Light Dragons 01 - Love in the Time of Dragons

“water on a duck’s back” thing and let it all roll off me. “I think I’ll go with ‘roll off me,’ ” I told Jim.
    “Really? Like roll in the hay? With someone else, or with Baltic?”
    “Baltic tried to kill people at a sárkány ?” I asked, taking a firm grip on myself. I had decided that I would not go insane. Brom needed me, especially now that I knew what a bastard his father really was, and I couldn’t take care of him if I was locked away, drawing pictures on the padded walls using only my own drool.
    “Yeah, a while back. I wasn’t there because Aisling was about to pop with the spawns, but I heard it was a real Wild West shoot-out. Until May exploded the dragon shard and blew up the top floor of the hotel.”
    I let that, too, roll off. In fact, I would have just sat back and closed my eyes in an attempt to let everything and everyone roll off my back, but a woman was approaching us with a glint in her eye.
    “Jim, so help me, if you’re bothering poor Ysolde—” the woman said as she stopped in front of us, her hands on her hips.
    “Hey, I’m just sittin’ here partaking in polite chitchat, being my usual Mr. Helpful self. Right, Soldy?”
    “The name is Ysolde,” I said stiffly, then realized what I’d said. “No, it’s Tully! Tully! My name is Tully, not Ysolde. Oh dear god, now you people have me doing it!”
    “This is Aisling, my demon lord. She had twin spawns the day you keeled over in her house,” Jim told me as Aisling clucked her tongue sympathetically at my outburst.
    “You’re a demon lord?” I asked, finding it hard to reconcile the image of the pretty woman with curly brown hair and hazel eyes, and a being who commanded demons.
    “Yup. May says you don’t remember anything, not that we met, but still, that has to be a serious pain in the butt. I’m married to Drake. He’s the wyvern of the green dragons. That’s him, over there, the good-looking one.”
    I looked to where she was pointing. Several men were clustered together at the far end of the room. I hated to say anything because they all looked pretty darn good to me, but a vague sense of recognition twinged in the back of my head when my gaze reached a tall man with dark hair. “And are you a dragon, too?” I asked Aisling.
    May entered the room just as she laughed. “Oh, lord no. I was as human as they come before I met Drake. I was a courier, and we met when he stole the aquamanile I was taking to Paris. It was very romantic.”
    Jim choked, coughing and hacking as if he’d swallowed a hairball. “Romantic!” it finally said. “Man, if you knew what sort of hell she put us through while she was deciding to hook up with Drake—”
    “Silence, furry demon.” She smiled at May as she joined us. “It was almost as romantic as May and Gabriel’s courtship.”
    May rolled her eyes. “What courtship? One minute I was myself, the next Gabriel was there demanding I be his mate. Not that I minded, but still. Oh, there’s Cy. That means Kostya won’t be very far away. Excuse me a minute.”
    “I forgot for a minute she was a doppelganger,” I said as May crossed the room to join the woman who’d just entered. Although they were dressed differently, and the other woman’s hair was longer, it was clear they were identical twins.
    “Cyrene is more or less the mate to Kostya,” Aisling said. “It’s kind of confusing, really, but basically, he’s accepted her as his mate, but she isn’t technically a wyvern’s mate, if you get my drift.”
    “I don’t think I do, no.”
    “Well, as I understand it, it means that she is his mate in the eyes of the weyr, but can’t be taken by another wyvern.”
    “Kidnapped, you mean?” I asked, confused how that could have bearing on anything.
    “No, taken as in challenged for. Say if Bastian—he’s the handsome blond on the right—if he wanted Cy as his mate, he couldn’t challenge Kostya for her, because she’s not technically a wyvern’s mate. Whereas he could challenge Drake for me, or Gabriel for May, because we are mates. Does that make sense?”
    “Only if it means that there is some bizarre rule to this world that says one man can steal someone else’s wife. Er . . . mate.”
    “Archaic, huh?” Aisling asked with a little shrug. “That’s the dragons for you—they look hip and modern and may have lusts for all things technological, like Drake, but deep down, they’re still in the fourteenth century.”
    “You mates should