Sherrilyn Kenyon - Dragonswan

"And that's the best you can do?"

"Hey, just be grateful I'm old. When an Arcadian first starts time-walking, we only have about a three percent chance of success. I once ended up on Pluto."

She laughed in spite of herself. "Are you serious?"

He nodded. "They're not kidding about it being the coldest planet."

Channon took a deep breath as she digested everything he'd told her. Was any of this real? She didn't know, any more than she knew whether or not he was being honest about returning her. He was still very guarded. "Okay, so I'm stuck here until the next full moon?"

"Yes."

Oh, good grief, no. Had she been the kind of woman to whine, she'd probably be whining. But Channon was always practical. "All right. I can handle this," she said, more for her benefit than his. "I'll just pretend I'm a Saxon chick and you…" Her voice trailed off as she recalled what he'd said about time-traveling. "Just how old are you?"

"My people don't age quite the same way humans do. Since we can time-walk, we have a much slower biological clock."

Oh, she really didn't like the way he said humans, and if he turned fangy on her, she was going to stake him right through the heart. But she would get back to that in a minute. First, she wanted to understand the age thing. "So you age like dog years?"

Sebastian laughed. "Something like that. By human age, I would be four hundred sixty-three years old."

Channon sat flabbergasted as she looked over his lean, hard body. He appeared to be in his early thirties, not his late four hundreds. "You're not joking with me at all, are you?"

"Not even a little. Everything I have told you since the moment I met you has been the honest truth."

"Oh, God," she said, breathing in slowly and carefully to calm the panic that was again trying to surface. She knew it was real, yet she had a hard time believing it. It boggled her mind that people could walk through time and that she could really be in the Dark Ages.

Surely, it couldn't be this easy.

"I know there has to be more of a downside to all this. And I'm pretty sure here's where I find out you're some kind of vampire or something."

"No," he said quickly. "I'm not a vampire. I don't suck blood, and I don't do anything weird to sustain my life. I was born from my mother, just as you were. I feel the same emotions. I bleed red blood. And just like you, I will die at some unknown date in the future. I just come equipped with a few extra powers."

"I see. I'm a Toyota. You're a Lambourghini, and you can have really awesome sex."

He chuckled. "That's a good summation."

Summation, hell. This was unbelievable. Inconceivable. How had she gotten mixed up with something like this?

But as she looked up at him, she knew. He was compelling. That deadly air and animal magnetism—how could she have even hoped to resist him?

And she wondered if there were more men out there like him. Men of power and magic. Men who were so incredibly sexy that to look at them was to burn for them. "Are there more of you?"

"Yes."

She smiled evilly at the thought. "A lot more?"

He frowned before he answered. "There used to be a lot more of us, but times change."

Channon saw the sadness in his eyes, the pain that he kept inside. It made her hurt for him.

He looked down at her. "That tapestry you love so much is the story of our beginning."

"The birth of the dragon and the man?"

He nodded. "About five thousand years before you were born, my grandfather, Lycaon, fell in love with a woman he thought was a human. She wasn't. She was born to a race that had been cursed by the Greek gods. She never told him who and what she really was, and in time she bore him two sons."

Channon remembered seeing that birth scene embroidered on the upper left edge of the tapestry.

"On her twenty-seventh birthday," he continued, "she died horribly just as all the members of her race die. And when my grandfather saw it, he knew his children were destined for the same fate. Angry and grief-stricken, he sought unnatural means to keep his children alive."

Sebastian was tense as he spoke. "Crazed from his grief and fear, he started capturing as many of my grandmother's people as he could and began experimenting with them—combining their life forces with those of animals. He wanted to make a hybrid creature that wasn't cursed."

"It worked?" she asked.

"Better than he had hoped. Not only did his sorcery give them the animal's strength and powers, it gave them a life span ten times longer than that of a human."

She arched a brow at that. "So you're telling me that you're a werewolf who lives seven or eight hundred years?"

"Yes on the age, but I'm not a Lykos. I'm a Drakos."

"You say that as if I have a clue about what you mean."

"Lycaon used his magic to 'half his children. Instead of two sons, he made four."

"What are you saying?" she asked. "He sliced them down the middle?"

"Yes and no. There was a byproduct of the magic I don't think my grandfather was prepared for. When he combined a human and an animal, he expected his magic would create only one being. Instead, it made two of them. One person who held the heart of a human, and a separate creature whose heart was that of the animal.

"Those who have human hearts are called Arcadians. We are able to suppress the animal side of our nature. To control it. Because we have human hearts, we have compassion and higher reasoning."

"And the ones with animal hearts?"

"They are called Katagaria, meaning miscreant or rogue. Because of their animal hearts, they lack human compassion and are ruled by their baser instincts. Like their human brethren, they hold the same psychic abilities and shape-shifting, time-bending powers, but not the self-control."

That didn't sound good to her. "And the other people who were experimented on? Were there two of them, too?"

"Yes. And we formed the basis of two societies: the Arcadians and the Katagaria. As with nature, like went with like, and we created groups or patrias based on our animals. Wolf lives with wolf, hawk with hawk, dragon with dragon. We use Greek terms to differentiate between them. Therefore dragon is drakos, wolf is lykos, etcetera."

That made sense to her. "And all the while the Arcadians stayed with the Arcadians and Katagaria with Katagaria?"

"For the most part, yes."

"But I take it from the sound of your voice that no one lived happily-ever-after."

"No. The Fates were furious that Lycaon dared thwart them. To punish him, they ordered him to kill the creature-based children. He refused. So, the gods cursed us all."

"Cursed you how?"

A tic started in his jaw, and she saw the deep-seated agony in his eyes. "For one thing, we don't hit puberty until our mid-twenties. Because it is delayed, when it hits, it hits us hard. Many of us are driven to madness, and if we don't find a way to control and channel our powers we can become Slayers."

"I take it you don't mean the good vampire slayer kind of slayer that kills evil things."

"No. These are creatures that are bent on absolute destruction. They kill without remorse and with total barbarism."

"How awful," she breathed.

He agreed. "Until puberty, our children are either human or animal, depending on the parents' base-forms."

"Base-forms? What are those?"

"Arcadians are human so their base-forms are human. The Katagaria have a base-form of whatever animal part they are related to. An Ursulan would be a bear, a Gerakian would be a hawk."

"A Drakos would be a dragon."

He nodded. "A child has no powers at all, but with the onset of puberty, all the powers come in. We try to contain those who are going through it and teach them how to harness their powers. Most of the time we succeed as Arcadians, but with the Katagaria this isn't true. They encourage their children to destroy both humans and Arcadians."