37. Lucy #2
My forelegs moved, redistributing my weight, and the movement brought me closer instead of further.
I felt him register it, felt the long slow breath he pulled in, felt the way his entire body stilled beneath mine the way something does when it’s trying very hard not to startle what it’s waiting for.
The beast wanted him. That deep animal certainty vibrated undeniably through me, the smoke and frost of him, the gravity he carried, the devotion.
The woman wanted him too, which was somehow more terrifying.
Both parts of me pulled in the same direction for once, unanimously and decided.
I wanted him to take this completely out of my hands.
The thought should have frightened me.
“Lucette.”
Just that. Just my name in his voice, rough at the edges, my name like something precious and fragile and only his to speak.
My head dropped until my jaw rested against his throat and I felt his pulse against my scales like a second heartbeat.
The collar went completely silent. Just gone, swallowed whole by the thundering of Riot’s heart beneath my cheek.
The shift moved through us both at once, the world shrinking from vast and aerial to immediate and breathless until I was simply a woman lying across a man’s chest in the dark, his heart still hammering beneath my ear, his arms coming around me with slow certainty.
I lifted my head.
He looked up at me with those amber eyes, unhurried, a ghost of something devastating at the corner of his mouth.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hi.”
Neither of us moved.
His eyes dropped briefly to my mouth and something tightened low in my chest. One second more and I thought… I really thought…
Then something moved in the dark.
I stilled.
A low sound carried from the ruins to the east. Something breathing, circling the perimeter of wherever we’d landed. Then another sound from a different direction.
I moved off of him. Riot hadn’t budged, but his eyes were already tracking the darkness with calm focus.
“How many?” I asked.
“Seven. Maybe eight.” He sat up slowly, completely unbothered. “There are two behind the far ruin, three along the ridge to the north. The rest are downwind. They’ve been there a while.”
“And you didn’t think to mention that as we were… fighting?”
“They wouldn’t approach during a claiming.
” He said it simply, like it was obvious.
“Even Ash beasts understand, some things are not to be interrupted.” His eyes found mine in the dark with a warmth that made my stomach flip despite the growling closing in from three directions.
“But if enough of them gather, they’ll get brave. They always do.”
“It wasn’t a claiming,” I protested, hearing the trace of doubt in my own voice.
He lifted a brow. “It could have been.”
My mind betrayed me completely by wondering what would’ve happened if nothing had interrupted us.
Something snarled from much closer than before. A second before I shifted, Riot’s hand found the small of my back and tugged me toward him, kissing me deeply, desperately, fingers clutching just enough to say goodbye to the woman, if only temporarily.
Then we were dragons, and the Ash beasts that had been circling scattered like smoke in a strong wind.
Riot launched first and I followed, climbing hard into the cold air, leaving the ruins and the dark behind to whatever came next.
We landed side by side on the familiar stone cliff that overlooked where I always exited the wards.
The night stretched ahead of us still, unhurried and vast. I told him more about Tavian, of the Keep and its cold corridors and how he’d found me half frozen on a bridge and asked for nothing after saving me.
About Baylor the jeweler with his kind eyes and his poorly concealed devotion to a cook who didn’t know it yet, bringing her what he could from the farmlands north of the city while pretending he simply enjoyed the journey.
Riot made a sound that was unmistakably fond.
I told him about the honey cakes and Maren’s secret ingredient and the argument Emrys had been having with Tavian about whether they glowed.
“He’s not young but he has a young spirit about him.
I don’t know, in some ways he reminds me of my brother.
Oh! And, he took me up into the mountain caves looking for answers about my collar and spent the entire time asking me about the ocean.
Then on the way back he challenged me to a human foot race down the mountain path.
He fell into a snowdrift and pretended he’d meant to.
I absolutely would have beaten him had I not turned back to make sure he was okay. ”
Riot’s chest rumbled with quiet laughter and I felt the comfort of it move through me. “I’m glad you have people behind those wards. That it isn’t only the Ossira, the dark and the hunt waiting for you.”
“It helps,” I said honestly. “But it’s not only the hunt waiting for me on this side.”
“And it never will be.”
We were quiet for a moment before it surfaced, the thing that had been sitting between us since we’d landed.
“The lycan,” I whispered, afraid to leave the comfort of seeking something normal between us back to the problems circling.
“There isn’t a full moon. But he was mid-shift.
That’s not possible without one. A lycan can’t just choose it.
He can prevent it with a pricey rune, I believe, but there’s no magic in this world that lets them choose to shift.
It’s what keeps them different than us… than the shifters, I mean. ”
“No,” Riot said carefully. “You’re right.”
“So something forced it. Or someone. I wasn’t hunting the Furies, but the collar was pulling me toward him. It wasn’t random.” I looked down at my claws against the stone. “You kept me from killing him.”
“Maybe, but I don’t think so. If you wanted to kill him, I think you would have. You were reaching for him, claws open. Collecting him.”
“Either way, thank you for keeping me from becoming something I couldn’t come back from.”
“If it came to that, my Tilouri, I would have taken the kill from you.”
The horizon began to warm at its edges, the first suggestion of something coming.
Riot sighed. “Betrayed by the sun once again. I’ll see you tomorrow, beautiful beast.”
“Tomorrow,” I whispered, already feeling the ache of missing him, though I hadn’t left his side.
He pressed his forehead to mine, and in the silence he gave me I tried to memorize everything. The weight of him. The charm. The way the world went quiet enough that I could hear my own heartbeat. I almost asked him to kiss me again just to have something to carry back into the dark.
Then he pulled back and I launched into the air, heading toward the fog. I was almost through it when I saw the large dragon with green scales moving parallel to the wall. The collar around his throat caught the growing suggestion of light, a dull gleam against dark stone.
He slowed. His head turned toward me.
We looked at each other across the distance and I felt the words rise up before I could stop them, barely a breath, barely anything at all. “Stay inside. Whatever they’re asking you to do out here. Stay inside.”
The dragon held my gaze for a moment that lasted too long.
Then it turned, wings folding, and disappeared back into the white.
As if it had never seen me at all.
I let the collar pull me back to Luneth Hollow.