Chef proved to be a large older man with a twinkle in his bright eyes, a white mustache, and biceps the size of winebarrels. He welcomed Saina into his kitchen domain with the open-hearted kindness that she was beginning to accept was a genuine part of this odd resort and showed her the tasks that needed attention.

“Are you sure you are up to this?” he asked sincerely.

Saina rolled her shoulder, turning her head to look at the fading puckered scab. “It’s almost all healed,” she promised before diving into a soapy sink of dirty dishes.

He continued to regularly check in with her as he moved around the kitchen with busy authority, praising her attention to detail and generally encouraging her in an unexpected way. He sang as he worked, and it was surprising to Saina because it was without method or motive, just for the joy of it.

She joined him, because his pleasure in it was so addictive. She was careful to keep her magic dampened, and to keep her grief from coloring the counterparts she sang. It helped that Chef seemed to like happier tunes, skipping from Italian arias to folk songs as the mood struck him. Most of them weren’t songs that Saina knew, but she could improvise a harmony to almost anything, and after a few choruses could usually pick up on lyrics. Breck joined them for a few lines, as he moved in and out of the kitchen bussing tables and restocking and refreshing the buffet.

She was chopping tomatoes for that night’s dinner, singing the soprano to “Tonight” from West Side Story and forgetting for a while that she would be leaving very soon, when Bastian broke through her reverie.

Saina! He called her. Saina! I have your tribute! You will be mine!

Saina dropped the knife, snatching her hands out of the way in time to avoid disaster, and left it on the counter to answer the call. Judging by the way that Chef and Breck also startled, they’d heard Bastian’s imperious words, and they were at her heels when she came out of the back kitchen door to find a gigantic green dragon perched at the retaining wall.  

Her pink rolling carry-on case fell with a sodden thump at her feet.

I have won you, Bastian said, and his golden eyes were shot with glowing red.

Goldshot.

“You have done nothing of the sort, you idiot,” Saina could not stop herself from saying, and she saw Bastian flinch and then rear his head back in anger to flame into the air.

She recognized his irrational anger and the unnatural glow to his eyes and scales. She didn’t for a moment fear for her own self, but she knew that Bastian would lose his real self if she didn’t do anything, and she cast desperately for something she could do to free him as she opened her mouth.

Her grandmother’s words came back to her, and she drew power not from her belly, but from her heart. She focused all of her unpredictable magic into the idea of leaching the personality-altering drug from his system. She had to draw out the poison, sing it from his very veins. Not sure it would work, she poured her magic into her song.

Let it go,

Let it die,

Let it out,

Let it fly…

When the last note died away, Saina waited to see if it had worked.

Bastian remained perched on the retaining wall, swaying slightly, and she panted, every muscle in her body aching from the effort.

Chef and Breck looked from one of them to the other, baffled.

Bastian shook his big head and just as Saina was drawing in breath to try another song, he blinked and the remaining red in his eyes faded away. He seemed to draw into himself, suddenly much smaller and less glittery, but there was only a brief moment to observe his dragon before he shifted into a man. Then he was Bastian, vaulting down from the retaining wall to kneel at her feet.

“Saina,” he said. “I… don’t understand what happened. I’m so sorry.”

“You should be,” Saina said furiously. “You don’t own me and you never will, but more than that, you are an utter fool.”

He looked up at her in consternation.

“Do you have any idea what is in that suitcase?” she demanded.

He started to reach for it, and she quickly said, “No, don’t touch it!” She crouched next to it and unzipped it, flinging the lid back to reveal a sodden, dissolved gray mass in a slurry of half-empty plastic wrappers. “This is goldshot.”

Bastian, poor sweet, innocent Bastian, looked across the luggage at her with no understanding at all.

“Goldshot is what got that French dragon eliminated from the World Mr. Shifter contest,” Breck supplied, snapping his fingers with the memory.

“It’s a drug,” Saina added. “A terrible, expensive designer drug that only works on dragons. You probably absorbed several doses of it getting that close to the stuff dissolving underwater.”

“I was a real dragon,” he said achingly, standing up and wrapping arms around himself. “For a little while I was a real dragon. A dragon of fire and strength.”

“You are a real dragon,” Saina told him firmly, standing to face him. “And I love you just the way you are, the way you really are, not the trumped up ball of muscle and ego that the goldshot makes you.”

He squinted at her, like he was struggling through the worst hangover of his life. He probably was.

“You love me?” he said plaintively.

Saina sighed. “Yes, dammit.” It hurt to admit, and felt good at the same time, like pulling off an old scab.

Bastian grinned at her lopsidedly through his pain. “You are my mate.”

“I’m not,” she insisted, but weakly. She wasn’t entirely sure of anything anymore. “You shouldn’t trust your feelings for me.”

“This is not a spell,” Bastian insisted. “I know what false confidence feels like now, and that is not what I feel for you.”

“I should have brought popcorn,” Breck told Chef. “This is better than the Spanish soaps!”

“That’s only because you don’t speak Spanish,” Chef hissed back. “And you’re too lazy to read the subtitles.”

“What would convince you?” Bastian asked, ignoring them.

His question was meant seriously, Saina realized, he wasn’t just speaking metaphorically about having her set an impossible quest for him to complete.

“Time,” she said thoughtfully. “Time away. My magic wears off if I don’t renew it. But…” she swallowed. “I don’t trust myself not to cast again, without meaning to. I have never loved anyone before. I don’t know how to do it without magic.”

Chef and Breck both made suspicious sniffling noises, and Saina glared in their direction.