He takes two steps closer and I take one step back. His movements are slow and deliberate. His body is quiet, but I don’t mistake this for calm or ease. He’s watching me, expecting me to challenge him.
I’ll not disappoint him, if it comes to that. But if he planned to kill me he’d have done it while my back was turned, and I’d be a fool not to use this knowledge to my advantage.
“Who’s not coming?” I demand, hands steady on the hilt of my sword. I keep my sword tip even with his, though he still stands nearly six feet away.
He studies me, and the effect of his light eyes glinting from within the circles he’s charcoaled around them makes me feel I’m being watched by an animal. A dark line runs down from each eye, like the track of a tear, yet they do nothing to soften his appearance. A band of silvery blue, close to the color of his eyes, traces down his nose, bottom lip, and chin. His hair is a shoulder-length tangle of dark-blond waves, and a set of silver plates like small shields form a necklace that adorns his otherwise bare chest.
A muscle in his jaw tightens, but he doesn’t answer.
I swallow hard so my voice won’t betray emotion. “You’ve killed her, then?”
A tight frown bends the set line of his mouth. “Draco? No.” He takes a slow step toward me, eyes bright with menace. “But if you want her to live, you’ll drop your sword.”
Draco…Latin. This man is no priest. Educated by priests, perhaps. Not the barbarian he appears, with his tribal markings and animal skins.
I force my lips into a smirk. He’s bluffing. He has to be. One man with a sword, however skilled, is no match for Aurora. “How will you kill her when you’re here with me?”
“I’ll kill her after,” he growls, surging forward. His sword arcs into the air.
Having exhausted his patience intentionally, the attack doesn’t surprise me. I easily block the blow as it swoops from above.
We hang there, swords locked and grinding.
“You haven’t killed her,” I challenge through gritted teeth. “You didn’t kill me when it was easy. You don’t intend to kill either of us.”
His blade slides and twists. I hold fast to the hilt of my sword, but allow the blade to spin with his motion as he attempts to disarm me. Before his tip can slide under my blade, I use his momentum to launch a counterattack.
The impact of his block rattles the bones of my arms and chest.
He’s a match for my training, and his strength is greater. I can’t last unless he makes a mistake. My sword master taught me that you can make a man forget what he knows by piquing his anger—or his lust.
“Who are you?” I snap, the muscles of my shoulders and forearms on fire.
He leans close to our crossed blades. He’s not even sweating. “I come from the Sun King, who tires of the unruly País d’Òc. He wants your gold and your draco. You, however, are expendable.”
Louis XIV, king of France, and officially our sovereign. But it’s not so easy for even a king to rule a people so far from his capital. Especially once he’s called to court all the Occitan nobles who might have looked out for his interests.
“Roussillon answers only to the Artists Guild,” I hiss, shoving at him with all that remains of my strength.
He drops his resistance, and the force of my shove carries him to the ground—and me along with him. I splay across his chest, our swords pressed uselessly between our bodies.
I try to roll away, but he catches my sword arm and yanks me back. We’re so close my rapid breaths lift the hair around his face. The fire of his gaze scorches my cheeks.
“Let me go,” I demand.
As he holds my gaze, I notice a change. A pulse of…color. Blue and silver spirals, like ink under his skin. They rise with each inhale, fade with each exhale.
Fighting hard now, I manage to scramble away from him. He rolls to his feet, blocking the entrance to the cave, watching me like a wolf. Syllables roll off his tongue like stones—a language I don’t recognize. The strange markings are everywhere—I watch them rise and fade across his chest, abdomen, and forearms.
“Tell me who you are,” I breathe, backing away.
His lips part, but for a long moment he says nothing. And then finally, “Roark.”
I raise my sword between us. “What are you?”
His eyes narrow and his head tilts oddly, like Aurora when she’s listening to something. “You don’t know?”
“How could I know?” My voice takes on shrillness from fear and desperation. I’m beyond controlling it. In the time of my grandparents, a priest was burned for demonic possession of Ursuline nuns in the southern city of Aix. I’d never thought it more than a story to frighten children.
But what is this, if not a demon?
His eyes move over me, raising goosebumps on the back of my neck. During our fight he never became winded. Never loosed even a bead of sweat. Now his chest rises and falls rapidly, his skin glistening with moisture.
“You’ve never been taken by the color,” he says.
My jaw falls open and my grip relaxes, the tip of my sword lowering. “What?” My mouth is so dry it comes out a whisper.
Again his eyes move over me, and this time I drop my gaze to see what he sees.
My sword clatters to the floor of the cave as I grab hold of my wrist. Beneath the skin of my inner arm, patterns of color shift. Ochre and vermilion, a mirror to his blue and silver.
“What have you done to me?” I cry.
His eyes widen, brows lifting. “I’ve woken you.”
My heart pounds, and I see the pulse of color even when I close my eyes. My breaths come in ragged gasps. My body is covered with leaves, flowers, and symbols I don’t understand—like paintings on the wall of an ancient cave. Glancing down at my torso, I stare at a red-gold vine pattern that dips below the tie of my chemise and into my bodice.
I sink to my knees, imploring him with my eyes. “Please make it stop.”
He shakes his head slowly, and I see a battle raging behind his eyes. See it, but don’t understand it.
“You’ll turn now,” he says, his voice changed. No more deep, controlled tones. He’s gone husky and rough, as I have. “It can’t be stopped. Not if it’s the first time.”
“Turn to what?” I demand.
“Draco.”
I stare at him, eyes wide with shock and horror. I shake my head, and the color throbs against my skull. I squeeze my eyes closed. “No. Not possible. What have you done to me?” I repeat.
“Your first meal came from the body of a dragon. Aurora’s mother, perhaps? Is it not so?”
Blessed Virgin, save me. “Why would you say such a thing?”
“Is it not so?” he demands.
“Yes!” I nod into my hands, which I’ve pressed against my temples to dampen the hammering. “To make me strong.”
A barking noise escapes his lips, and I realize he’s laughing at me. “It has worked, madam.”
“But I’m a grown woman,” I protest. “Why now?”
“Have you never fought the color before?”
The color. Every day, for almost as long as I can remember.
“Mostly at the time of the full moon,” I say, more to myself than to him. My gaze scrapes over the walls of paintings.
“But it never won before” is his tight reply. “It will now.”
I jerk my head up and glare at him through a crimson and orange fog. “How can you be sure?”
“Because I’m here.” He strides toward me and I sink back on my heels. “I thought it was Aurora I scented, but it was you. I thought my scent had called her—it can be a fatal vulnerability, the call to mate. But she came to protect you from me. She knows.”
I stare at him, agape. Am I to believe this? He takes another step toward me, and the fear that grips me swirls into a ball of heat at my core. It shifts and changes like the color beneath my skin. With each vermilion pulse, I feel his mouth on my neck. With each flash of ochre, I feel the grip of his hands at my waist. M
y mouth waters, and heat throbs between my legs.
I stumble away blindly, trying to banish these impossible sensations. Even with my eyes tightly closed, his image rises before me—the power and potency of his body, the gaze that burns like fire everywhere it touches.
When I look up again, I see he’s come no closer. But he has sheathed his sword.
“I can help you,” he says, his voice back to the thunder-like rumble. “The shift…it will come like an explosion of sensation. Without pain or fear.” He raises his hands and unclasps the fur cape that rests over his shoulders, letting it fall to the floor. I can’t help studying the hard lines and curves of his arms and torso. “This is what your body is asking for. It’s the reason you’re changing now.”
I lock onto his gaze, those bright smoldering points, and I think he must be the devil himself. My grandmother told me about the demon priest, but it was our cook Sabine who told me the Ursulines had accused him of carnal transgressions. Depraved acts of the flesh.
I dart past the blue devil toward the mouth of the cave.
His arm shoots out and he catches me around the waist, drawing me tight against his chest. “Isabeau,” he hisses into my ear. “Are you a dragonmaid or a frightened child?”
Age of Dragons
Let go of the fear so you can think.
I hear my sword master’s voice. This man is an enemy, no question, but the devil? I stopped believing in such things five years ago, when a wandering monk denounced Aurora as the spawn of Satan. The old man’s body was scarred from rending his own flesh, and he accused me of being a servant of the devil.
The smell of my enemy floods my nostrils—warm and earthy, with tendrils of masculine sharpness. I feel the hard muscles of his chest pressing into my back. He exhales hot and slow against my ear, and my belly floods with tingling heat.
Coiling his arms tighter, he lifts me off my feet and crosses to one side of the cave. He shoves me against one of my paintings—a dance of dragons in flight—and plants a hand on either side, caging me.
His chin sweeps down my plaited hair, and I feel first his lips, then his teeth, against the back of my neck. He bites and sucks, pressing my body into the cave wall, and my nipples go hard against the rough surface.
I can’t think. Can hardly breathe. But something he said is echoing inside my head: It can be a fatal vulnerability, the call to mate.
I can’t fight this. Am very near not wanting to. But even as I drown in color and sensation, my sword master speaks. While I resist my enemy, he is stronger. This interplay of bodies will give me power. And at the end of it, if there is truth in what Roark’s told me, I will have perhaps my only chance to escape him. To find Aurora and warn the village. Because if he’s come from the Sun King, he hasn’t come alone. And this trial of mine will be nothing to what’s to come.
But I will have it on my own terms.
I turn in his arms until my back rests against the wall. His face sinks into my hair and he breathes me in, exhaling with a groan. The patterns beneath his flesh no longer fade, but only throb from faint to bright. Will he change too? I wonder. It doesn’t matter. When I find Aurora, we’ll be a match for him.
I realize the fire has gone out. I can see him in the dark without it—because the color beneath our skin is glowing. He reaches up and hooks his fingers into my bodice, tugging so hard I gasp. The curling leaf pattern between my breasts is bright as hot coals now. His head dips and he traces it with his tongue.
The ache of need between my legs is hard and hot. It’s all I can do not to lock my ankles around his waist and pull him against me. I’ve felt this need before—when I began to see my sword master as a man. I felt it when our swords clashed. In his eyes I could see he felt it too. But he had a family, and was master of both his swords. I believed, like a child, that I was in love with him.
But when the color came, it burned away my desire for him as it burned away what was left of my childhood. There is nothing childish about this desire.
“Let go,” Roark growls, rising from between my breasts to look at me. “Stop trying to control it and open to me.”
His hand coils in my hair and he yanks my head back, lips landing hot on mine. I raise my arms and shove him away.
He eyes me with shock and impatience, but I reach up and begin unlacing my bodice. His body goes rigid as he watches the movement of my fingers. I drop the bodice and pull my chemise over my head. I bend and remove my boots before working my breeches down over my hips.
The moment I straighten, he’s there, fingers curling around my waist as he lifts me and settles me against the hardness at his groin. I coil my legs around him, soaking the front of his breeches with the evidence of my need.
My breasts feel swollen and heavy, and he closes a hand over one. With his other hand splayed at the base of my spine, he holds me steady as he grinds his body against mine.
With a growl he sets me down, pressing me until I buckle onto all fours under the force of his hand. I had intended to take charge of this, but I’m so raw and ragged with need I’m willing to be mastered.
Rocking backward toward him, I bow my back so my buttocks rise high.
Without warning he slides hard into me, only stopping when my backside’s jammed against his abdomen. His big hands grip the fronts of my hips, lifting my knees off the floor so he can sink deeper. I support myself on my arms, breasts swinging with each thrust, and I clench around his cock. He’s thick and solid and I feel like I’m riding a fencepost. His hands control me, gliding my body over his length, shifting right and then left, testing every angle.
I glance down between my breasts, where I can see him entering me, and gasp. The ochre patterns on my lower abdomen recede as blue spirals creep up in their place.
I feel close to exploding when he lifts me, pulling my back against his chest. Again gripping my hips, he raises and lowers me over his cock, penetrating deeper still.
With the tight rhythm of his cock jabbing high in my abdomen, something in me releases. Two shouts ring out, their echoes tangling in the back of the cave, as sensation floods my belly like molten liquid. One arm wraps around my middle, hand reaching up to squeeze my breast, and I notice that instead of blue spirals, his arm is now covered with silver scales.
I cry out in alarm as he lifts me off his cock and lays me on the floor. He walks on his knees until he’s hovering over me. Light-blue scales fan out over his abdomen. I try to scoot away, but he grabs my hips again, and a moment later he’s dipping his still-hard cock into my mound, slicked with his seed and my own desire.
“No!” I cry, but my hips rock up in betrayal, opening to receive him, and he thrusts hard and deep. I watch the glide of our bellies, silver and ochre, until the color throbs so hard behind my eyes that I see nothing.
The second release is an explosion of heat and color. Before I even understand what’s happened, I’m following a jet of flame as I careen through the mouth of the cave, like an arrow fired from a crossbow.
—
Thunder cracks the clear, starry sky and I glance over my extended wing.
The Silver is not far off the tip of my tail. I’m in a strange body—somehow both heavier and more buoyant than my earth-bound clay—and I don’t know whether I’m fast enough or strong enough to escape him.
But I know about dragons. A Persian tradesman in the company that brought Aurora had a priceless illuminated manuscript on the subject. The Artists Guild tried to buy it, but had to settle for making a copy—far inferior to the original due to only having a few days to complete it. Twenty years later our artists are still working to create a replica from the copy.
But I am permitted to study the copy when it is not in use by the artists, and I know that I have something a Silver doesn’t.
With a slight wing adjustment, I wheel around to face my pursuer. I only have to think what I want to happen, easier than striking a flint, and I feel a tiny explosion at the base of my throat before flame erupts from my open jaws.
He’s so close I expect a howl of pain, but all I hear is a hissing, and a great cloud of steam rises between us. I don’t wait for it to clear before whipping back around. I have to find Aurora.
Just beyond the mouth of the valley, I find her lying as if dead, bound with rope from tooth to tail. The bellows inside me kindles a rage hotter than my fiery breath. Descending toward the field, I find it crawling with soldiers—hundreds of them, mounted, moonlight glinting off their armor.
I want to blast them with fire. The urge is so powerful I’ve opened my jaws without realizing it. But in the moment before I drop within range, I feel a light weight at my back, like a mantle falling over my shoulders.
A voice rumbles up to my sensitive ear, and I realize the accursed shifter is astride me. Roaring in furious protest, I curl and roll into an aerial somersault, but he grips powerfully with his legs and manages to hold his position.
“You’re a fine, powerful Persian, Isabeau. The most magnificent I’ve seen.”
These words are purred in low, seductive tones, but I hear them clearly, as when his lips were at my ear. Even now—even in this alien body—his voice kindles a fire in regions far south of my internal forge.
You’ll not defeat me with flattery. Yet even as I think the words—even knowing his game—I discover his praise has created a swelling sense of satisfaction.
The most magnificent I’ve seen. Aurora has always been a vain creature. Now I know it’s her birthright.
“You’re more terrifying than even your sister,” he continues, “who still possesses an animal’s intellect. But remember that your human forebears were Gauls, and that makes us doubly kin. So hear me now, if you want to live.”
The men on the ground have noticed my circling form, and I find a hundred crossbows following my movement.
“Those arrows are tipped with poison,” continues Roark. “Potent enough to sink even a creature as powerful as yourself. It will take only a few strikes to make you sleep, as Aurora does. If they’re all loosed, it will kill you.”
His voice has risen so that his next words carry both command and threat. His heels dig into my sides. “Find ground. I have something to say to you. Do it now.”
Before She Wakes: Forbidden Fairy Tales Page 5
