had been diluted over hundreds of miles caught my attention from wildfires burning far to the south, probably already put out by whatever cabal was local.
It felt good to stretch my wings and soar. And it gave me time to think, and commune with my dragon.
We weren’t separate, really, but there were times that it felt like it had its own mind and needs that tangled up with my own. Never out of my control, but also never entirely in my control. It was some kind of deep symbiosis, and if there was some explanation for it, that was long, long lost to time. Certainly, each time I turned my eye down toward Daniel, I felt it stirring.
It liked him. Which made sense. I liked him.
But my dragon really liked him. Shifted like this, the sensation was much stronger than I had let it get before. My dragon saw him, and considered that he might make a good mate.
Which of course was what I was thinking, too. Except, the human part of me knew to think about things like circumstances, and complications, and practicality. And, you know, consent.
Way, way back in the mists of time, dragons hadn’t shifted. No one really knows how we got where we are now, but deep down a dragon is still a dragon. And mine really didn’t care about nonsense like outside circumstances. All it knew was “pick mate, claim mate, keep mate safe”. Clever animals, dragons; cunning predators. But not nuanced. And consent was a recent invention as far as that primal part of my brain was concerned—one that didn’t make sense after about a million years of swooping down from on high and giving the mating bite as proof that a dragon was a competent predator.
I tore my gaze away, but was never entirely unaware of Daniel’s location with the wide peripheral vision my dragon eyes afforded. I was patrolling. Not fantasizing. Though, the thought of being with Daniel again, of biting down on that tender shoulder, of hearing him cry out as I claimed him…
I felt the cold wind sliding over my cock, and banked to get more altitude. If there’s one thing I did not want Amy, especially, to see, it was me soaring through the air with my dick flapping in the wind.
It was a relief to take the time to indulge my wings, feel the air under them, and listen to the wind over my scales. But that was just about shattered when a flash of light caught my eye, and I looked down in a panic at the same moment my body twisted into a sharp descent, to see a desert blossom of yellow and orange where Daniel and Amy were.
With an anxious cry that I couldn’t contain, I dove, banked, twisted, and landed nearby with a crash as I took off toward them at a sprint, my wings tucked tight against my back.
Before I reached them, the fire dissipated. Amy stood some distance away, a cloud of steam evaporating around her as she held her hands up. She wasn’t a pile of ash, at least.
Daniel almost was. His clothes were in tatters, blackened and hanging from his shoulders and waist. His skin was free of burns, of course, though there were smudges of black where the cotton had burned and marked him with ash.
I shifted down to my half-form, keeping my profile to Amy for her own sake. “What happened?”
Daniel stared at his hands, then at me, a wild smile coming over his face. “I… I did it.”
Dorsal spines that were still out clicked at the back of my neck as I cocked my head to the side. “You… controlled it?”
He laughed, and shook his head quickly. “I wouldn’t say that, no,” he said. “More like… I rubbed two sticks together successfully. Holy… I mean, it was amazing. I’ve never felt my magic like that… it just… it…”
“Flowed,” Amy said as she approached us. She looked me over once, disinterested, and smiled at Daniel. “That’s good. If you know what it feels like to make it happen, that’s one step away from keeping it from happening when you don’t want it to. Let’s go again.”
“He should eat,” I told her. “And rest. It takes a lot out of him.”
Amy shrugged, looked to Daniel.
Daniel did look a bit worn, as if it had been an effort. But he shot me a shy, apologetic glance. “Uh… maybe just one more time. I need to practice.”
I sighed. “All right. But—you’re gonna be standing out here naked after the next one.”
He looked down, and only then seemed to realize. “Oh. Uh… I’m going to have to pick up some fireproof clothing one of these days, I guess.”
“We’ll work on it,” Amy said. “In the meantime—nothing I haven’t seen before. In case you both forgot.”
I had certainly tried.
Daniel bit his lip, chuckled, and seemed to shake something off as he planted his feet. “Okay. Walk me through it again.”
I took a step back as his attention clearly narrowed to the task at hand.
My dragon didn’t like that one bit.
Shut up, I told it, which… yeah, I know. I couldn’t blame it for everything.
Still… Daniel was making all the necessary steps toward being able to take care of himself. And that made me worry, just a little, as selfish as it was… that when he could, he just wouldn’t need me.
And if he didn’t… would he stick around?
22
Daniel
Every day, Amy made me work. Every day, it got a little easier, and a little harder. People say that you’ve only got so much emotional energy. I had understood that before—feel too much for too long and you just empty out, and can’t feel anything.
But that’s just when things are overwhelming. When you’ve got too much happening, and it comes at you too fast, and you shut down. This was different.
Every night, I fell into the tent. Rez helped me strip down—after I managed to at least control where the fire came from when it did. The first couple of nights, he snuggled up, and I wanted to get excited and get hard, and mess around even if we had to be quiet. But the energy just wasn’t there.
“Sorry,” I said, the second time I couldn’t muster.
I half expected him to go cool on me, withdraw a little. Now that I wasn’t the helpless, horny, rarely touched stray that he’d rescued.
He didn’t, though. That was almost worse. The pressure seemed to be growing, and when I ran out of fear and anger during my sessions with Amy, I had to burn something else. Because that was the key. I had to burn something to make the fire come when I wanted it.
She seemed intent on making me burn everything. By the fifth day, after four sleepless nights that Rez spent awake, sniffing, listening, and I spent worrying that the moment I fell asleep was when the djinn would come for us, I didn’t have much left.
“Dig deeper,” she ordered. “You’re holding back. You have to learn to burn everything, kid. What have you got left? Close your eyes. Tell me what you’re feeling. Every emotion—don’t care what it is, I’ve heard them all.”
I was on the ground, on my knees, breathing hard. I’d managed to summon up my frustration this time around. At being out here, in fact, and at the way she pushed and pushed like there was no time. Which there wasn’t—and that became fuel, too.
My chest ached. The ground around me was scorched. Some of it
was just black. Some was actually shiny, where sand and grit had fused to a chunky, uneven glass.
Rez had taken to patrolling the skies every day. I looked up, searched the sky for him. It was blue up there, but he was just slightly darker along his belly, and I spotted him drifting in a wide circle, so far away but, the way he explained it, nevertheless able to see the expression on my face with the sharp eyes of an ancient predator of the skies.
Amy glanced over her shoulder, looked around, spotted him. “Huh.”
“What?” I asked, weary of hearing her make that sound. Every time she did, she dug something new out of me.
“Let me tell you something, kid,” she said, approaching me to squat down nearby and pluck at a hunk of fire-blackened glass. “You know why I push you to feel every emotion, and burn every one of them?”
“Because any emotion I can’t burn is one I can’t control,” I muttered, repeating back the words she’d told me dozens of times by now.
“You want a cracker for that?” she asked.
My brow pinched. “What?”
She sighed. “It’s a parrot joke, sugar. Good gods, you’re mostly empty. But you've got something left. Something you’ve been resisting. You can’t. There can’t be a blind spot, Daniel, you get me? Especially that one.”
“Just say what you mean,” I groaned, and shifted sideways to sit and pull a knee up to my chest. “I don’t have the... I don’t even know. I’m exhausted.”
Amy glanced back at the sky, where the dark blue sliver that Rez was had banked, and started to swing back around. She jerked a thumb at him. “Tell me your dragon fella is just an easy hookup,” she said. “If it’s true.”
“Of course he isn’t,” I muttered. “But it’s not... it’s not what you think, either.”
She peered at me for a long moment, then snorted. “I can’t tell if you’re worried that burning it means it’ll be gone, or if you’re afraid that it’s there to burn in the first place. You’re in love. Has doing all this erased your fear? Your anger? Your anxiety?”