Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Four
Maxim
I am hunting.
In these strange and deadly Avalon skies, I am not the only hunter. Nor am I the only hunter who flies.
I am not even the only dragon. For the Unseelie realm is overrun with the creatures, most of them feral and starving and therefore dangerous.
But I am the dominant male. So when I hunt, these others who are lesser?
They cringe and they cower and they hide.
Except for my prey .
That one, my Vasili, he never cowers. Vasili, who is both wily and treacherous, is the kind who schemes and lurks and lies in wait.
Already tonight, that one has led me a heady chase.
As my wings beat strongly through the summer sky, my six-chambered heart thunders in my chest, pumping ichor through the vast network of my veins. Every cell and capillary in my mighty body tingles and burns with need.
Just as my forked dragon dick, jutting rampant between my hind legs, throbs and weeps with need.
I breathe in a gust of balmy island air, drenched in the sweetness of night-blooming lotus, spiked with the alluring musk of breeding dragon. My balls ache and my loins burn.
I part my jaws and bellow a blind promise into the dark.
I will find you. That is the promise my bellow delivers to my crafty mate, so cleverly concealed. And then, sweetheart, I will breed you.
Of course, Vasili does not deign to answer.
Not with words.
He might bend for me in our warlock form (although never as often as I desire, so every rare fucking he allows me is a triumph). Yet Vasili has never permitted my mating bite. Thus, we lack the deep telepathic link of a true mating bond.
Still, I can sense my mate in other ways.
Under the dreamy sweetness of an Avalon summer, the air is redolent with the spice of caramel and vetiver laced with birchwood. That is Vasili’s unique mating scent.
My senses hum with his malicious amusement. He is amused over rousing me to such a state. I can practically feel my mate’s fretful spite stinging my hide, like his vicious backhand that time I approached him before he was ready.
That day, in my warlock body, he slapped my face so hard he made my ears ring. The memory still makes my jaw ache.
This time, in the hunt, my dragon and I will be more cunning.
Already I have tracked the alluring musk of Vasili’s mating scent from the place where Zephyr crowned Zara—my precious queen and sovereign—to rule at his side over the Unseelie realm spread beneath me.
For hours, I have followed Vasili’s scent from the city by the sea through the wild hinterlands to the mountains.
Now, the dormant volcano of Avalon Island looms over me like a catastrophe.
Its rocky slopes are pockmarked with hundreds of caves, many large enough to hide a wily creature like my mate.
I angle my wings to descend on a downdraft, silent as a held breath. Midway down the volcano’s flank, my eye picks out the familiar contours of a deep cave with a broad ledge. The steam of a hidden hot spring, thick with the rotten egg stink of sulfur, rises from the black mouth.
That is our cave.
Mine and Neo’s.
That is the place where I fucked Neo Mercury through his heat last winter.
Here, too, I have fucked Zara.
Vasili would never come here. This place is too well known to our polycule, and therefore far too obvious.
Still, a single hypnotic whiff of dragon heat twines through the sulfurous fumes. That whiff of scent pulls me toward the hole like a magnet draws iron.
I rumble out a suspicious snort and tilt my wings for a flyby. Can I have been mistaken? Now the reek of sulfur masks any hint of mating scent.
But perhaps Vasili is counting on that.
Acting on impulse, I fold my wings tight and drop toward the ledge like an anvil. By all the saints of the northern steppes, I will search every nook and cranny of that cave—
A long streak of silver explodes from the cave. I glimpse the cold glitter of starlight on ice-white scales. Then a flying serpent slices past my reaching talons like a javelin.
Surprise and exultation split my jaws in a deafening roar of triumph.
Now I know the truth.
Vasili, for all his vicious protests in his warlock form, wishes to be caught. His dragon, who is genderfluid and in heat, who took wing tonight in their first mating flight, wishes to be mounted and fucked and bred.
Never fear, sweetheart, I bellow with pride as the elusive creature shoots past me into the night. I am the right dragon for that job.
Even if she… they… ze? I struggle with the pronouns Vasili’s dragon has never shared. (When my mate is finally caught, I must ask.) Even if V’s dragon is jumpy and skittish as a medieval virgin on her bridal night.
I twist my big body, pivot on my tail in midair, and give chase.
Vasili’s snakelike dragon streaks through the skies, iridescent wings a blur of motion as they beeline toward the dim blue glow of the Dark Fae city by the sea. Dark shapes flutter like a flock of giant bats from the caves that flash past.
Fuck .
These are feral dragons drawn to V’s alluring heat—despite my deadly presence—like moths to the fatal flame.
I twist my long neck in midflight and rumble a column of crimson fire at the wretched beasts. My fire ignites the nearest pair as though they are dipped in pitch.
With piteous screams, they fall from the sky like a shower of flaming comets.
MINE! I bellow at the others—greens and blues and a few scrawny blacks, none of them approaching my size and strength. The white dragon is mine and no other’s!
The ferals scatter shrieking in all directions, clearing the way for Vasili’s escape.
But that mate of mine will not escape me.
V is agile and slippery and fast… so fast! But I am faster.
With every beat of my wings and throb of my heart, I close the distance between us. V’s flying serpent angles their flight to skim the tangled treetops of the Dark Fae forest, no doubt seeking a place to hide. I fall into their blind spot, which is above and behind.
In dragon form, my mate is still new to flying.
This is an advantage I ruthlessly exploit.
I catch the gleam of a cold blue eye as the white dragon casts about their periphery, vainly seeking my black shape in the night, through the streaming tendrils of silver mane that crown them.
I drop my inner lids, the membrane that protects a dragon’s eyes from sleet and hail, to dim my own wicked glow.
When Vasili turns away without seeing me, gliding like a bird of prey just above and behind, I know this elusive creature is finally mine.
I fold my wings and drop like a wrecking ball.
My forelegs descend to wrap around the sinewy coil of diamond scales and grip tight.
At the first shock of impact, Vasili hisses horribly—a shrill teakettle scream of rage—and twists to snap at me with dagger-sharp teeth.
I clasp the madly twisting coil of enraged dragon to my chest. Then I beat my mighty wings to lift us from the tangle of trees and forest where my crafty mate could hide.
As we climb through the Avalon skies, Vasili fights me like a harpy, shrieking with malice, furious wings buffeting me like shovels, teeth snapping at my throat.
All the while, mating heat radiates from those pale scales in shimmering infrared waves that glow amber in my sight.
The twisting coil of dragon I clutch to my chest is writhing with fury—
But also with need.
I cannot laugh aloud in dragon form.
But I am dizzy with anticipation and triumph.
I rumble low and deep in my chest, a sound meant to soothe my fractious mate. Hush now, sweetheart. I will give you what you need.
Vasili’s sharp teeth snap closed, deadly as a bear trap, an inch from my grinning muzzle.
By now, we have climbed high enough that the island spreads beneath us, a dark opal set against a shimmering plate of sea. It is mating instinct that fuels my climb. The genetic drive to prove my strength and guile to my mate.
Being Vasili, of course, my mate is unimpressed.
Beating my wings to hold us aloft, I grapple with the writhing column of scale and sinew in my forearms. My hind legs swing up to restrain my mate.
My forked dragon member—swollen and priapic, scrotum swinging heavy as a cannon ball—prods Vasili’s sleek belly, slick with the juices leaking from my snake’s genital slit.
The acrid brimstone and leather of my own scent floods my nostrils.
Through flying tendrils of silver mane, I meet the narrow gleam Vasili’s vicious blue glare.
Oh, sweetheart, I rumble, thick and husky in my chest. You and I, like this, we were always meant to be.
V’s white dragon screams defiance in my face.
But now, there is no stopping me.
My questing organ has found the narrow slit where Vasili’s shaft hides in this form when he is male, which is also where a female dragon’s eggs wait to be fertilized.
With a single mighty thrust, I sink deep into my mate’s slick heat.
My twin barbs shoot out to anchor me in place.
A raw bellow, fueled by fierce satisfaction, rips from my lungs.
With the first pump, my eyes roll back in my head with blinding pleasure.
For a heartbeat, I have forgotten what Vasili is capable of doing. His dragon may be more than willing, and indeed is all but begging for it. But Vasili himself—his warlock self—is rancid with spite at being caught.
All this knowledge returns in a rush when V’s sword-sharp fangs sink deep into my throat.
My lips peel back in a snarl of betrayal and agony.
In this electrifying moment, while we are locked together by my barbs and my own brutal passion, I am at the snake’s mercy. Even while V’s fangs pierce my scaly hide, my hips drive furiously into the tight suck of my mate’s genital slit.
If this is what Vasili wishes, his dragon will tear out my throat.
Well, if that is what occurs, at least I will die buried balls-deep in Vasili Romanov.
Where I was always meant to be.
Instead of ripping open my jugular vein, those deadly fangs buried in my throat retract. A slick forked tongue flickers over my bite, delicately lapping at the welling blood, administering the shifter saliva that helps the wound to clot.
Slow understanding seeps through me.
Vasili and his dragon, they do not wish to tear out my throat. Instead, they have given me their mating bite.
Of course, as a matter of shifter ethics, one is always supposed to ask before biting.
But this is Vasili.
A heartbeat later, the sinewy column of snake pressed against my body starts to undulate sinuously against me. While my hips burrow deeper, driving powerfully into the bewitching suck of slit that encases my throbbing shaft, V’s long tail winds around my hips to press me closer.
Our mating dance shifts, very subtly, from a savage fight to a savage fuck.
All the while, the serpent’s fierce face burrows into my throat, tending to my mating bite.
When shifters mate, it is the alpha who bites. But Vasili would never permit me that privilege.
In Vasili’s mind, the dominant alpha in every coupling is Vasili.
Even when he bends for me in human form, I am fully aware, he considers himself to be in complete control.
This mating bite will make it worse. After tonight, neither the man nor his dragon will give me a moment’s peace from the daily litany of commands I must obey.
Vasili hisses, long and satisfied, into my throat. At the edge of thought, the first spark of a true mating bond flares to life.
Now you truly are mine, Rasputin, he purrs. Which is just as well. I can use your compliance to finally get rid of that little Dark Fae tyrant.
Inwardly, I heave a grumbly sigh.
Vasili has always hated Zephyr—with a jealous, unreasoning hatred that is heightened (in my view) by the unconsummated passion that sizzles between them.
In Vasili’s secret quest to unearth some obscure and ancient spell to close the portal between our worlds and banish the Dark Fae King to permanent exile in this one, I am already compelled to act as Vasili’s reluctant ally.
Now this terrible creature’s demands will worsen.
Well, so be it. In this, I have sworn to do Vasili’s bidding.
Zephyr must fend for himself.
My flicker of discontent evaporates as Vasili’s genital slit clenches and pulses and ripples around my dick. Already my cock is drizzling the copious, seed-rich fluid of my spend—the first of many orgasms Vasili will wring from me tonight—over the clutch of our waiting eggs.
Wings beating gently to hold us both aloft, I rumble in deep contentment and let my mate set the pace.