in time? To another century? Or back to last week, to warn me not to burn dinner so I wouldn’t have to go to bed hungry?”
Beau laughed softly. “Nothing so dramatic or useful, I’m afraid. It’s really a one-time-only thing, and calling it actual time travel is a little bit of an exaggeration. It’s more like we can pause time – or close to it – for everyone but ourselves. We keep moving, but everyone else stops. But it’s only for a moment, and it takes a lot of energy. Which is why we’d never use it unless we had no other choice. There’s hippogriffs who’ve had to do it for more than a couple of seconds, and the results were… well, it wasn’t pretty.”
Annie swallowed. “Oh… what happened?”
Beau hesitated before he answered. All of this was still new to Annie, and he didn’t want to scare her. But he supposed if she was going to be frightened, she already would be.
“She was in a coma for three weeks. We weren’t sure whether she’d come out of it, though eventually she did. It was touch and go for a long time, though.”
“You sound as if this was someone you know,” Annie said quietly, reaching out to touch his hand.
Beau swallowed. Of course, Annie had been able to intuit it in his voice. She was his fated mate, after all.
He nodded. “Yes. My mother. It was years ago, but… well, you never forget that kind of thing. Especially when it was your fault that it happened in the first place.”
“Oh – what happened?” Annie asked softly.
Beau took a deep breath. “I was a kid, and I hadn’t learned how to use my wings yet – not properly. But like a lot of kids, I took a silly risk, and misjudged a distance. One minute I thought I was flying, just like my older sister and cousins, the next… well, the next my mother was holding me in her arms. I never knew what happened in between, except I remembered realizing I’d overshot where I wanted to land, and I was going to go tumbling down the side of a ravine instead.”
Beau shook his head. The memory still felt fresh in his mind, even though it had been over twenty years since it had happened.
Annie squeezed his hand. He looked up to find her gazing at him with her beautiful green eyes, which were wet with tears.
“I’m sorry I asked – I didn’t mean to bring up a painful memory.”
“Hey, no – no crying,” Beau said quickly, leaning forward to gently run his thumb over her cheekbone, catching her tears before they could fully fall. “It’s okay. It’s something I’ve dealt with. I won’t pretend it wasn’t hard and I didn’t have my fair share of guilt for a while. But we can’t hold on to these things forever. My mother and I are still close, and believe me, it definitely made me appreciate my family all the more. In that way, it was a good lesson to learn early on.”
Beau paused, swallowing. He meant every word he said. It was part of the reason he was always quick to put in for leave every Christmas.
“She’s always said she’d do it again in a heartbeat, for any of her children or grandchildren,” he continued after a moment. “Though obviously I hope it’d never come to that.”
Annie nodded, blinking away her remaining tears. “Sorry. I just… well, honestly, this is all kind of overwhelming. I have to admit I’m still kind of quietly freaking out about the fact you just casually mentioned dragons exist.”
Beau grimaced. Had he dumped too much on her too fast? “Yeah, sorry about that – and sorry my power isn’t as cool as breathing fire or something like that.”
“Ah, no, I’m fine with being able to pause time,” Annie said quickly, shooting him a smile. “Breathing fire sounds like… more than I could handle. What if you sneezed and set my hair on fire?”
Beau couldn’t hold back his burst of laughter – not that he was inclined to. “Okay, good point. I don’t know how dragons keep that kind of thing under control.”
Annie giggled shyly. “Honestly, I do have a lot more questions for you, but I think I need some time to… to process what you’ve already told me. I think I should probably just eat my soup for now.” She lifted the spoon to her lips, sipping at the chowder. “Mmmm. Oh my God. That’s so good.”
Beau