QUOTE : Lora, beloved. Lora of the moon and sky. <i>You</i> are a dragon.”<br /><i>Ah</i>, sighed the fiend, swelling with delight inside me, filled with an awful, awful recognition. <i>Ah, ah! AH!</i><br />“That is <i>enough</i>,” I shouted over them both; rather, I tried to shout, but my voice was so strangled it came more as a gasp. “I don’t know what you’re playing at, but I don’t appreciate your games. I-I came here to tell you to stop pestering me, and leaving me gifts, and <i>smiling</i> at me-“<br />“You dream of flying,” Jesse said, which cut me off midsentence.<br />“Aye.” He nodded, shadows and gold, tall and warm and much too near. “I know all about it. I know all about you. You have wings at night. You lift as smoke. And you come to me, don’t you? Always to me.”<br />I could not reply. I could barely take a breath.<br /><i>This is a dream, this is all still a dream, it’s just a new part to the dream, that’s all-</i><br />“It’s why you’re here now, tonight. You’re drawn to me, as fiercely as I am to you. You didn’t even have to follow my song this time. I muted it, didn’t you notice? And you came anyway.”<br />For a long, long moment, I gave up on breathing. For a long, long moment, all I heard was my heartbeat and his, and a gull crying miles away, and the distant thunder of a German bomb exploding on innocent ground.<br />Jesse lifted a hand and placed it on my arm. His palm felt hot against the cotton of my sleeve, his fingers felt firm, and that rush of longing and pleasure that always overtook me at his touch began to build.<br />“Lora,” he whispered again, so quiet it was barely a sound. “Inhale.”<br />And when I did, he bent his head to kiss me.