He hadn’t been in his house in half a year, and it felt stale and claustrophobic. Armstrong wasn’t the outdoors type, but he’d been shocked by how easily he’d adapted to life on Buto with the dragons. Admittedly, he missed television, music and fast food. He did learn how to grill meats and vegetables like a champ and his body, from running after a baby dragon with an endless supply of energy, had an impressive muscular cut he hadn’t seen since he turned thirty-seven and his metabolism began to slow.
Dressed in worn jeans and an old T-shirt, Armstrong plopped on the couch a cushion length down from Kya, who looked as awful as he felt. Well, at least that was something he supposed.
He shifted to his side to face Kya, who leaned against the armrest of the couch, her legs pulled to her chest. Physically, she’d changed little in the twenty-two years they’d known each other. Even if she’d never become pregnant with Elijah, this would’ve been their fate. He would’ve continued to grow old while she stayed young and beautiful.
Armstrong had his forty-seventh birthday while on Buto. He’d known men who’d dated women twenty years their junior. Some guys were even stupid enough to leave their wife for a younger woman. While he, like any man, enjoyed the sight of a beautiful woman, youth and vitality couldn’t replace the depth of pleasure that came with knowing someone for years and loving that person all the more for the time shared together.
Still, he possessed enough vanity to not want Kya to see him grow old while she went from looking like his lover to his daughter and finally to his grand-daughter. Kya was a dragon, but she was also human enough to appreciate the virility of a male’s body.
“Your father agreed to turn me into a dragon. According to Westmore’s files, if a human consumes the blood of a dragon, the shift will take place. That’s how he was able to create the Kesins.”
“Father has never turned any human into a dragon. Westmore was insane, and so were his monsters. Do you wish to become like them, Armstrong, a mindless beast of prey?”
“Westmore theorized that the blood and stone of a full-dragon would mediate the negative effects he experienced with the Kesins. That’s why he and Cafferty turned their attention back to capturing you. They wanted a pureblood source, no offense to Elijah.”
“Did you not hear me when I said Kenneth Westmore was insane? You cannot entrust your life to the hypothesis of a madman.”
“What if he’s right?”
Even in human form, when upset, Kya released wisps of Bloodstone magic from her nose.
“What if he’s wrong? Do you know what that will mean?” Her voiced rose, and the hands on her knees fisted. “It means if you shift into a bloodthirsty Afiya, which is so much worse than an out-of-control Kesin, I’ll be forced to kill you.”
“I know.”
In a blur of dragon speed, Kya was in his face and straddling his hips. “You know nothing, Armstrong Knight. You always think you do, but you do not. Harming you would destroy the Bloodstone Dragon and the human that is Kya. I would rather watch you grow old and die than kill my son’s father and my mate.”
“Your kendi.”
“Gasira talks too much. But yes, you’re my kendi.”
“Forever love. That’s what I want us to have, Kya. And there’s only one way for us to have what we both want.”
She shook her head and tears formed but didn’t fall. “It’s too dangerous. I won’t permit it.”
“It’s my choice.”
“A selfish choice.”
“How is wanting to spend centuries with you and Elijah a selfish choice?”
Armstrong slid his hands into Kya’s long, thick hair. They hadn’t been this physically close in years, she in human form and them alone in their house the way they once were.
“It’s selfish because there’s no guarantee of success. If the transformation doesn’t go as you hope, your death will bring pain to your family. Is that what you want, for your mother to bury her son as she did her husband?”
Pulling her even closer, Armstrong laid his forehead against hers. “You know it isn’t. I don’t want to leave my family. No more than I want to lose you and Elijah. Help me find a way to have both. So yeah, call me a selfish human, but I want to have both.”
He kissed her, the way he’d wanted to do for months. But Kya, like all the Dracontias, he’d learned, rarely shifted into their human form while on Buto. They were, as she’d said many times, dragons who could simply transform into a human.
But there, in their home and on his lap, Armstrong took what his mate willingly gave.
Kya kissed him back with the same hunger lust surging through him. She tasted so good, her tongue in his mouth, exploring and driving him wild. His gray-and-white shirt ripped under her impatient hands. And the buttons of her blouse popped under his.
Before he knew it, they were upstairs, on the bed, lights off and the bedroom door closed. They finished undressing each other as best they could while refusing to stop kissing.
He worked his way down Kya’s amazing body, sucking her neck and fondling breasts and flicking nipples.
Throaty moans and writhing hips had Armstrong planting open-mouthed kisses on her taut stomach, curvy hips, and soft inner thighs. Kissing his way back up to her waiting lips, Armstrong’s fingers played with her springy nest of curls, his thumb rubbing the supple folds of her sex.
Kya moaned into his mouth and swallowed his tongue deep, just as his fingers slipped inside her. Probing, thrusting, and crooking to find the ridges to her pleasure he remembered all too well.
Wrenching her mouth from his and breathing hard, Kya arched her back, drove her sex onto his thick fingers and came in a burst of dragon magic and human cries of release.
Hands going to his face and cradling, Kya opened green jasper eyes and smiled. “I’d forced myself to not think how good you could make my human body feel.” A lick of his lips and then a bite to his chin. “I tingle all over. It’s a delicious sensation.” With dragon strength, she shifted them. Armstrong on his back and Kya above him on her knees, their groins pressed intimately close. “I remember what you like and how to please you.”
“Got to love that photographic memory of yours.”
Kya took him inside, she wet and pulsing, he hard and throbbing. Hands rose and gripped her waist, hips lifted and pressed.
No condom
He stopped. Swore.
Kya leaned down and kissed him, her nipples grazing his chest. “What’s wrong?” Not waiting for an answer, she began to move over top of him. Short thrusts to the tip of his penis, then back up. Short thrusts, then back up. One deep slide, a grind and then back up.
The short thrusts decreased as the long slides onto him increased. By the time she reached ten deep slides, Armstrong was close to coming and had almost forgotten about his lack of a condom.
“Kya, wait.”
She began again with nine short thrusts and one deep slide. Eight short thrusts and two deep slides. Damn, she was going to kill him and get herself with another Kesin.
He wanted that. He really did. To tie his Bloodstone Dragon to him with another child. She would have to give in then, right? Wrong. He wouldn’t do that to her or to himself.
“Kya, I’m not wearing a condom.”
“I know.” She sat up, grabbed his wrists, lifted his hands to her breasts and continued to ride him. Eyes closed and head fell back on soft, persistent groans. “A Dracontias can conceive only once every two hundred or so years, regardless of our form.”
Disappointment welled in him, but he knew it was for the best. Unless Armstrong was turned into a dragon, he and Kya wouldn’t have another child.
“How many years before you’re next able to conceive?”
Glassy, passion-filled eyes opened and stared down at him. Not answering, Kya stretched her body over his. Greedy hands went to her ass and helped her rock against him.
“By the human calendar, I’ve lived for two hundred fifty years, which is quite young for a dragon.”
“You’re sexy for an old lady.”
She laughed, then moaned when he spread his legs and thrust upward.
“And tight.”
He did it again.
“And wet.”
Armstrong was so close. From her harsh breaths, so was Kya.
“A compromise, Bloodstone Dragon.”
“Mmmm, not now. Later.”
Knowing she wouldn’t listen to him as long as she was on top and in the power position, Armstrong flipped them over. Not as smoothly as Kya had done but he’d stayed inside of her, which was all that mattered.
Her growl of annoyance had him wrapping Kya’s right leg around his hip and driving into her with long, deep thrusts. In a matter of seconds, her growls evened out to pleased groans.
“A compromise.” Armstrong stopped and waited for Kya’s eyes to focus on him. When they did, he said again, “A compromise. Please.”
Her hands cradled his face again. “What’s the compromise?”
“I won’t accept my wish from the Aragonite Star Dragon. I’ll live what’s left of my human life, spending as much time with you and Elijah as your duties to Buto will allow. In exchange, Kya, I only ask that when I’m old with a well-lived life behind me, you’ll come to me and grant my wish. I know the compromise doesn’t solve the issue of the possibility of Westmore being wrong. I don’t know how to get around that except to say, if the worst happens and you have to kill me, you’ll know that you haven’t denied me life but given me the death I earned.”
The tears she hadn’t let fall when they were downstairs dropped now. Down the sides of her face, over her ears and onto the pillow below her head.
“The first night on the rooftop of my apartment building, you asked me to be your human guide, a cross-cultural exchange you couldn’t fully offer in return. As a compromise, you agreed to grant me one wish and two questions. Since then, you’ve given me so many wishes, some I didn’t deserve or shouldn’t have expected from you. And you’ve answered hundreds of my questions except for the one I’ve never been brave enough to ask because dragons don’t marry.”
More tears fell, and Armstrong began to push into Kya again, unable to deny them this rare stolen moment of carnal delight.
“You have always asked for too much.”
“I never asked for anything before I met you. As a child, I forced myself to accept the absence of my father in my life. With you, Kya, I can’t breathe for wanting you so much. Your bloodstone does more than heals. It brings love and grounds negative energy. I have faith in the power of your Stone of Dracontias, not because of what Westmore hypothesized but because I know my wish is also yours.”
Armstrong made love to Kya, channeling his hopes and dreams for a shared Dracontias future into giving her pleasure and multiple orgasms.
He grunted as he came, sweaty and loud and blissed out of his mind.
A floorboard outside of the closed door creaked. “Dad-dy?”
Wait. Had his son just—Armstrong, naked and partially erect, bolted out of bed and rushed to the door. He would’ve opened it too, as he was if a composed Kya hadn’t used her magic to dress him in boxers and a T-shirt.
He opened the door and smiled down at his son. He’d gone to bed as a dragon and now stood, sleepy-eyed and the size of a five-year-old. Armstrong didn’t think he would ever get used to the difference between human and dragon development. Thin but strong arms raised. Armstrong didn’t hesitate to pick up his son and bring him into the bedroom.
“He spoke.”
“Yes, I heard.”
“He said daddy. All my hard work paid off. Elijah’s first word was daddy.”
“As I said, I heard.”
“You’re jealous.”
As usual, when he said something ridiculous, Kya ignored him. In a blink, she’d done away with the sex-scented sheets and replaced them with fresh linen. They both smelled of sex, which, thankfully, Elijah wouldn’t know.
Armstrong settled himself and his son under the covers. Elijah went straight to his mother the moment his knees hit the mattress. She wore a sexy red nightgown he planned to strip off her come morning. That was if he could get their son back into his bed without waking him.
Tucked against Kya and between them, Elijah wasted no time falling asleep, one hand fisted in his mother’s hair, the other in his mouth, sucking his thumb.
He’d worry about the boy having buck teeth if he kept that up, but Elijah was a healing dragon. His teeth would be just fine.
Armstrong caught Kya’s gaze over their son’s head, a mass of hair the child hated to have combed, but Kya refused to have cut.
“A compromise?”
“Yes,” he answered.
On a long put-upon sigh, Kya, the Bloodstone Dragon, future leader of Buto and mother to his child, rolled her eyes like a true Knight female. “Fine. We have a compromise. If I’m forced to kill you, Armstrong Knight, I’ll make it bloody and quite painful.”
“I love you, too. I’ll never ask for another wish.”
“Liar.”
“Okay, maybe one tiny wish in a hundred fifty years when you’re ovulating again or whatever happens to female dragons when they’re ready to conceive.”
Present-Day
“Mother, it’s time.”
“I know.”
Kya’s eyes drifted from Armstrong’s weathered face and to Elijah who held his father in his arms. She’d heard humans say, about the ninety-two-year-old Armstrong Knight, that he “looked good for his age.” To Kya, her kendi appeared frail and exhausted. Death danced around the corners of dull brown eyes that sagged more than focused.
She thought she prepared herself well for this moment. The way tears slipped from her and hands shook, Kya knew she had not. Her diata could die tonight. If she did nothing, his human form would succumb to age. If she transformed him and he turned in a mindless Afiya, he would be lost to her and Elijah forever.
“It’s what Dad wants.”
“I know.” Eyes that reminded her so much of Armstrong stared back at Kya, watery and afraid. “You do not need to be here. Everyone will watch over your father.”
Elijah shifted his father in his arms and glanced around the clearing. The entire Akata family stood in front of Armstrong’s cabin home on Buto. In honor of the human they all loved, they’d gathered in their human form to say farewell to the man they knew and, if all went well, to welcome a new Dracontias to their family.
“I know I’m young, but I’d like to stay. Please, Mother.”
Kya should make Elijah return to the Eshe Forest until it was done. She didn’t want his last memory of his father to be that of a ravaging dragon his mother had to put down like a rabid dog.
Like his father, Kya could deny Elijah little.
“Place your father onto the sleeping bag, then step back.”
With careful movements, Elijah bent to one then two knees and settled Armstrong onto the black sleeping bag he’d had for years. For several minutes, the young dragon held his father’s hand and didn’t move. He understood, like all gathered, that his father might not survive what was to come.
Kya gave her son the time he needed to say what could be his final words to Armstrong.
“I love you, Dad.”
Weak, Armstrong raised a hand to Elijah’s cheek and wiped away his tears. “I know. You’re the best son a man could’ve ever hoped to have. If I cannot, take care of your mother for me. She’ll grumble that she’s the Bloodstone Dragon and can take care of herself. It’s a partial truth. Stay by her side and listen to her words of wisdom. She’s the smartest person I know.”
Elijah laughed, pressed his cheek into his father’s palm, and then with slumped shoulders stood.
“Come closer, Kya. I can barely see you.”
No, not prepared at all for this moment. Armstrong understood the risks and had tried, since Kya brought him to Buto a week ago, to get her to speak with him about it so they could say their farewells. She’d refused. But she could no lo
nger.
Kya dropped to her knees beside Armstrong. “Don’t make me say goodbye.”
“Not goodbye, my Bloodstone Dragon. Never goodbye. Three words. You’ve only said them once. I’d like to hear them again.”
Leaning over Armstrong, loose hair a curtain of black around his face, Kya kissed his forehead. His cheeks. His lips. “I love you.”
“And I love you. I’ve lived a good life, Kya, much of it because of you and our son. I have no regrets, if this is the end. Any life I may get to live after this one is a bonus. So, don’t cry, my love. I’ll always be your diata.”
Heart in her throat, Kya stood and stepped away from Armstrong. She didn’t trust Westmore. The man’s thought processes hadn’t worked like most humans. Yet, he had achieved something no Dracontias knew was possible.
Kya had learned much from the Aragonite Star Dragon, who stood next to Elijah. Dragons, though powerful as one, were invincible as a group with a single-minded purpose. Today, Armstrong’s safe transition from human to Afiya was the Akata family’s single-minded purpose.
If Westmore thought the magic from one Afiya’s Stone of Dracontias would produce a mentally stable dragon, then Kya reasoned the combined magic and might of ten would be that much stronger.
Elijah’s blood may have resulted in a weak, impure version of a Kesin, but Kya had no intention of plying Armstrong with dragon’s blood. She may not have prepared for his passing, but Kya had given his transformation much thought.
If she didn’t succeed, it wouldn’t be because Kya failed to dissect and address every option before deciding on the best plan of action.
Her family, all except Elijah, who ran onto the cabin’s front porch for his safety, transformed into dragons. Kya did as well. As one, they lifted fifty feet into the air, a circle of gold and green dragons around the form of Armstrong Knight.
Sirens and Scales Page 320
