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“Right, right.” I waved my hand through the air, inwardly groaning. “Remind me to dock the pay of whoever keeps me doing any interviews.”
“Your publicist,” Miles sighed, since it was obvious.
“Things were easier once,” I gritted ruefully. “I remember when Edward the Seventh was on the throne.” I closed my eyes, weary already. “Whenever that was. No publicists. No politicians. No nothing. Just rolling around a lot in my gold chamber. Nobody thought it was suspicious, because back then, everyone who was rich did that.”
“Well, times have changed, obviously,” Miles mentioned, not looking particularly forlorn about this fact. “People don’t often starve to death in the winter or get eaten by wolves as much now, either, for example.”
“Good for them.”
“Oh, you’re in one of those moods again,” Miles told me with a roll of his eyes. “Excellent. Can’t wait for the rest of the day. Get in the shower. You don’t smell like bacon to me. You smell like you were fucking a prostitute last night wearing too much designer perfume.”
I smelled my own shoulder, which admittedly did hold the lingering smell of perfume. “Fair enough.”
As I was going about my day, mainly moving art and artifacts to and from millionaires and billionaires, I found myself mostly thinking about myself.
I know, it’s a shocker. But it struck me that I was the same age my fathers had been when I was born, but my fathers were not dragons that seemed to dread every day of their existence, and they didn’t live in a constantly changing world like the one I had been subjected to.
But then again, my fathers had had my mother to share, so there was that. My fathers had children. There was that, too. I couldn’t get a woman pregnant if I tried. And I had. Murtagh and I had tried for centuries with probably a couple of hundred women. Hell, we’d strained ourselves with the effort. We were forced to realize that humans couldn’t get pregnant by dragons, even if those dragons passed as human men.
And did I even want children in this hellscape? It wasn’t home. It wasn’t the world I was raised in. What world was this to raise dragon children in?
No, I still wanted to. I didn’t care—I wanted more than this. I wanted more than to be alone.
Or to be with anyone besides Murtagh, who I was stuck with since there were no other dragon males, and we bonded in threes. He wasn’t exactly the male I would have chosen to share life with. And I wasn’t his most optimal choice, either. Maybe that was why we hadn’t seen each other since the 60’s, when we had our latest spat. He had moved nearby in the last couple of years. I knew because several years ago, he’d sent me his latest address and phone number, since we promised we would send contact information whenever we got a new face or a new place. But I didn’t miss him yet. I felt like I could go a couple more decades before seeing him again. There was no rush—apparently, we weren’t going anywhere.
Thinking had gotten me nice and depressed, once again. It was as if I couldn’t help myself. Every time I had a good morning, by evening I’d worked myself up into a near-suicidal lather. It was as if my own sadness was a sore tooth that I couldn’t keep my tongue from pressing against.
Or maybe it was my work that was bringing on this daily depression. Or playing the part of a wealthy artifact dealer who had to negotiate with other billionaires and mobsters constantly. It was busy, and it made the day go by, but it didn’t exactly fill me with purpose. Case in point, before I even left for the day, my secretary had pushed a whole booklet full of papers at me that I had to sign on the way home.
It was raining. It was always raining here, it seemed. Maybe it was time to move. It was making my dark and dreary mood even darker and drearier. As the hours of the workday ticked by, I tried to remind myself that it didn’t matter what the weather was. I had gold and gems. Lots of gold and gems. It was all at home, it was waiting for me, all piled neatly in a room. I could just go home and stare at it all day if I wanted to. I bathed in it. Literally.
Miles came in and interrupted my work by clearing his throat, and I looked at him, a bit peeved at his sudden presence.
“Remember that you have an interview inside with that business magazine,” Miles reminded me when he met me at the car door with an umbrella.
“Fuck!” I huffed under my breath, hunching my shoulders over with annoyance.
“Don’t pout. It’s not a good look on you,” Miles suggested as he followed me in and opened the door for me.
“Can you just tell them to go away?” I huffed. “I’m just not?—”
I stopped speaking as soon as I walked through the door, my body going rigidly still at the smell in my mansion.
My eyes widened, my pupils dilated, and parts of my mind that I had long forgotten about were turning on. It smelled like home in the house.
Not home like they’d call it in a Hallmark movie, but Home.
I hadn’t even realized that I had mostly forgotten about what home had even been like. It had been so far away that it was like a long-past dream. But the smell was bringing it back: the trees, the way the wind and rain hit my wings while in flight. My family, my brothers. Friends. Others of my kind. The way the sky looked, the way the stars twinkled overhead, so different than the stars here.
Suddenly, I was slapped across the face.
I refocused and was confused to find Miles in front of me, looking at my head like it had turned into a cantaloupe.
“Why’d you do that?” I demanded in a hiss.
“I thought you were having a stroke or something!” he replied with annoyance, unapologetically gesturing at me. “You were just standing there, catatonic!”
“It worries me that you think that’s what to do to someone displaying stroke symptoms,” I snipped, then took another deep breath in. The smell was definitely still here, permeating the air. It wasn’t immediately in this room, but it was unique and real. I quickly followed the scent to where it was stronger, leaving Miles confused and groping for my wet coat.
