Dragon Call (7 page)

Cora concentrated on the sky, searching for
the moon while the glitter of sunrise worked on chasing nighttime
away. Light and shadow vied for attention. She thought she saw a
dark streak dip and skate through the line where pink blurred into
purple, but she blinked and it was gone.

Her body distracted her from serenity. The
cold winter air drew her nipples tight and lent a firmness to her
breasts, ordinarily too heavy to achieve that firmness on their
own. Her back and shoulders tingled as if they were being touched;
her toes curled against the cold floorboards. Cora found herself
thinking of Salim again. She wanted to know more about him despite
Diane’s warning, despite the danger he posed to her family.

Unbidden images danced through her awareness:
Salim the Collector languishing in a tent in the desert, naked and
hard on silk-covered pillows. The women he had collected bathed the
sweat from his body with their tongues. Cora snorted and rolled her
eyes at her own insomnia-induced romance novel fantasies. She
needed to focus, but she was in no frame of mind for concentration.
Rising from the circle, she closed the windows and barricaded
herself in the shower until the hot water ran out.

As soon as the clock rolled around to a more
practical hour, Cora bundled up against the cold and headed to the
closest Barnes & Noble. She armed herself with a triple-shot
café Americano before staking her claim on an armchair in the New
Age section. She carried every book on hypnosis in the store, with
the exception of books with cartoon covers, back to her chair and
settled in to research. She might not follow up with Greg’s offer
to introduce her to the wonderful world of hypnotism, especially
after the scene between him and Salim, but he wasn’t the only
hypnotist in the world. Her brief foray into meditation and
goddess-seeking hadn’t gone very well. Hypnotism might still hold
the key to a good night’s sleep.

Cora perused the indexes of a few books,
tapping the blank page of a spiral notebook with her pen and
yawning into her coffee every time she read the word “sleep.” She
had difficulty concentrating. She’d hoped the coffee would keep her
alert in the absence of a restful night, but it wasn’t living up to
its purpose.

“I guess I won’t have to ask you to share
those books. You look like you’re about to fall asleep.” Salim. She
tapped the pen too hard, too erratically, and it skipped out of her
hand to bounce on the carpet. Her motor skills betrayed her, and
she didn’t manage to convince her muscles to work in time to catch
the pen before it rolled away beneath the chair opposite her
own.

Salim crouched and reached under the chair
before she could make eye contact. “My fault,” he said. “Please,
allow me.”

His face was angled away, and long, curling
black hair swung forward to hide his profile. In the fluorescent
lighting, his hands were the color of caramel. His eyes, when he
looked up, were an amazing velvet shade of brown.

He produced the pen and offered it back,
holding it between thumb and forefinger. Instead of thanking him,
Cora said, “You followed me.”

“I scared you.”

“You didn’t. Triple shot of espresso.” She
wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing she feared him. She
lifted her paper cup. “Side effect of being awake is being a jumpy
wreck.”

“The only people I know who consume caffeine
like that are students and investment bankers.” He dropped onto the
vacant chair and stretched out his legs, crossing them at the
ankle. “I know plenty of people interested in hypnosis, but you
don’t fit the profile.”

“You should expand your circle of
acquaintances.” She lowered her head over the book on her lap,
hoping he would go away if she ignored him. As far as she was
aware, that trick only worked in third grade. Still, a girl had to
have something.

From the corner of her eye, she saw him
produce a coffee table book of fantasy art and open it across his
lap. Cora traded out her current book for a collection of essays by
psychiatrists who incorporated hypnosis in their practices. She
tried to focus, but her attention drifted back to Salim. The cuffs
of his pants, black cargos, drew back to show the red and grey
diamond pattern of his socks. His shoes were quality leather, but
she didn’t recognize the style or manufacturer. She wasn’t a
connoisseur of men’s footwear.

Cora followed the legs up to narrow hips, and
the book he held on his lap. His thumbs caressed the edges of the
glossy, color-splashed pages that he turned. She watched his hands
go through the motions of turning one page after another and
wondered what his handprint would look like next to her own.
Higher, she met his eyes. Even though he turned the pages of his
book, he’d been watching her examine him.

She cleared her throat. “Tell me about last
night.”

“Here?”

She bit her lip and looked up. On every side
of them, people perused bookshelves and chatted with their
companions. She wanted to take the request back, wanted to keep
secrets secret and not discuss them in an impersonal,
fluorescent-lights bookstore that didn’t even have dust on the
books to give them a bit of charm. She thought of Diane, though,
and the way she always went back around to Cora’s refusal to
publicly acknowledge the other part of her family’s life. Being a
Lune, a Dragonkeeper, was different for Diane. She had everything
to be proud of and nothing to be ashamed of. She, unlike Cora, had
been able to receive and hold onto her gifts whereas Cora hadn’t
believed strongly enough to receive them in the first place.

She should stop being a coward and allow
herself to believe she was enough part of it that she had a right
to discuss that different world at all, never mind publicly or
privately. Instead, however, she shook her head and said, “No, not
here.”

“Where?”

“Nowhere.” Cora bent to stuff her things into
her bag and stack the books she’d taken into a neat pile. “I need
to go.”

Salim moved, and she jumped. “I’m not going
to hurt you,” he murmured. “What happened is I got sidetracked. I
intended to make sure you understood the importance of keeping your
distance from Cho. You don’t know what he’ll ask of you. You took
me by surprise, though. It was stronger than I expected.”

Cora swallowed and straightened, shouldering
her bag. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I need to go,”
she said, inexplicably shaken. Salim leaned back in his chair, his
eyes intent on her face, strange and unreadable. She wasn’t sure
she wanted to read what was in them. Diane had called him a
monster, which was a powerful label from one familiar with reality
beyond the normal rhythm of the world. She didn’t want to stick
around long enough to find out how he’d earned that title.

Chapter Seven

Cora stopped at a small Italian bistro for
brunch. She positioned herself to face the window and watched
pedestrians go by, scrutinizing every face. Salim didn’t follow
her, to her relief. Eventually she relaxed and dug her cell phone
from her bag. She checked her minutes, an automatic habit, and
grimaced at the month’s usage. Fortunately December was almost over
and her minutes would reset.

She dedicated some of her remaining time to
calling Diane.

“Salim warned me to stay away from Greg,” she
told Diane after exchanging morning greetings. “I was thinking
about trying a hypnosis session. I need to get some sleep.”

“Have you tried meditating?” Diane asked.
Cora heard the gurgle of a coffee pot finishing its perk. She made
a mental note to order a cup of her own when her server came around
again.

“I tried last night,” she said. “I had a hard
time concentrating.”

“Try it again. There’s a portable DVD player
in my nightstand and a couple yoga DVDs. Try using the exercise to
relax yourself and spend some extra time during the meditation
portion at the end.”

“Does that really work?” Cora pulled the
phone aside so she could request coffee of the server when he
brought her fruit plate.

“Did you just order coffee? No more caffeine;
how are you supposed to get any sleep with all the coffee you’re
drinking?”

“You’re drinking it,” Cora said
defensively.

“I don’t have any trouble sleeping at night,
either.”

Cora stubbornly let the coffee order stand.
“I’ll try the yoga,” she said. “When are you coming home?”

“Don’t have any set plans. Want me to hang
out here so you have some privacy for the day? You can give me a
call for dinner or something if you’re ready.”

She wouldn’t have to worry about Diane
walking in to find her slack-jawed and drooling in meditation, at
least. “Yeah, I’ll call you,” she said. She was still reluctant,
but Diane’s suggestion made sense. Even if she didn’t connect with
any goddesses, the exercise would do her good.

Mindful of her minutes usage, Cora said
goodbye to Diane. She picked at her food, avoiding the strawberries
and leaving half the coffee in the cup. On her way back to Diane’s,
she picked up a lavender bubble bath and some candles to create as
relaxing an environment as possible for her latest attempt to cure
her insomnia.

Cora found Diane’s DVD player where she’d
said it would be and selected a beginning yoga course to pop in.
During her soak, she watched the DVD in a preliminary run-through,
making faces at some of the cheesy New Age lines in the script.
Once her skin showed sufficient wrinkling, she climbed out of the
bath and toweled dry. She hesitated with clothes. Yoga in the nude
seemed over the top, especially on the hardwood floors, but she had
it in her head that these mystic things worked best without
artificial barriers.

She opened the window, as she had before, and
spread a blanket on the floor inside Diane’s circle. Naked and
freezing, she settled down for the relaxation exercise, going
through yoga positions as the on-screen instructor indicated. Cora
had her doubts about the effectiveness of this exercise and knew
she’d be sore the next day, including her nipples from the sharp
cold air. She was relieved to reach the part of the DVD where her
only instruction was to sprawl out spread-eagled and breathe.

Eventually she sensed a separation, a
distancing between her mundane preoccupations and a higher
awareness. It felt almost like falling asleep. She tried not to get
too excited about the prospect of sleep lest she drive it away. Her
skin grew hot despite the cold wind; instead of cooling her nervous
body, it made her pulse points burn. She was aware of heat searing
her cheeks and focused on that heat. Something somewhere groaned:
she realized that it was her own voice. She was dizzy without even
moving. Gritty soil clung to her skin, clammy with sweat, as the
wind lifted it from the floor and threw it around the room,
destroying the earthly definition of the ritual circle. Cora
gasped, gulped air desperately, and tried to open her eyes. Panic
and self-preservation tried to undo whatever she had inadvertently
done, but it was too late. Cold wind suddenly seared her already
hot skin and rendered her numb; she wrenched her eyes open against
the weight of anxiety and couldn’t see anything in the unnatural
dark.

Time passed unmeasured until the stun wore
off. Eventually, she realized that she was no longer upright, nor
was she alone. Her head was at the northernmost point of the
circle, her arms and feet splayed to the other directions. The
darkness was a scary, solid wall of condensed shadow pinning her to
the floor. She tried to raise her knees—suddenly paranoid, suddenly
aware of her naked defenselessness—and found her limbs
paralyzed.

This was her nightmare, except she couldn’t
run now. The dragon had caught her, was bathing her in its fire.
When the darkness touched her, she whimpered. She felt it moving,
exploring her skin. Its touch was not normal: it didn’t touch one
spot; it didn’t stroke; instead, it engulfed her entire foot, her
leg, as if absorbing an entire meal at once rather than chewing
each bite. Its presence touched between her thighs, where she was
wet with fear instead of arousal. A low moan hung in her
throat.

Release me.

The words were inside her head.

“What are you?” she croaked. She had no idea
what to do, no idea whether she was dreaming or whether she had
really done this thing, called something to her. She desperately
wished Diane were with her, or that she could reach her phone.

She pushed ineffectually against the
darkness, pressing the back of her head down against the floor
until her neck ached. The ache reassured her that she was still in
Diane’s apartment, still linked to the world.

She inhaled, exhaled, concentrated on the
blood in her veins. She’d thought the craft’s gene skipped her
during its trickle through the pool, but here she had summoned
something—the dragon, her nightmare—and trapped the beast in her
circle. She was a Dragonkeeper, deep in her blood. She had power.
She tried to wrap her mind around that, to convince herself to
think like a witch, like one of the brilliant tricky women who
first bound dragons. The dragon/nightmare might think itself in a
position to give orders, but it was wrong.

Cora pushed it from her head through sheer
force of will. She didn’t want to waste her energy communicating
with it; she just wanted it gone. She struggled to make her body
move and gained enough ground that she was able to rise up on her
elbows, thrusting through the dragon’s viscous heat.

The pressure eased without warning, and Cora
found herself completely removed from the floor in one motion, only
to be flipped onto her stomach, on the floor again, in the next.
Whereas the dragon’s presence had only been a wall, albeit an
all-too-close wall, moments before, now it came crushing down on
her. The strange lines of its form moved against her, shoving her
legs apart and hauling her hips into the air. The dragon brought
her up onto her knees and held her head and shoulders down,
grinding her nipples hard against the floorboards.