Dragon Fires Everywhere, page 3
He’s tall. And broad. Muscled in ways it would be rude to study more closely. It’s as if he’s still carved, only now in flesh, not wood.
More importantly, he’s still here, not fading away into dream or imagination.
I take a breath and I can feel it in my lungs, laced with smoke so it tickles, and there’s no way that’s a dream.
And I think, very distinctly, Oh. At last. It’s him.
It hits me so hard I don’t know how I’m still standing. It’s him. It’s all my daydreams come to glorious life. Passion and loud, wild sex and the way my friends take care of each other and life-altering kisses and intensity and him—
But before I can take that on, my friends appear. My coven. The Riverwood, the new leaders of the witching world.
All six of them land around me, looking alarmed and pissed and ready to fight. They look around, as if searching out an enemy—
“No one’s here,” I manage to croak out through the thunder inside me.
“Georgie! You’re home early.” Emerson tosses her arms around me and squeezes. “We felt a very strange disturbance and came . . .”
She trails off as she seems to realize there’s someone else in the foyer with us.
“Did you bring home . . . a guy?” Rebekah asks, sounding impressed.
“A hot guy at that,” Ellowyn mutters to Rebekah, and I try to take comfort in the fact that since she can’t lie, Azrael is not only real, but really and truly that hot. “Can you say upgrade?”
“I’m right here,” Zander complains.
“Yeah, yeah. You’re hot too.” She waves him off, one hand resting on her ever-expanding belly. She smiles at me. “So, are you going to introduce us?”
But before I can think of even one word to say, because oh it’s the dragon newel post come to life seems like not enough, Nicholas Frost steps forward.
The unknowable former immortal witch turned Riverwood coven member narrowly regards Azrael—apparently not just a newel post any longer.
Then they speak the same word at the same time, fury and hate sparking off each other.
“You.”
4
“You know a dragon?” I ask Frost. Incredulously.
“A dragon?” Emerson demands, casting a suspicious glance at Azrael. Then back at me. “What do you mean, a dragon?”
I mean things I don’t know how to put into words, and I don’t even try. I look at Azrael, who stands there, notably not looking like a dragon. He’s dressed like a regular guy—if that guy happened to be that tall, that cut, and that ridiculously hot. He’s also lounging against the far wall instead of filling the whole foyer, examining his hand as if it’s of tremendous fascination to him.
Which is fair, because it’s not a human-looking hand like the rest of him. It was a humanish hand a moment ago, I’m sure it was, but now it’s a claw. A dangerous-looking claw, though it’s smaller than the whole talony thing I saw on him earlier.
It’s clearly meant to intimidate Frost.
I’m not sure it works, or if Frost is even capable of being intimidated in the first place, but if they know each other . . .
“Georgie, I hate to break it to you, but that’s just a guy,” Zander tells me, gently.
Like I’m fragile.
I want to scowl at him, but Emerson has moved over to the shattered newel post. She touches one sharp shard. “What happened here?”
“Well.” I saw the whole thing transpire, but I still don’t have the words to describe it. To explain it. Certainly not in a way that’s going to make sense. And that’s not getting into how it feels. I glance at Azrael. In his . . . man form, I guess. His absurdly attractive man form—but I tell myself to focus.
Because he was a dragon there for a few minutes.
I saw it. It’s real.
Dragons.
Are.
Real.
His mouth curves into a smile, and that may be a man’s gorgeous face, but the grin is all dragon. Everyone sees it. I can tell, because they stiffen. “Greetings, witches. You can call me Azrael. Don’t worry, I won’t eat anyone.” His dark gold gaze slides to Frost. “Anyone important, anyway.”
“Dragons are a scourge,” Frost says coldly. “So much so, I forgot they even existed.”
“Is that why you killed so many of us?”
“I never killed a dragon.” The affront is clear in his tone.
“My mistake.” Azrael’s smile shifts, but not to anything remotely humanish. And I have to wonder if he actually looks . . . hungry. “Unicorns were your victims of choice.”
Frost frowns. He doesn’t immediately reject Azrael’s accusation, which is . . . not great, but he doesn’t seem to agree, either. “I don’t remember unicorns . . .”
He rubs at his temple. Becoming mortal did a number on his memory, and as much as I mourn the access to all that firsthand knowledge, he did it to save Rebekah. To make sure we all lived through our second pubertatum test this summer when the Joywood was ready to kill us off, and almost had enough support to do it.
“Let’s take a step back,” Emerson says, eyeing the way Rebekah moves closer to Frost, as if fully prepared to take the newcomer on herself. “You’re Azrael? As in the dragon in the newel post? But now a real dragon. A dragon Frost knows because he was alive back before dragons went extinct?”
Emerson is clearly trying to put all this information together. She’s doing a better job of it than me. I keep getting stuck on dark gold and all those muscles.
“He looks like any average guy to me,” Zander says, apparently not stuck.
But he’s also wrong. Azrael does not look like any average anything, but that’s really neither here nor there. I decide Zander’s lucky the dragon ignores him.
“Extinct?” Azrael scoffs at the word Emerson used. “Hardly.”
“Not extinct then,” Emerson corrects herself, but she’s not patronizing him. She’s trying to understand. “You . . . became a newel post? And then a man? But how did a newel post become a dragon?”
“A better question would be, how did a dragon become a newel post?” Azrael returns. He pushes off the wall, and his claw is a hand again. “Not all of us could be killed off.” He slides a pointed look at Frost. “Some of us were just cursed.”
“And by us you mean . . . dragons?” Jacob asks from where he stands, solid and strong, next to Emerson.
“I mean magical creatures of all kinds.” Azrael gestures upward, and we all look at the grand foyer’s mermaid chandelier. A chandelier I have seen just about every day my whole life and have never paid that much attention to. Lights, crystals, a vaguely nautical vibe, sure. But that’s not magical. Is it?
“You’re telling me there’s an actual mermaid trapped in that chandelier?” Zander asks, peering up with interest. Maybe too much interest. When Ellowyn elbows him in the stomach, the chandelier seems to dance.
Azrael only shrugs. “Naturally. Though in Melisande’s case, maybe that’s for the best. She can be so melodramatic.”
As we watch, the crystals on the chandelier . . . shimmer.
“So someone cursed you into our newel post?” Rebekah asks, not as interested in the shimmering. Likely because Azrael was making threats toward her beloved, however vague. “And a mermaid into our chandelier?”
“Not someone. The Joywood. They wiped out who they could, including their own.” Azrael looks pointedly at Frost. “Then they cursed the rest of us. They couldn’t actually exterminate the most powerful among us, but they could trap us in place. So they did.” Another shrug, though there’s nothing lazy about it this time. “Assholes.”
The Joywood. Of course, the Joywood. I try to sift through everything I learned about dragons, mermaids, unicorns, and all the rest of the various magical creatures that supposedly once populated witchdom. The things I learned when I was young and could sneak such tales under my mother’s nose. She thought it was pointless to worry about extinct beings—and suggested that maybe they had never existed at all, that these were just more fantasy stories that people told children.
I thought I remembered them. Which I didn’t. I couldn’t.
Most witches accept that magical creatures once lived side by side with witches, but long ago. Maybe back when Byzantium was a thing, not recently enough that the Joywood could have killed and cursed them and installed them in various artistic flourishes around a house.
But when did the Joywood actually start their reign of terror? They’ve made sure to obscure our understanding. Once I unlock all of the witchlore archives, I’ll know. I’ll finally know all the Joywood’s dirty secrets, because the archives aren’t like human history that changes with the victor of every war. They are many things, but one of those things is a neutral collection of every last fact.
“How did this curse break, exactly?” Emerson asks, studying the broken newel post again.
Azrael turns his gaze to me, his eyes direct and rimmed in that gold while otherwise black like onyx. “You tell me,” he says.
“How would I know?”
He doesn’t break that intense stare. “You’re the one who did it.”
I didn’t do anything. I was just sitting there feeling pathetic and . . . “All I did was . . .” I glance back at the stairs. At the newel post that’s now in smithereens.
“What did you do?” Emerson presses when I don’t immediately explain. But I don’t want to tell them the whole story. It’s embarrassing, and they’ll get that poor Georgie look that has been ramping up since I started dating Sage.
Who I’m no longer dating. A topic we can broach later. Much later.
You know, once we figure out how there’s a dragon in the foyer.
“I was reading that book.” I point at it, because it’s still sitting there on the stairs where I dropped it.
“I thought I had that book,” Ellowyn says, tilting her head slightly, like she expects the book to rush at her.
“I did too,” I tell her. “But it was sitting there, and I just . . .” I don’t want to tell them, but I remember that I’m Georgie Pendell, who has been known to chase moonbeams and dance skyclad in the back garden, because I long ago decided that if I couldn’t be perfect then I might as well embrace the weird. Before I tried to grow up, anyway. And still I use that fantasy girl as a weapon or deflection when I need to.
It’s better than touching that live-wire thing inside me that keeps reminding me it’s him.
I smile. “It wanted me to read it. Out loud. I think maybe it was lonely.”
I hope they think about that, a lonely book, rather than why ditzy, airy me was wafting about by myself in Wilde House on Thanksgiving.
Meanwhile, I think about what I actually said out loud. Words about love. Promises. No spell. Nothing magical. Just the old words of some fairy tale.
And I’m pretty sure I said them all with as much disdain as I could manage.
I push on, keeping ahead of any potentially embarrassing questions or my own traitorously pounding heart and giddy head. “Then everything started to shake.” I explain Azrael’s sudden appearance in detail, because I know Emerson will demand it if I don’t. “I don’t think I actually did anything. Reading the book out loud has to be a coincidence.”
“A book is a spell even a human can cast,” Azrael says, as if it’s simple enough. And as if he’s chiding me a little while he says it. “A universal magic.”
“I . . .” I say that all the time. Exactly that, and especially to witches who get sniffy about humans.
But Azrael has turned away from me. From all of us. He’s walking for the door.
“If you’ll excuse me, I have Joywood members to incinerate. I’ve been waiting to rain fire upon them for a long, long time.” He says this offhandedly.
Half of my friends are still staring at what used to be a newel post. The rest of us are close to gaping at the magical creature, the dragon, that erupted from it.
And is now sauntering off to commit a few revenge murders, like he suggested taking high tea.
He walks straight out the door. He doesn’t even close it behind him.
I assume we’re all rendered totally speechless and immobile, because I am.
But Emerson grabs me. “You have to stop him.”
“Why me?” In what world would I be able to stop a dragon?
Besides, I’m all for him incinerating the Joywood. Shouldn’t we all be?
Emerson shakes her head. “You broke him out.”
I don’t think I actually did, but there’s no use arguing with Emerson and a dragon. “So what? I didn’t do it on purpose.”
“I think that means he’s yours,” Rebekah offers. “Like a chinchilla.”
I don’t know how I feel about the word yours, or how it shifts inside of me—hard—but I suppose she has a point. I was the one who was here.
Besides, her mention of chinchillas, historically a fraught topic between them, diverts Emerson’s attention from me.
“He won’t be able to incinerate them,” Frost says darkly. There’s something torn in his expression. “He doesn’t understand what’s changed.”
“Do you?” I ask.
His eyebrows draw together. “Not fully.”
Because why would anything be that easy? I sigh. I’ve unleashed the dragon, allegedly, so somehow it’s up to me to re-leash him before he makes a mess.
Or a bigger mess than . . . whatever’s happening in me.
That makes me want to laugh, but I rush outside into the bitter cold of the dark November night instead. I’m getting ready to try a quick spell to locate him, but I don’t have to. He’s stopped before the gate that leads out to the sidewalk.
And he’s still in the form of a man, looking up at a bright crescent moon.
Like he’s drinking it all in, and I suppose if he’s really been trapped in a newel post for what has to be at least a hundred years he should. Fresh, cold air. The rivers murmuring all around us. Moonlight. Magic and life and movement.
I take the moment to try to reason with him. With a dragon, because every myth I’ve ever read suggests that’s a possibility.
“Azrael. You can’t go incinerate the Joywood,” I tell him. Not that I think he’ll listen to me, but I don’t know how else to talk to supernatural creatures.
He’s still staring up at the moon, and the fact that he’s only wearing a T-shirt while the cold wind cuts through us doesn’t seem to bother him in the least. “Why not?”
“If they cursed you once already, won’t they just curse you again?”
“Only if they know I’m coming,” Azrael says, with a lack of concern that I should find alarming.
But I don’t. All that offhanded confidence makes something in me . . . hum.
“Maybe they do know you’re coming,” I point out, ignoring any humming and focusing on my rational, reasonable approach to an ancient, powerful dragon. Because I might not understand that burst of fate and him and passion and mine, but reason and rationality I can do. Reason and rationality are who I am. “Maybe they felt it the same way my friends did. Wilde House is protected, but we don’t actually know if they’ve got eyes on you. Maybe the mermaid is a spy.”
Azrael scowls at this. “She would be. She likes a grudge, does Melisande.”
The way he says that makes me think—but I shove images of dragons wrapped up with mermaids in a variety of acrobatic poses aside. Facts are what matter, not fantasies. Something I keep trying to learn.
Besides, there are far more important questions to ask him. “Why did they curse you in the first place?”
Azrael doesn’t spare me a glance. “For their own shitty and nefarious reasons, Georgina. Obviously.”
He turns to look at me then. Really look at me. I feel those dark gold eyes on every inch of my skin. And the strangest part is that it’s not all that different than when he was in the newel post, because he always felt real, no matter how much I told myself he wasn’t.
Did I sleepwalk as much as I tell myself I did . . . or did I just like to sit with him? With him.
Night after night after night?
I know I should be thinking about the Joywood and the implications of magical creatures being cursed so that we all believed they were mythical or lost. But instead I’m thinking about all the ways I’ve unloaded my most private thoughts over the years on what I thought was a charmed inanimate object that, sure, spoke every now and then. But charmed things do that.
My cheeks heat, embarrassment ripe.
His smile goes sharp and self-satisfied, like he knows why. “I was very cognizant of everything happening around me during my time as a post.”
I want to melt into the ground, but it’s frozen solid beneath my feet. “Ah.”
“He isn’t worth your tears, you know.”
I stiffen. This day really couldn’t get worse. A dragon saw me cry and thinks it was about my lame ex-boyfriend. “I do know, thank you,” I say, sounding prim to my own ears. “I wasn’t crying for him.”
“Good.” Azrael studies me for a moment, then looks out at the night again. A crow caws from somewhere up above, and Azrael’s eyes sharpen. He takes a deep breath. When he exhales, the cold air turns into a big puff of smoke. “Perhaps you’re right. Going head-on at the Joywood is never the answer. It’s what got us into this mess in the first place. This calls for subterfuge. And them not knowing their curse can be broken.”
He breathes out another puff of smoke, a ring this time. He watches it disappear into the night as if fascinated. Hot air meets cold and makes condensation. It’s simple science. Not magic. But Azrael seems delighted.
Then he turns to face me head-on again, and he has a kind of battle light in his eyes that reminds me of Emerson.
If Emerson were a large man who’s really a dragon.
“The truth is, Georgina Pendell, Riverwood Historian, you need me.” That jolts in me in a way I tell myself I don’t love, but he keeps going. “You all need me. We need to have one of those meetings your Wilde sister is so fond of. We have work to do.”
Then he strides back inside, like he was never going off to incinerate the Joywood at all.
