This story was spurred on by the 2/3-Nano semi-burnout and by buying a 2-month-old, 20-meter long dragon as the mate for a 2-day-old, 2-meter-long hatchling.
Despite that, I tried very hard to avoid anything remotely squicky. Also, this is not about dragons. Continue reading
If you are new to my Fae Apoc setting, Kai(lani) and Rozen are from my Addergoole series.
This story takes place 50 years past the original story, nearly 40 years after the apocalypse, after the Retirement stories.
Short summary: Rozen, a “big bad wolf” in school at Addergoole, managed to finally piss off Regine, the school’s Director, enough that she mind-controlled him into a Belonging (magical slavery; “Keeping”) and shipped him, literally, to Kailani, her protege, ignorant of or uncaring about the romantic/sexual/violent tension that had existed between those two in school.
Since Kai was growing too old to pretend to be human in her current locale, she chose to go on the road with her new, somewhat violent, companion.
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Kailani and Rozen were being followed.
Not exactly followed — more like followed-in-front-of — and not by a person or people. Rozen would have been able to deal with people.
(If he was allowed to, of course. He had no physical collar, because in the places they were travelling, sometimes having a collared person with her would get Kai killed and sometimes it would get him killed and, either way, it was a dangerous luxury. He wondered sometimes if having a physical collar would have helped him get used to the uncomfortable feeling of being on a leash. )
They were being anticipated by rumor and legend, and Rozen didn’t like what they were saying.
He was Masked, of course, and Kai’s disguise was to go back to the way she’d looked at sixteen and seventeen, fresh-faced and not that much like the aging Dean Storm. So when people told them about the midnight-skinned man with white hair and red eyes, he was pretty sure they weren’t seeing his middling-brown skin, hair, and eyes and thinking they were talking about him.
“I swear, Kai, I’ve never been through that town before.” She was frowning, had been frowning since they left the town — in more of a hurry than they normally did, almost enough to bring attention to themselves. “Any of these towns we’ve been through. I—” He shifted. “I stuck to the northwest and, uh, the Lakes, you know that.” Continue reading