Shana Abe - Queen of Dragons

Kimber had been Alpha heir his entire life. Speculation on whom he would wed had dogged him all his years. The girls of the shire sent him long, improper looks from beneath their very proper lace caps, every one of them alluring, every one of them like him. Striving to lead. In their sharp-edged beauty and sugary sly ways they intimidated him, just a little. He wasn't truly chaste; he'd dallied aplenty before that letter from Lia made its way into his hands. But dalliance wasn't love, and it wasn't matrimony. And the maidens of the shire made it awfully clear to Kim that when they said, yes, touch me there, or oh, how your lips are soft, they actually meant, we will wed.

He'd been away too much, perhaps. All that schooling. All those stays in London with his parents, learning the glamour and falsehood of the human world. The young ladies of the ton giggled and smiled behind their fans and held his arm while they pretended to trip across some invisible stone, so that he might catch them.

The young ladies of Darkfrith dispensed with all that. They mouthed invitations to him from across crowded rooms. They met him in the woods. They begged him to Turn so that they might ride to the moon atop his back, clinging to his body with warm, strong thighs. Dragon-girls, every one. Their eyes glowed and their lips were carmine, and he had knelt to them and admired them and failed to fall in love with a single one.

He tried. He knew his duty and for years, he tried. With every new face, every stroking caress, he'd ask himself, This one? Is it she?

But his heart never answered. Kim would slip away again, time after time, ever alone.

Discovering Maricara had seemed to take the matter out of his hands entirely, and frankly, he'd been relieved. The subject was closed; he could stop trying to feel things he'd never comprehend. Romantic love was for Others. He was to wed a princess. It was his fate and hers, and they would spend their days together leading their people and raising their children and creating new strength for generations to come. It was logical, it made sense for the tribe; he hadn't been able to think of a single argument in opposition to it when the council raised the vote.

Maricara of the Zaharen.

She was a name on a piece of paper. He'd had no idea what she looked like, how tall she was, her favorite color, the pitch of her voice. If someone had said to him: mirror eyes; to your nose; royal blue; husky sweet, they still would have been merely words.

The reality of her was beyond that. There were no words significant enough for her. There was sensation. There was excitement; the tidal rush of desire, drowning deep.

She would not be the grinning girl astride him as he launched into the night. She would be the beast on the wind beside him, teaching him new loops and tricks, seeing the world just as he did. Sovereign, seizing the sky.

For the first time in his life, Kimber was beginning to understand something beyond duty and carnal pleasure and devotion to his kind. He was beginning to understand his own self. She'd emerged from the shadows that very first night and where before there had been emptiness in his chest, now there burned a white-hot spark. His heart spoke at last: You've found her.

She was a miracle. To know of her, to touch her in the flesh, a princess with wings.. .a miracle.

By the oldest laws of his kind, they were already wed, Alpha to Alpha. The ceremony would be merely formality. It was why Rhys stayed away, why the other men were careful to give her a wide berth even as they were drawn to her. Kim rather thought that Maricara knew it too. It was why she had let him kiss her. Why she wasn't letting him do it again.

Through the darkening dusk now she raced beside him, smoke and beauty, following him south, no doubt feeling his urgency, trailing thinner and thinner with speed until she was little more than a wisp against the blue-gray gloaming.

Booke kept the lead. Kim felt the last hidden sliver of the sun disappear. The ground grew dim and flat. The forest gave way to meadows and fields again. Small, cloistered villages, mills and viaducts that shone silver with water as they flashed overhead. Flocks of sodden sheep.

Harrogate emerged as a veil of light upon the horizon, a misty thin glow that resolved into crooked medieval streets and very modern buildings. The rusty scent of dissolved iron struck him from miles away, followed at once with that of sulfur; it was a spa town, fashionable and rich, with Turkish baths and steam rooms and more than a few people Kim might know taking their leisure there. It wasn't as large as York, but it was far bigger than Darkfrith. If he was careful, he needn't run into anyone at all. Especially since he would be naked.

And so would his bride.

Booke took them perilously close to the main square, where riders crowded the streets even in this weather and shops lured customers with lamps set in glinting windows. Beneath the sulfur stench rose more human smells, wet clothing, tea and gin and a bakery of meat pies. He heard men laughing. He heard fiddlers, and the slap of cards on felt.

As mist they began to drift more slowly, plainly caught in the illumination of the candle lanterns. Horses shivered directly below them, shaking off raindrops. Pedestrians cocooned in capes and hoods rushed along the sidewalks, darting from awning to awning. A few miserable footmen carrying sedan chairs kept their hats pulled low as they attempted to trot through the crowds. No one looked up.

Booke skirted the main boulevard, drifting over a sprawling garden of flowers. There was a building directly ahead of them, facing the garden—one of the spa hotels, Kim realized, constructed in the Eastern style as a palace, with everything scrubbed blinding white, the piers and carved marble filigree at every angle, the magnificent onion dome dominating the roof. Enormous statues encircled the dome, gods or Romans, who knew.

Candlelight hazed warm from the lower windows, revealing the patrons within. A pump room, a formal dining chamber. Dressing rooms. The baths themselves, set beneath the central dome, slitted skylights fogged with steam incised in curves along its base.

Booke turned into man on the walkway that circled the dome. It was closed and narrow, clearly meant more for ornamentation than practicality. There were no people nearby, no lanterns, only braziers, and none of those were lit. He took shelter behind one of the oversized statues, eyeing the slow-dropping smoke that was Maricara.

Kim Turned before her. He walked to the next statue—Athena, without question—and lifted a hand, waiting until the princess slithered down to his side. She Turned behind the goddess, her fingers becoming flesh over his, slipping free. She leaned her head past the stone hips to see them both. Rain slid down her hair, soaking it instantly, blackened strands clinging to her cheeks.

"What is this place?"

"An excessively malodorous hotel. Sir Rufus thought he felt the girl here." Kimber looked back at his man. "Booke?"

"It was beneath us, my lord. In the pools, I must suppose."

Kim shook the water from his eyes, trying to concentrate. It seemed an unlikely location to bring a hostage, especially a well-bred, unwilling girl.but perhaps there were secret rooms. A basement of natural caverns. "You're certain?"

"Aye. I don't feel her now—but before. Aye."

Kimber reached out. He sought the girl, and when that didn't work, he sought drakon, anything of them. He felt foremost still that heavy rich iron that swamped the air, and then the people below them, bathing, drinking, chatting with cups in their hands, sophisticated accents, trilling voices.songs from a thousand gemstones, smaller and larger, bright and clear; a more subdued energy beneath it, the spa workers, the great sloshing pools, pipes of thermal water, the rocky ground, fissures in the stone...

"No," he said, on an exhale. "I sense nothing. Maricara?"

Her brow puckered. Her eyes took on a distant, glazed look; water dripped in a tiny stream from her chin. She curved a hand around the folds of the marble tunic. Her nails went bloodless; she pressed hard—too hard. The stone began to crackle.

Kim touched his fingers to hers. She blinked and came back to him, thick wet lashes, her hand dropping free.

"I don't know," she said, hesitant. "I thought there was something..."

"Sanf? " he asked instantly.

"No. A few notes, indistinct.almost eerie."

"Only that?" demanded Booke, also soaking behind his god. "We all hear songs, gel."

"This one I last heard when you handed me the kerchief of Honor Carlisle, Lord Chasen."

Kim nodded, turning back to the panes of a fogged skylight. He bent to wipe a hand across the beaded surface, glimpsing colors and shifting darkness inside.

"Then let's go in," he said.

It was her idea to steal the clothing. Although the baths themselves were curling with steam, the rest of the spa remained a bright, luxurious building, with tall, tall ceilings and Italian-looking frescoes, and Baroque gilded flourishes plastered along the walls. Exquisitely garbed dandies and gentlewomen were sauntering up and down its halls, carrying teacups or tiny glasses of port, their wigs slowly gumming in the humidity.

Nude people would be noticed, Mari pointed out. So would smoke. The antechamber beyond the main baths was lined with dressing booths, women on the left, men on the right. They could float in and walk out. It would be easy.

They stood debating it, the three of them, in the darkest, deepest part of the waters. There was a tiled dividing wall separating the ladies from the men; Mari didn't have to raise her voice to be heard across it, and neither did Kimber or the older man. They could whisper to each other and catch every word, although she was gathering some startled looks from a few of the other women bathers.

A pair of rouged matrons in voluminous black swimming costumes stared at her from across the pool. It seemed unlikely they'd noticed her materialize a few moments before; the chamber was vast and gloomy. But Maricara bent her knees a little more, so her bare shoulders would not show.

"You know, some people say it's wrong to steal," murmured the earl, with a very dry undertone to his voice.

"Hang that," muttered the other man. "We'll give it all back." "A bientot, " Mari said, and ducked her head under the water.

It was nasty, really, stinking of sulfur and metal, and she couldn't imagine why anyone would want to bathe in it, much less imbibe it as they were in the other part of the spa. But all she had to do was Turn beneath the thick waters, smoke again, pushed up in her lighter state to the air, rising like the rest of the steam in lazy fat rolls.

She made it over to the booths, past the bored maids seated in chairs along the side, past the heavyset footmen sweating at the pillared entrance to the baths. Mari spread sheer, and slid over the nearest door.

She emerged wearing a stylish ensemble of pearl-gray silk and jet-beaded trim, her hair piled up precariously with the few pins she could find. The slippers were loose on her feet, and she hadn't taken the wig or any of the jewelry—a fob watch and a wedding ring, a silver brooch; there was a placard posted inside the booth declaring METALS IN THE WATERS WILL TARNISH FOULE—but this would do.

She hoped the woman who owned this dress enjoyed the fetor of sulfur very much.

Kimber was already waiting for her in the shadow of the portico just past the footmen, wearing a coat and breeches of black and faun, striped stockings and heels of red leather. He slanted her a look beneath his lashes that brought blood to her cheeks.