Dragonswan

Channon ran to his side. "Sebastian?"

He was shaking in her arms. Together, they sank to the ground and she held his head in her lap.

"I thought you were dead," he whispered, running his hand over her forearms. "I heard you scream."

The man she'd cornered knelt beside them. "I startled her. I was trying to help you with Bracis. I sent out a feeler for your essence and it led me to her. You didn't tell me you were mated."

Channon ignored the man as Sebastian's body temper­ature dropped alarmingly.

Why was Sebastian trembling so? His wounds didn't look that severe. "Sebastian, what's wrong with you?

"Dragon's Bane."

Channon frowned as the man cursed. What was Dragon's Bane?

"Sebastian," he said forcefully, taking Sebastian's face in his hands and forcing him to look up at him. "Don't you dare die on me. Damn you, fight this."

"I'm already dead to you, Damos," he said, his voice ragged as he turned away from him. "You told me to die painfully."

Sebastian closed his eyes.

Channon saw the grief in Damos's eyes as her own tore through her. This couldn't be happening. She wanted to wake up.

But it wasn't a nightmare, it was real.

Damos looked at her, his greenish-gold eyes searing her

with power and emotion. "He's going to die unless you help him."

"What can I do?"

"Give him a reason to live."

Her hand started to tingle where the mark was. Chan-non scowled as it began to fade. "What the ... ?"

"We're losing him. When he dies, your mark will be gone, too."

The reality of the moment hit her ferociously. Sebastian was going to die?

No, it couldn't be.

"Sebastian?" she said, shaking him. "Can you hear me?"

He shifted ever so slightly in her arms.

She wouldn't let him go like this. She couldn't. Though they had only known each other one day, it felt as if they'd been together an eternity. The thought of losing him crippled her.

"Sebastian, do you remember what you said to me in the hotel room? You said, 'I'm here because I know the sadness inside you. I know what it feels like to wake in the morning, lost and lonely and aching for someone to be there with me.' "

She pressed her lips against his cheek and wept. "I don't want to be alone anymore, Sebastian. I want to wake up with you like I did this morning. I want to feel your arms around me, your hand in my hair."

He went limp in her arms.

"No!" Channon cried, holding him close to her heart. "Don't you do this to me, Sebastian Kattalakis. Don't you dare make me believe in knights in shining armor, in men who are good and decent, and then leave me alone again. Damn it, Sebastian. You promised to take me home. You promised not to leave me."

The mark faded from her palm.

Channon wept as her heart splintered. Until that mo­ment, she hadn't realized that against all known odds,

against all known reason, she loved this man.

And she didn't want to lose him.

She pressed her wet cheek to his lips. "I love you, Se­bastian. I just wished you'd lived long enough for us to see what could become of us."

Suddenly, she felt another tingle in her palm. It grew to a burning itch. It was followed by a slow, tiny stirring of air against her cheek.

Damos expelled a deep breath. "That's it, little brother. Fight for your mate. Fight for your dragonswan."

Channon looked up as Damos doffed his cloak, then wrapped it around Sebastian's body.

"Is he going to live?"

"I don't know, but he's trying to. The Fates willing, he will."

Three

Channon bathed Sebastian's fevered brow while she prayed for his survival and whispered for him to come back to her.

After they had stabilized Sebastian, Damos had taken them to a small village in Sussex where humans and Ar­cadians lived and worked together. She learned that though Arcadians could only time-jump during a full moon, they could use their magic to make lateral jumps from one place to another in the same time frame any time they wanted to.

It didn't really make sense to her, but she didn't care. At the moment, all that mattered to her was the fact that Sebastian was still fighting his way back from death.

It was long after midnight now. They were alone in a large room where the only light came from three candles set in an iron fixture against the wall. Sebastian lay draped in a sheet on an ornate bed that bore the images of dragons and wheat and was shielded from drafts by shimmery white drapes.

The sounds of the night drifted in from the open win­dow while she waited for some sign that he would wake up.

None came.

At some point before dawn, exhaustion overtook her and she curled up by his side and went to sleep.

"Channon?"

Channon felt as if she were floating, as if she had no real form at all.

Suddenly, she stood in a summer field with wildflowers all around her. She was dressed in a sheer, white gown that left her all but bare. There was a medieval castle in the distance, highlighted against the horizon. It reminded her of one of the manuscript pages she studied.

None of it seemed real until she felt strong arms wrap around her.

Glancing over her shoulder, she looked up to find Se­bastian behind her. Like her, he was practically naked, dressed only in a pair of thin white pants. The breeze stirred his dark hair around his handsome face, and he flashed those killer dimples. Her heart soaring, she turned in his arms, reached up, and placed her marked palm over his Sentinel tattoo. "Am I dreaming?"

"Yes. This was the only way I could reach you."

She frowned. "I don't understand."

"I'm dying."

"No," she said emphatically, "you're still alive. You came back to me."

The tenderness on his face as he looked at her made her heart pound. "In part, but I still lack the strength I need to wake."

He sat down on the ground and pulled her down with him. "I missed you today."

So had she, in a way that made no sense whatsoever to her, but then feelings seldom do. The entire time he'd been unconscious, she had felt as if a vital part of her was gone.

Now, in the circle of his arms, leaning back against him, she felt right again. She felt whole and warm.

Sebastian took her hand into his and used his thumb to toy gently with her fingers.

"I can't lose you," she whispered. "I've spent hours thinking of my life at home. It was lonely and empty. I had no one to laugh with."

He placed his lips against her temple and kissed her tenderly. Then he cupped her head in his hands and leaned his forehead against her. "I know, love. I've spent my life alone in caves, my only company the sound of the wind outside. But the only way I can fight my way back to you is to regain my powers."

"Regain them how? How did you lose them?"

She felt his lips moving against her skin as he whis­pered the words while he nuzzled her. It was wonderful to have him holding her again. "I was using them against myself. I set the dragon and the human inside me at odds."

His touch burned through her. She didn't want to live another day without feeling him by her side, without see­ing that devilish smile and those deep dimples.

In short, she needed this man.

"Why did you do that?" she asked.

He pulled back and kissed her fingertips. "To protect you."

"From what?"

"Me," he said simply.

Channon stared up at him, baffled by his words. He would never hurt her. She knew that. Even in his true dragon form he had done nothing but protect her. "I don't understand."

He ran his thumb over her palm, tracing the lines of her mark. Chills swept up her arm, tightening her breasts as she watched him.

When he met her gaze, she saw his sorrow. "I lied to you when you asked me about the mark on your hand. Part of the curse of my people is that we are only des-

ignated one mate for our entire existence, a mate we don't choose."

Channon frowned. Damos had refused to speak to her when she asked him what he meant when he had called her Sebastian's mate. He'd told her it was for Sebastian to do.

Sebastian kissed her marked palm. "The moment we Arcadians and Katagaria are born, the Fates choose a mate for us. We spend the rest of our lives trying to find our other half. Unlike humans, we can't have a family or chil­dren with anyone other than our mate. If we fail to find our other half, we are doomed to live out our lives alone.

"As a human, you have the freewill to love anyone. You can love more than once. But I can't. You, Channon, are the only woman in any time or place who I can love. The only woman I can ever have a family with. The only woman I will ever desire."

She remembered Plato's theory about the human race being two halves of the same person—the male and fe­male who were separated by the gods. Now she realized Plato's theory was based on the reality of Sebastian's peo­ple, not hers.

"So what do you need to regain your powers?"

He fingered her lips and stared at her with desperate need. She knew he was still holding himself back, still keeping himself from kissing her.

"You have to claim me as your mate," he said quietly. "Sex regenerates our powers. It heightens them. I was trying so hard to keep from forcing you into the Claiming that I buried them too deeply. There is a delicate balance in all Arcadians and Katagaria between the human and animal half. I was fighting myself so hard to protect you that I ruptured the balance."

"It can only be repaired by Claiming me?"

He nodded.

"And this Claiming, what is it exactly?"

He traced the line of her jaw, making her burn from the inside out. "When you Claim me, you acknowledge me as your soulmate. The ceremony is really quite simple. You place your marked palm over mine and then you take me into your body. You hold me there and say, 'I accept you as you are, and I will always hold you close to my heart. I will walk beside you forever.' "

"And then?"

"I repeat the words back to you."

That seemed just a little too easy to her. If that was all there was to it, why had he fought it so hard? "That's it?"

He hesitated.

Inwardly, she groaned. "I know that look," she said, pulling back slightly from him. "Any time you're not tell­ing me the whole truth you get that look."

He smiled at her and planted a chaste kiss on her cheek. "All right, there is something more. When we join, my natural instinct will be to bond you to me."

That still didn't sound so bad. "Bond me how?"

"With blood."

"Okay, I don't like this part. What do you mean with blood?"

He dropped his hands and leaned back on them to watch her. "You know how humans will bind themselves together as blood brothers?"

"Yes."

"It's basically the same thing—but with one major dif­ference. If you take my blood into you, our mortal lives are completely conjoined."

"Meaning we will become one person?" she asked.

"No, nothing like that. Do you remember your Greek myths at all?"

"Some of them."

"Do you remember who Atropos is?"

She shook her head. "Nope, not a clue."

"She is one of the Moirae, the Fates. She's the one who assigns our mates to us at birth, and if we chose to bond

with that mate, her sister Clotho, who is the spinner of our lives, combines our life-threads together. At the end of a normal life Atropos will cut the thread and cause a death. But if we are bonded together and our threads are one, then she can't cut one without the other."

"We die together."

"Exactly."

Wow, that was a big commitment. Especially for him. "So you will have a human life span."

"No. My thread is stronger. You will have an Arcadian life span."

She blinked at that. "Are you saying I could live several hundred years?"

He nodded. "Or we could both die tomorrow."

"Whoa. Is there anything else?" she asked, curiously. "Will I also get some of your powers? Mind control? Time-walking?"

He laughed at her. "No. Sorry. My powers are tied to my birth and my destiny. Bonding only extends to our life-threads."

Channon smiled as she rose up on her knees, between his legs. She crouched over him, forcing him to lean back farther on his arms as she hovered over him. She bit her lip as she stared at his handsome face, at those lips she was dying to taste.

"So, what you're offering me is a gorgeous, incredibly sexy man who is completely devoted to me for the next few centuries?"