EVREN: Enter the Dragonette (3 page)

BOOK: EVREN: Enter the Dragonette
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His squirming made me smile, which was good because it made me forget what I kept reliving in my dreams, even if just for a little while.

When I saw that he was as comfortable as he could be, I began carefully, “This Evian thing—”

He made a face.  “
Evren,
Delilah.”  He sighed.  “Why do you insist on calling us a bottle of water?”

“It’s Deli,” I corrected him.

He smiled and I knew he had done it to make me forget some more.

The subtle act of kindness threatened to release the tears I was trying to hold at bay.  “Thanks,” I told him with a shaky smile.  “I appreciate what you’ve done—”


Uh-oh
.  No waterworks, please,
Deli
?  I said it to make you laugh and not cry.”

His panicky expression made me laugh again.  I willed my tears not to fall.  I owed him that much.

Dyvian glanced at me warily.  “Okay now?”

“As much as I can be.”

He sighed.  “Shouldn’t we take a rain check on this?  I don’t think—”

“I
need
to hear it.  I need to know the truth, Dyvian.”  I glanced down at the pillow I was wringing with my bare hands.  I forced myself to let go and smoothed the creases away, using the time to relax myself.  “You told me the other night that you knew something about my family.”

“In a way.”

“How?”

“To answer that, I’ll have to tell you a little about us first.”  He paused.  “About what you’ve become.”

I tried not to cringe.  I could still remember the monstrous entity that had bathed me with its fire.  Would I be
that
ugly?

“It’s not that ugly,”
a Lucian-like voice protested inside my head.  It was the same voice I had heard the night of my rescue, just moments before I had succumbed to fever and exhaustion.  I was afraid it was a sign of insanity.  I hadn’t told Dyvian, much less Lucian, about it.  If I was crazy, it was a secret I was determined to keep—maybe even from myself—for the rest of my life.

“Deli?”  Dyvian frowned.

I blinked.  “Sorry.  I was remembering what, uh, you guys really look like.”

He smirked.  “What
we
look like.”

“Whatever,” I snapped, but I was smiling.  When I wasn’t so bothered by my nightmares and I wasn’t feeling so weak, I could always count on Dyvian to make me laugh with our arguments.  I liked him a lot.  He reminded me of myself and that certainly wasn’t a bad thing.

“Do you want me to finish or what?”

“I’m keeping quiet.”

“Good.  Now, the first thing you have to know about Evren is our soul.”

“Thank God,” I blurted out.  “I mean, I’m just happy that we still have them.  I was scared that we didn’t like—”  I frowned.  “That’s what you’re going to say, right?  We do still have souls, don’t we?”

Dyvian’s face was grim.  “No, Deli.  We don’t.”

My heart jumped to my throat. 
Soulless? 
Tears filled my eyes. 
I’m going to hell.  I’m one of the damned—

“Just joking,” he retracted hastily when my tears trailed down my cheeks.  “We have them, Deli.”


Dyvian.

 
I wiped the silly tears away, relieved all the same that I still had a soul.

“I’m sorry.”  But his grin implied otherwise and his next words confirmed it.  “But you’re just too irresistibly fun to tease, Deli.”  He rolled his eyes.  “How could you even think we didn’t have souls?  Humans aren’t the only creatures of God.”

“I know that, but we’re…
different.

He smiled gently.  “We may not be entirely human, but we do descend from them.”  He wagged a finger.  “Now, will you let me continue without any more interruptions?”

I crossed my heart.

“Good girl.  Listen carefully because I’m going to tell you the most important thing to know about Evren.”  He stopped talking, as if waiting for me to interrupt him.  I didn’t.

His eyes twinkled.  “Evren, Deli, have dragons for their souls.”

I waited for the punch line, but when he only looked at me with expectant silence, my eyes widened in disbelief.  “You have got to be joking, right?”

The twinkle in his eyes became more pronounced.  “Nope.”


Dragons.
”  The mere idea strangled my voice. “I should have known…”  I banged my head with my fist in chagrin.  “Ugly beast, fire-breathing powers,
sheesh…
how could it be anything but?”  Davie always did say I had appalling deductive skills.

“Obviously, they aren’t mythical creatures like most people think.  They’re real.  They’re ancient.  Pure dragons no longer exist, of course, but a part of them resides in us, and it is their blood that allows us to have certain qualities humans don’t possess.”

My mind was busy retracing the past, reanalyzing what I had seen and experienced.  “Oh, my God.  Th-that monster.  It was Lucian, wasn’t it?”  Those forest green eyes were unmistakable.

Dyvian wagged his finger again.  “Uh-uh.  I wouldn’t call him that to his face if I were you, but yes, that
was
him.”

“You can turn like that, too?”

“All three of us—” he looked at me pointedly, “—can turn like that.”

“But I don’t want to turn like that,” I wailed before I could stop myself.  “No offense, Dyvian, but it’s kinda icky, having scales and all that.”  I glanced down at my hands, realizing in horror that my very lovely normal hands could turn into claws any moment.

“Tough.”  He sounded more amused than sympathetic.  “But that’s exactly what you are now.”

His words only made me cherish my hands all the more.  Life was so cruel.  My hands weren’t meant to be ugly.  But the truth seemed even worse.  It was supposed to set me free from my nightmares, not add to them.

I grimaced.  “What else do I have to know about being Evren?”

He wagged his finger again.  “I’m not finished about the soul bit yet.  An Evren’s soul is slightly different from a human’s.  It’s a separate entity, you see.”

“Separate entity?” I echoed.  “Does this mean someone, no,
something
else is living inside me?”  I felt violated all of a sudden.

Dyvian shifted in his seat, looking slightly apologetic.  “Something like that, yes.  When Lucian made you Evren, he had to change your soul, too.  I guess you could say he woke it up.  An Evren’s soul is the source of its power.  It will give you the ability to fly, turn invisible, breathe fire, live on heat, and things like that.”

My head started to spin again.  This was too much to take in.  It just proved that inconvenient truths were best left buried.  “Fly,” I parroted hoarsely.  That meant I hadn’t imagined flying in Lucian’s arms.

“And turn invisible…”  Dyvian’s tone was gleeful.

I didn’t even want to think about that.

“Breathe fire, live on heat—”

“Excuse me?”  I wasn’t sure what he meant with his last words. 
Live on heat?  Did he mean live in heat?

He laughed.  “I’m not talking about
that
.  Evren mainly subsist on heat, Deli.  We live on it.  Some food makes us stronger, but we can live without it.  We can live without just about anything except heat.  Do you understand me now?”

“Oh.”  I brightened as another thought occurred to me.  “Then this means we don’t have to drink blood, right?”


Deli
.”  He roared with laughter.  “We’re Evren, not vampires.”

“It was a perfectly sensible assumption.  I mean, monsters are monsters and—will you stop laughing?”

The doorknob rattled and a strange bout of shyness grabbed hold of me as Lucian took a step inside the room.  “I heard some noise—”  He stopped on the threshold when he saw Dyvian almost doubled over laughing.  No doubt, the sight puzzled him, but with his typical I-don’t-do-emotions-because-I’m-not-human aloofness, he simply raised a brow.  “Are you all right, Deli?”

A memory…or a vision—Lucian watching over me as I slept—struck my mind.

I turned my head away from Lucian, feeling more self-conscious.  Surely, that couldn’t be real?  It was probably my mind playing tricks on me.

Lucian didn’t seem to be the type to do that.  He was just too indifferent…
and
busy.
  I was still trying to avoid his gaze.  He looked like he had a million things to do, and my heart sort of squirmed, in a guilty way, at the thought of adding to his burdens.

“I’m fine.”  I pointed at the still-laughing Dyvian.  “But I don’t know about him.”

“You should hear what Deli thinks about us—”

“I wanted to learn about Evren.”  I cut Dyvian off, not liking the thought of Lucian knowing how silly my assumptions were.  “I was hoping that understanding what happened would make my nightmares go away.”  The mere mention made me remember them, and I forgot about being annoyed at Dyvian as a fresh wave of pain washed over me.  Another vision—my parents dead faces, inhumanly disfigured by a fiend lurking in my nightmares—slashed my mind, and I had the urge to throw up.

Why did I have to be alive when my parents were—

“What have you learned so far about Evren?”  Lucian’s question penetrated my thoughts.

I shuddered, relieved at being given something else to think about.  “W-we…”  I took a deep breath to steady my voice.  “We have dragons for our souls and we can turn…
you know
…if we, uhh, want to.”  My chest slowly eased as my mind focused on the less painful, albeit equally disturbing, topic of the Evren anatomy.

“So articulate,” Dyvian teased.

I glared at him even though I was secretly glad for his teasing.  It helped push the images farther away.  I needed a few moments to ready myself before facing the past again.  “Stop showing off.  I know some big words, too, you know.”

“Like what?  Monstrous?”

“Here’s one for you.  Ass—”

“Children,” Lucian scolded.  But he was smiling just the tiniest bit, and there was something about him that made me automatically smile back.  It was almost like I felt better just by seeing him smile, which was plain ridiculous.

“Feel better now, Deli?”

Dyvian smiled, too, and this time I burst into tears.  They had done it again.  “I’m really lucky you guys saved me,” I sobbed.  I was a stranger to them.  Why were they so nice, and why did they care so much that they did everything possible so I wouldn’t feel sad?

“Oh, damn,” Dyvian whispered in a panic-stricken tone.  I would have laughed if I hadn’t been so busy crying.  It was funny how grown men, even sophisticated ones like those two, could get so uncomfortable just because of tears.

Lucian drew closer and patted my head awkwardly.  “It’s okay now.  We’re here.”

His words only made me sob harder.  “I know,” I wailed.  “And that’s why I’m crying.”

“Right.”  Dyvian was trying hard to look like he understood me.

I smiled in spite of my tears.  “Don’t you see?  I’m happy.  I know I should be alone right now, but I’m not because I have you two.”

They gave me several minutes to compose myself, and I sniffed out the last of my tears.  “Okay now?” Dyvian asked uncertainly after a while.

“Yes.”  One last dab using the corner of my pillow erased the remaining traces of my tears.

Dyvian visibly hesitated.  “Well—”

“I’m fine…and I still want to know what happened that night.”

Lucian clasped his hands behind his back.  “What can you remember of that time?”

The memories came back swiftly, like they were always there, ready to ambush my thoughts.  I swallowed.  It hurt to relive those moments.  It hurt to speak.  But I forced myself to do both.

“We were just driving…  Davie was sleeping.  I was listening to…Ne-Yo.  I had my iPod with me.  My parents were in front, talking, laughing.  They teased me about moving out of New York and asked me if I was okay with living in Nevada if Dad’s business deal would push through.”

My eyes flew open, and I stared at them in remembered horror.  “Someone, something, had suddenly appeared before us, forcing my dad to swerve in the opposite direction.”  I hugged my arms to myself, remembering what the man looked like.  His eyes had glowed red, and there had been a feral quality to him that made me realize something bad was about to happen.  He looked human, but he wasn’t.  He couldn’t be, not when his evilness was almost like a breathing, salivating creature inside him.  “I knew…”  I gulped back the sobs.  “Oh, God, but I knew just by looking at him that my father should have run him over.  Just one look and my instincts had gone c-crazy…like they were telling me I had to do anything possible to kill him.  B-but I was t-too late.” 

“It wasn’t your fault,” Lucian grated out.

“He was incredibly strong,” I whispered.  Sweat drenched my skin.  More excruciating images swept through my mind, so vivid I could almost smell the scent of fire mingling with the dry, cool air of the desert.

“He grabbed hold of our car and he tossed it upside down like it was nothing.”  My voice rose and the words tumbled out in a rush, as if I believed that saying them quickly enough could prevent the past from becoming true.  “And then the others came out of nowhere…three or four of them, maybe?  They looked…
excited,
like they were having fun. 
Oh, God, how could they feel like that? 
Two of them dragged my parents away.  I could hear them screaming.  Davie was still stuck inside the car.  The crash broke her leg somehow.  I tried pulling her out of the car, but I kept falling, I was too dizzy.  My hands were smeared with blood—”

BOOK: EVREN: Enter the Dragonette
12.21Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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