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“Oh, yes—I heard about that.” He leaned back against the door and crossed his arms over his broad chest. “You got her son shame-marked and thrown out of the Nocturne Academy, right?”
“I didn’t do any of that on purpose!” I protested. “What happened was, he hit me and then my friend, who’s a Sister—a witch, I mean—slapped him and marked him by accident because she was so angry and just learning to control her magic. When he went to complain to the Headmistress about it, she found out what he’d done and expelled him. I didn’t ask for any of that to happen, really.”
“Well, sometimes we get things we don’t ask for, whether we want them or not,” Saint said darkly. “I didn’t ask to be cursed with a Blood Drake inside me, after all.”
“What’s so bad about a Blood Drake, though?” I asked, glad once more to switch the conversation away from my own past and current predicament. “You never told me. Is it just that he’s unusual looking so people think he’s bad luck?”
Saint shook his head and sighed.
“You might as well know—Ari will tell you anyway. My Drake is completely savage—he can’t be tamed by any female. Though that’s not to say none have tried,” he added darkly.
“They did? Why? How?” Despite the situation I found myself in, I was fascinated. Or maybe I was just desperate to focus on anything else but what was happening at the moment. Either way, I wanted to know more.
Saint sighed again.
“To understand you have to know the whole story. A Blood Drake never comes about by accident, you see—it is the result of a curse—a Blood Curse laid upon the Sire of the one who bears it. For the sins of the Sires shall be visited upon their sons,” he said, which sounded like a quote from the Bible, I thought.
“Before I was born, my Sire killed one of his lieutenants in cold blood.” Saint began to pace again as he spoke. “The man committed a minor infraction but my Sire—whose temper has always been quick—killed him for it unjustly. Now, it just so happened that the man’s L’lorna was a bruja.”
I didn’t have much Spanish but I knew that word.
“A witch,” I whispered.
Saint nodded.
“But not like the Sisters and Warlocks you have back in your human world. The brujas of the Sky Lands work with Black Magic—the kind that stains your very soul.” He ran a hand through his hair again. “And so, she cursed my Sire—she told him that his only son—me—would be the last of his line. For my Drake—when he manifested—would be a Blood Drake that no woman could ever tame or conquer. And sure enough…” he shrugged unhappily. “When my Drake came out at the age of nine, he was black with the blood-red sheen on his scales that denotes a Blood Drake. And so the curse has followed me my whole life and tainted my very existence.”
“But…can’t anyone break it?” I asked, thinking about what I had learned about witchcraft from Megan and Avery. “I mean if it’s just a spell…”
“Oh, my Sire has tried, believe me,” Saint said flatly. “Tried and failed most spectacularly.”
“How so?” I asked.
He looked away.
“You don’t really want to know. It was…a tragedy.”
“Please tell me.” I could tell he both did and didn’t want to talk about it. Maybe I was the first person he’d been able to tell outside his family. Or maybe just the first unbiased listener he’d ever found, since everything from the Sky Lands was new to me.
Saint ran a hand through his thick black hair again, rumpling it up into a dark halo around his head.
“My Sire was determined that my Drake should be tamed and should claim a L’lorna. I tried to tell him it was a bad idea, but he insisted. He gathered the daughters of the noblemen of our province, as is often done for a male of high rank to choose from. The idea was that one of them would catch the fancy of my Drake and tame him with her feminine charms. He would claim her as his L’lorna and the curse would be broken.”
“I’m guessing that’s not what happened, though,” I said. I could tell as much by the bitter, unhappy look on his dark face.
“No.” Saint shook his head. “I held out—held him back—for as long as I could. But the presence of the females who had come to tame him enraged my wild Drake.” He looked away from me and his voice dropped to a rough whisper. “Two died and three more were mortally wounded before the rest could be gotten to safety.”
“Oh, no!” I said, putting a hand to my mouth. “Oh, Saint, that’s…” Words failed me.
“Horrifying? Sadistic? Murder?” he growled, glaring at me. “Yes, all that and more, L’lorna of my cousin. I bear their blood on my soul and I will forever. To see what my Drake was doing and not be able to stop him—” He broke off and shrugged, abruptly returning to his former nonchalance. “Well, at least now my Sire no longer tries to make me learn the proper way to rule a province. He has his hopes pinned on the male my oldest sister is to marry. Though he is not royal and does not have the two-toned scales which Alphas are supposed to have, he has an even, easy temperament and his Drake was tamed to her hand the very first moment they met. So my Sire has his heir, even without me.”
