Two Mates For The Dragon Anthology

Zoe Chant Lauren Esker Elva Birch

Juno Blake Harriet Bell Larkin Dailey
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmeta.com/product/two-mates-for-the-dragon-anthology-zoe-chant-lauren
-esker-elva-birch-juno-blake-harriet-bell-larkin-dailey/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

A Dragon for Christmas 1st Edition Zoe Chant

https://ebookmeta.com/product/a-dragon-for-christmas-1st-edition-
zoe-chant/

Bear for the Holidays Zoe Chant

https://ebookmeta.com/product/bear-for-the-holidays-zoe-chant/

The Dragon Prince s Betrayal Royal Dragons of Alaska

Book 6 1st Edition Elva Birch

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-dragon-prince-s-betrayal-royal-
dragons-of-alaska-book-6-1st-edition-elva-birch/

Unicorn Marshal U S Marshal Shifters Book 6 1st Edition

Zoe Chant

https://ebookmeta.com/product/unicorn-marshal-u-s-marshal-
shifters-book-6-1st-edition-zoe-chant/
Dragon Blood 0 5 Dragon Rider from Beginnings anthology
Lindsay Buroker

https://ebookmeta.com/product/dragon-blood-0-5-dragon-rider-from-
beginnings-anthology-lindsay-buroker/

Queen and the Kingsmen Dark Fantasy Book 3 2nd Edition

Alta Hensley Zoe Blake

https://ebookmeta.com/product/queen-and-the-kingsmen-dark-
fantasy-book-3-2nd-edition-alta-hensley-zoe-blake/

Red and the Wolves Dark Fantasy Book 2 2nd Edition Alta
Hensley Zoe Blake

https://ebookmeta.com/product/red-and-the-wolves-dark-fantasy-
book-2-2nd-edition-alta-hensley-zoe-blake/

Snow and the Seven Huntsmen Dark Fantasy Book 1 2nd

Edition Alta Hensley Zoe Blake

https://ebookmeta.com/product/snow-and-the-seven-huntsmen-dark-
fantasy-book-1-2nd-edition-alta-hensley-zoe-blake/

Snow and the Seven Huntsmen Dark Fantasy Book 1 1st

Edition Zoe Blake Alta Hensley

https://ebookmeta.com/product/snow-and-the-seven-huntsmen-dark-
fantasy-book-1-1st-edition-zoe-blake-alta-hensley/
TWO MATES FOR THE DRAGON

MFM PARANORMAL ROMANCE ANTHOLOGY

ZOE CHANT LAUREN ESKER LARKIN DAILEY ELVIRA BIRCH

JUNO BLAKE HARRIET BELL

 CONTENTS

Author’s Note

LAUREN ESKER
Heart of Stone

ELVIRA BIRCH
The Neighbours Might Talk

ZOE CHANT
The Dragon’s Choice

JUNO BLAKE
Never Get Between a Dragon and his Treasure

HARRIET BELL
Dragon Rising

LARKIN DAILEY
Penny, Clover, Rabbit Foot
 AUTHOR’S NOTE

Thank you for reading this collection! All profits from it will be
donated to OutRight Action International, which works to protect the
human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex
people across the world.
 HEART OF STONE

LAUREN ESKER

The turn off the highway was easy to miss, a gravel road marked
only by a wooden sign, half buried in brush, reading Monument Hot
Springs. Tess overshot it on the first try, even after carefully studying
the guidebook in their hotel in Whitehorse that morning. They were
beyond the range of cell service here; her phone had stopped giving
her directions forty kilometers back.
She stopped on a wide place in the road—there weren't many
proper turnouts here—and got out of the car. The gravel underfoot
would do in a pinch, but there was a rocky outcropping along the
road that was much better for what she needed.
David woke with a jerk as she parked. "What ..." he mumbled.
He looked weak and pale, strands of brown hair straggling on his
sweat-damp forehead. He was visibly getting worse now by the day.
"Are we there?"
"I just need to check directions." She leaned over to press her
cheek lightly against his hot, feverish one. "Go back to sleep."
She walked swiftly to the outcrop, a short nondescript woman
with a cap of dark curls and a man's shirt rolled up at the sleeves.
She laid both hands against the rock and let herself sink into it.
It was harder than usual to sense the pulse of the land beneath
her. She'd been afraid of that. This land itself was hostile to her; the
rock did not want her here. She pushed harder, forcing herself
through the barriers holding her back—and regretting it even as she
did so, knowing she wasn't being a proper guest, but she simply
didn't have a choice.
These were young rocks, as rocks went: basalt and quartz and
granite, thrust up in geologically recent times from the furnace at
the heart of the earth. There had been volcanic eruptions here in the
not-too-distant past, only a millennium or two. She could still sense
the traces of the resulting ash layer, buried in the thin, silty soil
under the spruce trees around them.
And she could sense the hot springs, to the south and west. The
land was even more inimical to her there. She let go with a shiver
that went deep down into her bones.
There would be a price for what she was trying to do, a bitter
and brutal one.
But there was always a cost for everything.
When she went back to the car, David was sitting up, studying
the map at the back of the Yukon guidebook with glazed eyes that
he kept blinking as if he found it hard to focus. Although it was a
warm day and the air was close inside the car, he was huddled in his
leather jacket. Tess tried to keep from staring at the black traceries
visible on the surface of his skin above the collar, creeping up his
neck, reaching around to the base of his skull.
"We missed it," she said, forcing her voice steady. "Back around
the last turn, I think. Somewhere in there."
"Yeah, it's back—back ..." His words faltered; he seemed to
forget what he'd been saying. Tess started the car and turned off the
AC. She rolled down her window instead.
"Tess?" When she turned his way, David's soft brown eyes, glassy
with pain and fever, searched her face. "You doing okay?"
He was worried about her, in spite of it all. She threw the car in
gear with more force than was necessary. "I'm fine. Drink some
water."
He didn't argue, just reached—with his left hand—for the bottle
tucked into the drink holder. His hand shook and water slopped onto
the seat between them, onto his leg and the gloved right hand
curled and immobile in his lap. "Fuck," David muttered.
"It was the road; these potholes—"
"Don't," David said harshly. He mopped at his leg with his sleeve.
Tess looked away, studying the scrubby willows and spruce along
the road. She spotted the sign this time, looking just like the one in
the guidebook. As she turned carefully onto the narrow, rutted road,
she noticed that the neat lettering was burned into the wood of the
sign, seared in black as if handwritten in flame.
She shivered.
"I'm sorry," David said quietly. "I'm just—"
"Don't. You have nothing to apologize for."
"I've been a jerk lately. I know it."
She put a hand on his leg. He curled his fingers over it.
"How are you feeling?" she asked. "Do you need more
morphine?"
He shook his head. "I'd rather save what I have."
They didn't have that much left. She had a feeling he didn't mean
for the pain, and bit down hard on her bottom lip until the stinging
in her eyes went away.
"This is going to work," she said, in a firm voice that left no room
for doubts.
David gave her the lopsided smile that was the first thing she'd
fallen for, back when she was determined with all her heart and soul
not to fall at all, and reached into the mess of loose coins and gum
wrappers in the car's change tray to retrieve a quarter. "Want to
bet?"
Tess bit her lip again, tasting blood. "I don't want to bet on that,"
she said. "Let's bet on ... whether the road bends left or right after
that turn up there. I say right."
"I think you have an unfair advantage."
"I can't sense the road up ahead. I can't sense much of anything
right now."
"Left it is, then."
David fell asleep again before they could settle who'd won the
bet. Tess eased the car over ruts deep enough that she'd heard their
underside scrape bottom, trying not to wake him.
The road wound through conifers and scrubby birch and willow,
crossed a rushing stream on a rickety-looking wooden bridge, and
finally passed through an arch made of polished wood, gleaming in
the late sun. She still couldn't get used to the way the sun stayed up
so late here; her watch said it was after 8 p.m., her body thoroughly
confused by the many time zones they'd crossed recently. She was
worried the hot springs would be closed. But there was an OPEN
sign in the window of the long wooden lodge building, and from
beyond it, a cloud of steam rose toward the cloud-flecked sky.
Tess parked in the gravel lot. She got out quietly, closing the
driver's door with care. David could rest while she looked around
and checked them into the hotel.
There was the usual deep quiet and sense of cessation of
movement that follows a long car trip, in this case made more
noticeable because the place itself was so rural and quiet. The lodge
and its outbuildings formed a rough "U" shape around the parking
lot. Beyond the main buildings, she glimpsed cabins at the edge of
the trees. Behind them, the land rose quickly into a hillside and then
a cliff, leaning over the resort as if to embrace it ... or crush it.
She needed to check in, she needed to get David into a proper
bed, but she understood how these things were done, and she knew
there was a more important introduction to be made first, if they
were going to stay here at all. Therefore, rather than going into the
lodge, she followed a path around back of it. The sound of rushing
water drew her onward.
In back of the lodge, the ground dropped away sharply. A steep
path with stairs and handrails led down the rocks to a series of
steaming pools, each a jewel of brilliant, startling green-tinged blue.
The nearer pool had some families splashing in it, and was so
shallow that it barely came up to the adults' waists. The water
dropped in a short waterfall—five feet or so, barricaded with a
locked metal gate—into the next pool, where a large sign read 18+ -
NO MINORS BEYOND THIS POINT.
Tess followed a well-worn path around the top of the rock
amphitheater above the pools, past a sign warning CAREFUL -
BEWARE OF SUDDEN EDGE. A metal railing affixed to posts
hammered into the rock at regular intervals provided a measure of
security, or at least it should have. Under normal circumstances, the
rock underfoot would've kept her feeling steady and secure. But
instead there was a sense of instability, as if the rocks might shrug
her off at any moment, just for the fun of it.
From up here she could see the entire hot springs, a string of five
pools in all. The top one was the wide, shallow family pool. Below it,
the other pools nestled among the rocks. They were nearly deserted,
with just a handful of visitors sunning themselves on rocks or
soaking in the curiously green water.
Tess paused at an interpretive sign beside a bench, explaining
about hot springs with diagrams that she only glanced at. She rested
a hand on the guardrail as the smell of the hot springs, a mix of wet
rocks and sulfur, tickled the nostalgia centers of her brain with a mix
of pleasure and longing.
"You are not welcome here."
The low voice sent a shudder through her as she turned.
She wasn't sure what she'd expected a dragon to look like, but
she was pretty sure that it hadn't been this: a tall, muscular man
wearing a T-shirt and jeans and clay-caked boots, looking like any
rural logger or farmer, someone who clearly worked with his hands.
His skin was dark bronze, his black hair swept back from a high
forehead, and black eyes were fixed on her with an intensity that felt
like a palpable heat. She didn't need to ask if he was the one she
sought, any more than he needed to ask who she was.
He carried an axe loosely in one work-gloved hand, and there
were bits of bark and grass stains on his T-shirt. He'd been clearing
brush, Tess told herself, and forced herself to stand her ground, all
too aware that there was nothing at her back except the long plunge
to the hot springs.
Ancestral enemies they might be, but she couldn't help thinking:
If I weren't a married woman, I'd bang that like a screen door.
Instead she said, through lips that were dry for more than one
reason, "I come because I need your help, Verdegris, lord of fire."
 Anger blazed in his fierce black eyes. "What is the matter with
you? Do not speak that name here."
"No, of course not, I ..." She wanted to apologize; she knew
what it was to hide from the human world. But faced with his disdain
and his heat, the aura of power that surrounded him, his sheer
masculine intensity, she found that she simply couldn't think. Her
carefully marshaled arguments fell apart, and all she could do was
struggle to keep herself together.
"And what makes you think I would help one of your kind?"
Verdegris, or whatever he was calling himself in this place, asked her
coldly.
"Because I'm here," she said, the words tumbling out carelessly
in a way her mother would have slapped her for, "I'm here with
David—with David Monaghan. Your David Monaghan."

This woman smelled like cold rock, old rock. Verdigris had felt her
presence as soon as she entered his lands, the way he would have
sensed one of his own kind—but different, a dissonance among the
harmonies of basalt and quartz and ancient lava flows that sang to
him from deep in the earth.
He had expected her fierceness, the sharp glitter in her stone-
gray eyes. She looked small, but she would be strong. Oreiads—rock
nymphs—always were. And he had expected her beauty, because all
nymphs were beautiful; he was steeled to resist it.
But he had not expected her solidity and strength. Though she
was small, there was nothing delicate about her. She was as earthy
and solid as the rocks that had given birth to her. And he had
certainly never expected that name dropping from her lips.
"How do you know—"
"How do you think?" she asked simply. "He's in the car. He needs
you. Come on."
And with that, she set out with a rapid, ground-eating stride
despite her short legs, back the way she'd come. Verdegris was in
the uncomfortable and altogether unwanted position of having to
break into a trot to catch up, on his very own lands. Trust David to
find himself a troublesome woman like this one.
David ...
"Child of stone—" he began.
"My name is Tess."
"Is it?" he asked harshly, challenging. "That sounds like a human
name. Is it your real one?"
"It's short for Thessaly," she said, somewhat petulantly, and he
began to realize she was much younger than he'd thought at first.
No wonder she'd lost her composure when confronted with the full
power of a dragon at the heart of his territory; she might actually be
the same age as her human face suggested, just a few decades at
most. As rare as his kind were in the modern world, she might never
have met a dragon before.
"If you don't go by—" She broke off before speaking his true
name again, and instead asked, "What do you call yourself here?"
"Verd Torvald."
"David said you used to be called Vincent."
How much had David told her? He was suddenly, irrationally
jealous. A vivid sense-memory shivered through him, of David's
touch on his heated skin, David's body against his—
Back when they were nearly equals. Back before he came into his
own as an adult dragon, and a hundred lifetimes of memories
poured into him, like a torrent of lava burning away everything he'd
been before. Everyone he'd loved before, from his foster parents to
the Monaghans' son down the road.
"Then he must have told you I'm no longer the person he knew.
I don't know what help he expects from me."
They had been walking toward the lodge, following the path
around the rimrock. Now she stopped and spun around, reaching
out to take Verdigris's arm. He looked down in surprise. Even normal
humans shied away from touching him since he'd come into his
power as an adult. They sensed the danger in him, even if they
didn't know what they felt. And this woman knew what he was, so
she also knew how dangerous he was.
 But she not only didn't hesitate to touch him, she actually pushed
him a step back. He'd been right about how strong she was.
"He is dying, Verd," she said, her voice as cold as the rock he
sensed inside her.
"What?" The word was startled out of him.
"He didn't even want to come here. I talked him into it, I thought
maybe you could help. I certainly couldn't think of anything else to
try."
"Why—" he began. Now it was his turn to be caught wrong-
footed. She still had hold of his arm, and he was caught between
anger and a strange, raw hurt that David hadn't thought he would
help, even though it should be true. "Why," he tried again. "Why do
you think I could—"
"Because it was one of your kind that did this to him," she said,
letting him go with a shove.
"What?"
"I'll explain when you see David. Just ..." Her anger melted, and
he was surprised by the depths of feeling that he saw in her gray
stormcloud eyes. "Just, will you take a look at him, please? For
whatever you two shared, back then."
Verd managed to gather the shreds of his dignity around him. "If
David told you what happened between us, then he must have told
you how it ended. I don't feel what I once felt anymore." Liar. "I
have a hundred generations of my ancestors' memories; one love
affair from a single lifetime can't possibly—"
"Nothing?" She scowled, as if she could see straight through his
obfuscations. "Nothing at all? You're just going to let him die out
there in the parking lot, then?"
"God, woman," he muttered.
"Just look at him. That's all I'm asking. It'll take five minutes.
Verdegris. Please."
Verd was starting to understand what David, with all his fire and
determination, had seen in her. Did David even know what she was?
he wondered. Possibly he thought she was an ordinary human
woman. But ... no, David had told her about Verd's true nature; he
must surely know hers.
 "So that's how it's going to be," she muttered, mistaking his
hesitation for denial. "Fine. I'll tell David you were too much of a
coward to help."
Anger flared in him along with the inner rustling of wings, the
stirring of his dragon—but she turned on her heel and strode away
before he could say anything.
Verd dropped the axe beside the path and followed her, both
angry and curious. For such a small creature, she moved fast,
vanishing around the corner of the lodge. He caught up in the
parking lot, where she was opening the door of a dust-covered silver
car with US plates, leaning down to speak to the man in the
passenger seat.
And Verdegris hesitated.
He had no reason to fear seeing David Monaghan again, he told
himself. No reason that should matter. He didn't feel those things
anymore. He bore a hundred generations of ancestral memories,
seething in his mind. There was no room for David anymore.
But now Tess had her arm around the man in the car, helping
him out, and recognition struck Verd to his core.
David should have changed more since Verd had seen him. It
seemed unfair—it had been fifteen years, after all, and he'd
changed, and humans were supposed to be a more changeable kind
than his own.
But it was still David: the floppy brown hair, the lanky body now
draped on Tess's shorter frame, the lines of his face that Verd had
once traced with fingers and lips. There were a few fine lines around
his eyes now, crinkling as he gave a pained smile to something Tess
had said—and that hurt, it hurt, that she'd had so many more of his
smiles, could still coax them out, even now ...
Because it was clear that something was badly wrong with him.
David moved as if his very bones hurt, and he slumped against the
side of the car as Tess supported him, giving the impression that he
didn't even have the strength to stand unaided.
And there was something about him that Verd could sense even
from here. Something off, a sickness, a poison.
 One of your kind, Tess had said, and his chest clenched:
righteous anger at the unfairness of the accusation, mingled with
guilt. He could believe a lot of things of a nature nymph, but he
didn't think she was lying. A dragon had hurt David, infected him
with something that was even now spreading and growing,
threatening to consume him.
Tess murmured something to David and nudged him, and David
looked up.
Verd had forgotten how expressive David's face was. It had
always reflected his emotions like a mirror, and that was still true
now—surprise and wonder, then a soft nervous warmth that was
harder to take by far than the anger and resentment Verd had
expected.
He had to look away, turning his gaze on the oreiad. Her face
was challenging and hard; he found her dislike easier to cope with
than the warmth and fondness that was still reflected in David's
eyes.
"Take a room. The best that's available. Tell the clerk you're here
with me and they won't charge you," he said, biting off the words
before he could regret them more than he already did.
Something flashed deep in her eyes. "You'll help him?"
"I didn't say that," he said, his voice as hard as he could make it,
and turned away, walked away, forcing himself not to look back at
David, in that woman's arms.

"He's a jerk."
Lying on the bed in their room, David couldn't help smiling at
Tess's indignation, despite the pain that the morphine hardly dulled
anymore. "You've only seen what he wants you to see, so far."
"Okay, fine, so he wants me to know he's a jerk. That doesn't
really help. And he's been completely useless, anyway."
The curtains were drawn and the lights in the room were off
except for a single lamp, so all he could see of Tess at the moment
was a mobile shadow that went in and out of focus as she paced,
from the bedside table with the lamp around to the window side of
the bed and back again. It made him smile again, thinking of how
still she'd seemed when he'd first met her. Still, calm, cool. It was
only later that he'd learned how fiery and passionate she could be.
She reminded him a lot of Verd, something he'd never realized
until recently. He suspected neither of them would appreciate the
comparison.
"So I guess we're supposed to sit here in the room until His
Highness decides to pay us a visit," Tess muttered. "They don't even
have room service here. What kind of hotel doesn't have room
service?"
"One in the middle of nowhere, run by a dragon. You could go
down and get something to eat."
She looked suddenly, terribly hopeful. "Are you hungry?"
"A little bit."
Tess grimaced. "I can tell when you lie. Don't forget that."
"Okay, so the idea of eating makes me feel sick, but I know that
I need it. Think you could bring something up for us?"
Tess looked like she wanted to argue, but couldn't think of a
good counter-argument. "All right. Do you want anything specific?
I'd better get down there before the kitchen closes for the night."
"Just see what they have. Some soup, maybe."
She leaned down to kiss him, long and lingering, and squeezed
his hand before leaving the room.
His body wanted to drag him back down into sleep. His entire life
had been weakness and exhaustion lately, and sleep at least offered
a temporary escape from the pain. But he fought to stay awake, and
was rewarded a moment later when the door to their room clicked
quietly open and a tall shadow slipped inside, pausing just within,
one hand on the half-open door as if prepared for a hasty retreat.
"Verd," David said quietly, and the tall shadow flinched. "I didn't
think you'd come in if she was here." Typical Verd, avoiding any
situation he didn't want to deal with.
Verd hesitated, then let the door click shut behind him.
 "Think you could come closer?" David asked. "It's hard to have a
conversation if I can't see someone's face."
"I wasn't going to come here at all."
Verd's voice was soft, a quiet husky rasp, achingly familiar.
"Neither was I." David couldn't help laughing; it ended in a
cough.
There was movement in the room, and the bed sank under
Verd's weight. Strong fingers supported David's neck, cool against
his overheated skin, lifted his head while Verd held a glass of water
to his lips. David took a few sips, fumbling weakly to get his own
hands on the glass, but Verd took it away before he had a chance to
get hold of it.
"So how've you been," David said when he got his breath back.
Verd eased him back against the pillows, but Verd's hand still cupped
the back of his neck, showing no inclination to pull away. "You catch
up on Game of Thrones? I think you'd like it."
"The dragons were not to my taste. I preferred the books." Verd
sounded distant. He picked up one of David's hands in his strong,
cool fingers and turned it over.
"Yeah? I'm a 'movie before book' guy, myself." David looked
down, as best he could, at his own arms in the sweater Tess had
helped put on him. Verd had turned his hand over and he knew he
shouldn't have been surprised to see that the black signs of
corruption showed on his palms now.
"Your oreiad said—"
"Her name is Tess," David interrupted. "She's my wife."
"She said that one of my kind did this to you."
"That's not quite accurate—" David began, but Verd had already
pushed up his sweater sleeve. There was no hiding it now, the tattoo
on the inside of his wrist, a rod and a snake inside a circle.
"You joined them," Verd said. His voice was flat. "You joined the
dragonslayers."
"That's not what they do. Look, you and I both know there are
dangerous things out there in the world." David huffed out a breath
and jerked his hand out of Verd's loose grasp so he could push
himself up in the bed. He couldn't have this conversation lying flat
on his back. "Basilisks, wyverns, hellhounds, all kinds of things.
People don't know. They're in danger. And I knew enough about it to
be useful—"
"Things I told you. Things you decided to use to hunt my kind."
"They're not—Look." David blew out a breath and ran a shaky
hand through his hair. "I'm not even with the Hunters anymore,
okay? It was a ... a rebellion thing, I guess. I was young and
reckless, and angry at you—"
"So you ran off to hunt dragons."
Verd's voice was still flat, but there was a sharp edge of pain in
it.
"Look, I'm not going to deny I hooked up with the Hunters for
awhile, or even that it had something to do with being angry at you.
But there, I could be useful. I could use what I knew to help people.
To protect people."
"Protect humans, you mean."
"Protect everyone," David said, anger flaring now through the
sick weariness. "That's how I met Tess. There was a basilisk on her
mountain, poisoning the land, making the dryads sick—and yeah,
there are still dryads in Greece, a few of them. That was about the
time I quit the Hunters. I've been freelancing off and on, since then.
Helping out where I can."
"And hence ... this." Verd traced a finger down the back of
David's hand, sending a shiver through him. "What did this? Another
basilisk?"
"No. I don't even know what it was. It was dragonlike, but it was
something I'd never fought before, in the American Southwest.
There are a lot of things in the Americas that aren't in any of the
old-world lore. I'm sure the locals knew what they were and how to
deal with them, but ... well. That's what happens when you come in
and kill off most of the people who knew how the local magic
worked."
"It's not—"
"Magic. Yeah. Whatever. Anyway, this happened awhile back,
about two years. It's been slowly getting worse ever since, until ...
this. You see what it's like now."
 Verd was quiet, still stroking the back of David's hand; David
wasn't sure if he was aware he was doing it. Finally he said, "And so
you come here, bringing your oreiad—"
"I told you, you stubborn jerk, her name is Tess, and she brought
me."
"In the belief that I could help you."
"Yeah." In spite of knowing better than to get his hopes up, and
in spite of the strain between them, David couldn't help asking, "Can
you?"
There was the soft whisper and click of a key-card in the door
lock. Verd jerked away and all but leaped off the bed as the door
opened to admit Tess, carrying a tray.
She stopped. The two of them looked at each other. At last Tess
said, "Does this mean you've decided to help?"
"I don't know if I can," Verd said.
"But you'll try." It was a statement, not a question.
Verd didn't answer; instead he walked to the door, forcing her to
step out of the way or be shoved aside, and closed it behind him as
he left.
"Did he upset you?" Tess asked anxiously.
"No. He was okay." David touched the back of his hand, still
feeling Verd's fingers stroking his skin.
"You know, I asked one of the restaurant staff what it was like
working for him," Tess said, setting the tray on the bedside table.
"She said he's actually a really good boss, very fair about giving
them time off and keeping their work hours reasonable. He's just a
little weird. Doesn't talk much, doesn't smile ever, has strict rules
about what parts of the resort the employees and patrons are
allowed in, that kind of thing."
"He wasn't always like that." David sagged into the pillows, his
brief surge of energy draining away. "Well, I guess he was always a
little like that. Distant and serious. Kind of a nerd, honestly. But he
did smile, Tess. He used to laugh a lot ..."
His voice trailed away. Tess sat beside him on the bed and took
his hand. She mistook his silence for weariness and pain, he thought
—and some of it was, but not all of the pain was physical. It hurt,
thinking about the person Verd used to be. Thinking about how that
person was gone forever.
Except he wasn't, was he? Verd seemed to think so. Verd had
insisted so, when they'd parted all those years ago. The ancestral
memories that he'd received when he became an adult would
change him forever, he'd said. And certainly, they'd seemed to.
But David wasn't the same person he'd been fifteen years ago,
either.
"We weren't doing anything except talking," David felt compelled
to say. His skin still seemed to tingle where Verd had touched him,
as if to give the guilty lie to his words.
"I'm not jealous." Tess took his hand and put it against her chest,
where he could cup the familiar curve of her breast through the
oversized men's shirt she was wearing. "My people don't feel that
way, in general. I've told you, I don't mind if you have other lovers."
"I never wanted others besides you," he murmured, stroking her
breast and running a thumb across the firm nub of the nipple
stiffening in her practical cotton bra.
"Except for one."
Oreiads could detect falsehood. It was one of the things he
appreciated about his marriage; in a very real sense, she kept him
honest. He couldn't lie to her, which made it harder to tell lies to
himself.
Except for one.

Tess left David asleep in the room—he was too tired for sex, too
tired for anything except a few spoonfuls of soup before he drifted
off again. She didn't like leaving him alone, but she wanted to find
Verdegris.
She hadn't come all this way to let the dragon go off and sulk
while her husband sank ever closer to death.
No one in the main lodge seemed to know where he'd gone. The
front desk attendant told her the pools were still open and offered
her a complimentary swimsuit and towel. Tess shook her head and
went out on the back path that led to the pools and hiking trails. If
he wasn't at the lodge, Verd must be out here somewhere.
It was after midnight, but still eerily bright, the sunlit night of the
far northern summer. The sun had finally dipped below the
mountains, but there was no darkness; the sky was pale blue,
almost white, flecked with clouds that were tinted sunset colors
along the northern horizon. She had no trouble picking her way
along the path to the pools.
The pools might stay open all night, but there was no one out
here now except for a young couple who passed her on the path,
wet and giggling in their bathing suits with towels thrown carelessly
around their shoulders. It would have been a perfect time for a
midnight swim, but Tess had no interest in swimming. It was Verd
she needed to find. David's remaining lifespan could be measured in
days; what did Verd think he was doing, wasting time while David
fought for his life?
She knew that David still loved Verd. He'd talked about his old
boyfriend often enough that she had no doubt of that, even though
she wasn't sure if David himself knew it. But so far Verd wasn't
doing much to convince her that he was worth the feelings David
clearly still had for him.
She didn't know what she could do if she found him. If he had no
love or compassion in his heart, what words could possibly reach
him? But there had to be a way. She hadn't come all this way for
nothing.
On the upper paths, she circled the rock pools, checking each
one. Night seemed a likely time for Verd to bask in the hot water,
when the tourists had cleared out. Dragons liked to be hot. They
enjoyed geothermally active areas, and some of them even lived in
volcanoes.
But there was no sign of him. The pools were empty, glistening
beneath the bright midnight sky. Tess looked up at the mountainside
rising above the lodge, where the path around the rock-pool
amphitheater split into a maze of hiking trails that vanished among
the spruces and willows. Somewhere else, she might be able to get
the rocks to talk to her and tell her where Verd had gone. But not
here. The rocks were his. The entire place was his.
The sound of rushing water intensified as she reached the far
end of the rock pools. She had wondered where the water went, and
now she saw: there had once been a ravine here, but an ancient
rockslide had blocked it, and now the water rushed into the rock
itself, vanishing in a froth of steam into tunnels it had carved
through the slide.
On the far side of the rockslide, the landscape was wilder and
more chaotic. She glimpsed twists and turns of the outflow creek as
it wound its way down the mountain, carving a deeper and deeper
channel, to meet some far-off river and eventually make its way to
the sea.
It made her uncomfortable. She had never felt much of an
affinity for water. Water and fire and air were all such changeable
things. Only the rock underfoot could be relied on, steady and
stable.
... except it wasn't, of course. The ancient landslide that had
penned up the creek and formed the pools was evidence of that.
Rocks changed just as much as any river, but on a longer time scale.
Mountains wore down to hills, deposited themselves as gravel and
made new rocks, while new mountains rose in place of the old ones,
born of the furnace inside the earth.
Actually, if it came to that, the sea itself was a constant, and so
were the sky and the molten core of the planet. Mountains came
and went, but the sea was the same. Tess couldn't help smiling to
herself, a strained smile given the desperation of her situation, but a
smile all the same. Perhaps she was the one who was wrong, all this
time, thinking of her own element as the only truly stable one when
it was, in reality, the only one that changed—
A sudden splash came from below, as if the water itself wanted
her attention. Tess looked over the edge, down the hillside where
the creek plunged in loops and curves through the trees. Maybe it
was just the sound of the falling water she'd heard, but it seemed
different. Closer.
 And then she noticed it. There was a path here, half-hidden in
brush. She had to duck under the safety railing to reach it. A sign on
a chain across the path read PRIVATE: NO ADMITTANCE. She
ducked under that, too. From below, she heard more splashing.
There was another pool down there, she guessed, hidden under an
overhang of the rocks, invisible to the prying eyes of tourists.
The path was less a path than a plunge down the steepest part
of the hillside, twisting in sharp switchbacks between boulders and
spruce trees. It emerged beneath an overhanging outcropping of
boulders, framed by thick willows and alders. The brush that had
been neatly cut back around the lodge was allowed to grow wild and
profuse here, to help conceal this place, she guessed. Steam and
warm air wafted past her face, heavy with the sulfur smell of the hot
springs.
Dragons were known for killing those who invaded their lairs.
She pushed back the brush anyway, peeking through.
She'd been right. There was a pool here, jewel-green, beneath a
shelf of rock that hid it from all but the most determined searcher.
Between the visibly rising steam and the heat she could feel from
here, she guessed that this was nearly undiluted hot springs. Unlike
the springs above, tempered by the cold-water stream running
through them, these would be too hot for the tourists to touch.
Verdigris reclined in the near-boiling spring as if it was warm
bathwater.
It was the first time Tess had seen a dragon, in its shifted form,
up close. She hadn't realized why he was called Verdigris until seeing
him like this. His scales were the color of copper with a green patina.
Gleaming loops and coils of his great body sprawled in and out of
the pool. His huge head rested in the sand, water lapping around his
lower jaw, eyes closed.
Tess was frozen, unable to move. He was beautiful and terrible.
No wonder her people feared and hated dragonkind. But she felt no
hate. Fear ... yes, there was that. But also wonder.
Without looking around or opening his eyes, Verd spoke in a
deep, rumbling voice that she felt in her chest. "Come on out. I
know you're there. The stone told me."
 Tess drew a slow breath and ducked through the brush. Rocks
crunched under her shoes. There were no bones here, she reassured
herself—at least none that she could see.
"You're persistent," Verd said. He shifted suddenly, his body
collapsing from dragonform to his human shape.
He was completely naked, his bronze body long and glorious, half
submerged in the rippling water. After a dismissive glance at Tess,
he sank deeper and rested his head on a rock as if it was a pillow.
The rest of him drifted just below the surface of the water, lightly
touching the pebbles and sand of the pool's bottom.
"And you're relaxing in a pool while David suffers up at the
lodge," Tess said sharply.
Verd closed his eyes again. "I'm consulting my memories. The
hot water helps me think."
"Oh." Cautiously, she sat on a rock by the pool. Steaming water
curled around the base of it, probably hot enough to sear her flesh if
she touched it. "Have you found out anything helpful?"
"Hard to say. It's not like searching the internet. I have the
memories of every dragon in my line, but it's like ... well, imagine
trying to determine exactly what you had for breakfast on a certain
day twenty years ago. Now multiply that by a hundred thousand."
"Sounds confusing."
"You have no idea."
Silence lay between them. It was peaceful here. Behind a screen
of brush and rock, the outflow from the larger pools rushed down
the little waterfall. Water dripped from the overhanging rock,
plinking into Verd's private pool. Whenever he moved, wavelets
lapped along the shore.
Now that she'd seen him as a dragon, something was puzzling
her. Finally she got up the nerve to ask.
"You're a European dragon, aren't you? There are no dragons
native to North America, at least none that David knows about,
except for the feathered serpents in the south."
After a moment, Verd stirred himself enough to reply. "Why?"
"You don't look it."
 "My parents were First Nations." At her puzzled silence, he asked,
"Didn't David ever tell you how dragons reproduce?"
"You're born of molten rock, the same way my people are born
from the rocks in high mountain places." She herself had been found
among the roots of a pine tree, the usual way for oreiads to be born.
"Yes, but unlike you, we're not raised by others of our kind. We
are born looking like the local humans, and we're generally mistaken
for one of their babies and raised among them. Like a cuckoo's egg,
raised in another bird's nest."
Tess swung her feet above the too-hot-to-touch water. The night
air had been cool on the climb down, but it was so hot and humid by
the pool that she was covered in sweat or condensation. Her lips
tasted salty when she licked them. "You didn't even know you were
a dragon?"
"Oh no, I knew. We start to get bits and pieces of our memories
when we're quite young. Confusing at first, but eventually it adds up
to a complete picture. By the time David and I met, I knew what I
was, and I knew that my full memories would come in when I was
an adult. I just didn't yet realize what that meant for me. For us."
"And what does it mean?"
"That I would stop being that human-like person I used to be,
and become a dragon, ancient and serene, one with the earth—"
"Bullshit," Tess said simply.
Verd raised his head, blinking. Water dripped off his long black
hair. "Excuse me?"
"If you're ancient and serene and all of that, why in the hell are
you running a hot springs resort, rather than going off and
meditating in a volcano all day, or whatever you people do?"
"It's entertaining," he shot back. "I enjoy watching humans.
They're interesting. I didn't say I was completely detached from the
world, simply that I no longer feel—"
"Bullshit."
A hint of a growl rumbled in his throat. "Stop saying that."
"Stop saying things you know are lies. Or didn't you know that
nymphs can recognize when people lie to us?"
He stared at her. "That one's not in the myths."
 "It's not precisely something that fits our image, don't you
think?"
"That must've been interesting for David, being married to a
woman he can't lie to."
She raised an eyebrow. "That'd only be a problem if he went
around habitually lying to people. Which he doesn't. David is one of
the most honest people I've ever met, and I grew up around people
who are incapable of lying—or, at least, incapable of hiding it if we
do."
"Yes," Verd murmured, sinking back into the water. "He always
was ... sincere."
"He's a good person."
Silence, except for the lapping of water on the sand.
"David said you met when he fought a basilisk on your ancestral
mountain." Verd's voice lifted at the end, turning the statement into
a question. It felt like an olive branch, a cautious attempt at truce.
Tess slipped off her shoes, tucked her socks into them, and
tossed them one at a time onto the rocks along the pool's edge. The
water was much too hot to dip her feet, but she disliked wearing
shoes when she could go barefoot, letting the rocks whisper to her
as they liked to do. She tucked her feet under her on the rock,
sitting tailor-style.
"Yes, as you might guess from knowing David, it was all very
heroic and dragonslayer-y. There was a basilisk dwelling on our
mountain, poisoning our soil and water, making the dryads' trees ill.
We had tried to deal with it ourselves, but it defeated all our efforts.
The dryads were beginning to die, and the rest of us were talking
about moving elsewhere. So they sent me to talk to the Hunters,
since I was the youngest of our clan and the best at dealing with
humans. I like to travel, and I had even attended university classes
among the humans for a while. Unlike dryads, oreiads are not bound
to our mountain. All rocks everywhere remember that they are part
of the same whole."
She glanced at Verd. He seemed to be listening, though his eyes
were closed again, his long black hair drifting in the water. There
was a light fur of dark hair on his chest; her fingers twitched with an
irrational urge to reach out and touch it.
"So I went to talk to a dragonslayer. I don't know what I
expected, but it definitely wasn't David. He was so young and
friendly and curious—about me, about our world. He asked me a lot
of questions about the nymphs of the mountain, not in a rude way,
but just because he had never met our kind before and he wanted
to know more about us, the dryads and nereids and oreiads of the
Greek backcountry."
"You didn't mean to fall in love with him," Verd said, his eyes still
closed.
"No," she said softly. "No, I did not. He's easy to love. We fought
the basilisk together and ... I don't know what to say. He'd never
been entirely comfortable with the Hunters as an organization, and it
made sense for us to pool our knowledge and resources and
contacts, and go on our own to help people the Hunters couldn't or
wouldn't. Besides, I wanted to finish my geology degree."
Verd cracked an eye open. "You have a degree?"
"I have a PhD, thank you. I know things about rocks that humans
don't, but they have knowledge I don't, about the atomic structure
of rocks and the geological history of the world. And David paints—
you knew that, didn't you?"
"He was interested in it, when I knew him."
"He's really very good. So we traveled, David for painting, me for
rocks, and both of us in search of anyone who needed our help.
Until something got him in Arizona."
"He said he didn't know what it was."
Tess shook her head, her lips pressed together in a line. "Neither
did I," she said tightly. "I should have. I should have been able to do
something. I'm the one who—who knows these things. But it
poisoned him, and I ..."
She had to stop talking. She didn't want to weep in front of a
dragon.
There were soft sloshing sounds; water lapped the edge of the
pool. Tess looked up to see that Verd was sitting up now, one arm
propping him in place while the other drifted loose in the water
beside him.
"Two years ago, he said?"
Matter-of-fact. No overt displays of sympathy, no attempt to hug
her or offer false comfort. His calmness made it easier to recover her
own composure.
"Yes. He was sick for a while, but he got better, and we thought
... except then it started getting worse again. We were in Greece
until just recently, hoping the oreiads could help, but they wouldn't
even talk to me." She stopped and took another breath. That was a
pain she couldn't touch right now, not on top of the fresh rawness of
her fear for David. "And he'd burned bridges with the Hunters.
Coming to you was all that we could think of."
"Faith?" Verd said, his voice wry.
"Desperation."
"Mmm. Sometimes the two are much the same."
"I didn't come here to play games." Her voice cracked. "If you
ever loved David, if you still feel anything at all for him—he's dying,
Verd."
"I know." His voice was unexpectedly gentle. "Come here."
She frowned at him, sitting in the water as he was. "What?"
"Come here." He swished a hand through the water. "Swim with
me."
"We don't have time for—"
"When you're in the water, I will know you. Let me know you,
mate of David Monaghan."
It was a small thing, in exchange for David's life. She couldn't
exactly turn him down. Except— "In case you've forgotten, you
might be able to survive swimming in nearly boiling water, but I
can't."
"It won't be." Verd swirled his fingers in the water, turning his
hands in a graceful loop underwater. "This is my place; the waters
do what I want. Come in."
Tess leaned down and cautiously brushed the water's surface
with her fingertips, then dipped her hand. He was right; it felt like
pleasantly hot bathwater. She could feel the cooler currents he was
stirring; occasional searing heat rippled painfully across her
knuckles.
Putting herself in the water placed her entirely at his mercy. He
could roast her alive with a stray thought.
You were the one who insisted on coming here. Isn't David's life
worth some risk?
And there was more risk in backing down, anyway. She didn't
know a lot about dragons, other than their mutual enmity with her
kind, but one thing she'd learned from years of fighting supernatural
predators with David: you must show them strength, not weakness.
This was a challenge. By meeting it, she might earn Verd's respect—
which, she realized, she wanted very much, and not just for David's
sake. Back down ... and she might leave the cave alive, if he was
feeling charitable.
But two could play that game. She was not totally helpless, even
here on the lands of a dragon.
She stepped barefoot off the rock, and began to strip. She
shimmied out of her jeans, folded them neatly, and followed them
with her shirt. Looking up as she undid her bra, she saw that Verd's
eyes were fastened on her in surprise and ... was that a veiled hint
of appreciation? She hadn't been sure whether he enjoyed the sight
of female bodies as well as male ones. Now she knew.
She unfastened the bra, stepped out of her panties, and folded
both atop her pile of clothes. Naked as the day she was pulled from
the roots of her parent tree, she stepped into the water.
It was painfully hot at first, stinging her feet and ankles, but like
stepping into a hot bath, she acclimated quickly. She waded in to her
knees, then to her thighs. The water lapped up her skin, climbing
towards her sensitive places.
In the water, I will know you. How much did he know?
On her home mountain, she and her fellow oreiads could sense
the tread of every hiker and goat-herd who climbed those peaks.
Could Verd feel these waters caressing her thighs, stroking the backs
of her knees, rising ever higher on the soft skin of the insides of her
legs?
From his slight smile, she thought he could.
 Well, if this was a challenge, so be it—she would give him
something to feel.
She let herself fall and the hot water caught her, swallowed her,
turning the world to deep blue-green silence. It was deeper than
she'd thought. She kicked forward; her fingers brushed rock that
was slick with algae, and she twisted around in the water's embrace.
She didn't swim often, preferring the feeling of her feet on the
ground to the uncertainty of the water's uneasy grip, but she had
forgotten how light and graceful it felt to be fully submerged in
water. There wasn't normally much grace to her; she was a creature
of the rocks, solid and sturdy, not delicate. Underwater, she spun like
a dancer and then splashed to the surface.
Verd had drifted deeper into the pool, watching her. He was
smiling—a real smile, not that sideways sardonic quirk of his lips.
"You are brave," he said.
"And you love being the mysterious oracle of the mountains a
little too much." She scooped a handful of water and splashed him.
Verd backpedaled, looking shocked. For an instant she thought
she'd overstepped, perhaps torpedoed any chance David might have
here, but then, shockingly, unexpectedly, Verd laughed.
It was hoarse and rusty, and he stopped almost immediately, as
if he'd shocked himself too.
"What do you know," she said. "There's a heart in you
somewhere."
Her feet just touched bottom here, enough to anchor her. Naked,
she half-stood, half-floated, as Verd stroked slowly toward her and
then kicked himself upright. Water rolled off his shoulders.
They were close enough to touch. She wanted to; she suspected
David wouldn't mind, would probably love to watch her do it. The
smooth planes of Verd's chest, the width of his shoulders ... she
ached to explore them. And his eyes, dark and smoky and swirling
with emotion beneath the surface calm, drank her in. She was all too
aware of the water enveloping her, touching her everywhere; it was
like being held gently in warm hands.
But she could feel something else too ... a tickle of something, a
sense that something was being done to her, that her oreiad nature
resisted.
"What's all this about, anyway?" she asked. "It's not just an
excuse to get me naked, and it isn't just about making me swim in
your pond. What are you really doing?"
"No," he said quietly, "you're right. Tess, I don't have the ability
to heal David. But I think between the two of us, we might. And now
I'm even more sure of it."
Her heart stuttered in her chest—hope and anger, rolled into one.
"If I could, don't you think I would have?"
"Not by yourself. But it is said that dryad groves can heal. That's
why you went to your people in the mountains, isn't it?"
"For all the help they were," she spat. "Anyway, oreiads can't
heal."
"Perhaps not. But between your connection to the rocks, and
mine to the waters, and the innate abilities that some of your people
have, I think we might. There's a catch, though. For both of us."
"There's nothing I wouldn't do for David," she declared.
"Nor I." The words came out on a sigh, and she realized he
might not have admitted it even to himself before he said it out loud
to her. "We both have to open up to make this work. Nothing held
back."
"What do you mean?"
"Your nature resists mine. Mine resists yours. How much are you
willing to give up to save him?"
She looked up at him, at the dark, tormented eyes, and thought
the question might be directed at himself as much as her. He had
even more to lose than she did, with millennia of ancestral memories
in his mind, shaping him, while he gathered memories that would
help shape his descendants. She had only her own life to worry
about, attached though she was to it. Verd was faced with the
possibility of changing all of dragonkind to come.
For David.
And ... for us too. Perhaps.
She reached out cautiously and touched Verd's face, stroked her
fingertips down his wet cheek and planted her hand firmly on his
shoulder to give herself an anchor. Then she kicked off from the
bottom, lifting herself high enough in the water to kiss him.
It was brief, a brush of lips wet with the hot springs' sulfurous
water. It was chaste, almost; she needed David's blessing for more.
But Verd didn't pull away; instead his hands moved under the water,
took her waist in his hands and held her, floating, as she held herself
by her grip on his shoulder. He was looking at her now with
something like wonder.
"Let's go get David," she said.

David was drowsing, drifting in and out, when the door opened. He
was dimly aware of it, and then Tess's face swam into focus above
him, smiling at him. Her hair was wet, a riot of plastered-down curls;
her shirt gaped open at the neck, revealing a tantalizing glimpse of
collarbone and freckled chest.
... and she was talking to him; he'd zoned out for a minute. "Can
you get up?"
She put an arm under him, helping him sit. Dizziness swamped
him, and it wasn't until it receded that he realized Tess wasn't the
only person holding him up. Verd was on his other side; it was Verd's
hands holding him, as well as Tess's, Verd's arm wrapped around his
back.
"You came back," he mumbled. The words sounded foolish to
him, but Verd smiled.
"Can you stand?' Verd asked quietly.
"Yeah. I think so." He swayed even with both of them holding
him. "Where are we going?"
"It's a little bit of a walk." Tess looked past him at Verd, frowning.
"And there's some climbing. Do you think he can make it?"
"No need," Verd declared, and before David knew what was
happening to him, he'd been swept off his feet and Verd was holding
him bridal-style.
 "What the hell," David managed faintly. He tried to struggle, but
there wasn't much strength in it, or much heat. "Put me down, you
ox."
"I'll get the door," Tess said, patting his arm, and vanished. It
was a conspiracy, he thought weakly, as Verd carried him through
the door. They were getting along with each other now just to make
his life difficult.
He rested his head against Verd's chest, and the steady thumping
of Verd's heart, the rhythmic motion of Verd's steps, carried him out
of the hotel into the bright night. He was only dimly aware of the
passing scenery, until Verd's stride faltered, and now Tess was
holding onto both of them from the side, helping keep Verd steady
as they navigated some kind of steep path. Branches caught at
David's hair.
"Where are you taking me?" he mumbled.
"Somewhere we hope we can help you," Tess answered.
He smelled the hot springs as he was let down on the wet rocks
at its edge. Opening his eyes, he saw an overhanging rock ledge
above him, and a sliver of the colorless, too-bright midnight sky.
Two pairs of hands undressed him. He was beyond complaining
now; he just let them take care of him, relaxing into it.
Verd cursed softly, and David remembered, in his half-dreaming
state, that Verd hadn't yet seen how much of the dark corruption
covered his body. The threads visible under his collar and sleeves
were only the tip of it. His entire body was a map of darkness now,
all of it radiating out from the place on his hip where he'd been
bitten by that monstrous dragon-like thing he'd fought in Arizona.
Hot water touched him, and he jerked.
"Shhh," Tess soothed, and, "Shhh," Verd echoed. He relaxed
again, trusting them, letting their hands support him in the water.
He opened his eyes to find that they'd both shed their clothing,
too. The three of them were naked in the pool.
If he didn't feel like hell at the moment, this would be like some
kind of glorious dream. He'd literally had dreams like this. The
problem was, in real life he knew Tess and Verd wouldn't get along
...
 Which meant this might actually be a dream. Maybe he was
dying.
Lips brushed his. Verd's lips. He would know Verd's kiss
anywhere. He kissed back, because if he was going to die, he
wanted to kiss the first love of his life one more time.
And then Tess was kissing his cheek, his brow. Verd's mouth
moved aside to make room for hers.
Some people were lucky enough to fall in love with one amazing
person who completed them. He'd done it twice.

It had been fifteen years since Verd had seen David's body in all its
naked glory, since he'd tasted David's lips with his own. When he
was a teenager and young adult, when he'd lived only one lifetime in
his own head and was hardly distinguishable from the humans
around him in mind or soul, he had lost his virginity and his heart to
David Monaghan.
Now, he had a hundred generations' memories of other lovers in
the back of his mind. Yet all of them faded away as he floated in the
water, supporting David between himself and Tess.
Since he'd come into his adult memories, he wasn't sure if he'd
ever felt this centered in himself, this sure of what he felt as
opposed to what all his ancestors had felt. There were endless
memories crowding his mind of old loves, old families, old homes,
faded like sepia-toned photos with the emotions bled out of them,
leaving only ghostly echoes behind.
But there was only one David. Only he, Verdegris, had loved
David. The emotions he felt now were his own.
And he now knew that he loved David still.
Even after what he'd glimpsed in the hotel room, he had been
unprepared for the extent of the corruption that had spread across
David's body. It wasn't rot or a rash or anything he'd ever seen
before. The purplish blackness was under the skin, delicate traceries
of darkness like a bruise or broken capillaries, but everywhere,
covering all of David's body except his face and most of his hands
and feet.
In the water, it was worse. Verd could not only see but feel it,
and he now realized that the visible corruption on the surface was
only a small part of it. That poisonous infestation had invaded
David's tissues and internal organs, tearing him apart from the
inside.
"How long has it looked like this?" Verd asked Tess quietly as
they floated in the pool.
"Not very long. It started as a black spot on his hip, like a bruise,
and it's getting worse by the day. You can see why I said he didn't
have much time."
David drifted between them, naked and limp, his eyes half
closed. "Do I dare ask what you're planning on doing?" he asked
faintly.
"Your guess is as good as mine," Tess said.
Verd knew that he should have found their frivolity irritating, at a
serious moment like this one. His memories told him so. But instead
it made him smile slightly. This was what David had always brought
into his life—lightness, play, delight. And there had been little of
either in his life since he'd done his best to shut David out of it.
He truly enjoyed running the resort. He could take advantage of
the casual companionship of his human staff when he wanted it, and
solitude when he didn't. But he had missed this with a pain that he
now understood had been his heart breaking: true companionship,
being around someone he cared for, someone who made him smile.
Except it was no longer as simple as just himself and David. He
looked across David's supine form in the water to meet Tess's
intense gray gaze.
Nothing simple. Not at all. But how much fascination could
anything simple hold, for a creature like him?
"Do you feel the corruption in him?" he asked Tess. He was more
acutely aware of it the longer they remained in the water.
"Feel it? I don't understand."
"Your kind can sense things in the rocks, can't they? Use that."
 Tess's face contorted in a fierce frown. "Can't ... can't feel
anything."
"Try." He was going to have to help her, he could see. "This
might be easier underwater, closer to the rocks. David, hold your
breath, all right? And let us know if you need to come up."
David gave a small nod.
They dived together, pulling him down. As they sank toward the
bottom, Verd opened his eyes. It was dim down here, but not dark.
Tess's curls floated in a cloud around her head; her eyes were
screwed shut, concentration visible on her face. David looked almost
asleep, his hair belling out from his scalp and his eyes loosely closed.
Verd's pulse thrummed in his ears. Normally, when people swam
in his pools, he was dimly aware of their energy and delight. It
invigorated him, and was one of the reasons why he'd opted to keep
the hot springs open to visitors when he had discovered and
purchased this place some years back, claiming it as his lair.
But he had never been this aware. He could feel every ripple of
the water across Tess's bare skin, across David's face.
And suddenly that awareness extended to the rocks, in a way it
never had before. He was always aware of the landscape around his
springs in a dim kind of way. He had assumed it worked similarly for
the oreiads. But now, as his world expanded with Tess's enhanced
senses, he recognized that he'd only ever beheld a faint shadow of
what she could see.
He could sense the hard basalt core of these mountains, the
granitic intrusions; he could feel the soft tickle of streams wearing
the mountains away, of roots curling through soil that had once been
river silt and glacial loess, eroded away from the mountains farther
up the valley.
Tess's eyes opened suddenly, staring at him through the water in
surprise. She must be feeling what he felt now, he realized. She
could feel the taint in David the same way he could.
 The question was, between the two of them, could they do
anything about it?

In her childhood, on the mountain where her clan had always lived,
Tess had grown up with the serene conviction that not a rock could
fall or a grain of sand tumble down a mountain stream without her
knowing. She had taken that intense awareness of the rocks for
granted until leaving her mountain for the first time, when she'd
discovered that other rocks were far more opaque to her. She could
get them to yield up their secrets if she worked on it, but it was
hard, like struggling to learn a foreign language when her mother
tongue was barred to her forever.
Now, suddenly, the rocks around her opened up to her, welcomed
her, in the same way the rocks of her mountain had once embraced
her.
It was like coming home.
She might have been weeping. With the water all around her, she
didn't know. All she knew was that she was once again a part of the
world in a way she hadn't been for a decade.
And it wasn't just the rocks. She could feel the water too, and
she now knew what Verd was talking about when he'd spoken of
being able to feel the corruption that was killing David. She felt it the
same way she would have been able to feel pollution or the scar of a
strip mine on her ancestral mountain. It was an ache, a fundamental
wrongness.
But what to do about it?
David jerked between them, gesturing feebly toward the surface,
and she became aware of a different kind of ache as her lungs
begged for air. She and Verd kicked off from the bottom together,
breaking the water's surface an instant later. She and David both
sucked in deep breaths. Verd's breathing was no rougher than if he'd
been above water all this time, and she wondered how long dragons
could hold their breath, or if it was simply another facet of his
affinity for the pool.
She no longer felt the connection to the land quite so strongly
like this, with her head in the air and her feet drifting rather than
touching the bottom of the pool, but it was still there. Her head
swam with it; her heart sang. She'd forgotten what it was like to feel
the rocks, the entire land itself, welcome her as a returning
daughter.
"This is incredible," Verd breathed, and she wondered how much
of what she felt he could also feel.
"But now what?" she asked, looking at David's pale face as they
drifted together in the water.
"Now you help me," Verd said simply.
"I don't know what to do."
His smile flickered briefly, making his face beautiful in the
rippling, water-reflected light. "I don't either," he said, with a hint of
wonder in his voice. She guessed that with thousands of years of
ancestral dragon memories in his head, discovering something he
truly didn't know was a novel experience. "We'll figure it out as we
go along. Let's see if you can guide me—you using your abilities as a
nymph, me using my affinity with the water—and we can draw the
poison out of him."
This time they left David's face out of the water and sank
together, supporting him between them. It was easier this time for
Tess to sink into the unity they shared under the water, her entire
body thrumming with awareness of the rocks and the water and the
two men in it with her. She could feel the taint in David, scraping a
fingernail down her nerves, and this time she tried to focus on it,
concentrating on picking it out from the rest of the everything that
filled her senses. She was aware of Verd supporting her, helping her.
It was like a single dissonant note in a symphony, and as she
focused all her awareness on it, separating and isolating it became
easier.
She opened her eyes and, to her shock, discovered that the
water was full of black tendrils, bleeding out from David's body like
ink.
 She desperately wanted to ask Verd if this was supposed to be
happening, if he had it under control, but she couldn't open her
mouth underwater to speak. Verd's face was tight with strain, eyes
screwed shut. All she could hear was the throbbing of her heart,
loud in her ears. Her lungs ached for air.
But we're doing it. We're doing it. We're getting it out of him.
She threw all her effort into keeping it going, sorting the
discordant notes from the symphony of the world. Somehow, she
knew, Verd was dealing with the poison, using the hot springs to
neutralize it. And David was helping too, fighting it as hard as he
could, as he'd been fighting for the last two years—throwing the last
of his strength into it, everything he had, to keep heart and lungs,
soul and body together long enough for them to help him.
Her need to breathe had grown beyond desperation into stark
pain. Yet there was something purifying about that pain, forcing her
beyond her own limits, until the entire world consisted only of
herself and Verd and David, bound together in an unbreakable circle,
and she could feel David getting stronger even as her own strength
flagged—
Black spots danced in front of her eyes. And then there were
hands on her, pulling her up, and a voice telling her to breathe.
She sucked air into lungs that couldn't get enough of it, sobbing
for breath and then reeling with hyperventilation. Arms held her—
two pairs of arms, she realized dazedly, as her head began to clear.
"David," she gasped. "David."
He had his arms around her; Verd had his arms around both of
them. And David was well. He still looked pale and weak, but she
could feel that his body was clean of the taint that had marred it,
ever since the scorpion-monster attacked him in Arizona. He was
healthy, and he was going to be fine.
She lunged to kiss him, clamping her mouth over his. Verd had
his head pressed into the crook of David's shoulder, and Tess's head
ended up resting against his as she and David kissed for dear life.
When the kiss broke, David turned his head to kiss Verd. Tess
held them both, floating in the water together, and a new thought
came to her with the suddenness of a spring dawn: there was no
going back to the way things had been.
David's mouth separated from Verd's, and now it was Tess's turn
to lean in and kiss him. This time, it wasn't chaste; she parted her
lips, and Verd opened his mouth, and they tasted each other,
tentative and careful, turning heated as they both pressed naked
against David and reached around him and their hands and arms
entwined.
And she couldn't help thinking, as desire grew in her, burning for
both men: Yes. This is going to work.

Verd brought breakfast down to the cave in the morning. They'd

made love in the water, all three of them, an awkward dance of
limbs that they were all three still trying to figure out—but heartfelt;
it had made Tess think of the way it had been when she first got
together with David, the way they were still trying to learn each
other's bodies and how they fit together. And then they drowsed on
the shore, with a tangle of their discarded clothing for a bed.
Verd brought a bundle of blankets with him, and laid out a
breakfast of croissants and fresh pastries beside the water.
"So what are the odds someone's going to wander in here and
find us like this?" Tess asked, reaching for a donut. She and David
were half-dressed, him in pants, her in her underwear. It was warm
enough next to the hot springs that she didn't feel the need for
more.
"None at all." Verd looked cheerful. He was more expressive this
morning than she'd ever seen him, happy and lit up from inside. "No
one can find this particular pool unless I let them. It's only for me,
and those I allow here."
Tess gave him a narrow-eyed look. "You wanted me to come
down here."
"I thought if you were determined enough to find me, I could
give you a small helping hand."
 "It was a test?"
"Guys," David murmured, and she looked around at him. It took
her breath away to see him like this, his skin healthy and unmarked.
He was still thin from his illness, not as bulked out as she was used
to seeing him, but that would go away in time. All she really cared
about was that he was well.
Her gaze drifted from David's face, down to his hands, one of
which had reached out and twined loosely in Verd's. She felt no
jealousy. She could see what David saw in Verd; she was starting to
feel it herself, the first hints of love twining around her heart. It
didn't feel the same as what she had with David, but neither did it
feel less. Just different, because Verd was a different man from
David.
It might be nice to have someone around who understood the
particular realities of being a non-human in a human world. As much
as she loved David, there were certain aspects of her life that he
could never quite relate to, for all the sympathy he showed her.
And she could see the way that David lit up, having Verd around.
Not to mention the quietly fond looks that Verd darted toward David
when he seemed to think no one was looking. Detached from the
world, my ass, she thought. Just watching them like this was a treat
all its own.
Yeah. This was going to work. She didn't know yet what they
were going to do about living arrangements, but there was plenty of
time to figure that out, and it wasn't like she and David had a well-
established home elsewhere. It might be nice to stay in one place
for awhile.
She laid a hand on the ground, and felt, once again, the deep
connection with the rocks that had stayed with her since their time
in the pool. Whatever had happened between the three of them last
night, and between her and Verd in particular, this place recognized
her as its own now.
Home, she thought, testing out the word, seeing how it felt.
 It felt right.

Lauren Esker is a writer and artist who lives in Alaska north of

Fairbanks. She worked for a number of years as a graphic designer
for a daily newspaper and now writes full time. She also writes
under the pen names Layla Lawlor (urban fantasy and science
fiction) and Mar Delaney (lesbian romance). To keep up with
Lauren's new releases, click here to join Lauren's mailing list or visit:
www.laurenesker.com
www.laylalawlor.com.

If you enjoyed this story and would like to read more of Lauren's
books, you might try:

Shifter Agents - paranormal romance about the men and women of

the Shifter Crimes Bureau. Each books is a full-length romantic
suspense novel with an HEA. Visit the series page here.

Metal Wolf - the first book in a new science fiction romance series.
Sarah is a farm girl who dreams of the stars; Rei is a cyborg soldier
who crash-lands in her backyard. The stars may be closer than she
thinks ...
 THE NEIGHBOURS MIGHT TALK

ELVIRA BIRCH

Trudy straightened up and brushed her hair back from her face, the
silver strands teasing the edges of her vision.
Insects hummed, and the sun beat down on her shoulders. It
was so beautiful and peaceful in the country; no kids shrieking in the
streets, no neighbor dogs who wouldn’t stop barking.
If the wind died down, she could hear the distant highway, but
for the most part, the breeze muttered musically in the cornfield
next just outside their little fenced yard and kept the heat from
being oppressive.
“You about done out here?”
She looked back to find Rikard, looking tanned and more relaxed
than he’d ever been in the city. He was carrying the compost bucket
from the kitchen.
“Almost done with this row,” she answered, admiring the way his
body still moved underneath the casual t-shirts he now wore. They
suited him so much better than the ties and jackets he’d put aside
with his job as a university professor. He had loved his job – or at
least parts of it – but they’d both been happy when he could put
aside all the hassles and red tape. Quiet retirement in the country
stretched before them like a promise.
 Rikard dumped the kitchen scraps into the big compost barrel
and came to stand beside her. “Nice beans,” he said sagely.
“These are peas,” Trudy reminded him.
“Great tomatoes,” Rikard said suggestively, eyeing her grubby
shirt. “Ready to come inside yet and peel out of those dirty clothes?”
“I want to finish this row,” Trudy said regretfully, knowing his
ulterior motives. “It’s supposed to rain tomorrow and I want them all
staked up before that happens.”
When she tipped her head up, Rikard bent to kiss her, slowly and
full of promise.
“You could take a little break,” he suggested, one hand tracing
her jaw.
“Mmm,” Trudy said, tempted. “Out here? In the sun? The
neighbors might talk.”
“We don’t have any neighbors,” Rikard reminded her. “That’s why
we retired out here, instead of staying in the suburbs.”
“I thought it was for the fresh odor of cows and the sunburns,”
Trudy teased.
“It was really so I could screw my wife on the back lawn without
judgmental gossips thinking they had moral fucking high ground,”
Rikard said with a chuckle.
“Rikard!” Trudy said automatically.
“I’m retired,” he said, laughing. “The kids are grown up and
already learned all my bad habits anyway. I can swear like a sailor if
I want to, now.”
Trudy loved how easily he laughed since he’d left the city.
But given a better opportunity to show off his vocabulary, neither
of them could come up with anything more clever than “What the
hell is that?” and “Dear heavens!” as the sun was momentarily
blotted out and a gigantic shape crashed down from the sky above,
rattling all the windows in the house as it skidded halfway across the
lawn and collapsed squarely on the row of peas that Trudy had just
spent all afternoon staking up.
They clung to each other as the form gave a tremendous groan,
unrolling enormous, sail-like wings over the raised beds that had just
been destroyed.
 “Honey,” Trudy said hesitantly. “I think there’s a dragon in my
garden.”

Before Rikard had to come up with a plan to deal with a creature

nearly the size of their house, the mass of shimmering scales and
wing membranes gave a weird shiver, and there was suddenly a man
lying near the center of where the dragon had been.
“Rikard, he’s hurt.” Trudy’s hand on his arm was tight and
anxious, and she started to move forward.
Rikard wasn’t against women’s lib and he’d marched in several
parades at Trudy’s side, but he wasn’t going to let her hare off
unprotected towards a man who’d been a dragon that had just
destroyed a dozen raised beds and part of a greenhouse. He
grabbed a rake from Trudy’s gardening trolley, and tried to go first.
That worked about as well as trying to get Trudy to do anything
ever went.
“He’s not going to hurt us,” she said impatiently, pushing past.
“He’s obviously a shifter. And look, he’s injured.”
The man in the garden was completely unclothed, and when he
moaned and writhed, it was clear that he was bleeding. It was green
blood, which struck Rikard as odd, but then, it was less odd than the
dragon had been. The shifters of their acquaintance were all
standard Earth animals, and to the best of Rikard’s knowledge, all of
them bled red iron blood just as humans did.
It looked like the stranger had puncture wounds on his chest,
three of them in a row.
“Oh,” Trudy said in sorrow as she scrambled over the broken
garden beds. “I think he hurt himself on the pea stakes.”
The iron stakes that the pea runners had been strung between
were the only thing left upright in the garden – and they were
dripping with the same green blood. It appeared that the dragon’s
shapeshifting had transformed the wounds into smaller injuries,
translating to where they would have been on the dragon’s form.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 Fig. 356.—Keegan Method.

Verneuil Method.—Contrariwise to the methods just given,

Verneuil, after cutting out the frontal flap, cuts the flap from the
remaining sides of the old nose somewhat involving the skin of the
cheeks, as in Fig. 357. This done, the frontal flap is simply turned
down, raw surface out, and the cheek flaps are slid over it, bringing
the raw surfaces together. The inner borders of the flaps were
sutured in the median line, as shown in Fig. 358. The base of the
nose is made from the frontal flap by any of the methods already
given.
 Fig. 357. Fig. 358.
Verneuil Method.

Thiersch Method.—The frontal flap is cut from the skin of the

forehead in the shape shown in Fig. 359. Then two quadrilateral
flaps are raised from the cheeks, as also illustrated. These are made
wide enough that, when they were brought together, their inner
borders could be made to face each other. In this position they were
sutured along the median line, so as to give a double-gun-barrel
form to the nose, with a septal wall between.
From the lower border the nostrils were formed, giving to the new
nose a normal appearance, the continuous septum curving
downward to form the subseptum, the whole being sutured to the
remains of the old nose.
The frontal flap was now brought down over it, the raw surfaces
facing each other, and sutured in place, as shown in Fig. 360. Later,
Thiersch replanted the sides of the nose, to give it better contour,
and attained a very satisfactory result. The frontal wound was
covered with skin grafts, but the cheek wounds were allowed to heal
by granulation. The cicatrization of the latter was not sufficient to
effect the lower eyelids nor the angles of the mouth.

Fig. 359. Fig. 360.

Thiersch Method.

Helferich Method.—His is an ingenious application of the French

method. Both flaps are cut from the cheeks; the lining flap was made
from the left and the covering one from the right cheek. The shape of
the flaps is shown in Fig. 361.
The lining flap is stitched along the freshened margin of the right
side of the nose. The flap should be wide enough to give convexity
to the nose, as shown in Fig. 362.
The covering or right flap, cut much larger, is now slid over this. It
should be cut amply large to cover the flap just sutured in place. It is
sutured on both sides of the nose to hold it in place, also at the
inferior margin. The nose is lightly packed with iodoform gauze.
 The pedicle of the right flap was cut after two and a half weeks
and brought into place across the root of the nose, and sutured in
place to give better contour to the part after freshening the skin
about the left side of the nose at this point. He does not make a
subseptum, but thinks the inferior base of the nose of sufficient size
to hide the absence thereof.
The subseptum could, however, be readily made from the upper
lip, as will be shown later.

Fig. 361. Fig. 362.

Helferich Method.

Sedillot Method.—This operation is particularly efficacious in

giving a splendid subseptum and support of the point of the nose,
but does not overcome the falling-in of the whole anterior line, so
common with all Indian-flap methods. A flap one centimeter wide and
extending downward almost to the vermilion border is cut from the
thickness of the upper lip, not including the mucous membrane,
however. It is turned upward, as shown in Fig. 363.
The frontal flap is fashioned as shown, care being taken to cut a
subseptal rectangle of greater length than usual, since it is intended
to overlie the raw surface of the flap taken from the lip. It is rotated
downward and sutured into place at both sides, and also to the lip
flap, to assure of accurate union.
 A lateral view of the nose as formed in this manner is shown in
Fig. 364.
The free end of the septal flap is fixed into the superior lobial
wound with a harelip pin. The lobial wound is sutured as in ordinary
harelip operations. This method is particularly valuable in total
rhinoplasties involving the columna and alæ in conjunction with flaps
obtained by the Italian method.

Fig. 363.—Anterior view. Fig. 364.—Side view.

Sedillot Method.

Küster-Israel Method.—A flap was taken from the arm by the

Italian method, which was sutured to the remains of the old nose so
that its raw surface looked upward, not downward, as in the ordinary
case.
The flap was made sufficiently large to permit of building the wings
and subseptum. After it had healed into place the pedicle was cut,
and a frontal flap was cut from the forehead to cover it.
An unusually large flap was required to do this, since it had to
overcome the greater curvature already given and added to by the
arm flap, necessitating an extensive secondary wound.
The reverse order of procedure would be the more advisable for
this reason, and is resorted to by the following:
Berger Method.—This surgeon makes the lining flap from the
forehead. The secondary wound is at once closed. A flap is then
made from the arm by the Italian method, and brought into place
before the one just made. It should be of sufficient size to allow of
building the base of the nose, which is done not later than three
weeks after the pedicle of the arm flap is severed, which may be
done at any time between the eighth and the twelfth day.
All the precautions are used as already given in the description of
the Italian method. The arm is held in the position shown in Fig. 365.
Berger sutures the arm wound before bringing the flap into place
upon the face to overcome the discomfort of suppuration to the
patient.
The apparatus is fixed definitely after the patient has recovered
from the anesthetic. Great care is exercised to prevent coryza from
exposure. Dressings are made twice daily.
The pedicle is cut under local cocain anesthesia.
To make the subseptum and wings of the nose, the base of the
flap is cut into three sections. The posterior surface is freshened and
the parts are folded upon themselves and sutured into position.
Instead of employing rubber tubes, he resorts to a specially
devised apparatus to retain two metal tubes in the nares, and at the
same time make gentle pressure to the sides of the nose to mitigate
the columna contraction. The latter is planted into a V-shaped
incision made into the tissue of the upper lip at the proper place of
attachment. The subseptum may be lined with a flap of mucosa
dissected up from the floor of the inner nose.
 For the wings of the nose, such tissue as may be of service to give
them stability and structure is taken from the remains of the old
nose.

Fig. 365.—Berger Method.

The apparatus just mentioned and shown in Fig. 366 is used from
the very first day until total cicatrization has taken place, and even
for a longer period to aid in shaping the entire nose and the tendency
to collapse has been overcome.
 Fig. 366.—Berger Retention Apparatus.

Szymanowski Method.—A frontal flap, divided along the median

line and shaped as outlined in Fig. 367, is made from the forehead.
Two triangular flaps are then raised from either side, and including
the angle of the nose as shown. The divided frontal flap is now
brought down in such manner that their raw surfaces meet, thus
forming a vertical septum. The margins are united by suture, and the
lower ends are fixed into a wound made for the purpose at the base
of the nose, as shown in Fig. 368, to form the new subseptum.
The lateral triangular flaps are dissected up so that they can be
readily slid forward toward the median line. Their inner freshened
margins are sutured to the raw edge of the septum just made, and to
themselves. The objection here is that there is a liability of
considerable contraction of these lateral flaps, with a tendency to fall
in and drag with them the new septum; and again, in total
restorations, the upper third of the nose is only partially covered, and
necessitates later upbuilding. The author finds difficulty in making the
four margins thus brought together unite evenly throughout, and that
a vertical contraction is caused by the cicatrization of the median
marginal wound.

Fig. 367.—First Step.

Fig. 368.—Disposition of frontal flaps.
Szymanowski Method.

Goris Method.—The operation is performed as follows, having

given very good results, according to the author:
I. The frontal flap is divided lengthwise so that its raw surfaces
face each other. The resulting fold, representing the bridge of the
nose, is held in place by catgut suture.
II. The skin to make the wings of the nose is folded in, as in the
Langenbeck method.
 III. A flap, half the thickness of the upper lip is brought up to form
the new subseptum.
IV. Dissection and turning down the triangular flap of skin which
surmounts the orifices of the old nose, and making it serve to line the
lower part of the frontal flap.
V. Suturing the frontal flap thus modeled into two grooves made
into the margins of the old nose along both sides to its base.

Organic Support of Nasal Flaps

It soon became evident to the rhinoplastic surgeon that without

some support to the flap or flaps used for the construction of the new
nose all of the preceding methods, as far as æsthetic results were
concerned, were useless. Truly, the deformity lost its hideous
appearance to a great extent, but the general results obtained hardly
warranted a patient to undergo restorative operations of the nose. In
fact, many surgeons advised against total rhinoplasty when
practically all of the old nose was lost.
Langenbeck says “that total rhinoplasty, or even operation as to
repair partial loss of the nose by the use of soft flaps, should not be
undertaken. It is better to rely upon some prothesis.”
All that could be expected of utilizing the flap and making it heal
into place had been accomplished up to about the year 1879.
Thereafter many surgeons proceeded to evolve and use some kind
of intranasal prothesis made of various inorganic materials. It may be
stated, however, that Rousset in 1828 wrote: “Perhaps some day
surgeons will give whatever shape they desire to the reconstructed
nose. Then a frame of gold or silver, cleverly shaped and solidly
fixed in the nose, will give the patient, at his own option, a Roman or
Carthaginian nose, and to the ladies a choice of a roguish type, and
to our Sultans a nose a la Roxelane.”
But it was after 1878 that such prothesis came into use, and these
were at first made so that they might be removed at night and be
replaced in the morning.
 The intranasal supports were made of all kinds of material, such
as gutta percha, gold plates, leaden devices, amber, silver,
porcelain, celluloid, aluminum, platinum, etc.
With all due respect to the ingenuity of these inventions, especially
that of Martin, which was made of platinum in the form of a St.
Andrew’s cross, having at the four ends sharp pins which were
driven and fixed into the skeleton of the nose, the use of these
protheses resulted in nothing but failure.
The movable devices were a source of irritation and pressure, and
could not overcome the consequent contraction of the flaps whether
placed below a single flap or between two flaps, and the fixed
protheses of whatever form or material caused so much pressure
that gangrene resulted, and they had to be removed sooner or later.
Before the discovery of Gersuny, the author had many occasions
to utilize such movable protheses in the correction of saddle noses.
These were generally made of a silver shell, gutta percha, and later
of decalcified bone, as advised by Senn. The former remained in
place from six months to two and a half years, and then were thrown
off or had to be removed because of irritation. The bone chips soon
became absorbed, leaving the nose as before, or a thin median strip
that became broken with the least violence, and then was absorbed.
In several cases where other surgeons had resorted to such
protheses, the author was called upon at a later period to remove
them.
While the immediate result is very gratifying, the ultimate result is
worse than useless, since in the elimination of the foreign body the
flap of the nose was married by cicatrices that added still further to
the contraction and falling-in of the nose.

Periostitic Supports

Some other method had to be devised, and organic supports

became known. These organic protheses were made of the tissue in
the near vicinity of the flap, and at first formed a part thereof. The
earlier method included only the periosteum; later bone and
periosteum were added to the flap to give it shape and support, and
lastly cartilage was employed for the purpose.
Of the methods employing only the periosteum, it may be said that
what the surgeon expected of this membrane—namely, the springing
up of bone cells—did not take place; at least, not to the extent
desired. The very best to be attained was a thickening of flap in the
membrane, but not sufficient to add necessary support to the nose.

Osteoperiostitic Supports

The inclusion of the periosteum-lined flap was soon abandoned,

and recourse was had to such bone additions to the flaps as could
be obtained from the vicinity of the nose.
The bone was removed with its periosteum, adherent or
nonadherent to the flap, as will be shown by the methods described
hereafter.
Both single and combined flap methods are employed as might be
expected, following the procedures of the Indian, French, or Italian
schools. The greatest credit for the methods herein involved belongs
to the surgeons of Germany.
The earliest operation on these lines was that of König, who
published his first successes in 1886.
König Method.—Extending upward from the root of the old nose,
a flap is outlined in vertical ending at the hair line of the scalp, as
shown in Fig. 369.
This flap was made about one centimeter wide, and is made to
include the skin and periosteum. With the chisel a thin strip of bone
is raised from the frontal bone to nearly the full length and width of
the flap, making it an osteoperiostitic cutaneous section attached by
its pedicle at the root of the nose.
This flap is brought down with bony surface outward, and the distal
or skin end is fixed by suture into the upper lip at the point of the
intersection of the subseptum.
 Any of the soft parts of the old nose remaining are now dissected
up toward the median line, and are folded upward and inward and
sutured by their freshened margins to this median flap.
An Indian flap in oblique direction and of the form shown is cut
from the skin of the forehead and rotated down into position before
the bone-lined flap, and sutured into place.
He advises not to include the periosteum in the flap making up the
subseptum, as it is likely to interfere with respiration. In fact, he
deems it best to make the tegumentary flap sufficiently long to build
the bone of the nose, doubling the raw edges upon themselves with
a celluloid tube apparatus that may be removed for cleansing, and
be kept in place long enough to give contour to the nares.

Fig. 369.—König Method.

 Von Hacker Method.—The frontal flap was cut in the ordinary
Indian method, and of the shape shown in Fig. 355. The skin at
either side of the median line was dissected up to within four
millimeters, leaving a strip eight millimeters wide from the root of the
nose to the distal or scalp end. The two loose lips of the flap were
brought together at the anterior median line by a few sutures to keep
them in place.
This was done to give freedom to the surgeon while he detached a
strip made of the periosteum and bone chiseled from the frontal
bone. At the root of the nose or below the pedicle the bone was not
included to the extent that it would interfere with torsion of the flap,
and yet sufficient to allow the raw bone surface to fall upon what
remained of the bony bridge of the old nose.

Fig. 370.—Arrangement of frontal flap to allow of chiseling.

Fig. 371.—Making the osteoperiostitic support.
Fig. 372.—Bone-lined flap brought into position.
Von Hacker Method.
 He utilizes pins driven into the bone to outline this bony section, as
shown in Fig. 370.
The latter is done in an oblique direction. See Fig. 371. The septal
section is made to include the bone strip.
The bridge of bone holding the flap at its inferior end was now
broken, leaving, however, the periosteum as part of the pedicle
hinge.
The whole flap thus outlined was rotated downward into position
and sutured, as shown in Fig. 372.
The margins at the base intended to form the subseptum were
sutured behind the osseous structure, or, in other words, were
doubled inward and fixed by suture. The bony strip was broken at
the proper point to give prominence to the lobule.
The margins for the nostrils were turned inward and doubled on
themselves, and sutured with silk.
Rubber tubes were left in the nares, for drainage and to keep them
distended.
Rotter Method.—The frontal flap is made in the shape shown in
Fig. 373, containing a section of the frontal bone and its periosteum.
The width of the flap is about three and a half centimeters wide.
This flap is turned downward so that its raw surfaces look outward.
Owing to the loose adherence of the bony section to the skin flap,
he allows the raw bone surface to granulate over for four weeks, to
fix it more solidly to the soft parts.
The bone plate is then sawn into three sections made by two
vertical incisions, made as shown in the illustration.
The median section forms the bridge and dorsal prominence of the
nose.
The adherent skin of the lateral bony plates is dissected up
sufficiently to permit of the proper formation of the sides and wings of
the nose.
 This gives a shape to the nose, as shown in Fig. 374.
The lateral margins of the integumentary flap are now sutured to
the freshened margins of the old nose, and the remaining skin, if
any, is made to cover the granulating surface; if this is lacking or
insufficient, skin grafts are utilized to cover it completely.

Fig. 373.—First step.

Fig. 374.—Disposition of frontal flap.
Rotter Method.

Schimmelbusch Method.—The principle herein is to give an

osseous wall to the whole length of the restored nose, covering well
the skin inside and outside, and, if possible, to fix the new nose
solidly at the pyriform opening.
“I cut an osteo-cutaneous flap from the middle of the forehead, of
a size proportional to the size and shape of the nose. Its pedicle
between the eyebrows is two or three centimeters wide; it widens out
superiorly to form seven to nine centimeters. It is triangular, and its
base lies near the hair line. In cutting it out, preferably a little large, it
goes at first to the bone, through skin and periosteum. With a large,
sharp chisel, a thin bone plate throughout the whole extent of the
cutaneous flap is detached. It is not always possible to make this a
plate in one piece; it often breaks or gives off splinters. This is of no
consequence, if care be taken not to lose them and to keep them
adherent to the periosteum. They are attached as well as possible to
the cutaneoperiostitic flap by passing threads crosswise from one
edge of the flap to the other over bony surface, as in Fig. 375. The
whole flap is then enveloped in iodoformed suture.
“The frontal wound I close at the same sitting by sliding large
lateral flaps whose upper border follows the margin of the hair as far
as the ears. These are freed completely, brought down and stitched,
leaving eventually only a linear cicatrix on the forehead. The lateral
loss of substance which results is healed by granulation, and the
scars concealed by the hair.
“At first parts of the bone die; they ought to be expected to fall out;
after four, six, or eight weeks the bone is completely covered with
fleshy granulation, and adheres solidly to the flap. The prominent
granulations are then scratched, or, better, trimmed away with the
knife, and the whole surface is covered with Thiersch grafts.
“When the flap is thus furnished with skin within and without, it is
put into place. I saw the bony plate with a fine-toothed saw from the
grafted side; then I model the flap and place it on the loss of
substance freshened by turning the grafted surface toward the
interior of the nose by twisting its pedicle, as in Fig. 376. The
osseous rim of the pyriform opening is uncovered at the moment of
this freshening, and the bony edges of the flap are placed exactly on
the bony edge of the aperture. The skin of the flap is then stitched at
its lower margins to the skin of the cheeks. To preserve the height of
the nasal profile and avoid displacing the bones of the nose, the
nose is kept in place with a pin thrust through the nose, and
furnished at each end with a rubber button. This aids to form the
wings of the nose. If a subseptum is needed, it is made by taking
from the skin that covers the circumference of the pyriform opening
two small flaps, which are dissected from without toward the median
line as far as the point where the septum is normally found.
“These are stitched at this point, first upon themselves, then to the
end of the nose. Three weeks later the pedicle of the frontal flap is
cut; it is turned, put in splints, and the stitching is finished.”
 Fig. 375.—First step.
Fig. 376.—Disposition of frontal and skin-grafted flap.
Schimmelbusch Method.

Helferich Method.—A lining flap is made, according to the French

method, from the one cheek, which is dissected up and turned over
to bridge most of the loss of nasal tissue, and sutured to the opposite
freshened margin, as showed in Fig. 377.
A frontal flap, as outlined in the same illustration, is now cut from
the forehead, leaving a pedicle as shown, and containing a section
of bone at its median line. This is rotated downward and into place,
and sutured along the same margin to which the genian flap is fixed,
as shown in Fig. 378.
When the frontal and genian flaps have become well united, the
latter’s pedicle is cut when the freshened lateral margin of the frontal
flap is sutured into place.
A subseptum is now made or deemed necessary by this surgeon.
At a later period the pedicle of the frontal flap is cut, and fixed by
suture and some cutting, to reduce the resultant prominence thereof.
 Fig. 377. Fig. 378.
Helferich Method.

Preidesberger Method.—This author cuts away the skin

surrounding the arch of the old nose, and turns this flap downward to
form the lining to the flap made from the forehead made in the same
manner as Helferich.
The bone section is made in the median line, and is one
centimeter wide and four long.
The frontal flap should be made long enough to permit of building
a subseptum and the nostrils.
Krause Method.—This frontal cutaneo-osteo-periostitic flap is
made according to the method of König.
After turning down the flap it was covered with a nonpedunculated
skin flap taken from the upper part of the arm by transplanting after
its subcutaneous fatty tissue had been removed. (See Fig. 379.)
This method necessitates a long-continued dressing of the
forehead before the pedicle is cut, because of the needed nutrition to
make the two flaps heal upon each other.
After union has been established the sides of the transplanted
flaps are raised by dissection, as shown in Fig. 380, to expose the
bone plate of the frontal flap. A median strip is left intact.
With a fine saw the bony plate is cut into three sections, making
the narrowest the median.
The margins of the old nose are now freshened, and the combined
flap is sutured along the sides, preserving what tissue the surgeon
can use to add support to the nose, which is done by dissection and
turning or folding, as heretofore described.
The lower or forehead flap is sutured to the soft parts of the old
nose, and the transplanted lateral margins to the marginal skin of the
cheeks, giving to the nose the appearance as shown in Fig. 381.
At a later period the pedicle is cut and the wound that cannot, at
this time, be overcome by sliding of the adjacent skin, is covered by