by Selena Scott
Idris felt his mouth drop open as O lowered an enormous eye, easily the size of an oven.
“See?” O’s dragon said. “Easy as pie.”
Idris turned and looked back at the porch to catch Isla’s eye. Her mouth was dropped straight open. But he couldn’t tell if she was looking at his naked body or O’s dragon.
“It’s not as easy for some of us,” Amos said.
“It hurts, you mean?” Idris asked.
“Sort of. It’s more like a difference of style. I think O dips his toes in the water and I cannonball in.”
“Show me,” Idris said, for a moment taken aback at the command in his own voice. But Amos didn’t seem to have noticed or taken offense.
Amos’s muscles bulged. A primal scream ripped out of his chest as he doubled in size. But he wasn’t growing, he was exploding. His amber green scales sparkled in the sun as Amos’s dragon immediately took to air. As if he had too much energy to stay on the ground. Amos did a quick loop in the air, low to the ground, before he landed.
Idris studied him. Moved past the raw awe of the two dragons in front of him. Amos was larger than O. O was sleeker and faster, with what looked like some pretty nasty battle scars on his left wing.
He took a few steps forward, studied the armadillo pattern of gorgeous, glossy scales on Amos’s flank. He didn’t touch though. They looked sharp enough that they could slice his finger right off.
“I take it you’re a fighter?” he asked Amos and the dragon did something as close as it could to a grin.
“Close enough,” his low voice rumbled over Idris like a distant earthquake.
Idris moved on to O, studying his brother’s scales. They were less regular than Amos’s. Less like armor. Their turquoise color was almost an illusion. Each one was more like a tiny rainbow that just happened to bend more toward turquoise. O stretched one of his legs out so that Idris could see the way the scales moved over one another. There was a lot of flexibility there.
“I take it you’re pretty agile?”
“Like a cat,” O’s huge dragon responded, raising one claw in the air and giving the air a scratch. “Meow.”
Idris couldn’t help but laugh at that one. And it surprised him. He wasn’t much of a laugher. The look of utter delight on O’s face had something twanging in Idris’s face. He wondered, for the first time, what it had been like for O to find out he had a brother. Had it been as disorienting for him?
“Now, let an old man show you how it’s done,” Donovan’s voice came from behind Idris.
He turned, and the man stood there for a moment, his muscles tensing. And then there wasn’t even a shift. It was like man one second, dragon the next. There was a flash of light, a wind from all the air he’d just displaced. But that was it. He was just there, celery green and glistening in the sun. He had scars and nicks. His face was narrower than Amos’s and his tail was longer. And even though he looked more like he was made for speed, he was obviously a fierce fighter.
Idris could tell just from Donovan’s stance that, even now, he was prepared for battle of any kind. And in fact, the old man’s eyes were scanning the skies in reflex. He took to the air, did a quick sweep of the perimeter and had Idris holding his breath. Donovan’s dragon was the closest thing to regal that Idris had ever seen. And not in a sit on your throne sort of way. But in a fight for your people sort of way.
“Alright,” Donovan said, coming to land by the other dragons. The ground quaked under his landing, like a semi truck had just touched down. Which, by the heft of him, Idris considered, it was probably an equivalent weight.
“My turn, huh?” Idris said, uncrossing his arms.
Donovan nodded. “Don’t force it. We have no idea if you’ll be able to do it right away or not. Just see if you can feel out for the edges of the feeling.”
Idris closed his eyes. He did what they asked. What they’d explained. He let his mind wander, drift, the way he did before sleep. He let his body feel the edges of the air around him. He felt where his muscles rested against his bones. He felt his skin, the hairs along his arms.
He knew time was passing. He could feel the dragons shifting around him. He knew frustration wasn’t the way to shift. He could just feel that forcing it wasn’t going to work. And he could be very, very patient. But could they? He was very aware of the eyes on him. He could feel Isla watching from the porch as if she were standing right next to him. She wandered through his mind the way she had when he’d been fighting.
Idris felt a hand on his shoulder and he opened his eyes, looked around. His mother was there. He shifted on his feet. It wasn’t his first choice to be dead ass naked right now, but, there it was. The dragons made him do it.
Those thoughts subsided instantly when he saw a tear in her eye. His mother never cried. She was the toughest woman he’d ever met. And if things got to her in that way, she’d never showed Idris.
“That’s the way he looked the first time I ever saw him.”
Idris saw that she was talking about Donovan. The dragon straightened under her gaze, like he was growing taller.
“He saved my life, you know?”
“You were falling through the air?” Idris asked, remembering the vision that O had shown him.
She nodded. “I fell through a portal. I would have died had he not been there to catch me.” She paused. “I’ll never forget that feeling. Of being in the air with him. The rush of it. The wind past your face, like the windows down on the highway. But ten times more intense because it’s everywhere at once. And when you’re in the air, you have the choice of going any direction, any angle. Not just forward or backward like a car.”
Idris felt something stirring inside him. Something instinctual that knew exactly what his mother was describing. His heart knew what she was talking about, even if his brain didn’t quite yet.
“His grace always surprised me,” Felice continued. “Because he’s sleek, sure. But that’s not the way he is in dragon form. He’s much more like a grizzly bear. And you should see him fight in the air. Jesus Criminy. It’s like a car crash on the highway.”
“Like a semi truck,” Idris supplied
“Exactly,” Felice agreed. She gazed at the dragons, thoughtful. One hand on her boy’s shoulder still. She could feel what was stirring in his chest. She could feel the electricity of his nature just as she’d felt it in Donovan. It was unstoppable.
“And he,” she continued, nodding toward O. “The way he just stretched into his shift, that doesn’t surprise me at all. That’s just the way he was as a little boy. I could see his dragon so clearly within him. He was like a dolphin. Smart and graceful and so playful. He would be a dragon just for the sheer joy of it. I could see that even then. The size, the grandeur, the glint of the light across his scales. Those were all things that would appeal to him about being a dragon.”
She was speaking to Idris, but her voice carried across the field. O was as still as his father, listening to her words like his life depended on it. And maybe it did, Idris considered. He’d grown up without a mother the same way that Idris had grown up without a father. He imagined that left a similar mark. Maybe not the same one, but a reciprocal one. The other half.
He thought about his mother’s words. The playfulness of being a dragon. Swooping through the air like a dolphin through the waves. The air around him felt warm, fuzzy, like his edges were blurring a little bit.
“And what about me?” he asked her. “Could you see my dragon as a boy?”
She looked up at him. “I could see it every day. I can see it now. It was the most clear to me who you were. What your nature was.”
“And what’s that?” he asked, but he almost didn’t need to. He thought he knew what his mother was going to say. Because he wasn’t learning it. He was finally, finally recognizing it.
She squeezed his shoulder. Stepped back away from him. The tears in her eyes were for him now, not for his father or brother. She looked only at him. At her boy, whom she’d ra
ised almost completely on her own.
“You have always been like a lion, my love.”
And with an exhale of extreme relief, like stepping into a warm room after too long in the cold, Idris felt his body let go of the tight rein of control he’d been keeping since the day he was born.
It was painful. Uncomfortable. Like rubbing out a charley horse over every inch of his body. But Idris focused his mind on a lion. On the roar, the sauntering, swaggering protection of his pack. He thought of the teeth. The duty. The blazing fight of leading.
And his body was expanding, racing, arming itself. He heard a roar echo out of his chest, like a volcano waking up after thousands of dormant years. He knew he shook the trees, the ground.
He was still transforming, growing, exploding. His body was still his. But as he ripped off the ground, he was also very, very different. His arms were both the claws in tight fists in front of him and the wings at his back. He could feel his human arms, somehow in all of those appendages.
And a tail, what a mindfuck. He whipped it around experimentally and realized that it was pretty much the most badass weapon he could imagine. Like an extremely wieldable mace.
He realized with something like ecstasy that his feet weren’t on the ground. His wings had instinctively brought him right up off the ground. He was up, beating at the air. Perhaps not extremely smoothly, but he was in the air. He was fucking flying.
He let out another roar. One that had been building in his chest for what felt like damn near thirty years. His jaw was heavy and strong and he felt like he could bite a tank in half. Maybe he could. He extended his claws and realized that they were as dexterous as fingers but almost a foot long each.
He wasn’t sure about how to land so he let himself drop with a thunderous bang. He saw the reverberation of it made his mother topple to her knees.
And then, with a sort of confusion, he realized that Amos, in dragon form, was bowing his head to him. Idris cast his gaze over toward O and then to Donovan. And both dragons quickly swept into a bow as his eyes hit them. Idris took a step back, confused.
And as he stepped back, one of his wings came into view. What color was it? How to describe that? Idris looked down at his chest, his flank, his tail. He was… clear? But refracting light in every direction. White light. Rainbow light. He was every color and no color at once. Simply bright. Painful almost to look at.
No wonder they were bowing their heads away from him. He didn’t dwell on it. He was a dragon. But more than that, he was finally in his true form. He felt it down to his bones. This was what he was supposed to be. What his body had always known he could be. Even if his brain hadn’t believed it. Idris felt a primal energy racing through him. He wanted all things animal.
He wanted to eat something delicious and cooked over a fire. He wanted to drink from a stream. He wanted to feel rain on his back. He wanted the wind of the thinnest part of the atmosphere. He wanted to hunt. To protect. He wanted to fly and fight. And fuck.
The thought struck him like an anvil. He turned to look at the porch where Isla stood. Staring at him, completely awestruck, her hands clasped in front of her chest, almost as if she were in prayer.
And then she was all he could see. All he could think of. He thought that without her, he might never change back into a man.
But there she was. So lovely that he was shifting before he’d even asked himself to. It felt like folding himself down. Taking off a suit of armor. Hanging up a gun, the way a cop might when he comes home.
It felt like coming home, to be in his human form. Not as exciting as the new world he’d discovered. But just as important.
His dragon blood didn’t cool though, as he strode across the field. His eyes on Isla. His heart pumped with the same animal need that he’d felt just moments before, in his dragon form. He needed her in a way he couldn’t begin to describe.
Not just man to woman. But the way an animal needs another to survive. To go on. For the species. The need of it, the frantic compulsion, was in his blood. He could taste it as he closed the distance between them. There was an electric snap flowing over him as he bounded up onto the porch.
Her eyes were humongous, her mouth popped open on a squeak and she took a shocked little half step away from him.
Nope.
He gripped her waist, scooped her up and over his shoulder. He kicked the door of the house open, kicked it closed and was through the house in seconds. And then he was slamming the door of their own room closed behind him.
He didn’t care what kind of scene he’d just created. He didn’t care that all of them were very, very clear on the fact that he’d just taken his girl upstairs to fuck her gorgeous brains out.
He didn’t care. All he cared about, all he saw, was the spread of her hair over the bed as he dropped her down. The desperate rise and fall of her breasts against her shirt. Her parted lips. Her eyes, hot and melting for him.
She was gasping, reaching for him, but he wasn’t having it. He couldn’t stand to be touched right now. He’d go off like a rocket. He needed to feel her.
Idris gripped her hips again, flipped her over so that she was on her hands and knees. He ran his hands over her once, from her neck, over her breasts and belly, cupping and sliding. He was rough, hurried by an unspeakable need to mate with her.
His hands nearly ripped the button off her jeans as he reached around her to rip her jeans over her hips. He didn’t bother taking her pants all the way off. He just ripped them down to her knees. He could do nothing beyond that.
Because he beheld the prettiest sight he’d ever seen in his life. Her round ass, pert and juicy. And her lovely pussy. Gold and pink and begging for him. He gave her ass a little slap, just to watch it bounce. She hissed through her teeth and turned to give him a saucy little smile. Her arousal written in every line of her face. The setting sun flung itself desperately to every corner it could reach and it lit a red flame in Isla’s hair. He’d never seen the red in it before. And it made him wild.
There was no stopping now. Idris’s hand immediately went to her exposed pussy, one finger tracing her hot seam.
And Jesus fuck, she was wet. Soaking. She moaned and pushed back, taking his finger inside her a little further. She was biting her lip, keeping her voice inside, but the time for that was over. His infinite patience was over.
He banded an arm around her waist and lifted her off the bed, his other hand still buried inside her. He set her on the floor on her hands and knees. He planted his own hands on either side of hers, so that his chest was to her back, his teeth at her ear. He enveloped her completely. She was trapped in the cage of his body. The human inside him screamed for him to slow down. He knew he was going too fast. But the dragon inside couldn’t be slowed.
He positioned his hips, found her wet, hot core and pushed the head of his cock into her just an inch. She moaned, biting her lips, biting back her pleasure.
A hundred images all raced through him. The scent of her, the race of wind on his face, what it felt like to expand, to shift, and then Isla. Just Isla. Her face when she came on his mouth. When she slid down the pole. Her eyes on his. Her body working just for him. That was before. Before she knew that she was his. And only his.
And that was the thought that had him slamming into her. Isla screamed, full body. No holding back. He pushed her a full foot forward on the ground, but he went with her, seated fully inside her. He knew he was big, but she’d taken him so well. Completely.
“You were made to take this cock,” he whispered into her ear when he nuzzled her, his teeth gritting against the intense pleasure. So potent it was almost pain.
“Yes,” she moaned and pushed back against him.
He was lost to her then. Lost to the feeling. Lost to what they were making between them. He rutted her like a beast. Thrusting and thrusting and pressing even further into her.
They inched across the ground with the force of their passion and he was groaning, growling as she screamed. Thes
e were no sexy, little pornstar moans. This was the full-bodied passion of a woman getting claimed. And he was. He was marking her. Mating her. Making her his in the only way his dragon knew how.
The man inside him knew that it was more nuanced than this. That he couldn’t just make her come on his cock and that was that. But his dragon didn’t care. Couldn’t look beyond. His dragon knew the opposite. That it actually was that simple. So he slammed into her again and again, all the care he’d shown her last night gone. Substituted for raw need and desire.
Her clothes twisted around her and helped him hold her in place. And then Idris groaned, roared almost at the exquisite torture of her pussy clamping down on his cock like a vice. Her head was thrown back, her back arching, her hands fisting at the floor as her body tightened like a flower bud. And then she bloomed, trembling, screaming.
Idris held her tightly, rutting her through it. And only when he felt her body go loose, relaxed and so wet, did he let himself go. He released every need, every instinct, every bit of the dragon that he was. He came like an animal.
CHAPTER EIGHT
So far, Isla really liked the dragon realm. She lay in a sweating, panting heap on the ground, 200 plus pounds of raw man laid out on top of her.
After she’d just had her entire existence fucked away. In a good way. Isla felt reborn. Like everything her body used to know was true was gone. Barely even a memory.
Men didn’t care about her pleasure, just their own?
Dead wrong.
Men only wanted to hurt her?
Super wrong.
No one could ever give her as much pleasure as she could?
Stupid wrong.
She felt his crushing weight and relished it. His monumental breaths pressing her into the ground. She’d never felt so thoroughly taken care of in her life.
“Holy shit,” he growled and lifted himself off of her. Out of her. He lifted her into his lap and immediately started kissing her. Like his life depended on it.
