A Shade of Dragon Read online

  “Oooh,” Dad responded. “Sounds like a real lady-killer. How old is this guy?”

  “Hm. I don’t know,” I was forced to admit.

  “Where’s he from?”

  “Some… other… country. He lives on our strip, though.”

  “Oh? He lives at a house on our beach?”

  I faltered. I’d never seen him go into that house. In fact, I’d never seen its lights. “I think so,” I said.

  “Huh. That’s odd. The other house on the beach is owned by a young married couple. The one at the far end of the beach was for sale, the last time I checked. But who knows? Maybe some enterprising college boy snatched it up with a little help from his old dad.” Dad winked. “You said he’s coming by to pick you up tomorrow night?” His eyes crinkled into a frown.

  “That’s right.” Why did I have a bad feeling about this? “Do you want to do the old-fashioned father thing and meet him?”

  At this, Dad raised his eyebrows and examined me. “Uh, yes, I do. I met Andrew, didn’t I?”

  “I guess.” I laughed nervously. “When he was, like, six.”

  I’d never introduced my father to a prospective suitor before, and I could only imagine how that would go. Oh, God. And Zada would be there too.

  “No reason to be nervous. A boy finally caught your eye!” Dad cheered, clapping me on the back. “He must be something else.”

  My mind turned to the way Theon had dried my hair by breathing into my mouth… the glimpse of him I’d caught in the strange pendant around my neck… and the fact that he visited the house by climbing the roof rather than the stairs…

  “Oh, yeah,” I answered. “He is.”

  * * *

  On the night of the twenty-seventh, I was waiting nervously in the den while Dad and Zada lounged nearby, watching a documentary about the oil industry. It was cold, but I’d dressed in gray cable-knit tights, a warm blue sweater dress, and a thick green-and-blue plaid coat. My hair was loosely braided down one shoulder, my makeup light and my only piece of jewelry the crystal pendant. I kept fondling it around my neck, glancing down at it and then away. The sun had set. Where was he?

  Dad occasionally glanced at the door, or the clock, too. I knew he was wondering the same thing.

  When a knock came at the door, I yelped and shot to my feet. “That’s him.” Please don’t embarrass me, I added silently. I moved to open the door, but Dad was off the couch. He snatched the doorknob from under my hand and twisted, pulling the door wide.

  Theon loomed over both of us, dressed in black dress pants, as luxurious as satin, and a matching black sweater. He vibrated with power, his broad silhouette practically filling the door frame. He stepped inside and extended his hand for my father. “Hello, sir. It’s my pleasure to make your acquaintance. My name is Theon, Theon Aena of Iphras.”

  Theon Aena, I repeated to myself.

  Dad was gaping up at Theon. You would’ve thought Theon had tentacles, the way Dad was staring. Blush crept into my cheeks. Dad!

  Zada cropped up out of nowhere, smiling winsomely at my date. “The pleasure is all ours,” she said, offering Theon her hand. She batted her eyelashes.

  Dad clapped his mouth shut, glared at his fiancée, and then examined my date. It was time for the next level of embarrassment. “You’re an awfully big boy, Mr. Aena. How old are you?”

  “I will be twenty-one during your summer,” Theon answered.

  I winced.

  “Our summer?” Dad echoed. “What are you, Australian?”

  “Twenty-one is such a fun year,” Zada interjected. It was the first time I’d ever been grateful for her presence.

  “I hail from the shores of Iphras,” Theon replied, ignoring Zada’s contribution. “Our island is small compared to this land. I wouldn’t expect you to know of my home country.”

  “Try me,” Dad said.

  “Dad!” I hissed, mortified.

  “We call them The Hearthlands,” Theon replied, polite but firm. “I’m a prince there.”

  Even Zada giggled. Zada, who had actually paid for classes in astral projection earlier this year, thought that Theon was unbelievable.

  “A prince?” Dad guffawed shamelessly. “Really?” He looked over at me and shook his head. “Penelope, you can’t believe this tripe, can you?”

  “Dad!” I pleaded, close to tears. Granted, I’d never heard any of this before, but—did I believe Theon’s ‘tripe?’ I guessed I did. I didn’t want to not believe in him.

  “No way, honey,” Dad said, shaking his head. “This is the kind of stuff older guys tell young girls all the time. I’m your father. I have to step in at some point.” He glanced up at Theon. “I apologize for wasting your time, Mr. Aena, but my daughter is not going out with you tonight.”

  Theon grimaced and nodded. “Fair enough, sir,” he said.

  “No!” I cried, but Dad didn’t even look at me. Theon did. Theon looked at me and smiled with an acute misery. He reached forward and touched my cheek.

  “It was enough to meet you,” he said, though his remorse was palpable. “You’ve restored my faith, Nell; perhaps this world holds something for me yet.”

  “Awww,” Zada groaned.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Dad grumbled. “Lots of guys know how to talk.”

  Theon cast a glower in Dad’s direction. Although he was happy to acquiesce to my father’s request, he wouldn’t dignify the doubts addressing his honesty.

  “Farewell, family,” he bade us, bowing slightly. “Merry Christmas.” With that, he turned, opened the door, and ducked out onto the porch, closing the door behind him, leaving me standing there, my mouth hanging open and my furious eyes on my father.

  Chapter 21: Nell

  “What the hell, Dad!” I flung my hands into the air more violently than I had ever gestured—and that was speaking as a member of the debate team. “You’re going to kick a perfectly nice guy out of our house because he’s, what, foreign?”

  “He says he’s a prince, Nell.”

  “Some countries still have princes, Dad,” I grumbled, massaging my temples. As furious as I was with Dad, I also kind of agreed with him. “In an impoverished country, he might just function as a figurehead... It’s not that big of a deal to be a prince, when you think about it like that.”

  “You don’t even know him,” Dad said.

  “This from the man who trots out a new girlfriend every time I see him? This was going to be our first date! No, I don’t know him yet! But I would like to! That was what the date was for! And if being from some country you don’t know is that big of a deal, even though he treated you with perfect respect, I’ll just go down to the country club and dig up one of the boring cokehead sons of your associates,” I snarled, shoving past them both and toward the front door.

  Dad called after me. “Come on, Nell—”

  The door slamming behind me cut him off.

  I emerged onto the wind-chafed beach. This strip of beach was barren. I didn’t see Theon anywhere. Dammit! He’d only just left. He couldn’t have gotten far. I could still catch up with him. He’d probably returned home.

  Setting off, composing an apology in my head, I strode past the beach house of the young couple. I knew that guy wasn’t Theon. The beach house in the corner remained dark, as always, but maybe Theon just used candles a lot. And he kept them far away from the windows. Or maybe he was never home. After all, he hardly knew America. It must’ve been very exciting for him. Anyway, he was there, because if he wasn’t there, well, where was he? And where the hell had he come from that night, and why did he know that cave so well, and how could he see me when I was alone, unless, in the name of all that was holy, he was the new owner of that beach house?

  But, as I pushed myself up the weed-choked dune between the second and third beach houses, my heart sank. It was just too dark. This home hadn’t borne the footsteps of an owner in a year or two. The sign at the end of the lot confirmed it: “SHOWN BY APPOINTMENT,” and a phone number.

&
nbsp; I sighed to myself and turned around. If I was crazy, I’d call the realtor and demand that they confirm Theon’s identity for me. But… I wasn’t that crazy. The realtor would probably assume it was a prank call. I made my way back down the beach, wondering what visiting prince wandered the private beaches of Maine for his Christmas—no, no—the private caves of Maine. Who did that? The roar and hiss of the ocean echoed back my frustration and my confusion. I wanted so badly to just be able to love him—but what the hell?

  I had only just reached the desolate shoreline when a strange noise drew my attention: a shriek. A bird’s shriek.

  I whirled, and swayed. The bird before me was no bird I had ever seen in my life.

  Its feet were the size of my arms, talons extended. Its thighs were thick, feathered—and flickered with tiny bits of electricity. The bird’s torso was dramatically female, in the same way that a comic book character could be. Its feathered torso was curved, its breasts nearly human. Its withered arms were tucked near the torso and tapered to slender claws. Behind it flapped massive wings—my assumption at the widow’s walk had been wrong. This wingspan wasn’t three meters. It was closer to five. And the face… the face…

  The face looked nothing like a bird at all. The face was human. It was almost an attractive face, but its inhumanity robbed it of that. The lines were harsh, the mouth splayed to reveal strange teeth, sharp and small.

  The beast shrieked again and snatched at me with its claws. I screamed as loud as I could. Dad still had to be awake. Wouldn’t he have worried where I’d gone? What about Theon? Had he driven away that quickly?

  The talons wrapped around my arm and the other set dug into my shoulder. Pulses of electricity laced from the wounds. I cried out as the creature pulled me off the beach itself and into the air. I wailed. This thing was going to kill me. It was so big that I was almost too small to even register as its prey. Cryptozoologists had no idea how right they were. What would the story of my death become, after all? Nothing but a handful of eyewitness accounts, blurry photos, and a missing girl whose body was never found.

  Oh, my God. I lived in a world where Zada understood reality better than I did.

  The beast didn’t carry me far. On the top of the mountain overlooking the sea, a cupped formation dominated the pinnacle. The formation consisted of assorted materials, soft and pliable, packed together. Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no, no. This was a nest. And how many of them had I seen in the sky the other night? Four?

  The creature dropped me into the nest and I landed with an oof, rolling onto my side and curling into a ball. But the creature didn’t seem that intent on killing me. Those talons could have ripped me open in a matter of seconds. But the bird-woman landed—her feathers were a mottled auburn and chestnut—and she hardly looked at me. She fluttered to the ledge of the nest and gazed out across the beach, just leaving me balled up in her nest, gasping for breath, trying to figure out exactly what… what was going on?

  Then I saw what the bird-woman was scouting off in the distance. Approaching silhouettes in the sky. I didn’t bother to look closely. I was certain they were the other three members of her flock. Maybe they hunted together and shared meals.

  I began to crawl backward as silently as possible off of the nest. It was a long way down from the top of this cliff, but I had to try something. Of course, they could pluck me easily off the rocks and bring me back, but—I had to try. And something told me that simply saying, “Excuse me?” wouldn’t work, no matter how human their faces seemed.

  I tumbled backward out of the nest and a shriek rose over my fallen body. The bird-woman hovered over me, her black eyes glittering with malevolence.

  Chapter 22: Nell

  A blur of brown and white surged from behind me and became airborne, tackling the massive beast to the ground. I screamed again and shot to my feet. It was Theon.

  He wrestled the giant bird to the floor of its nest, but more were arriving. I looked behind me at the steep, jagged decline of the cliff. Theon must have heard, or seen, and climbed it to follow us. But I didn’t know if I could. I could barely move at all, in fact, except for a tremble which ran through my every muscle.

  Theon reared back and kicked the beast hard in the face.

  “Your battle is already lost,” the bird-woman wheezed, cocking her head and grinning. Her sharp teeth were tiny.

  “Explain yourself, harpy.” Theon pinned one of her wings beneath his moccasin. “With whom have you been consorting?”

  The harpy whistled a tune back at him.

  I gasped as bone snapped beneath Theon’s heel, and the harpy screamed into the night sky.

  The other three harpies descended onto the nest. One of them was snowy white and speckled with coal spots; another was as black as obsidian. The third bore the same coloration as the broken-winged one, and she immediately went to her sister while the other two swirled forward and cawed at Theon.

  “Ladies, ladies, I mean you no harm,” Theon promised, bowing low to the ground. As he did so, he dug his right hand into their nest and whipped a log at them. It struck the white one and sent her tumbling into the nest; the black one fluttered overhead, out of reach. Theon wasted no time in disarming the bird. His left hand dove into the nest and extracted a length of hose. He wrapped it around her neck and the white bird-woman thrashed with such despair, I almost intervened on her behalf. “Tell me why!”

  He relented in his brutality with the speckled bird, and she hobbled away from him, calling out in a wounded warble to the others.

  “Tell me why,” he said, moving forward. The harpies shifted away from him, watching him closely. The black one wouldn’t even come back down. “Tell me why you have attacked my mate.” He flung his hand back to indicate me and my eyebrows jumped into my hair. His mate? We’d only kissed once! It was a strange way to say “girlfriend,” I guessed—or perhaps it was an error in translation, and he didn’t know what mate… meant, here.

  “Tell me now, and you will fear nothing from my hand,” Theon promised the wary women. The white one, having regained her strength, fluttered to the two brown-and-red harpies and helped lift the broken-winged one into the air. “If you do not tell me, I cannot promise to be kind.”

  The broken-winged one lurched forward, fighting her sisters to tangle with Theon one more time. “You’ll see soon enough,” she crowed.

  Theon kept himself between me and the harpies. He lunged for the offensive one and all three moved away in a flurry of wings. All four took to the sky and left Theon staring after them.

  “Augh!” he cried into the sky. “Damn you, ignoble monsters!” Leaning down, he wedged his moccasin against the ledge of the nest and gave it a thrust toward the ledge of the cliff. With two more kicks, the large basin toppled out of view, and I could only imagine how it came apart on the rocks below.

  Panting, Theon turned to face me again for the first time since this horrible nightmare had begun. I stared at him so bleakly, so helplessly, that I didn’t feel any words even needed to be said.

  He crossed the space between us in four strides and went down on his knees, cupping my arms. He stripped away my jacket to examine the burnt puncture wounds on my arm. I welcomed the heady warmth of his fingertips. I wasn’t sure if I was going into shock, or if temperatures were seriously hypothermic up here. He didn’t try to drag me up from my knees. “Tell me you are all right,” he pleaded. “Penelope? Tell me anything at all.” His eyes sought mine, glowing.

  “What…” I gulped. “Was… that?”

  “Look into my eyes, Nell. Look into my eyes and just focus there for a moment.”

  I took a shuddering breath and latched onto his golden eyes with relief. They seemed to get deeper and deeper as I stared into them, our surroundings getting darker, fading away.

  “Theon,” I whispered. During the brief spell I’d been under, he had brought me to a standing position with him, and the tear which had been cresting my lower eyelid had now darted down my cheek and its track was now froz
en. “You’ve got to start giving me some answers here.”

  His thumb brushed my cheek. “I will,” he swore, so close that his warmth insulated me from the eddies of freezing wind. So close that I smelled the fire and leather and salt crackling in his aura. “Let me just have these little moments with you before things get… harder.” Theon’s golden eyes burned into mine. “These are the moments I live for.” One finger traced down my cheek and across my lips, cracking them apart slightly as he did so. My eyelashes fluttered closed as his lips came against mine again, but this time felt nothing like the last. Rather than drowning in some kind of inferno, I felt gently prodded by a halo of candlelight. His fingers moved through my hair, down my neck, over my shoulders, along my back, and onto my hips.

  I poured into the negative space between us, craving more, but he relented in his pursuit. “This is a dangerous place to be. We know someone is watching us, and there is nowhere better for all eyes to see. If they can find reinforcements, the harpies will be back.”

  Were birds that well-organized? But then some of the disjointed moments from the earlier scuffle returned to me. “You were talking to them. You were talking to them about their use for me, and about who they had ‘consorted’ with… Theon.” I shook my head and grappled with the words. “You had some kind of business with those bird creatures.”

  “Harpies,” he corrected me.

  I laughed a shaky laugh. “Right. Harpies.”

  “They are not common in my country or in yours. Noted for being vicious. Prefer to hunt and fight in packs… which gives them a high likelihood of engaging in an alliance with any other interested—and resourced—party.”

  “An alliance?” I echoed weakly. My mind gave way beneath the sheer weight of this paradigm shift. Wouldn’t it have been so much easier if they had just been some undiscovered species of bird-monkeys?