Vicente (14 page)

“Will you stop saying that? I’m not the queen of anything. I can’t even get my cell phone to work right most of the time. How the hell am I supposed to be a queen? And queen of what, I ask you?”

“You’re the queen of all dragons, now and forever.” She looked at Vicente when he spoke. “I knew that you were rare. I’d never seen a golden dragon in all my life, but there you were. And when you shift, you’re the most brilliant color that any gold bars have ever produced. My golden dragon.”

Abbie sat down. There was too much information here, and she wasn’t getting any of it. Finally, she looked at Nora as she wiped at the tears. It was that or stare at the lap full of gems that had fallen as she cried. Abbie was sure the woman would understand, because for all accounts, she was a good deal older than her husband, right?

“We don’t want to rule. We have plans. Vicente is going to build houses, and I’m going to work with Hawk and Clar. They want me to be their partner.” Nora nodded and looked so sad that Abbie knew that she wasn’t going to get to do that. “We talked about this, Vicente and I, and we were only going to stay for a few minutes and leave. But that horrid man was hurting Auggie. Then he pissed me off and I hit him. Why anyone would want someone like him in charge is beyond me. But I’m not….” She looked at Nora, who had been nodding the entire time she spoke. “I’m not going to get to do any of this, am I?”

“My dear, you can do whatever you wish. Even if you left here now without taking the throne, you’d still be the queen. And no matter where you live, here or in the home you have with my grandson, you’re going to be the queen. I’m sorry.” Abbie wanted to cry. All she’d meant to do was help her friend. “Abbie, love, look at me.”

Abbie did as she asked and smiled when Nora did as she continued in her soft voice. “I know you think this is the end of the world, but it’s not. You’ve proven to me and the others that you can rule this realm. And keep others in line when they decide to do things on their own. There are many who would say they’ve waited for you their entire life. Others will…well, Barker isn’t the only one who would give you a hard time. But it will matter little in the end. You’re their queen, and there will be none other now.”

“Barker?” Nora told her he was the man she’d had arrested. “I didn’t have him arrested. They just took him home. He probably drank too much. Yeah, that’s it. He simply drank too much and had to be escorted home.”

Vicente laughed, and she glared at him. Nora stood up then and told them she’d give them time to talk. When she was out of the room, Vicente sat at her feet again. This time he took off her shoe and massaged her foot. She leaned back in the chair and watched him. Whatever he was going to say, she wasn’t going to like it, and no matter how much he buttered her up by doing this for her, she wasn’t going to do it.

“My father was the king for a time. I didn’t know him. My mother raised me alone while he was off doing whatever he wanted. I had heard a little about him. My grandmother would come around once in a while and she’d try to get me to see him. I never wanted anything to do with him, not my entire life. Then after a while, she stopped trying and we got along better after that. My mother however…she hated my father with a great deal of passion.” He set her foot down and stripped off her other shoe and started on that foot. She waited for him to continue. “He was a monster.”

“How so?” She’d called her own father a monster on occasion. He was an okay guy, but she was a rebellious teenager and he was a strict man. She smiled when she thought of all the times she’d defied him when he’d ordered her to her room.

“He really was a monster. His dragon was…mean, I guess you could say. And he would kill others, including whatever was in the forest at the time of his anger. No one would go against him for fear of their lives and that of their families. Dragons don’t have a great many children, but when we have them they are cherished beyond a fault. My father would kill children simply because he was bigger and meaner than anyone else. And he ruled the others like they were his own special kind of slaves. Grandmother told me once that he had an entire family murdered because the young woman who had waited on him at a local diner had spurned him.” Abbie sat up and he nodded. “It was the last time my grandmother spoke of him to me. And had Summer not told me of his death, I would never have known what sort of monster he had lived to be after she no longer told me of him.”

“He really did do that?” He nodded. “Why didn’t someone stop him? Or at least impeach him or something?”

“They couldn’t. It’s…dragon law isn’t like human law. It’s more….” He leaned back on his hands. “Samuel. You’ve seen him rule, right? He rules his pride, even though they are not all lions, like a well meshed family. He’s the greatest leader I’ve ever met. And it’s the reason I’ve stayed here for so long. He and Kennedy are perfectly matched for each other and for running a pride like they do. I’m proud to call him my friend as well. If I were to be a king, which I guess now I am, he would be the person I would model myself after. The person I would look for when I needed advice.”

“If you knew what sort of king you wanted to be, why didn’t you take the job when Summer told you about it? You’re certainly going to be a better king than I will ever be as a queen.” He nodded and grinned at her. “I don’t want to do this by myself.”

“You won’t have to. I’ll be there by your side, and if need be, I’ll be the man standing in front of you. But after tonight, I don’t think you’re going to need me. You showed Barker and any like him that he’s going to be messing with the wrong dragon if he fucks with you.” She shook her head. “And then there are the faeries. They would have died for you before this. Now? Now they will fight with you in all things. Forever. Dragons and faeries are as one when it comes to loyalty and love.”

“The faeries?” He nodded and looked up. She did as well. “Christ, where did they come from?”

There were millions of them. She watched as they moved to and fro like a murmuration of starlings did. Wave after wave of them moved along the ceiling until she had to lean back to see them. When a wave of them broke from the others, she watched as they formed a line in front of her and bowed. Abbie looked at Vicente when he laughed.

“This isn’t funny.” He laughed harder until he had to lie back on the floor to breathe. She got up from her chair and sat on him. He didn’t stop laughing completely, but he did slow enough to speak to her. She was going to murder him in his sleep if he didn’t straighten up.

“I love you.” She nodded, feeling her heart fill with his words. “Abbie, if you would take the position of queen, I will be your second. You can do this; hell, you were born to do this. And I want you to be the queen. I want to rule with you for all our lives. I want you to make the dragons better. All of them will be better because of you.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing.” He told her it was fine. Neither did he most of the time. “What if I mess up and they decide to…I don’t know, kill me?”

He kissed her nose as he stood up, pulling her into his arms as he did. He pulled back from her just enough to look into her eyes. She could see the humor there and wondered about that until he spoke. Then she was glad he was holding onto her.

“You can’t ever be killed. You, my dear queen, will live a lot longer than I have already.”

~~~

It was well after sunrise when they got home. Auggie had been trying his best to remember everything that the other faeries had told him, but it was all running together in his mind so quickly that he was sort of sick from it. And when his queen asked him to set up the office for her, he knew just what he had to do. Now all he had to do was figure out someone to replace him.

“You think she will allow you to leave her?” He looked at Yve and nodded. “I do not think she will. There is not a more stubborn woman than our queen, and I believe she will kick your button if you do try to leave her.”

“Bottom, not button. She will when she figures out I have no idea what I’m about. I don’t even know how to make that contraption she said I could use to schedule things for her work. Did you know how long it took me to type out the word December?” She nodded and smiled. “What am I do to if the phone rings and I’m still hopping from letter to letter trying to make out her schedule? I shall be days simply spelling out appointment. Can you imagine me trying to write up a speech for her should she need one?”

“You spelled December wrong too. It is Dec, not Des.” He groaned and sat down. The sooner he got this over with, the sooner her majesty could get organized. “She will tell you that you can do this. And will be upset with you that you’ve given up so easily. I think that she is sweet on you for some reason. And think what our master will say when he finds out as well. He will be hurt, too, by your quitting.”

“I don’t think he will mind a bit. Once she sees the mess I’ve made of her day tomorrow, she may well beg me to leave her.” He was embarrassed to say, even to himself, that he didn’t want to fail her, but he had and would continue to do so. “I think she will be better off with someone who knows how to do what she needs.

“I would suggest you find yourself a nard.” He tried to think if that was one of the things he was supposed to set up when she continued. “One of those computer people who can make the machine sing. I have seen them on the television set. They drive the silly car and drink copious amounts of coffee from the star store.”

“Nerd?” She nodded and smiled at him. He wasn’t even going to try and guess where the “star store” was and what they had to do with computers. “What good would that do me? I know nothing about this thing to even tell them what it is I need. They will ask me questions that I’ve no answer for. I’m not even sure what that contraption is called.”

Yve looked at the thing that Abbie had called a tablet. It didn’t look like any tablet he’d ever seen. First of all, his pencil didn’t work on it; and secondly, he was still trying to think how to make the swipe part of it work when he’d had to run quickly to get to the keys. Abbie had only ran her finger across it. Auggie was afraid that he’d never get that part to work when it had taken a great deal of his strength to run from key to key to put in her password.

“You hire them.” He looked at the computer, then at Yve. “You will need to have help, she said to you. Hire someone that can help you. Have Lady Clar go with you. She will tell you if the person you hire is honest or not. And then you will bring her here, and we will show her what we will need from her.”

Auggie was warming up to the idea. If he could hire people to work out the things she needed done, he could stay at her side. The list that he had to get worked on seemed to grow with each minute he had it in his hand. He looked at Yve again.

“What of the other things? Will I be able to have others do those as well?” He looked at the list. “It says here that I will need to make sure that she has a driver. She flies. What would she need a driver for?”

“Humans cannot know that she can fly.” That made sense, he supposed. Humans got all freaky when he flew past them. “Hire a driver for her and the master, and they can go to the other functions in style. And we will need to find them a limousine. A sleek black one with darkened windows.”

He was nodding as they wrote out how many people they were going to need to help her. By the time the queen and king came down to lunch later, he had made his list considerably shorter with Yve’s help. Yes, he thought he could make this work. Now he would have to find a way to make it so the helpers, humans, did not “freak the fuck out,” as he’d heard Master Jimmy say before when they found out what they worked for.

Auggie told Abbie what they were doing, and she nodded at him. He had a feeling she was going to point out that he was to do the things she’d asked, but she only told him good job for looking for help when he needed it. For the first time since she’d saved him, Auggie felt worthy of being her dragon faerie. And he was sure that she was glad as well.

“What do you know about babies?”

He nearly swallowed his tongue when he thought she was going to ask him how they were made. When she laughed, he knew that his horror must have shown on his face, and he flushed brightly with it.

“I mean my baby. I don’t know anything about having a dragon baby.”

“They are not born dragons, my lady. They are born as regular humans until it is time for them to change.” He felt his relief all the way to his toes. “They are generally ugly and their skin is soft and full of dimples, but they soon change into something more. And they stink. I have seen human babies before, and they are always wet at both ends of their body and stink in the middle as well. There is nothing they do not get into either. I saw one once that spit its food on the wall. They, as I say, are very ugly.”

“Ugly, huh?” Auggie felt his face flush again. “Are you saying that you think all humans are ugly when they are born, or is it all of them in general? I was a human once, you know?”

“Oh no, my lady. I meant other humans. Ones that are not going to turn into dragons.” He felt he needed to keep explaining when she laughed. “Most of them have no wings, and their feet even stink to high heaven when they take off their shoes. Don’t get me started on how they smell when they discharge their meals. And the things that will spill from their mouths looks like it had soured there before they pushed it from their gullet. I’ve never seen a more disgusting thing than a human baby.” He shivered and looked at her when she laughed harder.

“Oh Auggie, remind me not to have you in the delivery room when I have a baby. You might well puke on the kid and put a hex on all the doctors and nurses.” He wanted to tell her he wouldn’t do that, but he didn’t want to take the chance that he might. “You will need to find me a book on dragon lore. Do you think you can find me one?”