Light Dragons 01 - Love in the Time of Dragons

sides of the hall as the black and white dragons tumbled around, their claws slashing, dragon fire blasting everything.
    “I have had enough!” I yelled at the top of my voice, and snatching up the chair leg, started beating the two dragons with it. “You boys are not going to fight in my house!”
    “Uh-oh. Someone’s in trouble with Mom,” Jim said. “You better watch out, Balters, or she’ll bananate you.”
    “Mate!” Baltic protested as I whomped him on the butt with the chair leg.
    Kostya snarled and lunged at Baltic, but I smacked him under the chops with the chair leg, causing him to stop and shake his head, a shocked look on his dragon face.
    “You change back, both of you, or else it’s banana time!” I said, shaking the chair leg at them.
    “This is intolerable,” Baltic said, shifting back as he stalked toward me, his hands on his hips. “You will not treat me in this manner! I am a wyvern!”
    “Of what sept?” Kostya asked, wiping a thin trickle of blood from his nose as he, too, shifted into human form.
    “We’ll get to that at the sárkány ,” I said, absorbing the fire that Baltic snorted on me. “Calm down, please, Baltic. I know you feel that Kostya betrayed you, but . . . but . . . oh, no, not again . . .”
    The world spun. I reached out blindly, desperate to find Baltic, his hand catching mine just as I swirled into nothing.
    Nothing but white. It was all around me, biting cold and deep into my blood, roaring in my ears. The roaring resolved itself into the sound of the wind, an endless shriek that whirled around and through me.
    The white ebbed and flowed in time with the wind, and I realized that I was standing in the middle of a blizzard.
    “Snow,” a voice said behind me.
    I turned. Baltic still held my hand, looking around us with interest.
    “What are you doing here? This is a vision. You’re not supposed to be in my visions.”
    “I participated in the last one you had,” he pointed out.
    “That wasn’t really a vision. It was just more a reliving of a moment in time, triggered by the love token.” I touched the chain I wore around my neck, the token lying between my breasts, my fingers trailing down the front of the fur- lined cloak that was clasped about my neck. “This is different. This is the same sort of vision or dream that I’ve had before.”
    “Perhaps the shaman is right, and your dragon self is urging you to wake up,” he suggested, turning around. “Dauva. We’re on the hill outside of Dauva.”
    “I don’t think it’s quite that simple.”
    “Ysolde!”
    I whirled when my name was carried on the wind.
    “Constantine!” Baltic snarled, reaching for the sword that he no longer carried.
    A dark shape emerged from the whirling snow, his hair white with it as he stretched his hands out to me. “My love, you should not be out here. If one of my men had seen you cross before I did—”
    “You will die for that!” Baltic shouted, leaping forward to grab Constantine, but nothing met his grasping hands, his momentum sending him straight through Constantine to a deep snowdrift some feet behind.
    “I had to come,” I heard myself say, evidently locked into the past enough to repeat what I’d said so many centuries before.
    “Mate!” Baltic gasped, getting to his feet. The pain in his face was almost more than I could bear. I reached out for him, but it was Constantine who took my hand.
    “My love, I knew you would come to me one day.”
    “No!” Baltic snarled.
    “No,” I repeated, pulling my hand from Constantine’s grip, and shaking my head, the hood of my cloak sliding back, leaving me exposed. “My heart belongs to Baltic, and it always will.”
    Baltic stood up to his knees in the snow, his dark eyes watchful and wary.
    “I came here not to give myself to you, but to plead with you to leave. Leave now, before anyone else dies. This battle between you and Baltic is for nothing, a senseless slaughter, and I will not have the blood of any more innocent dragons staining my soul.”
    “You are my mate.” Despite the roar of the wind, Constantine’s voice was low and rough. “He took you from me. It is my right to reclaim you.”
    “She is mine!” Baltic growled.
    “You know that Baltic holds my heart—I’ve told you that often enough. You must believe me when I say nothing will change that. Please respect my decision, and leave us in peace.”
    I started to turn back toward Dauva, but he stopped me, gripping my arm.