Page 7 of Dreams and Dragon Wings (Clean Fairytales for Adults #2)
Aurelia
Fifteen Years Ago
T he clock on the mantel chimed eight. I startled, accidentally stabbing my needle through my poor attempt to embroider a pixie, puncturing her wing.
Only eight o’clock? I still had four more hours before Bene came for me at midnight.
Assuming he kept his promise.
Assuming he could even find me here.
Miss Clara Barton, with her strawberry-blonde curls and sparkling blue eyes, leaned over to give me a nudge. “Just a few more hours until your birthday,” she whispered, coaxing a smile to my lips. “And I rather like the butterfly you’re stitching.”
I had only been at the Thornwick House for Young Ladies for a few days, but already Clara was becoming a fast friend.
My only friend, in fact.
I bit the inside of my cheek, trying not to laugh. “It’s a pixie, actually.”
Clara giggled.
“Ladies,” Headmistress Whitcombe reprimanded us from her perch on the opposite side of the sitting room. “There is never any need to cackle like a hyena.”
Sighing, the stern-faced woman Mama had entrusted me to for the next year rose from her chair. “But it is time for us to transition to our devotionals, at any rate. And then we shall retire for the night.”
My heart fluttered wildly. This was my last opportunity to slip away from the other girls before Bene came.
I suddenly gripped my stomach and doubled over with a dramatic groan.
Clara stared at me.
Across the room, perfect Miss Selina Danbury rolled her eyes and whispered something to her friends, Rebecca and Phoebe. The three of them laughed.
Mistress Whitcombe thinned her lips and declared, “We will have silence, ladies!” before her attention returned to me. “Good heavens, child. Are you all right?”
“I feel ill, Headmistress,” I desperately lied. “Perhaps it was something I ate at dinner?” Wetting my lips, I chanced a look up into the woman’s piercing green eyes when I suggested, “Perhaps… perhaps I should spend the night in the infirmary?”
It was the only way I would be able to meet with Bene undetected. Selina and I shared a room, after all. And I knew she wouldn’t hesitate to report me when she saw a large, handsome dragon tapping at my window.
Pursing her lips, the headmistress waved me off. “To the infirmary with you, then. I will send Lucy along to look at you shortly. You will sleep there for the night.”
I leapt to my feet and bobbed a hasty curtsy before remembering I was supposed to be ill. Clutching my dreadful needlework to my chest, I doubled over again and shuffled out of the sitting room.
The moment I reached the corridor, though, I broke into a decidedly undignified sprint and raced up the stairs to my room to retrieve the present I had already prepared for Bene that was hiding beneath my bed.
It was nothing special—merely a collection of handkerchiefs I had embroidered with his initials.
But hopefully, he would love it all the same.
Hopefully, he would be able to follow the terrible directions I gave him in my last letter and find the finishing school.
Hopefully, he would even just… come.
I didn’t realize I had dozed off until I jerked awake some time later. For the span of a few heartbeats, I lay there on the hard infirmary cot, blinking in confusion as my eyes adjusted to the darkness.
And then I bolted upright.
What time was it? Had I slept straight through Bene’s visit?
Stomach clenching, I flung off my blanket and hurried to the window. Before I even reached it, though, something brushed through my thoughts like a summer breeze—a tentative whisper.
The very sound that must have awakened me in the first place.
“Aurelia?”
I stopped in my tracks as warmth flooded every inch of me. He was here.
Smiling like a lunatic, I ran back to the cot, retrieved his present, and then hurried to pull back the curtain and throw open the window.
And there he was, all pearlescent scales and golden eyes, gleaming like a beacon in the night. Before I could hail him, his large head swung toward me. His nostrils flared. His molten eyes fixated on me.
“Bene,” I whispered, my heart skipping a beat. He was so big now. So strong.
I tried to ignore the way the muscles beneath his scales flexed when he banked to the right and edged as close to the window as his wingspan would allow.
Fear welled up inside me when I realized I would have to jump the rest of the way.
As if sensing my fear, Bene spoke directly into my mind again.
“Trust me,” he whispered. “I will never let you fall.”
Of course. Trust.
Drawing in a deep breath, I leapt out into the humid night air before I had a chance to change my mind. My stomach turned a full flip. I bit back a scream, horrified at the prospect of being spotted through a window by one of the other girls now.
I was in free fall for only a split second at most, though, before Bene surged upward, catching me as promised.
I slammed atop him hard , jarring me to my bones. “I’m so sorry!” I apologized, beyond certain he would now have a bruise squarely on his upper back when he shifted back into his human form.
But he merely snorted and shot off into the darkness. “You cannot hurt me, you know.” After a brief pause, he quietly amended, “Not like that, at any rate.”
The world fell away, rapidly becoming little more than a blur of dark fields and starlight. No more finishing school. No more Headmistress Whitcombe and her disapproving stares. No more Selina Danbury.
Just Bene, me, and the open sky.
My heart swelled until it threatened to burst free from my chest. For a short time at least, I was free.
“You learned to weave Mind magic!” I exclaimed over the whip of the wind. Flinging my free arm around his neck, I gave him a squeeze.
He rumbled in a way I now knew meant he was speaking in Draconic. If only I knew what he was saying. One day , I promised myself. One day, I would learn his native tongue.
If he could learn an entirely new type of magic simply to speak to me, I could certainly learn a new language to speak to him.
“I’m so glad you came, Bene,” I whispered, ashamed I had ever doubted him in the first place. “I was almost afraid you wouldn’t be able to find me.”
“Always,” he promised without a breath of hesitation, that single word branding itself on my soul. “So long as you still want me, Aurelia, I will come. No matter the distance. Always.”