Page 26 of Dragon Fires Everywhere (Witchlore #4)

I push him away, just enough so I can look up at him. “I don’t know what life was like before you were cursed, but I doubt

witches and dragons were...”

I trail off because I don’t know what word to use for that kiss, for what I sense waits for us there, in all that wildness

and sweet fire.

His gaze is so intense that it should hurt. “Have you not read your own book?”

“It’s a fairy tale , Azrael.”

“It is a history of who our souls once were.”

“You can’t honestly think—”

“I don’t think. I know. I am a fabulae , Georgina. I know . And so do you. Have you not dreamed it? Always.”

Always.

It echoes inside me, deep and loud. I recognize it. I remember it.

But I have never let that echo control me. “A Pendell knows when to draw the line between fairy-tale foolishness and facts.

Cold, hard facts.”

Yet facts are not always the whole story , my dad, who is not my father, said only tonight .

And my mother has been lying to me since the day I was born.

“But you are not a Pendell,” Azrael says, with a quiet ruthlessness that slices through me like a stab wound.

I laugh then, a little hysterically. Even when I wasn’t living up to the name, I lived my life with the understanding that this Pendell Historian would have to accept who she was someday.

Boring and drab and reasonable , even if in the ruling coven.

Oh, I like my bright colors and flowy scarves and fantasies, but the truth of me was the scholar

of books, the devotee of research.

Because that’s who Pendells are.

And now that’s been taken away from me. It should be a relief. Maybe at some point it will be, but right now I can only feel

betrayal. “You’re right. I’m a Wilde .” Desmond Wilde’s secret child . I laugh again. “I don’t even like Desmond Wilde. Does anyone?”

I can feel—and see—the frustration mounting in him, and that hardly seems fair. His life didn’t get upended today.

I ignore the fact that he did spend a long, long time cursed into that newel post.

“It doesn’t matter what name you use,” he growls at me. “Names don’t matter. Don’t you see? That’s the point. Who cares who you are in this time?”

“This time?” I ask, though something in me is shaking. Like I am coming apart, from the bones on out.

He knows. Maybe he feels it. I can see it in the way his gaze searches mine. In the knowing, demanding gleam in all that gold.

“We are bound together, you and I, in every time.” Azrael says this like prophecy. Like fact. And he is not done. “There has

never been a moment in all of eternity that you have not been mine. You have lived many lives, and I am in all of them. This

is who we are.”

For a moment, I’m frozen. In sheer terror.

Because I want it to be true, even though I know it can’t be. Maybe dragons can live in every time, in many different lives,

but witches get the once. This is common knowledge. That’s why we have ghosts.

This is who we are.

Even though it can’t be, I want it to make sense of everything I’ve ever felt and denied.

I want to be the princess in that book.

I want everything I was told I couldn’t have because I was a fucking Pendell, and Pendells do not get to shine like that.

But I am not a Pendell.

I never have been.

“Okay, then,” I manage to get out.

Because in this moment, where my entire life has been upended, I don’t want to ask the questions. I don’t want to fix anything. I don’t want to pore over the facts and go drop this same bomb on my friends.

I want to be his. I want him to be right, and this feeling inside me to be true. For once, I want everything I feel to be

the only truth I hold on to. If dragons can exist, why can’t lifetimes? He was right about true covens and fabulae, so why

shouldn’t I let myself believe it’s possible he’s right about this ?

Now it’s my turn to reach out to him, to pull his mouth down to mine, to pour all this... whirling, confusing mess of mine into him.

And he takes it and turns it into wildfire.

Magic sparks against magic, desire against desire. We are nothing but flame—and I need it. Goddess, how I need it.

To sear off all these confusing things I don’t want to know.

I want it to roar through me and wash it all away.

I want to be purified in his this is who we are until I believe it too.

His hands are as hot as his mouth, rough and deliriously mobile. Our mouths are greedy, until there is nothing but us.

An us that does not seem to be tethered to my outside body, but to something far deeper.

Then we’re in the air.

The stars press in all around us, and we’re not flying the way we did before. This is something else.

“How are we...?” I ask in part wonder, part desire. “I’m not a...?”

“Dragon magic,” he tells me.

Because I am flying with him, but my body is not my body. We are both smoke and swirling, rush and plummet. I stretch into

scales and stars, wrapping myself around him, my arms wide like wings. Maybe I really do have wings.

And everything is a building, blinding pleasure. Everything is magic.

“I don’t know what to do,” I tell him, and the heavens.

“You do,” he tells me, his mouth at my neck. “You have done exactly this too many times to count.”

And I know it’s true. I know it’s all true. I know it’s fate and longing, passion and joy.

His magic makes me a dragon in the air, just like him. Crafted specifically for him and the press of his immensity within.

There is no name. There is no time. There is only us .

And a dizzying culmination that is more than just any moment. It is every moment.

Souls meant to come together, no matter what time they find themselves in.

Then we land in my bed, breathless and pulsing, in the shape of a man and a woman.

“Now,” Azrael murmurs as he crawls down my body and settles himself between my legs, “dessert.”

And when the fire comes for me then, I arch up and cry out. It’s brighter and hotter and louder than any other I’ve known.

Azrael laughs. It’s a deep sound I can feel between my legs, into my skin, deep into my bones. Again and again, until we roll

together and I climb on top of him. I prop myself up against the wide expanse of his chest.

I look down at him, and I know.

This is ancient, this power we have over each other. For each other.

This is forever, this passion without borders or bounds, beyond life and death.

I am his. He is mine.

His gaze is gold and black and fire straight through.

It’s him .

He is mine .

We have always been this. Us. Fate.

It takes me a long, hot little struggle—even though I am something far more than merely ready— to take all of him deep inside me. To breathe until I can move, then lose myself in the slide and catch and the sheer perfection

of the magic we make together.

Over and over and over again.

Until we can do nothing but breathe into each other, wrung out and still perfect, and us . Here in my bed, like we have always belonged here.

Azrael pulls me close, tucks me against his body, my head in the crook of his arm.

I hear him growl against my neck. “My own.”

But as my breathing steadies, I’m forced to realize that as wonderful as that was—too spectacular to believe, in fact—it really

didn’t solve anything.

I feel so much joy and wholeness that this sadness shouldn’t still be sitting there in the pit of my stomach. It should have been wiped away. At least for

a little while.

Azrael presses a kiss to my temple. “Go on, then. Let it out. You’ll feel better.”

So I cry.

And I let my dragon comfort me, as he did when he was my sleepwalking daydream.

The way I want to believe he always has.