Shana Abé: The Dream Thief

Very well. He knew how to wait.

Zane downed the apricot and crumbled the cake into pieces, consuming each mouthful with purposeful leisure. Joseph was thick-witted and slow and strictly as loyal as his next paycheck, but the true reason Zane kept him in his home was this. Cake. Scones. Fresh berry pies. He was the best hand at sugar pastries this side of the Channel, and the starving child Zane had once been fully appreciated his skills. By the force of his nature Zane remained a hammered blade; fat men never made good thieves. He survived on bites and water and potfuls of bitter coffee. But he was on his third slice before Amalia rose, taking back her cup from his hand.

She made a slow circle of the room, not drinking. “This doesn’t seem much like the residence of a notorious criminal.”

“No. That’s rather the point.”

“Is that why Mother gave it to you?”

“Pardon me,” he retorted, brushing the crumbs from his waistcoat, “she did not give it to me. I purchased it from her, and at a damned premium price. It was all extremely legitimate.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, oh. ”

She set the chocolate on the windowsill. She lifted a hand to the iron bolt holding the shutters closed.

“Do not, if you please,” he said curtly, unmoving. “I’d prefer not to invite your kith and kin inside at the moment.”

“It isn’t sealed?”

“The molding around one of the panes has come loose. I discovered that the hard way two days ago.”

Her fingers jerked back as if burned. It was only one loosened pane, nothing very helpful to the ordinary men and thugs who usually haunted him, a mere breath of space between the solder and the glass. Yet it was all Christoff Langford had needed to breach all of Zane’s careful defenses. Because Langford, of course, wasn’t a man at all. He wasn’t even human.

And neither was his daughter.

“You love my family,” Amalia said now, her back to him, rubbing her palm up and down her rumpled blue-and-flowered skirts.

He did not reply.

“Some of them, anyway.” She glanced at him from over her shoulder. “You do love some.”

“If you say so.”

“You know what we are,” she persisted. “You’ve helped us, over the years. You’re…close to my parents. You’ve aided the tribe.”

“That wasn’t for love, I assure you.”

“What was it, then? Only money?”

“Money is a subject very dear to my heart, child. Do not underestimate it.”

“And what of power?” she asked, softer. “Is that dear to you as well?”

“Did you venture all this way for an examination of my character, snapdragon?”

Lia turned and looked him fully in the face. She didn’t like his pet name for her, and never had. It sounded whimsical, childish, when everything inside her felt strong and cold.

But she knew what he thought of her. She’d always known.

He was the only mortal tolerated by the tribe. He was the only one suffered to keep their secrets. While she and all her kind were kept trapped in the green heaven of Darkfrith, Zane was the sole living creature allowed to come and go at will. Even her father, the Alpha, tended to inform the council when he meant to travel.

It was their way. She knew it was how they had survived all these centuries. The Others raised livestock, or crops. The drákon raised silence, year after year after year.

Lia was the daughter of a lord. She lived in a mansion of glimmer and light; she looked out her bedroom window every day at open skies and wild, wooded hills and sometimes felt so suffocated it was a wonder she didn’t open her mouth and start screaming and never stop.

The council gave lectures to the children in the village:

Of all the world, we are the last of our kind.

It is our duty to remain safe.

It is our duty to remain here.

We protect the earthbound: the young, the women, the weak.

We are drákon . Duty to the tribe above all.

Rhys and Audrey and Joan-even Kimber, who at least got to leave to attend a proper school-moved through the hours as if there could be nothing finer than what had been placed before them. Their lives were planned out, their hopes and futures would be forever confined by the boundaries of their land. They were born there, they would find mates there, and they would die there. To them, the world beyond the mist and bracken was of little consequence.

Lia understood why her mother had run away, all those years ago. If she thought for an instant she could truly do the same-

But she couldn’t. She wasn’t Gifted like the rest of her family. She couldn’t Turn to smoke, much less to dragon. She wasn’t beautiful, she wasn’t brave, she wasn’t any sort of reflection of the magnificence of her kind. It had taken all her meager resources just to get this far, and Lia knew her time here would be short. They’d find her soon.

There were only two things about her that set her apart from the rest of her tribe-two dark, disturbing things. And one of them was seated before her in this chamber.

Zane had not stirred from his chair. The lamps were bright and the shadows were harsh; he was sketched in charcoal and light, studying her with a half-lidded gaze she recognized from years of watching him pretend to relax at Chasen Manor, every line of his body casually elegant, his coat unbuttoned to drape the cushions, his waistcoat a satin gleam of pewter and taupe.

His eyes were paler than amber. His hair was very long and thick, honeyed brown. He was poise and muscle and as tall as her father; Joan and Audrey used to keep her awake at night for years in the nursery, just giggling his name, until at last she was old enough to realize why.

Because of this. Because of his hands, so strong and tanned. His fingers, gently tapping the wooden arm of the chair in an easy, steady percussion that belied the wolf-watchfulness of his gaze. Because of his jaw, and his brows, and the handsome curve of his mouth. Because when he stretched his legs and crossed his ankles and lifted his dark lashes to fully see her once more, she was as pinned as a deer in a dragon’s clear yellow sights.

The flames from the lamps smoked oily black. Outside the shuttered window, the eastern song softly murmured.

She remembered the blind dream of him. She remembered the stroke of his voice-

“Forgive me if I interrupt your contemplation of my cravat,” he said now, in a very different tone. “No doubt it’s adorned with all manner of fascinating stains, as I’ve been out the past two days and nights straight, searching every inn and tavern and coach yard in the city for one thoughtless, wayward miss. I find I’m a shade impatient with all these heavy silences. Why, pray tell, have you landed in my parlor?”

Lia blinked. “You-you were searching for me?”

“Your father seemed to require it.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, oh, ” he repeated, this time clearly mocking.

She took a breath. “If I tell you something, will you promise not to mention it to anyone else?”

“No,” he said bluntly.

“What if it’s important?”

“In that case, absolutely no. Look,” he said, leaning forward to prop his elbows on his knees, “if it’s something so dire you can’t share it with your parents, then I want nothing to do with it. I’m not courting that sort of trouble. Sorry, my heart. That’s the way of things.”

And tonight, my heart?

“Do you think,” she asked carefully, “that it is possible to-to tell the future?”

His eyes narrowed. “What, like tinkers and star-casters, that sort of thing?”

She shrugged. “Or like dreams.”

“Certainly.”

“You do?”