Chapter 25 #2
“And you are trouble, little Tracker.” He huffed what I thought could be a laugh. “Excellent, I’ve been bored.”
He dragged us the rest of the way up and the wind that had been missing was suddenly right back at me again. I clung to his tail, my ass sliding down until I was sitting on the hilt of it.
I couldn’t see anything and then the wind stopped and the snow was just gone. I blinked, unsure of whether it was safe to let go. Falling off a cliff and surviving was not something I wanted to try to do twice in one day.
Which meant from my angle all I saw was the woman on her knees in front of Veyyr.
She was staring up at him, her attention fully on his face, her top missing—
No. Not missing.
Gone. She was completely naked.
Something hot and ugly flared in my chest before I could stop it. A raw, instinctive spike of jealousy that had nothing to do with logic and everything to do with possession.
He did not belong to her.
Mine.
The thought was vicious. Immediate.
Veyyr turned to face the dragon. His shirt hung partially open, skin bared, but at least his pants were still on. The image was intimate enough to twist the knife just a little deeper.
For half a heartbeat, the world narrowed to that sight.
Then the bond snapped tight between us and his emotions slammed into me.
Not lust.
Not temptation.
Rage.
It flooded through me. Cold and furious and utterly focused. His anger was not the heat of desire. It was the ice in him that preceded violence.
The kind that came when someone dared trespass on what he believed belonged to him.
The woman’s gaze was worshipful, calculated. Too perfect. Too poised. She wasn’t looking at him like she wanted him.
She was looking at him like she wanted to own him.
Like she believed she could or thought she already did.
My jealousy evaporated as quickly as it had come, burned away by the clarity of what I felt from him.
Protectiveness. Not for her.
For me.
“Is that his mate?” the dragon asked. I didn’t answer right away. My eyes stayed on Veyyr. On the way his jaw was locked, the clench of his hands. The way he did not look down at the body of the Sylph once.
The bond thrummed again, steady and unmistakable.
There was no confusion in it. No divided desire. No hunger that wasn’t edged in violence.
He only wanted one thing.
And it wasn’t the woman kneeling at his feet.
My chin lifted slowly, a half-smile on my lips.
“No,” I said, voice calm despite the storm coiling under my skin. “That’s not his mate.”
Because no matter what illusion was being spun, no matter what it looked like from the outside—
I knew.
And so did he.
Veyyr stared down the dragon, and the Sylph at his feet slumped to the side, the angle of her neck and head wrong.
He’d killed the Sylph.
The dragon sat back on his haunches and lifted his tail around where I still clung tight to it. “You’re looking for a Tracker? I found her stuck to the cliff like a burr on a donkey’s ass.”
I let go and slid off the thickly muscled tail, giving him a pat. “Thanks. I think.”
Sorrow reached me first, tangling up with my hair and then falling over my shoulder, clacking his beak and making the most horrendous noises. Almost as if he…were crying.
“Buddy, I’m okay.” I held him tight, stilling him from thrashing. “Tell her I’m okay. Tell my sister I am okay.”
He went limp, almost like he was gone and then he shook himself and I gently put him down. The big bird hopped across the ground and pecked once at the dragon’s back claw closest to him. “Tracker. Mine!”
“A bit possessive for a sorrowbird, isn’t he?” Those eyes swung my way again, but Veyyr had reached me. Not running, striding toward me, his eyes locked on my face. He slid his hands across my cheeks and deep into my hair, bringing my forehead to his.
“The bond was just…gone.”
And now that I could feel it again, it thrummed with the remnants of a fear so deep it lingered still, even though he could see me. The desire to lean into him, to mark him as my own was on the edge of my mouth, the tips of my fingers.
He rubbed his face against mine, his breath coming in deep draws, as if he’d been running. Fighting.
I put my hands to his and tried to pull him away from me. Not because I disliked his touch, but the fear felt an awful like an emotion neither of us could afford. It would be too easy to fall into this with him, and each moment seemed to be pushing us closer together.
“I won’t die, not yet.”
He held on a little tighter even while I tried to gently pull his hands off. “Don’t, just let me have this moment. I thought…I thought I’d lost you.”
The bond settled a little deeper and after another minute, Veyyr finally let go, hands lingering. Only then did he seem to realize we were standing pretty much underneath a dragon.
And he tried to put me behind him. I laughed and shook my head. “No way, this guy with the beautiful eyes saved me.”
Veyyr frowned.
“Ah, that’s a little trick of mine, I learned it from the gorgon.
” The dragon sat back on his heels and stared down at us, winking at me the cheeky lizard.
“A way to make things disappear for a time. And I will have to use my beautiful eyes next time I look to Masany, she perhaps hasn’t seen them, because of my giant wingspan? ”
He spread his wings wide, slowly, one at a time. On the ground, Sorrow hopped around and faced him, spreading his own wings as wide as he could. “F-caw-f!”
I looked at Veyyr. “Don’t you dare try to measure it against these two.”
The dragon fell to the ground, a deep huffing laugh rolling out of him. “He would lose.”
Veyyr shrugged. “It’s how you use it, young one.”
Another bellowing laugh. “You call me young one?”
“You are no older than us.”
Us. Me and Veyyr. My brain ached as if something was banging at the back side of it, demanding to be let it in…but I didn’t have time for that. Not right then.
“You already know Veyyr,” I swatted back at him. “And this is Sorrow. My name is Mallory.”
The dragon’s crystalline gaze narrowed. “Is it now? Well then. My mother named me Laz.”
A word fell out of me that I didn’t understand. “Blaz?”
If I thought his eyes were narrowed before… “That is my father’s name. When a dragon is lost in battle, his firstborn takes his name, losing the first letter.”
Until all the letters but the last was gone and the line was wiped out completely. Knowledge from my past.
My chest and throat tightened. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
Laz flipped a lazy front claw at me. “You could not know, and I never knew him. But I think that is not why you are here? Not if you are here with that one?” He pointed at Veyyr.
There was no easy way to ask for a favor from a dragon. “Would you be willing to fly us across to the Witch Islands?”
Laz did a slow blink and frowned, showing off a few rows of teeth. “That is quite the ask, considering we just met.”
It was my turn to frown. “But is it the first time we’ve met?”
He did a slow unfurling of his body, creeping toward me. “Honestly? I don’t know. I feel like you…something about you I know. But I cannot put the tip of my tooth on it, and that bothers me.”
I looked at Sorrow who stood now at my left side and felt the seconds ticking by. “There is another who waits on me and the time is short. Will you take us? Please?”
Laz shook his head. “No. I—”
The roar of another dragon shook the air and Laz closed his eyes. “Ah fuck.”
Veyyr and I took several steps back as the edge of the cliff crumbled and the heavily scaled claws of a second dragon pulled itself up and over the top.
Laz turned and put his head low in supplication. “Mother.”
Just. What. We. Needed.