“Should I be frightened of you?” she heard herself ask. It wasn’t the question she’d intended to open with, but it had seemed to come out without her permission regardless.
Conrad looked back at her for a long moment, a curious expression on his face that she couldn’t quite read. “No,” he said finally, with a smile that was almost sad. “But I’d imagine that’s little comfort, coming from me.”
She frowned. He’d misunderstood her. “I’mnotfrightened of you,” she clarified, moving closer. The grimy armchair was absolutely not an option—instead, she sat on the edge of the low desk opposite the bed. “But that’s just the thing—logically, I should be. I just saw you turn into a—a mythical creature, twenty feet long, with claws sharp enough to kill me in about two seconds flat.” She gestured at the slices in her jacket. “Even my best fabric scissors aren’t that sharp.”
“I would never harm you.”
“But why do I believe that?” She exhaled hard. “I barely know you, Conrad. We met barely a day ago, and it’s been nothing but a disaster ever since. I’m an incredibly guarded person, for good reason. Half of my closest friends don’t even know my home address. If anyone else had brought one tenth of this amount of chaos into my life, I’d have cut them out of my life forever.” She looked at him, willing him to understand. “But despite all of that, Conrad, somehow I still trust you. Why is that?” He looked at her for a long moment, his expression shadowed—but he didn’t respond. She bit her lip. “On the beach, earlier today… when we were walking down to the car. You told me… you said I was a dragon, too.”
He nodded, not taking his eyes off her.
“Why?”
“It’s hard to explain. It’s an assumption we make, a kind of…” His hands shifted in his lap. “Instinctive judgment. Something about you resonates with my magic.”
Magic, she thought faintly. That’s what he’d called her kitchen appliances. She’d thought he was being poetic again. “What about me?”
He gestured, a little helplessly. “Your eyes, your voice, the way you move. I have a friend who can read auras, perhaps it’s something similar to that. And the way I feel about you, I assumed—” He cut himself off. Was that a slight flush rising to his cheeks? She leaned forward, suddenly fiercely curious about what he’d been about to say. “I could be wrong—”
“The way you feel about me?”
“Yes.” He seemed to be making a concerted effort to hold her gaze. He’d been as cool as anything with a battalion of armed men surrounding him, but right now, she could see that his composure was cracking. “You know.” It almost sounded like an accusation. “You must know.”
Mira nodded, some resistance in her giving way, and she quickly moved to sit beside him on the bed. He stiffened momentarily in surprise, but when she leaned against his shoulder, he cautiously slipped an arm around her. The silence that stretched between them was still strained, but she could feel that the tension had eased.
“I’m starving,” she said finally, rising to her feet. “Let’s see what kind of disgusting takeout we can get delivered here.”
And so the strangest night of her entire life continued. There were plenty of takeout places nearby, it turned out, and it wasn’t long before the room was littered with empty containers. Conrad ate politely and without complaint, but she could tell from the careful way he studied his meal that it was all deeply unfamiliar to him. She fought the urge to ask if dragons preferred to hunt and kill their own prey. Something told her she wasn’t quite at the stage where she was ready to joke about the deeply surreal twist her life had taken lately.
Instead, she asked him about where he’d come from. With this crucial piece of information to complete the puzzle, a lot of the strange comments he’d made about his home made a lot more sense. Their meals finished, they sat back on the bed as he described the mountain range that made up his home, the dense forest that surrounded them. But when she asked what lay beyond the forest, he hesitated.
“We don’t know,” he admitted after a pause. “Beyond the forest lies the Fog.”
There was something strange about his pronunciation of that word. “Can’t you just fly through the Fog and see what’s out there?”
He shook his head. “It isn’t like regular mist. The deeper you go, the denser it becomes. You begin to lose track of where you are, of which direction you’re heading… and eventually, even of who you are and where you’ve come from. And there are monsters that live within it, too.” He sighed. “We’ve only recently learned of the existence of communities beyond our own—other fragments of land, inhabited by other people. Some of them have learned to navigate the Fog. We’re learning, too.”
“Is that how you got here?” Lying back on the bed like this, it almost felt like she was listening to a fairytale. “Through the Fog?”
“No. This—this place is somewhere else again. The Queen—the dragon I told you about, the woman from this world—she was able to create a doorway between our worlds, but only for a moment.”
“You’re worried about her.”
Conrad glanced at her, then nodded. “Mostly, I’m worried that she’s worried about me. I didn’t exactly… warn her. It wasn’t part of the plan, my stepping through. But I knew you were in danger, and I just… didn’t think. Most unlike me, if I’m honest,” he added, those blue eyes finding her face again. There was such tenderness in that gaze.
“How will you get home?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted softly. “But I don’t intend to go anywhere at all until I’ve ensured that you’re safe, Mira. Those men—”
But Mira shook her head, lifting a hand to silence him. “Let’s not talk about them, alright? Just for tonight. I think we’ve got more than enough to deal with. They can be tomorrow’s problem.”
Conrad hesitated, but she held his gaze firmly, and he nodded his acceptance. “And tonight’s problem?”
“Tonight’s problem is that you’re a scaly fire-breathingdragon. I think that’s enough problem for an evening, don’t you?”
“I don’t breathe fire,” he said, sounding a little ruffled. “That’s an old folk tale.”
“Oh, how could I have been so foolish?” Mira said with a roll of her eyes. “What a ridiculous thing to believe…”