Magic and Mayhem: How To Date A Dragon (Kindle Worlds Novella) (Baba Yaga Saga Book 2) (18 page)

Jezibaba sighed beneath his hands and broke away from his hold. “Zenos is who he is. I am who I am. You’re stalling, Damien. What did you do to Thane? Tell me the truth of that.”

Damien lowered his head and studied the floor. “Since no one died, I could not justify taking his life. I turned him over to the Council of Dragons to be reprimanded and punished according to dragon laws.”

Jezibaba huffed out a breath and shook her head. “Dragon laws? Dragons weren’t even involved. Thane plotted with Nigel to kill a Chosen One. He physically tried to killed Ahmed, sexually harassed both Hildy and Carol, and planned to sell me to the highest bidder. That dragon deserved to die for his crimes and I would have killed him if I’d gotten the chance. The only reason I didn’t kill Nigel was that Carol got to him first. It won’t stop the council, but I’m betting seeing Nigel’s dead body slows them down for a while.”

Damien stuck his hands in his pockets. He paced around her small space. He hated to think of her being in this tiny, bare room all alone. He hated being in his space without her. This couldn’t go on.

His tired sigh broke the silence between their viewpoints. “Do you doubt my loyalty to you so completely now?”

Jezibaba turned to face him. “How can I not? You have chosen against me several times in the last few weeks. You chose it yet again when you didn’t bring the dragon back to me.”

Damien lifted his chin. “I promise you Thane will receive dragon justice for what he tried to do. The Jezibaba and the Baba Yaga are revered by dragon kind. Everyone knows keeping the balance is all that prevents magical chaos.”

“Are we really as valued as you say?” Jezibaba asked. “Morgana said I was to be a bridge between dragon kind and the rest of her creatures. I don’t feel like a bridge, Damien. I don’t feel respected. If my own lover can’t see the Jezibaba as someone with advice worth heeding, how am I going to convince others of your kind?”

“You’re forgetting you
are
dragon,” Damien declared. “No matter how much you deny it, you
are
one of my kind.”

Jezibaba shook her head. “My dragon is a borrowed form, a goddess’s trick. It is not who I am or what I am. The truth is I don’t know what I am anymore. The waning of my magic seems to be some horrid price I’m paying for my identity crisis. I wouldn’t have this problem if I hadn’t let the dragon out. And you wouldn’t be able to use that form against me.”

“Are you saying your loss of power is my fault? Because we now disagree on justice?” Damien asked, unable to keep the hurt from his voice. “I would never take your magic from you… never.”

“But you did take away my power, Damien. You didn’t bring Thane back to face me… or the girls.
We
are the beings he wronged. Facing his crimes against us is real justice. My magic is based on stopping people like him. Now it has nowhere to go because you decided to take it out of my hands.”

“So now you don’t trust my judgment either.”

Jezibaba swallowed, but nodded. She had to. It was her truth. “You and Zenos are a lot alike. You help and support only when it makes sense to your brain… only when it suits the needs of dragon kind. Although I don’t really know what Zenos’s kind is, I can sense he’s far more than a mage because he makes decisions based on ethics he won’t re-examine or explain. What he did for Nathaniel—that’s the act of a god. I don’t even think Nathaniel knows what Zenos is. But whatever his origins, I can’t trust him either, no matter how powerful he seems.”

Damien nodded. “I completely agree about Zenos. He is far more than he seems.”

Jezibaba walked to her bed and sank down on it. “I’m going to have to call Morgana and ask her about him. I don’t know why I’m hesitating. I’ve never been an indecisive person, yet I don’t want her to know what he did for Nathaniel. If I didn’t know better, I would say he’s spelled me to think kindly of him no matter how awful he acts. It’s the same way I feel about you. I actually had Nathaniel check me for unhealthy traces of your residual magic.”

Damien wisely hid his smile. “Why don’t you talk to Zenos first… before you call Morgana? Perhaps you’ll learn what is necessary to know about him.”

Jezibaba huffed. “You make it sound so easy. Have you spent any real time with the man?”

Damien laughed. “Yes, he’s not all that bad. I know many dragons as arrogant as he is.”

“Of course you do,” Jezibaba said. “You see one every time you look in the damn mirror.”

Damien grinned over her sharp reply as he walked to the bed. He hauled the woman he loved up by the front of her low cut blouse and put his mouth on hers before she could push him away. Her arms came around him reluctantly, but they did come around him. In his mind, that meant he could win her back and he would. He’d find a way.

And as soon as the Council of Dragons made their decision about Thane, he’d tell her what punishment the boy had received. Then perhaps she would understand how Thane would suffer far more than his death at her hands would have allowed.

He pulled away and put his forehead on hers. He hated how tired and defeated she still looked. If anything was his fault, it was this. His lack of support had done this to her. But he couldn’t let his past mistakes keep him from a future he knew in his heart was right.

“Keep something in mind while you’re debating my character. It was
my
kiss that broke the spell on you.
My kiss
… because
my love for you is true
,” he whispered. “It will be that way until I take my last breath, Elenora. I may continue to make mistakes where you’re concerned, but I will never stop believing you and I belong together.”

When she didn’t answer, Damien made himself let go and walk away.

But he would be back. Yes. He would be back.

Jezibaba paced back and forth in the area where she and Damien went to practice shifting. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d tried being a dragon. The physical pain was so excruciating, over the years she had avoided it whenever she could. For the last year or two, no threats had forced a shift and she’d found a hundred excuses to avoid Damien’s suggestion to practice the change.

Even looking at the ground and envisioning talons digging into the earth was enough to send her heart racing and her pulse scrambling. She’d concluded this unconquered fear was part of her waning power problem, but still couldn’t bring herself to shift by choice.

Sighing, she hung her head. She hadn’t felt this insecure since she told Ambrose she couldn’t marry him. The mage who had trained her had been devastated. It had taken her months to get her confidence back after she’d understood how deeply she’d disappointed him. She’d learned the hard way that doing the right thing often knocked her back on her self-righteous Jezibaba ass.

Knowing she wasn’t going to be able to wrestle the dragon problem on her own, she opened her mouth to call her benefactor.

“Feck, woman. Don’t call the banshee. Morgana can’t help ya or she would have already done so.”

Jezibaba spun to face the voice. Before her stood a twenty foot tall talking phoenix. While she watched, the creature shrunk until it morphed into an attractive, middle-aged version of Zenos.

“The firebird is an immortal form. You’re not just a mage. What are you?”

Zenos snorted. “I’m no fecking consort to yer goddess, if that’s what ya be thinking.”

“Are you a god then?” Jezibaba asked.

Zenos shrugged a shoulder. “A long time ago I wanted to be a god, but I’m well over that foolishness. As for being immortal, I can die just like the rest of ya, but the difference is I always come back. The firebird is my native form now. Whatever is left of me at my death turns into him no matter what.”

“You now look half the age you were when I met you. You look my age… or Damien’s. How many times have you come back to life?”

He rubbed his nose and laughed. “More times than you can imagine. I was already magically immortal before yer conniving deity got her hooks into me. But I was very old and I looked it. I didn’t like being old. Morgana promised to help me find my youth again and I believed her. But the price I paid was too dear, and for a long time, I believed it had been for no good reason. I wanted her dead over it because I concluded all she had said had been lies.”

“What price did you have to pay?” Jezibaba asked.

“My original form. Morgana The Red took it from me forever. A few years ago, I finally found out what she did with it. She put it in another which is the only truth she ever spoke to me.”

“So that’s why you don’t like her? She stole your original form?”

Zenos snorted. “Like? I fecking
hate
her for what she did. Ya should know I’ve spent many years thinking about how to get even. My promise to the druid came back and bit me on the arse before I could figure out how to take my revenge. The connections between creatures will always trip ya up when yer not expecting them to.”

“Do you hate Nathaniel too? Because I will kill you as many times as necessary to protect him from your wrath.”

Zenos grinned. “No. Nathaniel has reminded me for a second time in my long-lived life that there are forces binding us all together that even yer goddess can’t get around. Those forces have turned my mistake into a legacy I’m now forced to support because of my honor. Being pissed about that for a couple of millennia won’t change it. So there it is… ya now have the whole sad tale.”

What could she say to such a revelation? No one knew better than she did how single minded her goddess could be about what she wanted. “That support you mentioned… are you talking about training Carol and Hildy? That’s your debt of honor, right?”

“Yes. I’m also talking about training ya to control that beast in ya. Professor Bluster might take credit for inspiring the dragon to come to the surface, but he’s hell and far from being the source.”

Jezibaba sighed heavily. “You lost me.”

Zenos huffed. “Those fecking mages Nathaniel saved me from were after my true power. I hadn’t wanted to feel so alone in the world, so I told those buggers everything. They would never have completely killed me that day. That’s not possible and they knew it. They were just after enough of my immortality to do to themselves what I did to Nathaniel. They had no remorse with using me for their own benefit. That’s why I killed them. I know I shocked the druid. He was a boy then. But I had no choice. I made him that promise to keep him from thinking I would kill him too. After all, I owed him my life.”

Zenos kicked a clump of dirt.

“They were fools anyway. By that time, yer goddess had already taken from me what those mages wanted. My dragon was the true immortal. Morgana knew the beast would return to this plane and bring power when it was reborn. That’s why she took the real source of my power and gave it to your great grandmother.”

“What are you talking about it?” Jezibaba exclaimed in irritation.

Zenos walked close and leaned in closer. “Yer dragon is not yer dragon. It’s really my dragon. And I can prove it.”

Jezibaba snorted. “Zenos… your anger at Morgana has driven you insane.”

Zenos growled until the sound echoed in his throat. “Yer stubbornness is so like me I want to bash yer head in sometimes.
Shift and become the beast
,” he ordered fierce and low.

Jezibaba’s scream of pain was lost as her body morphed and changed. When the shift was done, Elenora the dragoness was fire-breathing mad and turned on the mage with hot eyes.

“Fry me, beast. Go ahead. I dare ya to end my miserable life without ya,” Zenos yelled.

Zenos was angrier than she’d ever seen anyone be. His sudden pain filled scream of frustration stopped her own anger cold. When she didn’t release the breath she’d drawn in to blast him with, she saw Zenos lift his head and shake his fist at the sky.

“Damn yer fecking arse, Morgana. I did everything ya wanted. Ya had no right to take my dragon from me. That was never part of the bargain.”

Jezibaba looked down at herself, her red body, her large red claws. What was he saying? How could any of what she was belong to him? She had inherited what she’d become, hadn’t she?

She swung her large dragon head and saw Damien running breathlessly from the building. Somehow he always knew when she shifted.

Are you alright?
Damien asked, entering her mind.

Do I look alright? No, I’m not alright. Zenos ordered me to shift and I did. He seems to have that power over me
, she answered.

Damien walked to the mage who was standing with his eyes closed. He looked in severe pain. “Zenos?” The mage opened his eyes when he heard his name. He spoke in dragon, only not the current tongue.

“You’re not dragon, old man. If you were, I would know. What are you?” Damien demanded.

Zenos pointed at Jezibaba… or rather at Elenora the Dragoness. “I am dragon, ya educated eegit. I’m her fecking great grandfather.
My dragon is in her
.”

Damien’s gaze swung to Elenora the Dragoness who melted back to the Jezibaba as he watched. She must have heard what Zenos said because only the softer emotions allowed Elenora to shift back so quickly. He ran to her, removing his shirt as he did, so she’d have something to cover her body.

Her gaze turned to Zenos. “You’re Garrell The Wise One, aren’t you?”

Zenos snorted. “Not for a long fecking time.” He hung his head and sighed. “Yer power is weakened by the beast’s anger at ya not letting it out. The beast’s been punishing ya. Same for Professor Bluster here. His wards around this place are weak because his dragon is pissed at him. Yer both being eegits.”

Jezibaba pulled on Damien’s shirt and stood. She walked to face down her ancestor. His younger self was almost exactly her height. Now it all made sense, even his hair color. Her great grandmother must have known from the moment she was born.

“So you’re my actual great grandfather?”

Zenos snorted. “No. That’s just a pleasant spin on Morgana’s trickery. What I am is the rightful owner of yer dragon form. That’s the bald truth of things.”

“Well, I’d certainly give it back if I could,” Jezibaba said. “I never asked for it. I never asked to be what I am. I could have happily died after a hundred years like every other witch protectoress. I would have been fine with that.”