Page 22 of Dragon Cursed
He reached for it gladly.Rage was simpler than the cold, sick thing underneath."Get away from there."
She didn’t turn.Didn’t move.
He crossed to her in two strides.His hand closed around her wrist to pull her back —
And then he saw her face.
Her eyes were open.Unseeing.Magic thrummed over her skin like a river over rock.
Whatever she was looking at lay somewhere inside her own mind.Her pupils were blown wide and very dark.Her lips moved around shapes that were not words — not in any tongue he knew.A slow shudder traveled the length of her body.The fine hairs along her arm stood up under his palm.
"Ná déan."He hadn’t meant to say it aloud.The old words came out of him like a prayer he had forgotten he knew."Ná déan, ná déan, le do thoil—"
He knew this place.
He had known it for centuries.He had stood in this chamber as a boy.As a man.As a beast.He had felt the weight of it press against the inside of his skull, and he hadnever— never — seen it do this to anyone.
The shrine never gave, it only took.It always took.From him it had taken his sister.His blood.His sleep and his peace and any chance at a quiet death.From a human — a soft, small human with no defense against it — he had assumed it would take everything at once and leave this beautiful woman a dried-out shell.
Instead —
It was pouring something into her.
He could see it.The faint shimmer along her hairline.The way the air around her bent and breathed.The carvings under her hand had warmed.The defaced dragon figure beneath her palm — the onehehad taken a chisel to, in a grief so profound he’d buried the memories in a deep dark place inside himself— pulsed once with a light that had no source.
Then he saw the pendant.
It glowed against Poppy’s skin.Green-silver light bled through her sweater and shone like a small sun pressed against her heart.Mairin's pendant.Glowing.Awake.Calling.
His blood turned to ice.
"Poppy."He cupped her face with his free hand.Her skin was cold.Too cold."Poppy.Look at me.Look at me."
Her gaze drifted toward his voice.It didn’t find him.A small sound came out of her, soft, almost a question.
Her knees gave out.
He caught her before she hit the stone.
For a dragon, she weighed nothing.He held her against his chest and her head fell into the hollow of his throat as if she had been made to fit there.Her breath was warm and slow against his skin.
She was alive.Barely.
“Stay with me, my love.”
He repeated the command, over and over again, like a charm warding against the cold thing in his stomach.
Mine,the dragon snarled.Low and ragged.Mine and almost lost.Mine and you let her wander into the place that took Mairin —
"I know," he whispered into her hair."I know."
Her hand had fallen away from the shrine.The pulse of light beneath the stone faded.The pendant at her chest dimmed.The chamber went quiet again, leaving him only the rush of water at his back and the soft sound of her breath.
He looked down at her face.
The peace there terrified him.
She looked the way she had looked in his arms before the dawn — when he had watched her sleep because he couldn’t summon the strength to walk away.
