The Treasure Keeper

Prologue

Something Dark is coiled around your heart. Something scaled and glistening, and ferociously beautiful. It has been with you all your days and nights, all your years, in all your thoughts, shaping every single movement: your hands, your lips, your respiration. It lives because you live. It lives because magic is real.

It gives you grace when Others are clumsy. It gives you strength when Others crumble apart. It gives you animal splendor, and cunning, and the means to walk the earth on two legs in open disguise. You are secret smoke and claws, a cocked ear to the music of metal and stone, fangs and luminant eyes, wings for flight. You are the zenith of creatures; you are the hunter and the reaper, and all the Others—whether they witness your true face or not—instinctively glance away when you pass.

Their skin crawls; they don't know why. Their souls heave a shudder. It is because of you.

Yet you are not above the laws of the universe. As with every facet of life and death and even magic, there is a price for glory, and that price for you is this: the Dark Thing eats through your blood and tendons like acid. Although for the sake of your very existence you must restrain it, it demands constant release. Sometimes the physical need for Change racks you so fiercely you are lost; you cannot taste your food or wine, you cannot suck in the filthy city air, you cannot move or speak or look even the lowest urchin in the eye until you surrender and cut the Dark Thing loose.

Because you're not like the slow and dense Others who trudge through their tiny lives just beside you—no, not at all.

You are a dragon.

Drakon.

* * *

Did it hurt, your first time? Of course it did. It hurts us all, even me. This is how it happens: You're minding your day, or drowsing through your night. You're young, you're strong, and the sun threads gold through your hair, and the moon celebrates the luster of your skin. You are standing or seated or incumbent, you are breathing or talking or eating. The only necessary constant in every instance is that your eyes be open, because it won't happen without your sight. So the world spins on the same as every other day, every other night, and between one contraction of your heart and the next, you are devoured.

You're vanished. Jewelry flashing and falling, your garments drifting into a heap on the floor. It's that swift.

Without your will, your human-shaped body has Turned into something else, something diaphanous. Ephemeral.

You are smoke.

And aye, it hurts. It's as if with the Turning of your flesh your very essence is scraped away raw, skin ripped from sinew, sinew torn from bones. You want to scream but you no longer have voice; no one hears. You're alone. Even if you're surrounded in that one lethal instant by those whom you love, you're alone, because their hands only slip through you. There is nothing they can do to help. You must Turn again, you must fight the agony and Turn back to what you were before—or else you're truly gone.

Too many headstones dot our burial grounds from children who die just like that, bright lives snuffed into wisps of vapor that rise and thin and never return. No coffins to bury, no bodies beneath the sod.

But you lived, didn't you? You knew what to do, and you lived, and after that ... the pain diminished. By your third or fourth Turn, you had control, and all you felt was searing joy.

Are we not magnificent?

_{* * *}

You won't remember our origins. None of us do, except perhaps in the most fevered of clan dreams. But I know our past, a very good deal of it; certainly more than you'll hear from anyone else.

We're not from here. We are not native to this soft and mild green isle. Ages ago we were churned to life from the molten union of earth and sky, from smoking lava and diamonds and a crescent range of faraway mountains that are now called Carpathians.

It was a good place for us. The magic that whipped us into perfection had also perfected our home: thick misty woods, glacier-fed rivers roaring hard and clear, melting into streams. Mounds of pine needles and sweet resin throbbing in the trees and delicious animals that fled too slowly at our approach.

Gold sifted through the streams, swirling into pools with beckoning laughter. Veins of copper and silver fingered up, up through the bedrock, trying to reach us. Diamonds speckled the forest floors, so fat and numerous we could pluck them like summer berries for our pleasure.

Each one welcomed us. Each one begged for our touch.

So we thrived. We hunted and soared and eventually built a castle for our clan, one set upon the highest, bleakest peak, carved from pure quartzite, studded with gems. We named it Zaharen Yce. The Tears of Ice.

Imagine it a moment, sparkling in the sun like distant pillars of salt, the songs of all the stones lifting and calling and weaving lush dreams around you from dawn to dusk and back again.

Close your eyes. You can almost hear it, can't you? So can I.

Humans, as you know, perceive little beyond the most primitive of sounds. But they are spawn of the earth; they crave diamonds and rubies and precious metals nearly as much as we do, although for different reasons.

Zaharen Yce drew them to us like a flare.

Siege after siege befell our people. Arrows. Ambushes. Poison left to steep in the rotting carcasses of our once-abundant prey; drakon too starved and desperate to detect it.

We lasted as long as we could. We had much to defend, after all. Much to lose.

And yet . we did lose.

Now we live here. Now we look like them. We wear corsets and silks, powdered wigs and rapiers. We attend cotillions with rouge on our cheeks; we sip tea and port and ale and try never to breathe very deeply when surrounded by the stench of mankind.

Consummate actors, we drakon. To ensure our survival we've learned to mimick a creme de l 'humanite, and we do it with such skill and guile we deceive nearly everyone, betimes even ourselves.

But we are not humans, and nearly everyone is not everyone. Those are the Others who hunt us still.