The first human Cael saw in three hundred years was holding a mop.
He stood at the base of the service stairwell, back pressed to the cold concrete, and listened.
The world was unbearably loud.
Footsteps thudded overhead, light and quick, then slower and heavier. Machines hummed and whirred. Somewhere far away, something rattled with the distant clatter of a train. The massed, murky soup of human voices above washed into one another, more sensation than words.
He filtered it out ruthlessly.
Here, in the bowels of the structure, the noise was thinner. Easier to sift.
He smelled bleach first. Then sweat. Then the plasticky tang of cheap sneakers.
The man came whistling around the corner, earbuds in, the mop slopping water in lazy arcs across the concrete.
Cael narrowed his eyes.
When he’d last walked among humans in this shape, their clothes had been made of wool and linen and leather. There had been belts. Cloaks. Smell of smoke in everything.
This man wore loose pants with an elastic waist and a faded T-shirt with a cartoon on the front. His hair was buzzed close to his scalp. He swayed to some private rhythm only he could hear, oblivious.
He did not expect a dragon.
He did not even expect another human at this level, clearly. When he saw Cael, he jerked, yelping. The mop clattered to the floor.
“What the—?!” He stabbed at his ear, pulling one earbud loose. Tinny music spilled out. “Jesus, man, you scared the crap out of me. You can’t just—” His gaze flicked over Cael, taking in the bare chest, the half-torn trousers Cael had managed to salvage from an abandoned storage locker down the hall. His eyes widened. “Are you… lost?”
Cael stared.
Human tongues might change shape over centuries, but tone did not. That thin edge of incredulity, layered over suspicion, over a concern that had less to do with another being’s welfare and more to do with the potential inconvenience.
It was familiar.
He opened his mouth.
The first words came out as a growl, rumbling up from a chest built more for roars than speech. “Where is my hoard?”
The cleaner blinked. “Your what now?”
Cael rolled the word in his mouth again, tasting how clumsy it felt in this language. “My hoard,” he repeated, slower. “Gold. Jewels. Silver. Steel. Swords. Shields. Cups. The things that were *here* when I slept.”
He gestured broadly, encompassing the building around them.
Water from the abandoned mop spread slowly toward his bare feet.
The human’s brows knit. “Man, I think you’re looking for the wrong floor,” he said cautiously. “The galleries are upstairs. This is just storage and maintenance.”
“Galleries,” Cael repeated.
Museums, they had called them, in the last decades before his sleep. Houses of dead things. Places where humans put their past behind glass and pretended it meant they understood it.
His lip curled.
He took a step toward the man.
The cleaner flinched. To his credit, he did not run. “Hey, hey, uh… this area is restricted, okay? Staff only. You need to come with me to the security office and we’ll… figure out who you are.”
“Who I am,” Cael echoed, amused despite the headache forming behind his eyes. “I know who I am.”
“Yeah?” the man said, nerves making his voice go too bright. He fumbled at his belt, pulling out a walkie-talkie. “You wanna… share with the class? Because if you’re with one of the contractors, they did not get you a badge.”
Cael considered him.
Comically fragile. So soft. He could break him with two fingers.
He had made a half-hearted vow, sometime in the long dark, to try not to slaughter his way through this new world the moment he woke into it. The vow had not involved a cleaner with a mop.
“We’re not impressed,” his oldest brother had laughed once, when Cael had ranted about humans. “You can only set fire to so many villages before it gets repetitive, little brother. Show some imagination.”
His brother’s bones were ash now.
Imagination, then.
He eased his mouth into what he remembered passed for a human smile. “You will take me to my hoard,” he said. “And in exchange, I will not eat you.”
The cleaner went very still.
Then he let out a high, breathy laugh.
“Oh,” he said. “Okay. Got it. You’re one of *those*.” He hit a button on his walkie-talkie. “Uh, Tim? You down here? We got a… uh… a guest in the sub-basement who is very confused about museum policy.”
Static crackled. A male voice answered, crackling. “On my way. Don’t engage. You know the drill.”
Cael’s eyes narrowed.
He’d heard that voice before.
Not the exact timbre, of course. But that confident tone, wrapped around a quiet edge of almost-bored readiness. The tone of someone used to trouble, who didn’t fear it.
The footsteps that approached a moment later were heavy, measured.
The man who rounded the corner wore a uniform in dark blue, with SECURITY stitched on the chest in white letters. He looked older than the cleaner, and unlike him, his posture didn’t advertise surprise.
His gaze skimmed Cael once and sharpened.
“Afternoon,” he said. His voice was calm. “Building’s closed to the public right now.”
“I am not the public,” Cael said flatly.
The security guard’s mouth twitched.
“Okay,” he said. “Then you’re somewhere you’re not supposed to be.” He flicked a glance at the cleaner. “You good, Sam?”
Sam swallowed. “Yeah. Uh. This is… he says his hoard is missing.”
“His what?” the guard asked, sounding more tired than alarmed.
“Hoard,” Sam said. “Like… dragon.”
Cael lifted his chin.
The guard—Tim, if the scratchy name patch on his chest could be believed—looked at him more carefully.
“You’re not on any of our lists,” he remarked. “What’s your name?”
Humans had had a lot of rules about names, back when he’d last bothered to care. Formal addresses. Patronymics. Layers of title.
He stripped it down to the simple, ugly syllable they’d given him. “Cael,” he said.
Tim nodded once, as if that meant anything to him. “Okay, Cael. I’m Tim. This is Sam. We work here. You don’t. So we’re going to go upstairs, and we’re going to find out where you came from and how you got past security, and we’re going to get you some… clothes.”
His eyes dipped briefly, pointedly, to the fact that Cael was barefoot and shirtless in a corridor that smelled faintly of mold.
“Since when does skin offend you?” Cael asked, annoyed.
Tim’s brows climbed. “Since HR started making security sit through sexual harassment seminars,” he said dryly. “C’mon. Walk with me.”
He turned his body at an angle, careful and non-threatening, inviting without crowding.
Cael considered.
He *could* tear his throat out.
He could also find himself on the wrong end of a hundred human weapons very quickly, and no hoard to shield him. Dragons were not invulnerable. Without the grounding weight of his hoard, his power would bleed away faster than he could replenish it.
He needed information.
He needed to get a sense of this place and its hierarchy.
He needed…
He closed his eyes for half a second, inhaling deeply.
Over the tang of chemicals and old stone and mop water, another scent threaded through the air.
Light and strange, not sharp like Sam’s cheap detergent or Tim’s cologne. Old paper. Linen. Copper. Something floral and faint.
It slammed into him like a memory he hadn’t made yet.
Burned on the inside of his skull.
His eyes snapped open.
*Her.*
The human from the archives. The one whose blood had bridged the gap between his scale and the rest of him.
The oath he hadn’t meant to make coiled, unbidden, in his chest.
*Mine.*
Not the way humans meant it. Not a collar. Not a chain.
Not entirely unlike those things, either.
Dragons hoarded.
It was how they survived. How they anchored their power in the world. Alone, unbound, their magic ran wild, ripping their minds apart. They needed a *center*—a collection of things that mattered, amassed over centuries, each piece chosen with care, each one bound to them by the simple, stubborn declaration of *mine*.
Gold. Jewels. Weapons. Books. Paintings. Silk. Bones.
People, rarely.
That hadn’t been his vice.
Once, three centuries and a lifetime ago, he’d made an exception.
He’d paid for it.
He’d sworn, snarling, as the spell closed around him and his hoard was dragged away, that he would never make that mistake again.
Now, in this slick concrete corridor under a building full of strangers, the smell of that human—this new human, this curator of dead things—stung his senses like the first lungful of air after drowning.
He could follow it.
If he went with these security men. If he did not break the fragile limbs of the first ones who stood in his way. If he was patient.
Patience had never been his virtue.
He bared his teeth, more in frustration than threat.
“Very well,” he said, each syllable bitten off. “Take me to your—” He paused, then substituted the word that seemed to have taken on the weight of authority in this place. “—keepers.”
Tim’s mouth twitched again in that half-smile. “Happy to,” he said. “Sam, finish up down here. And for the love of God, don’t tell anyone you found a guy looking for his hoard in the basement until I get back.”
Sam made a muffled sound that might have been agreement.
Tim gestured for Cael to precede him up the stairs.
Cael snorted. “Your back is safer if you follow me?”
“Something like that,” Tim said easily.
Cael went.
The steps were built for shorter legs than his, but his human body adapted quickly, muscle memory adjusting to the smaller stride. The air grew warmer as they rose, more crowded with sound and smell.
He wanted to shake off this shape, to stretch and flex in his true body, to fill the space around him and *own* it.
He wanted—
He tamped the want down ruthlessly.
Information. Hoard. Then indulgence.
They emerged into a narrow corridor lined with doors marked STAFF ONLY. The buzz of human voices was louder here, a muffled roar behind the walls.
Tim walked ahead of him now, glancing back over his shoulder. “Stay close,” he said. “We’ve got cameras everywhere. The less footage we have of you wandering around half naked, the easier my report is going to be.”
Report.
Cael’s lips shaped the unfamiliar word silently.
Tim led him through a door marked SECURITY that opened into a cramped room packed with monitors, filing cabinets, and two more uniformed men. One of them sat in front of a bank of screens, eyes flicking between the black-and-white feeds. The other leaned against a filing cabinet, sipping coffee from a paper cup.
Both stared as Cael followed Tim in.
“Okay,” the one with the coffee said slowly. “This is new.”
“Found him in the sub-basement,” Tim said. “Says he’s looking for his hoard.”
The man at the monitors—mid-thirties, ponytail, rings on three fingers—raised an eyebrow. “Like… his hoard of streaming passwords? Because same.”
Cael looked at the screens.
The images made his head swim.
Dozens of eyes watched different slices of the building in grainy grayscale. Galleries. Hallways. Stairwells. A view of the grand entrance hall, empty now except for two security guards and a cluster of maintenance workers.
It was… clever.
Dragons had no need of such things; their senses covered miles. But for humans, who saw in such narrow bands, who could be ambushed by the simplest illusions, it was a simple, brutal innovation. Extend your eyes with machines. Put them everywhere.
He could respect the impulse.
The man with the ponytail caught him looking and smiled faintly. “Welcome to prime time,” he said. “I’m Jay. That’s Marcus. You giving Tim trouble?”
Cael looked back at Tim.
“He threatened to eat me,” Sam’s voice crackled over the walkie-talkie on the desk, tinnier than in person. “I don’t think he’s kidding.”
“Sam has an overactive imagination,” Tim said dryly. He looked at Cael. “You want to sit?”
Cael didn’t.
He sat anyway, mostly because standing made him feel like he was about to spring, and he had promised himself he would try not to attack anyone in the first hour.
The cheap office chair creaked under his weight.
“Where did you come from?” Marcus asked, leaning forward. He had cop eyes: assessing, weary, curious beneath the boredom. “And please don’t say ‘the basement,’ because we checked all the doors, and the locks were intact.”
“I woke,” Cael said.
“From where?” Tim asked. “I’ve worked this building for eleven years. There’s no place down there for you to have been hiding.”
“Hiding,” Cael repeated, amused in spite of himself. “If I hid, you would not find me.”
Marcus snorted. “Okay, tough guy. Humor me.”
Cael tilted his head back against the chair, staring at the cheap acoustic tiles on the ceiling.
If he told them the truth, would they laugh? Call whatever passed for healers in this era and hand him over? Humans had always been eager to put what they did not understand in cages.
Except… someone here had already taken pieces of his hoard and put them under glass.
He knew it, the way he knew the taste of old gold. When he’d stretched his senses upon waking, he’d felt the faint, distant tug of his things scattered through the building. Thin threads, like spider silk, binding him still.
He could follow those threads himself, one by one, but it would take time. More time than he had, maybe. The spell had not just stolen centuries from him; it had eaten away at his reserves. Without his hoard close, he would burn magic faster than he could draw it back.
He needed help.
He hated that.
He could lie, spin a story about being a lost visitor, a thief, a madman.
Or…
He thought of the human whose blood had tugged him up from the dark. The one whose scent wound through the concrete now like a challenge.
If he told these men enough truth to be dangerous, perhaps it would bring him closer to her.
He sighed, an ancient sound in a small room.
“I am the last of my kind,” he said.
Jay made a small choked sound that he smothered with a cough.
Marcus rolled his eyes. “You’re going to have to be more specific than that, man. Last what? Janitor? Security guard? We’re hurting, but we’re not that short-staffed.”
“Dragon,” Cael said.
Silence crashed down.
Jay stared.
Marcus’s coffee cup paused halfway to his mouth.
Tim’s expression didn’t change, but the air around him tightened.
“Right,” Jay said after a beat. “Like… Dungeons & Dragons. Smaug. Khaleesi. Cool cosplay, dude. Where’d you leave the tail?”
Cael’s mouth thinned.
He reached out, faster than any of them could track, and caught the paper coffee cup in Marcus’s hand.
He did not spill a drop.
The heat seeped through the flimsy material into his palm, pleasantly warm. He lifted it, inhaled, then brought it to his lips.
Bitter liquid scalded his tongue. He swallowed anyway.
Marcus gaped. “Hey—”
Cael exhaled.
A thin plume of smoke slipped from between his teeth.
The room froze.
The smoke curled up lazily, hung for a moment in the air, then dispersed.
Slowly, very slowly, Marcus lowered his hand to the desk.
“I didn’t see that,” he said faintly.
Jay blinked, then pushed back from his chair. “I’m getting the good camera,” he muttered.
Tim didn’t move.
His gaze was locked on Cael’s face, on the faint glow of old runes along his ribs where the half-torn shirt shifted.
“Do that again,” he said quietly.
Cael lifted an eyebrow. “No.”
“It could be a trick,” Jay said, but his voice had lost some of its earlier easy mockery. “Like one of those vape things. You know, kids do that all the time.”
Cael had no idea what a vape thing was.
He did not particularly care.
He reached for the nearest object on the desk—a cheap ballpoint pen—and rolled it between his fingers.
“You have pieces of my hoard in this building,” he said, unamused. “Do you think I do not feel them?”
“We have… what?” Marcus said weakly.
“Gold. Silver. Gems,” Cael said. “A chalice with a crack along the rim that tastes of old wine and older blood. A sword with a dragon coiled around the hilt. A necklace of green stones that was cut from my hoard while I slept.” His lip curled. “You cover them with glass so your kind can stare at them and tell each other stories you do not understand.”
Jay looked at Tim. “Okay, that’s… creepily specific.”
Tim’s jaw worked.
“We’re a museum,” he said finally. “Half the things in this building match that description. We have an entire medieval collection upstairs.”
Cael smiled without humor. “I know.”
Tim stared at him.
Then, abruptly, he barked out a laugh.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that I believe you.” He spread his hands. “What do you want us to do about it?”
“Return them,” Cael said. “Bring them to me. All of them.”
Marcus choked on nothing.
“You want us to help you rob a museum,” he translated, half-laughing, half-horrified. “Do you have any idea how much trouble—”
“They are mine,” Cael said, steel sliding under his tone. “Mine, not yours. You took them while I slept.”
“‘You’ is doing a lot of work there,” Jay muttered. “Pretty sure none of us were around three hundred years ago, Gandalf.”
Cael frowned. “Gandalf?”
“Later,” Jay said quickly.
Tim pinched the bridge of his nose.
“What happens if you don’t get them back?” he asked, voice quieter.
Cael didn’t answer.
Not immediately.
His fingers tightened on the cheap ballpoint pen.
He could feel it—already, a faint, insidious drift at the edges of his thoughts. Without his hoard’s grounding weight, old impulses could sharpen. Rage, grief, hunger. The wars his people had fought with themselves before they’d learned to tether their minds to something solid.
He had been young, the first time he’d felt it, the sizzle at the edges of his vision, the itch under his scales that no cool stone or hot spring could ease. His oldest sister had taken him by the scruff of the neck and dragged him into her cavern, snapping at him until he understood.
“You will *choose*,” she had snarled, gold and shadow flickering over her scales. “You will gather. You will bind. Or you will burn everything you touch, little brother, and then yourself last.”
He had chosen.
He had *loved* what he’d chosen.
Now, stripped of it, he could feel that old, terrible heat licking at the edges of his skull again.
“If I do not get them back,” he said evenly, “I go mad.”
Jay’s humor vanished. “Mad how?”
“Unmoored,” Cael said. “Hungry. There are old stories among my kind. Of what happens when a dragon loses his hoard. They are not pretty.”
Tim’s gaze swept him. “How long do you have?”
Cael lifted one shoulder in a dismissive half-shrug that did not quite hide the tension knotting his muscles.
“It has been three nights,” he said. “The spell that held me has eaten much. I do not know how much time I have before…” He searched for a word humans would understand. “Before I… slip. Drift. Before I stop caring who is in my way.”
Marcus swallowed. “And if that happens?”
Cael smiled, all teeth.
“You will need more than cameras.”
Silence stretched, brittle as thin ice.
Jay broke it first, voice higher than before. “Tim, man, I know you like weird cases, but this is… this is above our pay grade.”
Tim didn’t answer immediately.
He looked at Cael.
“What’s the alternative?” he asked quietly. “We call the cops. We tell them we have a naked guy in the sub-basement who thinks he’s a dragon and wants his hoard back. They take him somewhere with padded walls, give him meds, and we pretend none of this happened until something bad does.”
He paused.
“Or we humor him. We walk him through the galleries. We see if he knows things he shouldn’t. We find out if those pieces he’s talking about match things in our medieval collection.” His gaze flicked back to the faint rune-scars on Cael’s ribs. “We let the people who know this stuff take a look at him and the objects. If he’s crazy, we figure it out without getting anyone hurt. If he’s not…”
He trailed off.
Jay made a face. “If he’s *not* crazy, we are so unbelievably screwed.”
“We’re already screwed,” Marcus muttered. “If he breathes fire again, I’m quitting. I did not sign up to be dragon chow.”
Tim’s mouth ticked.
“You won’t be,” Cael said.
Marcus snorted. “That’s… reassuring?”
“I will not eat anyone who brings me part of my hoard,” Cael clarified.
Jay sagged back in his chair. “Reassurance level: still zero.”
Tim exhaled.
“Okay,” he said. “We’re not doing anything illegal. Not yet. We’re not taking anything out of the building. We’re just… giving our guest a tour. Discreetly. And we’re calling Halpern, because if anyone deserves to have their day ruined by this, it’s the medieval curator.”
“Halpern will call the board,” Marcus pointed out. “The board will call the city. The city will call…” He gestured vaguely at the ceiling. “People with letters in their titles.”
“Only if we give them something to panic about,” Tim said. “Right now, all we have is a weird guy with weird scars and decent smoke tricks.”
He looked at Cael. “You willing to play nice for a couple of hours?”
Cael’s jaw clenched.
He did not like the way the words tasted.
He did not like the mortal’s assumption that he had a choice.
But he was not stupid.
“Yes,” he said finally. “I will… play nice.”
“Swear it,” Tim said.
Cael bared his teeth. “I do not swear to humans.”
“Then we’re done here,” Tim said calmly, standing.
The simple finality of the gesture hit harder than any shouted threat.
Cael surged to his feet.
The cheap chair skittered back, slamming into the wall.
Jay flinched. Marcus’s hand darted toward the stun gun on his belt.
“Careful,” Tim said softly. His hand rested lightly on his own weapon, but he didn’t draw it. “You’re in our house right now. You want our help, you show some good faith.”
Good faith.
The words had meant very little, the last time he’d trusted a human.
He remembered another man in robes the color of stormclouds, standing in a circle of salt and sigils, promising peace, promising amends, promising safety.
He remembered the taste of betrayal, hot and copper in his mouth.
He remembered the weight of a woman’s body in his claw, the sound of her breathing shallow and fast, the way her eyes had met his with a mix of trust and terror.
He remembered—
He cut the memories off.
He had been young, then. Quick to rage. Slow to consider the angles.
He could do better.
“I swear,” he said slowly, the words dragging against his tongue like rough stones. “On my name, on what is left of my hoard, on the bones of my kin. For the space of one full day and one full night, I will not harm anyone within these walls unless they attack me first.”
The runes along his ribs flared, just for an instant.
The hair on Jay’s arms stood up.
“Holy—” he whispered.
Tim’s eyes narrowed. “That binding?”
“A promise,” Cael said curtly. “More than words.”
“So if you break it…” Marcus ventured.
Cael smiled without humor. “My magic eats me from the inside instead of you from the outside.”
“Neat,” Jay muttered. “We’ve got ourselves an honor-bound dragon on a twenty-four-hour leash. What could *possibly* go wrong.”
Tim exhaled, slow, some of the tension draining from his shoulders.
“Good enough,” he said. “Let’s go see some art.”
***
They took him up in a metal box that moved without apparent cables.
An elevator, Tim called it.
Cael did not like it.
The walls were too close. The hum of machinery around him made his teeth itch. He felt every shift in the building’s structure as they rose: the weight of floors above, the subtle sway of the tower, the vibrations of footsteps.
When the doors opened, the rush of cooler air and noise still shocked him.
He stepped out into a wide, high-ceilinged gallery.
Light poured in from tall windows, filtered through some sort of translucent shade that softened it before it could burn the objects inside their glass cases. The walls were painted a deep, rich blue. Spotlights picked out gilded frames and iridescent surfaces.
People moved through the space in clusters, voices low.
They smelled… distracted. Curious. Some bored. Most respectful in that peculiar, slightly self-conscious way humans had when they thought they were being watched.
They were being watched, he supposed.
By him.
By the cameras.
By the dead, their leavings polished and labeled in clean serif fonts.
Cael’s nostrils flared.
He tasted gold.
It called to him like a familiar song.
Tim watched him carefully as they walked past an oil painting with saints in it, past a row of carved wooden statues.
The tug grew stronger.
When they stepped through the archway into the medieval wing, it slammed into him like a wave.
His steps stuttered.
For a heartbeat, the smell of the place drowned out everything else.
Old wood. Old iron. Old leather. The faint, delicate tang of vellum. Glue. Dust. Time.
His hands curled into fists at his sides.
*Mine.*
He felt it in his bones.
Not all of the objects. Not even most of them. The room was full of things others had claimed, human artisans and human collectors. But threaded through the scatter of unrelated relics were a dozen familiar presences, each one a small, fierce flare against the quiet.
His sword.
His cup.
The necklace with the green stones.
He could feel them, even blind.
He wanted to go to them like a man crossing a battlefield toward a lover.
Instead, he forced himself to walk at Tim’s side, his jaw tight.
“You okay?” Tim asked under his breath.
“No,” Cael said bluntly.
Tim’s mouth twitched in what might have been sympathy.
They stopped in front of a glass case.
“Anything look familiar?” Jay asked, hovering a step behind them.
Cael looked.
His throat closed.
The cup sat on a white display plinth, lit from above. Clean. Polished. The crack along the rim, earned in the hands of a careless king two centuries before Cael had claimed it, caught the light in a delicate, pretty line.
The label beneath it read:
GOBLET, POSSIBLY FRENCH, c. 1400 Gilded silver, enamel. On loan from the Schmiedler Collection.
Schmiedler.
Cael repeated the name in his head, feeling the shape of it, the sibilance.
A thief. Or the descendant of a thief. It didn’t matter. His hand twitched toward the glass.
Tim cleared his throat. “I wouldn’t,” he said quietly. “Cameras, remember?”
Cael’s lips peeled back from his teeth.
“They polish it,” he said, voice rough. “They put lights on it. They call it *French*.” He spat the word. “It was forged in a mountain three hundred miles south of here, in a smithy that burned the day after I took it. A boy made it for a lord who never paid him. He died with his hands on the anvil.”
Jay’s swallow was audible.
“You… saw that?” he asked.
“I smelled it on the metal,” Cael said. “His sweat. His blood. His bitter rage. It tasted good. So I took it.”
“And now it’s here,” Tim said.
“Yes,” Cael said tightly. “Now it is here.”
He forced himself to step back.
He moved on to the next case.
And the next.
And the next.
His hoard—*pieces* of his hoard, torn from context, stripped of meaning, tagged and numbered and cataloged—glimmered at him from behind glass and velvet.
The emerald necklace had a new clasp. Someone had repaired the flawed solder on the third link. The sword’s hilt had been re-wrapped in leather that didn’t smell like the one he’d known. Small indignities. Petty changes.
It hurt.
He didn’t expect it to hurt as much as it did.
“Okay,” Jay said eventually, voice subdued. “I’m… not saying I believe you. But if you’re making all this up, you’ve missed your calling as a fiction writer.”
Tim stayed silent.
His eyes weren’t on Cael.
They were on the far end of the gallery.
Cael followed his gaze.
She stood with her back to them, a few yards away, in front of a tall tapestry. Short. Curvy. Dark hair threaded in a messy twist at the nape of her neck. Cardigan sleeves pushed up to her elbows, revealing strong, capable forearms. She held a tablet in her left hand, a stylus hovering over the screen as she frowned thoughtfully at the fabric.
Isla.
He didn’t know her name yet, but the knowledge slotted into place as surely as if it had been carved in stone.
The thin silver thread between his scale—the one in the drawer in the basement, humming faintly under the weight of floors—and her bright, vivid presence pulsed.
*There.*
Desire speared through him, sudden and sharp and furious.
Not sexual, not yet. That would come later, he had no doubt; he was not dead. But this first, startling wave was something older. Deeper.
Dragons hoarded what they found beautiful.
It was not always beauty in the human sense. He’d loved the flaking, mismatched goblets of a backwater village as fiercely as he’d adored the jewel-encrusted offerings of a queen. Beauty, for his kind, was resonance. It was the rightness of something in their bones.
This woman resonated.
She shone.
She *belonged*.
The realization slammed into him with enough force to rock him back a step.
He snarled—a low, instinctive sound that made Jay swear and Tim’s head snap toward him.
“Hey,” Tim said under his breath. “Easy.”
Cael dragged in a breath.
The scent of her wrapped around him.
Soap. Skin. Coffee. The faintest trace of her blood, sharp and sweet and still singing in his scale downstairs.
He wanted—
He didn’t even have language for what he wanted.
Not yet.
He took one involuntary step toward her.
Tim’s hand closed around his forearm.
The contact was light, but the implicit challenge in it was not.
“Remember the part where we agreed not to hurt anyone?” Tim said, voice very soft.
Cael turned his head.
His eyes met Tim’s.
“I am not going to hurt her,” he said, the words an insult in themselves.
Tim’s fingers tightened. “You look like you might eat her.”
“Not in the way you mean,” Cael snapped.
Jay made a strangled sound behind them that might have been a laugh or a prayer.
Tim blinked, then shook his head, as if he’d decided he did not, in fact, want to know.
“Who is she?” Cael demanded.
“Conservation staff,” Tim said. “Works under Halpern. Archives. Why?”
“She woke me,” Cael said simply.
Tim stared.
“Of course she did,” he muttered. “Because that’s exactly the kind of shit that happens in this place.”
“Language,” Jay murmured faintly.
Tim ignored him.
“She doesn’t know,” he told Cael. “Whatever you think happened, she’s just doing her job. So you are not going to grab her. You are not going to breathe fire on her. You are not going to… whatever it is you dragons do when you decide something is yours.”
Cael’s lip curled. “We *keep* it.”
“Yeah, no,” Tim said firmly. “You want her help? You ask. Like a person. You scare her, she’ll call security, and this whole house of cards comes down.”
“Asking,” Cael repeated, disdain curdling his tone.
“Welcome to the twenty-first century,” Jay muttered. “Consent is sexy.”
Cael glanced at him.
Jay held up both hands. “Never mind. Forget I said anything.”
Isla shifted her weight, reaching up to trace a hovering finger over a faint patch of damage in the tapestry.
Her cardigan rode up, revealing a sliver of skin at the small of her back.
Heat licked down Cael’s spine in ways entirely unrelated to hoard-binding.
He ground his teeth.
He had been awake in this new world for less than a day, and already it demanded too much of his control.
“Introduce me,” he ordered Tim.
Tim snorted. “You really think that’s a good idea?”
“You brought me up here,” Cael said. “You wanted proof. You have it. Now you will take me to her.”
He would have gone on his own, but a tiny, rational part of his mind—which sounded annoyingly like his oldest sister—muttered that perhaps barging up to a lone human woman in a public gallery while half-naked and casually radiating ancient magic was not the cleanest way to begin a negotiation.
Tim hesitated.
He looked at Isla.
He looked at Cael.
Then he sighed.
“Fine,” he said. “But you follow my lead. And if she tells you to back off, you back off.”
“Why would she—”
“Because you are a stranger,” Tim said. “Because she doesn’t owe you anything. Because that’s how things work now.”
Cael bristled.
Jay leaned in. “Listen to him,” he whispered. “He’s basically the dragon whisperer at this point.”
Cael ignored him.
His heart hammered in his too-small human chest as he followed Tim across the gallery.
The closer he got, the stronger the pull.
By the time they were three strides away, it was a physical ache, lodged under his breastbone.
He wondered, distantly, if she could feel it too.
“Isla,” Tim called softly. “Got a minute?”
She turned.
Cael’s world narrowed to the span of her face.
She was… not what he’d expected.
Not that he knew what he’d expected.
Her features were strong rather than delicate, her nose slightly crooked as if it had been broken once and set imperfectly. Her eyes were large behind square glasses, their color an ambiguous, interesting brown that caught flecks of gold when the light hit them. Her mouth was plush, the lower lip fuller, bitten pink from the concentration she’d been directing at the tapestry.
She wore no paint on her face, no jewels in her ears. Her clothes were practical: jeans, battered sneakers, cardigan frayed at the cuffs.
She looked tired.
She looked… *real*.
“Hey, Tim,” she said, pen still poised over her tablet. “What’s up? Because if a kid has put gum on the reliquary again, I might cry.”
Her voice—*
His scale flared in the basement, answering like a struck bell.
Cael’s hands clenched.
Tim gave her a quick, reassuring smile. “No gum. I promise. I, uh…” He cleared his throat. “I wanted to introduce you to someone. He has… questions. About the medieval collection. And the Schmiedler pieces.”
Isla’s gaze slid past Tim.
Landed on Cael.
He watched recognition hit her in stages.
First, the automatic visual assessment: tall man, bare chest, ruined trousers, old scars. Her eyes widened behind her glasses, a quick once-over that she immediately seemed to feel guilty about, color rising under her tan skin.
Second, the professional reaction: confusion at his presence, wariness at his lack of badge, annoyance at the potential threat to her objects.
Third, deeper, under it all—
Her pupils dilated.
Her nostrils flared.
Her hand tightened on the stylus until her knuckles went white.
The air between them thickened.
She sucked in a breath.
Then, decisively, she frowned.
“Is this a prank?” she asked Tim. “Because if the board hired another ‘interactive actor’ for this wing without asking me, I swear—”
“It’s not a prank,” Tim said.
Cael took a step forward before he could stop himself.
“Hello,” he said.
Her eyes flicked to him.
He felt the moment their gazes locked like a physical impact.
Heat lanced through him.
His magic surged, pressing against his skin as if it wanted out, wanted to reach for her the way his hands itched to.
He saw it hit her too.
Her breath caught.
Her pupils blew wider.
For a heartbeat, the gallery vanished.
There was only the two of them, the ghost-chain of the scale in the basement pulled taut between them like a leash.
*—mine—*
Cael’s heartbeat thundered.
He felt his eyes shift, the pupils slitting, gold flaring brighter.
Isla swayed.
Her hand shot out blindly, bracing on the glass case beside her.
Her stylus clattered to the floor.
Tim’s hand clamped down on Cael’s arm.
“Dial it back,” he said tightly. “Whatever you’re doing, dial it back.”
Cael sucked in a breath.
He hadn’t meant to—
He dragged his magic back in, forcing it into the tight, cold shape of his human body again.
The pressure in the air eased.
Isla blinked.
She looked down at her white-knuckled hand on the glass, then back up at him.
Her jaw tightened.
“I know you,” she whispered.
He smiled, slow and dangerous.
“Not yet,” he said. “But you will.”
Her eyes flashed.
Not with fear.
With anger.
“Tim,” she said sharply. “What the hell is going on?”
***
End of Chapter Two.
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