You Slay Me by Katie Macallister

Author:Katie Macallister [Macallister, Katie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

11

"Say what you will about you—and I can say a lot, despite having known you for only a couple of days—you really have a fabulous house. Is this all stuff you've stolen over the years?"

Drake shrugged as I set a lovely Grecian bowl back onto its pedestal. I took the shrug to mean yes. The room he called his library could have doubled for a museum, so full of antiquities was it. It gave me an odd feeling to know that he was old enough to have seen most of the objects when they were new. I moved over to stand in front of a triptych depicting Saint George about to stab his lance into a writhing dragon. "One of your ancestors?" I couldn't keep from joking.

"No, that was one of the red dragon sept," he answered in all seriousness.

I gaped, looking from the triptych to him. "You mean Saint George really did slay a dragon?"

"Of course." Drake walked over to an ebony sideboard holding a variety of cut-glass decanters.

"Wow." I looked back at the picture. "So what was it like back then? The Middle Ages, I mean?"

Drake gave me a disgusted look as he brought me a glass filled with a deep red wine. "I wouldn't know—I wasn't alive then."

"Oh, really?" I took a tentative sip of the Dragon's Blood, its now-familiar burn a comforting heat, one that effectively singed out the last remnants of my nausea.

Drake's digusted look got a whole lot more disgusted. He did the nostril-flare thing as he asked, "Just how old do you think I am?"

"Well, let's see. . .." I strolled around him, enjoying the opportunity to look him over without appearing to ogle him (which, of course, was what I was doing). He was dressed in a navy suit this time, although as soon as we arrived at his house, he shucked the suit jacket and tie, and rolled up the sleeves of his cream-colored shirt. As I circled him, I had to clutch my hands together to keep from allowing my fingers to go exploring. "I'd say . . . hmmm . . . five hundred years?"

"Five hundred!" Drake snorted.

I raised my eyebrows in mock surprise. "Four hundred?"

"I am exactly three hundred and eighty-nine years old, although I have been told that I don't look a day over two hundred."

I smiled at the outraged expression on his face. "Sorry, I didn't mean to offend. You're right—you don't look that old. I'm surprised that you're so young, though. You're just a widdle bitty baby dwagon, aren't you?"

"Hardly that," he said with another disparaging look.

I strolled over to admire a fabulously detailed ivory-and-ebony-framed dartboard. The darts in it were hand-painted with ornate dragons, trimmed in gold, each one fletched with peacock feather flights. "Pretty. Do you play?"

"Extremely well."

I put the dart I was examining back in its ivory socket. "Darts seem a little tame for a dragon almost four hundred years old."

"Any game can be made exciting if the stakes are right," he answered, waving me toward a chocolate-colored leather sofa.

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