Before She Wakes: Forbidden Fairy Tales (5 page)

My heart pounds, and I see the pulse of color even when I close my eyes. My breaths come in ragged gasps. My body is covered with leaves, flowers, and symbols I don't understand—like paintings on the wall of an ancient cave. Glancing down at my torso, I stare at a red-gold vine pattern that dips below the tie of my chemise and into my bodice.

I sink to my knees, imploring him with my eyes. “Please make it stop.”

He shakes his head slowly, and I see a battle raging behind his eyes. See it, but don't understand it.

“You'll turn now,” he says, his voice changed. No more deep, controlled tones. He's gone husky and rough, as I have. “It can't be stopped. Not if it's the first time.”

“Turn to
what
?” I demand.

“Draco.”

I stare at him, eyes wide with shock and horror. I shake my head, and the color throbs against my skull. I squeeze my eyes closed. “No. Not possible. What have you done to me?” I repeat.

“Your first meal came from the body of a dragon. Aurora's mother, perhaps? Is it not so?”

Blessed Virgin, save me
. “Why would you say such a thing?”

“Is it not
so
?” he demands.

“Yes!” I nod into my hands, which I've pressed against my temples to dampen the hammering. “To make me strong.”

A barking noise escapes his lips, and I realize he's laughing at me. “It has worked, madam.”

“But I'm a grown woman,” I protest. “Why now?”

“Have you never fought the color before?”

The color
.
Every day, for almost as long as I can remember
.

“Mostly at the time of the full moon,” I say, more to myself than to him. My gaze scrapes over the walls of paintings.

“But it never won before” is his tight reply. “It will now.”

I jerk my head up and glare at him through a crimson and orange fog. “How can you be sure?”

“Because
I'm
here.” He strides toward me and I sink back on my heels. “I thought it was Aurora I scented, but it was you. I thought
my
scent had called
her
—it can be a fatal vulnerability, the call to mate. But she came to protect you from me. She knows.”

I stare at him, agape. Am I to believe this? He takes another step toward me, and the fear that grips me swirls into a ball of heat at my core. It shifts and changes like the color beneath my skin. With each vermilion pulse, I feel his mouth on my neck. With each flash of ochre, I feel the grip of his hands at my waist. My mouth waters, and heat throbs between my legs.

I stumble away blindly, trying to banish these impossible sensations. Even with my eyes tightly closed, his image rises before me—the power and potency of his body, the gaze that burns like fire everywhere it touches.

When I look up again, I see he's come no closer. But he has sheathed his sword.

“I can help you,” he says, his voice back to the thunder-like rumble. “The shift…it will come like an explosion of sensation. Without pain or fear.” He raises his hands and unclasps the fur cape that rests over his shoulders, letting it fall to the floor. I can't help studying the hard lines and curves of his arms and torso. “This is what your body is asking for. It's the reason you're changing now.”

I lock onto his gaze, those bright smoldering points, and I think he must be the devil himself. My grandmother told me about the demon priest, but it was our cook Sabine who told me the Ursulines had accused him of carnal transgressions. Depraved acts of the flesh.

I dart past the blue devil toward the mouth of the cave.

His arm shoots out and he catches me around the waist, drawing me tight against his chest.
“Isabeau,”
he hisses into my ear. “Are you a dragonmaid or a frightened child?”

Let go of the fear so you can think
.

I hear my sword master's voice. This man is an enemy, no question, but the devil? I stopped believing in such things five years ago, when a wandering monk denounced Aurora as the spawn of Satan. The old man's body was scarred from rending his own flesh, and he accused
me
of being a servant of the devil.

The smell of my enemy floods my nostrils—warm and earthy, with tendrils of masculine sharpness. I feel the hard muscles of his chest pressing into my back. He exhales hot and slow against my ear, and my belly floods with tingling heat.

Coiling his arms tighter, he lifts me off my feet and crosses to one side of the cave. He shoves me against one of my paintings—a dance of dragons in flight—and plants a hand on either side, caging me.

His chin sweeps down my plaited hair, and I feel first his lips, then his teeth, against the back of my neck. He bites and sucks, pressing my body into the cave wall, and my nipples go hard against the rough surface.

I can't think. Can hardly
breathe
. But something he said is echoing inside my head:
It can be a fatal vulnerability, the call to mate.

I can't fight this. Am very near not wanting to. But even as I drown in color and sensation, my sword master speaks.
While I resist my enemy, he is stronger
. This interplay of bodies will give me power. And at the end of it, if there is truth in what Roark's told me, I will have perhaps my only chance to escape him. To find Aurora and warn the village. Because if he's come from the Sun King, he hasn't come alone. And this trial of mine will be nothing to what's to come.

But I will have it on my own terms.

I turn in his arms until my back rests against the wall. His face sinks into my hair and he breathes me in, exhaling with a groan. The patterns beneath his flesh no longer fade, but only throb from faint to bright.
Will he change too?
I wonder. It doesn't matter. When I find Aurora, we'll be a match for him.

I realize the fire has gone out. I can see him in the dark without it—because the color beneath our skin is
glowing
. He reaches up and hooks his fingers into my bodice, tugging so hard I gasp. The curling leaf pattern between my breasts is bright as hot coals now. His head dips and he traces it with his tongue.

The ache of need between my legs is hard and hot. It's all I can do not to lock my ankles around his waist and pull him against me. I've felt this need before—when I began to see my sword master as a man. I felt it when our swords clashed. In his eyes I could see he felt it too. But he had a family, and was master of both his swords. I believed, like a child, that I was in love with him.

But when the color came, it burned away my desire for him as it burned away what was left of my childhood. There is nothing childish about
this
desire.

“Let go,” Roark growls, rising from between my breasts to look at me. “Stop trying to control it and open to me.”

His hand coils in my hair and he yanks my head back, lips landing hot on mine. I raise my arms and shove him away.

He eyes me with shock and impatience, but I reach up and begin unlacing my bodice. His body goes rigid as he watches the movement of my fingers. I drop the bodice and pull my chemise over my head. I bend and remove my boots before working my breeches down over my hips.

The moment I straighten, he's there, fingers curling around my waist as he lifts me and settles me against the hardness at his groin. I coil my legs around him, soaking the front of his breeches with the evidence of my need.

My breasts feel swollen and heavy, and he closes a hand over one. With his other hand splayed at the base of my spine, he holds me steady as he grinds his body against mine.

With a growl he sets me down, pressing me until I buckle onto all fours under the force of his hand. I had intended to take charge of this, but I'm so raw and ragged with need I'm willing to be mastered.

Rocking backward toward him, I bow my back so my buttocks rise high.

Without warning he slides hard into me, only stopping when my backside's jammed against his abdomen. His big hands grip the fronts of my hips, lifting my knees off the floor so he can sink deeper. I support myself on my arms, breasts swinging with each thrust, and I clench around his cock. He's thick and solid and I feel like I'm riding a fencepost. His hands control me, gliding my body over his length, shifting right and then left, testing every angle.

I glance down between my breasts, where I can see him entering me, and gasp. The ochre patterns on my lower abdomen recede as blue spirals creep up in their place.

I feel close to exploding when he lifts me, pulling my back against his chest. Again gripping my hips, he raises and lowers me over his cock, penetrating deeper still.

With the tight rhythm of his cock jabbing high in my abdomen, something in me releases. Two shouts ring out, their echoes tangling in the back of the cave, as sensation floods my belly like molten liquid. One arm wraps around my middle, hand reaching up to squeeze my breast, and I notice that instead of blue spirals, his arm is now covered with silver scales.

I cry out in alarm as he lifts me off his cock and lays me on the floor. He walks on his knees until he's hovering over me. Light-blue scales fan out over his abdomen. I try to scoot away, but he grabs my hips again, and a moment later he's dipping his still-hard cock into my mound, slicked with his seed and my own desire.

“No!” I cry, but my hips rock up in betrayal, opening to receive him, and he thrusts hard and deep. I watch the glide of our bellies, silver and ochre, until the color throbs so hard behind my eyes that I see nothing.

The second release is an explosion of heat and color. Before I even understand what's happened, I'm following a jet of flame as I careen through the mouth of the cave, like an arrow fired from a crossbow.

Thunder cracks the clear, starry sky and I glance over my extended wing.

The Silver is not far off the tip of my tail. I'm in a strange body—somehow both heavier and more buoyant than my earth-bound clay—and I don't know whether I'm fast enough or strong enough to escape him.

But I know about dragons. A Persian tradesman in the company that brought Aurora had a priceless illuminated manuscript on the subject. The Artists Guild tried to buy it, but had to settle for making a copy—far inferior to the original due to only having a few days to complete it. Twenty years later our artists are still working to create a replica from the copy.

But I am permitted to study the copy when it is not in use by the artists, and I know that I have something a Silver doesn't.

With a slight wing adjustment, I wheel around to face my pursuer. I only have to think what I want to happen, easier than striking a flint, and I feel a tiny explosion at the base of my throat before flame erupts from my open jaws.

He's so close I expect a howl of pain, but all I hear is a hissing, and a great cloud of steam rises between us. I don't wait for it to clear before whipping back around. I have to find Aurora.

Just beyond the mouth of the valley, I find her lying as if dead, bound with rope from tooth to tail. The bellows inside me kindles a rage hotter than my fiery breath. Descending toward the field, I find it crawling with soldiers—hundreds of them, mounted, moonlight glinting off their armor.

I want to blast them with fire. The urge is so powerful I've opened my jaws without realizing it. But in the moment before I drop within range, I feel a light weight at my back, like a mantle falling over my shoulders.

A voice rumbles up to my sensitive ear, and I realize the accursed shifter is astride me. Roaring in furious protest, I curl and roll into an aerial somersault, but he grips powerfully with his legs and manages to hold his position.

“You're a fine, powerful Persian, Isabeau. The most magnificent I've seen.”

These words are purred in low, seductive tones, but I hear them clearly, as when his lips were at my ear. Even now—even in this alien body—his voice kindles a fire in regions far south of my internal forge.

You'll not defeat me with flattery.
Yet even as I think the words—even knowing his game—I discover his praise has created a swelling sense of satisfaction.

The most magnificent I've seen.
Aurora has always been a vain creature. Now I know it's her birthright.

“You're more terrifying than even your sister,” he continues, “who still possesses an animal's intellect. But remember that your human forebears were Gauls, and that makes us doubly kin. So hear me now, if you want to live.”

The men on the ground have noticed my circling form, and I find a hundred crossbows following my movement.

“Those arrows are tipped with poison,” continues Roark. “Potent enough to sink even a creature as powerful as yourself. It will take only a few strikes to make you sleep, as Aurora does. If they're all loosed, it will kill you.”

His voice has risen so that his next words carry both command and threat. His heels dig into my sides. “Find ground. I have something to say to you. Do it
now
.”

The rage I feel at his words is like a living thing inside me. I may not possess “an animal's intellect,” but I'm more at the mercy of my animal drives than I ever have been. The same instinct that drove me to give my body is now driving me to scorch them all to blackened bones.

But I can't save Aurora if they kill me.

Swallowing the inferno that claws at the back of my throat, I reverse course and return to the cave. As I swoop in through the opening, Roark slides from my back. I round on him, growling a threat as smoke curls from my nostrils.

Ignoring me, he retrieves his breeches from the floor of the cave and pulls them on. Then he straps on his sword belt and crosses his arms over his chest, watching me.

The transformation happens without my willing it. It feels like falling down a brightly lit well. When I hit bottom, the lights go out. My skin tingles and my ears buzz, and I remain crouched on the floor, waiting for my head to clear.

When finally I rise, his gaze glides over me and I remember I'm naked. As I move around the cave collecting my clothes, I notice the ochre flash under my skin and wonder if it will ever stop.

“It's like a blush,” says Roark, as if he's read my thoughts. “You can't control it completely. But you can avoid situations that trigger it. Anger. Fear.” There's a pause before he adds, “Arousal.”

My color flares brightly, limning my skin with heat. I bend and lift my sword from the floor, avoiding his gaze.

“How old were you when you first…changed?” I ask. My hands shake as the blade glides into its sheath.

“Eleven.”

I glance up at him. “Were you frightened?”

He studies me, the lines of his mouth hard, yet failing to subdue the sensuous curve of his bottom lip.

“Yes,” he replies. “But I had known it would come. My mother told me as soon as I was old enough to understand.”

“How did she know?” Did
my
mother know?

His hand moves to his sword, but it rests there casually, palm pressed against the hilt. “Dragons are a part of our culture. The Northmen brought the first Silver eggs in their ships, trading them for goods in times of peace. The way of making shifters was taught to us. It became tradition for the ranking families of Ériu to choose that path for their heirs.”

“You were given dragon's milk at birth?”

He nods. “But I'm a shifter by blood. As were my mother and father.”

Ranking families.
I study the necklace he never took off. It had remained intact during the transformation. “You're a prince, then? Or a king?”

“Something very like, yes.”

I know very little of the isle of Ériu, beyond the existence of the Celtic Silvers—no longer “rumored”—and Roark's suggestion of a connection between our ancestors. Some said the mists blanketed the island shortly after the arrival of the Northmen, and never lifted. A pagan curse of some kind. My French tutor told me ships that penetrated the mist were never seen again.

“If you're of noble birth,” I ask, “why are you serving the king of France?”

A cold smile spreads over his handsome, angular features. “The money is good.”

“You're a mercenary.” The stigma of the word tinges my tone with a bitterness he perceives.

“I've forged an alliance with France on behalf of my people. Louis wants our help with the Dutch and Spanish. We may someday want
his
with the English.”

Louis XIV had been trying to wrest our neighbor Orange from the grip of the Dutch for some time, with varying degrees of success. The uncertainty in the region had made it easier for my village to avoid royal attention—until now.

“And why,” I ask, “with all his great wars, has the Sun King taken an interest in tiny Roussillon?”

“Wars cost money, Isabeau.”

I frown, studying him. He's not the sort of man to be worked on by feeling or sentiment. He's stronger than I am, and he has Aurora. I feel my impotence like a brand of shame. I've failed my family and my village.

“If you prefer your truths coated in honey,” he continues, “I will take you to the man himself. In fact, that's just what I'm proposing.”

“That I speak to the king?” I ask, incredulous. “What have I to gain from that?”

“It's possible the king might consider another alliance.”

“With Roussillon?” I laugh, but his lips don't so much as twitch.

“Dragons will shape our destiny. Nations will rise and fall by them. I've convinced the king of this. There are rumors the English are paying a high price to assemble a Dragon Guard. Louis cannot afford to be left behind.”

And finally I understand why this artists' village has come to the notice of Louis XIV, king of France. “That's why he wants Aurora.”