by Ophelia Bell
The itch to find his legacy had seeped into Geva’s blood since arriving here, and now replaced the languid buzz from the sex. As always, Erika seemed attuned to his mood and gently nudged Benjamin awake. He blinked sleepily and nodded, rising.
“This is as far as I go with you two,” Benjamin said. He gestured to a nondescript door nearby. “The loo is through there. The staircase will take you down to the lower dungeon.” He let out an involuntary snicker.
Geva raised a brow. Benjamin responded with a twitch of his shoulder. “His Lordship joked about sending your mother down to the dungeon on occasion. I always pictured leather contraptions bolted to the walls and torture devices, but was never allowed inside. Not once in thirty-five years.”
Erika cocked her head while fastening the buttons of her dress. “How old are you, Ben?”
He looked abashed and stammered for a second. He glanced between both Geva and Erika. “Ah, right, you would know about the Lord and Lady’s unique status. I took over as their body man for my mum after she passed, when I was twenty-five. That was thirty-five years ago.”
Without missing a beat, Erika said, “Well, I look forward to a long relationship. You are always welcome.” She bent over to pull on her shoes, giving both men a generous eyeful of cleavage.
Geva was grateful for Erika’s noncommittal reaction, and how deftly she managed to distract Benjamin from his embarrassment. Benjamin headed back up after explaining he would meet them in the upper tower that evening. After he departed, they headed down to the lower vault.
Like the rest of the manor Geva had seen, the lower dungeon was different from what he remembered. The walls were more polished, with electric lights at intervals. It wasn’t the dank, dreary dungeon he used to hide in as a child. Yet another secure door blocked their path at the bottom of the spiral staircase, this one with familiar old runes carved in the stone in the spot where the other doors had held an electronic lock.
“What does it say?” Erika asked, brushing her finger over the worn, recessed figures.
“Take a breath,” he said with a smile. “Something Mother used to say to me when I threw tantrums as a dragonling.”
“You mean to tell me you weren’t a perfectly behaved little angel as a child?” She batted her eyelashes at him innocently
“Dragons rarely change their colors,” he replied, with an impish smile.
He instinctively felt for the well of fresh energy from their lovemaking session above, and breathed a cloud of red smoke into the door latch. The door opened inward without a touch. Bright lights came on, illuminating sealed glass cases that displayed his family’s most valuable artifacts. Objects that had not seen un-mated human eyes for centuries and more. The walls of the room were all polished granite, the floors the same, buffed to a high shine with not a single speck of dust present. It had to have been magically sealed since his mother’s death to have remained so clean inside.
A beep and a whir sounded from the far end of the room. Geva strode with Erika by his side to an alcove amid the cases, within which rested an object similar to the modern gadgets Erika had introduced him to.
“It’s an IBM,” Erika said in amazement. “An older model. I wish Corey were here, but maybe we can make some sense of it without him. It has to be nearly thirty years old… almost before my time.”
Geva blinked at the string of characters that flashed green across the dark screen. He smiled. “Mother’s color,” he said.
Erika glanced at him and shook her head. “Most of these things came in green back then,” she said. “Green or gold on black. Sometimes white or even blue. This is all gibberish, though.”
Geva nudged her aside. “It’s perfectly legible. Mother always insisted on having the most modern contraptions. You would have loved her.”
“What does it say?”
“Dragon secrets,” he said with a smirk, earning him an elbow to the ribs. “It’s mostly a recounting of their lives since my hibernation. This isn’t the only vault of treasures, just the most valuable ones.” He rested his finger on one of the keys and the text began to flow slowly up the screen. The flow of words paused when he lifted his finger off the button. “Here she talks about a Benjamin—brilliant inventor—she says. Do you think she means our Benjamin?”
Erika gave him a quizzical look. “It sounded like our Ben was born in fifty-five—definitely proof that humans age well around you guys. Does she give a timeline?”
“Hmm, met in seventeen fifty-three. I guess that was a few years early.”
“Geva, that’s about two centuries too early. She’s talking about Benjamin Franklin. You have a lot of reading to do on the last five centuries, sweetie.”
He laughed, but resolved to spend some more time hunting for collections of the videos and books she had shown him so far to catch up on all he’d missed. At least he’d focus on the things his parents had lived through so he would have some frame of reference.
He kept skimming, pausing every few lines to read off a name for Erika. Each one impressed him more than the last. He paused and swallowed harshly at the emotions that welled up. Partly lingering sadness at not being able to introduce his mother to the amazing woman who stood at his side, and partly profound irritation that every generation still had to follow the Council’s ridiculous laws of hibernation.
“What is it?” Erika asked, tracing gentle fingertips through the hair at his temple.
He shook his head, blinking back tears and clearing his throat.
She moved closer and urged his arm around her, embracing him and resting her cheek against his chest. He lowered his nose to the top of her head and took a deep breath, letting the scent of her ease his brief anguish.
“My father would have loved you,” Erika whispered in the middle of his silence. “I miss him so much now. I’d never be able to keep you a secret from him, either, I don’t care if we would’ve broken laws to tell him.”
Geva kissed the top of her head and moved on, scrolling further. Judging by the date at the top of each entry he was close to reaching the current year. Only a few decades to go.
A few lines made him stop abruptly and backtrack. His stomach clenched at what he’d read. He scrolled forward quickly to the very end of the entries, then back again. He pushed Erika gently away so he could look more closely.
“Sweet Mother,” he whispered, and began reading out loud to Erika.
“Your father brought a new friend to the Manor tonight. Or, rather, a very, very old friend. I had not seen Warik since my youth in Greenland where we were raised together as dragonlings. After all the centuries he has never mated. Eternally alone, he promised he would stay after we parted, but as the Queen my responsibilities were to the Brood. I had to take a human mate. I pray that will change in your time. I love your father, but would have chosen differently had I had the option. In a perfect world perhaps I could have even had them both.
“Your father is thick as thieves with Warik, even after a few days and knowing my history with him. Your father was never a jealous man, which is an excellent quality in a mate. We have enjoyed the centuries largely in each other’s exclusive company, except for the occasional diversion—Benjamin being the latest. Do take good care of Benjamin, he is dear to us.”
“Wow,” Erika breathed when Geva paused.
His mind reeled at what he’d already read. He had to have her hear it all before he would believe it, however.
“Can you re-read his name?” Erika asked.
Geva did, pronouncing all five syllables for her, rather than the shortened version as he’d read it. Aiwarikar. He watched her brow crease the way it always did when she was reaching back into the wellspring of history she kept locked away in her mind. “Is it familiar to you? I suppose it does sound like your own name a bit. Erika.”
“Yes, but I don’t think it’s important to the story. Just an interesting tidbit, considering the timing. He was pretty damn famous figure if he is who I believe.”
“She
skips ahead several years here,” he said, and continued reading. Erika’s fingernails began to dig into his arm before he was finished.
“I am the example held up by the Council for the rest of the Brood to follow. I have failed in my duty but do not regret it. Warik and Bertram are beside me in this as well. When the child—your half-sister—is born, Warik and I have resolved to spend our last remaining power to bind her magic, then hide her from the Council. If they find her and take her, they will execute us and she will be forced to live as an Unbound. We will not relegate her to slavery. It is near time for the Awakening, but there is no more time for us. Please, my dearest son, find your sister and help her learn her heritage. Keep her safe and perhaps appeal to the Council to change their laws. Warik and I had no blood relations in common, and we will give her every last drop of our love and passion upon her birth. It will be with your father’s last breath that he sees her safe somewhere far from here, where the Council will not look. He hasn’t told me where that will be, but the Verdanith can find her. Just find a way to make the Council let you use it without betraying your sister’s existence. We mean to name her Rowan, a name that is as much a human name as it represents her dragon legacy, and that is all that I can tell you.”
“Is that the end?”
“She says she loves me and to never compromise destiny for someone else’s rules.”
Geva’s head spun. He looked around the room but there was nowhere to sit. Then he remembered one of the last things he had read. He rushed to the glass cases, frantically looking for it.
“Tell me what it is, I can help,” Erika said.
Geva shot the words over his shoulder. “The Verdanith, it’s a wedge-shaped piece of a disc carved from jade, about the size of my hand. Green like those characters on the screen.”
“Here!” Erika tapped at the latch of a case near the center of the room. “What is it?”
“My sister’s salvation.”
Chapter 4
The two of them spent the afternoon moving out of the hotel and into the living quarters at the Manor, which had taken a single trip considering the sparse belongings they carried with them.
In spite of her nomadic tendencies, Erika wasn’t a stranger to living rich like this—she’d grown up wealthy, after all—but after roughing it in the field for her studies and then work her entire adult life, it felt indulgent to be immersed in the luxury of royalty. After six months of living like an academic, with late nights in labs and hotel rooms—a situation Erika was accustomed to—this situation was suddenly very domestic and took a lot of getting used to.
Settling into a shared domicile that wasn’t temporary felt odd. Deciding on a bathroom. Deciding on shared closet space. Not that Geva had that much in the way of clothing aside from the single suit they’d bought for him the week before, and the odd necessities. It helped that it was all as foreign to him as it was to her, at least, in spite of it being his family home.
He’d developed a rather odd attachment to Erika’s bath products over the last six months. To the point she had to scramble to order more. She’d been relieved to discover the obscure organic-only company was still in business. Then winced at their increased prices. But how do you keep a dragon happy? Especially if he wants expensive bath products.
It was both irritating and comforting. She didn’t have an issue finding him bath products, and she loved his presence, particularly how eager he was to tell her everything he knew about the era he’d lived in. She’d really have loved to chat with his mother, though. The woman who’d actually lived through the last five hundred years.
For the first few months since she’d found Geva, she and her team had lost sleep finalizing their paper, then published to outstanding response. It had earned them lucrative grants and a brief moment in the academic limelight. In the past they would have been reeling from the attention, but in light of their fresh secrets the entire team was ready to slink back into the shadows and enjoy their true accomplishment out of the public eye.
She and the others had had to drastically alter their paper before publishing, but the Queen had allowed the collection of a handful of priceless objects to be taken and displayed.
Now she and Geva sat at their dinner table, basking in the moonlight that came through the tall window of the Manor’s East Tower and the flickering candlelight that Ben had provided. The flames of the candles were nothing compared to the object that captured their attention now that they were done eating.
Erika stared at the carved jade fragment they’d brought up from the vault earlier. There was something incredibly familiar about it, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. She’d seen so many jade dragon artifacts over the six months since their expedition, they all bled together.
This particular object resembled the other artifacts in some way, yet there was something different about it. When she touched it, she felt a pulse of power, the same as she’d felt at each of the doors she’d touched within the Temple—particularly the one that led her to Geva.
The slab of green jade sparkled in the center of the table now, monolithic in its significance in spite of its wedge shape only being half the size of a dinner plate. Erika chewed on her lower lip. Geva kept pulling at the cowlick on the side of his forehead where his right horn normally appeared when he was half-shifted during sex.
“We need to call the Queen,” he said.
By his inflection she took his meaning: She needed to call Corey. His reluctance to show his face to the Queen was almost comical considering how imposing a man he was in general. Yet there was no denying the Queen’s distrust of him, even after her show of support. Erika wondered if it was due to his lineage or for some other reason. She definitely didn’t believe Geva’s assertion that it was because he’d acted out when he was younger.
“And what would you like me to tell Corey?”
Geva glared at her for a second, then sighed. “The entire Court has to agree to the assembly of the Verdanith for it to happen.”
“So, why won’t you ask?”
“It’s a matter of propriety. No one ever wants to be the first to ask. It makes us seem desperate. It’s just…customary for things to happen this way.”
“Well, you need to get over your adherence to custom.”
“It’s not that easy. The Council is very strict where custom is concerned. If we don’t observe the required process, we could fail.”
“So, I’ll just call the others and ask…” She paused when he began shaking his head. “What?”
“They won’t say anything. It’s like a contest. You have no idea how competitive we are, do you?”
“But they’re my friends!”
“What your friends believe will have no effect. What the other members of the Court believe will, and we are far from united, in the Queen’s eyes. But if we can win over the Queen, we will have a true advantage.”
Erika found that hard to believe, considering how tight-knit she was with her team, but then she hadn’t spent much time with the other members of the Dragon Court since they’d left the Temple.
“And we can’t outright say we need it to help find your sister, either. So what’s our alternative?”
His jaw clenched and he gave her a sidelong look before averting his eyes. “We have to convince her we want it to assist in conceiving. That’s the reason everyone else will likely use. Once the Queen hears from all of us—sees we are united—she will take the request to the Council.”
She was about to ask how the hell it could help with that, but held her tongue. If it could help them locate Geva’s sister, she shouldn’t be surprised.
“So, what works? What did your ancestors do to convince the Council?”
“They’ve never said yes.”
Erika couldn’t quite believe what she was about to suggest. “What if we steal the pieces? Wait, don’t answer that, it’s a dumb idea. We’d completely compromise your sister if we did that.”
“It’s also impossible. You sa
w the security to get into our vault. The others would have similar measures in place. The Queen might not report us over it, but the Council would definitely know who’d stolen it. It’s really a simple request. We will sacrifice rank by making the request prematurely, but the others will follow suit quickly.”
“So, we convince the Queen we want to have a baby. I’m a pretty decent actress when I want to be.” Even though it would be a blatant lie, she’d compromised her principles for less. “Besides, it’s Corey we’ll be talking to. I’ve known him for years, he’s got a huge soft spot for me.”
Geva looked more optimistic at that. “Alright. Shall I join you for the picture palaver?”
Erika stood up and bent to kiss him. “Video conference,” she corrected, pulling back and squeezing his cheeks between the thumb and fingers of one hand until his lips scrunched together. “Yes, I think it would be a good show of intent if you were with me, don’t you? Corey likes you.”
Geva’s eyelids lowered just slightly and his expression grew thoughtful, a look Erika had grown accustomed to over the past few months, and it made her grow a little warm between the thighs every time. She resisted the temptation to climb onto his lap and take advantage of his infinite libido. It was a particular challenge tonight, too. Ever since their tryst with Benjamin that morning, she’d been aware of a subtle shift in the dynamic between Geva and herself. As if they were even more attuned to each other’s emotions. He’d been agitated to distraction about the bomb his mother’s journals had dropped, but rather than withdraw from her, he’d been more amorous to the point of desperation, like he was driven by raw need for her Nirvana.
“Come on. The sooner we get this done, the sooner we can find your sister.”
Erika retreated to the ornate bathroom attached to what Ben had informed her were her ‘quarters,’ though she and Geva had decided to share the smaller, more intimate bedroom on the opposite side of the floor. She wasn’t oblivious to Geva’s wistful glance when she nudged him toward the other bathroom, giving the excuse of not wanting any distractions because they were on a timetable.