What he said to Sanchez changed everything.
“She is mine,” he growled, his voice deep and sonorous in my ears. “Touch this little female again and I will flame you from the sky.”
That had caused Sanchez to retreat some—he and his Sire are high in the ranks of the Drakes, but my father is the leader of our kind—what some humans call the Alpha or the king. Also, my Drake is bigger, his flame hotter, and his wings fly higher than the beast Sanchez hosts and he knows it.
Still, he refused to back down completely. I had seen the murderous glint in his eyes, which let me know that Kaitlyn wasn’t safe—which was why I had started following her to and from class—at a distance of course—to make certain she was all right.
All right—that’s a lie. I followed her and kept close to her not just to protect her, but because I couldn’t help myself.
Once my Drake had laid his claim on her, my heart followed his. There was something special about Kaitlyn Fellows. I didn’t know what it was but my Drake sensed it and I did too. It was something that drew us both to her—something impossible to ignore.
“Dios…” I sighed and ran a hand through my hair as I felt the tension begin to fade on the other end of the strange connection I had to the little human. “See, she must have had another bad dream,” I told my Drake. “She does that sometimes, you know.”
I knew it was true because every time she had a nightmare, it woke me up. I would have been annoyed with her if I could have been, but there was no room in me for that emotion—I was too filled with the need to protect her and…other things.
I felt a sense of questioning coming from my other half—he wanted to go down and check to make certain Kaitlyn was okay.
I had done that in the past—left my bedroom in the West Tower where the Drake dorms were located and gone down to the entrance of the “Norm Dorm” where the human students who attended Nocturne Academy were housed. It was a trap door in the Dining Hall which led down into the dungeons of the old castle.
Sometimes I went down and listened at the trap door, making certain Kaitlyn was well, before going back to bed. Sometimes my Drake was too restless and I had to pace around, playing sentry for as much as an hour before he would finally let me go back to my own bed and rest.
As I said before, it would have been annoying if I wasn’t so filled with other emotions.
What my Drake really wanted was for me to open the trap door and go down into the Norm Dorm—where I most certainly did not belong—and take Kaitlyn in my arms. He wanted to feel her held close and secure against my chest, to still her night terrors personally and know that she was safe from having them again.
But that, I could not do, though I admit I wished for it deeply. She already feared me—at least, if the frightened looks she sometimes shot in my direction were anything to go by. And breaking into her bedroom at night to hold her would only make her more scared.
Not to mention getting me expelled.
Only once had Kaitlyn accepted help from me and that was after Sanchez had hurt and bullied her during the PE class we shared. She had allowed me to take her and her friend Megan Latimer to the Healer and she had even worn my shirt, to cover her scars.
I had waited for days for the shirt to return to me. Once you put an item of clothing into the laundry chute at Nocturne Academy, it gets laundered and returns magically to its original owner.
But the shirt never came back.
I wondered if she still had it—if she’d kept it somewhere to remind her of me. It seemed far-fetched but I liked to imagine her keeping it—maybe hanging it in the back of her wardrobe—maybe even putting it on from time to time to feel its fabric against her skin as though the fabric was my arms encircling her…
I tried to push such foolish thoughts out of my head and speak reason to my Drake, who was still insisting that we must go check on Kaitlyn.
“She’s not even here—it’s the weekend,” I reminded him. “She’s across town at the Breedlove’s house, remember? Besides, she’s resting easy now—she’s going back to sleep.”
Which was exactly what I needed to be doing. I had a History of Magic test the next day that I had barely studied for.
My Drake sent a thought message to me—an image of him flying through the dark night sky and circling over the Breedlove’s large, stately home—maybe putting one eye to Kaitlyn’s bedroom window, just to check on her.