All the next day, I have Skye to myself. We spend hours together searching my library, our fingers tangling every time we both reach for the same book. We practice lifts by the waterfall, my hands cradling her hips. We eat a wonderful dinner of pork chops with applesauce and wild greens while watching a movie calledStrictly Ballroom, and she doesn’t move away when I drape my wing across the back of the couch behind her. Finally, we dance side by side, moving in harmony as the video game asks for ever trickier footwork until Skye grins up at me, glowing and breathless with youth and laughter.
The memory stays with me as I visit my hidden romance collection to devour another two books, haunts me as I find my bed: Skye, so young and joyous and beautiful it makes my chest ache. I feel like the greediest of gluttons to want tokeep her for my own. Yet I’m exactly greedy enough to do exactly that.
When I enter the kitchen the next morning, Princess Buttercup sits beside her empty dish, her tail curled around her front legs. “Finally.” She rolls her eyes. “Feed me.”
“You have an automated feeder.” I flick a claw toward the mechanism a couple of feet away.
“That’s dry food.” She comes over to strop my shins. “I want wet.”
I lean over and scoop her into my arms. “Where’s your witch?”
“That’s the other thing.” Princess Buttercup taps my chin with her paw. “I’m supposed to tell you she left with Naomi, but she’ll meet you in the library in a little bit.”
I grunt and scratch a claw lightly under her chin.
“Ohhh, that’s a good spot.” She lifts her head, her eyes closing to slits, and begins purring, a deep rumble I can feel all the way to my bones. It’s oddly soothing.
Where could Skye have gone, and why? She knows how urgent our search is. We’ve only got a couple more days to either break her spell or master dancing to the extent that we can win a dance competition against professional ballroom dancers. I don’t want to explore exactly how many times the spell can make us dance the competition over and over. Skye finally showed meGroundhog Day, and while I found the film amusing, I have little desire to be stuck in one scene for the equivalent of weeks.
The purr halts, and the paw that taps my chin carries a hint of claws. “Wet food.”
“I know Skye. There’s no wayshe left without feeding you first.” My eyes narrow, and I take a deep sniff. “It’s exactly as I thought. Your breath already smells of wet food.”
“Worth a shot,” Princess Buttercup says, her tone casual. She climbs up to perch on my shoulder, my wing cupping her back.
A few days ago, Skye taught me how to scramble eggs, so I make several for my breakfast, passing little bites to Princess Buttercup whenever her pats against my cheek become a touch too claw-filled.
Once she sniffs my apple and declares it “disgustingly not chicken,” the cat lets me eat the fruit in peace. I place the dirty dishes in the cleaning cupboard, which Skye refers to as my “magical dishwasher,” and head for the library. Princess Buttercup continues to ride on my shoulder as I make my way through the castle but jumps down the moment I enter the reading room to disappear under the wisteria where I placed a cat bed.
I dive into my research on magical temperature control. Skye needs a heated bubble of air around her every time I take her flying, which I’m more than happy to provide. But what if she were outside in the cold without me? Her automobile could break down, and she’d have no way to stay warm. I want to devise an air-warming crystal that anyone can use, so that I can add one to Skye’s necklace.
My quill scratches across parchment as I find another reference of note.
A pop of displaced air jerks my gaze toward the middle of the reading room.
Skye stands beside Naomi. The teleporting witch glances around, her keen eyes making note of the room. “Got it.” Shewinks out of sight.
“What is this?” I push to standing. “How did she teleport into my library? She’s never seen it.”
“Naomi was able to pick up the location lock from me. She says I’m bonded to your library.” Skye points to the romance book hanging in midair. “Maybe because my spell’s still active.”
I grunt. “That might be how. That still doesn’t answer the question as to why—”
Naomi pops back into view, three dragon younglings clinging to her. Their little eyes brighten the moment they spot me, and they give a combined screech of, “Lukendevener!” They launch from her to slam into my chest.
My arms and wings sweep forward to catch them to me. A precocious red dragon with massive eyes battles to be the first to reach my face, scrabbling his way up my chest using his claws. “Uncle! I missed you!”
“Reevie,” I rumble, so happy to see him. “And Liloo and Bokri.” My hands pat each youngling in turn.
The golden girl dragon, Liloo, is almost as rambunctious as my nephew. Bokri is a green dragon, who’s sweet and a little shy and hasn’t yet chosen a gender. Not that there’s any hurry. Since dragons take thirty years to reach puberty, they have plenty of time to decide between the three options: non-binary, male, or female.
“How are you here?” I ask.
Reevie hurries to answer first. “Naomi asked Sheevora the Magnificent if we could visit you.”
“You’ve been working on this for a while,” I say, astatement, not a question. Sheevora, who leads the dragons of Alarria, was instrumental in forming an alliance with the orcs, unicorns, and human witches that saved all of Faerie. She’s very forward-thinking for a dragon over five hundred years old, but there’s no way she’d make this decision in a single morning.
“For a couple of weeks,” Naomi says. “It was Skye’s idea.”
