[Tuesday 1:30 PM – North Africa]
Ray stepped into the vortex and was met with darkness. He blinked a couple of times to adjust his eyes and heard a girl yell. He muttered a spell to hide his presence and crouched deeper into the darkness of the alcove, hiding his human form. While the spell wasn’t powerful enough to make him invisible, it would encourage people to ignore his presence.
He slowly examined the area around him. He was underground, his instincts as a land dragon told him that. He was in a tunnel alcove, the walls were carved and mostly smooth. It was shoddy work, in his opinion. Directly ahead of him, he could see the back of a human girl, or what he presumed was a human girl, but she seemed to have the abilities that he had only seen from light dragons – she was emitting light from her forehead and flashes of bright light were coming from a spot in front of her that he could not see.
The girl was sitting on the floor desperately clawing at her left arm and muttering to herself. She was panicking. Ray was certain that the person in front of him was supposed to be his mate. Why else would he show up in another world near her? From what he remembered from the lessons he had on the Renewal, he was supposed to be mated with a Gaian human, not a light dragon. Right now didn’t seem like the time to introduce himself.
It wasn’t that Ray was afraid of the girl, but he wasn’t sure the tunnel would hold up much longer and how far underground they were. If he were forced to transform, his size might be too much for the area and cause a cave in. Getting buried deep underground was fatal for anyone.
Ray noticed that the light emanating from the girl’s head was dimming. How long had she been down here? Ray knew that for light dragons, maintaining light was just as tiring as digging was for land dragons. He wasn’t really sure, he never spent the time to ask any of them in the village.
The girl stood and started moving down the tunnel, and Ray decided to follow her. He judged that if he waited until they got above ground, maybe he could get some answers. Perhaps this girl would help him locate his mate.
As they walked, he could feel the sand above the roof shifting and the walls on either side starting to strain and buckle. Why anyone would cut perfectly solid stone and then try to build a wall from it instead of just carving the wall from the stone directly was beyond him. What he did know was that if they both didn’t hurry, they were both going to die down here. This girl had to be out of her mind to venture into such a dangerous place!
The girl was moving far too slowly for Ray’s comfort and he needed some way to increase her pace. He reached down, picked up a large pebble, and threw it as hard as he could back toward the way they came. Unfortunately, the imbecile stopped and looked back instead, staring into the darkness with her wavering light.
What did she think she’d be able to see!? Was the girl completely daft!?
Don’t stop! Run! He urged her in his mind, carefully moving closer to her. He was starting to get fearful himself. He was sure that the girl must be able to hear how loudly his heart was pounding.
As they finally approached light coming in from above, Ray could feel the stone blocks below starting to grate against each other as they slowly succumbed to the weight of the sand above. Any moment now this whole place was going to collapse. If the weight of the ground above didn’t crush them, the dust from below would suffocate them. Ray was positive that he wasn’t strong enough to stop that much debris. He thought about forcefully dragging the girl from the tunnel, but they were so close to the exit, he was afraid that startling her might cause a lethal delay in getting out.
By the time the girl started climbing the stairs out, Ray was on her heels. Despite his rising panic, he found her scent intoxicating.
His distraction led to his face bumping into her butt. He hadn’t counted on her hips getting stuck in the opening of the cave. He reeled back and just before he acted to widen it, the girl dislodged a clump of sand from above.
The rumble of collapsing stone came from below. Ray, no longer content with waiting for her to move, shoved her butt harder than he probably should have. She popped from the hole suddenly and rolled head over heels into the sand outside. Ray frantically lurched forward and clawed his way out of the hole just as a huge blast of sand gushed into the air. He quickly rolled to the side to hide from the girl.
“Wow, that was close!” the girl said after laying on her back for a few moments gawking at the huge cloud of sand, dust, and toxic gases. “Who would’ve thought that air pressure expelling you from a hole would feel just like hands pushing on your ass.”
[Monday 10:30 PM – Los Angeles]
Lynne allowed herself to be led from the ballroom. Her hand in Daisuke’s.
Tonya smiled and took another sip from her glass.
“That’s not something often seen,” she thought to herself. “Lynne never lets anyone lead her.”
A young man approached Tonya with obvious romantic intent. She raised her left hand to show him her rings. He veered off and headed for the crowd at the stage.
Tonya glanced back just in time to see the doors close as Daisuke led Lynne through.
“Now maybe she can get her mind back on work!” Tonya said to herself, pulling her cell from her purse. She saw a new text message from William and selected it as the music from the stage assaulted her ears.
“Situation getting worse. Impacting national security. Will be a very long ride. Sorry,” it read.
Tonya shut off the phone’s screen and had just returned it to her purse when she heard familiar music from the amplifiers. She left her isolated corner and climbed the stairs onto the small stage so that she could see over the crowd.
“Well, I’ll be,” she said. “That’s Maria’s favorite band. They look older than I imagined.”
“They normally travel with a female pop star named Miranda,” came a male voice behind Tonya. She turned to see the young man from before standing closely behind her. “Miranda’s the only draw for the guys. The KoRT is good and all, but she’s really the primary draw of the show. They’ve been touring the world together for about the last year and a half, off and on. Miranda takes time off during the tour for mysterious reasons – like now. It’s part of her allure.”
He offered Tonya a glass. “Scotch?” he said. “That’s what you were drinking, right?”
She refused the glass and stepped back. “Trying to get me drunk isn’t going to get you anywhere. I’m happily married with children.”
“Can’t blame a guy for trying,” he said.
“Thanks,” she said cynically. “My husband, an Air Force General, will be flattered that you think so. Just FYI, I happen to be Ms. Jackson’s Executive Assistant. If you intend to stay employed I would advise that you call yourself a cab and call it a night before I have a reason find out who you are. Is that clear enough?”
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The young man held up his hands and backed away. “Just being friendly. No harm intended.”
Tonya watched him until she saw him exit the ballroom. She descended the stage stairs and approached the table that Lynne had been using.
“Shit!” she said seeing the white clutch purse laying on the floor under the table. She quickly snatched it up and headed for the hotel’s admissions desk.
“Excuse me,” she said to the concierge behind the desk. “Could you perhaps tell me what room Lynne Jackson and Daisuke Ishi are in?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. We don’t divulge that kind of information,” the man said politely.
“This is important,” Tonya insisted.
“It’s always important,” the man retorted, rolling his eyes.
“She left her… her purse in the ballroom before she accompanied him to his...”
The man was just staring at her. He had obviously heard this before and was completely unfazed.
“Miss... You are welcome to leave the item here with her name on it. We’ll make sure that she knows it is here.”
“By then it’ll be too late. Her birth cont--” Tonya blurted, but then trailed off as the people around her started taking notice.
“Is the lady underage? Are you her guardian perhaps?” the man asked.
“Well, no,” Tonya stammered.
“Then there is nothing I can do for you other than hold the item until her return,” he explained.
Tonya sighed, “That won’t be necessary. I’m the one who will be taking her home. Thanks anyway.”
---
Daisuke flipped on the lights to the room and offered Lynne entry before him as he held the door. She started to slide past him, pointedly rubbing against him. On a whim, she paused and kissed him. She grabbed the front of his tuxedo and dragged him into the room, hungrily kissing him. The door made a loud thud as it closed on its own.
She pinned him to the wall just inside the hotel room and started removing his tuxedo while the two lustfully kissed and pawed each other. Once she had removed everything except his undershirt and pants she started to drag him toward the bedroom. Never before had she felt this kind of fire, not even with her previous husbands. She felt a burning need to have this man – to own him.
He stopped her midway through the main room. “Lynne. There’s something I need to tell you,” he said between her attempts to kiss him.
“It can wait,” she answered.
“It’s very important. It affects us both in a very intimate way,” he tried to explain.
“It can wait,” she insisted, pulling him into the dark bedroom.
“But --” he started, but she put her fingers over his mouth.
“I don’t care right now,” she said allowing her dress to fall to the floor.
She unbuttoned his pants and pushed them to the floor while he removed his shirt. He was muscular and heavily tattooed. The majority of his back showed a colorful scene with an ice blue dragon flying over Mount Fuji, its neck snaking across his left shoulder so that its head was drawn on his left pectoral. A black tattoo of a woman wearing an ornate dress was tattooed over his sternum, though it was too dark for Lynne to make out the details. On his right pectoral were the Kanji for ‘Love’ and ‘Destiny’.
“You like dragons?” she asked pulling him to the bed and making him fall on top of her, where she started kissing him again.
“I guess you can say that,” he said between her kisses and her attempts to remove their underwear. “Lynne, really, I need to --”
“Shut up and make love to me,” she ordered, grinding her pelvis into his.
Several hours later, Lynne lay next to Daisuke, her head on his chest. She was winded, her head was buzzing causing her thoughts to be fuzzy. She had a ringing in her ears, and she noticed that the base of her skull was tender and aching. “I think I’ve pulled a muscle. That’s quite some endurance you have,” she murmured.
“It was my first time,” he admitted.
“Really? Not even with your wife?” she asked, raising up onto her elbow to look into his face. Lynne refrained from saying something offensive, thanks to the information Tonya provided on the way here.
“She was not interested in men. Nor I in her. I was saving myself for you. Only for you,” he said.
“That’s sweet. But you’ve only known me for about a year,” Lynne said.
“That’s not quite true. Although I’ve recently been in your presence for a year, we actually met at the Sassy Lady several times. Each time I tried, you spurned my advances. You even danced with me once – the very same song we danced to tonight in fact. That’s the reason I requested it, I have to admit,” he laughed. “To have the woman you’ve wanted to marry your whole life in your arms, and to be rejected was torture,” he mused.
Lynne initially jumped at the word ‘marry’ but found that she wasn’t uncomfortable with it. But, try as she might, she could not remember meeting him at the club. However, something about what he said was nagging at her, though in her current euphoria, the facts just weren’t congealing.
“And now I’ve actually married the woman I’ve dreamed of for 140 years --” he started.
“Wait. What?!” Lynne’s mind finally connected the dots. He was a young adult in the 1930s, and the seventy years since the Sassy Lady closed didn't match his apparent age.
Lynne reached across him to turn on the lamp next to the bed. Suddenly she saw the tattoo on his sternum in detail. It was a tattoo of her, from a photo taken when she was known as Madame Lyona. The richest Madame in the West. The photo had been taken in 1862 at the White House, during the Civil War. Only two of them existed, she had one at home and the other was given to her brother when he was sent away. There were two other photographs taken at the same time, but those included Abraham Lincoln.
“Where did you get – wait a minute. 140?” She looked closer at the dragon tattoo. “Is this dragon supposed to be me?”
He nodded.
“Are you also a dragon?” she asked.
“Yes. Could you not tell? I’ve been trying to tell you since before we --”
“Consummated our marriage,” she finished for him laying her head heavily back onto her pillow. She found that the idea didn’t bother her, though she thought it would have.
“No, I couldn’t tell,” she continued. “Or, should I say, I didn’t bother to look. I cannot tell without making a concerted effort. As you probably know, I’m only half dragon.”
“Yes. I know all about you, my love. I trained with your brother in Okinawa 130 years ago. That’s where I saw your picture and fell in love with you as a boy. He refused to give me the photo, so I had a copy put in a place where I would never lose it.”
“Ishi… Ishi!” Lynne suddenly said. “Damn me! Your family is one of the remaining nine Gaian Dragon Families. Why are you not on the High Council?”
“Actually, I’m the last surviving member of the family – my sister was killed in the Russian Great Purge and her only child was overworked to death in a gulag mine in Siberia. I was removed from the Council before you started collecting everything into TEMPLAR. With the demise of the black dragons during World War I and my insistence on mating only with you, they resigned the Gaian Ice Dragons to extinction. To be honest, until a year or so ago, I believed that might happen as well.” He raised up to tenderly kiss her. “Now that we are forever joined, I could not be happier.”
“You do realize that, unlike other dragons, the biological system that compels lifelong monogamy is somehow broken in me,” she said.
“It’s true that you’ve been somewhat, ah, popular in the past, you’ve shown loyalty to your spouses. I believe that it’ll be the same for me. As for my part, I am now forever bonded only to you.”
A realization suddenly struck Lynne and she sat straight up. “Tonya is going to kill me!” she said.
“Why?” Daisuke asked.
“I left my purse in the ballroom,” she answered.
“We can pick it up when we leave.”
“It had the birth control in it,” she explained.
“Is that a problem for you?” Daisuke asked.
Lynne thought about it for a moment. “I had intended this night to be nothing more than sex for pleasure.” She looked at Daisuke. “Now I’m the wife of the last ice dragon.”
Daisuke smiled at her and reached up to caress her face.
“What’s done is done,” she said quickly reaching over to turn off the lamp. “What do you say about making it official, husband? Let’s see what we can do to prevent the extinction of the ice dragons.”