Page 24 of Dragon Fires Everywhere (Witchlore #4)

“Go on, then,” he says to me, nodding at the building. “You’ve been waiting your entire life for this. Unlock it.”

He isn’t wrong, and it makes me forget about the music. It makes me want to hug him.

Because long before I dreamed of ruling covens, I dreamed of having access to the witchlore archives. To all that knowledge,

all that history, hopefully untouched by the Joywood’s dark magic.

And if I can find clear-cut evidence of the Joywood’s misdeeds, then maybe this long nightmare can really be put behind us.

I move up the path. The building is glowing, but nowhere more so than the door I usually unlock first in the mornings. It’s

a small one in the back, facing the river, and once inside, you can either go up into the museum or down into the basement.

But suddenly there isn’t just one keyhole in this door I know so well. There are two. One is dark.

One is gold.

I put the key into the gold one, holding my breath, and the door opens. It looks almost the same as it would normally, but the stairway down to the basement is bathed in more bright, shimmering gold.

I can hardly contain myself as I run down the stairs, Azrael behind me.

When I wave my hand to turn on the lights, the basement looks almost like it usually does—until I cross the threshold and

all those old boxes and shelves shift . Every step I take, another part of the room resolves or dissolves itself.

It’s like Frost’s library. Things move and change, expand and retract.

As the Riverwood Historian, I’ll have more control over it, unlike when I’m in Frost’s library.

The idea of control immediately vanishes though, because as I step forward, there on the gleaming table at the center of everything

is my book. That stupid fairy tale once again. Complete with that clinch cover.

I can’t think of a single reason it should be here amidst all these important tomes I am itching to get my hands on.

Before I can reach out, or send some magic out to make it disappear, Azrael steps around me and picks it up himself. He studies

the picture of the dragon and the princess intertwined, then looks at me with a raised brow. “Interesting.”

I try to sound unbothered, but I flush. “Is it?”

“What do you suppose this one means?” he asks, but his smile is hungry. And knowing.

I laugh, but why does it sound so... shaky? “Who even knows? It’s not a fortune teller, Azrael. You have yet to fall bleeding

from the sky.”

“Because it gave me a warning, and I heeded it. The cover changed because you lot had the good sense to save me from myself. Had I gone charging after the Joywood or exposed myself as a dragon, that would have likely been me.”

My heart is beating so hard in my ears, I’m certain I didn’t hear him correctly. “What?”

He looks impatient. “The spell? That makes everyone think I’m a human? It worked. The book warned me and I listened. Now we’re

on to this next part.”

“It’s a book, not an oracle,” I argue immediately. Even though I can feel all that song and shimmer inside me. That longing,

that recognition.

My body is still humming with the magic of the spell, the archives of knowledge are all around me, and I’m Historian enough

to find that exciting. But he’s more exciting, and that should scare me.

It does.

Because I know that there is nothing casual here. Nothing between us that doesn’t matter.

No thread in me that fate can’t pull tight and make sing.

I try to argue myself out of it. I am a witch. He is a dragon. There’s no sense to any of this. My life is not a fairy-tale book.

Though there must be something wrong with me that I’ve always wished it was. That I was really that princess. That I could

live in a turret and lose myself in books, and imagine whatever I liked where no one else could see it or hear it or know.

He shakes his head sadly, like I’m a failing pupil—and while I have always played up the Georgie is in the clouds narrative, I never failed a class.

The longing in me feels heavy, like spun gold, but I make myself ignore him. I reach out into the archives. Archives, strong and true. Keeper of fact, of knowledge, of truth. Show me, what have the Joywood been up to?

But nothing happens.

I close my eyes and try to focus more on books than the dragon standing behind me. But once again, nothing happens.

Because it couldn’t be that easy. I rub my hands over my face and catch a hint of his scent from the dancing. It goes through

me like a shattering. “I suppose I’ll have to work harder at it.”

“I suppose,” Azrael agrees, and I don’t appreciate the agreement.

“Maybe it will show me something else. Something important. Something...” I turn and Azrael is still holding my fairy-tale

book, the cover pointed at me. Like nothing could possibly be more important than that embrace.

Something inside me uncoils at that.

My heart seems to leap into my throat. I swear I can see... some vision that feels like a memory, though it isn’t mine.

It’s the princess in her dress, holding her sword, her heart a song I already know.

It’s been singing in me since Thanksgiving.

Before that.

Right now, here in the buttery light of the archives, it’s the loudest it’s ever been.

And I understand that my resistance grows stronger when I’m most afraid that I’m about to dissolve into him the way the archives

do around us. Because once I do, there’s no taking it back.

This thing between us has been a vow since the start.

Since I sat on a staircase and whispered my most private thoughts to a banister.

The uncoiling thing in me seems to laugh at that. That is nothing like the start.

“You still don’t understand, Georgina,” Azrael says, and there is some rare gravity in his voice while all that fierce dragon

gold stares into me.

“Understand what?” I ask breathlessly.

But inside, I keep going back. Back to my own history, for a change.

I let myself remember all the dreams I used to have of dragons.

A dragon. Walking together in a foggy wood.

Flying high over places that were not here .

Waking together in a warm bed, a cozy cave. Fighting, side by side, for right.

For love.

Every time.

My mother tried to charm that away too. Because those dreams did not become me, she would say. They were a sign I was too

silly, too foolish, and we couldn’t have that.

“Understand what , Azrael?” I ask, because I can feel the great knowing inside me, just there . On the other side of this cliff I’ve been dancing on for far too long.

He doesn’t explain. Not in words.

His huge, solid arms come around me. “You already know,” he tells me in a low voice.

Then his mouth is on mine.

And it’s like I’ve never been kissed before in all my life.

That great, wild song inside me swells.

And every last one of the million dreams I’ve had—both specifically dragon-centered and generic daydreams alike—comes true

in the searing heat of his mouth on mine.

The way he kisses me like he has tasted me a thousand times before. Like he already knows me so well, knows the secrets of

my body and the key to my soul.

Everything is foolishness and fairy tales and kisses that change everything.

Everything here is meant to be, and it’s like I can see our souls twined together through time, through different bodies that

are still this, still us .

Us. Us. Us.

I think, This is it . We’ll just incinerate each other. Everything will be over, and maybe that was his plan all along? Maybe he is my end.

But the kiss only keeps going.

It is wild and free and astonishingly carnal. It’s like flying, even with my feet firmly planted on the ground, though I try my best to twine myself around him, because this is new and this is memory and this is it .

Something inside of me... lets go . In relief.

Finally.

His voice or mine?

Our voices, or something else?

I don’t care, because everything around us pulses. Magic and need. Hope and desire. And the overwhelming feeling that I’ve

been waiting centuries to feel this again. Like I once was a princess, riding a dragon who couldn’t be mine. Not in that time.

But in this one...

I can feel him pulling himself together to fly us somewhere else, and I have lost any and all resistance somewhere along the

way to this marvel of a kiss—

But then something makes a slamming sound, deeper in the archives.

We both startle enough to break the kiss. To look at each other, dazed, and then look at where the sound came from.

“What was that?” I ask, trying to move toward the sound.

Azrael growls. “Ignore it.”

But clearly the archives want to tell me something. Something that isn’t in a fairy-tale book, and I can’t ignore that, no

matter how I feel on the inside.

Or you want an excuse to stop the unstoppable.

I don’t know if that’s my own voice or Azrael’s, because I see a huge leather-bound book on the floor. On the cover is a big

unfurling tree.

Then it slams open, pages flying everywhere, as if there’s a great wind in the room, though there’s not. When the hubbub stops,

an ancient-looking and carefully inscribed family tree is on the open page.

I lean forward, peer at it. “A family tree. A Wilde family tree.”

“Georgina.”

I don’t like the way he says it. Sort of a warning, but a soft one. A you won’t like what you’re about to see warning. He hasn’t let me go, but he hasn’t pulled me away from the book either.

If the book wants me to know, how can I look away?

Besides.

I see my name.