Price
EIGHT
The best time in my work week was the one where nobody was watching.
Rafe and my other assistants were in the next state installing a lobby piece.
Them being gone for a few days gave me the perfect opportunity to work on that blue.
I was so close to getting it right, and I needed the studio to myself when I reached it.
Celebrating this color was something I wanted to do alone.
The commission had been bugging me for a month. The collector was rich, so he was unbothered about time and how much it was costing him. And he was in his ninth decade and time had sped up, he said, unlike when he was young and the long hot summers stretched ahead.
He couldn’t describe the shade of blue or give me a reference but said it was the blue over the beach he’d visited as a six-year-old. But when he shut his eyes and raised a finger, pointing back through the decades, he grew teary, saying he needed to capture the color.
“It will give me peace, having that with me in my final years.”
He’d been here in the studio, and I had to look away as I experienced a flood of emotions. I didn’t want to reach the end of my life and not be surrounded by what was most precious: Bea, Isla, Jack, and Cam. Nothing else mattered.
I’d been chasing the color for weeks, getting close, and this morning, I was alone and had the big bay door rolled up for the heat. I finally had the glass on the end of the pipe.
Glasswork was equal parts patience and violence. I had to gather the shape and keep it turning to prevent gravity taking over. Every few seconds the glass went stiff, refusing to cooperate, and it had to go back into the heat.
Every trip to the reheat cost a glassblower a few seconds, and one piece needed a hundred trips. That was one of the reasons why custom-made glass was so expensive.
But I didn't make those trips because I had a dragon inside me. I reheated the glass with my own fire, breathed from my chest, so I never had to carry it back to the reheat.
Ready? This has to be precise. If my dragon let off a stream of fire that was too hot or vicious—the kind he used to protect me and my family—the trees lining the property perimeter might go up in flames.
I’m not a novice, my beast huffed.
He was right. We’d been work partners for years and not once had he made a mistake. Except for that one time.
Seriously? That was a practice run. Why do you keep bringing that up? I need a raise when we’re done here.
I’ll get right on that.
I brought the pipe up with the piece cooling on the end.
This was the part of my work that I only ever did alone.
I opened my mouth and gave it my own fire.
It had to be a low blue flame and couldn’t waver in strength.
The heat had to be not a degree hotter or cooler than required, and the glass absorbed the heat as though it were swallowing.
It became liquid, and the color bloomed under the flame as if it had read my client’s memory.
I’d gotten what I wanted and what my client needed, but as I savored my success, a scent wafted in on the breeze. It’d become as familiar as my kids’ scents, one I’d recognize even if we were parted for decades.
Cam! He was behind me.
How had I not sensed him approaching? Between the smoke and hot-metal stench, I’d missed my mate’s scent that had snuck in and hid in a corner before it surrounded me.
You wanted to show him who you were, but this is an oops, my dragon mused. You need to fix this.
Quiet!
I turned, with fire still on my breath. Instinct had me recalling the last of the fire into my chest. Not that it would help. Cam had already witnessed the flame trailing from my lips. I could take the fire back but not the look on his face.
He was inside the bay door, holding my phone, and his mouth was shaped into a word that might have been “What?” There was no pretending he hadn’t seen the glow in my eyes, the last of the smoke curling past my face, or the scales on my chest. There was no version of this that I could make out as something else.
The blue-sky piece hung forgotten on the pipe, the glow already dying, as I let it drop.
I no longer gave a damn about it as Cam’s face drained of color.
His eyes were huge and fixed on my mouth.
He didn’t need to speak because in his mind, I was a monster, whereas before he’d arrived, I was his boss.
“Cam.” My hands trembled, and tears streamed down my face and over my lips, the same lips that moments ago had spat out fire. “Cam. It’s me. I’m still me.”
He stumbled back and bumped into the frame of the open door.
“Stay there.” He pointed at me as his nostrils flared and his body shook with silent sobs. “Don’t come any closer.”
“Let me explain.” I fell to my knees because my legs could no longer support my weight. “I’m not that different to you.”
Oh gods, that was a lie. I had an animal inside me, one humans believed was an ancient myth.
I pounded my chest and pleaded with him to stay, because if he ran, I might never see him again.
But he was gone, flinging the phone on the concrete floor and breaking the screen as he raced to his car.
I followed his progress, and each step wasn’t just taking him away from the studio, but as he pounded over the ground, his footsteps echoed a heartbeat that I’d never hear again.
Cam manually locked the four car doors which was the only way to do it in his ancient vehicle, and he made three attempts to start the car.
His eyes, filled with terror, were fixed on me over the steering wheel as I bowed my head.
If I couldn’t see the look of horror on his face and how rigid his body was, I might’ve been able to pretend he didn’t loathe the real me.
But there was no mistaking his car tossing up a spray of gravel as he wrenched it around and drove off.
Beyond me, the blue-sky glass lay in pieces, shattered and worthless, mimicking how I felt.
Stop him, my dragon ordered. Please. You can’t let him leave.
And do what? Chase a terrified man down the road and corner him?
I’d have to collect the children later and explain that our latest manny was gone. They didn’t need to tell me they liked Cam and how their lives were different now that he was in it. I heard in their voices, how they included him in activities, and how he comforted them.
And now they’d have to endure yet another loss.