Chapter Eleven
F or the second time, Julie awoke to Sard stiffening in a panic and helicopter-like noises outside her grandparents’ cabin. He once more flew out of her bed—and the cabin—without a scrap of clothes.
Oh, she was not doing this again.
This time, Julie didn’t bother with clothes. She wrapped the blankets around her and jammed her feet into slippers. Copper bounced in front of the windows, his cute scales shimmering in the onesie, and she scooped him up and raced with him outside.
Once more, a massive alien ship hovered over her little cabin, causing wind like a helicopter overhead.
It even cleared snow down to bare ground in one spot in front of the cabin.
The wind and noise abruptly cut off as its engines changed tune and it hovered over Sard, who once again stood in the center of the clearing, defiant and completely naked.
She crunched across the frozen ground toward him.
Two unfamiliar dragons wheeled overhead.
“Stay back,” Sard ordered with a growl, and she stopped, but he never took his eyes off the wheeling dragons.
“Who are they?” she asked.
“My brothers’ servants.”
She shivered on the icy ground. Copper wiggled, a warm baby excited by all the noise. In her arms, he was like a magical heater, and she hugged him tight.
The dragon servants landed in front of Sard.
The older, more distinguished servant held a view screen showing two aristocratic dragons.
They looked quite different from Sard, one skinny and tall in blue robes and the other short and squat in red robes, but they also were covered in silver and gold piercings, rings, and unimaginable wealth.
They had to keep their human forms to wear the robes, but let their heads bulge to dragon shaped.
“Sard, how dare you make our servants chase you across this wretched backwater planet?” the skinny male in blue robes demanded. “You’re an embarrassment to the Carnelian name.”
“Go back to your wife,” the squat one in red ordered. Although they didn’t share Sard’s looks, his brothers had certainly inherited the tone. “If you woo her hard enough, she’ll stop having feelings for that low caste and become attracted to you.”
“No,” Sard growled.
“It’s the least you can do,” the blue one said. “First you lose your companyto low castes, tarnishing our name, and then you’re publicly humiliated as being incapable of producing a dragonlet, thus invalidating your marriage. What an embarrassment.”
“Yeah? What company have you started?” Sard shouted back at the view screen. “What company of yours has gone to the number one position of companies outside Draconis?”
“And once more, you force us to collect you from this derelict farm,” the blue one sniffed. “Imagine, throwing yourself at a human! No matter how attractive she is, that’s simply embarrassing. Come at once, or you’ll be kicked out of the family!”
“I’ll rip your faces off!”
The red-robed dragon laughed archly. “Try it!”
“Ah, we must be careful not to issue anything that could be misinterpreted as an official challenge…” The blue-robed dragon looked nervous. “Younger brothers can be sneaky when inheritance is on the line.”
“Our servants will drag him back in chains,” the red-robed one said dismissively.” He can try to fight us that way.”
“Well, if you want to…” The blue-robed dragon frowned. “Servants, bring Sard onto the ship so he can be forced back into a marriage with his ex-wife.”
The servants produced laser guns. The younger, stockier servant clamped Sard’s arm.
“I’m only going with them so I can rip your faces off,” Sard declared.
His brothers chortled.
He muttered to Julie, “Wait here.”
Her heart thumped hard. This was just like before. She was no longer confused or powerless to stop what was going on, and she wasn’t going to stand by and let her dragon get dragged away again. “No.”
Sard swung around to stare at her, shocked. “No?”
The beefy servant also hesitated.
“You can’t take him away to remarry his ex-wife,” she told his brothers in the view screen, “because he already consummated and validated his dragon marriage to me.”
Everyone looked at Copper.
The baby’s scales shimmered as he wiggled excitedly in her arms.
“Oh, yeah.” Sard smiled broadly, straightening and pulling free. “That’s right.”
“That’s your dragonlet?” his blue-robed brother shrieked. “You had a dragonlet with a human?”
Sard put his arm around her and Copper. He threw out his scarred chest. “You all heard it!”
“But she’s a human,” the blue-robed brother whined. “She can’t know our laws.”
“My wife claims me as her husband. This is our son. We are married according to dragon law! You cannot force me to go to another when my family is here.”
“Your family could suffer an accident…” the red-robed dragon mused.
Sard bristled. “Mother wouldn’t like it if anything happened to one of her grand dragonlets. Would she?”
Both his brothers turned a paler shade.
“What’ll we do, brother?” Sard’s brothers conferenced with each other. “He has a son? We can’t force them apart now. They’re married by law. She has a son.”
Sard just grinned at her like he’d won the lottery.
The older, distinguished servant unexpectedly spoke. “You can still force them apart. It’s happened before.”
Sard’s smile dropped. “No.”
“Your family forced your elder sister away from her chosen mate. Your mother allowed it.I was there. I served her, and I saw it all happen. You flouted the laws, ignored her feelings, and destroyed her. Why should we not destroy you?”
Silence blanketed the freezing clearing. Even Sard’s brothers looked deeply uncomfortable.
“It’s because of her that I did everything,” Sard told him gruffly. “I started my business to save aristocrats like my ex-brother-in-law. If he hadn’t died right after their separation, my sister might’ve defied Mother and Father. They could’ve had a second chance.”
“You ‘did everything’ but save her.”
“I was a dragonlet myself?—”
“You did nothing! You all watched as she, a bright and shining star, withered and died!” The older servant glowered, then addressed the brothers in the view screen.
“If you could do it to her, why don’t you do it to him?
Why don’t you waste his life just like you wasted hers? What was it worth to you?”
The silence stretched.
Sard snarled. “I don’t want?—”
“Who cares what you want? Who cares that you were married already? Do you think I like serving a family like yours? If she had to suffer and die, she who was like sunlight shining through sea glass, then you must suffer too. Now, get in the ship, or I’ll shoot you dead myself.”
Sard heaved a sigh. The gun centered on his injured chest. He released Julie, stepping toward the servant. “Stay here.”
“No,” Julie said again.
“I’ll take care of everything properly and come back.”
“The last time I let you go, you were gone for two years and you overthrew the government. I’m not going to let you go again.” She addressed his dragon brothers. “If you take him away, I’m telling all our clients what you’ve done.”
“As if we care about our reputation amongst humans,” the blue-robed dragon sneered, and the red-robed dragon chuckled harshly.
“Not human clients, our dragon clients at the salon. I’ll tell them how you’ve taken my husband and the father of my dragonlet because you didn’t want us to be happy.”
The red-robed dragon continued to chuckle menacingly.
But the blue-robed dragon held up a hand, frowning. “Wait a minute. I seem to recall… A beauty salon for colorations and body decorations, yes? Who were your clients again?”
“Ruby of House Chromium, Larimar?—”
“Larimar, the daughter of Adviser Wrathmoda?” the blue-robed dragon squeaked, eyes widening. The red-robed dragon stopped chuckling. “She rips off arms when she gets mad!”
“And about a hundred more,” Julie said. “Mostly female dragons, theones nobody wants to mess with. I could go on.”
Sard’s brothers panicked, hugging each other and gibbering. “We take it back! We changed our minds! You can stay, forget we said anything!”
The older servant ignored them. His laser gun was aimed at Sard.
“What happened to my sister changed my life,” he told the servant. “It’s why I came here and why I tried to save as many fallen aristocrats as I could. I mourn her to this day.”
“Come home!” the brothers shouted at the older servant. “Stop this nonsense and come back!”
The older servant glanced down at them in disgust. “Perhaps you are the only dragon in your family who is repentant.”
“I’ve changed, and so can you. We’re living in a new era. You don’t have to work for my family any longer. You can go out and seek your own fortune.”
“I don’t care about clothes.”
“There are other businesses. Hundreds of opportunities await. You can choose.”
The older servant looked down at the brothers, then lowered his gun.
He gave it and the view screen to the beefy youngservant, took off his earbud communicator, and handed it over along with his ID badge.
The brothers yelled at him as their shock wore off.
He ignored them and flew a short distance away, hovering in the air and staring at the majestic snow-covered mountains of the North Cascades.
“Is he going to be okay?” Julie asked, staring at his back.
Sard watched the beefy servant try to get his attention, then give up and return to the brothers’ spaceship alone. The ship flewaway, leaving the older male behind. “Who knows?”
She choked. “After your speech, you don’t know?”
“I don’t know. But he can choose his own destiny as I may finally choose mine.”
Sard pulled her into his embrace, squishing their baby son between them in a loving way. “Do not stand in front of a laser ever again. If something happened to you… Let’s just say I can understand the devastation of my elder sister.”
“I couldn’t let you go again.” She leaned into him, her satisfied feelings mixed with sadness that she hadn’t been able to do this two years ago. “You missed so much.”
“Yes. But now I have the rest of our lives to prove I’ll never miss another moment.”
An enraged scream made them jump.
“The rest of your life is going to be very short!”
The older servant couldn’t escape his past. He transformed fully to dragon, claws out, and dove straight at them.