“But…can’t anyone break it?” I asked, thinking about what I had learned about witchcraft from Megan and Avery. “I mean if it’s just a spell…”
“Oh, my Sire has tried, believe me,” Saint said flatly. “Tried and failed most spectacularly.”
“How so?” I asked.
He looked away.
“You don’t really want to know. It was…a tragedy.”
“Please tell me.” I could tell he both did and didn’t want to talk about it. Maybe I was the first person he’d been able to tell outside his family. Or maybe just the first unbiased listener he’d ever found, since everything from the Sky Lands was new to me.
Saint ran a hand through his thick black hair again, rumpling it up into a dark halo around his head.
“My Sire was determined that my Drake should be tamed and should claim a L’lorna. I tried to tell him it was a bad idea, but he insisted. He gathered the daughters of the noblemen of our province, as is often done for a male of high rank to choose from. The idea was that one of them would catch the fancy of my Drake and tame him with her feminine charms. He would claim her as his L’lorna and the curse would be broken.”
“I’m guessing that’s not what happened, though,” I said. I could tell as much by the bitter, unhappy look on his dark face.
“No.” Saint shook his head. “I held out—held him back—for as long as I could. But the presence of the females who had come to tame him enraged my wild Drake.” He looked away from me and his voice dropped to a rough whisper. “Two died and three more were mortally wounded before the rest could be gotten to safety.”
“Oh, no!” I said, putting a hand to my mouth. “Oh, Saint, that’s…” Words failed me.
“Horrifying? Sadistic? Murder?” he growled, glaring at me. “Yes, all that and more, L’lorna of my cousin. I bear their blood on my soul and I will forever. To see what my Drake was doing and not be able to stop him—” He broke off and shrugged, abruptly returning to his former nonchalance. “Well, at least now my Sire no longer tries to make me learn the proper way to rule a province. He has his hopes pinned on the male my oldest sister is to marry. Though he is not royal and does not have the two-toned scales which Alphas are supposed to have, he has an even, easy temperament and his Drake was tamed to her hand the very first moment they met. So my Sire has his heir, even without me.”
His apparent indifference about the situation didn’t fool me a bit. I had spent too long living with my own outer scars not to recognize the inner scars of another.
“Saint,” I said softly. “I’m so sorry. But what happened wasn’t your fault.”
“Try telling that to the families of the girls my Drake killed,” he said and I heard the bitterness creeping into his voice again. “Try telling them it isn’t my fault. I cannot bear to go to our court in the Western Province and meet their eyes.” He sighed and looked away. “It’s why I spend so much time flying—so much time in my Drake form. Though it sounds strange, it’s easier to forget what he’s done when I’m one with him. Maybe because his mind is savage and strange—not like the thinking, reasoning Drakes of other males. His thoughts are…snarled. Tangled like a ball of twine I cannot unravel.”
It sounded to me like his Drake might have some kind of mental disorder or chemical imbalance. I wondered if maybe modern medicine could help. Would Prozac or Zoloft or one of those other depression drugs—I had been on a few of them after my parents died—help a magical being like a Drake?
“Have you thought about coming to the human world and going to the doctor?” I asked frankly. “We have medicine there…”
“Medicine to break a curse?” Saint demanded, rounding on me. He laughed and it was a wild, angry, unhappy sound.
I shrank back from his sudden outburst, even though he was still over by the door and I was sitting on the bed. Saint saw my gesture and sighed unhappily.
“Don’t worry,” he told me. “I know what you’re thinking but you’re safe with me. Even if my Drake came out, you’d be safe. You’ve been claimed by another Drake—you’re someone else’s L’lorna which means you would never try to tame him. So he’d leave you alone.” He shrugged. “He really does have no interest in females, you know. Maybe because I have no interest in them myself.”
“Oh,” I said faintly. “Well…that’s good.” I had another thought and dared to speak it. “You should still think of coming to the human world, Saint,” I told him. “Even if you don’t think medicine could help your Drake.”
“Why?” he demanded. “Assuming that Nocturne Academy you all go to would even have me.”
“Well…because,” I said carefully. “We also have this thing called ‘therapy.’ It’s where you talk to someone about your past and the things that happened to you and all the guilt and anger and sorrow it caused. I had lots of therapy after my parents died in The Fire,” I went on candidly. “And it helped—it really did.”
“Therapy, you say?” Saint looked skeptical but I thought there was a
