“Don’t you feel at least a little better after telling me your past?” I asked him gently. “Sometimes it helps to just have someone listen.”
“You know…” He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “I didn’t think it would but…it did. A little, I think.”
“See?” I asked. “And I’m not any kind of a trained therapist. But talking helps.” I thought of how I had talked and cried with my Coven-mates—especially Megan—about the pain of losing my parents. My heart went out to Saint. What a terrible load of guilt he was carrying! I wished I could get him an appointment with my old therapist back home. She had been such a wonderful listener.
The people of the Sky Lands might have magic and the wonderment of dragons merged with humans, but they were living in the Dark Ages. They needed things from the human world they couldn’t or wouldn’t take. It was like poor little Jalli, going around with a club foot which could be fixed by surgery if only Ari’s parents would let her have it.
I resolved right then and there that if I ever did get to be Queen of the Sky Lands, I would make some big changes. People who needed medical help would get it and all this nonsensical insistence that anyone who was born or looked different from the norm was “bad luck” would have to stop. Diversity was an integral piece of a successful society where people had sympathy and empathy for each other and the Sky Lands badly needed it.
Then I realized I was planning for a future which was most likely never going to happen—not now that the Blind Crone had given everyone such crazy, unrealistic expectations of me. When the Drake people found out I wasn’t the mother of a new race they had been waiting for ever since the first dragon merged with the first man, they would reject me. They might even want to kill me.
No, it was never going to happen.
At that moment there was a knocking at the door and Ari’s voice called my name.
Saint opened the door at once and Ari came in. He looked at me and nodded.
“Well,” he said, “We’ve come up with a plan.”
90
Kaitlyn
“So…we’re going to sneak away, back to Nocturne Academy in the middle of the night and not come back for a couple of years until the rumors have died down?” I looked at Ari skeptically. “That’s the whole plan?”
Saint had gone back to his own room and Ari and I were alone in mine, sitting on the bed while he explained what we were going to do.
It wasn’t much of a plan, in my opinion. I still preferred the idea of telling everyone the truth right away—tonight—before they could start spreading the crazy lies the Blind Crone had said. But Ari’s parents were in agreement—they couldn’t challenge the wisdom of the local Oracle, even if she was now deceased.
“This is ridiculous!” I exclaimed, getting off the bed and starting to pace as Ari watched me in surprise. He was probably expecting the old Kaitlyn—the quiet, timid girl who was too afraid to stand up for herself. But the deeper into this crisis we got, the more I felt myself changing—becoming more than that—more than I used to be in the past.
“This whole place is ruled by superstition,” I told Ari as he watched me pace. “Everything and everyone that looks a little bit different is just ‘bad luck’ or ‘under a curse’ or some nonsense like that. Look at Saint and what happened to him,” I continued and saw the look of surprise in Ari’s face.
“He told you his past?” he asked, his eyebrows rising high. “But he never speaks of that to anyone.”
“Well, he spoke of it to me,” I said firmly. “And what he needs isn’t magic—it’s medicine and therapy. And your little sister, Jalli—why can’t she come back to the human world with us and have an operation to cure her club foot?”
Ari sighed unhappily.
“Dios, Kaitlyn, I’ve told you—my Sire won’t allow it. The older Drakes don’t trust anything from the human world.”
“But they came from the human world—at least half of them did,” I pointed out.
“Yes, but that was centuries ago,” Ari told me. “If the records in our oldest archives are correct, the first brave farmer who came through the rift in Spain did so sometime back during Medieval Times.”
“And that’s the mentality your people still have,” I told him. “You’re talking about witchcraft and bad luck and magic and you’ve completely ignored any kind of science.”
“But witchcraft is real,” he reminded me. “And magic truly works. It’s not just superstition, like most humans believe.”
All right—he had a point, I had to admit. But still…
“Just because magic works doesn’t mean it’s the only way to solve any given problem,” I argued. “Why can’t we find a way for magic and science to coexist?”
“That, my L’lorna, is the question the various groups of Others have been asking themselves for as long as they have been interacting with the human world.” Ari sighed and shook his head. “Come—can we please not fight right now? Aren’t you thirsty?” He bared his throat for me, pulling down the collar of the rich satin robe he was wearing to expose the pulsing blue vein at the side of his neck. “Don’t you need to drink?” he asked.
His low, seductive tone and the sight of that vein pulsing under his smooth, caramel-colored skin made my fangs feel itchy and my throat feel dry. But I was in no mood to be manipulated or appeased right then.
I felt like what we were doing—running away in the middle of the night and letting Ari’s people continue to believe the blatant lies about me—was wrong. And while I couldn’t stop him or his parents from doing it, I could at least be
