Chapter 8
Medwin Smokescale
Moonscale London Under the Reign of Roster and Ferrick Moonscale
I heard the familiar thump of Clarence landing on my balcony.
I started to sprint through the flat, but Volex held up a hand to stop me.
Roster and Ferrick were back. That most likely meant Clarence had a new tail.
Volex exited through the front door, and I ran into the kitchen to put the kettle on and start coffee.
We’d missed out on our dinner reservation but that didn’t mean we couldn’t spend time together.
Volex came through the front door with a severed head wrapped in his shirt and motioned that I could let Clarence in now. At first, I never understood where the bodies were but over time, I figured out either he burnt them to a crisp or ate them. I wasn’t sure which I preferred.
At the moment, my walk-in was overfilled with tubs full of heads.
Under normal conditions, Volex would fly them out to some Scottish bog and bury them but with Haen and Pras out gathering support from the edges of the Moonscale Territory for Clarence’s coup he didn’t like the idea of leaving London.
I wasn’t stupid. I might hold my own with Roster Moonscale.
I might even beat him because he thought highly of himself and I was desperate for revenge and for Clarence.
I wouldn’t survive Ferrick. Not yet. Not even with all my secret magical studies.
Some nights I lay awake because my dragon wondered if the only way to beat Ferrick was to eat him and steal his magic that way.
“Hey! Maybe that’s why Volex is so powerful,” he chimed off into my thoughts, and I shushed him as I went to let Clarence into the apartment.
He hugged me tight before I got a word out and despite the chaos that was our lives for a second, I felt safe.
With his arms wrapped around me it felt as if there wasn’t a threat we couldn’t overcome together.
We kissed before we said hello. Our lips crashed together and our tongues met, twirling to say all the things that so often went unsaid because of the situation.
I buried my fingers into his shirt, holding onto him so that he had to stay close.
Leaning in against his body, I savored his muscles and the heat from the dragon fire radiating from his belly.
“I’m going out for a while,” Volex called from the corridor. “You two have fun! I might go for a flight up to the bogs tonight and see what I can hunt down. Pickings here are getting slim unless I want to steal a cow or sheep.”
“Have fun!” I called back, hoping that Volex left with his arms loaded down with severed heads.
We were running out of places to put them and unlike Izin, most of them couldn’t talk and spill the beans on what they knew.
I hated how Volex tortured the truth and prophecies out of him, but I was desperate to save Moonscale London.
These were my dragons. My friends. At the end of the day, my and Clarence’s fates were irreversibly entwined with that of the city and of the broader territory.
If the Moonscale Dragon Flight failed, so did we.
With the flat to ourselves, we didn’t bother with words.
Clarence kicked his shoes off and I pulled my shirt off over my head before starting to undo his buttons.
We had undressing down to a science despite hardly ever getting to be naked together.
His scent yelled STRESS but that wasn’t surprising.
Ferrick and Roster were back and the city once again held the old familiar tension it always did when they were around.
I started to drop to my knees and suck the stress out of him, but Clarence picked me up and toppled onto the bed with me.
With his nude body pressed up hard and warm against mine I could almost pretend we weren’t at war with his parents.
I could almost pretend everything was normal.
Almost. Because if everything was normal, he could sink into me over and over again.
We’d exchange our claiming vows, and he could fertilize my eggs.
This was our normal, but it was far from how the world should’ve worked.
So, we kissed with our tongues dancing between our mouths and our hips grinding together.
With his dick in his hand, Clarence rubbed the tip of his cock up and down my shaft and over the sensitive, textured skin of my scrotum, using the precum that dribbled out of him to mark me as his territory.
“I want you so much. I need you,” he groaned against my lips.
“Every second I’m not with you is torture.
” He moved and buried his head into the crook of my neck where my claiming gland was.
It was still plump and squishy. These days I wore a shirt to workout anywhere but at home because it was too obvious that something was unusual about it.
He kissed the gland and I froze. Immobile, I wondered if my alpha was about to throw caution to the wind and claim me.
He didn’t. Of course, he didn’t. Me and my friends couldn’t be the ace up anyone’s sleeve if Ferrick and Roster knew about us.
Clarence let out a growl of frustration, and I grabbed his face in my hands to make him look at me.
“I’m right here. The rest of it is all magic and tradition.
We don’t need that. We might want it, but we don’t need it,” I whispered to him as we lay in the dark.
“I’m here. You’re here. We’re alive and that’s enough for this moment.
There will be so many more moments. Moments where we look back on this and are grateful that it didn’t last forever but also grateful for everything it taught us about ourselves, each other, and the world.
” Then I took a deep breath and kissed him again.
In between kisses, I told him how much I wanted him and needed him and that I was ready to descale Roster with a butterknife just to lay my claim on him.
We’d lock Ferrick in the basement and toss down chicken eggs for him to smash or something.
We’d figure it out because we had to and I was nearly desperate enough to try anything just to be with him.
Eventually all our dirty talking, frotting, and stroking paid off and we both came hard. Smoke wafted from our mouths and noses as we panted to catch our breath and wrap around our heads around how good every atom inside our bodies felt despite the world being a burning trash heap.
“I have to kill him soon,” Clarence said.
“I know. Do you think you’re ready?” I panted.
“I don’t know that I’ll ever think I’m ready,” Clarence admitted.
“I think that’s the first step of being ready. If you could fly home and kill your own sire without a second thought, you wouldn’t be the alpha I love.”
“I love you too,” he said and kissed me softly.
After a little nap and quick shower, Clarence told me about Charden. I wasn’t sure what to make of the wizard either, but I knew either he was very powerful and manipulative or very stupid and easily led astray. Eventually, we’d find out which one. I only prayed that it would work out in our favor.
***Notes from Clarence: I’ve often wondered why some true-mates can go years without fulfilling their claiming vows without any major problems with their claiming glands and why other people will have them rupture.
I clearly didn’t have the answer, so I reached out to Doctor Michael Lawngry.
He has published several peer reviewed articles and research studies on the matter but in layman’s terms we still don’t know why.
It’s something to do with the magic of the true-mate response being individualized for each couple and possibly each mate.
Some folks he’s encountered have suggested it also depends on the goals that souls have for that lifetime and how important that claiming bite is to those goals or if it’s better to wait.
So, the answer is still that none of us know for sure, but some very intelligent people are still looking into the matter and scratching their heads about it.