It was Vyktor’s fault, of course. He was the cause of her incarceration. He was the reason she was being kept from her freedom, kept as a pet, but in spite of that, she no longer hated him. What he was doing to her was far less cruel than what was done to most prisoners of war. She did hate the way he had been so very right about her, how he’d known she’d respond to his strength and direction. How she’d come to almost crave obedience to him at times.
It was frightening, in a way, to respond so strongly to a man. She thought of him as a man even though he was clearly not. Even his slitted catlike pupils no longer looked strange to her. Shewas coming to read his expressions the same way she could read anyone’s.
“You look bored, pet,” Vyktor noted one afternoon. “Let me show you an amusing trick.”
Aria sat up on the bed cross-legged and looked at him askance. “What are you going to do, pull a rabbit out of your ass?”
“That sounds disrespectful,” he chided. “But no. Come.”
He led her out onto the mountainside, and while she shivered, told her to collect a rock. Any rock.
“Are you serious?” Aria’s teeth chattered, her jeweled leash jangling. “You brought me out here to freeze naked and pick up rocks?”
“Pick one quickly, pet,” he ordered. “And then we will seek warmth again.”
Wondering if Vyktor had gone crazy, Aria scooped up a handful of gravelly pebbles and a larger rock. “Here,” she said. “Will this do?”
“Perfect,” he said, scooping her up into his arms. His body heat provided immediate shield against the cold, but she was still chilled when they got back to Vyktor’s rooms. He blew gently on her hands and feet to help warm them. Aria loved that talent of his; it could create quite an interesting sensation on her nethers—and a much less pleasant one on her bottom.
“Neat trick,” she smiled.
“Wait until you see this one,” Vyktor said, picking up the largest rock Aria had chosen. He settled it in the palm of his hand and breathed on it softly while stroking it with his thumb andfingers. Before Aria’s bewildered eyes, it turned from lumpen rock of no value at all to a soft, shiny ore.
“Holy… Is that gold?”
“Yes,” he said. “Our breath allows us to change the structure of certain materials—as well as discipline naughty pets.”
“You know, people have been trying to turn rock to gold for centuries here,” she said. “They never did it.”
“Our worlds are very close,” Vyktor said, sliding the nugget of now pure gold into her hands. “I think perhaps some more sensitive humans have been able to feel it from time to time, perhaps even see into it in their dreams. We have a kinship which is not obvious, but which is very deep and very old.”
“You think?” Aria rolled the gold in her hands. She could only imagine how much it must be worth, something almost as big as a tennis ball. “You could crash our entire economy with this trick,” she mused. “Or become very, very rich.”
“We are also adept at finding jewels buried in rock,” Vyktor said. “I believe there is already a small trove here. I have a few of them here.”
He produced a box from the wall, a smooth stone container she hadn’t noticed because it blended so well with the rest of it.
“It’s heavy,” he said, putting it on the bed. “Open it, pet.”
Aria’s eyes opened wide as she pushed off the lid and looked into the shoebox-sized case. It was full of diamonds, emeralds, and rubies. Some of them were rough, but some of them had already been cut, presumably by dragons with too much time on their hands.
“Oh. My. God,” she breathed. “This is…” She turned to Vyktor. “You don’t need to fight to conquer Earth. With this, you could just buy it!”
“Humans value these trinkets?”
“Humans kill one another for these,” she said, combing her fingers through the trove. It was the strangest thing, to suddenly be confronted by more wealth than she could ever have imagined. “This… this matters more to some people than life itself.”
“So there is more we share in common,” Vyktor mused. “What do humans do with them?”
“Wear them, display them, trade them…”
“You are just like dragons,” Vyktor laughed. “Soft-skinned, flightless dragons.”
“We can’t just find them. We have to mine huge tracts of land,” Aria said. “There are people who spend their whole lives looking for a fraction of this.”
“Soft-skinned, flightless… inefficient dragons,” Vyktor amended with a small smile.
* * *
