Page 21 of Dragon Cursed
A woman.
A forest.
A wound at the heart of the world.
The woman knelt.The woman opened her chest.Something poured out of her into the roots of the trees.The trees rose around her in a great green crown, and the woman was no longer a woman but pure light — suggested with curving lines like a small sun.
Below the woman.Beside her.Behind her —
There had been someone else.
Poppy could see the shape of a dragon.Next to the dragon, a man, or something in the shape of a man.The carving here was the most violently defaced.Whoever had taken a chisel to this wall had wanted both man and dragongone.
Was this her dragon?
Hadhedone this?
Who was the woman?His lover?His mate?
The pendant at her throat heated against her skin.
Poppy gasped and pressed her hand flat against the pendant.The emerald burned through the fabric of her sweater, a heat that should have scalded her skin but didn’t — a heat that was alive, that pulsed once, twice, three times in time with her heartbeat.A faint silver-green light bloomed beneath her hand.The light bled through her sweater and lit the carved wall in front of her.
The defaced dragon figure pulsed back.
The pendantanswered.
Poppy's breath caught.Some part of her knew what was about to happen.Knew she should run.Turn around.Walk back through the falling water and never come back.
She pressed her trembling fingers to the wall instead.
The world went white.
Her presence hithim with the force of a sledgehammer.
He smelled her long before he saw her.The scent cut through wet stone and moss and the green rot of the deep forest.Lavender.Warm skin.The particular sweetness ofherthat he’d carried on his tongue for two days.
He had told himself, since he’d left her sleeping, that he wouldn’t look for her.He wouldn’t put her in danger.He wouldn’t draw her into the darkness of his world.
She was human.He wasDraquonir.He had already broken their most sacred law by revealing his dragon form to her in the forest.That alone condemned her to death if his kind ever learned what he had done.
Though, in truth, he doubted any of his people remembered his existence.He hadn’t shown himself, nor spoken to anotherDraquonir, in three hundred years.
Until her.
He had told himself to leave her alone.To die with honor.He had told himself a great many things since the morning he had crept from her bed before dawn — his cock still slick from a night spent buried inside her, his dragon snarling in his head with every step that took him farther from her side.
None of those things survived the scent of her on the air outside the falls.
Then he understood exactly where she was.
A sound came out of him that made the nearby creatures of the forest tremble with fear.
He covered the last of the distance in three strides.Ducked under the falling water.The cold chamber of the shrine opened before him.
She stood at the center with her back to him.
Rage rose in him so fast it eclipsed everything else.
