Dragonswan.doc by Unknown Read Free Book Online

hundred
    sixty-three years old."
    Channon sat flabbergasted as she looked over his lean, hard body. He appeared to
    be in his early thirties, not his late four hundreds. "You're not joking with me at all,
    are you?"
    "Not even a little. Everything I have told you since the moment I met you has been
    the honest truth."
    "Oh, God," she said, breathing in slowly and carefully
    to calm the panic that was again trying to surface. She knew it was real, yet she had
    a hard time believing it. It boggled her mind that people could walk through time
    and that she could really be in the Dark Ages.
    Surely, it couldn't be this easy.
    "I know there has to be more of a downside to all this. And I'm pretty sure here's
    where I find out you're some kind of vampire or something."
    "No," he said quickly. "I'm not a vampire. I don't suck blood, and I don't do
    anything weird to sustain my life. I was born from my mother, just as you were. I
    feel the same emotions. I bleed red blood. And just like you, I will die at some
    unknown date in the future. I just come equipped with a few extra powers."
    "I see. I'm a Toyota. You're a Lambourghini, and you can have really awesome
    sex."
    He chuckled. "That's a good summation."
    Summation, hell. This was unbelievable. Inconceivable. How had she gotten mixed
    up with something like this?
    But as she looked up at him, she knew. He was compelling. That deadly air and
    animal magnetism-how could she have even hoped to resist him?
    And she wondered if there were more men out there like him. Men of power and
    magic. Men who were so incredibly sexy that to look at them was to burn for them.
    "Are there more of you?"
    "Yes."
    She smiled evilly at the thought. "A lot more?"
    He frowned before he answered. 'There used to be a lot more of us, but times
    change."
    Channon saw the sadness in his eyes, the pain that he kept inside. It made her hurt
    for him.
    He looked down at her. "That tapestry you love so much is the story of our
    beginning."
    "The birth of the dragon and the man?"
    He nodded. "About five thousand years before you were born, my grandfather,
    Lycaon, fell in love with a
    woman he thought was a human. She wasn't. She was born to a race that had been
    cursed by the Greek gods. She never told him who and what she really was, and in
    time she bore him two sons."
    Channon remembered seeing that birth scene embroidered on the upper left edge of
    the tapestry.
    "On her twenty-seventh birthday," he continued, "she died horribly just as all the
    members of her race die. And when my grandfather saw it, he knew his children
    were destined for the same fate. Angry and grief-stricken, he sought unnatural
    means to keep his children alive."
    Sebastian was tense as he spoke. "Crazed from his grief and fear, he started
    capturing as many of my grandmother's people as he could and began
    experimenting with them-combining their life forces with those of animals. He
    wanted to make a hybrid creature that wasn't cursed."
    "It worked?" she asked.
    "Better than he had hoped. Not only did his sorcery give them the animal's strength
    and powers, it gave them a life span ten times longer than that of a human."
    She arched a brow at that. "So you're telling me that you're a werewolf who lives
    seven or eight hundred years?"
    "Yes on the age, but I'm not a Lykos. I'm a Drakos."
    "You say that as if I have a clue about what you mean."
    "Lycaon used his magic to 'half his children. Instead of two sons, he made four."
    "What are you saying?" she asked. "He sliced them down the middle?"
    "Yes and no. There was a byproduct of the magic I don't think my grandfather was
    prepared for. When he combined a human and an animal, he expected his magic
    would create only one being. Instead, it made two of them. One person who held
    the heart of a human, and a separate creature whose heart was that of the animal.
    "Those who have human hearts are called Arcadians. We are able to suppress the
    animal side of our nature. To
    control it.