feed off one another. The only way to prevent that would be to separate. And even then it might not be enough. Too much has already begun.”
“I don’t want to separate from you,” I said.
“No.” Jesse lifted our hands and gave mine a kiss. “Don’t worry about that.”
Armand practically rolled his eyes. “If you two are quite done, might we talk some sense tonight? It’s late, I’m tired, and your ruddy chair, Holms, is about as comfortable as sitting on a tack. I want to …”
But his voice only faded into silence. He closed his eyes and raised a hand to his face and squeezed the bridge of his nose. I noted again those shining nails. The elegance of his bones beneath his flawless skin.
Skin that was marble-pale, I realized. Just like mine.
“Yes?” I said, more gently than I’d intended.
“Excuse me. I’m finding this all a bit … impossible to process. I’m beginning to believe that this is the most profoundly unpleasant dream I’ve ever been caught in.”
“Allow me to assure you that you’re awake, Lord Armand,” I retorted, all gentleness gone. “To wit: You hear music no one else does. Distinctive music from gemstones and all sorts of metals. That day I played the piano at Tranquility, I was playing your father’s ruby song, one you must have heard exactly as I did. Exactly as your mother would have. You also have, perhaps, something like a voice inside you. Something specific and base, stronger than instinct, hopeless to ignore. Animals distrust you. You might even dream of smoke or flying.”
He dropped his arm. “You got that from the diary.”
“No, I got that from my own life. And damned lucky you are to have been brought into this world as a pampered little prince instead of spending your childhood being like this and still having to fend for yourself, as I did.”
“Right. Lucky me.” Armand looked at Jesse, his eyes glittering. “And what are you? Another dragon? A gargoyle, perchance, or a werecat?”
“Jesse is a star.”
The hand went up to conceal his face again. “Of course he is. The. Most. Unpleasant. Dream. Ever.”
I separated my hand from Jesse’s, angling for more bread. “I think you’re going to have to show him.”
“Aye.”
A single blue eye blinked open between Armand’s fingers. “Show me what?”
• • •
He must have known this moment was near, because only this morning he’d gotten up in time to venture out to the back meadow, where lush knots of foxtail and buttercups nodded through the grasses. By the light of dawn he’d picked a dewed bouquet—he’d thought for Lora—and brought it back to the cottage.
It rested now in his mother’s green glass vase on the sill of his bedroom window, all the dew dried, fragrance sowing wild and heady into the blankets and pillows of his bed.
Too much to hope, it seemed, that he could have shown it to his dragon-girl in there.
Jesse beheaded one of the buttercups, brought it to the table where the two of them waited, Lora with her hair down and her gaze steady on his, still chewing her slice of bread. A smudge of jam traced an endearing curve along the bottom of her lip.
And Armand, leashed but so coiled inside, looking absolutely as if he’d rather be anywhere else in the world right now than here with the two of them.
You and me both, mate, Jesse thought.
He uncurled his fingers to reveal the buttercup in his palm. Armand’s gaze flicked to the flower, but that was all. Lora, who knew what was imminent, wiped at the jam, closed her eyes, and turned her face away.
He would never, ever let her down. Jesse steeled himself, opened his soul to the fire, and let the agony come.
• • •
“A star,” Eleanore said once more, after the light had faded and Mandy had gotten his vision back.
He’d shoved away from the table without being aware of it; his chair now laid on its side by his feet. Holms no longer had that brilliant, horrifying glow that had blinded Armand, that had seemed to boil his blood to a peak and send his mind into a fierce frantic babble: It can’t be, it can’t, it cannot be.
“Dragon protects star,” Eleanore announced coolly from her place across the table, her half-eaten bread pinched between two fingers. “Star adores dragon. And now you can’t betray us.”
• • •
Like a dazzling reminder of the impossible made possible, the golden buttercup shone upon the table, lucent metal against the duller