On the Prowl

He tickled my chin.
    “You’re crazy,” I told him. At that moment, I really believed it.
    “No, I’ve simply had a lot longer to learn to deal with being Two-Natured than you have.” His face turned serious. “And it’s not so bad. Yes, there are…challenges…but there are advantages, as well. Both of you gain some of the other’s abilities, making you far stronger in either form than you would have been otherwise.” He thought for a minute. “Which might explain why you’re such a strong null. Your dragon twin lends you extra power.”
    “I’m a monster,” I whispered, wondering how he’d somehow missed that.
    “No, you’re half Fey, like me.”
    “I’m not like you!” I yelled into his too composed face. What was he, retarded? “Dragons are…are… things , not people!”
    “Now you sound like the Svarestri,” Heidar said disapprovingly. “There really are no Light and Dark Fey, Claire. It’s something we tell ourselves, but our blood is pretty much the same, when you come right down to it. The Svarestri used to rule Faerie, and they took their fall hard. They’ve never gotten over it, never learned to accept being on a par with the rest of us. So they refuse to believe that they are.”
    He settled back against the side of the bed, taking me with him. “They say the rest of the Light Elves have thin blood because we’ve married so many humans over the centuries. They say the Dark Fey are monsters, ancient experiments gone wrong that the gods never bothered to destroy. Only they are pure, only they are fit to rule. But it’s all a bunch of nonsense.”
    “Is it?” I remembered what I’d looked like, felt like, in that other skin, and shuddered.
    Heidar suddenly stood up, lifting me in his arms, and carried me over to a large bay window. I hadn’t noticed it because it was draped in dark red velvet that, in the shadows, became almost invisible against the deep gray stone of the walls. He sat me on the bench in front of it and drew back the drapes. Early morning sunlight flooded over the balcony, giving the mellow wood of the floor a cheerful golden glow. “Look out there, and tell me you see monsters,” he said softly.
    Outside, a glorious sunrise was breaking over a wide patchwork of green fields. A river cut a meandering path across the scene, like a ribbon of fire as the sun hit it. Orange and cherry colored clouds framed the rising sun, bathing the dark castle walls below the window in a soft pink blush. We were high, I realized, maybe twenty stories above the ground, because the castle was built over a ravine. But I didn’t have to look down to see what Heidar was talking about.
    A golden face noticed me and flew over to hover just outside the glass. Huge wings beat the air in powerful strokes, holding him in place as we stared at each other. Sunlight glinted off his scales, making him look like he was wearing tight-fitting, golden armor, and behind him, four more dragons hovered close, trying to catch a view. One was green, one a fiery red and two more a softer gray-blue. Like I had been.
    “They’re very excited,” Heidar whispered against my hair. “A child is a great joy among us, and none of them even knew you existed until last night. Your mother didn’t live long enough to tell her lover, or perhaps she was afraid he would want to take you away from her if he knew.”
    I found myself completely unable to tear my eyes away from the scene outside the window. They looked so…free. Something about the way they rode the air—with a command, a presence, an ownership of it—tore at my heart. My dragon form had been fat and clumsy, with small wings that would never have allowed me to fly even if I’d known how. “I’ll never do that,” I said softly.
    Heidar laughed, his blue eyes reflecting the color of the sky. “Your twin self is a newborn, Claire! How many babies know how to walk? Give it time.”
    “A baby?”
    “It’s why your father was able to find you,” Heidar said, hugging me against him. The compulsion I’d felt to touch him seemed to have gone, but the pleasure remained. I was glad that something, at least, had stayed the same.
    “When one of the Two-Natured reaches puberty, they usually come into their second self. If not, it tends to happen the first time they have intercourse with another Fey. The power unleashed is always considerable, and some families can feel it when a new child manifests. Your father was here, in the Dark Fey lands,