Chapter 19
Magma
I hear the water first. Then I smell it.
It cuts through the green-rot smell of the jungle. We’ve found a river. A good stretch of it, I think. I hold up one hand, and Carla stops behind me.
“I’m fine to keep walking,” she whispers. “You only just put me down not so long ago.”
“It’s water.”
Her eyes light up, and she smiles, looking quite beautiful despite the dirt caked on her face.
I pull my attention back to our surroundings and scan the tree line as we continue to walk.
The river is maybe thirty feet wide from bank to bank, not enormous but not nothing either.
The current is visible even from here, a steady dark pull at the surface.
The water is a brownish-green, murky enough that I can’t see more than a few inches below the surface.
“Stay back,” I say, keeping my voice low. “And do not come to the water’s edge until I tell you.”
“Why? What is it?” she whispers.
“Alligators. Anacondas. There are also caimans out here, which are smaller but no less dangerous. Even bull sharks have been found this far upriver before.”
I hear her swallow behind me.
“Sharks…really?”
I smile at her. “I doubt very much that there will be one. They’re very rare, and the current is a bit on the heavy side for caimans and anacondas, but I’m not taking any chances.”
“What about ’gaters?”
“They love waters like this. Don’t worry, I have good senses. Let me confirm we don’t have any unwanted friends anywhere near before we drink.”
“That would be fantastic,” she says. “I’m not moving an inch.”
I move forward alone, crouching as I approach the bank.
The ground gets softer underfoot, the mud thickening between my toes.
I stop at the edge and stay still, watching.
The surface of the water moves in a smooth, dark ribbon.
I watch the far bank, the tangles of root and vine that reach into the shallows.
I watch the water itself, the way the current breaks around the submerged rocks.
There is no slow roll of a body beneath the surface. No wide flat snout parting the water near the bank. No loop of something heavy and muscled coiled in the shallows. I listen for a heartbeat.
I watch for a long two minutes. Long enough to be sure.
Then I wave Carla forward.
She picks her way down to me, moving carefully on her wrapped feet. She reaches the edge and looks at the water and then at me. I keep my eyes on the far bank, the upriver stretch, and the shallows to my left.
“This is fresh runoff water from those mountains.” I point in the general direction. “It’s moving and drinkable. You go first. I’ll keep watch,” I say.
She nods and then goes to her knees on the bank. I listen to her cup water with her palms and drink, once, twice, then again. Then the sound of it being splashed over her face and neck. She makes a low, involuntary sound of relief that goes south, and I redirect my attention to the water upstream.
“That was great. I’m done,” she says quietly.
I kneel where she was and drink. The water is cold and has a mineral bite to it. I drink steadily, not rushing. I splash my face once and rinse my arms. Then I wash out my mouth a few times, drinking again. I keep my eyes up all the while and my senses honed.
I straighten.
Carla is looking at the river. Something in her expression has gone thoughtful.
“Is there any way we could actually…wash?” she asks. “Properly. Like, get in? I feel so icky it isn’t even funny anymore. I swear I’ll put mud all over myself again once I’m done, but at least I’ll be clean underneath.”
I look at her. She has dried mud streaked across her jaw and her neck and through her hair. I’m pretty sure we’d be able to do a better job at masking her scent if she were clean underneath.
“It is a good idea,” I say. “But I’d need to stay close. I’d need to stay with you.”
She looks at me, and I can see her working through it.
“I’d be naked.”
“I would have my back to you. Besides, your underwear doesn’t hide much. Sorry to have to tell you.”
“At least it’s something. I know you guys aren’t fazed about being naked but—”
“I won’t look. I swear. But it’s nonnegotiable. Either I’m in the water with you, or you don’t go in. Even then, you stick to the shallow part.”
She nods. “Okay.” Then she adds, “So how does this work, exactly?”
“I will go in deeper than you. I’ll keep watch on the water.
You go in where it’s shallower on the bank side.
” I look at the river and pick the best stretch of it, a place where the bank curves out slightly, and the trees give some overhead cover.
“I’ll keep my back to you while watching for anything. But be quick about it.”
“I’ll be quick. I promise.”
We go in together.
The cold hits me from the feet up, and I welcome it.
Cold water is useful. It does a good job of shutting down things I don’t need to be thinking about right now.
I wade in to about waist depth and position myself between Carla and the center of the river, my back to her, facing the opposite bank and the long upriver stretch where the current is strongest.
I listen to the river.
I listen beyond the river.
Behind me, she gets to work. There’s the sound of water moving, of her wading further in, the soft sounds of washing.
I fix my eyes on the far bank and keep them there.
I busy myself with scrubbing my own arms, my chest, the back of my neck, working through it methodically.
I keep my ears tuned to the water, to the jungle on both banks, to the drag of the current.
I am listening for anything that doesn’t belong.
I keep washing everywhere I can reach while scanning the water in all directions.
I am also actively not thinking about what is happening behind me.
I am not thinking about it at all.
There’s a splash and a rustle of movement. She must be tilting her head back to rinse her hair. I focus on a submerged log near the far bank that looked, for a half-second, like it was moving. It wasn’t. Just the current. I keep my eyes on it anyway.
Then she shrieks.
It’s short and sharp and loud enough to scatter birds from the canopy twenty feet overhead, and I am already turning before the sound is fully out of her.
Something long and dark darts away through the water between her legs. Gone in under a second, heading for the deep water.
It’s an eel. Long and fast, the bronze-brown of it disappearing into the murk.
“It’s gone,” I tell her.
Carla is frozen where she stands in the shallows.
I look up.
I should not have because fuck me sideways.
She is standing about five feet from me in river water that reaches just below her hips, and none of the mud is on her now. All of it is gone. She’s fully bare, the current pulling gently around her.
Her blonde hair hangs heavy and wet down her back. Her pussy is covered in dark fur but trimmed neatly on the sides. I had heard that humans do that. That some of them shave their pussy hair off completely.
I like that she has hair. I like the trim.
I lift my eyes to her lush hips and soft belly.
Despite just having had a drink of water, my mouth goes dry at her full breasts that sit high and round, her nipples tight from the cold water.
Her shoulders are wet and gleaming. Her face is tipped partly toward where the eel vanished.
She’s wide-eyed and startled and, incredibly, devastatingly beautiful.
My cock goes hard in an instant. There is nothing the cold water can do. My tip eases from the water.
She is, without question, the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in my life.
Something in my chest tightens. Blood rushes through my veins.
“Carla.” Her name comes out of me wrong. Too low. Too rough. I can hear it myself. I’m eating her up with my eyes, and I know it, and I can’t stop. I take a step toward her and the water lowers.
She turns her head and looks at me.
Her eyes go down and then up. I’m hard, thick, and heavy, impossible to miss. Even my balls feel heavy and throbbing.
She swallows.
“Should I…run?” she says. And she means it half as a joke, I think. Maybe it’s her way of telling me that she wants me to fuck her.
Shit!
Is that it?
“No.” The word comes out clipped. “Don’t!”
I know what I should do. I know it clearly. I should turn back around. I should put my eyes on the opposite bank, keep them there, get my body and my head under control, and remember every sensible word I said to her only just this morning.
I don’t turn.
She doesn’t move either. Her underwear and what’s left of her skirt are clutched in her fist. She doesn’t try to cover herself and doesn’t cross her arms over her chest. She just stands there in the water, her chin up a fraction, and her mouth has parted, and her eyes are half-dark and heavy.
She’s looking at me the way she was looking at me from behind that tree.
The current moves around both of us.
“Fuck.” It comes out of me like a breath. Then I’m moving.
I close the distance between us, and I get both hands on either side of her face, and I kiss her, hard, before either of us can think about it any further.
She kisses me back.
Her hands come up and hit my chest, her underwear still in them, and then her fingers curl against my skin, and she makes a sound into my mouth that does something catastrophic to my self-control.
I angle her head and go deeper. She gives me everything.
Her body, still cold and slick from the river, presses into me from chest to hip, and everywhere we make contact I feel it like something lit.
I break the kiss just long enough to get my arm under her legs, my other hand braced at her back, and I pick her up out of the water. She wraps her arms around my neck. I carry her to the bank and step up out of the river.
Her soft body presses against all of my hardness, and she pulls back and looks at me with those heavy eyes, her mouth still parted.
Shit!
“I can’t.” I put her down. “We can’t, Carla. I want you. Know that—”
“Now what do we have we here?”
The voice is male and low and comes from the trees to my left.
I drop Carla to her feet and push her behind me.
She gasps and starts pulling her underwear back on.
Something happens inside me. My dragon slams forward from the inside, and I let him, because the three things going off in my head right now are very simple and they don’t need examining.
Protect.
Mine.
Now!
The Red steps out from between two thick palms, and he is not fully shifted.
He’s somewhere in between, the way the worst of them fight.
Scales pushing up through the skin of his forearms, his fingers thickened and clawed at the tips, his eyes gone fully amber, no white left.
He’s big, a little shorter than me but built wide across the shoulders.
He’s got a grin on his face that I want to remove.
My muscles are already burning. I can feel the scales pushing at the surface of my own skin, feel them ridging up along my shoulders and forearms. The dark markings on them go hot. My fists are enormous.
“What is a Draiger doing on Red soil?” he asks. “Did you bring me a present? How nice of you.”
The Red’s grin spreads.
He starts to say something else.
I don’t let him.
I hit him before he can finish the thought. My fist connects with the side of his jaw, and the crack of it fills the whole clearing. He comes back at me immediately and catches me across the cheek, and it rocks me sideways. I don’t go down. I roll with it and come back in low.
He’s fast, but I’m faster, and angrier, which matters. My dragon wants me to shift and to tear him apart, but I resist the urge.
He gets his hands on me twice, and his nails rake my shoulder before I get an arm around his throat from behind and wrench, hard, to the left.
The snap is clean.
I hold him upright for a single beat, then let him drop.
He hits the ground at my feet.
I stand over him, chest heaving, the scales still up on my arms. I look at them, and I breathe, and slowly, one by one, they retract. My hands come back to themselves.
I turn.
Carla is standing a few feet from the riverbank, her arms wrapped around herself now. Her eyes are on me. They are very wide, but she’s not shaking, and her chin is up, and she doesn’t look away when I look at her.
I start toward her.
The space between us closes with every step I take, and I can feel every one of them.
I can feel her eyes on me the whole way.
The water is dripping off my skin. My pulse is still up, the adrenaline still hot in my blood, and the part of me that has been fighting since the moment she stood in that river is not done.
I stop in front of her.
“Tell me you don’t want this.” My voice is barely mine. The dragon is still too close to the surface. I can hear him in my words.
Her eyes don’t leave mine.
I pray to god she tells me that she doesn’t want me, but there’s a bigger part of me that needs to be inside her and right fucking now.
Whatever she chooses will be the wrong answer.
This is so fucked up.