Chapter 5
P oppy
The first thing Poppy registered the next morning was his absence.
The space beside her in her small bed was cool. The sheets tangled and empty. She blinked against the soft morning light filtering through her cottage window, a dull ache settling low in her muscles — a pleasant reminder of the night before.
Her thighs were sore.
So was her mouth, where his teeth had caught her lip. So was the place at the curve of her shoulder where he hadn’t bitten down but had almost , where she could still feel the ghost of his teeth pressed to her skin.
Her dragon was gone.
She didn’t even know his name.
A flicker of disappointment went through her — sharp, unexpected, and bone-deep.
He’d come to her last night; she’d lost count how many times.
Each possession more desperate and overwhelming than the last. A frantic dance of need and solace under the moon.
After the third time, he had carried her inside, his body a warm, heavy weight against hers, and she had fallen asleep with his arm wrapped possessively around her waist and his face buried in her hair.
They slept, only to wake and start again.
She’d never felt so safe. So claimed. So cherished .
And now he was gone.
She rolled onto her side, into the hollow his body had pressed into the mattress, and breathed in. His scent still clung to the linen. Smoke and stone and something older than the sea.
Mine , something whispered in the back of her mind.
She sat up so fast the room tilted.
A wave of dizziness washed over her. She braced a hand against the mattress and blinked until the room steadied.
She smiled then. A slow, radiant smile that banished the morning chill.
The prophecy her grandmother had whispered to her on her deathbed — the sacred duty that had kept her heart lonely, that had made her wait so long — it was all about him.
The moment she’d seen him, naked and furious in the forest clearing, her soul had recognized him.
Her heart, the heart that had waited so long, was meant to be his.
He would be back. It was her destiny to fall in love with him. She knew it in her bones. And it was too late to worry about it because the little voice inside her head said she was already halfway there.
It was fate. Their incredible, earth-shattering connection — it could heal him.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood. The room tilted again. She gripped the bedpost and waited it out.
"Too many orgasms," she murmured, and gave a soft laugh.
The weakness in her limbs must be the aftermath of such an intense, emotional night.
It must be.
She padded to the washstand and splashed cool water on her face.
From the small blue bottle that lived on her windowsill — the one she’d refilled every new moon since she was sixteen — she poured a careful measure of the bitter green tincture and drank it down in one swallow.
Pennyroyal, blue cohosh, and three other herbs her grandmother had taught her when her body first became a woman's. A daily safeguard. She’d never missed a morning, not even after a long night, and she didn’t miss this one.
A quick shower later, the hot water chasing away the last of the chill, and she felt almost human again.
Almost.
She dressed quickly and carefully packed the tincture she’d made, her movements humming with a new energy, a new purpose.
The world outside her cottage seemed brighter.
More vibrant. As she walked the short distance down into the heart of Cuanfirth, the familiar scent of the sea and the distant cry of gulls filled her with a sense of belonging she hadn’t realized she'd missed.
The villagers were still polite. Still a little distant. But their smiles seemed warmer today.
Or maybe it was just that, for the first time, she wasn’t looking to them for connection.
She had her dragon.
She wasn’t alone anymore.
Her first stop was the O'Malley cottage.
Little Finn, no older than five, lay on a pallet by the hearth — listless, his dark curls plastered to his forehead with sweat, his small body burning with fever so hot Poppy could feel it from three feet away. His breath came in shallow, rattling gasps that made her stomach clench.
He was dying.
She could feel it. The same way she had felt the wounded forest, the same way she had sensed the dragon's sorrow — she felt the boy's life flickering like a candle in a draft, and her senses recoiled at how close to going out it was.
Aoife O'Malley sat beside her son, hollow-eyed, her hands twisted in her apron. She’d been Poppy's friend since they were both girls running barefoot on the beach. She didn’t look like that girl anymore.
She looked like a woman who hadn’t slept in days.
Like a woman who had been counting her son's breaths.
"Poppy." Her voice broke on the word. "Oh, Poppy, please."
Poppy knelt beside the pallet and uncorked the small glass vial. The tincture inside glowed faintly with silver light that pulsed like a slow heartbeat.
"Three drops on his tongue. Now." Her own voice was steady, though her hands shook. "Then three more every two hours through the day."
Poppy tilted the boy's head and administered the drops. The silver liquid touched his pale lips and vanished — absorbed instantly, like water into parched earth.
For a long moment, nothing happened.
Then Finn's rattling breath caught. Eased. Deepened.
The flush of fever receded from his cheeks like a tide pulling back from the shore. The tight lines on his small face smoothed into the soft, peaceful expression of true sleep. His chest rose and fell with the steady rhythm of a child who would live to see his mother in the morning.
Aoife sobbed in relief.
She fell forward and wrapped Poppy in her arms, and for a moment they were just two girls on a beach again, holding each other while the world rearranged itself.
"Bless you," Aoife whispered into her hair. "Bless you, bless you, bless you."
A surge of confidence rose in Poppy. A certainty in her own work that was stronger than ever before. The Aos-sí-bloom tincture would work. It was working. The forest's magic — the dragon's magic, in some way she didn’t yet understand — was flowing through her hands and saving this child's life.
Then the dizziness rolled through her again, and she had to grip Aoife's shoulder hard to keep from falling over.
She laughed it off, insisted she was just tired. She wasn’t sure that was it, but she didn’t want Aoife to worry. They chatted quietly for a few minutes, then Poppy went on her way.
She visited two more families. The Donnellan girl. The Byrne twins. Each tincture worked. Each fever broke. Each mother wept and clung to her hands and called her blessed.
And each time, the dizziness grew worse when she was done.
By the time she made her way back up the path to her cottage, the unease was no longer something she could ignore. The air felt heavy. Still. Wrong. The sounds and smells of the village fell away behind her, and the path that should have felt like coming home increasingly felt all wrong.
She stopped short.
Her eyes widened in horror.
Her garden — her pride and joy, the garden her grandmother had tended before her and her great-grandmother before that — was dying .
The cheerful marigolds she had planted last week drooped, its bright orange petals turned brown and wilted.
The lush green leaves on the climbing rose vine by her door were brittle, edged with black like they had been touched by frost in high spring.
There, on her stone doorstep, its fuzzy body unnaturally still, lay one of the fat, happy bumblebees that always pollinated her lavender.
She stared at the bee in horror.
A wave of nausea rolled through her, so sudden and violent she had to grip the fence post to keep from falling. The heaviness in her limbs returned — a profound, bone-deep weariness that made her want to curl up on the ground and sleep forever.
Something dark was here.
Something that didn’t belong.
She stumbled into her cottage and slammed the door shut. Her heart hammered against her ribs. What was happening to her? To her home?
Her eyes were inexplicably drawn to the small, locked chest at the foot of her bed.
The family journal.
She would find an answer there. She had to.
Her fingers trembled as she worked the old, intricate lock and lifted the heavy lid.
The leather-bound book inside was older than her great-grandmother.
Older than the cottage itself, some said.
Its pages were filled with her mother's elegant hand, her grandmother's spidery script, and more.
Dozens of women had written in the sacred tome — a record of recipes, spells, and the sacred history of their line stretching back many generations.
She flipped frantically through the pages. Her eyes scanned for anything, any clue that might explain the sudden sickness in her garden. In her own body.
There was almost nothing about dragons.
Almost.
On one page, written by an ancestor at least two hundred years ago, was a list of mythical creatures that were, according to the woman who had lived long ago, very real.
Dragons — called Draquonir in the old tongue — ruled the others.
Elves, dark and light. Shapeshifters. Fairies. Witches and mermaids.
Poppy had memorized that list as a little girl.
She had spent hours at the edge of the forest and on the coast, young hopeful eyes constantly scanning every shadow and flicker of light, waiting to catch a glimpse of one of the creatures her family's books had promised her existed.
Until yesterday, when a dragon had appeared, she had believed but never seen any of them.
She turned to the page she had read a thousand times.
The page her grandmother had pressed her finger against the night she died, voice rasping with the last of her breath, “ Remember, my Poppy. Remember. He will come. The heart of the eldest daughter shall be a beacon, waiting for the cursed one whose wound is deep. She shall know him instantly. Her touch shall be his salvation.”
Poppy read the passage again. Confused. Her love was supposed to heal.
There was no mention of gardens that withered. Of fatigue that yanked her soul out of her body. Of dead bumblebees on the doorstep of a cottage that had always been a place of life. It didn’t say anything about her dying.
She read the passage again. And again. The ancient words offered no comfort.
Only a growing sense of dread. The prophecy was clear.
Poppy was the eldest daughter — her mother's only child.
The dragon had found her in the woods, as if drawn by a beacon.
By her. She had touched him, all right. All over.
The zap of energy they had both felt when she touched his arm still burned in her memory.
He had been shocked by her touch. He had followed her home. Kissed her. Given her so many orgasms she had stopped trying to count.
Based on the prophecy, everything was happening as it should.
Wasn’t it?
A single tear slid down her cheek. She closed the book and hugged it to her chest. A chill settled over her that had nothing to do with the morning air.
She was uneasy. Deeply so. But beneath the fear, beneath the dying garden and the bone-weariness and the dread that something was very, very wrong, a fierce, unwavering longing burned.
She had to see him again.
She needed to feel his arms around her. To lose herself in his touch and pretend, just for a little while, that everything was going to be all right.
That her wilting garden was a coincidence.
That the prophecy was a blessing, not a warning.