My whole body, in fact, had gone ice cold. I had become crystalline, see-through.
I wasn’t driftwood but an icicle, and the wrong words, Jesse’s next words, might shatter me to pieces.
Whatever they were, I didn’t want to hear them. Yet I couldn’t move.
Perhaps he understood. He watched me closely but didn’t try to approach.
“Think about it. Don’t lose your nerve now, just think. Where did you come from? Who is your family? You’ve known all your life you’re not like any of the creatures around you. You hear things, you sense things no one else does. You can do things that no one else can. Those weren’t the delusions or even the hopeful fantasies of a lonely child. It was the hidden part of you seizing the truth. Using it. An ancient magic created you, a powerful magic. It twines through you, growing stronger with every full moon. This is only the beginning. It’s going to consume you eventually. That voice inside you—”
“What?” I did lurch back a step then.
“The voice inside you,” Jesse repeated, gentle. “It’s not truly a voice, is it? It’s more feelings than that. Instinct. Animal. Bestial.”
“Are you—did you just call me—”
“A beast, yes. You are. Better than that, though. You’re better than all the other beasts in all the rest of the universe.” He paused, a smile breaking through at last. And it was a dazzling smile, one to melt hearts and lies and all manner of icy-cold things. He came to his feet and crossed to me, stopping a handbreadth away.
His eyes captured mine, summer green darkened to dusk. His voice became a whisper.
“Lora, beloved. Lora of the moon and sky. You are a dragon.”
Ah, sighed the fiend, swelling with delight inside me, filled with an awful, awful recognition. Ah, ah! AH!
“That is enough,” I shouted over them both; rather, I tried to shout, but my voice was so strangled it came more as a gasp. “I don’t know what you’re playing at, but I don’t appreciate your games. I—I came here to tell you to stop pestering me, and leaving me gifts, and smiling at me—”
“You dream of flying,” Jesse said, which cut me off mid-sentence.
“Aye.” He nodded, shadows and gold, tall and warm and much too near. “I know all about it. I know all about you. You have wings at night. You lift as smoke. And you come to me, don’t you? Always to me.”
I could not reply. I could barely take a breath.
This is a dream, this is all still a dream, it’s just a new part to the dream, that’s all—
“It’s why you’re here now, tonight. You’re drawn to me, as fiercely as I am to you. You didn’t even have to follow my song this time. I muted it, didn’t you notice? And you came anyway.”
For a long, long moment, I gave up on breathing. For a long, long moment, all I heard was my heartbeat and his, and a gull crying miles away, and the distant thunder of a German bomb exploding on innocent ground.
Jesse lifted a hand and placed it on my arm. His palm felt hot against the cotton of my sleeve, his fingers felt firm, and that rush of longing and pleasure that always overtook me at his touch began to build.
“Lora,” he whispered again, so quiet it was barely a sound. “Inhale.”
And when I did, he bent his head to kiss me.
• • •
He tried to be careful about it. He tried to limit himself to a barely there touch, just his mouth to hers, nothing alarming, nothing assumed. But her lips were even softer than he’d dreamed, and with their bodies this close her scent wrapped around him in a heady rush. Jesse felt like he was drowning in flowers and fever and delight.
He wanted to drown. This was so much better than he’d … ever …
It spun out longer than he’d planned. It was still a joining of near chastity; the as-yet-contained part of him was afraid to move, afraid to lift his hands to her face, as he desperately wanted, to discover the contours of her with his fingertips. To feel her bare skin.
But he didn’t want to frighten her, and he didn’t want the kiss to end.
When he pulled from her at last, they were both sleepy-eyed and breathing hard. She looked stunned, so flushed and so beautiful and so very much at the edge of what he knew her to be that he nearly smiled, which would have