Chapter 16
The hammock swayed gently, a lulling tempo that seeped into Arkyn’s bones. He couldn’t remember ever being so relaxed, like butter in the sun. Blame the warmth of the day. Blame the dancing sunlight filtering through the tree leaves. Blame the gooey crullers resting in his belly.
Blame all that, but give credit for his mood to its true source: Ama.
She lay flush against his side as if painted on him. Her head nestled in the crook of his neck, her arm and leg draped across him. If he tilted his head just right, he got a delicious view of a long expanse of leg curled over his, the hem of his shirt hiked to her hip from the combined efforts of the day’s light breeze and his fingers lightly trailing up and down her back.
They were in his back yard now, which boasted several acres of woods. No one else would see if she got naked. No one would overhear their pleasure if he pulled her astride his hips so she could ride him. No one would know if he slipped down and feasted on her until she screamed.
He’d never before fully appreciated the privacy his homestead offered.
Yet he did nothing. Ama’s soft puffs of breath tickled his throat as she dozed. She’d had a horrible experience today. When he’d first seen her in that god-awful jail cell, she’d appeared as lost and alone and desperate as Astra when the little furball had run in front of his truck that fateful day. What horrors had spurred Astra to risk her little life thus?
What terror had Ama experienced from her sleepwalking?
How awful, to wake up somewhere that wasn’t where she’d gone to sleep. And although Father had used his dragon’s persuasive water power to redirect the officers’ intentions, there was no way to keep them from talking. Alexandria was a small enough town that the gossip mill was no doubt in full force.
Ama would probably lose her job.
Would she feel obligated to move away? By the Allfather, he hoped not. At the thought of Ama leaving Alexandria, his muscles tensed, ready to go with her. Could he leave his family and business?
Ty had managed just fine in LA. But he wasn’t the heir-alpha. His relocation had been a family decision in the face of Níeh?ggr’s prophesized arrival. If Arkyn left, that would be a decision based solely on his own personal, selfish reasons.
For a man who’d always known what was expected of him and what course of action he should pursue, this situation was unnatural. No decision seemed a good one, and yet he knew in his heart he would choose Ama.
He exhaled quietly so he didn’t wake her up. Would she even want him to follow her? She didn’t know he was a shifter. Didn’t know his responsibilities went deeper than mere son and employee. She didn’t know much about him at all. Just as he knew very little about her. Would they have time to discover more about each other before she fled this small town?
Despite the tumultuous thoughts backflipping in his brain, the peace of the day and the woman in his arms lulled him. He pulled Ama closer and wrapped her more firmly so she didn’t sleepwalk. She sighed in contentment and snuggled deeper. His eyelids dipped, then dropped as he drifted to sleep.
He dreamed of that space place again.
Only in this dream, he viewed it through different eyes. Eyes that saw in brilliant detail the full spectrum of light from distant stars, like when black-and-white movies became technicolor. Eyes that recognized the surrounding galaxies from their initial creation and had watched them grow and develop through the eternities. He glanced at his feet: large, blunt claws and ocean blue scales dotted with browns and greens and wispy whites.
Not a dream, but his dragon. He was in his dragon. Like so many times before when his dragon had writhed beneath his skin to be acknowledged, Arkyn was now buried but present and aware within his dragon, traveling the plane where the beast had existed throughout time.
Approaching from just ahead was the deep purple dragon from his dream. But if this was not a dream, then the dragon must be real. Arkyn didn’t know all the dragons in the realm, but his dragon did and sensed the one zipping in their direction was unfamiliar. A young dragon maybe? Arkyn had assumed they’d just… always existed in some form. They never died, but had instead been reborn into a new host through thousands of lifetimes. Were new dragons ever born? If two dragons mated and procreated—gods, imagine two apex predators ferociously defending their offspring against any and all perceived threats—they might very well incinerate the cosmos.
The strange dragon stopped before him, just out of reach but close enough they could examine each other. Its feline eyes, oversized opals shimmering with wisdom as old and vast as the universe, gazed from either side of a wide forehead that tapered in a graceful slope to a dainty muzzle. Where his own dragon boasted thick whiskers that trailed like an exaggerated dragon Fu Manchu, this one had fine, hair-like filaments that wafted and drifted as if on a watery current, lightly glowing. His had a ragged dorsal crest that resembled a mountain range running along his back from top to tail. By contrast, this dragon’s dorsal crest was gracefully spined and translucent, wafting sinuously like some exotic fish. Its body was longer than his, willowy and elegant, its claws were short and sharp.
Delicate.The word popped into his head as he looked at the other dragon. Compared to his own dragon, a blue battering ram with rocky protrusions and claws intended for carving through planets, this dragon appeared practically dainty.
Another dragon might assume this dragon’s exquisite form meant it was weak. But Arkyn’s family knew from experience not to judge ability by size. Lucia’s diminutive dragon could fell an entire army. Lin herself was a tiny yet fierce warrior. Eydís didn’t even have a dragon, yet she made men cower.
Even Ama had an internal strength which gave her the fortitude to hold her head high even while others mocked her. A strength which belied her slender figure and her unconventionally-short purple hair and her galaxy eyes?—
As one, Arkyn and his dragon blinked. Then looked again at the strange dragon before them. Slender and long, face angling to a pointed chin, scales ranging from nearly black raisin to lavender, galaxies swirling and constellations winking along its torso and dorsal crest.
Just like Ama’s eyes.
Arkyn’s dragon took a step toward the other, speaking to it in a language so ancient, Arkyn couldn’t understand it except to assume it was a greeting of some sort. A welcome-to-the-neighborhood, if you will. The other dragon replied with soft, hesitant words as if it hadn’t spoken in years. His dragon was able to translate only the barest context. Something like “long sleep” and “now awake.”
Not sure what an ancient creature would consider a “long” sleep, but perhaps this was why it seemed unfamiliar. How many years—centuries—had it napped?
Growls erupted in the distance. Like in his dream that apparently hadn’t been a dream, angry, fearful growls sounded from other dragons that had yet to show themselves. Were they warning it away like last time? If so, did that mean this was the rogue dragon the Council had panicked over?
Arkyn’s dragon had stood before the other beast long enough to give it time to attack if that was its intent. It could have issued a challenge, exhibited whatever irrational territorialism it supposedly felt, wrought whatever damage it could. But it had done none of that.
In fact, it cringed, backing away from the growls as if afraid. Its head swiveled, on the lookout for an attack.
This wasn’t a rogue dragon hellbent on killing anything. This was a dragon in desperate need of a friend, the look of hope and confusion and crushing disappointment in its eyes familiar. He’d seen that same look recently.
In Ama.
He called her name. The dragon paused, looking at him with uncertainty. Did the dragon language even translate? He called to her again, using the mental communication his family enjoyed. “Ama? Is that you?”
The dragon canted its head, looking more closely at him. Surely she was in there somewhere or the dragon would have reacted differently. Perhaps she just didn’t understand why she heard his voice in her head. It was an ability he’d always had, but Lucia and Eydís had explained not all dragons could communicate this way without training.
He continued. “It’s me, Ama. Arkyn. Arkyn Drekison. You know… the guy with?—”
The dragon cried out in shocked joy and wrapped around his dragon, just like Ama when she threw herself into his arms. The disembodied growls around them intensified, like he was fraternizing with the enemy. The Ama dragon flinched and loosened its hold, but his dragon wrapped itself more tightly. “Don’t be afraid. I got you, Elskr.”
“Arkyn?” He heard soft her voice, distant and muffled, but definitely Ama’s. “Where are we? What am I? Why are you a talking dragon?”
She sounded confused. She sounded like she did when she spoke about her sleepwalking. Had she not known she was a shifter? Had she lived her whole life not knowing she hosted a powerful dragon? By the Allfather, when she thought she sleepwalked, had she actually shifted instead? Shifting would also explain how she’d gotten all the way across town to the playground without being stopped, and why she’d arrived there without any clothes on. Thankfully no humans saw her?—
Wait. One had. There had been the drunk guy who’d claimed to see a UFO rocket toward the sky near her apartment complex. Fortunately, no one had believed him.
Eydís had once explained how empty and agitated it felt to be born a shifter with no dragon to host. Unfulfilled. What must it feel like to be na?ve to the fact one shared its soul with something that could burst forth and turn the humanoid body into a massive, volatile dragon?
It might feel distracting. Muddled. Like—how had she described herself when they’d met?—a chaos tornado stuffed in a hurricane of crazy and wrapped with a blizzard of mayhem.
Arkyn chuckled as his dragon rubbed his jowls against her dragon, like Astra often did to him. “Elskr, you might not believe this, but I’m a dragon shifter. And so are you. And we’re on the plane where our dragons exist.”
Her dragon pulled its head back to consider the news. “You look like the Earth.”
“Dragons aren’t always so literal in their coloration, but yes, my dragon is an Earth Dragon. And I assume from your amazing coloring that your dragon is a Space Dragon.”
She unfurled just enough to look at herself before slipping back into his dragon’s embrace. “Space dragon. But… I’ve always been terrified of emptiness and floating, like I might drift away and be alone forever.”
Her voice sounded closer and clearer, like she was getting the hang of this shifter thing. “But being with you keeps me tethered to something solid, so I don’t fear so much.”
“I’ve always felt chained downed with the burden of responsibility and expectation. Then I got lost in your eyes and all that lifted from me and I felt free for the first time in my life.”
The growls rose in tenor and proximity. Would the dragons attack him as well? His dragon assumed a defensive stance, snarling, muscles tensed for battle and power quaking the plane in warning. His dragon would eviscerate any dragon that dared to attack.
Maybe that was what the Council had meant when it claimed dragon lives were at stake.
Ignoring the approaching growls, his dragon looked into the shimmering opal eyes of hers. “Wanna take your dragon out for a spin and see what it can do?”
Ama’s dragon merely swept out of his dragon’s embrace and shot away, into space, leaving a trail of Ama’s bubbly laughter. Arkyn followed and caught up with her a moment later. Their dragons zoomed across space, the lack of gravity and air unaffecting them, which wasn’t a surprise, considering they existed on an airless place in space without true form or mass.
Galaxies and nebulas whizzed past them as their dragons cavorted and embraced, the universe a glittering backdrop to their playful dance. Eventually, the dance slowed as they embraced longer, gazes lingering, bodies rubbing. A kernel of heat grew where they touched, roiling and boiling and flaring, powerful and uncontainable until light burst from them, radiating outward before coalescing into a luminous sphere of heat.
They’d created a star.