SEVEN

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24 July 2004

The dreams have started again.

Drake tapped the pen on the journal, wondering whether he should make a notation of the phenomenon that he hadn’t experienced since he was a youngling dragon.

It had to have meaning. He would note it.

The dream began as they all did, with a half awareness that something was beyond normal.

“Grand-mère?” The words lifted on the breeze that rolled inland from the shore.

Drake glanced around and realized he was standing in the small garden of his grandmother’s villa outside Cannes.

She turned, holding a bouquet of her favorite flowers—pink and white carnations—surprise chased by delight as she beheld him. “Drake! What brings you to see me? Is all well?”

He received two featherlight kisses on his cheeks, her familiar spicy flower scent surrounding him with love. He basked in it for a moment before responding, “Nothing is awry, although I am not sure why I am here. I have not visited you in a dream since ...”

“Since you went through puberty, yes,” Grand-mère said as she nodded, then moved past him, glancing with pleasure around her garden. “We had many visits during your youth, did we not? Ah, I remember that wall with the columbines! How pretty they were. This was always my favorite villa. Did you keep it after I died?”

“Yes,” Drake said, wondering if the recent highly erotic dream experience with Aisling had meant a return of his long dormant ability. “Why am I having dreams visiting you now? It was understandable when you were alive, but ...”

“But that is no longer the case. Something must have happened,” Grand-mère said before murmuring words of delight as she continued to stroll around the garden. “Such lovely pinks. I’ve always felt roses were a bit ostentatious, but really, these tea roses were not at all of that class. I must see about changing our domicile to one of a house with a garden. What has changed in your life, kincsem?”

Silence followed the question. Drake frowned as he wondered how to explain the experience of the last week. “I met a Guardian,” he answered at last. “She had an artifact I desired.”

“And you relieved her of the item?” Piroska tipped her head to the side, a smile curling the corners of her mouth. “Why do I even ask? Always you were extremely adept at acquiring items you desired.”

“Yes, I took it,” he said absently, trying to sort through his emotions. “She—the Guardian—is a wyvern’s mate.”

“Drake!” Grand-mère clapped her hands with joy before kissing his cheeks again. “I am so happy for you. And you did not think you would ever find a mate. That’s why you must have dreamt of me again—you knew I would not rest easy in the afterlife until I knew you had found a mate.”

“She won’t have anything to do with me,” he admitted, sitting on the wrought iron bench when Grand-mère gestured to it, taking her own seat.

Bees buzzed happily behind them, while before them both, the garden sloped down to a sparkling white beach, beyond which the sea glistened and glittered a brilliant cerulean.

The contrast between the idyllic scene and the hellish nightmare of his emotions did not escape him. “She refuses to accept she is a mate.” The words seemed to come out slowly, as if he was encased in ice. “She left me. I put the sept mark on her, and she still left.”

Grand-mère seemed to hear the mingled frustration and hurt that laced his words, for she took one of his hands in hers and gave it a gentle squeeze. “It is like that, is it? I do not fear you will do as your father and force her to accept you, for you are not in the least bit like Toldi, but still, a mate is not to be dismissed. What are you doing to woo her?”

“Nothing,” Drake answered, the word leaving a bitter taste in his mouth. “She has returned to her home and refuses to remain in contact with me.”

“Ah,” Grand-mère said, and, releasing his hand, rose, clearly going to head back into the villa. “That is why you are dreaming again. It has been pleasant seeing you again, but, my Drake, it is not to the past you must look, but to your future.”

Before he could answer, the dream wafted away into nothing, just as if it were fog evaporating before the potent rays of the sun.

He opened his eyes, staring up at the familiar ceiling of his bedroom, and wondered just what the hell Grand-mère meant by that.

25 July 2004

Grand-mère was correct.

Drake stepped out of the shadow of a smallish one-story house, glancing around to pinpoint just where his dream had taken him. He was once again on the shoreline, this time right on the beach, the scrubby, stunted grass underfoot mixed with sand and dotted with scraggly shrubs.

The door of the cabin opened and Aisling stood there, her hair whipping around with the breeze off the water, while her eyes came damned close to shooting lasers at him.

“No!” she said, then slammed shut the door.

Drake fought the need to simply storm into the house and demand she recognize the fact that she was his mate, aware that would be all too close to the actions of his father.

“I’ve never before understood why he did what he did, but I’m starting to see it now,” he muttered to himself, the dream fading until he found himself once again lying in bed, staring up at the lights of the city as they skittered across the ceiling.

The following night, he settled into bed and schooled his mind into a rehearsal of what he would say to Aisling, how she would respond, and how graciously he’d welcome her home as his mate.

The dream was the same as the night before. It was late night on a beach, the moon’s light skipping across the crest of the waves as they reached inky fingers onto golden brown sand.

He tapped at the door.

“I said no!” Aisling all but snarled when she opened the door, once again glaring at him. This time he had the presence of mind to stick his foot into the doorway, keeping her from slamming the door on him.

She gave it a good try, though.

“Peste!” he swore, jerking back and hopping on the uninjured foot as he felt his toes to see if they’d been broken when she tried to force the door closed.

“Yes, you are. Go away, Drake. I said we were done, and we’re done.”

The door was closed again in his face, just as forcefully as it had been the previous night.

He retreated from the dream, sitting in bed as he absently rubbed his bruised toes, his mind quickly sorting through a number of options and discarding anything that smacked too much of Toldi.

“I want Aisling in my life,” he told his abused toes. “But I want her to want to be here.”

The following three visits to Aisling’s cabin at the sea ended the same as the first two, minus the sore toes.

But it was the sixth dream where he stopped thinking like a wyvern, and decided to tackle Aisling a different way.

“What’s this?” she asked suspiciously when she opened the door and discovered the square box with green ribbon he’d placed on her doorstep. “The aquamanile?”

He simply cocked an eyebrow at her.

“I didn’t think so.” Her face bore a decidedly disgruntled expression. She nudged the box with her foot. “What is it?”

“Open it,” he told her, leaning against the side of her cabin, his arms crossed.

“OK, but if it’s something that hurts me—” She stopped before he had the chance to be outraged at the idea of such a thing. She lifted her hand. “No, you don’t have to say it. I’m sorry for implying I believe you’d harm me. But, Drake, we have to stop meeting like this! For one, I left you last week. I ... left ... you. And for another, I’m hardly getting any sleep what with you popping into my dreams every night, and Jim’s comments about the bags under my eyes are getting over the top to the point where I’m seriously thinking about ordering it into the form of a cement block. A silent one. So please ... oooh.”

While she had been speaking, he removed the ribbon from the box, and lifted the lid. Inside it sat a Sacher torte made by his favorite chef.

“Is that ... a cake?” Aisling asked, peering into the box when he lifted it for her inspection.

“Yes. You like cake.” He offered the box to her.

“Oooh. Is it that Austrian one you had when I was staying with you?” She dipped her finger into a mound of chocolate and whipped cream that adorned the cake, then licked it off in a manner that left Drake immediately hard. “Mmm. It is. OK, this cake has bought you five minutes to talk, assuming that’s what you are here for, but only because that’s how long it will take me to finish off the whole thing. And don’t look at me like I’m being selfish by not even offering you any. It’s a dream, and you’re crazy if you think I’m not going to take advantage of the fact that I can eat this entire thing without any result on my hips.”

To Drake’s amusement, she dug her fingers into the torte with a glint in her eyes that reminded him of his mother when she was at her most outrageous. He didn’t at all comment on how messy it was to eat cake with her bare hands, and instead gave voice to what was uppermost on his mind.

“You miss me,” he found himself saying. For a moment, he gave a mental eye roll at the words. He was an erudite man, one who prided himself on the manners his grand-mère found attractive, and to blurt something so baldly was unlike him.

“Yeah,” she answered around a mouthful of cake, popping a chocolate-and-whipped-cream finger into her mouth to suck off all the goodness.

He grew even harder, and for a good minute, all he could think of was how she filled his senses, how she tasted, what her silky, delicious skin felt like against his, and most of all, how right she was. He’d never truly believed in the validity of mates, given his family history, but Aisling ... Aisling was different. She enraged him, true, but she also fit so well—both physically and on a dragon level—that he was beginning to understand the emptiness that echoed inside him had its beginning and end with the curly-haired woman who stood before him stuffing her face with an entire Sacher torte.

Warmth flooded all the dark corners of his soul at the sight.

“That doesn’t mean anything, though. I’m trying to cut out refined carbs, and I miss them a hell of a lot, too,” she continued while he was wrestling with the need to bury himself in her, and revel in the sharing of his dragon fire. “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to let them back into my life, where they can control me and take advantage of me, and just in general annoy me with their irresistibleness. I am a professional, Drake. I can handle having no sugar just like I can handle having no sexy green-eyed dragon stomping around in my life.”

He looked pointedly at her right hand, which was holding a piece of cake.

“This doesn’t count,” she snapped, defiantly biting at the remainder. “It’s dream cake. It has no calories. I just said that. Didn’t you listen?”

“I heard you,” he said, trying to retain his sense of calm, but she made it very difficult to not give in to his inner dragon.

At last he understood why his father had done what he’d done. Not that Drake condoned the killing of innocent mortals, but he understood the extremes that Toldi had gone to in order to bind Catalina to him.

“Why are you here?” she asked, murmuring her thanks when she took the handkerchief and moistened towelette he offered before wiping her sticky hands with it. “What’s so important you had to barge into my brain with an absolutely delicious dream cake that won’t add a single ounce to my hips and thighs?”

It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her he liked her hips and thighs, liked them far too much for his own peace of mind, but instead he sat down on the sandy wooden porch, deciding that his plan to share a secret from his past would show her that he trusted her. He could think of no way to prove his dedication to her.

The Pacific Ocean lay before them, an undulating mass of sound and scent. Drake stared into it, plucking through the mists of time to uncover the ulcer of shame that even now gave him a moment of remembered pain.

“Drake?” Aisling yawned. “Dragon got your tongue?”

He turned to her, confused. “What dragon?”

“It was supposed to be a funny variation of ‘cat got your tongue,’ but I can see it went right over your head.” She yawned again. “It’s because I’m super sleepy and not making sense, and now my dream self has eaten like a week’s worth of carbs, so I’m about to go back to sleep. What was it you wanted to tell me?”

“When I was a young dragon, probably about twenty or so years, I spent my days with three other green dragons,” he said slowly, hoping to find a way to explain the guilt that still ate at him at unexpected moments. “This was in Buda.”

“Budapest? Hungary?” Aisling asked.

He was very aware of her sitting next to him, aware of the heat of her body, and the scent that teased his nose despite the tangy air rolling in with the gentle surf. “This was in the seventeenth century, so the part I lived in was simply called Buda. My ‘company of troublemakers,’ as my grandmother referred to us, acted no different than any other young men at the time—we trained in arms, we drank far too much bad wine and ale, we dallied with the mortal women—” He moved on quickly when Aisling jerked to the side, his subsequent words coming out in an undignified tumble. “We fought, we jousted, we hunted ... it was our lives.”

“A group of dragon toughs, in other words,” Aisling said softly, but he felt her interest. He was also aware when she stopped recoiling from him and actually brushed his arm with hers.

“Not in the modern sense, no, but something similar. There was no malice in us, just high spirits.” He paused, the old pain stinging. “Until that night. We were drunk, and stumbled out into the streets, my friends accosting mortal women.”

“For the love of Saint Pete!” Aisling said, this time not recoiling, but she actually separated herself from him, standing at the base of the three steps to glare at him. “You sexually assaulted someone? Do you know how heinous—”

“Pax,” he said, holding up his hand. He wanted badly to be righteously indignant that his mate, his own mate, would think he could do anything so vile, but the common sense that came from his grandparents reminded him she did not know him well.

Yet.

“I did not then, nor have I ever forced myself on a woman,” he told her, allowing her to feel the fire that swirled inside him at the slander.

“I should hope not,” Aisling said, and, after a couple of seconds’ obvious struggle, retook her seat next to him. “So if you weren’t pillaging and raping, what is it your gang of thugs did?”

“What you would call roughhousing, I suppose,” he said after a moment’s thought. “Stealing a bit of fruit or bread. Stirring up the merchants. Teasing a few of the more pompous mortals. It was relatively harmless until I decided to assert my dominance over my friends. I was in the running to be named heir, and looking back with the wisdom of time, I see that it had gone to my head. I was determined to prove to them that I was the natural leader, so instead of just picking up a mortal’s basket of goods and teasing her with it before returning it, I knocked a woman’s small basket of food to the ground, and stomped on it.”

Aisling gave him a long look out of the corners of her eyes. “OK, that seems pretty out of character for you.”

“Whether it was or not doesn’t change the outcome. My friends laughed and mocked the woman as she fell to her knees and tried to salvage whatever bit of bread and potage had survived my boots. As my friends continued to the next tavern, the woman hunched over her destroyed food, weeping.”

Aisling said nothing, but blinked rapidly, clearly waiting for him to continue.

The shame burned in him with an intensity that came close to matching his dragon fire. “She looked up and, through her tears, asked me why I did it. ‘Does it make you feel like a big man to take food out of my hungry children’s mouths? Are you proud of making my family go without food simply because you have strength we don’t? There is death everywhere, and you must hasten its path by starving my children?’ Her words pierced me with the full shame of my actions, leaving me filled with mortification and dismay.”

“That last was a bit flowery, but I understand how horrible the situation was.” Aisling gave him another long look. “For the woman, that is; you don’t get to play victim, although I assume you gave her money.”

“I just told you how I shamelessly and carelessly destroyed a woman’s only food, and you assume I gave her money?” he asked, his head tipping to the side as he considered her face.

It was a nice face. He liked it. He especially liked that her emotions were plainly visible to him, laid out like a delightful book to read.

“I may not know you well, Drake, but I do know you’re not a cruel man. Not toward non-dragons, that is,” she answered.

“If I am, it is because my grand-mère devoted herself to the well-being of mortals around her, and tried hard to get me to do the same,” he answered, uncomfortable with the praise she had inadvertently given him. “As it happens, I did give the woman the coins I had with me. I left her still weeping over her spilled dinner, but at least she held the few coins I had. The shame of my actions haunted me, however. I could not bear to admit to my grandmother—with whom I was living—what I’d done. The following morning, I loaded a wagon with goods and tried to find the mortal woman, but she had disappeared. A plague was in Buda then, so it’s likely she succumbed to that. I do not know. I never found her.”

“Ouch,” Aisling said, nodding slowly. “You never got your moment of redemption. I take it this still rankles even though it’s been literally hundreds of years?”

“What rankles, as you put it, is the fact that I was never able to make reparation to the woman for my thoughtless actions. In the scheme of things, the life of one woman and her children do not matter overmuch, but ...” He braced for shame to lash him with its barbed hooks, but to his surprise, it had lessened a bit.

“But you are not so callous as to buy into that sort of misanthropic attitude,” Aisling finished for him.

He inclined his head. “It is a shame I bear nonetheless. Through my own arrogance I harmed a mortal woman, a being weaker than me, one my grandmother would say demanded my protection because of that weakness. And I treated her with contempt and ridicule.”

“You know, if you were any other person, I’d say you were fishing for a compliment. Or at least, if not a compliment, then reassurance that what you did was not so bad, and you made up for it.” Aisling put her hand on his leg and gave him a quick pat. “But I suspect instead you’ve internalized everything, and are letting it fester.”

“Fester is a good description,” he agreed. “Although I don’t seek redemption in your eyes, if that’s what you’re thinking. I want you to understand me better, even though it is painful to bare my shame with you.”

She shook her head, rising even as she spoke. “I appreciate that, I really do. And if I had a soul-searing admission to make, other than the stupidity of me being eighteen and marrying the first beach bum who flexed at me, I’d reciprocate, but it doesn’t mean I’m going to run into your open arms. I think our wires are crossed, Drake. You believe I’m meant to be your trusty sidekick, and I think I’m a main character who has a whole new world to explore and learn about. And I’m going to do that.”

“Are the two things mutually exclusive?” he asked, slowly getting to his feet, as well. Oddly, he felt lighter, as if his admission had healed some of the pain that remained for four hundred years.

She hesitated at the open doorway before disappearing into it. “You tell me.”

He had no answer to that. Not one he wanted to give her.

The dream slipped away, leaving him feeling bereft once more.