CHAPTER ONE

Dragon, Dragon

Midnight black

Riding high upon your back,

Ever higher in the sky

'Til the winds of stars rush nearby

The alarm shrilled through the room until I could manage to reach it with one arm, groping my way from the heap of covers to slap the insistent noise into silence. The silence didn’t last long, now punctuated by muttered grumbling. I desperately wanted to stay where I was, swathed in the mound of bedclothes.

Duty finally got the better of me as I struggled from under the comforting warmth and weight of the welter of deep lavender silk sheets topped by an even darker purple silk comforter.

They had been outrageously expensive, but in some small way had given me a measure of comfort after the death of my mother.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed, feet dangling above the dark hunter green carpet for a few moments before managing to stand, groaning. Yesterday had been one doozie of a workout at the dojo.

The black silk gown fell around my ankles as I made my way to the bathroom, flipping the light switch automatically the instant I was through the doorway.

Looking into the mirror, my reflection gazed back, looking just slightly…off. Unless someone knew what they were looking for, they’d miss the details that said that I wasn’t entirely human.

My name is Leigh. Leigh Bain. I turned twenty-five last month. It had been the first birthday I’d had without my mother. She’d died the month before after an automobile accident.

I’d sat by her bedside, holding her hand when she’d finally told me about the odd heritage I’d wondered about my entire life.

Laurel, my mother, was a delicately built blonde who’d let me grow up believing that my father died before I was born. The truth, when she finally told me that day, was so much stranger than anything I could ever have imagined.

Laurel had fallen in love with a young man she met at one of the Wiccan gatherings she’d attended.

The odd, but beautiful man courted her for months before she finally agreed to go out with him. The rest, as they say, is history.

It had been a whirlwind romance. She was married in a quiet Wiccan handfasting to Keenan Bain. Laurel was expecting their first child, me, when she found out that Keenan was a bit more than she had bargained for…

Twenty-five years earlier –

The loving couple had arrived home from a movie that night to find a dragon sitting in the middle of the living room floor. It had one ‘arm’, for lack of a better term, propped on the arm of the leather sofa as the scaled tail snaked across the floor and curled around the small, polished coffee table.

“Keenan, it is time you returned home.” The beautiful ebony scaled dragon told the young man very matter of factly, as Keenan struggled to cope with his wife’s rising panic.

Laurel clutched uncertainly at her husband’s sleeve, desperate for an explanation that would make sense of what she knew couldn’t be sitting in her living room. Much less speaking good, clear, if slightly accented, American English!

“Keenan… What - what is going on? Th- that’s a d-dragon! A dragon in our living room, Keenan!”

Keenan turned his green-eyes, the eyes that Laurel always thought so beautiful, to his very pregnant blonde wife. He wrapped his arms around her. “Laurel, honey I’m so sorry. I meant to tell you. I wanted to tell you, but I just didn’t know how.” His face begged for forgiveness as he held her.

“You MEANT to tell me? To tell me WHAT, Keenan? That we’d have a dragon visit us? That dragons were real? What!” Laurel’s fright and uncertainty were rapidly becoming anger.

“Sit down, Laurel. Let me explain.” Keenan tried to gently lead his wife to the large cream-colored leather sofa. The end away from the gleaming black dragon.

Wresting her arm from her husband’s hand, Laurel stood, feet apart, fists on her hips as she faced both her husband and the dragon. Her voice had fallen to that dangerously quiet tone Keenan had learned to associate with her rising anger.

“What exactly did you need to explain to me, Keenan? I think I’ll stand right here while you and that over-grown talking lizard tell me what’s happening in my own house.”

“Keenan, how could you forget what she is and not tell her ahead of time? You’re slipping badly in your old age.” The dragon chuckled as he admonished the man.

Keenan exhaled an audible sigh as he ran slender fingers through his red-blonde hair, then sat heavily in the leather chair next to the dragon.

“Chintos, why don’t you shift a bit so you can sit down? This may take a while.”

The air wavered around the dragon as Laurel and Keenan watched him shrink, changing shape, until a handsome black-haired, blue-eyed man stood there before them. He had that same indefinable quality to his looks as Keenan.

Laurel made the connection instantly, turning to look at her husband again, shock and anger mingling on her face. “You’re what he is, Keenan, you’re a dragon!” Laurel accused him. She advanced slowly on her husband, anger building around her like a thunderstorm, lightning almost crackling in the air as she moved.

“Laurel. Laurel, wait! Listen to me, honey.” Keenan got out of his chair and was backing away from his very angry, pregnant wife as she stalked toward him.

The blonde witch halted a few inches from her husband, when the wall finally blocked his backward momentum, her hair billowing out around her from the anger fueling her own magick. “Alright. I’ll listen. But this had better be damned good, Keenan, or you’ll spend the rest of your life on that couch with your shape-shifting lizard buddy.”

Laurel, surrounded by a crackling nimbus of electric green light, stalked back to the now abandoned leather chair. Sitting carefully due to her pregnant girth, she waited for her husband’s explanation while one foot tapped insistently at empty air, a sure sign of her continuing anger.

Keenan explained that he was indeed a dragon. He’d seen her at the gathering, attracted there by the magick wafting on the air. More specifically, HER magick. According to both dragons, Laurel must have a fey or Sidhe ancestor. It gave a distinctive ‘feel’, ‘scent’ and ‘taste’ to her magick. That had lured Keenan to the gathering site. Once he was there, he’d been attracted to her beauty, the fiery spirit and the unwavering kindness she’d shown all around her. That she rejected him initially simply made him more determined to have her and in the pursuit of her favor, he’d fallen in love with her.

So Keenan had done the unthinkable for a dragon. He’d married a part Sidhe, part human woman. Nature had caught up with them as they had indulged in their lovemaking with abandoned, as newlyweds usually did. Laurel had gotten pregnant.

“It’s the Sidhe blood, love. We can’t have children with pure humans.” Keenan explained to his wife.

Tears flowed unheeded down Laurel’s face, as she instinctively understood that something horrible was about to happen. In a voice that was barely a whisper, she looked at her husband with wide, frightened eyes.

“What happens now? What happens to us? All three of us, Keenan? Is that even your name?”

Keenan rose quickly from the sofa, red-blonde hair a swinging cloak around his upper body. Laurel loved his long hair, soft and silken to the touch, as it drifted over their bodies when they had lain together.

He gathered her hands in his, as he knelt in front of her, his eyes filled with love and longing.

“I have to go back home, Laurel. My presence wasn’t required in my homeland, but Chintos’ appearance here means there’s a serious problem and I have to go back.”

“But what about me! What about our child, Keenan? This is your home!” Laurel barely managed to get the words out before she collapsed sobbing in his arms.

Keenan held her close, stroking her hair, murmuring soft endearments until he finally had to tell her, “Laurel, my home will always be with you. I have no choice in this, love. If I don’t go back, all three of us may be in danger, as well as all of my people. I’ll be back whenever I can. You’ll always be taken care of, love.”

Laurel raised a tear stained face to look into his deep green eyes. “No matter what anyone else gives me, I won’t have you beside me, Keenan. Nothing will ever make up for that.”

Keenan and Chintos had returned the next morning to Underhill. Laurel was left with more money than she could ever spend. Dragons actually did hoard gold, it seemed.

When the time came for Laurel to have their child, Keenan returned for the birth and was with her every moment at the hospital until she returned home.

It seemed that her husband had been fourth in line for the throne. The chances of him every having to sit upon that throne had been nearly non-existent, thus he had the luxury of remaining in the human world. But a devious plot by an unknown enemy had taken the life of his uncle and three nephews in an attempt to secure the throne for a rival. Keenan had actually escaped death because he’d been in the human world.

Between Chintos and Keenan, there was always someone with Laurel and the little girl she and Keenan named Leigh. The two were eventually moved to another city where Keenan’s absence could be explained as an accident that had taken his life.

~*~

Laurel, my mother, died two days after her revelations. I met the father I’d always believed dead, for the first time, accompanied by his long time friend Chintos, at Mom’s funeral.

I‘d been prepared to be completely furious with the man that helped give me life. Furious because he’d not been a part of that life. Furious because my mother spent those remaining years alone except for her friends or me. But the instant I saw him I understood one of the major reasons he’d remained absent from our lives.

He didn’t look a minute older than any of the photos Mom had of him. Dragons, it seemed, were extremely long-lived. Keenan, who I still couldn’t think of as ‘Dad’, was almost 500 years old and considered just a young man among the dragons.

I eventually managed to convince him to show me his other form before he’d returned again to what he called ‘Underhill’.

My father was a beautiful red-gold dragon of exquisite proportions, though he couldn’t fully unfurl the magnificent gossamer wings in my living room, even with its cathedral ceiling.

I asked permission to touch the transparent tissue of his wings. He explained that it was very tough and resilient, but to me it felt as soft as the silk of his hair.

Neither Keenan nor Chintos could tell me if I’d ever have another self, a dragon self, because, after all, I was only half-dragon. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to have that ability or not… Nor what I’d do with it if I did…

Since those monumental revelations, it seemed that every time I passed a mirror, I had to look. Not because I was vain, but to try and find something, anything that I could point to and say ‘that’s IT!’. But there was no specific feature that ever truly explained the certain odd exoticness of my face.

My entire life it had been that unexplained look that sometimes attracted new friends like a magnet, while at the same time, occasionally repulsed people no matter what I tried to say or do.

But the knowledge of what had created my odd features had its uses. I knew now, maybe not what I was, but at least who I was. Or perhaps better to say, what had gone into the making of me… That knowledge also let me spot the fact that Darian was half Sidhe.

Darian, my boyfriend for the last six months, was a tall, slender man with almost white-blonde hair. We were often told that we made a striking pair. Me a whole whopping five feet tall with long, below the shoulder, flame red hair and my father’s deep green eyes, as I stood next to Darian with his six feet of height, storm-grey eyes and white-blonde hair that fell to his shoulders.

Darian was a detective on the police force in Atlanta. We’d met while he was on vacation in Florida. I’d been doing freelance private investigations in the area surrounding the town of Altamonte Springs, where I had grown up in Florida. I’d been asked to look into a death of a man at the campground where Darian was camping. It had been a last ditch effort on the part of the Insurance company to avoid paying a claim filed by the widow. Darian had gotten involved in the investigation and as we’d worked together, we’d been attracted to each other. Once the investigation was over, he’d asked me out. After a few dates, Darian’s vacation was over, but we continued a long distance relationship until finally one weekend while he’d been visiting me, he managed to convince me to move from Florida to Atlanta. I made the move, opening a Private Investigation firm as well as the dojo where I taught

I’d gotten my black belt in Iaido, the Japanese martial art of swords, when I was sixteen years old. It was extremely unusual, so I’d been told repeatedly, to have a black belt in that oh-so-precise martial art of sword work, but the wizened Japanese man who taught me had always bragged about what he termed my ‘natural talent’ with the swords. Neither he nor I had any idea that it had been a gift of my heritage on both sides; the Sidhe from Mom and the dragon from my father. If Mom suspected that’s where my skill came from, she’d always kept quiet about it. I guess that made sense, knowing how many other explanations that would lead to… But equally unusual for so many older Orientals, my sensai always teased me, calling me his ‘little tatsu’, which meant, his ‘little dragon’.

If only he knew!

I finally managed to pull myself out of such deep thoughts, especially for this early in the morning, and glanced at my wristwatch, experiencing a moment of panic. I’d have to scramble if I planned to shower quickly enough to avoid being late for my appointment with the new client who was coming into the agency for a consultation.

That’s me. Always hurrying and always trying to not be late!