Elaina turned off the car and peered up at the low mountain range through the windshield. This edge of the Carpathian Mountains rose up more like gigantic hills than the other massive rocky formations she’d explored. From here, they didn’t look promising, but her research had confirmed the existence of a cave-welcoming limestone base out there.
More importantly, the map’s red dot claimed this was the place, even though this angle made her destination impossible to recognize. Every time she’d gone to Nastav’s cave for her lessons, she’d ridden on her mother’s back. Last night’s studies of the satellite overlays for this area lined up with her memory of the various peaks and streams they’d flown over, so this was her best shot at finding his cave.
The blizzard had stopped during the night, leaving a pristine layer of snow on the ground. She laced her hiking boots and zipped up her jacket under her chin. A three-mile hike into the backcountry awaited her.
Before pulling on her gloves, she kissed the diamond on her ring finger and touched her ruby pendant. She owed a lot to the necklace from Alex. Its bond to her hoard had held up for months.
Good thing. If that part of her plan hadn’t worked, she’d have been dead already.
“Wish me luck.”
Her boots crunched prints into the snow as she climbed along the ravine from the faint trail she’d turned into a road. Sunshine warmed her face, and she shielded her eyes against the midday snow glare every couple of minutes to double-check her position. The outcropping she was aiming for still waited up ahead.
By the time she reached the rocky protrusion, she was certain this was the right place. At least, it had been where he’d kept his cave. Whether he was still here was another matter.
Her senses prickled as she rounded the outcropping and climbed into a side gorge toward the cave opening. Treasure. That was a good sign.
She pressed a palm against her sternum and let her head fall back on a deep breath. Honestly, that sensation was the best feedback she’d gotten yet that she could find another dragon. Maybe she could do this after all.
Tinkles sounded from dripping water, acting like a homing beacon for the cave entrance above her. Melting snow meant the cave was occupied. By a belly-full-of-fire, full-grown dragon. In dragon form.
Her steps slowed. She was walking into a dragon’s cave without so much as a butter knife for a weapon.
Yet after coming this far, she forced her feet to move. Hopefully, her lack of armaments would help convince Nastav that she meant him no harm.
The small entrance was barely big enough for a person to wiggle through and led to a narrow tunnel, just how dragons preferred their homes. Tiny openings meant enemies couldn’t surprise the cave’s occupant in their dragon form. Only humans or those in human form could enter.
The tunnel wound down into the mountain’s base for a quarter mile and then split into multiple passageways. This section looked familiar. Even without the heat flowing from the opening on the left, she’d know which one was her destination. If she remembered correctly, the other two paths formed a loop, leading nowhere.
She took the left fork and climbed a steep incline to the top of a subterranean cliff. The underground trail continued on a matching cliff on the other side of a wide abyss so deep and dark even her keen dragon eyesight couldn’t make out the bottom.
This was where the rare human visitor would turn back. Only serious cavers with ropes and rappelling equipment could hope to make it to the other side.
Of course, she had none of that gear. All she had was stubborn determination and a vague hope that she’d grown and strengthened in the years since her mother had helped her across the broad expanse.
Before nerves could take hold, she backed up several yards, ran, and pushed off the solid edge. Thump.
She landed hard on the far side, and pebbles skittered, echoing down the sheer drop. The chasm lay just behind her heel, and she teetered, almost slipping off the rim. She quickly shoved her balance forward.
Her wild leaning brought her to her knees, and her palms scraped over the cold, damp soil. Gravel ripped through her gloves. The torn fabric was better than the alternative.
That had been too close.
From this point, the path led down into the depths of the mountain’s heart. Each step brought her closer to the treasure room and the pushback she felt from a dragon’s ownership of the priceless artifacts. Her intention to not claim the hoard allowed her to press through the invisible, territorial barrier.
If it wasn’t Nastav inside, this would be a very short visit.
Ahead of her, the tunnel opened into a cavernous room. She removed her gloves in the warm air and crept inside. Nothing happened.
In her native Drakish language, she called out. “Nastav? It is I, Elaina.”
If it was Nastav, announcing herself should make her seem less threatening. And if it wasn’t him, she was dead anyway.
His answer, breathy and rumbling, rolled around the cave’s curving walls. “Come here, little one. Let me see you.”
She rocked back and forth on her toes. So far, so good. His dragon-form voice was less strong than it had been years ago, but she recognized it regardless.
A dim orange glow emanating from the back of the cavern illuminated the loose hills of crowns, religious relics, and bejeweled swords she passed. Landslides of priceless artifacts accompanied her steps wherever she took shortcuts too close to the piled mountains.
At the far end of the cave, the light from Nastav’s heart rippled from his belly like orange coals in a breeze. The smoldering radiance revealed him lying on a mound of coins separated from the rest of the treasure. This one collection of gold and silver was ten times larger than her old apartment.
She knelt prostrate at the edge of the low pile, the traditional Drakish greeting of a youngling to an elder coming easily to her lips. “Forgive me for disturbing you, Great One.”
Heat blasted over her, fire erupting from Nastav’s mouth.
Her chest tensed so quickly a cry squeaked out. She’d guessed wrong about Nastav. This was the end.
I’m sorry for everything, Alex.
But she didn’t die. Instead, the cave exploded with light, the torches around the cave ignited by Nastav’s flames.
“Rise, little one.”
She stood on wobbly legs and faced the dragon. He was as big as she remembered, the size of a two-story house. The black parts of his body—the horns protruding from the top of his head, the frill along his spine, and his folded wings—contrasted with the dark blue of his scales and the armor plates running down his neck and belly.
It had been so long since she’d seen one of her own kind in dragon form she couldn’t help staring. Evidence of his extreme age became more apparent the longer she studied him.
His wings drooped, their edges ragged. Instead of a bright royal blue, his scales were the dull, steel blue color of the Chicago River in winter. In places, patches of missing scales exposed soft tissue below.
She dropped her gaze. Interest in his poor health might be taken as a threat.
“Turn around. Let me look at you.”
She did as she was told, despite the fact that she had to turn her back to the creature.
Once she faced him again, his blue eyes flashed.
“It is good to see you. When I heard about your parents, I feared the worst.” He stretched out a foreleg and tapped a claw on the coins. “Sit. Tell me of your life.”
She sat cross-legged on the rocky floor where she wouldn’t accidentally touch his bed of treasure and seem aggressive.
“You feared the worst? What would have been worse than my father killing my mother?”
Smoke curled to the cave roof with his laugh. “If you had been killed, little one. The favorite of my students.”
She dipped her chin, no longer too scared to take her eyes off him. “You are a good portion of my favorite memories as well.”
After so many years around humans, Americans especially, the formal structure and limited vocabulary of the Drakish language sounded odd in her ears.
“Indulge an old one who does not get out anymore. Tell me of your journeys.”
For the next couple of hours, she told him of her escape from her father, his continued hunt for her, and her eventual trip to the Americas. Her stories of the human world fascinated him, but most human inventions had no word in Drakish, so the telling took longer with her detailed descriptions to his questions.
“And now you have come back. Why?”
She slid her jacket’s zipper up and down. Scorn awaited her for telling him the truth, but he’d always possessed an uncanny knack for detecting lies.
“I met someone in the United States. A human man. Alex knows what I am and loves me regardless. He was trying to help me get stronger, buying me jewelry to claim. But my father tracked me down and threatened Alex.”
Instead of expressing disgust at her confession for latching onto a human, his eyes simply bore into hers.
A tense moment passed, and then he asked, “Do you love this human as well?”
She bounced to her feet. They refused to stay still, moving with itchy energy. “I–I cannot.”
“Is that the truth? Or is that what you tell yourself?”
Her feet stuck to the rock. “Dragons cannot love. My mother was delusional.”
“I have always loved you, little one. Will you dismiss me as a feeble old one the way you dismiss your mother?”
The cave blurred, and she blinked quickly. “I have always cared about you too. You are the best of the Great Ones.”
“What do you think love is?”
She plopped down onto the cold stone, and her answer came out in a whisper. “I do not know what to think anymore.”
Warmth wrapped around her with his slow laugh. “That is a start.”
He stretched and curled his tail around his hind legs like a cat. “Volus might be watching the area, and yet you came. I am glad for your visit, but you did not come back for one last lesson from old Nastav. Why are you here?”
“I want to make things work with Alex, but to do that, I must convince my father to leave us alone.”
“I fear that will not be so easy.”
Her voice dropped, thickness choking her throat. “I worry I will have to kill my father.”
A roar thundered through his words. “You are not strong enough for that.”
“I know. Either way, I need to get more treasure first.” She carved lines on the rocky floor with a fingernail. “And I do not have much time. I hurt Alex by leaving, and I do not know if he will forgive me, especially if I take too long to return to him.”
“So you have come to kill me for my treasure?”
She scrambled backwards, hot itchiness filling her with nausea. “No! I would never kill you. I need to find an old one and take their hoard, yes. But not you. I just need your help finding one of the others.”
Cli-cli-cli-clink, cli-cli-cli-clink. His claws tapped a repetitive rhythm on the coins, and the glow of his eyes dimmed.
“You think I would tell you where another Great One is so you could kill them?”
Oh... When he put it like that, her request sounded rather obscene.
Sure, she wasn’t planning to kill a dragon to steal their treasure, but as Nastav’s frailty proved, elderly dragons would die if their treasure were taken from them. The result would be the same, no matter how much she tried to distance herself from the act. She wouldn’t need to wonder whether she had the emotional strength to kill her father because she would have already shattered her vow of non-violence with her theft.
“I am sorry. I should not have asked.”
“No, you should not have.”
His statement threw a bright light onto her selfishness. She’d expected another creature to give up their life so that she might enjoy hers.
She crumpled against her knees. “I am sorry. I did not know what else to do.”
“Why did you come here?”
“I told you, I suspect I will need to kill my father so I can be with Alex.”
“And why could you not be with him regardless?”
She stifled a groan at the circular conversation. “As I said, my father was threatening Alex.”
“If your father had not done that, would you have stayed with Alex?” His Drakish accent turned the name into a hiss.
“Yes.” Hadn’t she just explained all this?
“So you came here not to kill your father. No, you left to protect Alex.”
She rubbed her cheeks and peered into Nastav’s unblinking gaze, waiting for his statement to make sense. The result would be the same either way. Killing someone was killing someone, right? There was no good way to look at that situation.
“Yes, little one, there is a difference.” He seemed to understand her confusion better than she did. His powers of perception hadn’t dimmed with age. “One is done out of vengeance, and the other is done out of love.”
Her brain was still struggling to process his words when he stretched his long neck, putting her face-to-face with his sharp fangs.
“Do you hate your father?”
Weight pressed her shoulders down. Did she? The answer used to be easy, automatic.
“For the longest time, I did hate him.”
“And now?”
“Once I met Alex, I was finally living my own life.” Her fingertip stroked the ring on her hand. “My days were not simply about surviving, but about enjoying the present and imagining a future. As to my father...”
She shrugged. “I think I pity him more than anything now.”
“Pity?”
“Yes, because he had it all and lost it. Because even after my mother’s murder, we did not have to come to this. Because someone loved him, and he did not treasure that as much as his gold.”
Nastav touched his nose to hers, and then he curled his neck back and peered down at her. “Come embrace your great father one last time.”
“Great father?”
“There are not many Drakish words for family. I am creating a new one. Volus, your father, is my son.”
She whispered the word in English. “Grandfather.”
He tried wrapping his large dragon tongue around the strange word. “Grandfather.”
She climbed onto the mound of coins and draped her arms around his neck, speaking to him in Drakish once more. “I am proud to call you Great Father.”
He rested his chin along her back. The sense of love and security coming off his body enveloped her like a blanket. There was no doubt that dragons could love.
“My great daughter, I have missed you. Seeing you one last time has made this old one very happy.”
A few of his scales disintegrated at her touch. She pulled away and rubbed the powdery remains of his once-beautiful armor between her fingertips.
“You are not well, are you?”
He lowered his head and brought his eyes down to her level.
“Do not mourn for me. I have lived a full life. I have lived long enough to see the generations of our kind forget the Mythos homeland we lost to the faeries long ago. And I have lived long enough to see you as the one I hoped you would become.”
“How can I help? I have a moving wagon. Should we get you more treasure?”
“To leave here, I would have to change into humanoid form. In that body, I would have died centuries ago. Only living in my dragon form, through which I can draw more strength from my collection, has kept my heart beating this long.”
“Oh.”
Spending time in their humanoid form shortened a dragon’s lifespan? Her lack of knowledge about her own kind was appalling. No wonder she hadn’t been successful in her searches.
Her muscles tensed at the thought of all the things she didn’t know. Things she needed to know.
She wanted to know it all, but Nastav was dying right in front of her.
“There must be something I can do.”
“Yes, my great daughter.” He rolled onto his side, exposing his belly. “You can kill me.”