Saving Marigold: Lick of Fire Read online

  “And if I decide I can’t help her after I’ve met her?” he asked, wary.

  “Then we will not ask this from you again. You have my word on it.”

  A little light seemed to spring to life in her eyes—a light Chris didn’t like one bit, especially when she added, “But when you meet her, I think you’ll change your mind.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Because the house where the dragon shifter lived was at some distance from the center of the town, the boarding house, and every building Chris had seen so far, he took one of the bicycles available for everyone to borrow. Steve had offered to drive him there, but as much as Chris wanted to believe it’d be a short visit, he didn’t know for sure how long he would stay there. Besides, biking through the countryside on a lovely late June day was a rather attractive proposition.

  The map a courier had brought him from Lily Littlewings was rather sparse; Sanctuary didn’t have that many roads, and several didn’t seem to have proper names. Just the same, he managed to find the little cottage, arriving early in the afternoon the Monday after the welcoming party.

  Fields surrounded the cottage, with a sizable yard in the front and a curtain of high trees on the northern side. A small electric car was parked in the driveway, and Chris left the bike next to it.

  He went to knock on the door, and after a few seconds a woman opened the door. She looked young, somewhere in her early twenties maybe. Dressed in a pair of faded jeans and a gray tee-shirt for the band the Mated Wolves, she wore round glasses perched high on her nose and carried a pencil behind her ear.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, a tone of unmistakable surprise in her words.

  Chris had a feeling few visitors ever came this way.

  “Hi. My name’s Chris Serden. Lily Littlewings asked me—”

  “Oh, you’re the telepath!” she exclaimed before he could finish. “Yes, she warned us you would drop by, but I didn’t realize it’d be today. Come in, please.”

  She stepped aside to allow him into a bright kitchen. He closed the door behind him.

  “Sorry, I guess I should have called but I don’t have any number or anything, just a little map.”

  She let out a quiet laugh.

  “Oh, no problem. I’m just not used to anyone showing up at all. Usually it’s just me and Mary. She had her lunch a little while ago so she’s resting now. We try to stick to a routine. Later in the afternoon is when I do some physical therapy with her, try to talk to her, that kind of things. I’m Kit, by the way. I’m Mary’s caretaker. Obviously.”

  As she babbled on, it sounded like she was glad for the opportunity to talk to someone. Too bad Chris had no idea what to answer to all that. He pointed instead at the small kitchen table, crowded with a laptop, a notebook whose pages were covered in tiny but neat handwriting, and a heavy textbook with the word ‘Psychology’ written across the cover.

  “You look pretty busy.”

  “Working on my Masters,” she said, a note of pride in her words. “When the UIPP raided my campus, I managed to get out but I thought for sure I’d never finish my degree. Sanctuary fixed it all for me. They got my university to enroll me in a long-distance learning program. It’s a lot of work. I have to do extra assignments to make up for the seminars I can’t attend in person, but…”

  Her rate of speech had slowed down, and as she trailed off she gave Chris a self-deprecating smile.

  “Sorry, I don’t get to talk to people much. I mean, I talk to Mary all the time but she doesn’t exactly answer.”

  “So I’ve heard. You’re here with her 24/7, then?”

  “Just Monday through Friday evening. Another caretaker does weekends. Her name’s Zita. You’ll see her later this week. I’ll let her know to expect you.”

  A little alarmed, Chris raised both hands in a ‘slow down’ gesture.

  “Wait, I don’t know yet that I’ll be coming back after today. I’m just here as a favor to Mrs. Littlewings. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to do anything. I was told other people tried and didn’t get any results.”

  Her enthusiasm visibly deflated, Kit nodded.

  “Yes, two of them. One said she couldn’t hear any distinct thoughts from Mary, and the other said he could hear too much all at once and couldn’t get any meaning out of it. So you see, not very helpful. Hopefully you can get more out of her.”

  “Hopefully,” Chris repeated, unsure whether he actually meant it.

  He looked around the small kitchen once again. It was neat, every surface clean and free of clutter, except for the table. A white board on the wall displayed a schedule—the routine Kit had mentioned. An open window above the sink let in a gentle breeze coming from the fields.

  “So, would you like to see her now?” Kit asked, sounding a little uncertain.

  “Of course,” Chris replied hurriedly. “If you’d please show me the way?”

  So much for delaying things just a little longer.

  Kit gestured for him to follow her into the hallway. There were only three more rooms to the cottage: a bathroom, and two bedrooms. Kit led the way to the bedroom in the very back. The door was half-closed. She walked in, and Chris followed somewhat warily.

  The room was the largest in the cottage, but even so it was barely large enough for a bed, a dresser, a small table set against the wall opposite the bed, and a chair that Kit claimed as her own. The window was open like the one in the kitchen, the breeze causing the light curtains to dance. The woman sitting on the bed, right in the corner where the mattress met two walls, seemed to be observing the curtains’ movements—although her eyes were a little unfocused, so maybe she was just staring ahead and not really seeing them.

  “That’s our Mary,” Kit said in a quiet but wistful voice. “I used to be worried that she’d run off if I left the window open, but she never moves at all.”

  Chris forced himself to take a good look at Mary, though in truth he’d rather have been anywhere else. Too pale and too thin, she had her head against the wall, her hands in her lap, and a blank expression on her features. Her long, brown hair with red hues throughout looked a little damp, like it’d just been washed before being plaited. She was dressed in a white tee-shirt and a simple skirt that was a little bunched around her, exposing more of her thighs than he was comfortable seeing.

  He was no prude, and he enjoyed all the different shapes a woman’s body could take, but there was a difference between looking at a woman who dressed to attract admiring looks and watching a woman who probably didn’t have a choice about what she wore, or cared that she was dressed at all. The same difference in entering a mind with or without permission, actually.

  “Can you hear her thoughts?” Kit asked, reminding Chris abruptly that he wasn’t alone.

  “Not yet, that’s not how it works for me. I have to touch her skin to have access to her mind.”

  And he might as well get on with it, he told himself forcefully. The sooner he started, the faster he could get out of here and forget this whole thing.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, he slowly reached out toward Mary’s right hand, curling his fingers over her wrist. If she felt his touch, she didn’t show it, and didn’t react in any way.

  Immediately, Chris could understand why his telepath peers had both heard too little and too much from the same person. The surface of Mary’s thoughts was as smooth and undisturbed as the surface of a lake when no hint of wind disturbs it. He was tempted to stop the experiment there and say he hadn’t heard anything at all, but the truth was that he could hear something. A lot of things, in fact. They just came from a deeper place than he was used to exploring in someone he didn’t know.

  His curiosity got the best of him. He couldn’t figure out what that roaring, whooshing sound was, and something inside him demanded to know. Closing his eyes, he pressed in deeper inside Mary’s mind, projecting out calm and a sense of peace.

  Without warning, he breached past the surface of that too calm lake and plunged right
into a world of fire.

  As flames rose all around him, enveloping an apocalyptic landscape, he had to remind himself that none of this was real. The fire couldn’t burn him, nor could those ugly beasts running toward him do him any harm. They had a vague dog shape, but too many legs like a spider, and oversized mouths in distorted human faces. He had a hard time not recoiling in horror as they came ever closer.

  He thought at first they were after him, but he soon noticed the little girl running just ahead of them and slowly losing ground. Was that Mary, or at least a representation of who she thought she was? If she considered herself a helpless child, it might explain why she let others take care of her body as though she were an infant.

  Without really thinking about what he was doing, he started jogging toward the little girl. The monsters didn’t exist any more than the fire did, he knew that, but it didn’t stop every last one of his instincts from demanding he help the kid.

  Before he was close enough to reach her however, a dragon appeared, its wings damaged and its side bloodied. It breathed fire at the monsters, and they retreated with yelps of pain… although they didn’t go far, and continued to lurk just out of reach. The little girl collapsed in front of the dragon, who curled around her, clearly ready to attack anything or anyone who came too close.

  Chris had seen enough. The flames might be mere figments of Mary’s imagination, he still had no desire to have the dragon breathe fire on him just to attempt talking with someone who’d mentally regressed to the age of a first-grader rather than face the world. He was out of his depth, and Lily Littlewings would simply have to accept that.

  As he retreated out of Mary’s mind, he had to blink repeatedly to chase away the lingering images of that wounded dragon surrounded by flames. He looked down without realizing what he was doing, and blinked again when he noticed a couple of letters on Mary’s skin, just above the place where he was holding her wrist. Suddenly very conscious that Kit was mere feet away and observing him, he shifted his hold on Mary’s wrist to uncover her entire mate tattoo.

  His own name was spelled in thick dark letters on her delicate skin.

  He tried to tell himself it was a common name and that it didn’t mean anything—it didn’t mean that she was his mate—but already his mind was finding clues that it may be otherwise. Petro had seen the name on his wrist, and in the plane he’d double-checked whether Chris was his full name or a nickname. And then, at the reception, Lily had seemed utterly convinced he’d change his mind about helping the woman if he only met her… Had she known what name was on her wrist—and on his?

  Still, even if his name was on her wrist, the name on his wrist wasn’t hers… was it?

  Wrenching his eyes away from her, he looked at Kit. His throat felt tight, and he had to push the words out.

  “You said her name is Mary? How do you know if she doesn’t talk?”

  “The squad who pulled her out of her jail, they said her name was on the door of her cell. That’s how I knew to call her Mary. Well, Marigold actually, but I’ve been trying to build some familiarity with her. Plus Marigold is a bit of a mouthful.”

  He tried hard not to look at his own wrist. He remembered being four or five and pointing at each letter in turn, spelling out the name he’d had a hard time learning to pronounce right. It was the first word he’d learned to write, before even his own name; it was easier than his name because the example was always right there, on his wrist.

  When he’d entered second grade and been offered a beautifully illustrated dictionary, it’d been the first word he looked up. His parents tried to explain that proper nouns were not in the dictionary, but after carefully looking on the MAR- page, he’d been delighted to find an entry, complete with a picture. From then on, every time he looked at his wrist, the image that came to his mind was that of those bright, fire-colored flowers.

  “Yeah,” he said absently, “I guess it is.”

  “So will you be coming back?” she asked. “Can you do something to help her?”

  Standing and stepping back when every fiber in his body demanded that he stay right where he was, he offered a quiet, “I don’t know,” that was an answer to both questions.

  Before leaving the room, he looked one last time at Marigold. With her eyes half-closed and her head leaning against the wall, she almost looked asleep, or at the very least unaware of her surroundings. Chris told himself that surely she’d look at him; surely she’d understand that someone who was meant to be very special to her had entered her life. She didn’t move an eyelash.

  Kit led him back to the door, saying that she’d tell the other caretaker he might drop by, just in case. Chris barely heard her, and after climbing back on the bike he couldn’t have said whether he’d so much as thanked her and said goodbye or if he’d just walked away without another word.

  Even as he pedaled back toward the boarding house at a normal pace, his mind raced and darted from thought to thought.

  He’d met his mate.

  After all these years of waiting and searching for her, he’d found her.

  A dragon shifter… His mate was a dragon… He’d seen dragon shifters on television, of course; everyone had. But as far as he knew, he’d never met one in their human form before being taken by the UIPP, and definitely never been in the presence of a shifter in their dragon form.

  He’d met his mate. She was a dragon shifter. And her mind was too damaged to even understand who he was—who he might ever be—to her.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Chris’ heart pumped fast enough that his pulse almost sounded like a drum roll in his ears. His throat was parched. His fists were clenched so tightly they hurt, and his legs were long past the point of pain. He ran and ran, uncaring of where he was headed.

  What had started as a regular running session had long since turned into the fastest, longest run of his life. He couldn’t have run any harder if the UIPP had been on his heels with an execution order. He was aware, vaguely, of the buildings around him, of the occasional cars or passersby he crossed paths with, but his mind was just too noisy to care about any of that.

  He ran until he was completely out of breath, gasping and aching. Unable to go even one more step, he collapsed into a patch of grass on the side of the road, arms spread out on either side of him, his chest heaving as he tried to calm his breathing.

  It took several long minutes before he could close his mouth and breathe through his nose. Even then, though, his mind was just as agitated as it had been the entire time he’d been running. All his certainties, all his hopes, all the truths he held dear had disappeared, leaving his inner world in shambles.

  As he looked at the cloudless sky above him, all he could see was a broken-up landscape devoured by flames. He couldn’t hear the joyous bird songs coming from a nearby tree; instead, a dragon’s roar filled his mind, pained, defiant, and unending.

  His arm shook when he raised it up, bringing his wrist in his line of sight. Marigold, the familiar lines spelled out. He felt that, since he’d met her yesterday, his entire understanding of what it meant to have and to be a mate had been upended, leaving him raw and confused.

  Over the years, he’d imagined a hundred, a thousand ways he might finally meet her someday. Maybe she’d be a new teacher at his school, and he’d first hear her name when she introduced herself to the rest of the staff. Maybe friends who knew what names were on both their wrists would set them up on a blind date. Maybe his profile on FindYourMate would finally get a match. Maybe he’d hear her name called out by a barista in a coffee shop when he was waiting for his own drink.

  So many possibilities… A dozen movies and three times as many literary novels came out each year based solely on the idea that mates found each other in the strangest, most random, most extraordinary ways. But this… this wasn’t anything he could have ever envisioned.

  How was he supposed to get to know her enough to fall in love with her when she didn’t speak or communicate? How could she fall in
love with anyone when she was lost in her own head?

  The only solution he could see was that he needed to bring her back from the edge of insanity. He had no idea how to set about doing that, but as he sat up in the grass, then forced himself back to his feet, he knew one thing for sure: running away wouldn’t help in the least.

  Wiping off the sweat from his forehead with his arm, he started back toward the boarding house, unable to go faster than a normal walk. His mind wasn’t any calmer than it had been so far, but at least now his thoughts were trying to work toward finding a solution rather than simply panicking.

  He was maybe halfway back to the village when movement on the edge of his vision caught his attention. He looked into a bare field a little downward from the road just in time to see his brother hurl a ball of fire at a wooden target placed behind two bales of hay stacked one on top of the other. The fire swerved around the hay as though directed with a radio command, and hit the target dead center. With another gesture, Idris extinguished the fire.

  Chris had watched Idris learn to control his abilities over the years, but he’d never seen him exert that degree of control on the flames he created. He couldn’t help but clap and cheer, drawing Idris’ attention to him. After shielding his eyes from the sun and seeing who was there, Idris jogged up to the road, joining Chris. He sported a big grin when he said, “Hey, did you see that last one?”

  Despite his own problem, Chris grinned back.

  “I saw. You’ve been training, huh?”

  “Every day since I came here. Violet and I are starting a group like the squad, so I figured I should have better control.”

  Chris nodded. He’d heard Steve and Seb talk about it.

  “You were out on a run?” Idris asked. “Mind if I walk home with you?”

  “Sure thing. You kinda disappeared on me the other night at the party.”

  Idris chuckled at that and scratched his fingers over his too-short hair.

  “Yeah, sorry about that. Violet’s been to dozens of these, and she had other ideas in mind on what we could do.”