by Chant, Zoe
There was a lake ... there ...
He lost the ability to fly in midair. His wings gave out and he plummeted into dark water. It closed over his head, and he went down, down. The water was deep and cold, flooding his jaws, freezing his body.
It was the cold, he later thought, combined with near-lethal-but-not-quite levels of the drug, that must have helped him survive. Dragons in their shifted form were highly resilient and capable of slowing their metabolism to a near-hibernation state. Cases were known of dragons surviving incredible amounts of damage, living for years without food and water, and the like.
In this case, he sank to the bottom of the lake, into the mud, and there he lay as Braun's enforcers searched for him and eventually—though he would not learn of this until much later—decided he was dead.
It was pure survival instinct that made him crawl out. He only had flashes of that time; the first thing he remembered clearly was waking up in a grove of trees far from the lake, so weak he could barely move, sick and at the same time ravenously hungry, and with nothing, nothing at all in the back of his mind where Esme used to be.
"Esme," he whispered from a throat torn raw.
But she was gone.
The old stories said that a dose of dragonsbane just shy of lethal could sever the mate bond. Apparently it was true.
* * *
Was everything that had been between them truly the mate bond and that alone? After all these years, did she really feel nothing?
"Esme!" he called, hoping she could still hear him. "The mate bond finds hearts that are compatible with each other. The most compatible. And even if the bond's not there ... that's still true, isn't it? All that we once had, all that we were to each other, hasn't changed."
Esme made no reply. Instead she circled higher.
"Esme!"
She folded her wings for a dive, and his heart lifted in hope. Was she coming down here? Instead, she swept out of sight over the ridge, rising moments later with the luckless mountain sheep gripped in her talons.
Heikon cursed under his breath. He shifted and sprang into the air, beating his powerful wings as he rose. By the time he achieved altitude, Esme was a small winged flicker in the blue bowl of the sky, headed for the Aerie.
Maybe she would listen, he thought. Best to give her a little time to cool off. He flew in a wide circle until he found prey of his own, a good-looking stag beside a pond. With the deer in his talons, he flew back home.
He got there to find that Esme had stayed only long enough to drop off her catch and gather her things. She was already gone.
Esme
From the large picture windows of her top-floor apartment, cup of cooling tea in hand, Esme watched rain and mist settle over the city. The dreary, rainy day suited her mood: gray and bleak.
Even after returning from Heikon's Aerie, she still couldn't get him out of her head. Damn that man.
All that we once had, all that we were to each other, hasn't changed, he'd had the nerve to say.
Oh, it changed, she thought furiously. It changed when you shut me out in the most final way possible, by destroying our mate bond.
He had thought he was protecting her; she understood that much. The fool, the idiot. And now they were nothing to each other.
You destroyed our mate bond and let me think you were dead for twenty years. No matter your reasons, that's how little I mean to you when it comes right down to it. What could possibly fix that?
Nothing. Nothing at all.
She took a sip from the teacup and found it had gone stone cold. If only dragons could really breathe fire, she thought with a grimace as she set her cup in the sink. She would never need a microwave again!
In the meantime, it was time to go downstairs and get ready for her evening ballroom dance class.
She pinned up her long red hair in front of the bathroom mirror, leaving the door open. The bathroom, like the rest of her apartment, was luxurious but not the kind of overt display of wealth that she had seen in many other dragons' homes, which she considered rather tasteless. She lived in a spacious, well-lit apartment that took up the entire top floor of the building, a renovated warehouse that she had purchased some time ago when the neighborhood was run-down, industrial, and cheap. More space than that, she neither needed nor wanted.
What could you think of a man who wanted to live in an entire mountain? Talk about overcompensating.
No, she preferred her apartment, with room to stretch out and live in, but not so much space that she'd rattle around like a ping-pong ball. Who wanted to live like Darius did, surrounded by gold-plated bathroom fixtures and antique rugs too expensive to step on?
And she loved the neighborhood, or rather, what the neighborhood had turned into. It had gone from being mostly warehouses, over the years, to a vibrant little arts community. Esme liked to think she'd had something to do with that; she had been quietly investing in businesses throughout the neighborhood ever since remodeling the warehouse into a living and working space and moving in.
She loved living somewhere that she only had to walk two shopfronts down the street to buy bread from a lovely little French bakery, and two more shopfronts took her to an old-fashioned greengrocer. There were restaurants and art galleries and all manner of art studios within easy walking distance. All the business owners knew her and greeted her by name.
Try explaining that to other dragons, though.
Every dragon had their own distinctive quirks, but Esme's fondness for city life was very unusual. Most dragons preferred solitude and isolation—mountain fortresses, hidden caves. Heikon's Aerie was the rule rather than the exception. Esme's own clan dwelt in an assortment of private chalets high in the mountains in Switzerland.
But Esme loved the glitter and excitement of city life. She loved being exposed to new kinds of music and new technology for making music.
And, her secret shame as a dragon: she really liked humans, too.
Other dragons might tolerate humans as servants, rarely even take them as mates. But dragons weren't friends with humans. They didn't live among them and enjoy their company.
Esme did.
It was a lonely life, sometimes. From their point of view, she didn't age, so she had made travel a part of her life, moving from one home to another and never staying in one place for more than a couple of decades. Some rare friends were let in on her secret, but the community must never learn. So the butchers and grocers whose shops she visited, the patrons of the cafés where she went to sip coffee and listen to bands play, the local musicians she got to know: all of these were left behind each time she went on to a new place.
She had chosen to view it as a series of opportunities, not losses. She'd lived in Vienna and Paris and New York; she'd also lived in a series of small, no-name cities around the world, enjoying the cultural and social opportunities they had to offer. Usually she divided her time between a few different homes scattered across the world—and the Heart of her hoard, of course, the place where no one had ever been except Esme herself.
When she bought this building, it was only an investment—by now she'd gotten good at recognizing neighborhoods where property values were likely to go up, buying cheap and renting them out for reasonable rates as the neighborhoods improved around them. But once she was done renovating it, she liked it so much that she had decided to move in.
And it had been her salvation in the last twenty years, as she suffered the agony of the broken mate bond, the grief of knowing she had lost her mate before she even got to know him. Without the building renovations to throw herself into, without the community surrounding her, she didn't know how she would have survived.
And now he thinks he can come waltzing back into my life as if those twenty years never happened. As if we're still mates.
Fury sparked green and gold in her eyes in the mirror, brief flashes of the dragon inside her.
How very presumptive of him, her dragon agreed. As if he thinks he is our mate. We have no mat
e!
She turned away with a soft hissing growl, before she could give in to the urge to shift and go flying. This dim gray weather was the only sort of weather in which a city dragon could fly in the daytime, and it was very tempting to take advantage of it ... but no, she lost track of time easily when she was a dragon, and she didn't want to disappoint her evening dance class.
She clipped on a pair of emerald and gold earrings, matching her green dress, and slipped into her dancing shoes. And now the best part: choosing the music.
Feeling a little more buoyant and less depressed, she tripped down the stairs to the middle floor of the renovated warehouse.
When she had done the remodeling, she'd lavished attention on the top floor—her apartment—and the bottom floor, which was a combination dance studio and community space. But in between was a level that was only for her, and it was where she kept her hoard.
All dragons hoarded in their own unique way. Esme's hoard was music.
The second floor of the warehouse housed a collection of records, tapes, CDs, and other storage media that would have made many a museum curator envious. She had records in pristine condition going all the way back to the earliest wax cylinders. She had bought most of them when they were new, played them a few times, and then put them away; there was always something new to listen to, and she preferred live music anyway, but somehow could never resist her urge to collect it.
That was, after all, what it meant to be a dragon. You hoarded things.
In addition to the commercial recordings, she also owned bootlegs of thousands of concerts, most of them one of a kind. As she brushed her fingers across the edge of each slipcover, she heard, in her mind, the music it contained, and felt her steps pick up, moving gracefully as if in the steps of a private dance.
This was only a fraction of her true hoard, of course. Esme not only had other warehouses full of records and CDs, but she had leaped into the world of digital music with absolute delight. She had been thrilled to discover that entire rooms full of records could be stored on a single hard drive of MP3s. Her collection of live bootleg recordings had also grown by leaps and bounds now that every concertgoer was equipped with a cell phone. Of course, she still liked having the physical objects; for a dragon, there was no substitute for being able to hold treasures from your hoard in your hands. But ... you could just have so much music in digital storage. So much. It made her dragon want to roll around with glee.
There was also a fully equipped recording studio on this floor, with soundproofed walls and state-of-the-art equipment; she peeked inside as she went past, just to enjoy it. Her hoard did not consist only of music recordings; in fact, she sometimes considered those the lesser part of it. She owned several small recording labels and enjoyed personally talent-scouting at musical competitions, bars, small outdoor concerts, and other places where new talent could be found. She also invested in symphonies and music schools.
And she loved to teach.
Not as a teacher of music. For all that Esme hoarded music, creating it was not really her thing. She could sing competently, but all the times she'd tried to learn an instrument—and during a couple hundred years of a dragon's lifespan, she'd tried a number of them—had only frustrated her. Esme could recognize true musical genius, and she didn't have it. She enjoyed playing the piano and other instruments (there were a number of different instruments in the apartment) but only for her own pleasure, not as a performance for others.
But teaching people to dance was perfectly suited to Esme's talents and disposition. She loved spinning around the room to beautiful music, showing other people how to let the music flow through them as it was meant to be experienced. Selecting a different part of her music collection for each dance lesson was her special joy. Dragons who hoarded gold and jewels might cling to them jealously, but music was meant to be listened to and shared. A record that was never played was just a circular piece of vinyl. Music was at its best when played out loud in a big venue with good acoustics, with a bunch of people dancing to it.
She selected a stack of records and CDs, and went down to the ballroom. Her dancing shoes clicked on the floor, echoing through the large, empty room. The last people who'd used it were the AA group that met at noon, and they had stacked the chairs neatly out of the way, as she had asked them to. She checked the sound system and got the music ready.
And all the while, she tried very hard not to think about Heikon twirling her around the ballroom, his hand strong and warm in the small of her back. It was a foolish fantasy, she told herself firmly—but she realized she'd been unconsciously fitting her steps to those of an invisible partner as she moved around the room, skimming and gliding, as if in response to someone else's steps.
Foolish. Pointless.
All of that was over, and it was never coming back.
Heikon
"You're going to follow her and spy on her? That'll end well, I'm sure."
"I am not spying," Heikon said with all the dignity he could muster. "I am going to approach her on ground on which she has the advantage and talk to her. Neutrally, with no strings attached. Which of these jackets do you prefer, the dark red or the emerald?"
Reive merely rolled his eyes at him. Heikon's great-nephew was a young dragon, still very close to the age he appeared to be in human terms; he looked in his late 20s and was only a few years older than that in reality.
Sarcasm, Heikon mused, was not an appealing trait in the young.
"Fine, the dark red jacket it is," he decided, pulling it over the crisp black shirt he'd already selected.
"Good choice," Reive said. "It won't show the blood when she bites you in the face."
"Don't you have somewhere to be?"
"But this is so much more fun."
Heikon growled at him. Reive actually laughed, brightening his sharp, handsome features for a moment, as he slipped out of Heikon's chambers.
It had been a pleasure to watch life in the Aerie return to normal after Heikon had reclaimed his seat from his brother two years ago. At first the place had been gloomy and dark. The entire family had lived in fear of Braun's sudden rages, had worried about even so much as mentioning Heikon's name for fear of being branded traitors and imprisoned or worse. The younger members of the family had never known anything else, and those like Reive, who Heikon remembered as happy, laughing children, had grown up into wary adults, forever looking over their shoulder for a betrayal or a punishment.
Restoring life in the mountain to all that it used to be had been his duty and his pleasure over the last two years.
But now he was starting to realize there was something else—someone else ... another duty, another pleasure, never far from his mind for all that time, but ...
But she doesn't know that.
Esme had no idea how often he'd dreamed of her, how he'd denied himself and waited, waited, knowing that he didn't dare bring her back into his life until it was safe for her.
And then went on denying himself, making excuses, telling himself that he couldn't bring her back to the Aerie when it was a dark and gloomy place still recovering from twenty years of Braun's rule.
And then the time slips away, and you realize what a mistake you've made, once it's too late to recover from it ...
He looked at himself in the mirror, pulling the shoulders of the jacket straight, twitching at its lapels, and finally admitted to himself that he was stalling.
Just as he'd been stalling for years, not wanting to hear from Esme's own lips that she no longer wanted him without the bond.
She must have thought him dead. He'd let his clan believe him so, and Esme must have believed it too. Had she searched for him? He wasn't sure what hurt more, that she'd held onto the faith and tried to find him during the years he was living in exile—or that she had simply moved on, found other loves and other things to fill her time.
Had it filled her with joy, when she learned he was alive, that Braun's poison had been nonfatal? If so, it didn't sho
w now.
For of course, his brother's poison had killed the best part of both of them.
Maybe she blamed him for Braun's actions. Maybe after all this time, she thought he was as responsible for the civil war within his clan as Braun was.
Maybe she was right. If he'd listened more, defused the tension with his brother before it erupted into an outright assassination attempt, none of this had to happen.
Is there still hope for us, Esme?
Not if he didn't fight for her, for them. And with that thought, he went out onto the balcony of his chambers in the Aerie.
Below him, the mountainside rolled downward, a tapestry of meadows and garden terraces and patches of forest. Much of the damage from the fighting in the gargoyle war had been cleaned up now, and it warmed the aching places in his heart to see the mountain's former beauty blossoming again. As he scanned the slopes with his sharp eyes, he located various members of his clan—his family—enjoying the warm day, working in the gardens or playing or sunning themselves in dragon form.
Long ago, he had dreamed of this place as a safe haven, a place where young dragon children could grow up without worrying about humans—where they could be themselves, far away from the prying eyes of the human world. And now it was becoming that again, slowly but surely.
He stepped off the balcony and shifted as he went: a huge dragon, glossy gunmetal blue, sheened with silver.
Below him, various members of his clan looked up and waved as he flew over. A small group of teenage dragons jumped off a ledge where they had been lying in the sun, and kept up with him for a little while, flying around him in a flashing swirl of green and purple and golden wings before they turned back and swirled down to the forest below.
Heikon kept flying until he left his lands behind. Cloudy weather closed in around him, low gray clouds and mist providing cover from the ground. Which was just as well, because now he was passing over scattered houses and the dots of grazing sheep and cattle far below.