Chapter 18
The cry of the leviathan tore through the air as Vilka flew on battered, torn wings toward it.
His heart was heavy, his body heavier. The battle had drawn on long past the time he thought he could stand it, and the toll it had taken was terrible.
The earth below was scorched, the fortress crumbling.
It was a dead world, and only he was left flying above it, doing battle with the world eater.
Avastias breathed a pure flame that eroded everything in its path, turning creatures to skeletons and then to dust.
He had battled Avastias a thousand times over a thousand nights and every time it ended the same way, his burning body plummeting toward the ashes of everything he had loved.
It would never end. Every night when he closed his eyes he was forced to once more do battle with the creature that had taken the one thing he loved most, the woman who animated his world—Kate.
When morning came he would wake covered in sweat, his heart pounding as he shouted his fear to the dawn. Morning had not yet come and Vilka was once more locked in teeth-clenching battle, his blankets twisting about his limbs as he tossed and turned in the bed that was now so very lonely…
“Hello?”
A high-pitched, soft voice intruded on Vilka’s nightmare. The world eater arched its neck and roared, a terrible sound that usually drowned out all others. On this occasion, it did not.
“Hellooooo!” The voice chimed again with an innocence that did not belong in the world eater’s domain.
Vilka looked about for the source of it, but he could not see anyone.
There were heavy clouds obscuring much of the terrain, and he did not recognize the voice.
It did sound familiar somehow, and evoked a strong instinct to protect.
His body racked with pain, he circled down from the sky, turning his back on the beast to search for the voice. The motion was not real, but the pain was.
Since defeating Avastias he had been in a kind of agony he had not known existed.
The physical wounds had mostly healed, but without Kate by his side, the world was not as it once had been.
He was no longer a pariah. Instead he had become a hero, but what use was hero status when he remained alone in his heart?
Thirty years. Thirty. Long. Years. It had been so long since he had seen her that sometimes he could not recall her face, but his body still remembered what she felt like, and how it was to sink himself inside her and feel the clasp of her warm embrace.
At first he had held out hope. After all, time passed differently in the Earth realm.
One Earth year was ten dragon years. He had known from the beginning that he would need to be patient, but as the decades passed, hope had waned.
It became clear to him that it was as she had always said: she had wanted to escape.
He had set her free and she had chosen her path.
He could have raged against her decision, gone into her world and claimed her against her will, but that was not how he wanted to have her.
A man’s mastery could go no further than a woman’s desire.
And so he slept, much like Avastias, the two of them slumbering, one until it was time for a world to end, the other for a life to begin.
“Hello!!”
Something soft and fluffy banged against his chest repeatedly, making the clouds of the dream dissipate and causing the rays of morning to enter his eyes as he opened them slowly.
“Wake up now, please!”
The speaker wasn’t immediately visible, owning to the fact that the small, very insistent voice was coming from quite near the floor. He turned his head and inquisitive eyes peered into his, bright blue orbs with a golden center.
A small female human was standing next to his bed, wearing what looked to him very much like a little dragon costume. She was holding a stuffed creature of some kind and continued to bang it on the bed with as much force as her arm could muster.
He blinked, thinking this was some new dream, or perhaps he was now seeing things. But no matter how many times he blinked, the girl was still standing there, a head full of bright red hair and a curious grin on her face.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello,” the girl said.
“Hiya,” a much more familiar voice added. Vilka felt a bolt of adrenaline rush through his body. He sat up swiftly and looked in the direction of the voice he had longed to hear so much it seemed to him that it was seared on his soul.
Kate.
Beautiful Kate, with her copper hair and her impish hazel-green gaze and that smile she always wore when she’d done something particularly clever.
Her eyes began to well with tears as she looked at him, her lower lip trembling with the same emotion he felt: an overwhelming rush of love and relief. She had returned to him.
“Kate…” he said softly. “I have missed you so much.”
“Not as much as I missed you,” she said, her smile tight as she tried to hold back her tears. “There’s someone you need to meet,” she said, putting her hands on the child’s shoulders.
“You’ve had a child,” he said. There was no doubting that the girl was Kate’s daughter. They had the same hair, the same smile…
“We’ve had a child, Vilka,” Kate said softly.
The child in question stuffed the toy into her mouth and made a sound halfway between a screech and a laugh.
Vilka looked at the pair of them, stunned. “She’s ours? But you said it wasn’t possible…”
“Turns out the radiation formula really messes with birth control,” Kate said with a smiling little shrug. “Of course, I don’t need it now, and she doesn’t need it at all. I guess even one quarter dragon blood is enough to provide protection from the radiation in this place.”
“Does she know where she is? Or who I am?”
“She doesn’t know much, she’s only two years old,” Kate said. “She’s going to need some time to get up to speed.”
“Hello,” the girl said after pulling the well-gnawed toy from her mouth. “My name is Mika.”
“Hello, Mika,” Vilka said. He found himself staring at her, seeing parts of himself in her face.
Her eyes, her nose, something about the way she held her brows.
He had wanted to father offspring with Kate from the beginning, but the sudden appearance of a two-year-old was quite something. Shock didn’t begin to describe it.
“You’re happy, aren’t you?”
He heard fear in Kate’s tone. The question was so much more than a matter of happiness. She was asking if he accepted her, accepted their daughter.
“Kate,” he said, reaching for her hand and drawing her down to sit on the bed. “I am the happiest man in either realm. I would show you that more completely, but…” he flickered a glance at Mika, “we may have to wait for that.”
“I can’t wait any longer for this,” she said, leaning forward to press her lips to his. Their kiss of reunion was powerful, soft, gentle, loving and filled with the longing they had suffered.
“I’m a dino,” Mika clarified suddenly, causing them to break the kiss. “I have scales and claws, but I don’t have wings.”
“She has scales and claws?” Vilka looked at Kate for confirmation.
“Not really.” Kate shook her head with a fond smile. “She imagines she does. Maybe she will someday, I don’t know. She definitely likes to talk about them.”
“She knows what she is,” Vilka said wonderingly. “And you came back to me. You didn’t… leave.”
“You thought I left?”
He took her hand, needing to touch her, to feel her soft skin beneath his own. “I didn’t know,” he said. “But I knew that you would come on your own terms.”
“I would have come earlier,” Kate said. “But…” she glanced at Mika.
“I figured the birthing units and such would be better in a place with electricity. And then I had to be sure it was safe. There were a lot of investigations around the whole event. I was a suspect. I had to live a normal life, you know?”
“That must have been agony for you,” he smiled.
Her answering smile faltered. “I didn’t know if you’d survived,” she said. “I mean, I really didn’t know anything at all. Sometimes, before she was born, I would wonder if she was the last part of you left.” A slow tear ran down her cheek. “I have missed you so much, Vilka, I can’t even say…”
A tap at the door interrupted their conversation. An elderly woman entered the room, still spry, but clearly withering under the effects of old age.
“I’m sorry to interrupt you two, but I have little time left with my grandchild,” Aria said. “Come, her grandfather and I wish to spoil her.”
“Mother? You know already?” Vilka was utterly confused. “How long have you been here?”
“I saw them first,” Kate said. “I’m sorry, but I didn’t know where you were and I made sure not to open the portal anywhere near the first one in case I woke the big one up again, so it’s been a bit of a mission to find you. They brought Mika and me here.”
“Gamma! Gamma Dino!”
Mika ran toward Aria, clearly already comfortable with her grandmother. Vilka could not help but smile as he watched his mother embrace the small child. He had slept in hell, but he had woken in heaven. It would take some time to adjust to it, but he was eager to do so.
“I have big teeth and I can roar so loud everybody is afraid,” Mika informed Aria.
“My mother was part dinosaur, I think,” Aria mused as she took Mika by the hand. “She probably gets it from my side—I won’t interrupt again,” she added. “You two have much to discuss.”
The moment she closed the door, they fell upon one another with a hunger that was not made of lust, but of pure relief and love. Vilka could taste Kate’s tears of joy as they embraced and kissed and pressed their bodies so tightly together that they were almost one entity.
It was a long time before they spoke, because it was a long time before words could do justice to their feelings.
Vilka ran his lips and fingers over as much of Kate’s body as he could reach, remembering every little bit of her as her clothes evaporated underneath his touch.
He wanted her nude, not to ravish her, but to revel in her.
The passing of time had matured Kate a little, he could see that in her eyes.
She was the same woman, of course, but he could see what she had been through written in her face.
Motherhood had made its mark on her. He could see it in the little lines about her mouth from smiling, and the little crevices above her brows from worry.
“You are as beautiful as I remember,” he said reverently.
“You look like hell,” Kate replied.
“What?” He laughed at her bluntness. Clearly that had not changed.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean that. You’re handsome.
You’re hot. You’ll always be those things, but your eyes are so sad,” she said, pressing kisses to his lips and his cheeks.
“It must have been a very long time for you, not knowing if I was returning. Three years was almost too much for me to bear. I do not know how you have managed thirty…”
“With the memory of you,” he said gruffly. “It sustained me through my battle, it helped heal my wounds, and it kept my heart from crumbling away.”
“You know there’s a statue of you in the center of the town up there,” she said. “You’re a hero, Vilka. Heroes have options. I’m sort of surprised you didn’t… take one of the options…”
“You mean you’re surprised I didn’t take another mate in the last thirty years,” he said. “I did not want any other woman.”
“But… thirty years…”
“Don’t forget, Kate. I age much more slowly than you, and though thirty years is a long time, it is a fraction of my lifespan.”
“But your mother and father are both aging at the same rate, it seems…”
“Dragons who enter the human realm seem to sacrifice their lifespan,” he said. “He has foregone hundreds of years, but I do not think he regrets it. They would not live one without the other—just like I would not truly live without you.”
“So that’s why you look like a rough thirty-five or so, and I look a solid twenty-eight. Are you telling me you’re going to stay hot and young forever while I age like a prune? Wait… you were in the human realm, for a little while at least… how come it didn’t change how you’re aging?”
Vilka shook his head and drew her close. “I do not know about that. I do not know entirely how I will age. I have a mixed genome. It may be I do not have as long as I think.”
“I don’t want to talk about this,” Kate said, her face falling. “I just got you back; I can’t stand the thought of losing you again.”
Vilka pressed a hundred more kisses to her lips and her face and her hair and her shoulders until she forgot about the weight of death and snuggled against him.
“Mika must have been a surprise for you,” he mused.
“I closed that portal and I got interrogated and I figured I was just sick with nerves or a cold or something. I didn’t even realize I was late,” Kate said.
She looked up at him, her expression earnest. “I had her alone, but there wasn’t a minute I didn’t think about you.
I’ve been telling her about you from the day she was born.
I was always coming back, Vilka, and I was always going to bring her here.
I just didn’t know if I was coming back for her to meet her father, or to see his grave. ”
He saw the emotion and the strain in her face and felt a huge wave of pity for her and grief for what had not been.
“I am so sorry you did all this alone.”
“I wasn’t alone,” she said. “Not really. I had Mika, and she is so like you in so many ways, Vilka. She is a bossy, determined little thing. She knows what she wants, and she gets it. Every time I looked into her eyes, I knew we were connected. Forever. And I knew I had to be patient—and that I could be patient and careful, and not just build a damn portal and throw myself through it. It’s not what either of us would have wanted, but there was no other choice. It had to be this way.”
“You’re right,” Vilka nodded, holding her close. “It was necessary, but I wish I had been there to take care of you.”
“You can take care of both of us now,” Kate said. “For the rest of our lives. Deal?”
“Deal,” Vilka agreed, beaming broadly.