Read Online Lokant by Charlotte E. English - Free Book Online

just that instant thrown it open.
Her mother - beautiful and mussed, as always - said nothing for a
long moment, merely stared at her daughter. Llandry could not read
her expression.
    ‘ Llan, ’ she
gasped at last, as if drawing in air after long deprivation. Then
her arms went around Llandry and she clung to her.
    A thud sounded from
behind her, and a male voice cursed in a language long dead.
Llandry winced as her mother’s gaze moved to take in the stranger.
He had shifted out of his draykon form as she had, but his human
appearance could be alarming.
    ‘Er, Ma... this is
Pensould.’
    ‘Pensould,’ repeated
Ynara faintly.
    ‘My friend,’ Llandry
added.
    Ynara nodded.
Reluctantly, she let Llandry go and stood back to survey the
newcomer. She surveyed them both, in fact, her gaze lingering
longest on her daughter.
    ‘Is it true? I heard
that you - you -’
    Llandry interrupted, so
that her mother wouldn’t have to find the words. ‘Draykon,’ she
said with reverence. ‘It’s true, Ma.’
    Ynara’s eyes widened
and her honey-gold skin paled. Llandry bit her lip, holding her
breath as nerves danced within her. How could her mother possibly
understand?
    ‘Changed you may be,
but you’re still our Llan,’ Ynara murmured. ‘We thought you were
lost.’
    ‘I was,’ Llandry
replied, swallowing a lump that had materialised in her throat. ‘I
found my way back.’
    ‘This is your sire?’
came Pensould’s voice. ‘Dam?’
    ‘Mother,’ Llandry
corrected.
    Pensould’s gaze swept
over Ynara critically. The contrast between his pale eyes and his
ink-black hair still shocked Llandry a little whenever she looked
at him. As did the strikingly blue colour of the veins that showed
themselves through his stark white skin. Long hours she may have
spent in teaching him to Change, but he hadn’t yet fully mastered
his human form.
    He grabbed Llandry’s
arm and jerked her backwards, gripping her wrist possessively. ‘My
mate,’ he said to Ynara.
    Llandry suffered a
surge of annoyance. ‘No,’ she said to him distinctly. ‘I am not. I
told you not to say that.’
    He shook his head. ‘My
choice, not yours.’
    Ynara’s eyes narrowed.
She took Llandry’s free hand in hers and gently drew her away from
Pensould. ‘Why don’t you both come in?’ she said.
     
    Pensould was a true
draykon. He had never before taken human shape, and had little
understanding of what it meant. Human customs were beyond him, and
he had slept through most of human history. It had taken Llandry
some days to effect her transformation back into human form, and
considerably longer to teach the technique to Pensould. He wasn’t
particularly taking to it.
    Sitting with her mother
listening to Pensould speak, both his talents and his shortcomings
were equally obvious. He spoke Glinnish haltingly, and he revealed
his ignorance of her world with almost every sentence. But that he
could speak her tongue at all was remarkable; he remembered every
word that he heard and he seemed to have no difficulty
understanding their meaning. His progress was slower outside of the
Upper Realm, but still he was (she would have said) impossibly
quick. It was as though he absorbed the sense of their utterances
by some means other than a purely intellectual understanding of the
words themselves.
    ‘Soon, you will do that
too,’ Pensould informed her, interrupting himself.
    She blinked.
‘What?’
    He tapped her head,
hard. ‘Your senses are dull. Flat. Too human. But I can feel you
waking.’
    ‘Waking?’
    ‘Becoming more clever.
More draykon.’
    Llandry scowled. ‘I am
human.’
    Pensould smiled, a
rather frightening expression displaying too many teeth. ‘No.
Human-shaped outside, draykon inside.’
    ‘I can assure you,
Llandry is entirely human. I gave birth to her myself. I detected
no sharp teeth, no claws, no unusual proportions.’ Ynara kept her
voice steady and her eyes on Pensould.
    ‘Wings, though.’ He
grinned. ‘I have seen humans