Chapter 19 #2
He brought his gaze to mine, and a cold feeling coiled within my stomach to see cunning lurking in his dark eyes. “Later…when we play our game of trading an answer for an answer. You can ask that one then.”
Ah, he’ll make a game of it later. Of course.
I swiveled my body to face him fully, with a hand on my hip. “And your sword was forged from Draxxon’s bones,” I stated, rather than questioned, because I knew that.
“Besides the sword, there are other weapons that were forged by the Blacksmith and handed from Wyrm Tamer to Wyrm Tamer. Those ancestors in between can use them as my father did, but he couldn’t touch the cursed sword. Only those of us who have the wyrm tamer genes can wield it.”
Wyrm tamer genes.
“How do you know you have the mysterious wyrm tamer traits?” I asked, curious to know. What made it obvious that he was a tamer?
He uncrossed an arm to point to his eyes.
I raised my brows. Seriously?
I waved my hands about, palms outward, mocking him. “Oooo… You have black eyes.”
His jaw ticked and his gaze was still level with mine, but there wasn’t a shred of hardness in it. Amusement shone bright and true. He liked my bite. He always had.
I snorted, then jabbed a finger toward his face. “That’s your only clue? Black eyes?”
He shifted his weight, his sparkly boots scraping against the stone. He angled his head and tried to tame the grin that teased his mouth. “Every so often the black shows up amongst the violet that’s prevalent within my family line. And there have been none for over five hundred years.”
My jaw slackened, and my limbs grew lax. “You’re the first tamer in five hundred years?”
“Yep,” he said, rocking back on his heels.
How curious.
And I was born after him.
I didn’t know whether there was a connection.
So, I stored that snippet away in my box of puzzle pieces that were Graysen and the Crowthers.
“And you know nothing about wyrm taming,” I scoffed, shaking my head at him as I took a couple of steps closer to the long table where Sage had padded off to investigate dropped scraps of food.
“Fuck all,” Graysen muttered before flashing a smile. “I didn’t have as much time as you to spend in the library. I expect while you were busy researching monsters, I was in the training pit getting the shit beaten out of me by my father as he taught me the art of warfare.”
He turned away to rake his gaze over Draxxon and the plated spines down the ridgeline of his back.
“But there’s been small bits of knowledge I’ve gathered when I had time to dig around in our family library…
The females mark and claim their mate during estrus.
” His gaze went far away as if thinking back to his ancestors.
“It must have been both exhilarating and terrifying to see wyrms warring in the skies over the right to mount the female. But from what I’d learned about them, even winning the battle didn’t ensure winning the female. She chose her mate.”
My mouth rounded into a surprised O. “They go on heat?”
“Yep. And they kept their young in burrows until they could keep their tempers in check… But as for wyrm taming…” A crease formed between his brows as he rubbed the tips of his fingers beneath his bristle-shadowed chin, deep in thought.
“All I know was that it wasn’t easy to break a wyrm.
One had to hunt it, capture it, bind its powers, and then get it to submit. ”
Well, I certainly experienced that firsthand.
“Draxxon and Hamon were bonded. I don’t know how… It just was… The precise knowledge of wyrm-taming is lost to us. All records were destroyed, I’m assuming, after my ancestors freed the wyrms after the Final War.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Maybe to bring an end to it. Maybe so no one else would learn their tricks and try to tame wyrms for themselves.”
I’d drifted forward without even realizing it. The roughness of Draxxon’s scale was like sandpaper abrading my fingertips and sent a shiver of low humming power down the bones of my arm. “He’s beautiful,” I sighed, smiling.
“Beautiful,” Graysen murmured in agreement.
But when I glimpsed his reflection on a small polished patch of dark scales, he wasn’t looking at the wyrm, he was looking at me.
And there was such deep longing in his expression, something fell away beneath me like stepping into sinking sand, cloying and wrong, grief at what once had bloomed between us.
Last night, I slept beside him to ward off his nightmares, and it had cracked a rent in the wall I’d erected to keep him out.
His heart still matched mine, beat for beat, and it wasn’t cold, it was filled with something I dared not think about.
I wanted that empty feeling back that had carved a hollow space within my chest. The one I’d held tight to after he’d placed Zrenyth’s magic about my neck. But that wasn’t right either. I’d helped him slip the collar over my head and settle it around my throat because he couldn’t.
Despite the complicated feelings where he was concerned, I reminded myself that Graysen was still going through with his family’s plan to use me to get into the Witches Ball.
Straightening my spine, I hardened my resolve to iron. I needed to learn as much as I could about this, us, him, and his family, starting with wyrm and tamer.
“I can’t quite wrap my head around it all,” I offered honestly, turning back to him to see that he’d safely tucked away his brimming emotions behind a neutral facade.
“Me either,” he replied, stalking closer. He slid his hands into his front pockets as he came to stand flush with me.
I waved a hand between the two of us. “Wyrm and tamer. What does it all mean?” How did it affect us both?
He hitched a shoulder and shook his head as if to say—fucked if I know.
My mind swept back to our family temple and the things Graysen had shared about Hamon and Draxxon.
“Obsessive. Territorial. Greedy. And the females…” I muttered under my breath.
And before I finished the thought I’d spoken aloud, it slammed into me I was about to echo what Graysen had just revealed.
What it meant. The females chose their mates.
During estrus, they marked them, claimed them… And they mated for life.
Estrus.
Oh my gods.
In heat.
They claimed their mate in heat.
I had no idea if that would affect me as a human. My wyrm was male. I sensed it. The wyrm and I were connected, its characteristics melded with mine. I was fire and brimstone, and when slighted, easily fell into a rage.
But I was female. And very much human.
Every inch of my body went taut with shock.
I covertly glanced at Graysen, who was stroking a fingertip along the edge of a scale.
That connection he and I shared. That hyperawareness of one another as wyrm and tamer was more than that. He was my human counterpart.
For some godsforsaken reason, I started blushing at the thought of going into heat.
I was pretty sure my skin was scarlet from the tips of my toes to my crown as my mind flooded with what we’d shared together in the guest bedroom at my family home.
I was helpless against the way my secret inner muscles clenched as the memory of him pushing his body into mine echoed between my thighs.
The way he thrust. His hips slapping against my own.
The deep moans and soft gasps of shared pleasure.
I bunched my fingers into my skirt, shifting my bare feet, trying to appear casual to hide the fact that I rubbed my thighs together to rid myself of the burning desire aching between my legs.
Hellsgate.
Fucking hellsgate.
For how long? Would it be days of blissed-out, mind-altering sex?
The two of us rutting like animals? That night I had fallen willingly into a world of white-hazed pleasure, no awareness, only a greedy need to take what I wanted, and then suddenly shaken awake with cold water splashing down upon me, sitting at the bottom of the shower looking up at him.
Suddenly, Graysen’s head snapped around to face mine as if a stretched line of string tugged at us both. I met eyes that widened in shock. Perhaps he’d sensed my thoughts, or my flaming cheeks gave me away.
His nostrils flared, and I cursed myself, realizing it was my arousal he could scent. Cursed him too for his keen senses. Cursed us both for this connection.
He shot his gaze forward once more, as did I, the two of us hyperaware of the other, yet pretending that Draxxon was so fucking amazing—which he was—and that there was nowhere else to look but at the wyrm.
But we stole sidelong glances at each other, our gazes darting away before they could connect because we knew what the other was thinking.
I blew out a long, low breath, dampening the arousal fizzing through my blood and between my legs, instead focusing on the mystery of my wyrm.
And forced my mind to flow back to the Uzrek.
You have soared above the heavens and chewed beneath the earth. You are familiar to me, yet a stranger.
Familiar because I was a wyrm. Or was there more to this, to Graysen and me, than that?
A strange feeling plucked at my senses. There was something hidden within those carefully chosen phrases the Uzrek had shared. And there had been something else he’d told me, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember what it was.
The same humming came from Draxxon’s body that I had felt when I’d snatched up Graysen’s cursed sword after falling off the cliff, using the weapon to protect him.
Moving sideways, I raised both hands flush with the plated foreleg of Draxxon and allowed the power to spark against my flesh.
“I felt the same thing when I touched your cursed sword.”
“Wyrmbone.”
Maybe that had been the connection. My wyrm had recognized its own kind. The curse couldn’t afflict me either. “Do you feel it?”