Thick patches of clouds had gathered in the twilit sky, blocking Dragonsbane from sight. The Red Heat still shimmered in the air, but with the comet not currently visible it was easier to ignore its effects—if only marginally. The horizon was aglow with grayish light that would soon enough burst into gold and orange, painting the mountains and the desert in that pure, unique light that only existed in the brief time immediately after sunrise. Falthyris had not witnessed that in decades, if not longer.
He scanned the landscape below, running his gaze over sand, stone, and rugged vegetation. Tiny creatures scurried here and there amidst the plants and rocks, taking advantage of the shadows, which were temporarily deeper thanks to the transitioning light. Falthyris should not have noticed any of them—like humans, these desert vermin should have been too small and insignificant to warrant his attention.
The female had disrupted everything.
When he flicked out his tongue, he caught the scent of fresh water on the air. Perhaps a drink, paired with the water’s soothing music, would help clear his head.
Spreading his wings, he caught a downward current and rode it toward the river canyon. His wings pitched and tilted as he sought his balance in this clumsy human form. He managed to maintain a straight course, at the very least, which was a marked improvement over his other attempts at flight since his change.
His feet came down upon soft grass along the riverbank, and his momentum carried him forward a few paces before he drew to a halt. He pulled his wings in tight and rolled his shoulders. The river flowed behind him, its presence like a cool breath on his back, but he did not immediately turn to face it.
There was a scent in the air. A familiar scent.
Falthyris extended his tongue to catch that smell, and his body tensed as soon as he’d sampled it—it was his human’s fragrance. Not just her feminine scent, as sweet as flowers blossoming under a desert moon, but the scent of her arousal. The scent of their mating.
His gaze dropped, falling upon an object on the ground nearby, lying beside a small patch of flattened grass. A bag.
The human’s bag.
Falthyris’s heartfire flared as he spun about to survey his surroundings. He barely bit back an enraged roar. He’d unwittingly returned to the very spot where his human had lured him in, the spot where she’d stolen everything from him.
He curled his hands into fists, squeezed his eyes shut, and filled his lungs with cool air. He could not allow himself to overlook what the human had done. He could not allow himself to forget what she had taken. The pleasure he had obtained from her body was fleeting, as ephemeral as the relief provided by his releases. It would never be worth the price he’d paid.
And yet even now, he felt that pull toward her, and his cock twitched with anticipation and desire. Falthyris clamped a hand around the base of his shaft and growled. His body was betraying him—not that it was truly his to begin with.
When images of the human’s lithe body, with that smooth, tan skin and those enticing black markings flitted into the darkness behind his eyelids, he knew it was not merely this accursed body working against him. His own mind had turned on itself.
And was that not what the female desired? Was that not a matter of her asserting dominance over him? He should have been able to crush her underfoot, scrape off the mess on a rock with an air of distaste, and move on with his existence. This human should have been little more than a momentary nuisance, forgotten almost as quickly as she’d entered his life.
In his mind’s eye, he saw the look that had been on her face after he’d dropped her in the tunnel. He saw her confusion, her hurt. He should have been able to take a modicum of satisfaction from that, but instead it was like a shard of ice embedded in his heartfire, forming a cold, desperate void in his chest.
Falthyris opened his eyes and snarled, tightening his hold on his shaft. He was a mighty dragon who had lived nearly two thousand years—he would not spare any remorse or sympathy for a human who would have been born, lived her full lifespan, and died over the course of one of his naps. Being bonded to her did not mean caring for her, did not mean acknowledging her as an equal. Because she was not his equal.
She never would be.
Drawing his wings even tighter against his back, he strode to the water’s edge. His human shape forced him down onto his knees in the mud, hands braced on the ground. He leaned forward, straightening his tail to act as a counterbalance, and lowered his face.
His mouth touched the water’s surface—as did his nose, quite unexpectedly. More unexpected was the water that immediately entered his nostrils, which he then sucked in deeper with startled gasp. He shoved himself upright, sputtering, coughing, and shaking his head, growling at the harsh sting in his nose and throat.
In his natural form, he would merely have had to lower his head and drink straight from the river—no kneeling the mud and tipping his body into some precarious position.
“Even water is a weakness for these humans?” he said, wiping the moisture from his stupid flat face. “A thousand curses upon mankind! A thousand curses upon—”
Falthyris’s heartfire roared to an inferno, and he snapped his mouth shut hard enough to make his teeth clack together.
Upon that female.
Those were the words he’d been about to say, but they’d died in his throat, and the very thought of them made his gut churn. No matter his anger, no matter the other things he’d said to her, he could not bring himself to wish a curse upon her.
And cursing her people is acceptable? She is human—this bond does not alter that.
Falthyris released a fire-laced huff through his nostrils, letting the flames chase away the lingering sting in his sinuses.
This world had seen curses aplenty. Dragonsbane’s curse had seen the dragons of the region decimated, and there’d never been many of them to begin with. They’d never been able to multiply like humans, had never been able to produce offspring every year—or however fast it was humans birthed their young. Along with the violent lust induced by the Red Heat, the comet had altered dragons in some way, leaving fewer and fewer females hatched.
He had not encountered a dragoness in centuries. Thanks to his human, it did not matter if he ever met another dragoness again. He was bound.
His rage was justified, and he would not let go of it, but ignoring the reality of the situation would not help him. He was altered, and there was no going back. He would have to adapt to life in this form, or he’d only fill his remaining days with excessive, unnecessary frustration and misery.
Falthyris glanced down at his hands. Their long, relatively thin fingers were so unlike the powerful digits of his dragon form, but they were nothing if not dexterous. His eyes shifted to the water again, which shimmered with the reflection of the cloudy gray sky. He was not incapable of solving problems, and this was a simple one to overcome once he set aside his annoyance.
He brought his hands together, curling them just enough to form a crude bowl shape, and dipped them into the river. He lifted them to his lips and drank from the water gathered on his palms. The liquid was cool and refreshing, briefly soothing the fires within him, and dulling the Red Heat’s constant pulse in his mind.
He scooped up more water as soon as he’d finished the first handful, gulping it down greedily, and took another afterward, unbothered by the water trickling down his chin.
Falthyris had not drank since just before he’d begun his slumber all those years ago.
He drew in a deep breath and sat back on his calves, bracing his hands on his thighs. The faint crimson waves flowing through the air around him baked into his scales. Dragonsbane’s fingers crept up his spine, causing another flare in his heartfire, but the ache in his groin—while still quite present—was bearable. His human had granted just enough relief for him to think clearly.
Clearly enough to understand that such lucidity would not last long while the comet was still up there somewhere, bathing the world in its power.
<
br /> Before he risked succumbing to the Heat again, there was another matter that required his attention, one he’d been reminded of after drinking—food. His last meal had been just as long ago as his last drink, and his gut was hollow with hunger.
Falthyris stood up. Maintaining his balance was growing easier. The relationship between his body, wings, and tail was gradually becoming apparent, and he was learning how to counteract the awkwardness of this shape. He turned away from the river and strode forward. Before he realized what he was doing, he picked up the human’s bag. Her scent clung to it. He groaned and lapped the smell off the air.
He took a few moments to rummage through her belongings. He recognized most of the fabrics as articles of clothing, and knew some of the objects were food, but many of the tools within were strange to him. What need had a dragon for such things? They were little more than means of bolstering a species too weak to survive on their own, a species that could be killed by things as harmless and mundane as exposure to the sun.
His foot bumped into something as he moved to walk away. He bent to pick up the object. It was a leathery sac, a bladder, with liquid sloshing inside. A rawhide cord was tied around its neck, and it was plugged with a wood cylinder wedged in a ring of carved bone.
Falthyris adjusted his hold on the bag to uncork the sac, lift it to his nose, and sniff the contents. Water. As he replaced the plug, he couldn’t help again recalling the human cities that had once stood in the wavering heat of the Forsaken Sands, the stone buildings that had been clustered around oases, along riverbanks, and near floodplains.
For all their shortcomings, humans were tenacious and inventive.
He dropped the water bladder into the bag, which he closed and slung over his head and one shoulder. His human would likely be happy to see her belongings returned.
The corner of Falthyris’s mouth quirked.
He fought back that smile with a purposeful scowl, punctuating it with a snarl. He would not take her happiness into account, and he would not go out of his way to please her.
But his lips still tingled with the remembered feel of her mouth, so soft and yielding, pressed against them, and his heartfire blazed.
His scowl faded. He told himself it was due to confusion—why would she want to join their mouths? Why would she want to rub their lips together? All that had mattered was the meeting of their pelvises, the slide of his shaft inside her channel. What did mouths have to do with any of that?
Did I not long to run my tongue over her skin, to taste her? Do I not still long for it?
Do I not yearn for the feel of her lips again?
“The human has lodged herself in my mind like a parasite,” he muttered. But he knew at heart it wasn’t so simple as that. Though the mating bond served as a perpetual reminder of her, though the Red Heat kept his desire for her burning bright, part of this was just…him.
Because despite everything, there was something intriguing about her, something alluring. Something he could come to admire.
With a guttural growl, he broke into a run, spread his wings, and leapt into the air. The first rays of golden sunlight had broken over the horizon, blanketing the land in a golden glow and making all the rock formations cast long, deep shadows. Much of the sky remained clouded, but he could tell merely by the humidity that there would be no rain today. This mountainous land—and the desert beneath its gaze—would remain dry for a while longer.
Falthyris scanned the ground, seeking signs of movement, signs of animals or their passage, falling as easily into the hunt as though his last had been yesterday rather than decades before.
But I did hunt last night.
It simply ended with me becoming the prey.
9
Falthyris landed heavily just inside the mouth of the cave. He tossed his quarry onto the floor without ceremony and shook his hands, willing the tension out of his fingers. It wasn’t often that physical exertion caused him discomfort, but holding on to the carcass of a beast that was longer than he was tall in this form had required far more effort than he’d anticipated—not because of the added weight, but because of how large, awkward, and limp his burden had been.
As though the human’s bag repeatedly falling out of place to bump Falthyris’s arm and ribs repeatedly hadn’t been irritating enough, as though the strands of his mane constantly blowing into his eyes and mouth had not been enough of an impediment, the dead sandstone ox had swayed and flopped throughout the return to the lair. Those erratic motions had disrupted Falthyris’s already tenuous stability over and over, making this last flight the slowest and clumsiest since his change by far.
He glanced deeper into the cave. The human was partway down the tunnel, close to where he’d left her, sitting with her back to the wall. She was unmoving but for the barely perceptible rise and fall of her chest denoting her breathing. Was she asleep?
Falthyris should have been sleeping. He should have been deep in his dreams until well after this human had been worn down to a grizzled husk by the harsh desert winds, until her children were grown, until—
Falthyris hissed and slapped a hand to his chest. His inner fire blazed hot enough to constrict his heart and steal the breath from his lungs. He curled his fingers, raking his claws over his scales as though he could tear out that sudden discomfort.
He knew what had caused this pain, knew what had triggered this latest flare in his heartfire—the thought of her having birthed another male’s offspring.
Have I fallen so low as to enrage myself with my own speculations of what might have been?
The answer came without delay—yes.
It didn’t matter if she was a human or a dragon, a mermaid or a damned mountain goat. She was Falthyris’s now, and his alone. He would allow no other male to so much as glance at her inappropriately. Whether he wanted her or not, this human belonged to Falthyris.
Of course, that did not mean he had to be happy about it. That didn’t mean he needed to take pride in the fact that he’d brought food home to her. That didn’t mean he had to give in to his sudden, foolish urge to recline beside his human and join her in the serenity of sleep.
He shook his head sharply and tore his gaze away from her. His wings pulled in tight against his back and his tail lashed restlessly as he bent forward to grasp the ox by its thick mane and the flesh on the back of its neck.
Body, mind, and soul—all were betraying him. But what did that leave to resist this human’s ensorcellment?
It is the Red Heat. I will have control once the comet has passed.
That should have been reassuring, but he found the notion unconvincing.
Falthyris bared his teeth and expelled a small burst of flame from his nostrils as he heaved the sandstone ox onto his shoulder. He walked deeper into the cave, staring at her during his approach. When he reached the human, he stopped in front of her and continued staring. He was barely aware of the weight on his shoulder as untold moments passed.
Her dark mane hung freely about her shoulders, tousled and shining in the bit of sunlight reaching this far into the tunnel. Her full, pink lips were relaxed, and her lush, dark lashes were fanned upon cheeks that bore a hint of rose. She sat with her chin tilted down, arms folded over her chest as though to keep her torn robe closed—but her arms must have grown lax in her slumber, for one of those mounds had escaped the confines of her clothing, its dark peak teasing him.
How had he managed to resist taking those in hand yet? They were round and smooth but for the darker circles at their peaks that hardened into little nubs, and the way they moved when she did…
Were they firm or yielding? Could they be both?
His gaze traced the patterns on her skin from the backs of her hands and up to her sleeves, both of which were drawn up to the middles of her forearms. Many of the elements comprising those markings were abstract shapes and lines, but some of them looked like flowers—like the very flowers that were blooming in the desert even now. Those markings only enhanced th
e natural grace of her lithe limbs. He’d not thought that grace possible in the human form, but she defied his expectations.
Pale scars also marked her skin here and there, some barely distinguishable from her unmarred flesh, including a thin one across the back of her hand. That called his attention to her fingers; they were long and slender, rough and elegant simultaneously. He’d already felt some of their strength—miniscule compared to his own, but surprising from such a small, fragile looking human. That strength had been intriguing, as had been the scrape of her blunt, pale claws over his scales.
What would those hands feel like elsewhere on his body?
His cock twitched in anticipation.
Falthyris shifted his eyes lower still, to her supple thighs and toned calves, to her dainty feet and little toes, which were also tipped with blunt claws. Those legs were strong, too. The feel of them looped around his waist, of her thighs squeezing his hips, her heels pressing into his back to drive him deeper, faster…
He groaned and curled the fingers of his free hand around his seeping cock. His mind swirled, his heartfire intensified, and building pressure briefly tensed his muscles. He longed to experience those sensations again, longed to feel her hungry sex grasping his shaft. Her scent swelled in his awareness, blossoming like the desert flowers of which it was reminiscent, and overpowered all other smells.
The Red Heat coursed through his body, creating a shudder that rattled his wings. It crept into the edges of his vision and slowly stained his world crimson. He could claim release from her so easily. He could take as much pleasure as he wished, could do anything he wanted with her.
He could taste those full pink lips with his own, could taste her skin with his tongue, could—
The sound of something heavy thumping onto the floor jarred him from those thoughts. He reflexively withdrew his hand from his shaft.
The sandstone ox had fallen, forgotten in his lust.
To Tame a Dragon (Venys Needs Men) Page 7
