Chapter 6
P oppy
That damn dragon had snuck out of her bed two days ago.
Two days.
He should have returned to her by now. But no. He didn't call. He didn't write. He didn't mysteriously show up to seduce her when she took a bath in her garden. Poppy tried to summon anger and couldn’t work through the disappointment underneath.
Her feelings shouldn’t be hurt. She shouldn’t be sad. Rejected. Unwanted. Abandoned .
He was magical. A mythical creature. A dragon. Yes, the sex had been incredible. But he hadn’t promised her anything at all.
Hell, she didn’t even know his name.
He had followed her home. Kissed her. Touched her. Made her beg and plead and lose control. He had also left without telling her his name .
Bastard.
Not acceptable. Who did he think he was? Dragon or no dragon, that boy needed to learn some manners.
She had checked on the village children yesterday.
Finn O'Malley was sitting up in bed, demanding biscuits.
The Donnellan girl had her color back. The Byrne twins were arguing over a wooden horse, which their mother said was the best sound she had heard in a week.
The tincture was working. The children were getting better.
Which left Poppy nothing to do but brood about that damn dragon.
She put on jeans that hugged her backside and a sweater that showcased her breasts. Left her hair down. Dabbed rose and lavender oil behind her ears, between her breasts, the inside of her wrists. She told herself she only meant to go for a walk.
To clear her head.
She was not going out looking for him.
Absolutely not.
She shoved her phone, the only high-tech gadget she owned, into her back pocket, and grabbed a water bottle from the fridge.
The cottage door clicked shut behind her. The dying garden lay at her back. Her boots found the path before her mind agreed to it. The air was cleaner here, away from the wilted marigolds and the small dark body of the bee she’d swept from her doorstep. She drew the fresh air deep into her lungs.
The fatigue eased a little.
That was reason enough to keep walking.
The forest closed around her.
She knew this path. She had picked elderflower along it every spring of her life. But today the trees stood differently. Closer. Branches tilted toward her as if leaning in to listen. A low hum threaded through the moss and the soles of her boots.
She mistook it, at first, for the memory of his voice.
"I met a dragon," she said aloud. "I had sex with a dragon.” A lot of sex. With mind blowing, Earth shattering orgasms. “And he hasn't called."
The forest swallowed the sound. No answer came.
She hadn’t really expected one.
The hum grew louder the deeper she went.
It pulled at the soft place behind her sternum — the same place that had ached all morning.
The ache eased as she walked. Her steps quickened.
The path narrowed, then disappeared, and still she walked.
Ducked under low branches. Climbed a fallen birch slick with rain.
The trees were older here.
The light was greener.
She had lived in Cuanfirth her whole life and until a week ago, she’d been very careful to keep to the outer edges of the forest, had never ventured into the haunted part.
Yet here she was, doing it again. Yes, and look at what that got you the first time.
A dragon. A real one. Could be more, less friendly ones in here, too.
Dragons that would eat you. Or ogres. Or Sidhe.
Dark elves. Probably lots of creatures in here that don’t like humans.
She should have been afraid.
She was furious .
The hum was directing her. She could feel it now — a hand at the small of her back, pushing her forward. And underneath the hum, somewhere in the deep place where her grandmother's voice still lived, she knew exactly who had set this trap.
"If you're calling me, dragon man ," she said to the trees, "you'd better have a damn good explanation."
The forest hummed louder.
The sound of water reached her before she saw it. A rush. A rumble. The kind of noise that swallowed everything else.
She pushed through a curtain of fern and stopped.
A waterfall.
A slim, white braid of water that fell from a cleft in the granite into a black pool below. Mist rose off the pool. The air smelled of cold stone. She stood at the edge and looked. And looked.
She already knew what she would find behind it.
The path around the pool was narrow and slick.
She picked her way along it, hand braced against the wet rock, hair already damp with spray.
The hum was no longer a hum. It was a chorus.
Voices she couldn’t understand spoke just under the roar of the water — and the shape of the words felt familiar in her mouth, as if she had once known the language and forgotten.
She rounded the curtain of falling water.
The world went quiet.
A shrine. Small. A chamber no larger than her own kitchen, hollowed into the rock behind the falls. There was a stone altar at the center and a floor worn smooth by feet she would never know.
The walls were covered in carvings.
She stepped inside.
The carvings were old. Some had been deliberately scored through — deep, angry gouges that crossed out faces and figures. Others had survived. She moved along the wall slowly, fingertips a hair's breadth from the stone, and used the flashlight on her phone to chase shapes out of the shadow.
The story rose to meet her in fragments.
A woman.
A forest.
A wound at the heart of the world.
The woman knelt. The woman opened her chest. Something poured out of her into the roots of the trees. The trees rose around her in a great green crown, and the woman was no longer a woman but pure light — suggested with curving lines like a small sun.
Below the woman. Beside her. Behind her —
There had been someone else.
Poppy could see the shape of a dragon. Next to the dragon, a man, or something in the shape of a man. The carving here was the most violently defaced. Whoever had taken a chisel to this wall had wanted both man and dragon gone .
Was this her dragon?
Had he done this?
Who was the woman? His lover? His mate?
The pendant at her throat heated against her skin.
Poppy gasped and pressed her hand flat against the pendant.
The emerald burned through the fabric of her sweater, a heat that should have scalded her skin but didn’t — a heat that was alive, that pulsed once, twice, three times in time with her heartbeat.
A faint silver-green light bloomed beneath her hand.
The light bled through her sweater and lit the carved wall in front of her.
The defaced dragon figure pulsed back.
The pendant answered .
Poppy's breath caught. Some part of her knew what was about to happen. Knew she should run. Turn around. Walk back through the falling water and never come back.
She pressed her trembling fingers to the wall instead.
The world went white.
Her presence hit him with the force of a sledgehammer.
He smelled her long before he saw her. The scent cut through wet stone and moss and the green rot of the deep forest. Lavender. Warm skin. The particular sweetness of her that he’d carried on his tongue for two days.
He had told himself, since he’d left her sleeping, that he wouldn’t look for her. He wouldn’t put her in danger. He wouldn’t draw her into the darkness of his world.
She was human. He was Draquonir . He had already broken their most sacred law by revealing his dragon form to her in the forest. That alone condemned her to death if his kind ever learned what he had done.
Though, in truth, he doubted any of his people remembered his existence. He hadn’t shown himself, nor spoken to another Draquonir , in three hundred years.
Until her.
He had told himself to leave her alone. To die with honor.
He had told himself a great many things since the morning he had crept from her bed before dawn — his cock still slick from a night spent buried inside her, his dragon snarling in his head with every step that took him farther from her side.
None of those things survived the scent of her on the air outside the falls.
Then he understood exactly where she was.
A sound came out of him that made the nearby creatures of the forest tremble with fear.
He covered the last of the distance in three strides. Ducked under the falling water. The cold chamber of the shrine opened before him.
She stood at the center with her back to him.
Rage rose in him so fast it eclipsed everything else.
He reached for it gladly. Rage was simpler than the cold, sick thing underneath. "Get away from there."
She didn’t turn. Didn’t move.
He crossed to her in two strides. His hand closed around her wrist to pull her back —
And then he saw her face.
Her eyes were open. Unseeing. Magic thrummed over her skin like a river over rock.
Whatever she was looking at lay somewhere inside her own mind. Her pupils were blown wide and very dark. Her lips moved around shapes that were not words — not in any tongue he knew. A slow shudder traveled the length of her body. The fine hairs along her arm stood up under his palm.
" Ná déan ." He hadn’t meant to say it aloud. The old words came out of him like a prayer he had forgotten he knew. " Ná déan, ná déan, le do thoil —"
He knew this place.
He had known it for centuries. He had stood in this chamber as a boy. As a man. As a beast. He had felt the weight of it press against the inside of his skull, and he had never — never — seen it do this to anyone.
The shrine never gave, it only took. It always took.
From him it had taken his sister. His blood.
His sleep and his peace and any chance at a quiet death.
From a human — a soft, small human with no defense against it — he had assumed it would take everything at once and leave this beautiful woman a dried-out shell.
Instead —
It was pouring something into her.
He could see it. The faint shimmer along her hairline.
The way the air around her bent and breathed.
The carvings under her hand had warmed. The defaced dragon figure beneath her palm — the one he had taken a chisel to, in a grief so profound he’d buried the memories in a deep dark place inside himself— pulsed once with a light that had no source.
Then he saw the pendant.
It glowed against Poppy’s skin. Green-silver light bled through her sweater and shone like a small sun pressed against her heart. Mairin's pendant. Glowing. Awake. Calling.
His blood turned to ice.
"Poppy." He cupped her face with his free hand. Her skin was cold. Too cold. "Poppy. Look at me. Look at me. "
Her gaze drifted toward his voice. It didn’t find him. A small sound came out of her, soft, almost a question.
Her knees gave out.
He caught her before she hit the stone.
For a dragon, she weighed nothing. He held her against his chest and her head fell into the hollow of his throat as if she had been made to fit there. Her breath was warm and slow against his skin.
She was alive. Barely.
“Stay with me, my love.”
He repeated the command, over and over again, like a charm warding against the cold thing in his stomach.
Mine, the dragon snarled. Low and ragged. Mine and almost lost. Mine and you let her wander into the place that took Mairin —
"I know," he whispered into her hair. "I know."
Her hand had fallen away from the shrine. The pulse of light beneath the stone faded. The pendant at her chest dimmed. The chamber went quiet again, leaving him only the rush of water at his back and the soft sound of her breath.
He looked down at her face.
The peace there terrified him.
She looked the way she had looked in his arms before the dawn — when he had watched her sleep because he couldn’t summon the strength to walk away.
She looked the same now.
Whatever had passed through her, whatever the shrine had given her, she had taken without struggle. The worst parts of him — the dragon, the thing that had been pacing the cage of his ribs since the moment he scented her on the wind — understood what that meant before the rest of him caught up.
She was meant for this place.
For the first time, the shrine hadn’t attacked. Hadn’t taken.
Whatever power resided within its walls had recognized his mate. Called to her.
He couldn’t leave her here. He couldn’t take her home.
He gathered her closer. He turned his face into her hair and breathed her in. The dragon inside him purred — a deep, possessive sound that vibrated through both man and beast as he tightened his arms around what was his .
Then he carried her out under the falling water and into the green light of the wood.
He didn’t look back.
He didn’t need to.
The figure he had once tried to chisel out of the stone was burned into the inside of his eyelids — and Poppy, soft and silent against his chest, forced him to confront the memory he had spent what seemed like an eternity trying to forget.
The day his sister died at the same altar.
The woman he hadn’t been able to save.
And the slow, terrible understanding that the same shrine had just chosen another.
He walked.
He didn’t know yet where he would take her.
He only knew he would rather die than let her go.