Dragon Cipher Read online

  “It doesn’t matter. Don’t you see what this means to me?”

  “It is a lot to take in, I know.”

  “Don’t patronize me,” she snapped. “I cannot have anything to do with you, not ever. Why didn’t you tell me that you were the dragon who consigned my people to be nothing but fodder for your army of winged creatures?”

  He coughed drily. “Why didn’t I tell you? How? I never meant for it to go so wrong. We merely wanted to end the chaos. Dragons were out of control, devolving into animals. We wanted to refine them, civilize them.”

  “But when you stripped them of their full range of emotions, you sentenced my people to death.” I took a step forward, toward him, but I could not relax my arms from their hold around me. Suddenly, even in the dry desert hear, I was shivering. “Have you thought all this time that my hatred for dragons was nothing to me? Was it just words in your ears?” My accusations were like daggers, intended to hurt him.

  “Laurel, enough. I know you are afraid of dragons. You fear them because they took your family. Not them. Us. You fear us.” When he corrected himself, he sounded only faintly sorry for not having included himself in his original pronoun.

  “You really think you are not a dragon? Not part of the problem?” I slashed at the air with one hand, cutting him off from answering. “You are so wrong about all this. I do not fear you. Nothing about this makes me afraid for my life. What I feel here, right now, in the center of one of your stupid dragon strongholds, is fury.”

  Safyr listened, but I did not think he understood yet. There was only one way in which I could make him understand how I felt about his kind.

  “You may go. Fly away and leave me here.” The desert winds took the proclamation that I yelled and sent it out across the sands.

  “What? No, I would never do that. It is not safe for you here.” Safyr stood tall, unwilling to follow my order.

  “I’ll be fine. Don’t you know how strong I am? What I can do?”

  He took a step toward me, then hesitated as I raised a hand, ready to use my magic against him. He looked from my sparking hand to Brick’s body. Then his eyes went to the golden tablet and rested there for a moment. His expression closed tightly, shutting as if a guillotine’s blade was a door, slamming down.

  Without another word, he gave up on trying to make me do what I could not. He did not plead with me, or beg. He simply turned and left.

  Safyr leapt from the mountaintop, shifting into his massive blue dragon shape as he met the air. His broad wings beat against the desert winds, somehow drowning out any echo of my voice that might have still circulated there.

  He flew away from me.

  And I sank to the ground in despair. I sat there, on the warm, flat landing stones, and finally allowed myself to sob. I cried for my family, and for all the peasants who had become dragon nourishment over a million years. When I mourned them, I mourned an entire lost world, one in which civilization had been badly confused with chaos.

  And I shed tears for the man whom I knew, deep in my heart, was my fated mate.

  Chapter 18: Safyr

  I left her there. Not because I was afraid of continuing our conversation. There was nothing more that could be revealed about me. I had no fear of that.

  My crimes were laid bare. After all these years, my own actions were out in the open, held up against me for all to see. If she wanted, Laurel could share what she knew with the other dragons whom I counted as my friends. She might, or she might tell all the peasants in Caerulean town that there was still a Founder left in their world.

  It did not matter.

  The only person in the world whose opinion mattered to me was the one who had brought it all into the light. Laurel’s face when she told me to leave was all I would ever be able to remember of her. It was the only thing she had ever said to me with the full knowledge of who I was.

  I wished with all my heart that I could hold on to my memories of our happy moments together, when we had joined our bodies in love. But I knew that she would no longer consider those to be times worth cherishing.

  She had asked me to leave, so I did.

  I was not worried for her safety at the House Rubellus stronghold. It was all but abandoned anyway. The red dragons had come upon hard times, after taking such poor care of their town and their peasants. Many of them were living in exile on other worlds now.

  Those red dragons who had not decamped would be no trouble to Laurel. Now that she had solved the code of how to unlock the golden tablet, she possessed more magic than our world had ever seen before. She could defend herself.

  She was the only being in the world who could save me.

  But I would not ask it of her.

  As I flew, I remembered the sensations of being with her, making love to my fated mate. Only a few short hours ago, we had lain together on my bed. We had been naked, tangling our bodies and sharing our innermost selves. It had been real.

  What Laurel did not understand, and I would not burden her with, was that when she caught a glimpse of my soul in the tablet, she was seeing who I had been a million years ago. She had said it herself: what she had felt of me in that magic was how I was then.

  After so many lifetimes of punishment, I was different now.

  I was no longer a ruthless killer from the Age of Chaos. And I was no longer a foolish idealist who hatched a plan that had consequences that went far beyond I’d ever imagined.

  Did she know that part of it? I wasn’t sure that she’d understood me. I never meant to create a system in which dragons consumed human to create magic. I’d meant to build a world in which civilization triumphed.

  I’d been so wrong.

  I would have told her that, but she did not need to hear another word from me. She deserved the chance to move on.

  I flew straight and fast, stretching my blue-scaled body through the air as I climbed higher. I could make my way to the portal. As I’d told Brick, I could use any portal in this world to travel to whatever dimension I wanted. My powers were godlike.

  But they were not strong enough for me to attain my true heart’s desire.

  I wanted Laurel.

  I wanted to hold her in my arms every night as she fell asleep. To caress the long hair that cascaded down her back or tangled on the pillow. To see her first thing every morning when we woke together, whether our days were filled with laughter or sorrow. I ached with my wish that we could live our lives in partnership, sharing our triumphs and conflicts as equals.

  And none of those things would come to pass.

  I had made her hate me, and with good reason. I could never have found a way to spin this. That was obvious now. I should have seen it all along.

  The last thing on my list of wishes was to be whole again. My shredded soul called out to the missing part of me that was still within the golden tablet. If I had not trapped myself as penance all that time ago, then I could have claimed Laurel as my mate.

  Now, it was too late.

  Too late for everything. I could feel the intricate spell of the tablet as it worked on me. My time had run out.

  Above me, there was a seemingly endless sky, in which I could soar forever. Below me was a flat expanse of yellow sand. Under the smooth surface of the sand, where all those tiny grains conspired to make a desert, were sand snakes. They slithered beneath the surface, their ravenous bodies made for nothing but evil.

  Laurel had lived her whole life in fear, and it had generated an anger in her that was fearsome in itself. The two emotions were the same, merely held up against a different lens. And to her, the world of dragons was like the sand I soared over.

  It was impenetrable, without end. It was smooth and indestructible.

  And I was every single snake that lived beneath the sand. I was the evil that she feared.

  As I flew, I felt the golden tablet reclaim all of me. The magic of the tablet’s spell reached me, no matter how far away I’d flown. Not only the tiny shred of my soul that was trapped ther
e, but every part of my existence would be erased now. If I had been in two-legged form, I would have clutched at my heart. As it was, my dragon claws merely flexed in pain.

  Pain was fine.

  At least I would feel something in my cold, ancient heart, before the end.

  If it had to be pain, then so be it.

  I fell, curled and twisted, toward the ravenous snakes.

  Chapter 19: Laurel

  How would I decide where to go from here? I couldn’t fly away as a dragon would, but I would find my way. The problem was that there was nowhere I wanted to be, not in any world. There were no dimensions out there that could assuage the wounds that I’d amassed.

  I reached down to pick up the shimmering golden tablet from where I had let it fall when I confronted Safyr. It might have been an impulse of tidiness, or perhaps it was that I couldn’t stand to see how incongruous it looked so close to the body of the man that Safyr had struck down.

  Brick’s cloak hid most of the charring that was left from when Safyr struck him down. There was a black mark on the stones that reminded me, and a sharp scent of coal. I didn’t need anything to jog my memory; the sight of one dragon taking the life of another would be in my mind for the rest of my life.

  He must have known that I was about to attack Brick myself. Had he? What if Safyr had been aware that I was within seconds of sending all my magic toward the destruction of Brick. I could not have killed a dragon. What would have been the outcome? I shuddered with a sudden chill as I understood.

  Safyr had known what I was about to do. He had killed Brick himself not because he was a monster, but because he sought to defend me in every way possible. He had protected me not only from Brick’s mauling, but from my own impulse to draw more power than I knew how to wield. His care for me went far beyond his care for himself.

  I was the same way. When I’d agreed to come to the stronghold of House Rubellus, I’d done so because I valued Safyr’s well being over my own. He had needed me, so I’d been willing to help. It was that simple.

  And I’d known, oh, I’d known.

  There had never been any real question whether he was a creature with a history of shadows and misdeeds, had there?

  He was a dark man, a dragon with a past that made the blood in my veins grow cold. But he was more than that, too.

  He was the kind, selfless lover who vowed to stand at my side forever. He was a friend who had brought Kat and Cobalt together through his loyalty to them. And he was a skilled diplomat who worked tirelessly, day after day, to facilitate dragon interactions in the social club that served as his office.

  Perhaps I had been wrong. Perhaps I’d been so blind that I might not have seen the best thing in the world that ever happened to me, cloaked as it was in danger and sorrow.

  As I lifted the golden tablet and cradled it against me, a shock spread throughout my body. A keening sound seemed to reside in my very bones as I stood still and listened. I sent my mind into the magic of the tablet, feeling the haunting melody of it fill me and wrap around me so tightly that I gasped.

  His time was up.

  I could picture my dragon mate as he flew. He was still moving away from me, not because he wanted to, but because I had ordered him to do so. The distance between us grew, but the tablet’s hold on him did not weaken.

  It held him in its grip like a vise, squeezing the life force from him. He’d built the damn thing as a moment to his sorrow at having cursed his own world. And he’d made one last bargain with it. When he allowed himself to fall in love with me, he had gambled on whether we could free him from the magical prison.

  We had not.

  Or, rather, I had not.

  And, according to that last bargain, the final one that Safyr would ever strike, he would lay down his own eternal life.

  My foolishness, my vanity, my stubbornness had been the end of him.

  True, I could not forgive all that he had done.

  But I did not have to. All I needed to do was to live with what was. To live with him every day because he was my mate.

  He had paid his penance. Finally.

  I held the tablet up in the air and shouted up into the sky.

  I wished I knew some mystical incantation for this, but I had none to offer. All I could shout was what I felt. “End it! Please!” It sounded woefully inadequate. I tried again. “The price has been paid. LET HIM GO!”

  The golden tablet glowed so brightly that I thought I would have to drop it again to shield my eyes. Instead, I became part of the light. I stood at the center of a golden column that shot from the mountain to the sky like a flare from the gods to earth. It thrummed all around me until the sound was a roar that deafened me to all else in the world.

  There was a trickle of dust down my arm as I held the tablet up to the sky. Sand. It was everywhere. Then another trickle, a brush of particles that made me wonder if I’d set off a storm of the dry stuff. The rushing of air around me quieted, and the gaudy gold light dissipated.

  I found that I had closed my eyes in the end, bracing myself as the magic coursed through me. When I opened them, I could see what was happening. The thin rivulet of dust along my upstretched arm increased, and became a rush of sand all at once.

  It was the tablet. It had come apart into the finest bright sand that had ever been here on this world. It belonged here.

  The particles of dust lifted in the breeze and flew about the mountaintop, finding their original place once again. My hand was empty, my palm dusty. In the center of it was nothing, no mass or magic.

  And out there, across the smooth, peaceful-looking yellow sand, was my mate. He was whole, restored, without fissure or weakness in the fabric of his soul.

  As I drew breath, he was winging his way back to me. Safyr was free to go anywhere at all, to do anything in any dimension or realm of the universe. He was a creature of power and softness, wisdom and fallibility. He’d given more than enough for his people.

  He was coming back to me.

  Chapter 20: Safyr

  As I neared the mountaintop that served as the stronghold of House Rubellus, the most violent of the dragons of Elter, I felt only peace. There was no sense remaining that I needed to battle the red dragons that I felt such animosity for, or that I would be required to defend my mate from them. They simply no longer had the ability to touch me.

  I was whole again. The ease that spread within my being was unfathomable. For years upon years, I had been a fragmented, tortured relic of the past. Now all that was different.

  When Laurel had changed her mind, I had already resigned myself to my fate. I almost welcomed the end of it all for me, if I could not be with her. I questioned my worthiness of her. Never, though, did I wonder if she was everything she had set out to be.

  She was magnificent, and she would grow to be even more so, whether or not she had me in her life.

  Then, as I spiraled downward through the clouds to meet my end on the desert sands of the world that I had rejected, I felt Laurel lift the tablet to the sky and fill herself with its magic. I lifted my blue, spiny dragon head as if I could hear the music of the spell unraveling.

  There had never been any question of whether she could do it.

  I had only felt uncertainty about whether she would. Whether she wanted to take a risk on me. The more I tried to hold back the truth about who I was, the more it came to light. And at that moment, after she had found out everything about me, she made her choice.

  Laurel, my green-eyed hedge witch whose magic was so much stronger than she knew, and whose caution masked a lifetime of hiding from dragons, chose me.

  She chose us.

  When my great wings brought me to the flat landing stones, I changed my form immediately. I was back in the shape of a man even before I landed, dropping softly onto the surface on two feet. There was no hurry, as I knew she would wait for me. Yet at the same time, my need for her was so urgent that I could not waste another moment.

  Suddenly tentative, L
aurel stood still, watching me as I alighted in front of her. She was covered with fine, sparkling sand. Her eyes darted from mine, then to it where it glistened on her arms.

  “The tablet broke apart,” she whispered. She looked unsure if she had done the right thing. Was she having second thoughts about whether she trusted me? When she continued, though, her voice was stronger. “I held it together long enough to free you. I am sure I felt it. It’s all right, isn’t it?”

  “You are worried for my safety? After all that?” I stepped forward and took her in my arms. She leaned into me without reservation. She surrendered, at last, to the whole of us.

  “I wasn’t afraid of anything when I held the tablet. I no longer had any fear for my own life, or concern about dragons. All I could think of was whether you would be all right.” She shivered lightly as I held her.

  I reached one hand to tilt her chin up. When she was looking at me with her uniquely direct, level gaze, I smiled. “We are. We are all right now.” And I lowered my lips to hers, tasting her sweetness first with a soft touch, then pressing my mouth on hers more firmly as our bodies responded to the connection.

  My hand traveled along her back, pulling her against my naked torso. She gasped as my tongue flicked into her mouth, then followed the line of her jaw down to her neck. She threw her head back as she savored the feeling. At the same time, though, she chuckled.

  Her laugh was like a summer brook, bringing water to my parched soul.

  “Perhaps we should leave here, and continue this in a better location. We may have outstayed our welcome here with the red dragons.” When she glanced over at the crumpled form of the dragon shifter that I had struck down, her expression clouded. Then she shook herself lightly and her confidence returned. I knew she had realized that one of us would have destroyed him, no matter what. Somehow, the sense that we were culpable together made it easier to bear.

  “Are you still afraid of me?” I couldn’t help but ask. After all, she had seen what I had done, and she knew firsthand how it had ruined our world.