"Kenyon, Sherrilyn - Dark-Hunter 03 - Dragonswan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kenyon Sherrilyn)

"Oh, God," she said, breathing in slowly and carefully



to calm the panic that was again trying to surface. She knew it was real, yet she had a hard time believing it. It boggled her mind that people could walk through time and that she could really be in the Dark Ages.
Surely, it couldn't be this easy.
"I know there has to be more of a downside to all this. And I'm pretty sure here's where I find out you're some kind of vampire or something."
"No," he said quickly. "I'm not a vampire. I don't suck blood, and I don't do anything weird to sustain my life. I was born from my mother, just as you were. I feel the same emotions. I bleed red blood. And just like you, I will die at some unknown date in the future. I just come equipped with a few extra powers."
"I see. I'm a Toyota. You're a Lambourghini, and you can have really awesome sex."
He chuckled. "That's a good summation."
Summation, hell. This was unbelievable. Inconceivable. How had she gotten mixed up with something like this?
But as she looked up at him, she knew. He was compelling. That deadly air and animal magnetism-how could she have even hoped to resist him?
And she wondered if there were more men out there like him. Men of power and magic. Men who were so incredibly sexy that to look at them was to burn for them. "Are there more of you?"
"Yes."
She smiled evilly at the thought. "A lot more?"
He frowned before he answered. 'There used to be a lot more of us, but times change."
Channon saw the sadness in his eyes, the pain that he kept inside. It made her hurt for him.
He looked down at her. "That tapestry you love so much is the story of our beginning."
"The birth of the dragon and the man?"
He nodded. "About five thousand years before you were born, my grandfather, Lycaon, fell in love with a





woman he thought was a human. She wasn't. She was born to a race that had been cursed by the Greek gods. She never told him who and what she really was, and in time she bore him two sons."
Channon remembered seeing that birth scene embroidered on the upper left edge of the tapestry.
"On her twenty-seventh birthday," he continued, "she died horribly just as all the members of her race die. And when my grandfather saw it, he knew his children were destined for the same fate. Angry and grief-stricken, he sought unnatural means to keep his children alive."
Sebastian was tense as he spoke. "Crazed from his grief and fear, he started capturing as many of my grandmother's people as he could and began experimenting with them-combining their life forces with those of animals. He wanted to make a hybrid creature that wasn't cursed."
"It worked?" she asked.
"Better than he had hoped. Not only did his sorcery give them the animal's strength and powers, it gave them a life span ten times longer than that of a human."
She arched a brow at that. "So you're telling me that you're a werewolf who lives seven or eight hundred years?"
"Yes on the age, but I'm not a Lykos. I'm a Drakos."
"You say that as if I have a clue about what you mean."
"Lycaon used his magic to 'half his children. Instead of two sons, he made four."
"What are you saying?" she asked. "He sliced them down the middle?"
"Yes and no. There was a byproduct of the magic I don't think my grandfather was prepared for. When he combined a human and an animal, he expected his magic would create only one being. Instead, it made two of them. One person who held the heart of a human, and a separate creature whose heart was that of the animal.
"Those who have human hearts are called Arcadians. We are able to suppress the animal side of our nature. To


control it. Because we have human hearts, we have compassion and higher reasoning."
"And the ones with animal hearts?"
"They are called Katagaria, meaning miscreant or rogue. Because of their animal hearts, they lack human compassion and are ruled by their baser instincts. Like their human brethren, they hold the same psychic abilities and shape-shifting, time-bending powers, but not the self-control."
That didn't sound good to her. "And the other people who were experimented on? Were there two of them, too?"
"Yes. And we formed the basis of two societies: the Arcadians and the Katagaria. As with nature, like went with like, and we created groups or patrias based on our animals. Wolf lives with wolf, hawk with hawk, dragon with dragon. We use Greek terms to differentiate between them. Therefore dragon is drakos, wolf is lykos, etcetera."
That made sense to her. "And all the while the Arcadians stayed with the Arcadians and Katagaria with Katagaria?"
"For the most part, yes."
"But I take it from the sound of your voice that no one lived happily-ever-after."
"No. The Fates were furious that Lycaon dared thwart them. To punish him, they ordered him to kill the creature-based children. He refused. So, the gods cursed us all."
"Cursed you how?"