by Calista Skye
Then he lets go of my cheek, giving it a soft caress. “But there’s no rush. It’s still night, and none of us want to go out into the cold again. Let’s make it comfortable for ourselves.”
I glance down. Yeah, that thing at his crotch is definitely on the way up.
I draw away from the dragon and think fast. I’m stuck in here with him. With a dragon, with the enemy. Sure, he is in a weakened form. But he’s still seven feet tall and as strong as three ordinary men. He even looks bigger than the average caveman. He obviously is in charge here, and he could kill me with a flick of his wrist. The smartest thing I could do would be to bond with him as much as possible, become as friendly as I can. Just to keep him from killing me. What’s that advice we always get about what to do if assaulted? Make the perp think of you as a person, not as an object. How far am I willing to take it?
Sure, he’s beyond gorgeous. The danger he radiates has an attraction of its own. He smells like manliness distilled. He hasn’t actually hurt me at all. It could be argued that he has saved my life.
And that thing down there… I don’t think it would kill me, exactly. I’d be walking funny for a day or two, sure. But is that what I want? Now? Does it even matter what I want? If he comes on to me and I give in, will that make it any less likely that he’ll end up killing me?
My thoughts are a jumble, and I can’t make sense of them. I have to play for time.
“Let’s remove those wires,” I state, almost able to keep my voice from trembling.
It doesn’t matter now. It’s not like I can run away. In these close quarters, I’m entirely at his mercy whether he’s bound or not. And I am absolutely sure that he’s not joking about that intense desperation he was talking about.
He sits down with his back to the rock. “I think the hands first.”
I get the two rocks and sit down facing him. “Keep the wire tight. Yes, like that. Lower. Okay.”
When I tied this on, I tightened the knot so much there’s just no chance to pick it loose like you could with a shoelace. I have to break the wire, itself.
I put one rock on the ground and place the wire across it, then hack at the wire with the other one. “This could take a while.”
His eyes are on me. “I have no great objection to that. Yet.”
I concentrate on the work for a while. I have to aim at the same point with every stroke, and the rock’s sharp edges are chafing my hand.
After hacking at the wire for at least ten minutes, I have only made a small dent in it. But my hands are sore. Curse Trak’zor and his exquisite workmanship!
I glance up at Kyandros and show him my palms. “Can I take a break?”
His yellow eyes narrow “Soon.”
Fine. I guess I deserve this.
Sitting like this, his alien manhood is right in my field of vision at all times. And while I doubt it’s at full stiffness, it does command my attention. It has features that I don’t recall seeing anywhere outside of an adult toys website. Not that I’m that experienced – despite the huge majority of guys in every engineering course I’ve ever taken, I never found that one guy I wanted to be super intimate with. So my knowledge of the male anatomy comes mostly from porn. And it seems to me that if this guy wanted to do porn, he would acquire a lot of female fans from the very start. Heck, I would sign up to his site, myself.
Another ten minutes or so go by, and the dent is maybe a little deeper now. My hands are developing blisters.
“Can I go get some water?”
“Soon.”
So I keep going.
After another five minutes I put the rock down. “I need a break.”
I get to my feet, but Kyandros grabs the middle of my dress. “Soon.”
I swat at his hands. “Seriously, my hands are about to start bleeding! And I haven’t eaten anything since yesterday.”
He pulls me back down. “Soon.”
I probably shouldn’t make a dragon angry. Certainly not a naked dragon.
As I place the wire on the rock, a thought shoots through my mind.
I almost slap my forehead. And I’m supposed to be an aerospace engineer? This is just about the only thing we think about!
“This works, but it’s very slow,” I state. “Let’s try something else. It’s called metal fatigue. So you bend the wire in the same spot where I’ve hacked. Like this. Then bend the other way. See? Always bend in the same spot. The steel will get weaker.”
At least I hope it will. Depending on the metal, it can take thousands of cycles of a movement like that before it gets weak enough to snap. But I have to assume that a caveman-made metal is nowhere near as resistant to this as aerospace-grade alloys.
I bend the wire back and forth a few dozen times, noting that the wire does seem to change color very slightly right at the bend, slowly getting a little brighter.
“See that? I think it’s working. I’ll just get a drink of water.” I let go of the wire.
“Soon.” The dragon’s hands shoot out and grab my wrists.
I sigh and get back to the bending, which is easier on my hands than the rock. I guess he just can’t wait to get this thing off him.
I pace myself and settle in for a long session of this. I’d love to zone out, but there’s a freaking dragon here.
I must have bent the wire back and forth a thousand times when it snaps, leaving two smooth ends.
“That should do it.” I wind the wire off his wrists. “Too bad you used all the gel on me. It really dug into you.”
Kyandros rubs his wrists with his hands. “Now you can take a break. Then work on the other wire.”
I gratefully get the backpack and take out the food pack and the water. Before I wolf it all down I offer half of it to Kyandros, but he just snorts and returns to rubbing his wrists. They actually look like they hurt.
I am extremely hungry, but I have the foresight to not eat all the food. I don’t know when I’ll be able to get any more of it. As for water… I look out at the wall of snow. Yeah, water isn’t going to be a problem.
I sit back down in front of the dragon. “Let me see your hands.”
He hesitates before he extends his arms.
“Looks like they’re not healing,” I notice, gently rubbing one massive wrist with both hands. “Did you use the gel, after all?”
“Alien witchcraft has no place on a dragon’s scales,” Kyandros says.
“I can’t see any scales right here, but I think you should consider it. Allow me?”
I think that’s a shrug, so maybe he sees the sense in it. I scoop the last of the gel out of the container and apply it to his wounds.
“There. Now let’s look at that other wire. Actually, you want to place the backpack over your… I mean, right there? I guess dragons don’t use clothes?”
He doesn’t reply, just stretches his legs out and leans back to the rock.
I repeat the process, bending the wire in one single spot over and over. It’s boring work, but I do get to admire Kyandros’ muscular legs and the slight hint of scales on his shins and thighs. His silvery skin is not metallic at all, just shiny in a way that my brain can’t quite process. It’s not polished and not unnaturally tightly drawn. It’s just silver and alien. Apart from that and the scales that seem to be embedded under the surface, he’s pretty human.
That thing between his thighs has settled down, at least. But his eyes are still on me, yellow slits that guard my every move.
I can’t blame him for that, either. I have hurt him much worse than he’s hurt me. I guess I can’t blame a dragon for having razor-sharp talons on his fingers and toes. There are ten of them, so that’s not too weird—
“Oh! What happened to your feet?” They have splotches of darker gray in a way that looks similar to the way human skin would get red when hurt. It’s swollen and blistery.
He shrugs. “A result of trying to remove the wires by fire.”
“Right. You just stuck them right into the flames?”
&
nbsp; “Dragons are not used to fire being harmful.”
“Huh. Wait.”
I let go of the wire, scrape a little bit of silvery dust from my ears, and carefully apply it to the burned parts of his feet. “I don’t think this will work when dry, but it’s worth a shot.”
I get as much as possible of the dried magic space gel from my own feet and nose, and some of the fresh stuff from his wrists, but there’s not much of it. “If you had put your feet into the snow right away, this would be much less bad.”
He doesn’t reply.
I keep bending the wire. Back and forth, back and forth, keeping the movement concentrated about one spot. The same thing is happening here as with the other one, and the single spot is getting a little brighter than the metal around it. My fingertips are getting sore, but I have no desire to suggest a break and have Kyandros say ‘soon’ again.
I’m struck with a sense of unreality. I’m on an alien planet, trying to provoke metal fatigue so an alien dragon can be loose from steel wires that I put on him while unconscious.
I sigh. It’s all too real. I’ve been separated from my friends, and my mission to check out the escape ship will be delayed by probably days.
I glance up at the yellow slits with the star-shaped pupils.
If I survive at all.
The wire snaps and I wind it off the dragon’s ankles. “There. You are freed.”
He bends forwards and rubs his ankles. “Finally.”
He gets up and walks around the fire a few times, throwing a large shadow on the wall of snow that surrounds us and which is even taller than him.
The sky is dark, and I have a feeling it’s still night. But yesterday was so dim and weird that I can’t be sure.
I am sure about one thing, though: I’m tired.
I go back inside the cave, to the place I woke up. I curl up on the ground and ignore the dinosaur smell from the dry grass.
The light from the fire outside is obscured. Kyandros is standing at the opening, his massive form filling it completely as an ominous shadow with yellow eyes staring at me.
8
- Kyandros -
She looks up at me with alarm in her large, dark eyes. She’s so small and defenseless that it both entices and calms me. Free of those cursed bindings, I can do as I please with this little lesser female. And I should. My pride was hurt very badly by the whole situation.
By all rights, I should have left her to die out in the snow. And yet that seemed to me an impossible thing at the time. I didn’t even consider it.
And now… yes, there is swelling in my midsection. She is right there, all pale and soft and round and scandalously female. The cave reeks of her scent.
I can just take her. Was that not the entire reason I followed her and toyed with her in the first place? Some delightful sport and then a pleasant kill, to cheer me up on this Fire-forsaken planet?
My lust is less now than then. I am weakened still. It would be enjoyable, certainly. But later it will be more so. Who knows when next I will have a female like this to ravage.
Damn this human form and its feebleness!
“Is something wrong, Kyandros?” Mia’s voice is small.
I turn my back to her and walk out to the fire, now burned down to almost all embers. It looks as weak as I feel.
There’s a slight glow on the horizon. Perhaps this night will soon be over.
I will do something useful while the light grows, something that will tell me exactly how weak I am. Something enjoyable.
9
- Mia -
A bright light wakes me up, and for a moment I think it’s the gigantic fire again. I tense up, then see that it’s just the sun.
Ah. The sun that was nowhere to be seen yesterday. Then maybe today will be back to normal.
I look around the cave. No sign of Kyandros. Dare I hope that he has left?
I get up and stick my head out.
No, there he is. Sitting on the ground, doing something with his hands.
To my surprise, I don’t feel disappointment that the dragon I caught is still here. I feel a little spark of joy instead.
I stretch and yawn. That wall of snow is still there, but now it’s not dark at all. In the sunlight it sparkles and glitters the way snow is supposed to.
The fire has burned down, and the moment I take a step outside the cold bites into me.
“No warmer today,” I state the obvious.
Kyandros doesn’t look up. “On some planets, weeks and months can go by like this. It’s called ‘winter’.”
“I know,” I say, still sleepy. “We have that on my pla— I mean, I know what winter is. It happens sometimes.”
Shit. We don’t want any dragon to know that Earth exists and that we girls are not native to Xren. I can only hope that he didn’t catch my mistake.
“It appears it has happened now,” Kyandros responds dryly, concentrating on his work.
I can’t tell what it is he’s doing, but there is blood involved. Red blood, not his own golden ‘ichor’. And there’s a lot of it now that I’m looking. In fact, it’s not just blood. That is a whole...
I frown. “What you got there?”
“Something to keep me busy.”
“Can I see?”
He shrugs and unnecessarily nods towards the impossible-to-miss cadaver of a not-raptor, one of the fast and highly aggressive dinos that seem to be the most numerous on Xren. This one looks like it’s been blown open by a bomb. It’s hardly recognizable as something that has once been a living creature. But the blood is still dripping from it, so its death must have been recent.
Kyandros has something red in his hands, an organ with a bundle of strings coming out of it. It can’t be the heart; it’s too small for that.
“Did you kill that?”
“We all need things to do. I enjoy killing.”
Kyandros is large, but this is a big raptor. I’m actually impressed. Our own cavemen can kill these things if they must, but they try to avoid getting too close if they can. And they would never try it without a big sword or ax.
“Of course. Dragons are here to kill the Bigs, just as I said. How did you do it?”
His lips move in a half-sneer that lasts for a split second. “I am a dragon.”
I frown. “Can you change to your dragon form?”
“Not at present.” His jaw is set in a hard clench.
“So, you hunted down this thing while… like that?” I point to his human and extremely male and naked body.
“I can move fast when I want. Lesser beings are often unbelievably stupid. And I think I understand why.”
He holds the organ up by the strings.
Ah. That’s the raptor’s brain, with the main bundle of nerves that used to go down its spine.
“It’s small,” I agree. “You’re not going to eat that, are you?”
He ponders the golf ball-size brain. “I thought that if I took it apart, I might find out how it worked. But still it escapes me.”
I scan the sky and the wall of snow encircling the patch of bare ground that the fire melted. It shouldn’t be impossible to climb the snow if I have to. And I probably will have to. I must get away somehow, find the village or Bune so I can complete my mission.
I shudder. The air outside the cave is bitterly cold. “I don’t think it works anymore. How does the jungle look today? It’s so cold!”
“The jungle is white. Cold, yes. I imagine this lesser being, here, was not helped by the iciness. It was clumsy. Puzzled. As if it didn’t know how to deal with snow.” Kyandros lifts his gaze and pierces me with yellow. “And yet, you said that winter is a regular occurrence here.”
“Yeah,” I say, thinking fast. “Well, what do you expect from a raptor with a brain that small? It probably can’t remember the sun rising yesterday.”
“The sun didn’t rise yesterday.”
“Sure, but… Hm. I guess it didn’t. Is that because of dragons? Can you do things like that?�
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“Dragons can do anything,” he informs me coolly. “But not in this cursed lesser form.”
If I’m leaving today, then this might be my last chance to get some information out of him. While at the same time not giving away all I know.
“Are there more dragons here now? There must be, right? In their dragon form?”
He swings the raptor’s brain around by its nerves and flings it out of the little bare clearing. “Perhaps. In their dragon form, probably not.”
I tap my lips. “You need hoards to change to dragons. But there is no hoard to be gathered here. Perhaps that is why you will kill the Bigs. So that their dead bodies will become your hoards.”
Kyandros snorts. “No.” He lifts the raptor’s head up from the snow and breaks its jaws apart with a sickening crack.
“No? Then why did you kill that one? Why will you kill all the Bigs here?”
He studies the mass of jagged teeth that used to be inside the raptor’s gape. “Your myths may not be correct.”
I shiver involuntarily. The sun is up, but it’s not heating the air at all. If anything, it’s just getting colder. “They must be right. You’re here. Wait, don’t throw that away! I can make something from it.”
He kicks at the raptor carcass. “From this smelly thing?”
“Yeah. You need some kind of clothing. Or do dragons maybe not like to wear anything?”
He looks down himself. “Some dragons enjoy the human form and spend some time that way, wearing garments. I never have. Being in the form of a lesser being is so far beneath me it’s all I can do to not rip myself apart in disgust. So no, I don’t think I’ll like wearing clothing. It’s un-dragonlike.”
I’m not sure if that’s a yes or a no, but if nothing else, I can make something for myself from the skin of that raptor. “Could you help me strip the skin off it, please?”
He chuckles. “Dragons don’t make things. We take.”
I rummage through the backpack and find the small knife. It will do fine. “I see. Then could you please take some wood from somewhere and then I guess take a fire to where there used to be one? Not as big as before, maybe. If not, I’ll freeze to death and you would have to take me to somewhere I can be buried.”
