Amelia Kevrinhart reached into the four hundred degree oven and pulled out a sizzling pan of herb-roasted potatoes with her bare hands… and didn’t flinch.
She did gasp, but not from pain. The audiobook she’d been consuming on double speed had just hit a major plot twist, and her luminescent amber eyes grew to the size of dinner plates with excitement.
Amelia, you see, was a dragon shifter. Which explains not one, but two things.
First, the heat of the oven meant nothing to her. She’d pushed up the sleeves of her pale pink cardigan before reaching in, but only so she wouldn’t singe her cuffs. Her bare skin was not affected by the blistering temperatures.
Second, like all dragons, Amelia kept a hoard.
Some dragons hoard jewels, and others hoard swords. Back in the old days — before they’d learned what an implant of gold could do — many dragons hoarded golden treasure. That was out of fashion now, though, and the new “it” thing was hoarding various computer systems and cutting-edge software.
Amelia was different. She didn’t hoard stuff.
She hoarded stories.
If you visited her home in the suburbs of Valehaven and saw the floor-to-ceiling shelves of books on every wall, you could be forgiven for assuming she hoarded books. But what Amelia truly collected were the intangible tales that lived between those pages. Untouchable, but every bit as real to her.
Amelia had seen what physical hoards could do to a dragon. The way they bred greed and malice in the hearts of her older family members and turned them into shells of themselves. She didn’t want that — had never wanted that — and she’d already experienced quite enough loss in her life, thank you very much. So while she’d be sad if something terrible ever happened to her books, she wouldn’t be ruined by the loss the way another dragon might.
Traditionalists found her “imaginary” hoard strange, but Amelia didn’t care. She loved her stories, and when she shared them with her husband, Charles, he brought them to life with his illusions — which made her love them all the more.
When she wasn’t sharing stories with Charles, she shared them with their city. Amelia worked at the Valehaven Public Library and had an arsenal of cardigans to prove it. As if to match the vibe of cardigans, her human form was that of a soft, bookish woman with bright blond hair that fell in short, loose waves around her face. Her reflective, liquid-amber eyes were the most dragonish part of her human form, and they were framed with tiny crinkles that she’d earned prematurely from copying the expressions that book characters made while she read.
The front door clicked and creaked. Amelia smiled. She double-tapped her earbud to pause her book and rushed to the front door — to the only man who would ever make her happy to pause a book in the middle of a jaw-dropping development.
“Chuck!” she cried before throwing her arms around his neck and kissing him breathlessly.
“Hey Millie,” replied her husband against her lips. He slid an arm around her waist, and his tone turned sly. “You’ll never guess what I brought home for you.”
Amelia pulled back, eyes wide and hands resting on Charles’ chest. “Another story?!”
Charles grinned and bopped her nose. “You betcha, baby. Today we got the Sweetheart Siren, and you’ll never guess who it ended up being.”
Amelia squealed and punched the air with delight. Charles laughed. She wanted to hear the tale right away, but he insisted he needed a shower. So while he cleaned up, Amelia devoured another chapter of her audiobook.
Apparently, the protagonist had known about his father’s evil schemes all along, and had only been pretending to be mad in order to glean information and bring down the wicked king’s empire from within! Stellar stuff.
Charles emerged from his shower, wearing loose black sweatpants and a snug gray t-shirt that was darker in spots across his shoulders from the wetness of his dripping brown hair.
“Whodunit?” he asked, and Amelia beamed. The question was a small thing, but it showed her he genuinely cared about her and the things she found exciting. (Even if those things were fictional stories in fantasy worlds that didn’t really exist.)
Amelia set plates and forks on the table, then brought over two steaming cast-iron pans — one with steak, and the other with potatoes. “Turns out Prince Nerrum knew about the conspiracy the whole time and was actually just pretending to be crazy, but never mind that now. I want to hear your story!”
Charles smiled and began heaping food onto his plate. “Right,” he said, “well, you know how the Sweetheart Siren has been running that drug ring in Lower Valehaven down by the Mirror Ports?”
“Of course,” replied Amelia, who kept up to date on every article published by the Crypticonsortium – the political powerhouse that ruled Valehaven – as well as every work story her husband would share. There were some that he wasn’t willing to share, but only ever for good reason. Sometimes detective work required confidentiality. Other times it was too grisly for Amelia to stomach.
“Based on the leads we got, how would you describe the Siren?” asked Charles.
“Hmmm,” said Amelia, tapping her fork against her lip while she thought. “I’d say average height, but very curvy. Late-thirties. Red hair and redder lips. Super sultry.”
As she spoke, an illusion of her exact description materialized in front of them. The woman blinked heavily lidded eyes and glanced around the room as if bored. Her chest moved with illusory breath, and her hair even shifted slightly from the overhead fan. The only thing Charles couldn’t replicate were the sounds she would have made if she’d been real. Still, she looked so lifelike that had Amelia not been so used to her husband’s magic, she probably would have screamed from fright. Instead, she just nodded at the figure. “Yeah, like that,” she said, “but maybe a little more wily-looking in the eyes. She is a drug lord, after all.”
“Is she now?” asked Charles, face stoic, though his eyes sparkled mischievously.
Sweet, sweet portals. Those were the words of a man about to reveal a plot twist!
“Well, isn’t she?!” demanded Amelia.
“I wouldn’t exactly call the Siren a ‘she.’ Picture them a little more like… this.”
The bombshell of a woman before them expanded and distorted until standing before them was an absolute walrus of a man.
“What?!” gasped Amelia. “But you said even the Siren’s employees described them the way I did!”
“They did,” agreed Charles. “And turns out this guy’s one heck of a siren. They knew he wasn’t like that at all, but he made them so desperate for his approval that they were willing to describe him like this, even under oath. In fact, I think a few of the inner circle even started to believe it. Sarge expects those ones to plead magical insanity in court.”
“No!” gasped Amelia. “Tell me everything.” She rested her chin on her hands and stared at her husband with wide, expectant eyes. Her dinner lay utterly forgotten.
Charles chuckled and popped a large bite of steak into his mouth before obliging. He told his tale between bites of food, and wove an illusion while he talked, illustrating the story in exquisite detail for Amelia.
She almost felt like she was right there next to him as the sting went down, and adrenaline tickled her stomach in the most delightful way. In return, she was the perfect audience — gasping and groaning and laughing at all the right moments. There had likely never been a man whose wife was so genuinely interested in how his day had gone.
Later that night, Amelia reviewed her stories in her mind as she brushed her teeth and dressed in her blue donut pajamas — both the audiobook she’d listened to and the story Charles brought home. She had an excellent memory, but she didn’t want to miss a single detail, so she thought them both through very carefully before tucking them away in her Hoard and padding down the hallway from the bathroom to their bedroom.
She gritted her teeth as she passed the unremarkable second door on the left in the hallway.
Don’t look at it. Don’t think about it. Don’t dwell on what’s behind that locked door.
When she arrived at her own bedroom, Amelia breathed a sigh of relief and peeled her fingers from the fists they’d been trapped in. Glancing down, she noticed eight little half-moons of white imprinted into the palms of her hands from her nails. The back of her throat burned with grief, and she wished for something — the wrong thing — to ease the ache.
Maybe just one…
“No,” she said firmly. “It’s just a door, and it can’t hurt you.”
That was a stupid thing to say. She knew it was just a door… and it hurt her all the same.
Not tonight, though. She could do this. She could be strong enough.
Amelia forced herself to step into her own bedroom and noticed the dark, lumpy mass of her husband shifting slightly as he breathed deeply. She’d taken a while to get ready, and he’d clearly dozed off after his long day. His phone was still glowing softly in one of his hands, a word puzzle pinging to tell him it was his turn to lay a tile.
Amelia gently dislodged the phone from his hand and plugged it in. Then she double-checked her morning alarms, turned on the fan for white noise, and snuggled under the covers. Next to her, Charles’ snores faded for a moment as he reached out an arm to pull her in close.
“Love you, Mill,” he mumbled before lapsing into snores yet again.
Amelia yawned and felt her mouth twitch in a soft, sad smile. “I love you too, Chuck,” she replied, even though he couldn’t hear her.
Her eyes fluttered closed, and she was soon fast asleep.
