Page 8 of Tamhas

Even about Keira, someone who I’d thought about endlessly. Both in the year prior to the kidnapping and during my time on St. Lucia, she’d been at the center of my waking thoughts.

When she wasn’t at the center of my dreams.

My dragon understood this better than I did, since it made little rational sense to jeopardize myself by continuing our relationship—if that was what it was. I’d never experienced one, but it seemed as though we’d forged a bond.

I should’ve left her alone. I shouldn’t have pursued our friendship or relationship. I shouldn’t have kept writing, and I certainly shouldn’t have chatted with her over Skype and I sure as hell shouldn’t have written again.

Even if it was to relieve her concern for me.

So I told myself.

I could barely wait until I was outdoors—a typically dreary day, with low gray clouds and a definite dampness in the air—before stripping out of my t-shirt and jeans and allowing the shift to take place. My dragon was fairly screaming to get out, to unfold his wings and fly.

And so he did.

He hardly wasted a moment, taking off the very instant the shift was complete. The freedom of flight, the sensation of air rushing past me and over me, catching it under my wings and using it to propel me higher and higher.

I’d never grow tired of it, no matter how many more centuries I was fortunate enough to spend on Earth. Flying. Shucking my human form, powerful though it might have been. Still not as powerful as the dragon’s.

I circled the arrowhead-shaped peak, climbing higher all the time. The clouds were nothing but fog at that height, threatening to break at any point and leave me in the sunshine.

Even flying, something as critical to me as breathing, couldn’t wipe the thought of Keira from my mind. If anything, she was more important than ever. Because it was my dragon who made it impossible for me to forget her. He’d plagued me for months with thoughts of her, memories of her. Things she’d said, times she’d made me smile and even laugh. The way she’d touched my heart more times than I could count.

He wouldn’t leave it alone no matter how I’d tried to ignore him.

Just as he wouldn’t leave me alone then.

We need her. Find her. The same two sentences—two demands—again and again. Find her. We need her. If anything, his obsession had only grown stronger in the months during and after the kidnapping.

We could have died, after all. And the looming threat of death, even for a dragon, tended to shed a different light on certain matters. Such as who we wanted for a mate. It was her. It would always be her.

But she was on the other side of the world, or might as well have been.

The dragon cared little for concerns such as this. Find her. She is ours. We need her. There is no time to waste. As though there was an emergency, as though we were running out of time. As though another threat waited just around the bend, another potential catastrophe.

No amount of flying would erase the obsession. I wished it would, somewhere in the back of my mind where my human consciousness lurked behind the dragon’s consciousness. I wished he would forget her, because that would make it easier for me to begin the process.

Not that I wanted to. I wished for nothing less than I wished to forget her. She’d been like a breath of fresh air. Like breaking through the clouds and feeling the sun on my scales.

I had functioned perfectly well without her for a thousand years.

Only because she hadn’t existed. And I hadn’t known of the presence of a creature like her. I hadn’t known there could be such sweetness in simply reading the words another person had written to me. Or of the way the sight of a certain name on a screen could lift my spirits.

Not knowing what I’d been missing had been easier in many ways.

I simply couldn’t forget her. We couldn’t forget her.

* * *

I gaveit two days before there was no choice but to make a decision. Two days of hoping to hear from her, of checking my email almost compulsively every time I managed to sneak in a few minutes alone in front of the computer.

Two days of silence. Of wondering what happened to her. Of fearing what might have gone through her head when I’d disappeared without warning or explanation.

Needing to explain myself, to assure her of how much she meant to me.

Alan wouldn’t like it.

I wasn’t even certain that I did. But it needed to be done.

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