Page 43 of Dragon Cursed
"Oh," Poppy said.Soft.Wondering.The same soft sound she made for everything."Oh."
And the dragon, who had been about to give a second blast of fire, held it back —
Because the dragon understood, before Alsander did, that whatever was happening washers.
Laoch withdrew.
It wasn’t defeated.The dragon knew it wasn’t.The shadow drew in on itself and went liquid and poured back into the seam in the rock, hissing all the way.
The last part of Laoch to leave the chamber were his eyes.
The eyes remained fixed on Poppy, full of hatred and retribution.
"I will be back for you, little daughter."The voice was very soft now.Almost gentle."You cannot stay near him.You do not yet know what you are doing to him.”Laoch laughed weakly.You do not yet know the full truth of what you really are — "
And then the shadow was gone.
11
Alsander
The last lightin the pendant fluttered and disappeared.
The light in Poppy's hand did the same.
The drip of water at the back of the chamber resumed.Slow.Steady.As if nothing had happened.
Poppy swayed.
The dragon caught her before she could fall— an ungainly motion that scraped his own scales against the stone — and he set her down against his foreleg.Then he poured himself back into the man-shape because he couldn’t hold her properly otherwise.
When he was Alsander again, he was on his knees on the cold floor of his lair with her in his arms.
She looked up at him with enormous, frightened eyes.
"What did I do?"she whispered."Alsander.What did I just do?"
"I don’t know."He had no word for what he had just seen."I don’t know,a chuisle.I don’t know."
He held her until her breathing slowed.
It took longer than he liked.Her hands fisted in the bare skin of his chest.Her face buried in the side of his throat.He could feel her trembling all the way down to her bare feet.He held her with one arm and dragged the fur up over her shoulders with the other and stared, over the crown of her head, at the seam in the rock where the shadow had come in.
Centuries of wards.
Wards laid by his mother and her mother.Wards that had held against Laoch every other night of his long, unhappy life.
They hadn’t held tonight.
They would not hold the next time.
The thought arrived cold and complete.
Whatever Poppy was — whatever the line in her blood was — it had drawn Laoch through the wards as surely as a candle drew a moth.Laoch had been waiting for the dragon to die quietly.He had stopped waiting tonight.He would come again.Soon.
The lair was no longer safe.
It was a doorway.Some sort of portal.
