Dancer Dragon: Bodyguard Shifters #6

by Chant, Zoe

  "Who ..."

  "My brother," Heikon said quietly. "Braun."

  He reached out as if to touch Braun's massive head, then pulled his hand back.

  "Is he dead?" Esme asked.

  "No," Heikon said. "What's been done to him is what he did to me, without meaning to. A dose of concentrated dragonsbane, not quite strong enough to kill, puts a dragon into a suspended state. Heartbeat, breathing, metabolism, all slowed to almost nothing. In my case, it saved my life. In Braun's case, it keeps him comatose, unable to threaten me or those I hold dear."

  Esme circled around the edge of the room, stepping carefully over a wing. As far as she could tell, there were no dragon-sized exits. Braun must have been brought here in human form, and could not leave without shifting back.

  "You've allowed everyone to believe he's dead," she said.

  "I know. It was necessary. When I came back after being gone for twenty years, Braun had alienated most of the clan with his cruel, heavy-handed rule, but he still had some followers. I had to take him out of the picture so they would have no choice but to fall in line behind me. There was some bloodshed, but nothing like the open warfare we'd have had if there were two competing rivals for the head of the clan."

  "Wouldn't it have been easier to just kill him?"

  "He's my brother," Heikon said. "Yes, it would have been easier. In the heat of battle, I might have been able to do it. But I managed to get the drop on him, took him down before he had a chance to fight, and then ..." He shook his head. "Well. You see."

  "The story I heard was that you had Braun and his inner circle executed."

  Heikon shook his head again. "A necessary lie. Everyone who died was killed in the initial fighting. But a show of strength was necessary. After twenty years of Braun, rule by the strong was all that my clan understands. So yes, I put that story around, to discourage any attempts to knock me off the clanlord's throne again."

  "Peace by the sword," Esme murmured.

  "And peace is what we have," Heikon said. "All because of a necessary lie to prevent further killing."

  "What if he escapes?"

  "That's why I asked Mother to guard him. She was the one person I trusted to do it."

  Privately, Esme wondered if she would trust herself to guard her dearly beloved child. Of course, the idea of Melody being accused of terrible crimes was so unthinkable that she could not even entertain it as a hypothetical possibility.

  "Do you see why no one must learn of this?" A note of desperation slipped into Heikon's voice. "Peace in my clan depends on it. If anyone knew of Braun's survival, there are certain factions that I fear would try to slip in and release him."

  She turned back and looked at him past the curve of Braun's great wing. "And yet you trust me to keep this secret for you."

  "I trust you." The words slipped out on a breath. "I trust you with my life and my heart—and with a secret that could destroy all I hold dear."

  She had been wrong. Offering her the Heart of his hoard, the key to his very life, was a small thing compared to this. Because this was a secret much bigger than just one dragon. This was, as he'd said, a secret on which the survival of his clan was balanced.

  And he had given it to her, with open hands.

  "I'll keep your secret," she said, for all the good it would do. What use were words in a situation like this? She could only prove her trustworthiness day by day, holding his secret for a lifetime.

  But she saw him relax, as if some hidden tension had eased out of him at her promise. The words mattered to him, she realized. They mattered a lot.

  She picked her way back to him, carefully not touching Braun. It was eerie; the huge dragon still looked dead to her. She trusted that Heikon was right that he was still alive, but seeing it was different from hearing about it. She could see why Heikon had felt he needed to bring her here.

  And it also brought home to her what he'd gone through when his brother had poisoned him.

  "How long was it like this for you?" she asked gently as they left the cave and entered the narrow, twisting passage back to the cliff.

  "I don't know. Years, I think. It's all a haze. I came back to myself very slowly. But," he added with a brief, tight smile, "if not for that, I'd have died. The cold of the lake in which I fell, combined with the poison that felled me, kept me from dying completely until my body could heal itself."

  "I thought you had. Died, that is."

  It was the first time she had really allowed herself to feel her grief since those very early days. The realization that Heikon had been killed—as she'd thought—had utterly devastated her. But she'd fought it down because she had to be there for Melody, and then the knowledge that he was alive, and her anger over having been lied to, had flattened the memory of the pain, washed it away in the kind of anger you could only have against someone who was still alive.

  Someone you loved.

  Now the memory of that overwhelming grief hit her again full force. It was a grief she could have easily drowned in. And then she'd blamed him for the pain she'd felt, but ...

  But he was a victim too. And she hadn't really let herself think of it. Or remember the devastation, the agony of knowing he'd been there, and then he wasn't—

  "Esme?" His arm went around her in the narrow confines of the passage. "I know this is a lot to take in—"

  "It's not that." She turned and put her arms around him, flashlight and all. "It's just ... all of it. All of it. You're not dead."

  "No," he said, and buried his face in her hair. "I'm not."

  "You lied to me."

  "I know. I shouldn't have."

  "No," she said into his chest. "You shouldn't have. But I ..." She drew in a shuddering breath. "I should have asked. I should have tried harder to find you."

  "You didn't know—"

  "But it doesn't matter!" she cried, looking up at his face. With his arms around her, the flashlight pointed at the floor, all she could see was a wash of shadows and the warm gleam of his eyes. "It doesn't matter. We were mates. We were partners. You left me, but I—I also left you, and I shouldn't have, I ..."

  "Shhh." He held her, kissed her forehead, her damp cheek. "We've both done things we shouldn't have."

  If they were still what they'd once been, she would have been able to feel him now through the mate bond. But there was still the warm support of his arms around her, his body against hers; his quick mind and subtle sense of humor and the companionship he offered. She had lost him once and gotten him back. Who was she to decry her luck and reject what she'd been offered, just because it wasn't exactly what it had been before?

  "Have you ever heard of kintsugi?" she asked, pulling far enough away to look into his shadowed face.

  "Kintsugi?"

  "Yes. It's the art of mending broken teacups with gold. You take something that's been broken, and repair it with a fine seam of gold along the broken line. It's not just trying to fix it as if it was never broken, a beautiful lie as if the damage never happened. It's taking the brokenness and making art out of it."

  He smiled down at her, a beloved shadow in the near-dark. "Actually, it's more of a philosophical statement about the impermanence of existence and the inevitability of—"

  "Heikon?"

  "Mmm?"

  "Shut up. I'm making a point."

  "Yes, ma'am," he said, and there was such a wealth of warmth and affection in it that filled her heart and brimmed over.

  I don't care where we started out or what we could have been. We have a second chance now, and I'm making gold out of this.

  She turned her face up and kissed him.

  Esme

  The next few weeks were the happiest of Esme's life.

  She and Heikon divided their time between the Aerie and Esme's dance studio. Outwardly, for the most part, their lives went on as before. She taught her classes, though she'd cut back to three or four days a week so she didn't have to shuffle back and forth between the city and the Aerie quite so oft
en. Heikon still spent the majority of his time with his gardens and his noisy, bustling clan.

  But it was a rare night anymore when either of them slept alone, ate alone. He slept over at her apartment so often that they'd begun keeping spare clothes for him there, and she had packed up a suitcase to take to the Aerie so she could stop borrowing other people's things. His toothbrush had moved in next to hers, and she had a spread of makeup in his bathroom.

  She had become a fixture at Corcoran clan breakfasts, just as Heikon had started to spend so much time in her neighborhood that people recognized him there, and asked after him.

  They wandered the streets together, and she took him to all her favorite restaurants. He bought beautiful glass hair ornaments and silk scarves for her at the little local artisan shops, and rarely left without some toy or other from the independent toy store down the street to take back to the children at the Aerie.

  And, in the mountains, they went flying together, wings spread under the sun, unafraid of prying human eyes. He showed her his gardens, displaying rare plants for her as if they were jewels, and picked flowers for her to braid into her hair.

  He even took her to the sakura grove that she remembered from so long ago. It was not as it had once been, with the trees towering up the canyon walls. Braun, he told her, had cut down all the trees, and burned the rest. When Heikon had returned from his exile and reclaimed his mountain, he had found a brush-choked wilderness in place of the old cherry trees.

  But throughout Heikon's long life, ever since he had established the grove with cherry seeds his mother had brought across the sea from Japan, he'd had a tradition of giving a small potted cherry seedling to each person in his clan when they traveled. It was for luck, and for a connection to the clan they'd left behind. So his trees were scattered across the world, and when he reclaimed the mountain and began to repair his gardens, it had been a small matter to obtain seeds from those many far-scattered trees, and even recover some of the young trees themselves, and bring them back to rebuild the grove.

  The replanted grove was still young, slim trees spreading their tender leaves toward the sky, most of them no higher than Esme's waist. But she thought she was learning to see what Heikon saw, the potential inherent in each young plant, the minds-eye vision of what they would look like in full flower. The grove was not going to be exactly as it had been before, but it would be beautiful. It was beautiful now.

  Mended with gold.

  * * *

  Quietly, on the side, Esme looked into draconic lore for any information on how to mend a broken mate bond.

  It was not an easy thing to research. As Heikon had said, it was a vanishingly rare event, so uncommon that it was not recorded anywhere. She had to ask, quietly sounding out the memories of the oldest among her clan to see if they ever remembered such a thing taking place.

  She presented it as a matter of pure curiosity. She and Heikon had agreed to continue keeping the secret of their true connection from the clans ... for now, anyway. Neither of them wanted to dredge up the entire tragic story every time they had to explain why they could no longer do all the things mates could do, including sensing each other at a distance and being able to recognize when the other was in danger.

  No, their tragedy was a private thing, and both of them continued to hold it close to their hearts. It was not for others to pull out and examine. The down side was that, without knowledge of their entire complicated backstory, both of their clans would go on viewing their affair as a temporary thing, the sort of dalliance that dragon shifters indulged in during their long lives before finding their true mates. If it felt more real, more permanent, there was nothing she could really say to convince her clan. And, with the mate bond broken, perhaps her clan would be right.

  Maybe that was why she felt happier and more fulfilled among her human friends right now than with her own clan. Humans didn't have the same expectations as shifters. They didn't know about fated mates. All their loves were like this one: fragile and perhaps impermanent things that had to be worked on, every day, to make them work.

  And yet, they did make them work. Albert and Greta, over fifty years married, were still wrapped up in each other at every dance class. Lupe and George arrived at every class hand in hand; Judy and Beatrice danced as if there was nothing in the world for them except the other.

  And when Esme shared her own new relationship with her human friends, their open, uncomplicated happiness for her was a balm to her soul, compared to her clan's guarded uncertainty.

  And they were friends. She started to make a habit of meeting whichever of the ladies were available (frequently Lupe, sometimes Judy and Bea, occasionally Greta or one of the beginning students) for coffee or lunch. She stopped by the senior facility where Miriam lived, bringing fresh-baked cookies for the old people, and talked to the director about hosting a '40s dance night with her collection of big-band records.

  Hardly a conversation went by without someone commenting on how happy she looked.

  She felt happy. She felt light as a balloon. She danced through her life; she hummed as she cooked and moved from kitchen to table with little skipping dance steps. Her heart was full; her life was full. She had Heikon, she had her dance studio, and she had a grandchild on the way, with frequent updates from Melody, finally culminating in a visit from Melody and her mate, Gunnar.

  "It's good to see both of you," Esme said, hugging first Melody and then Gunnar and then Melody again. Her daughter was very visibly pregnant now, filling out the drapery of a silky, floating maternity blouse. Their bookmobile was parked at the curb. For whatever reason—Esme couldn't fathom it, but it seemed to make Melody happy—they'd decided to take to the road with a mobile bookstore in a remodeled RV.

  "And you look amazing, Mom," Melody said, standing back to hold her mother at arm's length. "I gotta say, this guy seems to be a lot better for you than Dad was."

  Esme just snorted. Darius was happy with his new mate, from what she'd heard, and she'd sent a gift to their wedding—music, of course, neatly curated for wedding dancing. Beyond that, she had no particular thoughts to spare for Darius. He had his life, and she had hers, and it had been that way for a very long time—since years before she'd met Heikon.

  "So you're still not going to tell Grandma if it's a boy or a girl, hmm?" she asked, as Melody reflexively put a hand on the curve of her stomach.

  Melody's eyes danced. "Nope. We're keeping that part to ourselves. I can tell you one thing, though: there are two of them."

  "Two ... babies? You're pregnant with twins?"

  Melody nodded as Gunnar put an arm around her. "We haven't said anything because we weren't sure until my last ultrasound," she said. "I guess I had to catch up with Ben!"

  Melody's half-brother Ben and his mate already had a daughter, Skye. Did they have another one now? Esme hadn't been paying much attention to that branch of the family. Ben was Darius's son by a different woman, and he'd grown up with his mother; Esme had only met him a few times.

  Maybe she should make an effort to get in touch. Their children would be cousins of her own grandchildren, after all. The family, it seemed, was growing by leaps and bounds.

  "Twins," she said, shaking her head. "And you still won't tell me if they're boys or girls. Or perhaps both?"

  There were mutual headshakes and identical grins from Melody and her big, blond mate. "You'll just have to wait and find out when everyone else does," Melody said.

  * * *

  They had dinner with Heikon in Esme's penthouse. She was braced for ... well, she wasn't even sure what, exactly. That they'd hate each other? It was a fraught situation; Melody had a somewhat conflicted relationship with her overbearing father, and Esme wasn't sure how she was going to react to another dragon clanlord in her mother's life.

  But as it turned out, everything went wonderfully. Dinner was pasta with shrimp in a butter sauce, with a side salad, and everyone chipped in to help. Melody and Heikon seemed to like each other, and
Gunnar was the kind of laid-back person who got along with everyone, despite his tattooed-bruiser looks. Esme put on some music and poured wine (tea for Melody), and the dinner slipped away in a lazy haze of good food and better company.

  Afterwards, they lounged around and chatted on the couch. Melody had slipped off her shoes and her mate was massaging her feet, while Heikon had his arm around Esme. Melody sat forward suddenly, nearly dislodging Gunnar.

  "I just had the best idea, Mom. What do you think of a family vacation in Greece? We haven't been there in ages, and I know how much you love it. I wouldn't mind some time laying around in white beach sand myself."

  "You mean just us?"

  "Us, Heikon, anyone he wants to invite."

  Greece. At the very mention of the word, Esme felt her soul yearning for her sea cave, the Heart of her hoard. She could take Heikon there and show it to him. And Melody was right. It had been too long since they'd enjoyed the sun and sand of the country that she'd fallen in love with when she first visited as a young dragon.

  Still ... there were considerations. "Is it safe for you to travel?"

  Melody rolled her eyes. "Oh, Mother, I'm barely into the seventh month, and it's a perfectly healthy pregnancy according to my doctor. There's no reason why I can't. If it gets close to my due date while we're there, I can have the babies in Greece, or maybe we could go back to your family home in Switzerland. If anything, lounging around on the beach would be better for me than being here with all the traffic and stress, don't you think?"

  Esme tipped her head back to look up at Heikon. "What do you think? Do you like Greece?"

  "I've never been," Heikon said. "Unlike you, I'm not much of a world traveler."

  "If you'd prefer to stay here ..." She tried not to display her heartbreak at the thought. Greece without Heikon seemed suddenly empty. Even the sea cave was no compensation.