by Amanda Milo
Oh no, drhema. You won’t be leaving. I clap my hands around her.
She shrieks like a baby deer and struggles between my palms like a mouse.
Mmm. I haven’t bothered to hunt mice since I was a hatchling. The oblong scales of my upper lip pull tight as my mouth crooks up in a smile. I sort of miss their taste. Their little kicks as my throat muscles squeezed them down.
Just thinking about eating one makes me hungry.
But first, I will see to my newest treasure. I still can’t believe she clawed me.
“Knee-high!”
The words explode from between my hands, causing my neck frill to flare wide before slapping back against my throat again.
I drop onto my haunches and lower myself down on my elbows. Then I open my hands to get a better look at her.
If she were a mouse, I’d be eating her.
But I know her—there’s no way I could forget her. Her very presence here, in my cave where she's travelled so far to seek me out, it’s making my heart speed up. So no, I won’t be eating this creature of mine. Even if her furry-humped back looks more animal and less human and so completely different from when I last saw her. Actually, nearly all of her looks different.
Two fear-wide eyes stare up at me. A keen terra cotta color, her irises are. These eyes, I could never forget. As unique as her scent and as equally exciting to my senses.
The hair on her head I remember well, but it does not match the hair that’s grown on her hump. The hump is new. It must have sprouted when she reached adulthood. And her hump of hair doesn’t match the tufts of fur that circles each of her wrists. She has yet another patch of fur sprouting up on her hind legs, with the long hair shafts thickly puffed out everywhere they wrap each hind foot.
I sniff, trying to scent her, and receive a sting for my effort. Her damned claw. I bend my neck forward, draw one hand from around her slight body, and pluck the claw out of my nose.
Ungh, that smarts!
With an irritated hiss, I hold up her silver claw and glower down at where I’m keeping my little prize cupped in my other hand.
“You would do well not to scratch at me with this again,” I snarl.
It wasn’t my intention for the words to sound so full of aggression, but it’s difficult to articulate softness when you speak through fangs.
Rather than pledge her oath that she won’t raise her talon to my face, rather than even providing an apology—she whirls and races right off my hand on her pair of shaggy hind legs.
Tossing her claw aside, I easily recapture her. My tail twitches lazily behind me as I ignore her screech and scoop her up to bring her to my eye level.
I open my jaws to suck her scent onto my tongue, permeating my senses with her even further.
Instantly, my blood speeds. It’s been moonscapes since I’ve smelled you. Stalked you.
We were both adolescents then. I was much smaller, and she was much less hairy.
My eyes catch on the way she shivers, because the ring of fur humped up around her shoulders doesn’t shudder with her.
Waxing crescents, you’ve turned out so strange.
Long ago, I was ordered to stay away from her. But she’s stumbled into my cave and attacked me and I caught her so she’s mine now. I don’t care what she looks like. This female should have been in my keeping since we were children, and would have, if it wasn’t forbidden to touch a human. I was punished harshly for getting as close to this one as I did.
And yet… I’m holding her in my hands, and all the dire warnings that ring in every hatchling’s ears… none of the warnings have come true with her.
If I’m honest with myself, I’m experiencing a small degree of disappointment.
But this is fine. I can still keep her. I press my nose along her body, sucking in her scent, and immediately I’m entertained by an outraged squeal. When I rasp a laugh and puff at her, a rush of smoke travels under her skin, causing it to billow up before she slaps it back down.
Interesting.
Has she grown a frill, like my dragonkind have? A Crested Merlin like myself fans their frill for a variety of reasons: to express themselves, to accompany a mating dance, and to appear more formidable during a battle to protect your territory or your nest or your mate.
I puff again, watching her skin billow once more before she savagely slaps it down again.
“I want to see it,” I tell her, and frown when she cowers on my hand.
Perhaps she’s afraid to raise her frill to me. At her size and disadvantage when faced off with me, I can almost see why the average creature would hesitate.
But I have seen this female defend a lamb from slinking yotes using nothing more than a handful of rocks and her fearless stance and shouts. I would have thought she’d be fanning her frill at me like a hatchling faces off against a raiding wyvern. When cornered, a scrappy individual turns fierce.
And my still-stinging nostril says my human is scrappy.
Why did she come here?
I repeat the puff of air a third time, and when the top half of her skin bulges up from the force of my breath, I catch her frillskin with my teeth and tug.
She makes an outraged bellow as I peel up the loose flap. I don’t pull hard; I don’t want to injure her—I only want to see what her frill looks like. And she isn’t making sounds of pain, just indignation.
Only, instead of the frill lifting up a little bit, it comes completely off—and her arms drop out.
I stare at what’s revealed.
She doesn’t have a hairy humped frillskin at all.
It was a covering.
Save for her fluffed legs and her furred wrists, she looks more than ever like the human girl I stealthily pursued.
And with her skin flap removed, her scent is even stronger.
My tail curls around us and I knit my talons behind her back, pulling her closer, almost as if I’m cradling her to my chest.
As I draw her to me though, she begins to fight, her limbs flying with the incoordination of a panicked meal. Hunger begins to war with curiosity. Then her flailing hand bangs me in my clawed nostril.
I snarl.
She freezes.
My chest rises with my inhale, and her sweet scent is so good, I unconsciously flick my tongue at the air, tasting her with my receptors.
She shudders against my chest scales, and I tighten my hands around her, squeezing her to me, loving the way she feels against the scales of my palms.
I’ve never touched a human before. Save for this one when we were both young, I’ve never been interested in trying. All the dragons in our mountain range are to avoid these little beasts, these pests. And we do. Herds of humans inhabit the plains, but my kind rarely even fly over them, let alone eat them, for fear that they’ll matebond us by accident. We’re instructed as fledglings that if we ever consume a human, then we are to crisp them thoroughly with our flames before touching them. Elder dragons are insistent about this, about the danger humans pose to us. And with the red moon touching the world within a lunation or less, this human should be especially dangerous to me.
The red moon is a phenomenon over the land of Venys, and it comes to visit every hundred years. For dragons, this means we’ll undergo a month’s worth of unrelenting mating fever.
I shift, my groin scales uncomfortably heated. I’ve been suffering the first discomforts of mating fever, and the blood moon has yet to burn in the sky. I took to my cave during the earliest pangs, irritable beyond reason. This will be my first blood moon heat, and I’ve been lust-fogged and struggling to come to terms with the inevitability that I’ve reached the end of my solitary days. Because the urge to mate feels like it will kill me if I don’t give in, and once a Crested Merlin mates, he mates for life.
But I prefer to be alone.
Or rather, I’ve never met a dragon that I found compelling enough to bind myself to for the rest of my days. For my kind, our lives last centuries.
...Which is part of the reason we’re warned away from hu
mans. As a fledgling, I grew up on stories of dragons who were misfortunate enough to let a human touch them. When the human made contact, the dragons changed to human forms too and were trapped to live the same unbelievably short existence of their mate.
My brow scales bunch as I frown. Perhaps we’ve all been lied to. Perhaps the Elders are wrong. After all, who among them has ever bonded to a human? None. And now I hold this human in my hands—she clawed me, for skydrakes’ sake—and I’ve not bonded to her.
I place a clawtip under her chin with care. When she refuses to raise her head for me, I smirk and add a little pressure until she hisses and her nose goes up, showing me her face, her flashing firespice eyes.
The renewed bolt of recognition makes my neck muscles weak. My snout sinks to the level of hers, and I stare into her captivating gaze closer than I’ve ever dared to before. Until I was caught and punished, I stalked this human.
I’ve missed her.
Of course the relief of being reunited is a little one-sided on account of her never seeming to realize I was behind her. Staring at her. Flickering up her scent and following her. Eating the rabbits she released for me.
(The North Plains’ people don’t eat rabbits, we’re told. So she was likely emptying traps that caught the wrong type of quarry, simply not knowing I was right there, surprised as ever that she was feeding me.)
They were delicious.
She was probably no older than I was—my human, not the rabbit meals—and I wondered if she had snuck away from her herd to explore just as I had escaped the watchful eyes of my nestmasters.
Nestmasters are Elder dragons who tolerate hatchlings enough to become their teachers. My chief nestmaster taught all my nestmates, a whole passel of us, and because this dragon was older than God’s moss, I was able to sneak away more often than I had to stay and mind him.
And sneak away I did. I roamed the plains pretending I was a black lion with a frilled crest rather than a shaggy mane. I caught mice, chased buffalo—and then got chased by buffalo because I was smaller than I thought I was and my fires weren’t answering to my call yet.
It was a great time.
I would never have discovered this human if I hadn’t heard her laughing. The grasses on the plains grow so tall in the summer that a human can almost walk hidden. A child certainly can. And this one was hidden from the sky, but I heard her bubbling laugh, and I swooped down to investigate.
She seemed to be skipping and singing and entertaining herself. Situated with my throat against the ground, I tried to pretend I was nothing but a dark bolder, and I watched her until the sun was nearly down. When she began her journey home, I followed her as far as I thought I could without being captured by her tribe. And the next day and the next, I found her playing in the grasses again by her lonesome, and with a predator’s ability to hide in plain sight, I watched her again and again.
I only stopped when I was forced to. My drakon and drakaina (my sire and dam) were horrified to learn how close I came to a human.
“Isn’t it strange that you would find me all these suns and moons later?” I murmur aloud. “I was sure you never knew I was there. Why have you sought my company?”
Eyes the color of sun-warmed rock meet mine and flick to my mouth. To where my teeth points aren’t covered by my lip scales.
I cock my head. “Why do I have the sense that you can’t follow a single word I say?”
Her gaze flashes to mine again, and then she’s back to watching my mouth. Her chest is rising and falling, and I focus on the way her nose, framed by two small, nearly see-through membranes, flares. I’ve heard that humans have the worst senses—of smell and of sight and hearing, too. I wonder if that’s true of this human.
Her eyes dart to the side. In the space of a moment, I get the sense she’s preparing to escape me. She tenses—her intent very plain, although it seems she isn’t aware of that.
You must eat a lot of green things. You’d make a terrible hunter.
When she ducks my thumb claw and tries to run, I’m ready. I simply clap my folded hands over her, squishing her to the cave floor.
She screeches and I feel pressure on my thumb.
Is she trying to bite me?
Ha! This is exactly like my mouse-hunting days. The same effectiveness for this mouse too.
Amused, I sweep my hands towards myself, making her whole body slide across the cave’s stone floor. She hollers and shoves at my top hand, even kicking me, I think. Once she’s tucked to my chest again, I carefully raise my hands and curl my neck back so that I can peer down at her.
She opens her jaws to spit out the mouthful of my digit like I taste bad to her.
How bizarre, because I’m almost certain she wouldn’t taste bad to me.
She throws out her arm to slap at me.
Her hand lands right over my heart.
Lightning arcs between us.
The blinding flash is an arrow of pain. I bellow in shock.
Fire burns through my body—and dimly, I hear her yell too.
This I don’t like at all. My tail lashes the air. It’s a phantom stab to my heart, a further shredding of my already malfunctioning system to hear her pain, but I’m unable to do anything to help.
With spasms racking me, I try to draw my hands and claws against myself and far away from her, keeping her safe from the danger I pose, hopefully. My wings slap out and crumple, the thinly-scaled skin catching on the rough rock of the cave walls, my wing talons digging in as if they want to help fly me out of this pain. My long body tries to curl in on itself, and I collapse on my side, blinded and deafened and feeling all of my bones aching.
What is happening to me?
She touched my heart. A human touched right over my heart.
My femurs feel like they’re being compressed. Each and every one of my bones begins to feel a similar squeeze. And I know without a doubt what’s happening.
I’m turning into one of her kind.
CHAPTER 4
HALKI
Even as my body contorts into something so many times smaller than is natural, I’m almost frantic, wondering if my female—my mate, the female who enchants my eye, my drhema—is still here. If she’s waiting for me to finish my change into the form that will complement hers.
Through eyes slitted with pain, I try to raise my neck—and my head lifts with barely any effort expended because my long, heavy neck is no more. My skull is damn near attached directly to my shoulders.
Fried satyrs, it feels odd.
But my female is at my side. She waited for me.
She’s trying to back away, but I have her shackled in place by my tail. Thank all that glitters that she couldn’t leave—and that my tail hasn’t disappeared yet. Maybe it won’t.
It starts to shrink before my very eyes.
Basilisk’s balls! “Damn it, no…” I try to say. Out of rubbery lips, my short tongue and flat teeth garble, “Dnggg! RRRGH!”
I swallow, and a bone slaps up and down along the thin skin inside the front of my throat. The area feels very… naked. There’s no neck frill hugging just behind my jaws and halfway down my neck. I raise my hands up to my face, and find I still have claws. But they belong to a mountain cat’s half-grown kitten, not a dragon.
I plant them on the cave floor and try to stand.
My hind legs are all krevk’d up. They drag behind me like dead weights until I gain my kneecaps. A fever-hot weight swings heavily between my legs and just behind it tugs something that feels like a giant pendulum, both of them seeming unnaturally tight for their skin and making my narrow human’s pelvic region rage. With a confused contortion, I find the source: an overripe cock juts from my scale-less groin, and behind it, a swollen sac appears as if it’s about to explode.
I can only stare. Because Crested Ancestors above—my innards are fully exposed, with no groin scales for them to tuck into!
Out of my throat comes a rasping, “Krevvvkehd!”
Huh. My human throat m
akes a near perfect approximation of curse words. Fancy that.
Gritting my teeth, walking on my hands and kneecaps, hauling the rest of my legs behind me along with my heavy tailbone, I try to reach my mate before my tail shrinks completely and she can make her escape.
With pain-bleary eyes, I look to her face and find her own eyes are wide. Her mouth is open and she’s staring at me like I’m not her transformed dreams come true—but a monster.
“We have bonded,” I try to say. “That spark that lit when you touched my heart? We are mates.” What growls up from my throat doesn’t quite convey what I hoped. It sounds like, “WeeARRGH’td!”
She shrinks back. And fair enough. She’s unnerved at my inability to speak without growling at her.
I only need to practice, and I’ll secure the ability. I’m a Crested Merlin. We’re esteemed among all dragons, excelling at everything save for, perhaps, humility.
My long tail, which has been rapidly reducing, drops right off of her waist and shrivels into nothing. My tailbone feels instantly lighter—and it’s a good thing because the loss of its weight means my lunge forward carries me as far as I hoped to reach.
My mate has whirled around, and she’s going to race for the cavemouth, I’m certain of it—
But she doesn’t make it. Because I land on her.
CHAPTER 5
Nalle
It feels like a whole bogdamn dragon comes crashing down on me.
That’s because a whole bogdamn dragon does come crashing down on me. He just happens to be mostly man-shaped.
“UFFF!” My cheek smushes into the stone floor, and I absolutely cannot move under the male’s great weight.
And he is a male.
As in, he’s got the biggest tallywhacker I have ever seen.
My eyes pop open wide when he growls, his hands grip my waist—and something that feels thick as a broomhandle prods at my leather-covered ass.
“Get off me!” I holler.
I twist like a rabid weasel, fighting and shoving and cursing him until I’m splayed sideways and he’s no longer poking at a danger zone with that weapon he’s wielding.
