Dragonswan Read online

  Ummm, hmmm.

  Smiling, she started to speak until she realized she was on the back of a horse. A really, really big horse.

  Even more peculiar, she was dressed in a dark green gown with wide sleeves that flowed around her like some fairy-tale princess garment.

  "Okay," she breathed, running her hand along the intricate gold embroidery on her sleeve. "It's a dream. I can cope with a dream where I'm Sleeping Beauty or something."

  "It's not a dream," he said quietly.

  Channon laughed nervously as she sat up in his lap and glanced around. The sun was high above as if it were well into the afternoon, and they were traveling on an old dirt road that ran perpendicular to a thick, prehistoric-looking forest. Something was wrong. She could feel it in her bones, and she could tell by the stiffness of his body and his guarded look. He was hiding something. "Where are we?"

  'The where of it," he said slowly, refusing to meet her gaze, "isn't nearly as interesting as the when part."

  "Excuse me?"

  She watched the emotions flicker in his eyes, but the most peculiar one was a fleeting look of panic, as if he were nervous about answering her question. "Do you remember last night when I asked if I could take you home with me and you said sure?"

  Channon frowned. "Vaguely, yes.”

  “Well, honey, I'm home."

  An ache started in her head. What was he talking about? "Home? Where?" He cleared his throat and still refused to meet her gaze. The man was definitely hedging. But why?

  "You said you like research, right?" he asked. Her stomach knotted even more. "Yes.”

  “Consider this a unique research venture then.”

  “Meaning what?"

  His jaw flexed. "Haven't you ever wished you could go back to Saxon England and find out what it was really like before the Normans invaded?"

  "Of course."

  "Well, your wish is granted." He looked at her and flashed an insincere smile. Okay, the guy was not Robin Williams, and unless she was missing something really important from last night, she didn't conjure him from a bottle. If he wasn't a genie...

  She laughed nervously. "What are you saying?"

  "We're in England. Or rather we're in what will one day soon become England. Right now, this kingdom is called Lindsey."

  Channon went completely still. She knew all about the medieval Saxon kingdom, and this ... this was not possible. No, there was no way she could be here. "You're joking with me again, aren't you?"

  He shook his head.

  Channon rubbed her forehead as she tried to make sense of all this. "Okay, you have slipped me a mickey. Great. When I sober up from this you do realize I will call the cops."

  "Well, it'll be about nine hundred years before there are cops to call, about a hundred more years after that before you have a phone. But I'm willing to wait if you are."

  Channon clenched her eyes shut as she tried to think past the throbbing ache in her skull. "So you're telling me that I'm not dreaming and I'm not drugged.”

  “Correct on both accounts."

  "But I'm in Saxon England?" He nodded.

  "And you're a dragon slayer?”

  “Ah, so you remember that part."

  "Yes," she said reasonably, but with every word she spoke after that, her voice crescendoed into mild hysteria.

  "What I don't remember is how the hell I got here!" she shouted, sending several birds into flight.

  Sebastian winced.

  She glared at him. "You told me there wouldn't be any Rod Serling voice-overs, yet here I am in the middle of a Twilight Zone episode. Oh, and let me guess the title of it, Night of the Terminally Stupid!"

  "It's not as bad as all that," Sebastian said, trying to decide the best way to explain this to her. He didn't blame her for being angry. In fact, she was taking all this a lot better than he had dared hope. "I know this is hard for you."

  "Hard for me? I don't even know where to begin. I did something I've never done in my life and then I wake up and you tell me you have supposedly time-warped me into the past, and I'm not sure if I'm insane or delusional or what. Why am I here?”

  “I..." Sebastian wasn't sure what to answer. The truth was pretty much out of the question. Channon, I practically kidnapped you because you are my mate and I don't want to be alone for the next three to four hundred years of my life. No, definitely not something a man told a woman on their first date. He would have to woo her. Quickly. And win her over to wanting to stay here with him. Preferably before a dragon ate one of them.

  "Look, why don't you just think of this as a great adventure. Instead of reading about the history you teach, you can live it for a couple weeks.”

  “What are you? Disney World?" she asked. "And I can't stay here for a couple weeks. I have a life in the twenty-first century. I will be fired from my job. I will lose my car and my apartment. Good grief, who will pick up my laundry?”

  “If you stayed here with me, it wouldn't be a problem. You'd never have to worry about any of that again."

  Channon was aghast at him. Oh, God, please let this be some bizarre nightmare. She had to wake up. This could not possibly be real. "No," she said to him, "you're right. I wouldn't have to worry about any of that in Saxon England. I'd only have to worry about the lack of hygiene, lack of plumbing, Viking invasions, being burned at the stake, lack of modern conveniences, and nasty diseases with no antibiotics. Good grief, I can't even get a Midol. Not to mention, I'll never find out what happens next week on Buffy!" Sebastian let out an elongated, patient breath and gave her an apologetic look that somehow succeeded in quelling a good deal of her anger.

  "Look," he said quietly, "I'll make a deal with you. Spend a few weeks with me here, and if you really can't stand it, I'll take you home as close to the departure time as I can manage. Okay?"

  Channon still had a hard time grasping all this. "Do you swear you're not playing some weird mind game with me? I really am here, in Saxon England?”

  “I swear it on my mother's soul. You are in Saxon England, and I can take you back home. And no, I'm not playing mind games with you."

  Channon accepted that, even though she couldn't imagine why. It was just a feeling she had that he would never swear on his mother's soul unless he meant it. "Can you really take me back to the precise moment I left?”

  “Probably not the precise moment, but I can try.”

  “What do you mean, try?"

  He flashed his dimples, then turned serious. "Time-walking isn't an exact science. You can only move through the time fields when the dawn meets the night, and only under the power of a full moon. The problem is on the arrival end. You can try to get someplace specific, but you have only about a ninety-five percent chance of success. I might get you back that day, but it could also be a week or two after."

  "And that's the best you can do?"

  "Hey, just be grateful I'm old. When an Arcadian first starts time-walking, we only have about a three percent chance of success. I once ended up on Pluto." She laughed in spite of herself. "Are you serious?"

  He nodded. "They're not kidding about it being the coldest planet." Channon took a deep breath as she digested everything he'd told her. Was any of this real? She didn't know, any more than she knew whether or not he was being honest about returning her. He was still very guarded. "Okay, so I'm stuck here until the next full moon?"

  "Yes."

  Oh, good grief, no. Had she been the kind of woman to whine, she'd probably be whining. But Channon was always practical. "All right. I can handle this," she said, more for her benefit than his. "I'll just pretend I'm a Saxon chick and you..." Her voice trailed off as she recalled what he'd said about time-traveling. "Just how old are you?"

  "My people don't age quite the same way humans do. Since we can time-walk, we have a much slower biological clock."

  Oh, she really didn't like the way he said humans, and if he turned fangy on her, she was going to stake him right through the heart. But she would get back to t
hat in a minute. First, she wanted to understand the age thing. "So you age like dog years?"

  Sebastian laughed. "Something like that. By human age, I would be four hundred sixty-three years old."

  Channon sat flabbergasted as she looked over his lean, hard body. He appeared to be in his early thirties, not his late four hundreds. "You're not joking with me at all, are you?"

  "Not even a little. Everything I have told you since the moment I met you has been the honest truth."

  "Oh, God," she said, breathing in slowly and carefully

  to calm the panic that was again trying to surface. She knew it was real, yet she had a hard time believing it. It boggled her mind that people could walk through time and that she could really be in the Dark Ages.

  Surely, it couldn't be this easy.

  "I know there has to be more of a downside to all this. And I'm pretty sure here's where I find out you're some kind of vampire or something.”

  “No," he said quickly. "I'm not a vampire. I don't suck blood, and I don't do anything weird to sustain my life. I was born from my mother, just as you were. I feel the same emotions. I bleed red blood. And just like you, I will die at some unknown date in the future. I just come equipped with a few extra powers.”

  “I see. I'm a Toyota. You're a Lambourghini, and you can have really awesome sex."

  He chuckled. "That's a good summation."

  Summation, hell. This was unbelievable. Inconceivable. How had she gotten mixed up with something like this?

  But as she looked up at him, she knew. He was compelling. That deadly air and animal magnetism-how could she have even hoped to resist him? And she wondered if there were more men out there like him. Men of power and magic. Men who were so incredibly sexy that to look at them was to burn for them. "Are there more of you?"

  "Yes."

  She smiled evilly at the thought. "A lot more?"

  He frowned before he answered. 'There used to be a lot more of us, but times change."

  Channon saw the sadness in his eyes, the pain that he kept inside. It made her hurt for him.

  He looked down at her. "That tapestry you love so much is the story of our beginning."

  "The birth of the dragon and the man?"

  He nodded. "About five thousand years before you were born, my grandfather, Lycaon, fell in love with a

  woman he thought was a human. She wasn't. She was born to a race that had been cursed by the Greek gods. She never told him who and what she really was, and in time she bore him two sons."

  Channon remembered seeing that birth scene embroidered on the upper left edge of the tapestry.

  "On her twenty-seventh birthday," he continued, "she died horribly just as all the members of her race die. And when my grandfather saw it, he knew his children were destined for the same fate. Angry and grief-stricken, he sought unnatural means to keep his children alive."

  Sebastian was tense as he spoke. "Crazed from his grief and fear, he started capturing as many of my grandmother's people as he could and began experimenting with them-combining their life forces with those of animals. He wanted to make a hybrid creature that wasn't cursed."

  "It worked?" she asked.

  "Better than he had hoped. Not only did his sorcery give them the animal's strength and powers, it gave them a life span ten times longer than that of a human." She arched a brow at that. "So you're telling me that you're a werewolf who lives seven or eight hundred years?"

  "Yes on the age, but I'm not a Lykos. I'm a Drakos.”

  “You say that as if I have a clue about what you mean."

  "Lycaon used his magic to 'half his children. Instead of two sons, he made four.”

  “What are you saying?" she asked. "He sliced them down the middle?”

  “Yes and no. There was a byproduct of the magic I don't think my grandfather was prepared for. When he combined a human and an animal, he expected his magic would create only one being. Instead, it made two of them. One person who held the heart of a human, and a separate creature whose heart was that of the animal.

  "Those who have human hearts are called Arcadians. We are able to suppress the animal side of our nature. To control it. Because we have human hearts, we have compassion and higher reasoning."

  "And the ones with animal hearts?"

  "They are called Katagaria, meaning miscreant or rogue. Because of their animal hearts, they lack human compassion and are ruled by their baser instincts. Like their human brethren, they hold the same psychic abilities and shape-shifting, time-bending powers, but not the self-control."

  That didn't sound good to her. "And the other people who were experimented on? Were there two of them, too?"

  "Yes. And we formed the basis of two societies: the Arcadians and the Katagaria. As with nature, like went with like, and we created groups or patrias based on our animals. Wolf lives with wolf, hawk with hawk, dragon with dragon. We use Greek terms to differentiate between them. Therefore dragon is drakos, wolf is lykos, etcetera."

  That made sense to her. "And all the while the Arcadians stayed with the Arcadians and Katagaria with Katagaria?"

  "For the most part, yes."

  "But I take it from the sound of your voice that no one lived happily-ever-after.”

  “No. The Fates were furious that Lycaon dared thwart them. To punish him, they ordered him to kill the creature-based children. He refused. So, the gods cursed us all."

  "Cursed you how?"

  A tic started in his jaw, and she saw the deep-seated agony in his eyes. "For one thing, we don't hit puberty until our mid-twenties. Because it is delayed, when it hits, it hits us hard. Many of us are driven to madness, and if we don't find a way to control and channel our powers we can become Slayers."

  "I take it you don't mean the good vampire slayer kind of slayer that kills evil things."

  "No. These are creatures that are bent on absolute destruction. They kill without remorse and with total barbarism.”

  “How awful," she breathed.

  He agreed. "Until puberty, our children are either human or animal, depending on the parents' base-forms."

  "Base-forms? What are those?"

  "Arcadians are human so their base-forms are human. The Katagaria have a base-form of whatever animal part they are related to. An Ursulan would be a bear, a Ger-akian would be a hawk."

  "A Drakos would be a dragon."

  He nodded. "A child has no powers at all, but with the onset of puberty, all the powers come in. We try to contain those who are going through it and teach them how to harness their powers. Most of the time we succeed as Arcadians, but with the Katagaria this isn't true. They encourage their children to destroy both humans and Arcadians."

  "Because we have vowed to stop them and their Slayers, they hate us and have sworn to kill us and our families. In short, we are at war with one another." Channon sat quietly as she absorbed that last bit. So that was the eternal struggle he'd mentioned yesterday. "Is that why you are here?"

  This time the anguish in his eyes was so severe that she winced from it. "No. I'm here because I made a promise."

  "About what?"

  He didn't answer, but she felt the rigidness return to his body. He was a man in pain, and she wondered why.

  But then she figured it out. "The Katagaria destroyed your family, didn't they?”

  “They took everything from me." The agony in his voice was so raw, so savage. Never in her life had she heard anything like it.

  Channon wanted to soothe him in a way she'd never wanted to soothe anyone else. She wished she could erase the past and return his family to him.

  Seeking to distract him, she went back to the prior topic. "If you're at war with each other, do you have armies?"

  He shook his head. "Not really. We have Sentinels, who are stronger and faster than the rest of our species. They are the designated protectors of both man and were-kind."

  Reaching up, she touched his mask that covered the tattoo on his face. "Do all Arcadians have your m
arkings?"

  Sebastian looked away. "No. Only Sentinels have them." She smiled at the knowledge. "You're a Sentinel.”

  “I was a Sentinel."

  The stress on the past tense told her much. "What happened?”

  “It was a long time ago, and I'd rather not talk about it."

  She could respect that, especially since he'd already answered so much. But her curiosity about it was almost more than she could bear. Still, she wouldn't pry. "Okay, but can I ask one more thing?"

  "Sure."

  "When you say long ago, I have a feeling that takes on a whole new meaning. Was it a decade or two, or-"

  'Two hundred fifty-four years ago."

  Her jaw dropped. "Have you been alone all this time?" He nodded.

  Her chest drew tight at that. Two hundred years alone. She couldn't imagine it. "And you have no one?"

  Sebastian fell silent as old memories surged. He did his best not to remember his role of Sentinel. His family.

  He'd been raised to hold honor next to his heart, and with one fatal mistake, he had lost everything he'd ever cared for. Everything he'd once been.

  "I was ... banished," he said, the word sticking in his throat. He'd never once in all this time uttered the word aloud. "No Arcadian is allowed to associate with me.”

  “Why would they banish you?"

  He didn't answer.

  Instead, he pointed in front of them. "Look up, Chan-non. I think there's something over there you'll find far more interesting than me."

  Seriously doubting that, Channon turned her head, then gaped. On the hill far above was a large wooden hall surrounded by a group of buildings. Even from this distance, she could make out people and animals moving about. She blinked, unable to believe her eyes. "Oh my God," she breathed. "It's a real Saxon village!"

  "Complete with bad hygiene and no plumbing."

  Her heart hammered as they approached the hill at a slow and steady speed. "Can't you make this thing move any faster?" she asked, eager to get a closer view. "I can, but they will view it as a sign of aggression and might decide to shoot a few arrows into us."

  "Oh. Then I can wait. I don't want to be a pincushion."

  Sebastian remained silent and watched her as she strained to see more of the town. He smiled at her exuberance as she twisted in the saddle, her hips brushing painfully against his swollen groin.