Still, it had given her a little breathing room. She leafed idly through the pages of another journal, but her mind had returned to the subject that Conrad kept bringing up, in his quiet but irresistible way. That had been on the list, hadn’t it? Challenges me intellectually, but knows when to give me space… here she was, enjoying that space. And part of her wished that he was right here with her. She’d even be willing to let him read her diaries, she realized with a jolt. There was nobody on the planet she trusted that much, not even Heather.
But did she trust him about this? This wasn’t just her—this was her family he was talking about. How could she be a dragon without her parents being dragons? Conrad had said it himself—dragons didn’t age. And she’d literally watched her father age—incredibly fast, at the end there. It was like all his life had gone when her mother had… and though he’d done his best to hang on for Mira, at the end of the day, that hadn’t been enough to overcome his grief.
Her mother, though… Mira frowned down at the pages of her diary. There, glued carefully onto one of the pages, was a note in her father’s careful, looping handwriting. Tears sprang to her eyes as she recognized it. Every day, he’d slipped a little note into the lunch he’d packed her to take to school… even as he’d gotten sicker and sicker, towards the end, he’d insisted on the ritual. And even though Mira had been just about the only kid in her year who still brought a packed lunch from home, she hadn’t cared. She still had a huge collection of the notes in a box somewhere… probably with the rest of her father’s things. Things that the man in the shed had wanted to set fire to, she remembered with a flash of anger. Suddenly, the huge bruise on his face didn’t seem so much like overkill.
It wasn’t like his usual lunch notes, the one that had been taped into her journal. Those were usually quick little phrases, well-wishes or affirmations or, more often, terrible jokes he’d heard somewhere. This one was a couple of sentences long.I’m sorry there’s so much I can’t tell you yet, the note said.Confusion and grief are both dark places. I promise I have a torch waiting when you’re old enough.
She’d kept it because it had been so puzzling, so unlike his usual missives… but when she’d gotten home that night, he’d been too sick to ask about the note.
“Was this what you were going to tell me, Dad?” she whispered, thinking of Conrad, of the great wings that had spread out across the night sky and carried her to the ocean. She thought of the way her heart had raced, the way her chest had seemed to fill with light, with the city spread out below her and the wind in her hair. She thought of the way that despite everything, she’d felt no fear at all up there.
When she was old enough… the expression had always made her groan. How old was old enough, anyway? Eighteen? Twenty-one? At what magical age would she be mature enough to handle the truth about who she was? Because right now, she was heading for forty, and deep down she still felt like a frightened child. New souls, that was what they said about Virgos, wasn’t it? Virginal… not in the sexual sense, but in the sense of being brand new to the world.
But maybe it wasn’t that she was slow to mature. Maybe it was just that she was running on a very different timeframe to the people around her… and her eyes widened as the correction rose, unbidden, to her mind. A different timeframe to thehumansaround her.
Her childhood bedroom was growing dim by the time she stirred from her seat on the bed. Outside, the sun was setting, and she knew it would be casting ruddy orange light across the fields of her aunt’s rocky, hilly property. The night was setting in. But she wasn’t going to let the sun go down on yet another day of not knowing who she was, of why she’d always felt like she was waiting around for an explanation that never came. Enough was enough. It was time to face up to the shadow lurking in her past. And there was exactly one person she wanted at her side when she did it.
He wasn’t in the kitchen. Outside with the wolves, then? She was halfway out the door when she heard Heather call her name softly. Mira flinched as he turned, aware of what a brat she’d been earlier… but when she opened her mouth to apologize, Heather’s impatient hand wave and a brief flash of a smile told her she’d already been forgiven. Probably hours ago.
“Where’s Conrad?”
“In the spare room,” Heather said. “He was dead on his feet, the poor thing. Needed a rest. We had quite a good conversation while you were gone.”
“He doesn’t speak English,” Mira pointed out blankly. Heather’s eyes twinkled, and Mira couldn’t help but laugh. Her aunt had never needed words to get the measure of someone. A handshake and a few seconds of eye contact, she always said, that was all she needed. “And?”
Heather smiled faintly. “It’s early days. But so far… he gets a passing grade.”
That was high praise, Mira thought faintly as she headed down the hallway. The closest Mira had ever been to bringing a boyfriend home was when her friends from high school came up to stay for the weekend. Once or twice, a male friend had been among them… and Heather was never shy in passing fierce judgment. The woman had good reason to be distrustful of men, of course—Mira never held her defensiveness against her. She’d been through hell when she’d left her ex-husband, a man who hid his abusive red flags until after the wedding… and who’d been on such good terms with all the local cops that it had been years before Heather could get free of him without also losing her farm and her savings. All that had been before Mira and her father had lived in this part of the country, but Heather hadn’t so much as been on a date since the day she’d finally gotten her divorce, as well as an ironclad restraining order. It was framed on the wall in the study, right above the gun safe.
Whatever her parentage, Mira knew one thing for sure—the women in her family didn’t take any nonsense from threatening men. The man in the shed was lucky that a black eye was the worst of his wounds.
She tapped on the door before she let herself into the spare room, smiling a little as she took in the familiar bunk beds where she’d spent so many sleepovers as a teenager. It felt strangely empty in here with only one bunk occupied, Conrad’s sleeping form already stirring as the light from the doorway fell across his face. He blinked those blue eyes at her, coming quickly awake as he recognized her.
“Hey,” she said softly. There were a few English words she used when she spoke with Conrad, and that was one of them. His language simply didn’t have an informal enough greeting.
“Hey to you,” he replied, his voice drowsy. She giggled a little at how stilted the word sounded in his formal accent, pleased by the smile that spread across his face. He was a little less guarded when he was sleepy, she’d noticed. Quicker to smile, and his smiles lingered longer… “I fell asleep. I’m sorry.”
“You needed it,” Heather said.
“That may be true.” He sat up, running a hand through his tousled hair.
“That wasn’t all she said,” Mira added, hiding a smile at the way his eyes rocketed sharply up to meet hers. “She likes you. Well, that’s probably an overstatement, but for Heather, that’s a big deal.”
“I’m honored,” he said softly. He meant it, too. She could tell. Unbidden, a phrase from her crowded Perfect Man Manifesto rose to her mind—he will care for my family as much as I do.
She took a deep breath, steeling herself. “Conrad?”
“Yes?”
“How do we go about proving I’m a dragon?”
Chapter 22 - Conrad
It had been dark for hours when the four of them convened in the back paddock of Heather’s farm, jackets pulled tight around them to protect against the wind that had blown up since sunset. This was the lowest point of Heather’s property, as well as some of the flattest, which was why they’d come here. An ancient circle of soot-darkened stones marked the place where, Mira had explained to him, she and her friends used to light campfires and spend long evenings under the stars. It felt appropriate, then, to be here now, for this conversation.
Conrad wasn’t sure exactly what Mira had said to her aunt about what their goal was down here. She certainly hadn’t invited her to join them, and he got the feeling that she didn’t really want to be the person who told Heather about the existence of shifters, at least not right now… they had enough to be getting on with without adding that conversation to the to-do list. But the woman must have her suspicions, Conrad thought, thinking of the way she’d shown him the photos of Mira’s mother over the years. Humans noticed when other humans didn’t age the way they did.
Conrad had been rather surprised when Vee and Ren had offered to join them down here. Mira had filled them in on the situation outside on the patio, out of earshot of Heather, and Conrad had watched them nod, exchanging knowing glances with one another when Mira looked away. They’d recognized the same thing in her that he had, the moment they’d met… how could they not have? In a world dominated by humans, Conrad was already growing more attuned to how different shifters felt, how they seemed to press a different pattern into the vibrations of the world. He wondered how many shifters Mira had crossed paths with and been entirely unaware of what she was…