Touched by A Dragon: The Exalted Dragons (Book 2)

by K. T. Stryker

  The door opened and Peter stepped into the room. Ashe quickly straightened herself up in her chair and tried to control the nervous butterflies in her stomach. She should have known, after Peter’s conversation with the professor, that he would be the one assigned as her tutor. Though she had been daydreaming of running into him again, she had not anticipated being brought together like this. It was too sudden.

  “You said I was supposed to meet you about a job,” Peter said. “If you’re busy with another student I can come back later.” His hand was already on the doorknob and he looked ready to leave.

  The professor waved him inside. “Yes, I have a job for you. Miss Linfield here is in need of a tutor.”

  “I can’t,” Peter said quickly. Ashe almost breathed a sigh of relief, but she didn’t know why. She couldn’t decide how she felt about him.

  Professor Sharp’s face turned stern. “You may have just transferred here, but you’re the only student who knows the syllabus for my European mythology class. Miss Linfield has only a couple of semesters to graduate and if she can’t make it her four years here will have gone to waste.”

  Peter’s brow furrowed as he considered the professor’s words. “Okay, I’ll do it.”

  “Good, good.” Professor Sharp said with a satisfied smile. He reached into the drawer of his desk and took out a stack of old books. He slid the stack across the desk to Peter. “In case you need your own copy for reference, though from our talks I have a feeling you’ve got these all memorized by heart.”

  Peter gave only the hint of a smile at the professor’s compliment. His eyebrows were still furrowed in concern. Ashe wanted to apologize for being an inconvenience to him, if that was the case, but her throat felt dry and she had no words to say. Peter took the books from the desk and tucked them under his arm.

  “Do you have class now?” Peter asked Ashe, the first words he had directed towards her since walking in. They held none of the gentle warmth of yesterday’s introduction.

  Ashe shook her head. “Not until evening.”

  “Then let’s go.” Peter nodded at her to follow him out of the office.

  Ashe couldn’t help but notice the satisfied smile on the professor’s face as she left.

  Peter walked briskly through the hallway and Ashe struggled to keep up. “You think you could slow down?” she said to his back.

  “From what the professor told me, you’ve got a lot to catch up on,” he replied. Ashe didn’t like his tone. It was cold, almost condescending.

  “Hey,” she said. “If this is about yesterday, I’m sorry. I was shaken up by the accident and I’m not good at getting along with people anyway. But I’m not as bad a student as the professor made me out to be. I’ll be fine on my own.”

  “Let’s humor the professor for a little while, at least. Might be that your grades go up after all.”

  Ashe couldn’t stand the way he was talking to her. She wanted to prove him wrong about her, but knew that her bluff would be called as soon as they started studying. She was way behind on her readings and needed time to cram before their first tutoring session. That way she could show him up and prove that she didn’t need his help after all.

  “If you still want to get that coffee, I’d be glad to go with you,” she said, hoping to distract him from getting any actual studying done.

  Peter stopped and turned, his pale face locked between a frown and a smile. He brushed the hair back from his forehead. “First let’s get your grades back up, okay? Then we’ll talk about coffee.”

  He had stopped right in front of an alcove in the hallway containing a low table and several armchairs. Peter gestured for Ashe to sit and took the chair across from hers. He tossed his books onto the table. They fell into a jumbled mess and Ashe felt sick just looking at all of the unread pages. She had not done an ounce of work in two months.

  Peter leaned forward in his chair, his elbows resting on his knees. The sleeves of his button-down were rolled midway and Ashe could see the thick veins of his forearms pulsing blood from his muscles. His skin was so pale that she could even make out the blue hue of the oxygen-deprived blood.

  “Your problem isn’t these books,” Peter said. “The professor said you’re a literature major. You like to read.”

  Ashe had been hoping Peter was maybe going to hang around while she caught up on her reading and look over her essays before they were due, but apparently he was taking things very seriously. Though he couldn’t have been any older than Ashe, there was something about him that seemed old, like he understood far more of life than Ashe could ever hope to.

  Ashe sighed. “It’s just that the professor wants us to talk about these myths like they’re a part of history, like they’re real. I don’t mean what you were saying about vampires being real flesh and blood, but he wants us to think that people actually believed in this stuff back in the day. But it’s all so ridiculous. Even in the Middle Ages, people must have had better sense than that. At least in my literature classes everyone knows the stuff we’re reading is fiction.”

  Peter smiled. It was a knowing smile that Ashe didn’t like. She felt silly for opening her mouth and saying the truth. He probably thought she was an idiot.

  “You have a point,” Peter replied.

  “Then why are you smiling like that?” Ashe didn’t want to start a fight, but she felt the anger bubbling up inside of her nevertheless.

  Peter leaned back in his chair, clasping his hands behind his head. “You seem so sure none of this is real, but how can you be? Does the fact that you’ve never seen something mean it doesn’t exist?”

  “Well, no, but—” Ashe started. She didn’t know why she was even arguing with him about this. It had nothing to do with getting her grades up. All she wanted was enough motivation to study for the stupid class.

  “At least you can accept that a lot of these myths have origins in the truth,” Peter said. He grabbed a book up off the table and flipped through the pages. “See, this woodcut print from the fifteenth century for example.”

  The print showed a man in robes feasting beside a mass of bodies impaled on wooden spikes. The image made Ashe look away.

  “Vlad the Impaler was a real prince who was imprisoned for his cruelty. Of course; now people associate him with the origins of Dracula, but even when he was alive, people were publishing stories about him, some more verifiable than others. A real person, turned into myth. And he’s not the only one.”

  As Peter spoke, his eyes lit with a passion that seemed to make the dark circles under his eyes fade away. It was clear he enjoyed the subject, and Ashe found herself getting swept up as well. Maybe by studying harder, Ashe could get closer to Peter and find out what made him tick.

  Peter tossed the book down. “Think you can give it a try?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Ashe shrugged with an indifferent look. She didn’t want to seem too eager.

  A melancholy piano melody drifted through the maze-like corridor containing practice rooms on the first floor of the music building. Peter peered into one room after another, startling a cello player in the midst of a solo and an oboist who nearly dropped her instrument. Peter stuttered out apologies each time, growing less and less confident about finding Ashe. She had messaged him telling him to meet her in the music building, but Peter didn’t even know what instrument she played and so couldn’t locate her by sound.

  The tutoring lessons had been going well so far. Ashe was starting to pick up the motivation she sorely needed and though she seemed to resent Peter’s very presence, she was at least listening to his instruction. Her combative, indifferent nature did little to help Peter fight his attraction for her, however. If anything, it made him all the more curious about what was really inside. He sensed a lot of pain and distrust in her heart, and his own caring nature yearned to heal her. But the predatory side of him knew it was only a matter of time before he did something irreversible that would shatter her life into a million bleeding pieces. He had to keep a lid on h
is attraction.

  After exhausting every practice room, even the ones with no light on inside, Peter still hadn’t found Ashe. The haunting piano music continued. It drew Peter up a flight of stairs and into the performance hall above. Sitting at the sleek black grand piano on stage was Ashe, her fingers picking out the melody that sounded all at once archaic and achingly familiar. Her auburn hair was brushed back over one shoulder and the overhead stage lights illuminated the soft contours of her face. Peter held his breath, worried that even the slightest sound from him would break the beauty of the scene.

  Ashe suddenly banged hard on the keys and groaned. She snatched up the sheet music from the stand on the piano and squinted at the yellowing pages. She took a pencil from the stand and scribbled something onto the page, muttering to herself under her breath as she did so. After putting the sheet music back down, she resumed playing, though her fingers were more hesitant and the melody was halting and piecemeal.

  Peter came up behind her on the stage as she continued to struggle with the music. He could see that the last few bars on the second page were practically unreadable due to the sheer age of the paper they were printed on. Ashe had tried to fill in the missing notes on her own, her pencil renderings a hasty scrawl that was almost as hard to read as the original faded notes.

  He put a gentle hand on her shoulder and the music stopped. The feeling of her warm shoulder under his fingers sent chills up his arm. He shouldn’t have touched her, but he couldn’t help it. The temptation had been too strong.

  Ashe looked up at him as though she had been caught doing something wrong. She snatched the sheet music from the piano and hastily got up from the bench.

  “What time is it?” Ashe asked.

  “Three-thirty. You said to meet you here.”

  Ashe held the sheet music behind her back. Peter couldn’t help commenting on it. “Is it for a class?” He gestured at the papers.

  “No,” Ashe shook her head. “I found them upstairs. But the melody’s incomplete. I doubt anyone’s looked at them in ages.”

  So Ashe liked classical music. He was slowly piecing together an image of her and the more he found out the more he liked.

  “So are we going to study, or are you just going to smile at me all afternoon?” Ashe said.

  Peter coughed nervously, embarrassed that his emotion had shown on his face like that. He didn’t want Ashe getting any ideas that he was interested in her. He knew he wouldn’t be able to hold back if she started to reciprocate his hidden feelings for her.

  “I’m sorry, I just… I didn’t know you played the piano. It’s nice.”

  The corner of Ashe’s mouth curled up just enough to reveal a small dimple in her cheek. It was the closest thing to a smile she had given him since they met. He added dimples to the list of things he knew about her. He wished he could see her laugh.

  “Come on,” Ashe said, leaning down to pick up her backpack from the stage floor. “There’s a place nearby we can study. I finished my essay a day early so you can look it over. I don’t think the professor’s going to like it very much, but I’ll get better by the end of the semester.”

  Ashe led Peter out of the performance hall and into a large storage room across the way. It was stacked high with boxes of what looked like junk to Peter. A strong musty smell pervaded the room, reminding Peter of his family’s new house. It was a good thing his lungs did not require air and he could hold his breath indefinitely.

  A metal-runged ladder was set into the far wall. Ashe took hold of the rungs and hoisted herself up. Peter wondered where she could possibly be taking him. She had said she wanted to study, not take a dive off the rooftop. He hesitated to follow her.

  “You coming?” Ashe called down from above. She had just pushed open the trapdoor leading to the roof.

  Peter looked up and immediately regretted it. Ashe’s black jeans were skin-tight and from his perspective below he could see the perfect shape of her backside. He gulped and averted his eyes.

  “Yeah, I’m right behind you,” he said, though he waited until Ashe was over the lip of the doorway before following her up. He didn’t want the view of her distracting him.

  The rooftop was a wide, flat expanse of concrete looking out over the campus. Across the quad Peter could see the bell tower of the cathedral. The sight of it made him sick and he turned away.

  Ashe was already sitting near the edge of the rooftop. There was a stack of books by her side and her coat lay discarded a little ways off.

  “What, do you live here or something?” Peter joked trying to get another smile out of her.

  Ashe rolled her eyes. “It’s quiet up here. My house isn’t.”

  Peter settled down onto the concrete near her and crossed his legs in front of him. He was glad it was an overcast day because the exposure on the rooftop would have given him no place to hide from the sun. He pushed his dark bangs down over his brow, just in case.

  “You don’t live in the dorms either?” he asked.

  Ashe shook her head. “Couldn’t afford it. I have to live with my mom.”

  “Me too,” Peter said. “My whole family. Since I transferred late, there was no room for me in the dorms until next year.”

  “You’re a junior, then,” Ashe replied. “You’re younger than me but I’m the one getting tutored. Professor Sharp can be a real ass sometimes.”

  Peter didn’t know why Ashe was always so hard on herself. She clearly had a lot going for herself, but her lack of confidence was holding her back. Peter scooted a little closer.

  “I tend to move around a lot. That’s the only reason I’m still a junior. Not all the credits transfer between schools. I’ve probably taken twice as many classes as you by now. It’s an unfair advantage, really.”

  “How old are you?”

  Peter paused. Lies didn’t come easily to him, even small ones. He preferred avoiding the subject altogether. He knew his lies were to protect others, but it felt slimy to him to take advantage of someone’s good faith. Lying came easily to people like Landon.

  “How old do I look?” Peter finally replied.

  Ashe studied his face critically. “Twenty-two, twenty-three? But you seem old, like my grandfather.”

  Peter exaggerated a frown. “Thanks,” he replied sarcastically.

  “It was a compliment,” Ashe said quietly, looking down at the book in her lap. Peter realized she really meant it. She was probably trying to say that he seemed mature for his age; someone who seemed to have the wisdom from life experience that young people tended to lack. If only Ashe knew the real story, Peter thought.

  “Hey,” Peter said. “I’m sorry. I was just joking with you. I took no offense, honest.”

  Ashe turned the page in her book, though Peter knew she wasn’t actually reading. “It’s fine. I already know I’m terrible at talking to people. I don’t know why you’re even trying to get along with me. Professor Sharp never said we had to be friends.”

  Before Peter could even think to restrain himself, he reached out and cupped his hand to her cheek, drawing her gaze up into his. He could feel her pain through her words and wanted to make it go away. He leaned in to kiss her, watching her eyes close just before he closed his own. The scent of her blood was strong, even through her skin. Peter felt intoxicated with the idea of it being so close to his lips.

  There was a bang and a shout and Ashe reeled back from Peter’s touch. Peter whipped around to see the angry face of one of the music professors glaring at them from the entrance to the rooftop.

  “Who gave you permission to be up here?” the professor shouted.

  Ashe started gathering up her things as Peter stood.

  The professor hoisted his thick middle over the lip of the doorway and stood panting with his hands on his hips. His maroon sweater had snagged somewhere along the way to the rooftop and a jagged tear had opened up exposing the white shirt underneath. His face was beet-red with fury.

  “No students allowed on the roof!”
he shouted.

  The professor looked ready to wring Peter’s neck, but Peter wasn’t worried about getting in trouble. He figured someone this angry with a couple of students on the roof was also the one in charge of the building’s keys. If the two of them got in trouble for trespassing, the professor in the maroon sweater would also have to take responsibility. The biggest inconvenience was having his kiss interrupted, though that may have been for the best. Peter didn’t know if he could have resisted biting her lip hard enough to draw blood.

  Peter shrugged apologetically. “The door was unlocked. Whose fault was that?”

  “Just go back downstairs,” the professor spat, pointing a thick finger down the ladder. He looked about ready to have a heart attack. He watched the two through beady eyes as they left the roof. He closed the door after them and locked it with a thick padlock.

  “No more going where you don’t belong,” the professor warned with a waggle of his finger before turning to leave.

  Peter smiled at Ashe. “Do you think we should tell him his sweater’s got a hole in it?” he asked loudly enough for the professor to hear.

  To Peter’s surprise, Ashe smiled back. It was a full smile this time, the expression lighting up her face like a spotlight on stage. Peter felt weak in the knees. It was getting harder and harder to keep his urges under control. Even worse, he felt a strong thirst for warm blood.

  CHAPTER 3

  The day was blustery and bleak, the late November sky threatening to let loose a torrent of rain. Ashe tucked the ends of her striped scarf into her coat to keep them from flying wildly in the wind. She was on her way home from a stressful day of classes and wanted nothing more than a hot cup of tea and a bath, if her mom allowed it. The insufferable woman didn’t seem to realize that her drawn-out showers used much more hot water than it took to fill the bathtub.

  A young man nodded at Ashe as she turned onto the street that marked the edge of campus. He wore a sweater and slim jeans and his sleek black hair was combed straight back. Ashe didn’t know him, though she thought she had seen him around campus a few times. She assumed he was just giving her a friendly greeting as a fellow student of the college. She didn’t bother to nod back, instead turning the volume on her headphones even louder. The sudden crashing cymbals of the Tchaikovsky symphony she was listening to made her ears ring, but at least it was enough to distract her from her surroundings. Maybe Peter wasn’t so bad, but Ashe was not about to start making friends all over campus, as much as Professor Sharp may have wanted her to.