Xenon was fighting with Fensa again. Pleading with her to understand why he’d sent her away. Imploring her for the forgiveness she hadn’t granted him in nearly a thousand years of entreaty.

“I am begging you, Fensa.”

“Begging me?” she answered with a hissing scoff. “Begging me as I begged you before you spoke the words to send me back?”

“Reverence?” A voice appeared inside his mind, along with a cherished memory of how his title had sounded upon her tongue. The voice almost sounded like…

He shook his head. It could not be. Fensa had learned his drakkon language, and even if she hadn’t, she hated him too much to engage in mind speak with him.

“I sent you back because I loved you,” he continued out loud. “Because I needed to give you and our son the best chance of survival.”

“Reverence!” The voice-memory said again.

But then Fensa interrupted the voice-memory with her sneering reply, “Hmm, was it that you wanted me to live, or were you just too cowardly to watch me die? For all you know, I’m locked away in a mental asylum now. If I survived the birthing of twins—and that’s a big “if”—my babies were probably taken from me. You’re not even sure what year I returned to, or what year it is right now. For all you know, I could already be back, living in a hell you consigned me to!”

“REVERENCE!” This time the call was accompanied by a fierce shaking of his shoulders.

The feel of another’s skin on his startled him more than the shaking. Fensa sat on him. Often, she’d let her lips hover over his, mercilessly taunting him. But she never touched him in any real or unnecessary way. However, these were hands. Real hands, which he hadn’t felt in hundreds of years.

Inside his mind, the voice-memory said, “Look at me, Reverence. Look at me!”

Xenon looked at her. Only to start. Because he found a woman squatting down in front of him. A woman he might have mistaken for Fensa, except she had long, flowing curls and was not nearly as thin as Fensa had been when he saw her last.

“You mean when you sent me away!” Fensa corrected, still standing her ground in her favorite place to argue with him. Close enough so he could see every line of her face, but not close enough to touch. “Don’t act like parting was such sweet sorrow when you’re the one who sent me away!”

“I did it in the hopes that you might live! Please forgive me!” He turned his head to plead with her again—but a hand gripped his chin, yanking his head back to face the woman squatting in front of him.

The woman’s head came forward and rested against his in reverent greeting, as the voice in his mind said, “Reverence, it’s me, Fensa. Do you remember me? Know who I am?”

Of course, he remembered Fensa. But this woman could not be her. Fensa hated him and spent all his waking hours telling him so. This woman was looking upon him with shining eyes, her yellow flame sparking with both fear and pity.

“No, you are not her,” Xenon informed the woman. “You are but a cruel trick. An actress my cousin has paid to torture me further.”

“I don’t understand your dragon language. For me, it’s only been three months since I saw you last. You’ve got to speak into my mind. Who are you talking to, Reverence? Tell me. Let me help you!”

Fensa’s chortling laugh sounded then. “Oh, isn’t this fun? Now you will have two of us to help you remember what a terrible acolyte you were.”

He turned back to the angry Fensa. “I tried to be a good acolyte to you, Fensa. I wanted your happiness more than my own. I loved you above all others. Don’t you see?”

The woman squatting in front of him jerked, her flame flickering with confusion. “What that my name you just said? In Drakkon? Do you think there’s more than one of me in this room?”

“Y-yes. Two of you. But you are new. The other Fensa has been with me in this chamber for centuries,” he answered in Drakkon.

But despite her claims not to understand his language, her head flame flooded with sudden understanding.

“Widower’s madness…” she whispered inside his mind. “Is this what’s going on, Reverence? You have the same thing your father had?”

Xenon hadn’t heard the term in so long, it took him several moments to remember back to that time. When he and Fensa had spoken of his father’s suffering.

Which was not the same as his own…was it? “Fensa hates me. She has hated me for 15,000 years,” told the newcomer in Drakkon. “Maybe more.”

“Yes, exactly!” Angry Fensa hissed in his language. “You wish I could ever forgive you! But I will never forgive you for what you did. Do you hear me? I will never forgive—”

“Is she real?” the voice inside his head abruptly cut Angry Fensa off.

And he found himself once again looking at the woman in front of him. Her flame burned so prettily. Exactly as he’d remembered from that fateful morning…before his announcement had turned it red with anger and reproach. His cousin had chosen well. He much preferred this pretender to the Fensa who had been haunting him for centuries.

“You don’t think I’m real,” she observed, looking deep into his eyes. “But is she real? Did you ask her? Like, actually ask her?”

This question gave Xenon pause as he realized he never had.

“Ask her,” the woman demanded now. “Ask her if she’s real.”

He shook his head. He couldn’t trust this pretender. Didn’t know how long his cousin would allow this cruel trick to play out. But he’d rather be haunted by the ghost of Fensa than left alone in this room by the one pretending to be her.

“Oh, Reverence…” the voice said inside his head. But then a note as hard as the steel that bound his wrist entered her tone as she asked, “Where is she? Point her out to me. I want to talk to her.”

Xenon thought about this. Then raised his free arm to where Fensa always lingered.

The woman stood. Pointed. “Over here?” she asked, coming to a stop directly in front of his tormentor.

Angry Fensa gave the pretender a wide smile that in no way matched her cold blue flame. “Isn’t this priceless? He thinks you’re real! Like, you would ever come back to him after what he did—”

Fensa ceased speaking when the pretender suddenly produced a sharp knife. A women’s dagger from the Viking era, Xenon vaguely recognized from a time when he still walked free upon the earth.

“I’m confronting you,” was all the warning his tormentor got before the pretender stabbed her in the gut. Again and again and again, like a movie about prisoners he’d once watched on the box Damianos brought him.

Fensa shrieked in what sounded like abject pain. But then she was gone as if she’d never been there at all.

“Something you told me once before,” the voice said inside his head as the woman who’d stabbed Angry Fensa walked back over to where he was sitting. “You have to confront delusions. I mean, not necessarily stab them, but I happened to have my grandmother’s knife, and I figured why not give it a try while she stood there, trying to talk greasy, as my Michigan grandpa says. Speaking of grandparents…”

Fensa reached up to a medallion around her neck. What appeared to be half a wolf and half a man, cut at a jagged angle. He soon found out why when she manipulated both the wolf and the man, and broke the circle into two distinct pieces. “False key disguised as a necklace. This is what my grandfather used to break out of a jail cell when he came forward in time. Nowadays, most changing cells are on electronic locks, but if this manacle is as old as I think it is…”

A muted clank sounded then. It was the sound of the lock disengaging. A wingbeat later, for the first time in years, his arm fell to the side of his body, limp with atrophy.

The pretender took his arm and immediately began to massage it. In a way that felt so good, he didn’t have the heart to remind her as he had once or twice back in the ice age that his shell was also his medical suit. With a few sleep hours, his shell would take care of all healing, including the muscle atrophy.

Remind her…he shook his head. The confusion beginning to fade, now that Angry Fensa had been stabbed out of the room. And maybe out of existence.

He began pushing words into another mind for the first time in thousands of years. “Are you…? Are you real? Really my Fensa?”

A beat passed. And she once again filled up his vision. Though her eyes were shining bright with tears, the voice inside his head somehow sounded sunny and bright as it answered, “Reverence.”

He stared back at her, confused by her answer.

“You may call me by any of my titles: Reverence, Fated Mate, Great Wolf Mother—even Female 7-133. Because I am real. I am not a delusion. I am your wolf, and you are my dragon. And I will not hear my given name upon your lips ever again. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” he pushed into her head after a long, confused moment. “I understand.”

“Good,” she said, cupping his cheek. “And are you still my dragon?”

He nodded and used his non-atrophied arm to cup her cheek as best he could.

And just like the mate he remembered, she nuzzled into it, giving his palm a soft kiss, before placing it over her heart. “Good,” she said again. But now her throat flame, like the one in her chest, burned yellow with emotion.

They kept this position for several minutes. Him sitting, her squatting, neither of them wanting to look away for fear of losing each other again.

Then she said, “Next question. Can you still fly?”

“Yes…yes, I can,” he replied in her head. “This is but a shell, remember? It is also a medical suit of sorts. While my arms, legs, and wings atrophied over the centuries, this suit has been busily repairing those muscles, making them good as new.”

“Okay, good, good, good,” Fensa said with a nod. “Now last but definitely not least important question: what are we going to do about him?”

Fensa turned, and Xenon followed her gaze to where his cousin’s elderly manservant stood in the doorway, mouth hanging open.