1. ON WINTER’S WINGS
The most frustrating, though admittedly amusing in hindsight, factor of Cynthia’s bombshell was that the dragons weren’t going to show up this week. Being so intimately familiar with the processes surrounding relocating various entities, Sam’s mom didn’t realize the rest of us interpreted her warning as an imminent event. It was only the next day, when trying to plan where we could possibly host such a gathering, whether we even had time to rent a ballroom, and how we would possibly plan food for such a large number of people (and the unconfirmable variety of diets) at the drop of a hat, that she realized her mistake.
“I’m sorry, James,” she said, stifling a humorless chuckle as we sat around the table. “I appear to have misinformed you by omission. While this is something we need to plan soon, it doesn’t need to be done today. The dragons need to apply for temporary residence, explain why they’re coming here to both their authorities and ours, likely argue at least one round of automatic rejections — it’s going to take some time. A month would be optimistic; two or three is more likely.”
Which was a good thing. The guillotine I had imagined crashing towards my neck the day before wasn’t yet falling catastrophically, even if it was still hanging above me. Relieving the pressure by letting us know the due date on this task was both still up in the air and a ways off still had some unintended consequences, unfortunately. No longer under an impossible deadline, scrambling like headless chickens to half-ass what we could do in the short time available meant that we got to take a step back and really look at the size of the mountain we had to climb. Before, only able to see a single hand-hold at a time as we tried desperately to scale it, we couldn’t see the magnitude of the entire problem. Now, we had enough time to let it sink in.
Unfortunately, the ambiguity of their arrival date and the confusing, one-way nature of the channels by which we had communication meant that no one had specific steps we needed to take, at least not yet. Zenya contacted the hotel Beth and I had changed at before we met Aisling for the first time, and after they confirmed things with Aisling’s office, they concocted a tentative plan for using their ballroom to host our little meetup. Since I didn’t have a place of my own to host the dragons and their retinues, I felt it was for the best to do it publicly. It had the added side-effect of being a largely neutral place for us to meet; at least, as neutral as anywhere in Philadelphia could be. Until we had more firm dates, we couldn’t really take other actions, which left me going through the motions of the routine I had established, trying the best that I could to prepare.
Fortunately, the uncomfortable ambiguity left us enough time to handle several other dangling issues. Less fortunately, one of those issues was the wizard I had endured during the house meeting at Aisling’s estate, who eventually reached out to Beth and Sam about the potential for an independent evaluation of their living situation.
Sam, not exactly politely, but well within the acceptable diction of professional exchanges, declined, informing the wizard that she had made no complaints to the authorities and had no concerns at this time. She outlined her awareness of the resources available should a problem arise in the future. If he wanted someone to contact for further information, Cynthia was available to discuss our living arrangements. After all, she was the case handler for my transition, had extensive and intimate knowledge of both standard proceedings and our unique circumstances, and could verily say whether or not there had been any unjustified improprieties or transgressions that deserved to be brought before an official. She had Zenya look over her response several times, slightly workshopping the language so that it would brush right up against the line of being inflammatory without crossing it.
Beth, on the other hand, pulled no punches and did not ask Zenya to screen her words — if they found her response incendiary and combative, good. She told the wizard in no uncertain terms that she was not at all inclined to interact with him or anyone from his offices at any point without significant word done on their end to demonstrate that they were acting in good faith. How dare he suggest that she had been mistreated since arriving in Philadelphia? If he cared as much as he was pretending to, she reminded him that she had always been a member of his house, even when we lived further north and neither of us had been aware of this world’s existence. Where was he then if he cared so much about her well-being and her accommodations? Where was he when she spent evenings scrounging for food on the streets? Where was he when she spent nights sleeping at her part-time job, knowing that it would get her fired at some point but having no better option? As far as she was concerned, the only two people who had ever done anything for her were her deceased father and me, and damn this pompous, avaricious man to hell if he was suggesting anything to the contrary. She needed no evaluation but her own, and she was currently living a life better than she had imagined, one that could only be improved now if pushy busybodies with political agendas would leave her alone with her husband. Until she saw him taking strides to help those who needed it, magic or not, he could simply fuck off, because his actions made it painfully clear that he hadn’t even a single thought for Beth except as an avenue to badger me with.
Sam’s message received the concise, requisite, “We will speak with the listed Ms. O’Brien. Thank you,” in response.
Beth’s, unsurprisingly, received no response.
I also received a message from Bob apologizing for bothering me but asking permission to visit the apartment. Typically, he wouldn’t need approval to see a vampire in his domain, but he didn’t know what the precedent was for when a vampire belonged to another house, and my draconic nature certainly encouraged him to proceed with a level of caution and respect he may not have offered everyone else.
The explanation for his prospective stop revolved around a vampire's ability to regenerate with blood. Younger vampires, those turned in the last twenty years or so, tended to be locked in a battle with their predator instincts and, as such, at least in this part of the world, were closely monitored to ensure that they followed the local regulations and were not exposed to unnecessary temptation. Zoey informed me that she had participated in a task force eighteen months ago that successfully captured and contained a very, very fresh vampire — a woman who had been accidentally turned and then let loose without knowing what she was, proceeding to leave a trail of carnage and other freshly turned women and horrifically distorted ghouls in her wake in her confusion and rage. My werewolf mate didn’t comment on what the outcome was, except firmly stating that the outbreak had been contained.
Zenya was not a concern in that regard, at the very least. Older vampires, ones who had conquered their hunger and bent it to their will rather than being controlled by it, still had annual check-ins with the authorities. Bob wasn’t entirely sure who the authorities were in this case, though it was either him or me, so he planned to stop by, showing me the forms that needed to be filed and the responses that needed my attention. He stressed that for Zenya, it was a perfunctory formality that would take only fifteen minutes or so. I understood why, when, after we chatted politely for a minute or two at my dining room table, he began asking Zenya the questions for his form.
Was her budgeted blood supply adequate for her needs? Yes, given that she didn’t ever use it. In the last 12 months, had she drawn blood from anyone not listed as an approved, personally informed, consenting donor? No. During the previous 12 months, had any of her listed donors suffered adverse effects from either acute or chronic blood overconsumption? No, of course not. At any point in the last year, had any of her listed donors needed medical care or hospitalization as a result of an accidental overconsumption? Nope. Over the previous 12 months, had she had any impulses to turn any woman into a vampire or to turn any man into a thralled ghoul? No. In the last twelve months, had she, intentionally or otherwise, turned any women or men into vampires or ghouls? Not a chance.
Of course, Bob was aware of her aversion to blood — he had the last twenty years of her blood bank withdrawal history with him as he asked her the questions. Every year’s line had two liters of budgeted allocation, an amount he said was the lowest standard volume allocated to any vampire in the region, next to a goose egg in the actual withdrawn column. As the steward for vampires in the land, he was responsible for ensuring every vampire followed the rules, even ones like Zenya who were completely innocent. He looked at me pointedly as he explained that enforcement of these codes was part of the agreement necessary for the acceptance of vampires in the civilized world.
He didn’t come right out and say it, being more tactful than that, but he heavily implied that the reason there were a single-digit number of dragons remaining in the world, and that they were individuals kept physically isolated from one and another most of the time, were that such an agreement wasn’t reached with us in the past. He certainly didn’t mean it as a threat, peacefully sipping a cup of coffee at the table in the apartment I was living in, more as a warning. I couldn’t be sure that he knew what was happening, but he was a reasonably well-informed political figure in the area, so it wasn’t surprising that he had heard rumors. He was warning me — be careful when my brethren arrived, because the so-called civilized world had done some irreversible things to dragons that didn’t at least performatively bend their knees to the seats in the past.
I smiled politely and thanked him for the advice as he showed me on the document where Zenya needed to sign, and then where the two of us would. I didn’t really need the advice, as much as I welcomed the reminder that the world was a dangerous place as I sat beside the woman too scared to tell me her name, who had worn a web of scar tissue for who knows how long because something else had broken her desire to heal herself. Given how everyone else reacted to my presence and what that implied for their opinions on dragons, it seemed incredibly unlikely that I would be falling into cahoots with other wyrms anytime soon. Frankly, I wished they would show up a lot sooner, if only so they could do whatever evaluation they thought was necessary and then begone from my continent, taking their baggage and the associated pressure with them.
Before Bob left, I had him add me to Zenya’s list of pre-approved emergency donors. That prompted a prolonged attempt by my vampire PA to decline my suggestion. I finally convinced her that it was for the best when she insisted that I didn’t need to do it because she would never ask to utilize it. The response, that this was clearly an emergency measure intended to never be used and that I wasn’t going to force her to do anything she wasn’t comfortable with but that it would be good to give her legal permission for the astronomically slight possibility of an absolute worst case scenario, was met with begrudging acceptance. I could heal her without it, after all. Sam and Beth came out of the bedroom, hearing what I was feeling and thinking about through our bond, and added their names, as well.
In the meantime, I continued my physical training with Zoey, making progress on the six-week program she had written up for me. She kept me working through a variety of whole-body splits, slowly trimming the volume while increasing the intensity as the weeks progressed. In the third week, once she knew that I was incorporating swimming on my own, even if it wasn’t exactly regular, she stopped having me use random pieces of equipment to get my cardio fix during our gym sessions.
Instead, she added an hour of martial training. Unlike the resistance work, it was done exclusively as a human. Zoey was clear with her intention there: while I would eventually do the strength training while half-transformed, feeling the difference between the human shell I typically displayed and the true draconic form hiding just beneath the surface, there was no need to practice fighting while in the dragon form. There wasn’t any need to. If I could use my dragon body, the massive, scaled instrument of destruction would have no trouble making my foes reconsider, and if a fight was what they still settled on, my pure instinctive talent in evocation would make anyone besides another dragon reconsider. If I was in an altercation where my options were limited because I was pretending to be only human, I needed training. I did slightly push back, questioning why it was necessary when I was functionally invincible, but Zoey very pointedly informed me that, if any hypothetical enemies ever determined that fact, she wasn’t, and neither was Sam. Zenya and Cynthia weren’t either. Beth might be, but was I going to gamble on that?
No.
So, she started having me meet with physical readiness trainers who regularly evaluated prospective security force candidates. Twice a week, I met with a portly wereboar, who put me through my paces in striking training. It started similar to any other boxing instruction, as far as I could tell, but because I wasn’t an athlete looking to compete in a ring, he quickly shifted into instructing me on every part of fighting while on my feet, adding kicks, leg strikes, and elbows to the syllabus I was following.
That was supplemented by a lithe elf, on the other two exercise days a week, who began instructing me on how to handle an adversary who was already within striking distance. I got a crash course in the basics of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, judo, and Olympic wrestling, where I found that my newfound strength, while certainly an asset, wasn’t nearly as helpful as I thought it would be. My grip strength didn’t seem to matter when I couldn’t hold a pin tightly enough to prevent my teacher from slipping under my arm because I had gripped the wrong spot on them.
Of course, the first two weeks of both lessons were done without involving another person, at least in combat. I spent a lot of time with various bags and dummies, and then setting up holds with my grappling teacher describing, then demonstrating, the techniques before allowing me to move through them at half speed with their cooperation. By the end of the second week, we were working through things where he was resisting me, or he was the one pinning me and I was actively defending myself. We were moving closer to real speed there, but the intensity wasn’t there when I knew at any moment I could ask to reset and try again.
It did make me ask Zoey why she hadn’t enrolled me in these one-on-one lessons initially. The answer was simple: when she thought I was just a temporary VIP, a more generic strength training and work capacity cardio plan was enough. Now that I was her one and only mate in the whole world, she needed more. She knew exactly what I was — something no one understood, different even from the other dragons — and she needed me more prepared, just for her own peace of mind. So, I was being trained like I was a teenaged were coming in on the fast track for a security force position; a raw, physically gifted though technically unrefined student who would be attentive and interested in learning, and one who didn’t yet have years of bad habits that needed to be unlearned before better ones could be implemented in their stead. I did ask if the plan for me included firearms training, to which Zoey laughed. Her response could be summarized with ‘potentially.’ In the far future when things were calm and I had less on my plate, it was an option that could be explored. Until then, adding firearms wasn’t a necessary complication, given that I had magic I could use in most circumstances to replace the use-case of any gun.
In addition to the specific physical training I undertook with Zoey, I kept flying with Mallory. Our first lesson outside the training facility wasn’t where I thought it would be. After a lesson with Zoey, the bat collected me and brought me to a different underground area on one of the university campuses. I wasn’t informed precisely which one, as she spoke to the security guard who came to unlock the entrance for us, and then I was hurried down several flights of stairs into a massive, cylindrical concrete room, large enough in diameter that the central ten feet felt flat. Mallory asked me if I would be able to recharge mana sources that we would use during the lesson today, and though I didn’t understand why, I said that wouldn’t be a problem. She made me confirm that I had plenty of mana when she asked a second time, seemingly very intent on getting a clear answer from me.
I understood what I was in when she hit a button on a console I hadn’t noticed, and a great big fan began whirring up at the far end. We were in a wind tunnel, presumably used by one of the engineering departments (or, more likely, as a joint venture between a majority of the universities in the city).
She spent several minutes having me simply glide, getting comfortable with the feeling of the air moving over my body as I held position relative to the ground. Then, my bat trainer had me touching specific spots on the walls of the facility so that I could practice navigating and reorienting myself with the wind coming from different angles relative to my body. She pushed another button on the console after I had touched several of her targets, and the room was awash with magical energy.
“Force barriers, on the walls and floor,” she explained to my confused glance. “They function like padded walls. So that when you crash, it’s not just into a cement foundation.”
Which was good, because I did crash. Not horribly, but several times, I misjudged the wind’s effect on my body and either hit the target on the wall a little too firmly or scraped my scaled chest on the ground as I turned away to find the next marker. The force projections felt like a pillow on a spring — soft to the initial touch, but the more I pushed into them, the more they pushed back.
Eventually, she turned the big fan at the end of the hall off, though she had me continue flying and chasing targets. Then, suddenly, while she had me chasing a particularly engaging set of six markers that she had established as a pattern earlier, she snapped it back on. It took a moment for it to kick on, and I probably didn’t even recognize the sound of the blades starting to whir as fast as I should’ve. It was still a slow, gradual build-up of wind pressure back to the maximum I had experienced, so it was easy to adjust for. She did that same maneuver several more times, turning the fan on and off as I chased the glowing spots on the walls around the facility.
Then, she caught me by surprise again, as, while I was going through the pattern of six, she kicked the wind back on — but not from the fan. I looked up, and the fan blades were spinning freely, not pushing the wind at me but simply riding it as it passed through, before I glanced at Mal. She had a smug smile on her face, her thumb on the button.
Her earlier question made sense now. The mana drain from the passive force projection safety measures shouldn’t have taken that much energy overall, but if she were instantly conjuring air flow from a preexisting enchantment of some kind, that would definitely need to be refilled. Especially if we were only borrowing the facility under the expectation that the energy we used would be replaced.
Mallory continued the lesson, having me fly around inside the tunnel, flipping the switch to turn on and off the instant tornado occasionally. As I progressed, she slowly began doing it more and more aggressively, switching the conditions when I was nearing a wall or the ceiling, seemingly trying to make me crash. Not that I had any issue with that — I was sure that a normal dragon, in more typical circumstances, would have crashed plenty as a child. It was just a shame I had to functionally speedrun the whole learning experience, cramming a decade of growing into my skin into a handful of weekends. When she finally announced that I had passed her evaluation for the day, she had me come and refill several gemstones embedded into the control panel behind a service plate that kept them hidden from view from prying eyes. She questioned me about my experience flying as I restored the energy we used and how the wind made things change for me. It really hadn’t that much; my experience swimming had ostensibly prepared me innately to understand the fluid dynamics around my body, which earned a nod from my instructor. Then I earned a thoughtful “Hmm,” when I posited that, even in heavy wind, I should still be largely fine, because I could conjure an area around my body in which the wind avoided. It wasn’t something I had tried today, content with learning my new body, but I wanted to try it eventually. Mallory hadn’t even thought about it; given that the handful of natural flying species tended to be relatively weak in evocation, it hadn’t been something she had considered as a possibility before I mentioned it.
After the experience in the wind tunnel, we spent the next two weeks flying around a locked-down trampoline park — an indoor warehouse where every surface was padded and covered with foam, and lots of the ground had been replaced with custom-designed trampoline meshes. It was undoubtedly another great place to practice flying indoors, especially since Mallory’s goal was to work on landing, though it was probably better suited for the target demographic of adolescent weres than adult dragons.
Before we could work on landing, we worked on crash-landing. I climbed the tower in the center, presumably the space from which parents would watch their tykes roam around the facility as it could see almost every space in the building, and dove off the edge. Mallory talked me through feeling my body and my wings, giving me cues that she hadn’t during the wind test, likely because I wouldn’t have been able to hear her, and encouraging me to wrap my wings up and behind myself as I came in at a low angle on one the flat meshes. I was thankful for my scales as I repeatedly dove wildly against the ground; not having to take breaks to lick my own chest to heal the friction burns was a pleasure I hadn’t predicted when I set out that day.
During our second meeting at the trampoline park, I was intrigued to see Sophie joining us. She quietly said hello and that she appreciated my suggestion that Mallory should talk to her about the experiences of being around me when I transformed, though she didn’t exactly understand what my concern was. She didn’t say her piece with any hostility, but I could definitely feel that she had some concerns about me, a dragon who had bumbled into their lives and found three mates in a week, poking my nose in their relationship matters.
I avoided her appraising gaze as I stripped down and shifted into my draconic form. Seeing her and Mallory sitting on the padded bench, the werebat sitting comfortably, as she knew what to expect, with the witch desperately gripping her lover’s arm as she melted against her side, was an interesting experience. Strangely, I found it endearing rather than arousing. Watching Mallory meet Sophie’s eyes as they both caught their breath and fought off the fog of the sudden release, the smug smile on her face as she watched the spark of comprehension bloom in Sophie’s irises, made me feel content that I wasn’t ruining something.
Not that I had thought that I was — I didn’t imagine that Sophie would have any issues with the unintentional side effects of Mallory being my flying trainer. I just felt that she deserved the ability to say no if she wanted to.
She didn’t.
Despite saying she would only stick around long enough to understand my concerns, Sophie spent nearly half an hour watching me fly around the trampoline park. I could smell the instinctive fear she felt the first few times I dove into a rough landing, presumably imagining how rough that would be on skin. She seemed to get some exhilaration out of watching me simply coast around the room as I listened to Mallory’s instructions, the lazy flaps of my wings surprisingly stirring for her.
After she left, with a not-so-subtle comment about perhaps watching again in the future, Mallory explained that it was one major part of their relationship that they couldn’t share. Mallory was a bat; she could fly. Sophie was a witch (and not one with flight in her realm of expertise), so she couldn’t.
Watching me fly around the building smoothly so soon after being introduced, with my massive torso largely holding still, gave her the idea of riding me into the sky, finally getting to experience something so integral to her partner, something that had seemed out of reach before I arrived to befuddle everyone’s expectations. Sophie didn’t so much as hint at the desire while she was observing, and Mallory didn’t ask on her behalf even when she explained what the desire was. It did leave me curious, though; that was something that one of my mates, or perhaps Cynthia or Evgenia, might want to experience as well, so I asked Mallory if it had ever been done or if such a thing as a dragon saddle existed. She seemed surprised that I asked but didn’t have any information for me, unfortunately.
After that, my flying lessons became less regular. Still once a week, but not on the same day or time during the week. That was because we began using a hangar Aisling owned at the Northeast Philadelphia Airport. It was large enough to house two 747s, supposedly. There was no way for me to find out because Mallory only had clearance to escort me to the hangar when the planes were away.
She grew increasingly frustrated with our flying lessons, and I didn’t understand why until, during a lesson in the second week of November, she flat-out told me that she had been given the run around by her CO on giving me a night-time flight permit. Someone above her in the legal food chain was stalling us despite her insistence that I was ready for actual flying out in the countryside. Instead, we were going through the motions of practicing in a space I should have graduated from, keeping the training wheels on where none were needed because someone important didn’t actually want me flying around the airspace.
Conversely, an area where the training wheels had come off was with my lessons with Antonin. Like the flying instructions, they became more erratic as time passed, though that was because Antonin seemed intent on only teaching when it was prudent to do so. He wasn’t interested in testing everything about me or teaching me things for the sake of moving through a lesson plan, so he only called me to the archive when he had both a question about my physiology to answer and a subject matter expert to teach me the depths of something Antonin himself couldn’t demonstrate.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
The curmudgeonly, old elf wanted to investigate my strange, inconsistent, seemingly impossible energy generation. Unfortunately, he didn’t have any direct ways of doing that — until he had more information to draw conclusions from, he didn’t have definitive ways to test it. The only way to make any progress was to pursue other objectives, take notes about the observations that came up, and hope that something would reveal itself.
In that effort, Antonin brought in a telepathic dwarf in an attempt to compare traditional telepathy magic to the communication of my bond with my mates. He did call me in earlier in the week to give me a crash course of warning on dealing with telepaths. They were, evidently, nearly as rare as dragons were in the world, and my perception was that the world was almost as prejudicial against them as they were against me. Perhaps, Antonin suggested, that was part of the reason there were so few of them — those that developed the skill set later in life intentionally masking the ability so as to remain undetected as much as possible. He did instruct me on forming a telepathic barrier around my mind to prevent any unknown agents from unscrupulously poking around inside my head. I hadn’t been trained on it earlier, Antonin revealed dourly, so that Aisling’s advisors could check in on me every now and then as I settled into life. He no longer felt obligated to accommodate them.
When we met with the dwarf, it became evident that my bond with Beth, Sam, and Zoey wasn’t telepathy in the conventional sense. The detectors that blared when the dwarf contacted any of us didn’t beep even a peep as the girls and I had a conversation. With some instruction, Sam and I were able to learn the basics of telepathy from the baffled dwarf, though it felt odd, hollow and one-dimensional compared to the connection we already had. Sam explained later that a lot of the prejudice she experienced as a child was because the other magical types didn’t fully understand her mother’s abilities. Admittedly, neither did Sam, since she lacked the aptitude to actually perform the same techniques then, but she knew many believed her mother to be a government-licensed telepath rather than the empath she actually was. Avoiding Cynthia, and Sam by association, was the only option for safety, especially since barely any of the children could conjure anything, let alone mind shields to deflect probes from adults.
I demonstrated a greater ability than those scared children, as the mind shield I had constructed easily rebuffed the expert’s attempts to perceive my thoughts, to which he only shrugged dismissively. If he was tasked with scouting me, he would simply wait a couple hours nearby. After all, no one could sustain that impenetrable behemoth of a guardian for any serious length of time. Maybe, as I was a dragon, he’d have to come back tomorrow.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I had been carrying it constantly for three days and hadn’t realized myself that it was supposed to draw mana from me because Antonin never told me to release it during our lesson. Somehow, throughout the entire week, I had simply replenished myself faster than it consumed energy. A glance at the elderly elf caught a smug smile as he brushed a hand through his wispy, grey hair. Evidently, I hadn’t been told intentionally to see how sustainable it was to maintain.
Interestingly, though admittedly unsurprisingly after some consideration, he also couldn’t make contact with Beth at all. Neither was Sam, to be fair, though I was able to make the telepathy detector blare by talking to her. I didn’t share in front of the dwarf, but I hypothesized that the tendril of my soul that pierced into Beth’s and bound us together bypassed her shield, and since a part of me was inside the shield constructed around her, I alone was the one who could reach her. Despite breaching through the barrier, I could see from the cringe on her fair face that the voice she heard via the telepathy felt just as soulless to her as it did to me. I quickly followed up with a comment through the way she had been the first to ever experience, letting her feel the reassuring full warmth of my inner voice.
On the topic of the bond, I was surprised to realize in mid-October that it wasn’t developing uniformly. While all three of the women who had been tied into my life felt a certain baseline of connection to me, sharing some of our emotions and thoughts, they didn’t get quite the same depth in every area.
Beth seemed to get the sharpest, most direct connection—the colors she had initially felt flowed into focus as thoughts, eventually giving way to full-on telepathy with far more depth and nuance. She could hear my thoughts as a running commentary throughout her day as though I was beside her, and I hers. By Halloween, I had completely adjusted to having her thoughts brushing against my mind like a radio being played in another room, something I could step across the hall and listen to if I so desired, and yet not bothersome in my typical affairs.
Sam, predictably, given the blooming talent from her bloodline, honed in on my emotions, and I shared hers fully. I didn’t feel words, at least most of the time, from my redheaded sorceress, but the depth and nuance I could discern from the emotions she shared gave me insight into how her powers would have worked naturally had she the aptitude to capitalize on them. Stepping into the shower with her and feeling the sudden rush of arousal as she worked me over with her eyes, filtered with a hint of disappointment that we didn’t have time to do anything about it, and yet entirely coated with pure bliss when I would hold her against me and allow her to live the dream she found herself in was a captivating experience. Starting every morning by staring into her blue eyes, actually feeling the ocean’s worth of love lurking beneath the surface of the two azure orbs peering back at me, knowing exactly how the currents ebbed inside her, was just as rewarding as seeing Beth’s physical transformation. It made me wish I could stay home, blow off all of my obligations, and confess my love to her again, as I had as a teenager. I knew now it was returned a thousandfold before she even opened her mouth.
Intriguingly, Zoey’s connection to me didn’t develop as I would have predicted. Beth’s blurry emotional reading blooming into snippets of thoughts and then into permanent telepathy made sense when I thought that was the norm. Sam mutating that pathway to master her original talent didn’t even seem odd. Instead of following one of the women before her, Zoey, instead, got the dragon.
In a way, it was fitting for Zoey to be the one who developed a deeper connection with my draconic side. After all, she was the only one I knew who had so tightly managed her own animal instincts for her entire life. Even the other members of her family, including my best friend from what felt like a previous life, her older brother, Kyle, didn’t have any insight into the level of control it took Zoey to even function, let alone appear to be a serene, confident, composed woman entering her prime. My dragon and her wolf connected, bonding over their shared annoyance that the human they timeshared the body with was far too inhibited and restrained. They both wanted us to run free, to show the rest of the world our undeniable excellence. They both got a little of what they wanted with how they connected us — my dragon’s need to exert himself perfectly scratching her wolf’s need to act out and be brought back in line every now and then. She didn’t have to commit so much to steeling herself anymore — the dragon was watching, waiting for her to step out of line so he could tug her back.
In our daily lives, it meant she could feel when my dragon needed something I was disinclined to do, and I could feel when her wolf required her to do something that she was reluctant to indulge in. There were several times in the two months that passed where, after our workouts, one of us was grumbling beneath the surface, and we took an excursion back to the woods. Chasing her white fur around the forest didn’t quite sate my dragon's predator instincts, but it was close enough to relieve much of the tension I felt building. Every time I caught the deadly serious wolf as she played at rebelling from me among the foliage, it was a light reminder for the beasts about what the hierarchy was. When that wasn’t enough, and I could feel her wolf getting testy and quarrelsome, there were other solutions. I wasn’t the least bit surprised when Beth quietly left out a wooden, leather-faced paddle one night before Zoey came over. Zoey was surprised when the first strike landed on her backside — both by the act and by how right it felt for the dragon to discipline her for stepping out of line. When I decided the bruises had lingered enough to send my message, knowing full well that it would only be temporary and that we both enjoyed playing the game, and I licked her behind two days later, I found it significantly preferable to when I had done the same for Zenya.
Zoey didn’t end up moving in with us. I brought it up a second time around Halloween, even though she had asked for me to wait until Thanksgiving. It felt like we had made progress and that, even though I was being mildly impatient by asking prematurely, there was a good chance she would say yes. When she didn’t, it came with an explanation: she was still holding onto her own residence to give her some amount of legitimacy with her superiors. They were aware that she was reasonably compromised at this point — her leaping into my arms the very first time we met in the gym made sure everyone was aware of that — but, had she left her apartment and moved in, she wouldn’t have any plausible deniability of professional separation. As things were, she could still give the reports that were requested of her, appearing to everyone like she was playing both sides rather than being firmly entrenched at my right hand. It was easy enough for her to give ambiguous reports about what my goals were when I didn’t exactly have any yet, or how my magical prowess was developing when she wasn’t attending lessons with Antonin to see them first hand, and yet the trickle of incomplete information ensured no one else was officially sent to replace her. She figured there were others, both in her system and other privately hired investigators, who were doing slightly less overt observation, but they would know even less.
In the meantime, Zoey ingratiated herself with Beth and Sam, spending almost every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night with us and typically another weekday or two each week. She returned to her place every Sunday afternoon to prepare herself for her week. But the time she spent sitting on the couch and braiding little loops into Beth’s short hair or working with Sam to barbecue different cuts of meat really made her feel like a part of our family. She had a closet in Beth’s room full of her things, though she never seemed to use it. The delicate outfits she wore when she needed physical attention from me were stored in a drawer in the dresser in my room, and besides that, she only seemed to wear my clothes when she stayed over.
Every morning after, she would remain lounging in the kitchen, sipping a cup of coffee and listening to the bacon she kept for herself in my freezer sizzle, wearing only one of my shirts. Where both Beth and Sam could get by wearing my massive shirts as an impromptu dress, Beth in particular functionally swimming in the shirt when she decided to wear one, they didn’t fall nearly as far on the statuesque blonde, turning the otherwise banal attire into scandalous fashion. Thankfully, Zenya seemed utterly indifferent to everything that didn’t come from my mouth, and Cynthia largely ignored the wolf’s antics. However, Sam's mom did get fed up once, swatting the bratty werewolf with a pillow when she came in and found her lying across the couch with nothing but one of my shirts on, telling the younger woman that she knew her CO and might have to have a word.
In response, Zoey began wearing my boxers when she was outside the bedroom and knew Cynthia would be around.
There was one minor incident between my mates when Zoey let slip that because her birthday was coming up, she would have to spend several afternoons with various medical officers to renew her training clearances for the subsequent year. The only part of that sentence that Sam heard was that Zoey’s birthday was coming around, and she wanted to know what the werewolf was planning on doing and how she wanted to celebrate. The awkward silence that lingered after she posed the question and the cringe on Zoey’s face didn’t quite get through to Sam, either. The redhead was genuinely excited to celebrate with Zoey, perhaps having a night out with the werewolf and her friends that didn’t include an interrogation.
Zoey replied flatly, telling Sam that she never celebrated her birthdays.
“Why would I celebrate the final grains of sand falling out of the hourglass, Sam?” she asked rhetorically. “There’s nothing pleasurable for me there. I was fast and strong just a few years ago, and now I’m slow, I feel weaker than I did as a twelve-year-old, and everything hurts. Sam, I don’t spend half an hour stretching each morning to feel good. I do it so I don’t ache and hurt as much as I would otherwise for the rest of the day. Birthdays aren’t something fun for me — they’re a curse, and I would appreciate it if you didn’t bring mine up ever again.”
Sam quietly apologized for upsetting her with her eagerness, which Zoey readily accepted. “No, I’m sorry for snapping at you. I’m rather sensitive about the topic, but I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. The appointments aren’t just regular checkups, okay? I have to get a bunch of tests done to demonstrate that I’m still physically capable of reserve duty. If I slip too much year to year, they will forcibly retire me.” Her eyes swung to focus on me as she continued, “So we’re going to be pushing hard for the next three weeks, okay? I’m going to be tapering down my volume of work but keeping the intensity as high as I can go, trying to keep up with you. There’s no reason to even go easy into the assessment like I normally would — I don’t have to worry about getting too fatigued to perform on the day or picking up a little injury that would hurt my performance since you can just magic me back to health if I do strain something.”
That didn’t actually end up happening. She seemed to surprise herself with just how well she was able to keep pace with me during the workouts she planned for us — admittedly, doing triples and singles to my sets of ten or twelve. I noticed several times when she seemed distracted, scrolling through her phone between sets, her face scrunched up as she looked through past training logs. Eventually, she admitted that she was trying to find out when the last time she had done a work cycle this intense, and then when she found the answer, she acknowledged that it had been while I was still in high school. We played hard that afternoon — her wolf was itching for her to push more in the gym than she was mentally prepared for, so instead, I got to push her buttons.
The only spot of trouble we encountered in the gym was when I was accosted, seemingly out of nowhere, by a different woman wearing an employee’s shirt.
“What did you do to my sister, lizard?” were the first words spat out of her mouth before I was even aware someone was talking to me. Everyone else here left me alone, either ignorant or willing to leave me to Zoey.
I looked at her in confusion, having never interacted with her before in my life. I could smell her nerves brewing under the blustery facade of anger she was trying to present, and I could feel it swelling and continuing as I attempted to place who on earth she could be without responding. After a solid thirty seconds of silence, I had an epiphany: she was the older sister of the lifeguard I had interacted with a while ago. She didn’t particularly resemble her younger sister, at least initially, due to her undercut, short-cropped, dyed-black hair. As I took a closer look, I could see that she had the same eyes, at least physically, as hers were harder, and the same nose. The dragon, content with my memory of the girl’s features even if her name escaped me at the moment, suggested that I put the sister back in her place and bring both of them home for a pleasant evening. They need not be mates for me to enjoy them, and besides, someone of my status should get to experience having both of a pair of sisters at some point, right?
Again, I rolled up the newspaper and swatted the incorrigible beast down.
“Nothing,” I replied evenly. “Well, I scared her when I first dove in the pool. She tried to come scold me but got nervous about doing it after catching me at the wall. To balance out my breach of the rules, I took a picture with her. She said that you were too embarrassed to come ask me for one yourself, so she capitalized on the opportunity.”
The woman blushed but seemed no less irritated. “Then why won’t she tell me what she offered you for it, huh? What evil scheme did you tie her up in that she won’t even tell me?”
I laughed, though, as it was more out of frustration than actual humor, as I was so damn tired of this repeated rhetoric. Being accused of things on the premise that I was a dragon, so obviously, I wanted to exploit an otherwise completely innocent person without any evidence of such an act, was incredibly grating. To be fair, this was a complication entirely of my own making, though I was doubtful the sister would believe her if I had told Molly — that was her name! — to go ahead and tell people what it had actually cost. Damned either way, it felt like.
“Because I asked her not to tell people what a photo with me cost her — specifically leaning into your prejudice in the hopes it would lead to people leaving me alone as they imagined awful scenarios in their mind. I took the picture and posted it, alright? She really only wanted to say ‘Hello,’ to start.”
“A likely story,” she responded venomously. “Stay away from my sister, creep.”
I shrugged as she walked away. It wasn’t like I had interacted with Molly again. I had said hello when I swam and she was there, but that had only been another three or four times in two months, and Molly was only the guard on duty twice. Evidently, that was still too much. The older sister seemed to show up whenever I worked out with Zoey, side-eying me the entire time. She also appeared both times I was swimming when Molly was the guard, bringing her younger sister something the lifeguard had allegedly forgotten. I only knew that because she made sure to give the explanation when I could hear it — presumably ensuring that I would know that she was watching me.
While strange, she was ultimately harmless. Other than my dragon feeling I had missed an opportunity to tame her, he wasn’t concerned. After all, being scared and suspicious of us was prudent for a soft, weak human, even if we meant her no harm — when a tank rolls up your driveway, it’s best to be cautious, even if it’s not actually there for you.
Sam’s magic continued to develop, though less visibly than the shocking intoxicated response that first morning. Cynthia was shocked that, despite only being gone for a week, she returned to find her daughter gleefully working in the kitchen with Beth and Zoey. It only took a single bite of the magically enhanced food before she realized why Sam was now there — the same conclusion Sam had drawn after we had ice cream on our date. Somehow, I found myself on the receiving end of two shockingly earnest hugs, one from each redhead, as they talked over Sam helping more in the kitchen. I could feel just how important it was for Sam, how much she needed at least the opportunity to properly reconnect with her mother. The bridge there wasn’t obliterated from existence like Beth felt hers was, nor had it even been burned, but it had been conspicuously ignored for a time. A fresh coat of paint, in the form of reconnecting here, might be all it needed.
Unfortunately, or rather, inconsequentially because of dragon healing magic for us specifically, our diet degenerated slightly over the two months. Given that Sam transitioned into being the head chef for the apartment, largely in charge of picking what we would eat each week, and that Beth, Sam, Zoey, Zenya, and I didn’t have any fundamental dietary requirements in terms of nutritional intake, Sam turned our kitchen into a patisserie. Every night was a strange exploration of the desserts from around the world, occasionally with an actual entree for Cynthia or a double portion of protein for Zoey.
One touching moment I was completely blindsided by came about from Sam's developing talent. Sam had just taken what looked like three baked sub rolls out of the oven, golden brown and flaky in the signature shape. On closer inspection, there was a black sauce that seemed to be seeping out of the edges of the rolls. When she sliced into the rolls, I could see the insides swirled with the black sauce, resembling a loaf of cinnamon bread. My sorceress handed me a sliced piece, and it was delicious. Less sweet than I had imagined, given that she had made it, with some lemon I could pick out, and the innards were crunchy, adding an interesting texture to the treat.
After I had my slice and gave Sam my inevitable approval, she called for Zenya. The vampire clasped her hand over her mouth as she saw the cut-open loaf of bread, clearly recognizing it. Sam cut her two slices without exchanging a word, handing them to the clearly moved woman on a plate as I watched on in ignorance. Zenya took the dessert and sat at the table, eating it very slowly, savoring each bite with her eyes closed.
When she was done, she wrapped her arms around Sam and simply held her there for nearly a minute, something Sam seemed perfectly content to accept. Evidently, the poppy seed roll was something that Zenya had for her birthday as a little girl. It was typically made around Christmas, and her birthday was around then, so it was something her mother had made her every year. Even now, when she couldn’t taste it herself, she could remember the flavor and the familiar texture of the seeds, walnuts, and raisins Sam had blended, making it easy for Zenya to recall the treats she had last had baked specifically for her over a hundred years ago. It turned out that the entire third roll was set aside for the vampire, if she wanted it. When Zenya acknowledged that she enjoyed it very much, Sam promised to make it again, offering to do so for the vampire’s birthday since that was coming soon.
Which turned out to be a mistake. I already knew that Zenya didn’t remember her exact birthdate, but I hadn’t shared that information, unsure of whether Zenya wanted it to be public. It would’ve probably required explaining how long ago she was born, and I didn’t particularly want to go around telling the partial snippets of someone else's life story I had when I didn’t even have the complete picture myself.
Zenya halted in place, freezing in the act of accepting another slice of the poppy roll from Sam. After a moment, she told Sam that it was a lovely sentiment but that she wasn’t actually sure of when her birthday was. When she was born, it wasn’t that unusual for there to be sparse records, so many people from her time wouldn’t know the exact day either way, but on top of that, it often wasn’t celebrated until the parents were confident the child would live. At that point, a date near the actual date of birth might be selected to celebrate, rather than the exact day, combining reasons into a single day to conserve the ingredients necessary for a special feast. That was why she knew her birthday was around Christmas time, because that was when her family celebrated when she was a little girl. It probably wasn’t actually that day. Combined with the calendar shift that happened after she was born, and whatever she had left unspoken so far, she wasn’t sure exactly when her birthday was.
Sam listened politely as Zenya apologetically gave her explanation before gently grasping one of the vampire’s hands and holding it in her own. “That’s all in the past, Zenya,” she started. “Truth be told, it doesn’t actually matter if the day is the correct one or not. It’s not like any of us actually remember our own births — we’re just trusting our family, or a piece of paper, to be accurate. Why don’t you just pick a day sometime in late December and we can celebrate with you? We’re not actually looking to celebrate you getting older; I’d just like to do something to show you that we appreciate you, that we’ve enjoyed having you in our lives since we arrived here, alright?”
Zenya didn’t agree or disagree, cautiously replying that she’d think about it before thanking Sam again for the dessert and leaving for her room. I raised an eyebrow, curious as to why Sam was suddenly so focused on celebrating birthdays.
She rolled her eyes, then stepped close to me, laying her head on my chest so that she could whisper and I’d still hear her.
“I didn’t do them as a kid, J. I mean, my mom and I celebrated, and sometimes some of her family would stop by to wish me well, but that’s not the same as getting together with your friends. Now we can, so I’d really like to make a point to. On top of that, oh my god, it is painfully obvious that Zenya needs this. She needs us to treat her like a friend because I’m not sure she’s ever had any before, or at least not in a long time.”
Then she sighed before admitting, “And if Zoey won’t let me celebrate hers, I’m not missing another opportunity just because Zenya doesn’t know the specific day. As if we don’t move celebrations to the next Friday or Saturday all the time anyway.”
As November’s occasional frosts turned into the pervasive blustery chill of December, I felt as though I had caught my breath. I had spent time working with Antonin, answering his questions about dragons by being a willing test subject as he brought in experts to teach me magical basics. I had grown accustomed to the strange feelings in my mind, the dragon's presence, and the other thing lurking in the dark, slightly changing my impulses throughout the day. I had grown close with Beth, Sam, and Zoey, to the point that I wondered how I had ever lived without them. The way we grew as a group, the strange telepathic network connecting all of us, with me at the center reaching out to each of them, made me ponder how people had connected without it. It felt like cheating in a good way, instantly fast-forwarding our relationship decades at a time, making all of us know each other in a way I had rarely seen others. The kind of non-verbal communication that passed between the four of us in a moment was absurd, though I only realized it when Cynthia commented on it one morning as Beth and I helped Sam prepare breakfast. Our silent assembly line, the way that none of us ever lifted our eyes from our personal tasks to confirm that another person was ready for us, made her laugh heartily.
That’s not to say there weren’t any hiccups. The bond cheated for us in some ways, but we hadn’t actually spent years together. We weren’t perfectly in sync in the way we would have been had it been an organic development — we hadn’t earned that, in a sense. It just made the growing pains of living with three women I loved, though had only recently become involved with, easier. It made it easy to nip problems in the bud before they sprouted roots and grew into lingering resentment. I could feel when Zoey felt like she needed to be the one in my arms one night, and Beth had no issue lying beside us instead of on top of me (though she wrapped herself into Sam’s chest rather than taking Zoey’s place beside me).
My only complaint about my time spent in October and November was that I felt I couldn’t make any long-term plans. I couldn’t delve deeply into a more substantial goal when I still had the uncertainty of the dragon meeting hanging over me. I didn’t feel like I could invest in finding a more permanent housing solution for our family because I didn’t have a reliable income source. Not that I had any specific complaints about the apartment Aisling had graciously provided, but it wasn’t mine. That was something the dragon was insistent I would have to find. When I was a human student, living transiently in the dorms was acceptable, but a dragon needed a home, a place to hoard his valuables and rest after toiling for more. I don’t think I would’ve understood that idea a year ago or had understood how this luxurious apartment could still feel like a hotel room.
That said, I couldn’t spend more time looking for prospective employment while I was still getting impromptu lessons in being in this world. I still wasn’t aware of what my skills could even be used for. I was a jack of all trades here, capable of learning any area of magic I devoted myself to, but I still hadn’t been informed of how that was monetizable. I had three-quarters of a human degree, but it seemed like using that would be a massive waste of my newfound talents. Aisling was, for the time being, paying me to remain docile, but I wasn’t sure how long that would last or how long I wanted to be tethered so directly to her. Everyone around me seemed to have their paths chosen for them, either by birth or by natural aptitude, which tainted having the ability to choose from anything, making it not feel quite as much of a gift as I intellectually knew it was.
I didn’t feel like I could abandon the crash course education I was receiving until the dragons came, either. I didn’t feel like I could commit to a specific training program to get into a career here when I knew I would immediately need to take a week, or maybe more, off to handle the dragons. I was sure that any potential employer would understand, or wouldn’t be willing to disagree with a dragon, but it didn’t feel right to try and devote myself to something with this still clouding my mind. It was something I needed to do, both for my own sanity and to settle the dragon in my mind, though. I needed to get some kind of reliable income that I felt I had earned myself so that I could put down roots that I owned and feel like I was providing for the insane family I was growing here.
Which is why I was comforted rather than concerned when I saw Cynthia’s nervousness when she came home from the office on Friday at the end of the first week in December. Even before she said anything, I knew it meant that the holding pattern I had been stuck in was coming to an end. Once this once-in-a-lifetime event was over, we’d all be able to move on to the rest of our lives.
“The date’s set, James,” she informed me. “They’ll be arriving on the 18th at the latest, looking to start their meeting with you that following weekend.”