Page 59 of Dragon Fires Everywhere
And with my entire world upended tonight, I have to make this clear.
I don’t want to wish for too much. I can’tletmyself be wrong, not about him.
I push him away, just enough so I can look up at him. “I don’t know what life was like before you were cursed, but I doubtwitches and dragons were...”
I trail off because I don’t know what word to use for that kiss, for what I sense waits for us there, in all that wildnessand sweet fire.
His gaze is so intense that it should hurt. “Have you not read your own book?”
“It’s afairy tale, Azrael.”
“It is a history of who our souls once were.”
“You can’t honestly think—”
“I don’t think. I know. I am afabulae, Georgina. Iknow. And so do you. Have you not dreamed it? Always.”
Always.
It echoes inside me, deep and loud. I recognize it. I remember it.
But I have never let that echo control me. “A Pendell knows when to draw the line between fairy-tale foolishness and facts.Cold, hard facts.”
Yetfacts are not always the whole story, my dad, who is not my father, said only tonight.
And my mother has been lying to me since the day I was born.
“But you are not a Pendell,” Azrael says, with a quiet ruthlessness that slices through me like a stab wound.
I laugh then, a little hysterically. Even when I wasn’t living up to the name, I lived my life with the understanding that this Pendell Historian would have to accept who she was someday. Boring and drab andreasonable, even if in the ruling coven. Oh, I like my bright colors and flowy scarves and fantasies, but the truth of me was the scholarof books, the devotee of research.
Because that’s who Pendells are.
And now that’s been taken away from me. It should be a relief. Maybe at some point it will be, but right now I can only feelbetrayal. “You’re right. I’m aWilde.” Desmond Wilde’ssecret child. I laugh again. “I don’t evenlikeDesmond Wilde. Does anyone?”
I can feel—and see—the frustration mounting in him, and that hardly seems fair.Hislife didn’t get upended today.
I ignore the fact that he did spend a long, long time cursed into that newel post.
“It doesn’t matter what name you use,” he growls at me. “Names don’t matter. Don’t you see?That’sthe point. Who cares who you are in this time?”
“This time?” I ask, though something in me is shaking. Like I am coming apart, from the bones on out.
He knows. Maybe he feels it. I can see it in the way his gaze searches mine. In the knowing, demanding gleam in all that gold.
“We are bound together, you and I, in every time.” Azrael says this like prophecy. Like fact. And he is not done. “There hasnever been a moment in all of eternity that you have not been mine. You have lived many lives, and I am in all of them. Thisis who we are.”
For a moment, I’m frozen. In sheer terror.
Because I want it to be true, even though I know it can’t be. Maybe dragons can live in every time, in many different lives,but witches get the once. This is common knowledge. That’s why we have ghosts.
This is who we are.
Even though it can’t be, I want it to make sense of everything I’ve ever felt and denied.
I want to be the princess in that book.
I want everything I was told I couldn’t have because I was afuckingPendell, and Pendells do not get to shine like that.
