Behind us, I heard squeals. I turned to see shark-wolf bodies being seized and dragged away by others of their brethren.
“I didn’t mean for you to come.” Heat radiated from him as if he were fire turned flesh. He hadn’t been that hot before. But then again, there was no need for him to keep anymore dragon secrets from me.
Except his heat made me all too aware of exactly where he was.
“Well, I’m here,” he said, as the door clicked shut behind him.
I felt my face flush warm as I realized that I was alone in Grandma’s cabin with him, the man who was my betrothed, who I’d almost slept with.
Who was also walking quite naked.
The odd stench of bitterness and oil hit me.
Naked and covered in shark-wolf guts, I reminded myself.
I carefully kept my back to him. “You probably want to rinse off. There’s a shower here,” I said, heading for a small hallway.
“I’d appreciate that,” he said, his voice close behind me.
I opened the linen closet, trying my best to ignore his proximity. “You don’t need to stay. Everyone who has ever tried to protect me has been taken by the Devourer. My extended family. My parents. And now my grandmother.” I finally found what I was looking for; I grabbed the towel from the shelf and closed the door a little too loudly. “There’s no need for you to add yourself to the list. And I have other backup help coming.”
I turned and nearly walked right into him. He grabbed my wrists to keep me from falling, the heat of his hand sending a warm shiver through my skin. “I am the backup help. The agreement is still unbroken. You are still my betrothed.”
Oh. Hunter was the help I was supposed to be waiting for.
He had his hand on the doorknob to the bathroom. Had this hallway always been so small? I shook my head. “You don’t need to play the valiant hero card with me.”
“I’m trying to help you.”
I handed him the rolled-up towel and started to walk away. “Take a shower, I’ll make you some tea, and then we’ll talk.”
A strange thought occurred to me. “Hunter,” I said, turning around and looking him in the face for the first time since he’d entered Grandma’s cabin.
His steady gaze was almost too much for me to take. “Yes, Sophie?”
I couldn’t deny that there was something between us. But even I knew that there were things he wasn’t telling me. “How did you know my grandmother was taken?”
His lips turned up in a tight smile. “That release of power? I think every living dragon and shen on the Eastern Seaboard was aware when she was taken,” he said, before opening the door to the bathroom.
I headed toward the kitchen, clenching my fists.
Every living shen had been aware except for me.
I let water run for a few minutes before filling the electric kettle and switching it on. I wondered what kind of tea he would like. Something bold and spicy, I guessed. I picked a chai, and the scent of cloves and cinnamon filled the space as if they had been freshly harvested. I focused on the act of setting up the teapot with the strainer, pouring the hot water, and setting out the cups on the tray. The simple actions reminded me of her, and even now, it was as if I could hear her beside me saying something like, “It is never not time for tea.”
I splayed my hands on the speckled laminate countertop, imagining I could feel her magic embedded in the surface, as I knew it was.
As always, I could feel nothing.
Hunter came into the kitchen, the pink towel with a smiling cartoon cat in a pink dress with a bow on one ear wrapped around his waist. His hair was wet, and his skin was still damp. I had been trying to make him less fucking sexy, but seeing him with that towel emphasizing that V, that torso, I knew I’d never look at Nihao Cat in the same way again.
“Nihao Cat?” he said with a raised eyebrow.
“What? It’s not manly enough for you? I’ll make sure I have something black with skulls next time.”
“Next time.” From his tone, I wasn’t sure if he was agreeing or speculating.
I poured some tea into a cup and pushed it toward him. “There’s milk and sugar on the tray.”
“I’ll have it black, thank you.”
Of course he would. He leaned against the wall, in the Nihao Cat towel, his folded arms emphasizing his definitely not-ordinary biceps, the teacup almost laughably miniscule in his hands. “You know you can’t stay here.”
I walked past him toward the couch, where I sat and unlocked the trunk. “This is my grandmother’s place. I’m safer here than anywhere else.”
“And when the monster finally kills her, her protections will not just be weakened, but vanish, leaving you vulnerable.”
Tears sprang to my eyes. He thought Grandma was still alive.
I swallowed hard. Of course she was. She had to be.
Hunter must have seen the raw emotion in my face; he poked at something in the air. There was a brief shimmer of magic. “This would not be here if she was not.”
Grandma had made sure that help would come for me.
But what about her? Who was going to help her?
I tightened my grip on the umbrella, and for a moment felt the weight of the vambraces on my forearms. I had on more enchanted objects than a book of fairy tales. But then I thought of the rows and rows of yellow teeth. That wasn’t even the monster itself, but the minions that belonged to it.
I had no power to rescue her, no power to help anyone.
I finally admitted to myself what I had hoped would happen. I thought it would be other Shen, coming to my aide in reconciliation. I clenched my fists. I should have known. Shen protect only themselves. To them, I was no true Shen.
And now I had Hunter, my betrothed dragon, come to save me against helpless odds.
The thought of Hunter being consumed by the Devourer seized something in my chest.
“This place is all I have left of her. I’m staying here.”
Hunter set the teacup down and strode over to me. “I assumed, as the daughter of Yifan and the Maker of Storms, this is something you wouldn’t let go.”
I clenched my fists. “If there was something I could do about it, I would.”
He sat down next to me, the couch creaking under his weight.
“You thought I was playing shen games, but I don’t play those. Unlike my grandmother, I don’t have the capacity to deal with the consequences if I lose.”
Hunter frowned.
“I am my mother and father’s daughter, and I am shen.” I took a deep breath. “But I have no ability to use the power of my heritage.”
This was the sort of thing shen would keep under wraps in making a bargain if they could; Grandma apparently hadn’t disclosed my non-magical status when she’d arranged my betrothal, after all. Giving him, a dragon, this information without expectation of an exchange was reckless, I knew, but I was tired of secrets.
I said, looking at him, “I am shen, but I wield as much magic as a human.”
He looked back with an evaluative gaze.
“An average human,” I said, remembering my witchy roommate Chloe.
“The potential is in her blood,” he said, repeating my grandmother’s words to me. His eyes narrowed. “You commanded your grandmother’s wards. You used a magical sword to slay the Devourer’s minions. You’re wearing what I’m assuming is magical armor. And yet, you claim you cannot use magic.”
“I can drive a car too, but that doesn’t mean I know how it works or how to build one.”
He shook his head, almost as if he didn’t believe me.
I looked him in the eye. “I’m not trying to dissuade you or lie to you—”
He reached for my wrist. Heat emanated from his hand, enveloping my arm in flame. I yanked my arm back, but I was no match for his strength.
Instead of burning my flesh, the fire was hot yet oddly pleasant.
An internal warmth began to kindle within me, responding to his flame. “What are you
doing?” I said, my voice oddly breathy.
Fire danced up my arm, making me feel as if Hunter were caressing my skin, even as my sleeve remained unburned. His eyes were dark, his full lips slightly parted. “Give me your other hand.”
That strange feeling within me was warming and responding, as if it were a different part of me. I would be foolish not to be wary.
I stopped fighting. But I didn’t extend my hand.
“Please,” he said, his voice softer. “I promise I won’t hurt you. I won’t do anything without your consent.”
Dragons rarely asked for things, Grandma had once said. And when they did, it was important to listen. Because it meant that you had something they wanted. And dragons almost always got what they wanted. That was where one had to be wary.
And right now, if he and I were fully human, there would be no doubt in my mind as to what he wanted.
But he was not human, and it would be a mistake for me to think of him that way.
I slowly raised my hand and placed it in his. His fingers closed around mine, and the flames shot up my other arm, completing the connection. I gasped as I fully comprehended for the first time what being a dragon meant.
Power.
7
The intensity of his magic was beyond anything I had ever even imagined. It curled around me, calling to the tiny flame within me. My knees started to feel weak, and Hunter caught me in his strong arms. His fire burned around us, hot and protective.
I kept babbling, kept talking, because I didn’t know what else to do. “Yes it’s in my blood, because I am still shen. But just because you have eyes doesn’t mean you can see. It’s like that. I can’t use the magic.”
By the look in his eyes, my words had no effect on him. “There is magic in you,” said Hunter. “And it will fulfill the bargain that was made, regardless of whether or not you know how to access your power.”
His words reminded me of what he really wanted. Not me. My magic. I said with as much resolution as I could: “I am not marrying you, Hunter.”
His fingers tightened around mine. “Not even if it meant defeating the monster and rescuing your grandmother? I can sense your magic. It’s locked behind a barrier. I can break it.”
I knew what he was getting at. “I’m not letting you seal me to you.”
He looked at me. “What do you know about the sealing process?”
I pulled away from him and rose from the couch. “It’s a magical bond that allows for control over a person being sealed. I don’t care what your intentions are, I’m not going to be anyone’s minion or magical sex puppet.”
He stopped, leaning back on the couch, the corners of his lips turned upward. “Minion? Magical sex puppet? Really? What kind of stories have you shen been telling about us? Do you think we are so like the Devourer?” He shook his head. “Sealing does create a bond between two people. And yes, there are times in which there is one partner more fully in control than the other. But it is, as humans say, a two-way street. And it doesn’t have to be permanent.”
I stopped, sat down in the chair opposite him. This was a much better place, away from him, away from his touch. I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose. Grandma had said she had sent failed champions against the Devourer, hoping that “it wouldn’t come to this,” a marriage with a dragon. As a child, how many times had I heard the story of her flight with me, her certainty that she and I were going to die, and the desperate call for help, answered by the most unlikely of allies?
Why had I never even asked her what the bargain was that she had struck with the dragons in exchange for helping us to get to America?
Stupid stupid stupid me.
I should have known better.
I opened my eyes, to see Hunter, leaned back on the couch, arms open and resting on the back of the couch, regarding me thoughtfully. Shen and dragon had been at odds since their arrival on Earth. In some respects, shen knew as much about dragons, as humans knew of the true nature of shen.
Including the exact nature of what a dragon seal was.
I took a deep breath. “You can’t expect me to agree to anything without telling me more about what sealing is.”
His smile didn’t miss a beat. “I would be able to access your magic, and you mine,”
I put my hand to cover my face as I paced. Maybe this was her way of trying to give me a chance to be more shen than I was—giving me a chance to access magic in a different form.
“But now that you have been truthful with me, I will be with you as well. I want you to seal yourself to me because I need your power to destroy the Devourer.”
“My ‘power’?” I let out a harsh laugh. “There are so many things wrong with your assumptions.” I faced him. “First of all, you know your own history, right? The Devourer destroyed your world, your civilization, your armies. How are you going to kill this thing when it turned dragons into refugees?”
There was a grimness and carefully caged fury in his expression that reminded me of a predator, furious at his prey’s escape. “The Devourer here on Earth is incomplete. It’s only a piece of what it was, and it’s been weakened in coming here, cut off from its masters in a place, in a time, it doesn’t belong. Earth is our home now. It’s my home, and I intend to rid my territory of the threat it poses before it’s able to contact the rest of itself.”
There. There was that famous territorial dragon instinct.
Wait a minute. Incomplete? The rest of itself? “Are you saying there’s more than one Devourer?”
He blinked. “Yes and no. It makes copies of itself and alters its copies for specific purposes. It’s possible to kill pieces of the Devourer. We’ve been doing just that for the last few years.”
The words he spoke implied something I’d never believed could be true. “Wait. Are you saying you’ve gone up against the Devourer and won?”
“Pieces of it. Small pieces.”
So it was possible. I quashed that moment of brightness. “I don’t understand why you think you need me.”
“Because we are about to go up against the Mother of Teeth, the largest and oldest portions of the Devourer, the one that followed my people through the gates so many years ago.”
The same piece that had followed the dragons and killed my parents and countless other shen.
“You’re still not answering my question,” I said, picking up an orange quilted throw pillow and squeezing it.
“Because the Devourer learns from its past battles and opponents. But in all this time, the Devourer has never faced dragon and Shen magic working together in a common cause to defeat it. Only separately.”
I shook my head. “It’s still a suicide mission.”
“Perhaps,” he said, looking away.
And I realized he had always known it. He had already long committed himself to this course of action, well before I had ever crossed paths with him.
When I was young, I’d met a distant aunt who had once been famous for stealing young, handsome warriors and keeping them under her spell until all they’d known had turned to dust. When I’d asked her why she’d done such things, she had said, “To prevent them from throwing their lives away in meaningless deaths.”
In that moment, I understood Great Aunt Titania.
His hand closed on mine once more. Searing heat blasted me, forcing me to open my eyes.
Magical flames surrounded us. There was an odd warmth within me, one mingled with desire. I realized it wasn’t wholly desire but something else. Something that had been missing within me my entire life.
His fingers tightened. “You are magic, and even if you don’t know how to use it, I do.”
I blinked.
“Help me. I would protect you. I would treat you as an equal partner.”
The potential is in your blood.
I broke free. The flames around us died and dwindled to nothing. The fire, the heat within me that I had felt while connected to him, was gone as if it were never there, replaced by an
all too familiar feeling of anger and self-loathing.
“You say sealing is not slavery. Then tell me what it is. And why I should believe you.”
And then I saw my childhood drawing that Grandma had framed.
“It’s a bond of magical access.” I heard his voice, so close behind me. He said nothing else.
“That’s all. Isn’t there more to it than that?”
“It’s always different, depending on who is involved. No two seals are ever alike, just as no two people are ever alike. Help me and we may have a chance to help your grandmother.”
How selfish was I? What kind of shen was I? He was offering a chance to defeat the monster that had killed my family.
“Do you really think my grandmother is alive?”
“If her protections are still here, then yes.”
“She designed this place to withstand magical attacks, even after her death.”
“The Devourer has spent years building creatures designed to break this place. Even now, it waits and watches.”
This was how the Devourer always got what it wanted. Denied its goal, it would plan and bide its time, studying, designing, and building constructs designed to overcome what had stopped it.
“Do you truly think you can kill the Devourer?”
He leaned back on the couch, sprawling. I’d never thought of the couch as being small, but he definitely made it seem so. “I have before. But not against a piece so centralized. The Devourer has never faced an alliance of dragon and shen magic. With your help, we have a chance.”
Here was a man, a dragon, who had accomplished what I thought was impossible.
There was only one thing I could say. But before I agreed to anything, I had to negotiate.
“What about being married to you allows you to tap my magic? Could you do it with just sex, without marriage?” Even as I said it, I could feel my face grow warm.
Hunter’s expression was oddly evaluative and otherwise unreadable. “Are you offering yourself to me? Outside of the bonds marriage?”
“Bonds of marriage,” I repeated with a forced levity. “What century are you from? Didn’t we just almost have sex like…yesterday?” It seemed like a lifetime ago.
Betrothed to the Dragon Page 5