Dragon Moon (19 page)

After dinner, we take Henri outside and let him fly with us. I lead him and Chloe from our house to Windsor, to Barbecue Bottom and Clarkstown and back. Later, when Henri resists his bedtime, Chloe sits on the bed with him and reads a Dr. Seuss book she bought for him.

Chloe and I fly together after that, hunting again, feeding side by side once more.
“You know I have to go home later tonight, don't you, Peter?”
she says once we're done.

I remember the long trip I made with him the last time and groan.
“Why don't I just drive there myself?”

“Not a chance!”
Chloe laughs and takes to the air. I chase after her, follow her from valley to valley, my mate always just out of reach. I beat my wings even faster, find myself inches from her tail and, suddenly, she sprays the air with her scent.

A cloud of cinnamon and musk envelops me.
“Not again!”
I mindspeak, breathing in her aroma, surrendering to its effect.

Chloe slows, dipping one wing, turning over in midair so she flies upside down, displaying herself to me.
“Does that make it better?”
she says, slowing even more as I close with her, positioning herself so I can enter her in midair.

“Definitely,”
I say, joining with her, the night's calm shattered by our roars.

17

Henri and I both wake early and get ready long before Derek arrives. We go outside, wait for Derek on the front steps of Bartlet House, Henri standing, sitting, leaning on me, asking questions until, finally, he sees Granny going to the stables to groom the horses. “Can I, Papa?” he says.

I nod and the boy rushes off.

The stone steps have grown hard and painful to sit on by the time Derek pulls his tan Land Rover into the drive in front of the house. Henri and Granny come out of the stables, to see who's arrived, just as the man gets out.

“Hello, mon,” Granny says.

Derek ignores Granny's greeting. He stretches, examines the house, the stables, the cottages, and walks up the front steps to me. He looks like someone on his way to play tennis. The contrast between his pale white skin, blond hair and rosy cheeks and Elizabeth and Chloe's choice of darker hair and skin reassures me that the women's choices were better ones. There's a wasted look to the man and even though he's the larger and more muscular one of us two, I'm sure I'm the more vital-looking one. He shakes my hand, squeezing too hard, and grins one of his empty smiles. “Not too shabby, old man. Not too shabby at all.”

“Glad you like it,” I say, motioning to my son to join us, introducing Henri.

Derek glances at him, turns back to me. “Let's get going, old man. You know my mum. She'll frown at me for a month if we're late.”

At my request, Derek opens the trunk. I put two suitcases in and place the wooden chest beside them. The man can't keep his eyes off the chest. “Gold, isn't it?”

I nod and he laughs. “You learned your lesson didn't you? At least you know the way to Pa's heart — if the old bugger has one.”

Derek continues to talk as we get in the Land Rover. I check my pants pocket, make sure Chloe's gift, the earrings to match her necklace, is there before we drive away. “I can't believe you, old man,” he says, driving with one hand, gesturing with the other as he talks, Henri, in the backseat, staring out the window ignoring his words, me wishing I could do the same.

“Two brides of our kind in five years. I'm ten years older than you and haven't had one yet. Of course, you had to cheat to get your last one.” He laughs. “Not that I blame you, old man. All's fair and all that, what? Don't know why Mum and Pa are so put out. ‘Someone had to eventually get Chloe,' I told them. Why not you? After all, at least you're rich.”

Derek drones on about the human women he's encountered, his plans to eventually leave his father's house. I nod and occasionally make a monosyllabic answer, but mostly I look out the window and try to memorize key landmarks so should I ever return again, I can do so without the man's company.

We go a different way than I expected, driving through Windsor, past the road to the cave, entering Cockpit Country, crossing the trail that hikers take through it to Troy on the other side. Derek follows a near invisible path through the brush. Having been taken through Cockpit Country before, I'm no longer alarmed by the sheer drops on the edge of our trail, the apparent lack of any real roadway. I realize if I study the ground carefully enough I can make out the faint impressions of tire wheels.

I find myself looking forward to my wedding feast, most especially to the potion of Dragon's Tear wine and crushed Death's Rose petals that Samantha Blood will prepare. Elizabeth and I shared such a potion at our wedding feast and both of us had been stunned to find ourselves sharing every thought, every feeling we had. The potion's effect had mostly gone by the next morning, but it left us with a permanent connection I sorely miss now.

To share such an intimacy with Chloe! I sigh. It had been thrilling to do so with Elizabeth, who'd been so different from me. It could only be better, more intense with Chloe.

We go up and down hillsides, our ears popping in each direction. Derek surprises me by shifting the subject of his conversation from him to me. “Tell me, old man, what it's like living in Miami? How do you manage it? I mean, hunting and all?”

I tell him about life on my island, where I hunt, how I conceal my activities. Derek says, “But what about your wealth? How can you have so much — like all that gold?” He gestures back toward the trunk. “And Pa have so little?”

“Don Henri always saved most of his treasure,” I say. “And he learned to invest it too.”

“How?” Derek says. He guides the car around deep sinkholes and drives on the edges of circular lakes, steering around some trees, under others as I explain about LaMar Associates, the humans who run it for me, the investments they manage and the miracle of compound growth.

Derek shakes his head. “Pa would never trust any human with any of his wealth. He hates dealing with the creatures. He and Mum barely ever leave left Cockpit Country. I'm the one who has to go to the outside world. Bloody damned pain that. I'm expected to bring back enough money to support us.”

“Land Rovers aren't cheap,” I say. “You seem to be doing okay.”

“Do you know how many fool tourists carry barely anything but credit cards? Sometimes I think it's hardly worth killing them. If it weren't for those street peddlers in Montego Bay selling ganja to the tourists, we wouldn't have hardly anything. Whenever things get tight, I look for one of them, right after an American cruise ship has departed. You can almost always count on finding a big roll of Yankee currency in their pockets.

“But,” — Derek slows the car, steers around yet another tree — “you can only kill just so many of those buggers before you mess things up. Most the time it's tourists — Montego Bay, Negril, Ocho Rios — a little bit of cash, some traveler's checks, jewelry, cameras and watches. I take all of it, except the cash, to Kingston every month, to Virgil Claypool. He turns it into money for us.”

Derek looks at me. “I envy you, old man. Your pa set you up proper.” He turns his attention back to the wheel. “I bet he left you with a large bit of treasure too. Like that chest of gold you brought? Where do you keep stuff like that, old man? I mean you can't march into a bank and say, ‘Store this for me.' Can you?”

I look at Derek, wonder why he would think I'd answer a question like that. “Father made the proper arrangements for everything,” I say. “Chloe will be well taken care of.”

To my relief, Derek turns silent, concentrates on his driving. Because of the roughness of the terrain, there are times we slow to the speed of a walking man. I doubt we go faster than ten miles an hour anywhere within Cockpit Country.

Henri takes it all in, breaks the quiet periodically by pointing to different birds, asking their names. Green parrots, doctor birds, glossy black grackles and two John Crow vultures circling over a tiny valley are all named and duly noted.

We skirt a deep sinkhole and I recognize it by its steep sides and the jagged stones near its bottom, looking like huge white fangs sticking out of the greenery. I remember it from my previous visit to the Bloods' home. My heart speeds up. I look out the windshield and see, not too far in front of us, the two sheer cliffs that define the pass into Morgan's Hole.

Driving through it, we descend to the flat valley floor. “Home,” Derek says and floors the accelerator. We speed across the valley, stopping in its middle by a pile of stones.

Derek honks his horn and in a few minutes a contingent of Jamaican men, dressed in ragged clothes, steel rings around their necks, arrive with two thick wooden planks, stop by a similar pile twelve feet in front of us. Derek looks at me. “You pay your humans. Ours work for free.” He guffaws.

The Jamaicans stand the planks on end and carefully lower them directly ahead of each of the Land Rover's front tires.

“There's a fault here,” I explain to Henri as we drive across. “Like a big crack in the ground. It runs the whole width of the valley.”

My son stares at the ground in front of us. “I don't see it, Papa.”

“It's under the ground. If we stepped on it, we'd fall through.” I don't tell Henri, the last time I was here I'd tested the danger of the ground by placing one foot on it, bearing down with my weight for only a second. Had I continued, I would have crashed through and fallen, God knows how far.

Speeding past fields, by the tidy wood shacks that serve as slave quarters for the Blood's dozens of forced laborers, we soon come to the stables and the two towering silk cottonwood trees that mark the entrance to Chloe's home. Derek parks next to another Land Rover, a white one, under the trees and we all get out.

Henri tilts his head back, stares at the tops of the silk cottonwoods, over a hundred feet in the air, the massive stone house set into the hillside behind them. “It's bigger than our house, Papa,” he says.

I nod, look between the trees at the rest of Derek's family waiting for us on the front porch of the house, all in their human forms. Charles and Samantha Blood stand in the middle of the porch, with Philip to the right of his father. While Chloe's parents have chosen to dress in formal Victorian garb, the teenager wears only a T-shirt and jeans.

Charles and Samantha look as white and aristocratic as ever. Philip however, who, when I last saw him, had chosen to look as pale as his father, now has adopted the dark skin and Jamaican features of his sister. He wears his hair platted close to his skull. I think how irritated Charles Blood has to be with his son's current choice, and have to stifle a grin as I do.

Derek opens the car trunk and Samantha waves a hand toward two blacks dressed in tattered clothes, steel rings around their necks. They rush forward, take Henri's and my luggage. Derek takes the chest himself, walks with it, swaggers really, toward his father. Henri and I follow. “Peter brought this for you — for us, Pa.” He hefts the chest and laughs. “From the feel of it, it's a good bit of gold. It should make you happy, Pa.”

Charles gives a stiff nod.

“He's so big, Papa,” Henri whispers to me.

“That's your grandfather,” I say, understanding the boy's reaction. Charles Blood towers over everyone, Derek and me included. I know Derek lives in fear of his displeasure. Elizabeth had told me of the times both she and Chloe had been locked in the cells beneath the house as punishment for their disobedience.

Charles looks at me. “I'm glad to see you believe in following at least some of our people's traditions. Too bad you couldn't follow the others and leave our last daughter alone.”

“There's no tradition against what he did!” Philip says.

The elder dragon glowers at his younger son. “There are ways to pursue a mate and there are ways not to.” He glares at me. “If it were up to me, sir, you would not be welcome here. But my wife tells me I'm wrong.”

“You should learn to listen to your wife,” I say.

Charles's glare intensifies.

I return it, refuse to shift my eyes from his. Father-in-law or not, the man deserves to be taught some manners. Clenching my fists, trying to control the rage that threatens to overtake me, I say, “If I'm unwelcome here, I'll be glad to take Chloe and leave. You don't have to trouble yourself for us. You can keep the gold. It's meaningless to me.”