“I have no idea, but the word he used wasn’t just a standard insult. It’s specific to dragons. To do with heritage, the violation of tradition… not a nice word, overall, but not one that would make sense to throw at anyone but a dragon.”
“You’re saying I’m adopted, or something?” She lifted a hand automatically to her hair. “Ever since I can remember, everyone’s told me how much I look like my dad. You saw my aunt’s hair, right? No way that’s a coincidence.”
“I don’t know,” Conrad said softly. “But Mira—you have to admit it makes sense.”
The whole room felt like it was spinning. Mira shut her eyes hard against the sudden feeling that she was going to pass out. Conrad was at her side in an instant, steadying her with a warm hand on her arm, but suddenly he was too close, too near. She needed time, needed space—needed silence and nothing but her own company to think this through. “Leave me alone,” she ground out, her voice harsher than she’d meant it to be. Conrad moved back from her at once, though when she opened her eyes, his expression was almost enough to make her cry. “Sorry, Conrad, I just—I need some time, alright? Please.”
“I understand,” he said softly. And with that, he was gone, the door clicking shut gently behind him. Mira sat down on the edge of her childhood bed and stared into the distance, seeing absolutely nothing in the shapes and colors that danced before her eyes.
Chapter 20 - Conrad
Great, Conrad thought faintly as he headed back down the long hallway towards the dining room. He’d blundered in like a fool, trying to give Mira all the answers, and all he’d succeeded in doing was making her even more upset than she had been in the first place. Heather looked up when she saw him come into the dining room, a question in her eyes… and he shook his head mutely, neither of them needing a common language to understand what had happened. The wolves were nowhere to be seen, and when he cast his gaze curiously around the kitchen, Heather pointed through the kitchen window that overlooked the patio. He could just make out the shapes of the two young wolves in a far paddock. Getting up to mischief, no doubt. He smiled faintly at the memory of spring in the forest, when the young wolves would wrestle and play on the shores of the great lake… and another pang of homesickness struck him.
“Conrad.” He looked up at the sound of Heather’s voice, smiling a little. At least they knew each other’s names. She was beckoning him towards a door in the far wall, and he tilted his head curiously as he moved to join her. He soon found himself in a room that was quieter than the rest of the house, putting him in mind of the Palace Archives in miniature. Densely packed bookshelves, a desk cluttered with sheets of paper that had clearly once been intended as a workspace… that much was familiar. The gadgets that cluttered the room, on the other hand, were as alien as could be, with fat wires connecting them to whatever arcane source of power it was that they drew on to function. Mira had tried to explain electricity to him, but she’d failed. Their language wasn’t well equipped to describe such things, it seemed.
Heather was holding an enormous book, and she gestured him over to look down at its pages. Half expecting to see the kind of dense script that most of the tomes in the Archives contained, he was surprised when he realized that the pages of the book were decorated with pictures instead… but these were no ordinary pictures. These were impossibly detailed, exquisitely sharp and lifelike—much like the ones Mira had stuck all over the walls of her room. Photographs, she had called them.
“Mira,” Heather said, tapping on one of the images. He frowned at it, not understanding. This was a picture of a child, a short girl with a round face and a mess of frizzy hair. But then his eyes widened.
“This is Mira as a child?” he asked, but Heather’s quizzical expression made him sigh. “Sorry, Heather.”
She smiled at the sound of her own name, then repeated it a few times—and when he realized she was imitating his accent, he couldn’t help but laugh. He tried to say it the way he heard the wolves and Mira say it, emphasizing the final consonant. Heather burst out laughing, slapping him affectionately on the shoulder. She tapped on the photo again… then on another. This one was below the first, and it showed three figures. One was the child from the photo above, smiling even more broadly. The other two were a man and a woman, standing arm in arm. The photo had frozen them in a moment of looking into each other’s eyes, and Conrad found himself arrested by the expression on each of their faces. He’d seen that look before, countless times… in the Throne Room, whenever Lana called on her mate Seth to speak, or whenever Acantha complained of some new idea Cato had had in the middle of the night.
It was the look of a person who had found their soulmate.
These were Mira’s parents, he realized. The man had the same dark, curly hair as both Heather and Mira did. The woman, by contrast, had a mane of blonde hair that poured down her back and over her shoulders like flax… and though her eyes were crinkled in a smile, he could still make out the glint of gold. Mira’s eyes.
He could feel questions burning in him, and almost started asking them before he remembered himself. Heather was smiling at him. She leafed through the photo album again, showing him more and more pictures of the little family. Mira’s mother featured, again and again… he realized they were arranged chronologically, with the child growing younger and younger with each passing page. A photo of the golden-eyed woman, cradling a tiny baby against her chest with love vivid on her face. Then even more, clearly taken before Mira was born. Most of these were of the man and the woman. Heather lingered for a long moment on one particular photo, in which Mira’s mother stood resplendent in a long, white gown, Mira’s father standing proudly beside her in a dark suit. One long finger tapped on a figure in the crowd around the couple—a young woman with waist-length curly hair. Heather’s smile was mischievous when he met her gaze, and she tapped on her chest with her index finger.
Conrad ran some rapid calculations. These photos had to span at least a decade, likely much longer. He could see the differences in Mira’s father as the years passed, the fine lines that slowly marked his face, the touches of gray that came into his dark hair… but by contrast, every photo of Mira’s mother may as well have been taken on the same day for all that the years had marked her.
He looked at Heather, wishing he could ask her if she knew what this meant. She lifted both of her shoulders in an exaggerated shrug, her expression making it clear that she’d noticed the same strange thing that he had… but if she knew what it meant that her brother’s mate hadn’t aged a day in all the years she’d known her, she wasn’t letting on. But Conrad, at least, knew what it meant. It meant he’d been right. Mira’s mother had been a dragon… and Mira had inherited more than just her golden eyes.
Heather closed the book gently, and he put a hand on its dusty cover as he thanked her. The words may have gone over her head, but her smile of acknowledgment told him she’d taken his meaning. Conrad turned back towards the door, determined to take what he’d learned straight to Mira. She had to know who she was, what she was… but before he could, he felt Heather grab him by the elbow and shake her head firmly. She opened her mouth, closed it again, casting around the room as if looking for something… then pointed at the wall, where a clock was softly ticking. Conrad couldn’t help but laugh. Heather said something, then repeated the final word, pointing at the clock.
“Time,” Conrad repeated slowly. Mira had tried to teach him a few words of her language, but he’d been a disastrously slow study, especially compared to her own rapid advancement with Draconic. Did that have something to do with her ancestry, he wondered? Some aptitude for language, carried in the magic that made shifters who they were? The scholars back home would lose their minds when he told them this story. They’d be derailed for at least an hour.
That assumed, of course, that he’d ever see them again. And with that fresh wave of homesickness, he realized for the first time in a long time just how tired he was. He swayed just a little on his feet… but it was enough. Clicking her tongue, Heather took him by the elbow and all but marched him through the dining room and down the corridor. Past Mira’s room, past the bathroom, and into a small room dominated by two sets of bunk beds.
Language barrier or no, Conrad knew when he was being given an order. Obediently, he moved over to one of the neatly made bunks, and Heather gave him a reassuring smile as she closed the door behind him. He kicked off his shoes before laying back on the mattress, looking up at the underside of the mattress above him. Back home, the wolves maintained emergency shelters on the edges of the Fog, log cabins with enough bunk beds to house a dozen people or more in a pinch. At first, he’d been fascinated by the differences between this strange new world and his own… but the more time he spent here, the more it was the similarities that caught his attention.
Conrad was surprised to find sleep stealing up on him. He’d expected to lie awake here for an hour or so, using the time to formulate strategies for the overlapping calamities that seemed to be facing them… the question of the man in the shed, the question of the wolves’ lost packmates, the question of Mira’s heritage, the question of why the men were after her… but he hadn’t reckoned on his exhaustion outweighing the adrenaline. His eyes slid shut before he knew it, and it wasn’t long before there was nothing on his mind but darkness.
Chapter 21 - Mira
There was only one thing to do when you were feeling this overwhelmed by everything that was going on, Mira decided. It was time to lose herself in nostalgia. And what better place to do that than her childhood bedroom? She dragged all her old diaries from their familiar hiding places, and it wasn’t long before she was sitting cross-legged on her bed, giggling and cringing in equal parts at the melodramatic storytelling of her teenage self. The best stuff was from the earlier years, of course. After her father’s death, she hadn’t journaled for a long time, and when she’d started again, the melodrama was a lot more restrained.
She really had been a self-important little kid, hadn’t she? She grinned as she leafed through page after page of her adolescent despair at being the only girl in the entire school who wasn’t absolutely obsessed with boys. Every time one of her friends started dating a boy, the pages would fill with disgusted observations on his immaturity, his stupidity, all the things that made him Not Good Enough.
Then she found it—her favorite page of all. It was a manifesto she’d written in a free period one afternoon, incensed by yet another messy break-up between one of her friends and some good-for-nothing boy. In it, she described The Perfect Man, laying out the qualities she would require of a future partner. This was no wish list—this was a list of demands. And at the bottom, she’d signed and dated it, like a contract.
There were more physical requirements than she remembered, she noticed as she scanned the page. The Perfect Man would be taller than her (back then, she’d still been expecting to grow beyond five foot two.) He would be fit and strong, and take good care of not only his health but his hygiene, too… no stinky gym socks. A sharp dresser, who did his own laundry, who knew how to cook and clean and didn’t consider it a woman’s duty… she grinned as the list became more personality oriented. He would be calm and fully in control of his emotions. He would be thoughtful and attentive, a good listener, who knew when to offer help and when to simply listen to her troubles. He would understand his own feelings and communicate them intelligently, and he would honor hers. He would trust her judgment absolutely… the list went on and on, and she couldn’t help giggling at the emphatic tone she took when it came to commitment timelines. Incredibly specific. They would date for a minimum of five years before considering cohabitation. They would then live together for a minimum of five years before getting engaged was a consideration. The engagement would be a minimum of—yes—five years.
“Really keen on taking your time, huh, baby Mira?” she whispered aloud to the ancient pages. “Good instincts.” But what would baby Mira think if she knew she was already setting herself up for a future of such impossibly high standards that she’d be nearing forty before she even went on a second date with a man? Would she have underlined ‘dealbreaker’ quite so many times, she wondered?
And how would she have felt about how quickly she’d fallen for Conrad?
Mira chewed on her lower lip, shutting the diary and sitting back against her pillow. Outside, she could hear the distant sounds of shouts and laughter, and the occasional splash—the wolves, she guessed, had found the swimming hole around the side of the house. You could always trust Heather to be a good host. The afternoon was wearing on, and soon evening would swallow the property in dusk… her mind strayed to the man tied and bound in the shed, and she grimaced. So much for escaping into the past. The present was far too pressing for nostalgia to hold it back for too long.