A Shade of Dragon (12 page)

I
marched over the sand
, invigorated by the first time I could ever remember having stood up to Michelle. Theon said nothing. We had almost reached my dad’s car by the time he tugged at my hand and spun me to face him. “What was that, Nell?” he asked. “You can’t pretend that was nothing.”

“What do you mean?” Apparently, I could.

“The last time I saw you, you accused me of being a ‘con artist’. You said that the same pendant of which you made use tonight was only a trinket to woo naïve Earth women, and that I would only be interested in making premarital love to you; and yet now… tonight… you told your friend—and the whole of this town, it seems—that there are stranger things in this world than she has ever seen.” He shook his head. “I came because you activated the pendant, which is only meant for emergencies. I thought you needed me.” He frowned. “Even though it seems that you do not.”

“I do,” I assured him, sliding my hands into his and gripping tightly. “I do need you, Theon. I just didn’t know it until you were gone.”

He extracted his hand from my own and cupped my cheek gently. “I was never gone,” he whispered, descending to bestow me with a kiss. His mouth moved deeply against mine, and the black asphalt of Michelle’s driveway fell from beneath my feet. A torrent of fire scooped us into the air, and we were carried to another world without time or place. I was only vaguely aware of his fingers running through my hair, of his body moving against mine, and of the motion of my feet and hands.

When he slowly pulled away, his warm lips departing from my own tingling ones, the stars overhead hesitated to fall into place. Eventually, the world around us reassembled, and I found that we had migrated several feet. We were now directly in front of my father’s Mercedes. Theon must have carried me.

The sight of the car reminded me of real life. I’d promised my dad that I would return shortly from the party and spend my last night in town with him.

My last night in town…

Because, in the morning, I had a flight back to DC. To Mom. To the Shenandoah Institute. And, in another two days’ time, school would begin again. The mill of exams, homework, the waiting game for internship applications to be returned in the mail. What had once seemed so exciting was now hopelessly dull.

“Theon,” I breathed, gazing up at him. “I have to leave tomorrow. I’m going back to my mother. The District of Columbia. Remember?”

He nodded gravely. “I do recall.”

I forced myself to say the next words, jammed in my throat. “What’s going to happen to us if I leave here?”

“Nothing. If need be, I will follow you there, too. I came to this country, Penelope, in search of one woman… And I believe that I’ve found her.”

“Theon.” I couldn’t stop saying his name, as if conjuring him again and again, binding him to my side, ascertaining that he would never leave. “I think…” I paused, swallowing hard. “I think I’m falling in love with you.”

At this, he lowered himself again, and the real world only remained with us because I could feel the steel of the Mercedes passenger door pressing against my back, pinning me harder and harder to Theon’s insistent body. I moaned and the kiss transmuted like lead to gold, becoming wild, desperate, thirsty. His lips traced my throat with force, and we entered a rhythm, bound together as tightly as we were, as if to mimic one heart pumping.

When the powerful spell finally released us and our bodies were able to separate, even the wintry air not penetrating our bubble of heat, I stared up at him dazedly, feeling like I was on drugs.

“You must be the one,” he told me. “I know it to be true. But…”

I felt a ripping sensation down the center of my chest and my mouth fell open, as if he had knocked the air from my lungs. “But?” Even though I’d walked out on him only a few days ago, I couldn’t think about losing him again. Those two days had been hard enough. “But what?”

Theon sighed. “But there is more,” he explained. “There is more, and you reacted so poorly to the mere beginning of the story… I hesitate to finish telling it. I do not want to lose you again.”

“You won’t,” I said, daring to reach up and brush my hand along his sculpted cheek. He was forever touching me, but I hesitated to touch him, as his body cut such an intimidating shape. I couldn’t resist this time. “You can tell me whatever you need to say.”

Theon shook his head and gazed at me with great seriousness. “We must leave this place,” he said. “We cannot speak of these things here, in the company of such small minds.”

“Okay.” I frowned up at him and gestured to the Mercedes against which I leaned. “We can take my dad’s car somewhere private and talk there. Okay? I’ll drive.”

Theon leaned down again and brushed his lips lightly to mine. Even the slightest taste of him sent me onto my toes again, butterflies rioting in my belly.

“Let us return to the beach where your father stays,” Theon suggested. “That will be a good place for what I must show you.”

He walked me to the other side of the vehicle and opened its door for me, even though it was technically my car and I was the one driving. I sat down in the driver’s seat, thanking him, and he crossed to the other side of the vehicle and entered the passenger side door.

We fastened our seatbelts and pulled onto the road again, but I couldn’t even pretend to be focused on the signs and the turns. I had to slam on my brakes just to stop myself from charging through a red light at an intersection. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it.

How much deeper could the rabbit hole go?

W
hen we reached
the turn toward the string of beach houses, I hesitated and chose not to park the Mercedes in my dad’s garage. He would know I was home then, and I couldn’t risk him finding us. I knew that whatever was to come next was vastly important to Theon, and important to my relationship with him, if I was going to have one. With this in mind, I turned the wheel and propelled us into the driveway of the vacant beach house, parking where loose gravel transformed into sand. It was a bleak and freezing New Year’s Eve, and no lights spilled down onto the beach from the houses overhead. All was quiet, and silent, and lonesome.

Theon and I climbed from the vehicle without a word. “It’s fitting that you would park here,” Theon commented.

“Why did you think that this would be a better place than Michelle’s driveway?” I had to admit that this made me nervous. We needed to go to a special place for this next part. I’d already seen harpies, and a magical mirror. What more could there possibly be to reveal? “Where do you want to go, anyway?”

We crested the beach, which sprawled before us in monochromatic swaths: the gray sand, the black water, the dark gray sky. It had looked like this on the night we’d met. My first night in Beggar’s Hole. It had snowed. On our right was the craggy mountainside from which he’d rescued me, and on our left was the remainder of the strip, including my father’s new place.

Theon was quiet.

“I want to go into the cave,” he told me.

I balked at this idea. The cave? The same place where I had almost died that night? I glanced out toward the sea to gauge whether the tide was high or low, but who was I kidding? I was no oceanographer, and it was dark.

Theon grabbed my hand in his own, startling me, and pulled me down toward the shore with him. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I would never let harm come to you. I didn’t on that night, and I won’t now.”

He moved down along the beach, toward the cave, and I let him take me, however reluctant I was feeling. We reached the damp sands, and I realized that the rocks on which I had sat that fateful night were exposed, as they had been when I’d first taken my seat, and the snow had begun to fall. The tide must have been out. The rocks jutted up from the wet sand, and we needed to swing our legs over them, crawling across others, entering the narrow slit of the cave’s entrance. In spite of how dark and cold it was, it seemed laughable to me now that I wasn’t being choked by wave after wave of frigid saltwater. When the cave was dry, it was filled with stalagmites, yes, but easily navigable.

Theon gripped my hips and easily hoisted me up onto the stone shelving which led deeper still into the cave, the same shelf which had created the basin where I had almost drowned. He walked deeper still into the cavern, holding me beneath one protective arm as we walked, until he paused and released me. I heard a rough exhale and fire suddenly filled a pit of dry kindling. My eyes bulged. In an instant, a light source had been brewed from nothing, and cast its oily yellow color across the walls. I recognized this place. The bed of feather and stone. The fire. The arched ceilings. He had brought me to the same place I had regained consciousness on the night we met.

“Theon.” Even a mere whisper in this cave echoed with clarity. “Why are we here again?”

I needed him to show me. I was afraid it would be too much; I needed to see it and know that it wasn’t.

Theon ignored my question, which wasn’t like him at all. Instead, he turned his back on me, shrugged away his woolen jacket, and let it fall into a puddle at his feet. Next, he skimmed his loose cotton shirt over his head, revealing his chiseled and muscular back. I won’t lie. My mouth went a little dry, and even after everything I’d seen and been told to expect, I was shocked to see caps of glossy black scale on both of his shoulder blades. I remembered vividly how he had resisted my exploring hands on a previous night as they had crept beneath his shirt toward his shoulders. He hadn’t trusted me yet, not like he trusted me now. Not like we trusted each other now.

He didn’t stop at his shirt, however. He unfastened and removed his pants next, until every article of clothing he had previously worn had been shed to the floor. My mind wandered to other things, and I forgot exactly what he was here to show me…

Until spines erupted from his shoulder blades simultaneously, and I bit my lower lip to keep from crying out. I wasn’t afraid of him—it just looked like it must have hurt. But he made no sound whatsoever as claws exploded from his fingertips and toes, and his body hunched and melted and ballooned all at once. His hands and feet became broad, clawed talons, shiny and obsidian. Ebony scales coursed over his skin, laced in gold, and leathery, jointed wings unfolded from his back. They, too, were black with golden undersides. A sharp, pointed tail sprouted from the base of his spine and unraveled across the length of the cavern. I sprang away from it with a yelp as it slashed into the air and dropped onto the ground at my feet, ultimately harmless. At least, it was harmless to me. I was certain that this gigantic monster, for lack of a better word, could do serious damage to a foe, if he set his mind to it. Of course, this wasn’t some monster, and I knew that. Even as I stared at him in dawning comprehension and waning horror, it struck me: this was Theon. I couldn’t fear him. I couldn’t judge him. This was the man I’d fallen for.

Part of me—a very superficial layer of me—reacted to this with resistance. On the face of the matter, it was shocking and even dangerous. We didn’t see people transform into beasts. We didn’t trust beings which could easily strike us down. This kind of stuff didn’t happen here, and if it did, it was probably quickly ended by the local government. The alternative was the stuff of fantasy novels. But then again, we didn’t see harpies either; we didn’t see any creature from those alleged YouTube videos in which Zada ardently believed. But perhaps reality was not so mundane and explicable as the evening news would have me believe.

A much deeper part of me—the very core of me—couldn’t be anything but impressed with his power and glory. He filled this entire cavern with all the sinuous grace of an anaconda. His scales glistened with his every movement, as if he was wearing sequins like a second skin. In spite of his sheer size, he moved with an elegance which he had belied in his human form while picking his way down that mountainside with me in his arms. It wasn’t the only familiar thing about him in the dragon form; there were also the eyes. His gigantic, amber eyes still gleamed with the innate trust and dignity to which I had always felt drawn.

His angular head leveled itself and he peered at me, prompting some kind of reaction.

“You’re beautiful,” I told him. What else could I say? I wasn’t one for dramatic proclamations, in all honesty. But if I was, I would’ve told him that I’d already said everything I needed to say back at Michelle’s driveway.

I had come to trust him… and that sense of safety couldn’t be revoked, even by the reptilian skin which papered his body now.

Theon transformed back into his human self, and there we were, staring at each other. His body shone with sweat and his eyes trained on mine with a peculiar intensity. He was still nude, now facing me, and I allowed my eyes to slip over his body and examine the rest of him. He didn’t seem to mind, or even notice; perhaps he considered his body to belong to me now. He stepped forward and my eyes darted back to his as if I’d been caught, but he didn’t acknowledge my gaze. Rather, he took my palm and placed it onto his bare chest, so I could feel the thunder of his heartbeat and the slickness of his flesh. In fact, heat was radiating off of him at a rate I’d never felt before, and that was saying something. His skin almost burned to the touch.

Suddenly motivated to express my love, my devotion, I sprang onto the tips of my toes and wrapped my fingers around the back of his thick neck, pulling him down to my lips and reveling in another salty, burning kiss. His arms wrapped around my body and held me close and I was in an inferno again, I was battered by waves again.

When we separated, I felt dizzy, drained, and satisfied. The steamy pressure of his body receded from me, and I realized that even gripping me in his arms had caused a light sweat to spring up on my flesh.

“I don’t care,” I promised him. “It’s wonderful.”

Theon’s eyes glowed brighter, even though the smile which curved his lips was small. “There is, then, one final thing to show you,” he said. “Allow me.”

“You don’t have to,” I blurted, then blushed furiously. “I mean, well, uh, where are we going?”

Theon glanced over his shoulder at me, and I tore my eyes from his perfect hindquarters.

“You’ll see,” he said. “You’ll see it all soon enough, Penelope. Here. Hold this for me.” He passed his attire into my arms. “And wait for me outside.”