Page 25 of Dragon Cursed
"You are not dreaming."His voice came out wrong.Lower than he meant.Rougher.The dragon under his skin shifted in a slow uncoiling stretch that made his hands curl against the stone behind him.
"Where are we?"
"You shouldn’t be here."
"That's not an answer."
"It is the only answer that matters."
"You could try telling me where I am."
"No."
She tilted her head."Why not?"
He couldn’t say it.Couldn’t saybecause no human has ever been here, because the laws of my kind are older than your language, because every breath you draw in this room is a death sentence I gave you.
"You would not understand," he said instead.
The cowardice tasted like ash.
"Try me."
"You should be afraid of me, Poppy."
"I'm not."
"You should be."
"I'm not."She took a step forward.The firelight slid down her hair."You forget I saw you in the forest,dragon man.I am not afraid of you.I don't know how to make myself."
The dragon under his skin gave a long, slow shudder ofwant.
He understood, then, that words were not going to change her mind.
He had spent three centuries with words.He had nothing left in his mouth that could reach her.There was only the other thing.The shape he had been hiding from her since the first moment in the forest clearing.
The shape that was thetruthof him.It was one thing for her to see a dragon transform into a man from across a clearing, and another thing entirely to stand toe-to-toe with the fire-breathing beast.
No human could look a dragon in the eye and continue to feel what she was feeling now.
So be it.
Better the wound now than later.
"Then look," he said.He stood.He let go.
The first crack ran down his spine.
He unmade himself with a wet, brutal sound.Black scales rose out of him like a tide.The bones of his hands stretched and fused and stretched again into long, curved claws.His face elongated along with the rest of his body.His wings tore from his back in a spread of leather and bone that filled half the chamber, scraped the high vault of the stone above, sent a book skittering across the floor.
The doubled long-sight of the dragon swept over the chamber and caught her at the center of it.Small.Still.Unafraid.
His every dragon-sense lit at once.
Lavender.Warm skin.The particular sweetness ofherhe had carried on his tongue for three days.The thrum of her pulse — faster now, but not from fear.He couldsmellthe absence of fear on her.
He could smell, with the dragon's nose, the thing underneath.
