Page 18 of Against the Veil (Endangered Fae #3)

The dragon lord looked up from Diego’s papers. “Your Were is distressed.”

“My lord, this is Zachary Morrison. He’s only recently been cursed. Fionnachd might have mentioned him—the human warrior who helped rescue injured fae from the iron caverns.”

“Ah. There are layers upon layers here. All the better. Might one ask the nature of your discomfort, warrior?”

“It’s, ah…” Zack nodded toward the younger dragons, most of them now tangled in heaps of writhing limbs.

Diego glanced behind him, spots of color on his cheeks when he turned back. “Humans aren’t normally accustomed to sex as a communal activity, my lord. Embarrassment, a fear of intruding, rather than actual distress.”

Hssetassk shrugged. “They are young. Nothing but stomachs and cocks for the first few centuries. They begin to use their brains at some point.” He pointed to several boulders, which rolled sedately up to the stone table.

“Sit with me. Tell me of the human world and what has happened since I last laid eyes upon you.”

“My lord. I don’t recall ever meeting you,” Diego said with a little frown.

“I did not say we met. I attended your nuptials, and saw you there.”

“So you do come to the human world?”

“Infrequently. I prefer not.” Hssetassk gestured impatiently at Zack. “Come, cub, settle. I believe we might both be civilized enough to keep our teeth to ourselves.”

Zack slid onto the boulder seat across from him.

Hssetassk was beautiful in his fae form, hard-muscled and imposing, but the dragon form still appeared as an overlay when Zack turned his head, and the dragon was spectacular.

Gleaming gold with a pearlescent underbelly and throat, he would have been blinding in full sunlight.

“Gssetik.” The elder dragon gestured to the youngster sulking by the wall. He approached warily and Hssetassk hooked a claw in his torque to pull his head down for a ravenous kiss. “We have guests, beloved. Bring the bowls.”

It hit Zack suddenly that all the dragons were male. “Gssetik… He’s your mate?”

Hssetassk stared at him with narrowed eyes, his strange vertical pupils contracted to slits. Then he made a strangled sound and burst into laughter. “Oh, poor cub! I glean that you meant no offense. You are without malice or guile. Though the thought of my Gssetik trying to lay is amusing.”

“I think we have a semantics issue, my lord,” Diego said with a little smile. “Zack meant a life companion, not someone with whom to make offspring. Does your mate live here, too?”

“Great Mother forbid,” Hssetassk said as he leaned back to regard Diego in obvious horror. “My poor laptas would be slaughtered in days.”

“ Laptas ?”

“My…fosterlings.” He waved a hand to the orgy going on around them. “The younglings who belong to me.”

“I’m sorry I’m so ignorant, my lord.” Zack spoke softly, biting down on his injured pride. “So the females live somewhere else?”

“Yes. As is proper and sensible. They do not allow males in the nesting ground. For good reason. The younglings have no sense and the females prefer their own company. My mates call across the valley to me when they are in season and I visit briefly. You are not ignorant, cub. What human has seen aught of dragons these past centuries?”

“Yessir, that’s true.” Zack reached in his pack and brought out the Rubik’s cube. “Though I know enough to bring something to give you.”

“Ah! It is lovely!” Hssetassk’s eyes devoured the cube. “A handsome gift, indeed. It is of that material made from the black water? Plas-stick, I believe the pooka named it?”

“Plastic, yes, and you can turn a layer at a time.” Zack demonstrated before he handed over the cube. “To move the colored squares until each side is one color.”

“I see. Clever indeed.” Hssetassk’s fingers twisted and spun the cube with delicate precision. He had the puzzle solved in thirty seconds, but didn’t seem at all disappointed. “Marvelous.”

Gssetik returned with bowls and a pitcher, and settled primly at the older dragon’s feet.

“Try your hand, beloved.” Hssetassk re-scrambled the cube’s sides and handed it over. “It is a soothing puzzle.”

With a little cry of delight, Gssetik seized on the cube and was soon engrossed in its movement. He had the original puzzle solved quickly as well, but then set about creating other patterns. A distracted smile played over his beautiful face as he leaned against Hssetassk’s thigh.

“Beloved, manners,” the dragon lord growled even as he stroked Gssetik’s hair.

“Thank you, Were.” Gssetik glanced up at Zack from beneath lowered lashes. “It is a wondrous gift.”

The seductive look shot heat right to Zack’s groin, ratcheting up the discomfort factor, but it was a hell of a lot better than the open hostility from before.

“You’re very welcome.” Zack leaned his forearms on the table to address Hssetassk again.

“Sir, is it rude at this point to tell you why we’re here? ”

A golden brow arched at him. “Abrupt, at the very least. I have many questions before I ask your purpose.”

Shit. I was supposed to let him ask. Zack swallowed hard and plowed ahead, since the damage was already done. “Yessir. It’s just…I’m getting the weird feeling time isn’t our friend right now.”

Hssetassk leaned toward him, flicking a disturbingly reptilian, forked tongue. “You have the scent of the hill people. They have told you aught.”

“They told us precious little, my lord,” Diego offered. “But what we could understand was disturbing.”

“That they had a werewolf in their hands and let him go is disturbing enough,” Hssetassk replied softly. “It is more common for those who go into the hill never to be seen again than otherwise.”

“They seem to think I have something important to do, sir,” Zack said.

The dragon lord nodded. “Yes, that would follow.” He leaned back to scoop Gssetik off the floor and settle him in his lap. “But I do not engage in prophecy, at least not in such specifics. This is not why you came. Why have you sought me?”

“We had hoped, my lord, that you might know of something,” Diego began, paused on a sigh, then rushed forward again. “A cure for lycanthropy, maybe, or some way to separate Zack from the were-beast, keep it from happening.”

“Ha. You may as well request a cure for being human.” Hssetassk held out his hand to Diego. “The only cure is death. To release him and allow him to continue to his next life. The Mother has gifted humans with this possibility.”

Diego settled his hand in the dragon’s grasp, a stubborn set to his jaw. “But if it’s magic, the curse, then there has to be a way to undo it. They’ve told me before that I couldn’t do things that I did.”

“Hmm, yes. Those who told you did not take all the variables into account.” Hssetassk turned Diego’s hand palm up and held a claw over his index finger. “May I? Merely a drop?”

“Of course.”

Diego winced when the claw punctured his finger and Zack with him.

The medically trained part of him wanted to protest that the claw wasn’t sterile and might not even be clean.

But he figured the dragon didn’t need further reasons to be offended.

He only hesitated a hair when Hssetassk requested his blood as well.

The finger prick was as neat and precise as any lancet.

Zack couldn’t complain about his technique.

“So.” Hssetassk gestured at the blood drops on his palm.

They expanded until Zack could make out individual cells and even further, to what he suspected was a subcellular level.

The blood drops now formed twisting spires on the table, Diego’s on the right, Zack’s on the left.

The center structures bristled with numerous protrusion, knobs and spikes in unfathomable patterns while motes of light whirled and settled, illuminating and casting fleeting shadows.

They reminded Zack of pictures of space stations from science fiction books and fairytale towers and…

“DNA. Dear God. Diego, do you see it?”

“What is this word?” Gssetik asked, tilting his head to look at the expanded blood.

“Genetic structures,” Zack told him. “The blueprints, the design for a person.”

“Yes. Good.” Hssetassk nodded. “The central structures contain the inheritance, all that has been before. The smaller structures are the architects, which tell the structure how it will manifest. And the little ones, the kelan .” He indicated the light motes.

“That is how the world’s magic reacts to the structure. ”

Zack felt an odd twinge of disappointment.

Diego’s kelan glittered on nearly every spike and prominence of his tower.

The lights danced and swirled in eddies and currents, competing for space.

Zack’s looked like a half-abandoned ghetto housing project.

A few sad lights shone here and there on the structure.

Isolated colonies of sickly yellow-green huddled in crevices but the remaining motes seemed repelled and refused to settle anywhere on the blighted surface.

“I’m all…dark,” he said, unable to keep the quaver out of his voice.

Hssetassk regarded him with a frown. “This causes you pain. Though it is not so unusual for a human.” He gestured to Diego’s tower.

“That is unusual. But humans and magic are a difficult study. Kelan distribution in any fae is a product of bloodline. One young dragon will look much like another. A young sidhe like his cousin. We gather power as we age in our own distinctive racial patterns.”

“And humans?” Diego asked.

“Humans are subject to the variable patterns of their kind. It is part of the wonder of being human. No two humans react in the same way to magic, even under identical circumstances. While some part of a kelan pattern might be inherited, there are myriad factors that influence how it will grow. Past lives. Encounters with magic beings and places of magic confluence. Terrible tragedy. Overwhelming joy. Contact with warped kelan .”

“That’s those, sir? The sick-looking batches?” Zack stared at them, a lead ball in his stomach.

“There are most likely some among those clusters, yes.”

Diego got up for a closer look. “So if we removed them, Zack would be cured?”

“I suppose if you wished to kill him in the most painful way possible that you might try.” Hssetassk shook his head. “Those are his kelan . You cannot remove them any more than you could remove his head and expect him to live.”

“Oh.” Diego settled back on his rock, obviously disappointed.

Zack patted his arm. “Guess I have to learn to live with it. Maybe it won’t be so bad. Modify one of the rooms in the caverns. Lock me in. It’s only three days a month, right?”

“Zack…”

“The rest of your kelan pattern does intrigue me, though.” Hssetassk rested his chin in his palm.

“Werewolves have so often lived in isolation, when they have been allowed to live at all. For human magic, isolation rarely allows new patterns to develop. Hence the practices of apprentices and covens among human mages. While you cannot excise the curse, I wonder if it will…evolve over time.”

“Christ. You mean I might be more of a monster later on?”

“Who can say?” Hssetassk shrugged. “More likely, given your temperament and your circumstances, is that you may find a way to pattern the unsettled kelan in your blood. To acquire more conscious use of your potential.”

Zack weighed the words carefully. “You mean work magic, sir? Like Diego does?”

The dragon’s deep laugh vibrated through the floor. “Never as he does, cub. He is without peer. And, as I have said, every human is unique.” He turned his head to nuzzle at his lover’s jaw. “So like snowflakes. Equally singular and equally brief.”

They talked for several hours more since the dragon lord had questions about the human world. His laptas moaned and growled through their multiple bouts of sex, but no one paid any attention. Toward evening, Hssetassk finally rose from the stone table to bid them farewell.

He put a hand on Zack’s shoulder as he led them to the mouth of the cave. “Perhaps you will be a true shifter someday. Like the sidhe .”

“I guess miracles can happen, sir.” Zack glanced up at him and realized with a pang that he was the same height as Lugh. “Sir? Aren’t dragons shifters?”

“No, cub.” The fae shimmered and became a lion, then shimmered again and suddenly the true dragon, in all his shining glory, stood beside Zack. “A shifter becomes the form he takes. Dragons may take on different skins. But a dragon is always a dragon.”

Zack walked down the path with Diego, deep in thought.

Maybe they hadn’t found a cure but he sure as hell had seen a lot on their short journey.

He knew about the lack of sexual inhibitions among the fae, but experiencing it in such varied forms had driven it home.

Lugh wasn’t human, no matter how well he interacted with them. He'd been raised fae.

It had never occurred to Zack that something so basic, so ingrained for him, might be a struggle for the prince. Lugh had handled it badly, but maybe, just maybe, he had overreacted. Another thought suddenly occurred to him.

“What’s the smile for?” Diego bumped shoulders with him.

“I was just thinking,” Zack said on a helpless chuckle. “It’s normal for dragons to be gay.”

“It’s normal for us, too, hon.”

“Um, right, but lots of people wouldn’t agree with you.”

Diego’s brows furrowed. “It’s certainly interesting, though. I wonder if a truly hetero dragon would be considered an outcast.”

“Maybe there just aren’t any.”

Lugh sank into the overstuffed chair in the condo’s living room.

The gallery opening had exhausted him more than any battle ever had.

Smiling and making polite conversation with a shattered heart was more difficult than he had imagined.

He felt like such a fraud, pretending he understood humans when he had misunderstood so badly the one human more important to him than breathing.

“Highness? You didn’t eat much at that shindig. Are you hungry?” Kevin leaned his head in from the kitchen.

“No, I…” Lugh waved a hand in negation, unable to speak past the lump in this throat.

“Well, we’re gonna order pizzas, sir. Maybe you’ll change your mind once they get here.”

“Perhaps.” He couldn’t even find the energy to remove his jacket. How could he summon any to eat? Zack’s face haunted him, horror-stricken and repulsed. If only he had found another way. If only his Zachary didn’t hate him now.