7. Andreas
ANDREAS
It turned out that moment was never going to leave my mind.
The heat of his body.
That tiny whimper from the back of his throat.
The way his whole body arched, almost so far that he seemed like a dragon, infinitely more flexible than most humans.
The whole way back to my cave, I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it.
It was horrible and disingenuous, what I’d done. Touching him so intimately while not telling him that I wanted him. Sure, my intentions had been precisely as I’d said. I’d been worried because being sore for days wasn’t healthy and could be a sign of something more serious.
He’d accepted the touch, even leaned into me, but . . .
I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d done something wrong.
As the days passed and Blake did nothing at all to hurt anyone, I felt worse and worse about my suspicions .
. . but getting comfortable was a death sentence.
Eilonwy had decided that we were safe. That the intervening decades had been long enough for the humans to be finished with their bloodlust, and we could coexist in peace.
The result of that complacency would never leave me.
Humans could not be trusted. Not even ones like Blake, who seemed as much like a dragon as any human I’d ever met.
He was just so damned pretty.
Sweet, even.
“You should return to your people,” I told him once we’d returned to my cave, and damn the adorable human, he almost looked hurt.
“I can’t. A dragon’s head, remember? My brother told me that without killing a dragon, I shouldn’t return.
” He pursed his lips at me, crossing his arms defensively and leaning away, and damn him, but it lanced through my gut like an actual attack, that lean.
“And I won’t kill any dragons. I don’t . . . I don’t want to kill anyone.”
It occurred to me then, what his other option was: killing his brother and taking his position. That was how humans worked. They could take power by murdering the person in power.
Such a thing was so far outside draconic culture that it was hard for us to fully comprehend. If I’d murdered my sister, my own people likely would have killed me, or at least shunned me. They certainly wouldn’t have followed me as leader in her stead.
But no. Blake hadn’t wanted to kill me when I’d been a giant beast bigger than one of his people’s huts, and threatening to light him on fire. He wasn’t the type to rush into killing anyone, let alone someone who might have once been important to him.
The way he spoke of his brother, there was always wistfulness in his tone. Perhaps not as though he missed him like I missed my sister, but perhaps like . . . like he wished for something he’d never been given.
Love.
I shook myself out of the maudlin nonsense. I did not need to be obsessing about whether Blake’s brother had ever loved him, and how much that mattered to the soft little human.
But if Blake couldn’t return to the seat of human power, why couldn’t he go back to the place where they were building a castle? Surely those humans would accept him. He’d gone to kill dragons in defense of his own, and survived, hadn’t he?
Except, we all knew the story of Tegan gan Carryl and her human lover. She’d been sent to kill Athelstan, and instead fallen in love with one of his closest advisors. Upon learning about the affair, Athelstan had viciously and cruelly murdered his own man by piling stones atop him until he died.
Humans were constantly willing to kill not only dragons, but each other, for the tiniest of perceived slights.
It was part of the reason I wanted them away from my people, wasn’t it?
Of course.
And yet, Blake wasn’t like that.
“I’m . . . I’m sorry,” Blake whispered, halfway across the cave and so quiet I almost didn’t hear him.
I stared at him a moment, confused about the direction of the conversation. What was he apologizing for—his brother’s bloodthirstiness? His inability to go home? Those weren’t things that he could or should apologize for. He’d been wronged as much as anyone but my sister.
“Sorry for what?”
At that, strangely, he braced himself. Because I didn’t understand? He took a deep breath, then another, as though he was preparing himself for something deeply unpleasant, then finally, spoke. “I’m terribly sorry for taking . . . that which wasn’t freely offered. It was awful of me, and I—”
“Wait, what?” I stood and walked over to him, and as I did so, he seemed to deflate like a pierced air bladder.
Like he’d had to screw up his courage to say the words, and he simply wasn’t up to doing it again.
“I don’t understand. You’ve taken nothing that wasn’t given.
You’ve asked for nothing at all. For a human, you have impeccable manners.
Almost like a dragon. Is there something I don’t know about that you’ve taken? ”
Almost against my own will, I glanced over to the fire, to assure myself that Eilonwy’s egg was still there.
It was.
For a long moment, Blake simply stared at me, wide-eyed, in clear confusion. “But I . . . you know what I did.”
He glanced down at the mess he’d left on my trousers, and I finally realized what he’d meant.
It was my turn to be ashamed.
In two steps, I was next to him, lifting my hand to cup his fiery hot cheek. “You did nothing. You . . . if I had been uncomfortable, I would have stopped. I would have spoken up, said that I was displeased. I’m not unobservant. I was—I knew what I was doing.”
The admission made the shame inside me bloom and grow like wildflowers in the summer. I had known precisely what was happening when I’d had him over my lap, and I hadn’t had the least interest in stopping. I wished he were still sitting on my lap, even.
I leaned in, pressing my forehead to his and sighing. “You’ve done nothing wrong, Blake. You may be the only creature I know who can currently say that.”
He made a tiny sound almost like cracking ice as he stared into my eyes. Was he shocked? Shocked that I was capable of admitting the truth, or shocked at the truth? Somehow, I suspected that not a lot of people in his past had given him that.
I wondered if it got hard to recognize what was true, when you were told constant lies.
Just because I’d been honest, though, didn’t mean I wanted to deal with it any more than anyone else. So after a moment, I pulled away, turned, and left the cave.
Only afterward did I think about the fact that I hadn’t tied him back up.
I’d just been musing to myself about how the man was perhaps the only one I knew who hadn’t done any wrong, though. Was I so determined to disbelieve my own observations?
I marched steadily along the rocky shoreline for an hour, or maybe two, glaring out at the frigid sea. What were we becoming? Or better put, since the others had accepted Blake easily, what was I becoming?
Something I didn’t especially like.
I’d known a dragon in my youth who had hoarded mirrors, and I’d never much liked visiting her home. I suspected I would like it even less now.
She had also been rather unpleasant, given to pausing for long periods in order to stare at herself in those mirrors, leaving me to wonder if she truly hoarded the mirrors, or if she cared more about her own reflection inside them.
Odd, how some could look at themselves and see only the attractiveness of the outside layer. Even some dragons, who should know better, since we could shift forms.
“That bad?” Gareth asked, coming up behind me and startling me half to death as I stood on a cliff overlooking the ocean.
I huffed at him and turned back. “I’m not sure who I am anymore.”
“You haven’t changed,” he said, as though he was pointing out the obvious.
I turned to glare at him, and he held up a hand.
“You haven’t changed. Only your perception of the world has.
You thought that because we weren’t like other dragon clans, the humans would treat us differently than the others.
Now you know they see us all as the same.
It’s sensible of them, really, since trusting a dragon has almost never proven a good idea for them. ”
“Then why does Blake trust us?”
His gaze softened, and he turned to look at the ground. He truly liked the human.
Fuck me, so did I. It was just that Gareth seemed to trust Blake, and all I could see when I thought of humans was my sister’s body. They all seemed to trust him. Were they all naive, or was it something else?
“Blake isn’t like most others, human or dragon.
He’s a bit like you were before, only when his own brother sent him to do awful things, somehow it didn’t change him.
When Eilonwy died, you realized things. You .
. . grew up, in a way. You stopped trusting in justice and hope and the inherent goodness of people. He didn’t.”
He didn’t.
And Gareth was right, Blake still trusted in others. But he didn’t trust himself, which was . . . wrong?
“We’ll all be sad if you send him away,” Gareth continued after a moment.
“We’ll agree and do as you say because we .
. . let’s be serious here, even though you don’t want to be, you’re the closest thing we have to a leader.
So if you say Blake goes, we’ll help you bundle him up and fly him back to that castle.
But we’ll all be sad about it. We’ll miss him.
Because he fits here, Andreas. He’s one of us.
He doesn’t fit with his own people just like we never fit with other dragons. ”
“And you want to fuck him.”
“And I want to fuck him,” he agreed easily.
“We all want to fuck him.” The look he sent me, eyebrows lifted, told me I’d fooled no one into believing that I wasn’t a part of that number.
“It doesn’t change that he fits with us.
Besides, maybe it’ll stop Harri and Bran from wrestling it out all the time on who likes to be on bottom more, since the answer is neither of them. ”
I scoffed. “It’s you.”
“I know. But they’re kids, and they still think it’s about some kind of hunter-brained war for dominance, rather than simply doing what you enjoy doing with your body.” He smiled out at the sea, and I was sure he was thinking about Blake again. Maybe whether Blake would be willing to fuck him.
I rolled my eyes. “You would think that since women are always in charge of dragon clans, they’d understand that penetration doesn’t make anyone weak.”
He shrugged that off. “They might be over a hundred, but they’re immature. And the only woman they’ve ever lived around as adults was Eilonwy, who’d have never slept with either of them. Not on a bet.”
I tried not to laugh, because even if he was entirely right, it was disrespectful.
To say nothing of the fact that we didn’t discuss the relationship Gareth had been building with my sister when she had died.
The certainty that the egg in my fireplace was his.
After all, we were dragons; the egg belonged to the clan.
The egg.
“Fuck,” I muttered, and turned to run back toward my cave.
Gareth didn’t follow, but I supposed he’d gotten his point across.
Provided I didn’t get back to my cave and find Blake absconded along with our egg. Returned to his monster of a king with the easiest dragon there was in the world to kill.
With . . .
I rushed into the cave to find that Blake was indeed sitting as close as he could get to our egg. To that last remnant of my sister that existed.
But he wasn’t cooling it in an attempt to steal it away.
No. He was using a stick to turn it in the fire, as he softly sang what sounded like a lullaby about warm, soft kittens.
Singing.
I had a momentary flash of Eilonwy doing precisely the same thing as she breathed life into the egg. Perhaps the words had been different, but it was the same. The same soft, sweet moment, caring for a helpless being.
Because Blake truly was different from anyone else I’d ever known, human or dragon.
Perhaps he’d have liked to return to his people—or perhaps not—but it never would have occurred to him to kill anyone to “earn” that right.
If he wasn’t willing to kill his brother, the monster who had issued the order, why would he be willing to kill a baby?
I stood there in the mouth of the cave for a moment, then sighed, long and deep. I went to the bed and picked up one of the bear skins I had draped over it, and crossed to lay it around Blake’s shoulders.
He looked back up at me, his eyes wide and warm and brown. “You forgot to tie me back up.” He held up his wrists, together. “Could you tie them in the front? I think it’ll make my shoulders hurt less.”
I dropped to the floor in front of the fire, and sat there for a long time, just holding his hands in my own.
I would not tie him again. Well, not unless it was for something else, and next time, we’d have to discuss intentions beforehand, so he wouldn’t be left thinking he’d done anything wrong.
Yes, things needed to change.