Shana Abe - Queen of Dragons

The man had paled and Kim let go; after all, it really wasn't his fault, and Booke had made off with what the fellow swore was his new Italian coat.

Kim hoped wherever Booke had managed to leave it, the coat would be recovered unsullied. And quickly.

One of the more uncommon Gifts of the drakon was that of Persuasion, the ability to temporarily command Others, to get them to do whatever they were asked to do. To believe whatever they were asked to believe. It was a notoriously tricky Gift, and although Kim had inherited a trace of it, convincing an entire babbling chamber full of people of his innocence was proving a shade beyond his talents.

So he had offered to take their business out into the hallway—the less illuminated hallway—and in the ensuing argument and bustle had found just the right second—only that, a bare second—when all four of them had paused by the shadow of another marble god, and none of the Others were looking straight at him. He had said, very calmly, "You will not notice me," had stepped back against the statue and Turned, abandoning his own purloined garments to the floor.

He had not dawdled to listen to their eventual exclamations. If he'd had money, his own belongings, Kimber would have bought his way out of it all; there were fine advantages to being rich. But he could hardly afford to have another fuming, ill-dressed man stumble across them as they negotiated. He'd managed thus far not to mention his name or title. There were plenty of people present, however, who would have been delighted to mention them for him.

It was the devil's choice: Turn to escape, or get snared as the earl.

So he'd Turned, in public, potentially in view of half the ton. It was one of their most hallowed rules, one that might as well have been tattooed across his body, Thou Shalt Not Turn before Humans, and he'd done it just to save his own arse because he couldn't think of a better or more expedient way to escape the situation. When the council found out, there was going to be hell to pay.

It was all a right mess.

On top of all that, he'd lost sight of Maricara. He didn't know where she went, or how she went, only that by the time he'd evaporated into smoke, she was no longer in the same space.

Nor was she anywhere he floated. It wasn't easy to be inconspicuous as smoke inside a closed building. She'd been absolutely right about that. With the slanting rain outside, all the windows were shut tight. It had taken bloody forever to find a door that even had a decent crack around its jamb.

At least most of the Others roaming the spa were downing liquor instead of the water. Tipsy humans tended to excuse most anything.

Kimber scrubbed his hands over his face. She'd been right about the empty rooms, too. There were three of them; he'd invaded the farthest one. He let his arms drop, hanging over the arms of the chair, and gusted a sigh.

If she didn't show up soon, he was going to have to go get her. Under no circumstance was he going to simply wait for her to come to him, not with all that could yet go wrong. She'd said there were no sanf here, he himself felt nothing like that, but still....

He was weary. He couldn't recall the last night's decent sleep he'd had. Days ago. Weeks ago. Before his lovely, troubling, tempting, maddening-beyond-reason princess had shown up, that was for damned certain.

Kimber sat up in the chair. It was dim in here, only slivers of rainlight slanting past the shutters, but his eyes were adjusting. He stared blankly at the wall before him, the cornflower-blue-striped paper, a framed watercolor of coy hares and leverets cavorting in a field of strawberries. He felt the dust of the room in his nose, the threads of the satin in the chair against his forearms.the beech floors, oak joints behind the walls.mice, rapidly scattering to the other end of the hotel.gunpowder and summer flowers, a subtle wafting through the air.

The dragon in him blinked awake. He let it flood his heart, quickening. Let it singe his blood.

She was close. She was here.

Kim cut his eyes to the door. Smoke was curling through the keyhole.

She Turned in midstep, pacing over to a dresser, whipping off the cloth that covered it in an arc of grayish white. She wrapped it around herself just as he had, flipping an end over her shoulder.

"Pleasant," she said, glancing around.

"Adequate," he responded, and gave a narrow smile. "How good to see you, Princess. Any lasting repercussions?"

"No. A gentleman stopped me briefly in a hallway with his hand upon my arm, but he apologized profusely when he realized I wasn't his wife. It seems she has a gown exactly like mine. By the time I made it out to the courtyard, your squire was already gone. And you, my lord?"

"Nothing I couldn't handle."

"They didn't catch you?"

"Not for long."

"I see." Elegant black brows lifted in what might have been astonishment, or just plain amusement. "You're shedding your vaunted rules like last year's scales."

"You do seem to have that effect upon me."

She gave a bow in her sheet, as natural as any man. "Merci beaucoup. "

"Oh, you're most welcome. It's remarkable how easily nearly thirty-two years of hard-won wisdom and restraint are tossed."

"Was it easy?" she inquired, interested. And then: "You're thirty-two?"

"Thirty-one, and yes, extremely. I enjoyed immensely putting myself on display for all and sundry like the village poacher neatly pilloried. No doubt everyone was greatly entertained."

She went to the bed, perched upon the bare mattress and leaned forward with her arms on her thighs. Her hair slipped over her shoulders, a velvet-dark shadow covering her chest. "There," she said softly. "You see? Freedom is pleasurable."

"So is survival," he said, curt. "So are a few other activities I can think of. Perhaps we might engage in some of those instead."

Her head tipped, her lips still smiling. "Sir Rufus is currently downstairs, loitering in the garden as smoke. Don't you think you should go fetch him? He won't know where we are."

Kimber stood. He stared at her another long moment. Slowly her brows arched again.

He Turned. He left the way she had come in.

Mari made up the bed. She'd never done it before; as a child there was no bed to make up, only pallets, and as a princess there were always servants. Servants to tidy the rooms, servants to help her dress, servants to do her hair, and bring her food, and polish her jewels, and watch her with hawk-bright eyes when the prince was not at her side.

So she didn't truly make the bed. She only found a bureau stuffed with clean linens and tossed those over the lumpy mattress. There were no coverlets or even blankets stored anywhere else in the room, but there were five sets of sheets, and that seemed sufficient. It was warm still and she wasn't planning actually to sleep. But she could at least be comfortable while she waited for the earl to return.

She crawled to the center of the bed. She lay flat on her back with her arms out and stared up at a ceiling of smoothed plaster. She did not feel tired. She felt very, very awake.

Rufus Booke was not in the garden. Not as smoke, not as man—not as anything. Nor was he in the sky. Kimber hunted for him a good two hours, going back into the town, even back down to the pools of the spa—closed this late, the water lapping in tongues against the tiled stone, not even a single lamp for light—but Sir Rufus was no longer anywhere nearby.

Kim wasn't worried. Not yet. Booke was a good man but, more important, a cunning one. If he'd gone to ground, there would be a reason for it. Chances were, however, he'd only gone back to Darkfrith.

It was where Kim was going with Maricara, as soon as he could fetch her. If Honor Carlisle had ever been here, she wasn't now. He would have picked up something of her by this point, even if it was just the princess's mystery song.

But there was nothing. And as Lord Chasen, he could no longer afford to remain publicly.

He maneuvered down a thinly smoking chimney near her end of the hotel, emerged at a grate clutching the remains of a smoldering log and burnt tinder. Embers brightened and broke apart as he sighed past, but there was nothing of him to ignite. Kim poured away untouched.

A woman slumbered in the wide, curtained bed. Her maid was on a cot in the adjoining room. Both of them snored.

He glided out from under the door.

The room that held Maricara was still unlit. Even the rainlight had darkened to ash. He stood a moment in stillness by the window, letting what light would come fall across his skin, so that she could see him.

But she was also asleep.

Maricara did not snore. She was on her side amid a swirl of sheets, her hair a sable slash across the cambric, her arms folded and her legs bent. It was how she had slept in the abbey.

She had been naked then, too.

Kimber crossed the chamber without sound. He tested the mattress with both hands, then eased atop it. She shifted with his weight but did not wake, so he moved closer, settling down in front of her this time, his head upon his arm, examining her face.

They were so beautiful, all of them. He'd never thought on it much before, but the truth was, it might even be considered a weakness of their kind. Their unblemished bodies, their thick locks, the inches and corners and shimmering colors of them that all joined to create a being beyond simple man: It marked them for what they were. Not human.

He'd long ago grown accustomed to it. In fact, Kim vividly remembered his first impressions of London as a boy. Rooted in the city odors and noises and violent eddies of disorder were people, real people, who were very plainly a different sort of species from his own.

Their skin pocked with disease. Their teeth yellowed, and fell out. Their heads were shaved to stubble beneath their wigs and still they swarmed with fleas and lice; they smelled of their food, and their sweat, and whatever refuse they had last trudged through. Some of them were kind and some of them were not, but to a young, wide-eyed lad, their state of constant human decay had been both repellent and fascinating.

Retreating back to Darkfrith was like stepping into an alternate world, one in which everyone he knew lived suspended in their own unique perfection. No filth, no lice, no gap-toothed, drooling grins. His kin were born to a certain hard grace and they died in the same state. In between, they ruled the stars.

Maricara was no different. In rest, in lightning or candlelight or splashing rainfall, she remained lovely.

His hunger for her, the craving that ate through his bones, was as fierce as ever; in her every form, in her every motion, he responded.

The tribe had an overworn adage: Uncover the heart; wed the fire. Kimber had always assumed it was an oblique reference to the drakon' s legendary passion. But it was about love.

This sleeping young woman—clever, mysterious, royal and obstinate—was his fire. She had been for all of their lives, and it was simply a whim of the fates that it had taken exactly this many years for their paths to wind close enough to intersect.

Perhaps it was another weakness, this desire to love and be loved. This profound and ardent recognition of what was meant to be for the course of their lifetimes. Kim didn't know. Right now, on this bed with her, he did not care. Come hell or high water, come sanf or extermination, he could not let go of her. Even as she scorned him, even as she ducked and turned away, he could not let go.

He'd been lonely without her. It seemed now so patently obvious a child could have pointed it out to him, but he hadn't known. All his years alone, witness to the matrimony of his family and friends, and he had been lonely. He'd had his responsibilities to fulfill him, his position as leader and lord. He was Alpha and godfather and uncle; he was heir to a great tradition and estate. For some reason, he'd always thought that that had been enough.