Dragon Cipher

by Kendal Davis

  And now, only now, I realized the conundrum I’d placed myself in. I was excited beyond reason to be taking Laurel back to my own place. She was the only woman I had ever wanted to invite into my life.

  Yet that was just it. I never opened up to anybody. My private space was my own.

  It was a self-administered exile. I kept myself from my people because I had killed so many. Now, after all this time, there was somebody I wanted to be with.

  Had the world changed enough? Had I?

  Could I even be trusted with her?

  Chapter 5: Laurel

  Sometimes I forgot how draining it was to work so powerful a spell. I’d noticed Safyr’s surprise that I could wield magic like that. He was wondering, I could tell, how I was able to do it. What was my secret to harnessing the power that no other peasant could even call into them? Why me, and not somebody else?

  I had no idea.

  My power was something that had always been a part of me. But I should have remembered that it made me feel like I’d been run over by a cart in the market square once I let all that fire leave me. I was as limp as yesterday’s herbs.

  At the same time, though, I felt a new energy brewing within me at the thought of going back to Safyr’s apartment with him. I followed him down a hallway into his private elevator, then felt unexpectedly shy once we were inside it together.

  He turned to me with a brusque reassurance. “We’ll be there in just a moment. I can see that you are in shock.”

  “No, I’m fine,” I murmured. As I uttered the words, though, I felt the cool wall of the elevator against my arm. I was slumping, leaning without even knowing it.

  Safyr’s hand steadied me at my elbow. “Let’s get you inside here, so you can sit down and rest.”

  When the elevator doors opened, a beautiful, yet sparsely decorated living room lay in front of us. Everything about the apartment was light and clean, but without personal touches. The elevator decanted us directly into the room. I could imagine Safyr coming here late at night after finishing club business. He would, no doubt, do exactly as he was doing right now.

  “First, a drink,” he said. He guided me to a leather sofa, then left me there while he stepped into the kitchen. He came back in only a moment with a bottle of wine and two glasses.

  I nodded. “Yes, please,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve eaten much all day, though, so it will go to my head.”

  “That’s fine,” he answered. “I’ll order some food down from the club as well. They send me almost all my meals; nobody will notice. But you need to sit still. What you did back there was ill-advised from every perspective there is.” He spoke politely, but there was an undercurrent of anger in his voice that startled me.

  “Did you bring me here just to scold me?” I grumbled. He didn’t answer. Instead, he poured me a glass of wine and passed it to me. He had taken a seat across from me, so that our bodies did not touch at all. I’d thought that was his preference, given the way he had recoiled from me on the dance floor upstairs.

  However, I gasped when his fingers brushed mine, passing me a wine glass. I felt the same zing of energy as I had upstairs. It was uncanny. Nobody else had ever had that effect on me. It certainly wasn’t that he was so handsome, or that I was alone in his apartment with him. There was no way that those things would be a turn-on for me, not with one of his kind.

  He was a dragon, and I hated all dragons. Enough said.

  But the tingling in my hand refused to go away. That small patch of my skin, where he’d touched me, was shouting at my brain that something important was happening. And it was sending tugs of awareness throughout other parts of my flesh as well.

  I suppressed a little shudder, trying to wake myself up. Maybe I could shake some sense into myself. Some reminder of who I was, and what I was supposed to be doing here.

  Safyr’s sharp eyes took in my response to his touch. Something became reticent in his eyes, but he covered it up with the easy charm that I now understood was his response to any unexpected moment. “I can see that you aren’t sure if you should feel comfortable here. I assure you that there is nothing to fear. I would never harm you in any way.”

  “No,” I answered haltingly. “I don’t think you would. But some of the other dragons upstairs...well, I think they had other plans.”

  “Yes.” His response was clipped. “I will need to look into that. Our plan of inviting human women into the club as guests has not been without its pitfalls. Some of the dragons are not as respectful of our guests as they ought to be.”

  I moved my head from side to side. “I don’t think they saw me as a human from this world. They knew I was a peasant from Elter. That’s what they wanted to punish me for. I don’t think there will ever be peace for my kind from you dragons.” I felt a pang of regret at lumping him in with all the dragons I hated, but it left me quickly. He was one of them. It was best to keep that in my mind.

  “We have political problems here as well as there.” He shrugged. “That is no great surprise.”

  I frowned at him. “Is that all you think this is? Some minor detail of politics that you can brush off, so you can go back to your lifestyle of partying all the time? You think you can solve everything with late nights of drinking and dancing?”

  He looked away from me. His blue eyes focused on the dark night sky outside the wide windows that made up one wall of the room. “If that is what you want to believe about me, then fine. I have nothing to prove.”

  “Huh.” For some reason, his answer made me smile. All at once, I longed to capture his attention again, to make him look at me and really see me for who I was. “That’s the opposite of me, I guess. I have everything to prove. That’s why I’m here.”

  The corners of his mouth softened into a smile, but he did not turn back to me. “Yes. I can see that you are full of hopes and dreams for the freedom of your people. It is an admirable plan.”

  “But?” My response sounded snottier than I’d meant it to. “You don’t believe in it?”

  “You know the history as well as I do. Dragons from each House are bound to certain traits of personality. Because they cannot experience a full range of emotions, they must borrow from humans to create magic.”

  I felt the blood rush into my cheeks. “It is not borrowing! It destroys us.” I drew a long breath. Maybe he didn’t know how bad it was there these days. “Besides, I am working with the dragons of House Caeruleus to find new ways to build their magic, without using the emotions of peasants.”

  Safyr sighed, rising to his feet. “Laurel, you just don’t know what you are getting into, that’s all. Dragon business is more complicated than you know. It isn’t enough just to say that you want dragons to leave your peasant town alone. Who will care for the needs of the peasants once they have achieved their full freedom?”

  “Do you think I haven’t considered that?” I almost rose from my seat as well, anger filling me, but I found that I did not have the strength. “My plan is to cultivate sufficient magic among the peasants that we can always live independently of dragons. It will work, I know it.”

  “You are a dreamer.” He finally looked at me again. He flexed his hands at his sides, as if he wanted badly to hold onto something that he could not grasp. “I know this, because I was once the same way.”

  “I find that hard to believe,” I retorted. “You don’t appear to have anything on your mind beyond serving drinks and introducing people to each other.”

  “Do you think that is a small thing?” He grinned. “Can you imagine how hard it is to keep a group of red dragons from ruining all the furniture with their dirty shoes and picking the best shrimp out of every canapé tray?”

  “How dire,” I said dryly. But I smiled back at him.

  “No, there’s more to my story than that.” He remained standing. His expression became thoughtful, as if he were sorting through long-forgotten memories. “A long time ago, I was as young and idealistic as you. I wanted to fight for equality, f
or the rights of all.”

  “Was that a very long time ago?” I said doubtfully. Seriously, you could never tell with dragons.

  His gaze grew fierce as he met my eyes. “Yes. You have no idea.” Then he whirled from me without another word.

  As he disappeared down a hallway, he called out behind him. “I will bring you a blanket so you can warm up and rest for a while.” I heard the sound of a closet opening as he gathered a few things to carry back to me.

  In the moments before he returned, I wondered if I should make a run for it. I could probably sneak out, if I could get the elevator to respond quickly enough when I pressed the button. But what purpose would that serve? I was still here, on this stupid, cursed visit from my own dimension. I was still staying with friends who were dragons, in a building filled to the brim with...more dragons.

  It was starting to seem like the worst idea ever.

  What kind of hubris had led me to this visit? It was more than I could handle. Maybe it was time to let myself accept the truth of that.

  Instead of dashing out of the apartment, I took a moment to look around a little better. Perhaps I could see what Safyr was like in his private life. It would give me clues.

  Not just clues about what this sexy shifter man was like, no, that wasn’t what I needed to know. I was here to conduct research about all dragons. Important, life-changing, revolutionary research.

  I definitely wasn’t wondering what this gorgeous, brooding man was all about. And I most certainly wasn’t snooping to try to find out if there was a woman already in his life.

  The living room was disappointingly blank. The walls were a pale ivory. The furniture was all dark leather. The rugs were perfectly arranged, as if a decorator had come and done the entire thing without a word of input from Safyr. That was surely what had happened. It would have been a breathtakingly expensive decorator; even I, coming from another world, could see that.

  But no personal touches showed anywhere. No photos, no coat draped across a chair, no book laid down on the end table. This so-called private space was a blank slate, impenetrable in every way.

  Except for one thing. Above a small mahogany desk, I spotted a gleaming piece of art. It looked like a solid gold tablet of some kind. It hung on the wall like a painting, but it was nothing at all like any of the fine, yet nondescript art pieces that I saw on the other walls.

  This was the single thing in the room that looked as if it meant something to Safyr. I rose shakily from my seat on the couch, checking over my shoulder as I walked. He would be back soon. I wasn’t going to disturb anything, but I still felt wary of the appearance of snooping.

  When I reached the gold tablet that hung on the white wall, I reached forward and traced the cool metal lightly with one finger tip. There were designs stamped all along the surface of the piece. It looked like language, perhaps, but it was nothing I had ever studied. Yet at the same time, I was certain that it was from our home world of Elter.

  What was it?

  The glimmering gold had felt chilled when I first touched it, but when I ran my finger along it a second time, it was warm. Hot, even. I actually thought I saw a red glow beginning to develop. No, I shook my head. That was crazy.

  “You’re right,” Safyr spoke behind me, making me jump. His voice sounded louder than it was in the still room. “It is a magical device. That’s what you were wondering?”

  “But I’ve never seen anything like it.” I clutched my almost-burned fingers in my other hand, as if I could keep him from knowing that I’d touched it.

  “No, they are not made anymore,” he said. “It is very old.”

  As he did not seem angry with me, I mustered all the bravery I could and touched it one more time. I used the tip of my finger to lightly trace one of the hieroglyphs. I sent him a quick glance, to see if he would tell me to stop. Would he be stern and tell me to leave?

  What I saw in his face was nothing like that.

  As I touched the burnished gold, Safyr took a step back, almost stumbling. His breath caught in his throat and he gave a low moan. It couldn’t be, but it sounded like pleasure.

  “Don’t...I can’t stand it. It feels too good.” For the first time since we’d met, he looked directly at me, with a true, honest gaze. The look in his eyes was pure passion. He wanted me. More than that, I knew with certainty that he loved me with all his being.

  I drew my hand back as if I’d made contact with a lava flow. What? None of that made any sense. “What is this thing?” I squeaked out my question, still staring at him. The gleam of desire that had filled his eyes was still there. If anything, it was glowing brighter the longer he looked at me.

  “This golden tablet is the place where a piece of my soul has resided for a million years,” he answered simply. “It is a charm of the most elemental kind. I agreed to place part of my own essence within it, as a form of punishment.”

  He sent me a look that carried so much heat in it that I momentarily lost my ability to breathe.

  “Now, with your touch, everything has changed. I am ready to be free of this imprisonment. And I will claim you as my mate.”

  Chapter 6: Safyr

  A cocktail of excitement, desire, and self-loathing roiled within me. Was this what I had intended when I brought Laurel here? I could not have meant for such a thing to happen, yet it was obvious now that it was destined to occur.

  If I had not asked her to come to my home to rest, then she would never have seen the ancient golden tablet. Or if I had been more sensible and kept it out of sight in a different room. So many things might have happened that would have led us to go our separate ways after tonight.

  But it had not gone down like that.

  Now, from this moment on, we were bound together forever.

  There was just the small detail of needing to explain to her that she was my eternal, fated mate. And, of course, who and what I was.

  Something as sharp as the glass from the old volcanoes of my world pierced my heart. I could never, not in a million more years, admit to this fresh, honorable young woman what world wrecking I had been capable of, so long ago.

  She had been standing there, watching me, as if she was not sure whether I was joking. Did she not see that this was all deathly serious?

  Laurel tossed her head with an attempt at breeziness. “Safyr, you certainly sound dramatic, but it can’t be all that. Yes, I can tell that this is a magic device, but the things you just said are impossible.”

  “Which, do you think?” I was genuinely curious.

  “Ok, maybe all of them. There’s no magic strong enough to hold a part of somebody’s soul in any kind of imprisonment like that. And there’s nothing that old still in existence from our world. Elter’s history is long, but there are no artifacts remaining from the Age of Chaos.”

  Her insistence on focusing on the facts of the matter made me smile. “So your concern is about the archaeology of all this? Whatever just happened between us was not important to you?” I knew I sounded husky still. My nerve endings were all on fire from her touch. “Because I can tell you that the most crucial part of my world right now is my desire for you.”

  “Ah.” She was momentarily at a loss for words. “I don’t know what to say. I cannot be your mate. Of course not. You’re a dragon.” A faint pink showed on her cheeks. “Obviously. What I mean is that even if there was, maybe, a spark of some kind between us, that we could never act on it.”

  “I could.” My answer came in a low growl.

  “Well I would not,” she said firmly. “You seem like a nice guy. I appreciate that you saved me from the red dragons at the club. But none of this could ever work for me.” She spoke firmly, but her eyes were still wide. Her confusion was not all a result of the facts of the story, as she was trying to suggest. I knew she had felt the spark between us.

  “I am definitely not a nice guy.” My grimace was intended in fun, but I could see that it made her uncomfortable. That just proved my point.

&nbs
p; “You know what I mean. Not a dangerous dragon.”

  I actually laughed out loud at that. Even I could hear the tinge of despair in my bark of mirth, however. I could never even begin to tell her how dangerous I had been. And still was.

  Laurel gathered her composure, assuming an air of professional interest in the magical artifact. She ran her eyes over it, but conspicuously did not touch it again. On the contrary, her hands remained at her sides. The tension in her body suggested that she would rather run from the room before she touched the smooth gold again.

  “Why do you even have this in your living room? That’s so weird. It is priceless beyond words, isn’t it? And if it is what you say it is, then it must feel very private to you.”

  “Oh, it is. Both real, and more private than you could possibly know.” Her questioning look made me realize that I didn’t have a good answer to her question. “I have always kept it in my living space,” I went on, lamely. “Nobody ever comes here, so it is still for my eyes only. And it is important to keep it in sight, as a constant reminder to me of who I am.”

  “I don’t have the faintest idea of who you are,” she retorted. “But if you do, then I’m glad about that.” She still stood awkwardly against the wall, as if she was afraid to move toward either me or the tablet. “And I don’t think anybody else does, either. Not even the dragons who think you are their friend. Am I right?”

  “Of course,” I said. “My life has been a closely guarded secret for longer than you can imagine.” Finally, I could not stand watching her discomfort any longer. I had to try something, anything, to put her at ease.

  “Come back and sit down, Laurel. Have your wine and allow yourself to rest.” I stepped backward, away from the desk so she would not feel trapped.

  She continued to look at the golden tablet, however, without moving away from it. “I can see that it is ancient. I have spent my whole life studying Elterian artifacts and magical items. This is...well, stunning.”