Chapter 7
A lsander
The Next Day
Alsander hadn’t slept.
He sat in the deep shadow at the back of the chamber, shoulders against cool stone, and watched Poppy on the bed of furs across the firelit room. He didn’t move. Hadn’t moved in hours. His body ached from the stillness.
He welcomed the ache.
It gave him something to feel that wasn’t the slow turn of his stomach every time her breath caught.
The fire had burned down to embers. He hadn’t risen to feed it. He didn’t want to cross the room. He didn’t want her to wake to the sight of him at her side as if he had the right to be there.
He had no rights.
He had carried her through the wood. Lain her down. Pulled a fur over her shoulders. Then he had retreated to the dark, and there he had stayed.
She slept the way she had slept in her own small bed three nights ago. One hand curled near her mouth. The other open, palm up, as if she expected something to be placed in it. Firelight caught in her hair and edged it with copper.
He had brought a human into his lair.
The act had brought fresh waves of shock every quarter hour through the long night.
No foot but his own had crossed its threshold since he was cursed.
No dragon, no one from the Secret Kingdoms. Now a human, his true mate, lay on his furs with the rise and fall of her breath the only sound in a room that had known only his silence.
He couldn’t undo it.
He didn’t want to.
Mine, the dragon murmured from the deep place where it lived. Sleepy. Satisfied. Ours. In our lair. Where she belongs.
"I was being selfish when I brought her here. She does not belong here," he whispered to the dark. "She belongs anywhere but here."
The dragon didn’t bother to respond.
She stirred.
He held very still.
Her brow furrowed. Her hand closed on the fur beneath her cheek, fingers testing the texture of it, and a small line appeared between her brows that he understood — even from across the room —she had registered the texture as wrong . The bed was wrong. The smell of the air was wrong. She was awake.
He sank deeper into the shadows.
Her eyes opened.
She didn’t sit up. She blinked slowly at the firelit ceiling.
Turned her head. Took in the chamber in slow degrees — the high vault of the stone above her, the fire in its iron cradle, the shelves cut into the rock.
His books. His charts. The small green bottles of medicine.
The low wooden table he had built himself two centuries ago.
The chair beside it. The map on the far wall.
He waited for her reaction. Wonder. Anger. Fear. Any moment she would realize that this wasn’t just a cave.
Someone lived here.
Someone had lived here for a very long time. Alone.
She sat up.
The fur slid down to her waist. She still wore the sweater and jeans he’d found her in the day before. He had pulled the boots from her feet and set them neatly beside the bed.
She took it all in. Sighed. Swung her legs over the side and stood.
Her balance held. He hadn’t been certain it would. She took one careful step. Another. Her hand drifted out to touch the spine of a book on the nearest shelf. She didn’t pull it back.
His chest tightened uncomfortably as he watched her examine and touch his possessions. He couldn’t escape the feeling that she was examining more than his treasures, she was examining him . Who he was.
She moved along the shelf, inspecting his things. Took her time.
Not afraid.
Curious. Reverent.
She stopped at the table. Bent over the open book he had left there. Her lips moved as she read. A small soft sound escaped her that might have been a laugh, and the knot in his chest pulled tighter than he could bear.
She straightened. Turned in a slow circle, taking in the rest of the chamber. Her gaze settled on the dark at the back of the room.
Found him.
She didn’t flinch.
"Oh." Soft. Almost a greeting. "You're here."
He couldn’t make himself answer.
She didn’t move toward him. Didn’t move away. She stood in the firelight in her sweater and her jeans and her bare feet on his furs as if she belonged there.
"I thought I'd dreamed it," she said. "Waking up. I thought I was dreaming."
"You are not dreaming." His voice came out wrong. Lower than he meant. Rougher. The dragon under his skin shifted in a slow uncoiling stretch that made his hands curl against the stone behind him.
"Where are we?"
"You shouldn’t be here."
"That's not an answer."
"It is the only answer that matters."
"You could try telling me where I am."
"No."
She tilted her head. "Why not?"
He couldn’t say it. Couldn’t say because no human has ever been here, because the laws of my kind are older than your language, because every breath you draw in this room is a death sentence I gave you .
"You would not understand," he said instead.
The cowardice tasted like ash.
"Try me."
"You should be afraid of me, Poppy."
"I'm not."
"You should be."
"I'm not." She took a step forward. The firelight slid down her hair. "You forget I saw you in the forest, dragon man . I am not afraid of you. I don't know how to make myself."
The dragon under his skin gave a long, slow shudder of want .
He understood, then, that words were not going to change her mind.
He had spent three centuries with words. He had nothing left in his mouth that could reach her. There was only the other thing. The shape he had been hiding from her since the first moment in the forest clearing.
The shape that was the truth of him. It was one thing for her to see a dragon transform into a man from across a clearing, and another thing entirely to stand toe-to-toe with the fire-breathing beast.
No human could look a dragon in the eye and continue to feel what she was feeling now.
So be it.
Better the wound now than later.
"Then look," he said. He stood. He let go.
The first crack ran down his spine.
He unmade himself with a wet, brutal sound.
Black scales rose out of him like a tide.
The bones of his hands stretched and fused and stretched again into long, curved claws.
His face elongated along with the rest of his body.
His wings tore from his back in a spread of leather and bone that filled half the chamber, scraped the high vault of the stone above, sent a book skittering across the floor.
The doubled long-sight of the dragon swept over the chamber and caught her at the center of it. Small. Still. Unafraid.
His every dragon-sense lit at once.
Lavender. Warm skin. The particular sweetness of her he had carried on his tongue for three days. The thrum of her pulse — faster now, but not from fear. He could smell the absence of fear on her.
He could smell, with the dragon's nose, the thing underneath.
Mate.
The word filled him from the inside out. The dragon had known. The dragon had known from the first moment in the forest clearing, and Alsander had refused to listen. His dragon had been patient. Waiting.
The dragon wasn’t waiting anymore.
Mate. Mate. Mine.
And under the word — hot and rising — a second thing.
The fire.
The slow build at the back of his throat.
The instinct as old as his line. Breathe over her.
Mark her. Bind her. Wrap her in dragonfire so every Draquonir from here to the end of the world will know whose she is.
His magic would not burn her. It never burned the chosen one.
It would settle on her skin like gold dust and sink into her bones and she would be his.
Irrevocably. For as long as either of them drew breath.
No.
Alsander fought the dragon with everything still man buried inside the great black shape of him. The dragon turned its head toward her. Lowered its long neck. Alsander hauled at the reins of his own body and couldn’t stop the lowering, could only stop the fire, could only just stop the fire.
She hadn’t moved.
Run, he tried to warn her. Run, you brave foolish girl, run while I am still holding it back.
All that came out was the dragon’s deep, ferocious roar.
The air was electric.
She didn’t run.
She walked toward him.
Across the firelit floor of his lair, in her bare feet and her sweater that hugged the lines of her body, she walked toward the dragon as if the dragon were a horse in a stable she had come to greet, not a fierce predator that could fit her inside his giant maw.
Smoke curled lazily from his nostrils.
Stop smoking! You’ll scare her! Alsander commanded the dragon.
The dragon rumbled low in his chest, the equivalent of a dragon chuckle. Best to show mate we are strong, fire-breathing beast capable of incinerating anyone foolish enough to attack. Dragons without fire are weak. Get mate killed.
Alsander couldn’t argue with the dragon’s logic, but he wasn’t convinced. You’re just preening.
I am courting our mate. Something you should have been doing for the past three days. You almost lost her. Now it is my turn. Watch and learn, fool.
The cave shook as the dragon stretched to his full height, spread his wings, and breathed fire across the stone ceiling of the cave.
The flames rolled across the ceiling in a river of molten gold.
Heat crashed through the cavern. The shelves rattled. Shadows leapt wild across the stone as fire licked over the vaulted roof in branching veins, bright enough to turn night into something feverish and alive.
Alsander tensed deep within the dragon. Now she would run. She would run, as she should, and he would go back to the business of dying. Alone. Pain struck his heart with such force that had he not been in dragon form, he would have wept.
Poppy stopped beneath the flame.
Not fleeing.
Looking up in wonderment.
The dragon swelled with satisfaction so intense Alsander felt it in his own ribs.
See? the beast purred. Mate understands wonder.
You are setting the mountain on fire.
Stone does not burn. The dragon sounded smug . We are very precise.