Page 95 of Dragon Cursed
Brother.
Mairin, I am sorry —
I know.I forgive you.I forgave you long before you knew you needed it.Stop.
The dragon shuddered.
The dragon held the fire.
And Mairin — what was left of her, the small bright last piece of his sister that had been pouring back through the air of the shrine since the breaking — moved.
It moved through him.Past him.Into Poppy.
He felt it pass.
The bright last fragment of his sister flowed past his throat where the fire had stopped, slipped into the column of light he had been pouring into Poppy's body, and wentdeeper.It went past where his fire had reached.It went into the place behind Poppy's sternum where the pendant had lived.It went into the line in her blood that had been built to hold this exact gift.
It settled.
A second fire took root inside the first.
Agreenfire.Quiet.Alive.Nothing like the gold of his dragon-fire and everything like the green of the lights that had risen out of the broken pendant.The line in Poppy's blood — which had been waiting ten generations — opened to it.Drank it down.Made room.
The magic Mairin had spent on Caoimhe was coming home.
The pendant was gone but the magic wasn’t.
The magic now lived inPoppy.
And then —
Alsander felt it.
The dragon felt it.
The sense that lived in the deep place under his ribs, the sense that knew his mate byscent, knew herbond, knew the exact specific frequency of the heart he had been pouring his fire into for the last long minute — that sense suddenly registered something it hadn’t registered before.
A second heartbeat.
Small.
Steady.
New.
It was inside her.It was inside Poppy's body, just under the place his fire had pooled, and it had been there the whole time.It had been there since the night in the moss two weeks ago when he hadn’t stopped to think.It had been there in the lair.On the back of his dragon-form in the Atlantic dawn.In the brass bed in Dublin where he had bound her in fire and the binding had taken deeper than it should have because there had beentwoof them to bind.
Two of them.
His mate and —
Oh.
Oh, no.Oh, gods.
The dragon made a sound that wasn’t a sound.Not a roar this time.Something smaller.Something that lived underneath the roar —wonder, raw and shaking, the wonder of a creature who hadn’t had anything to be tender with in three hundred years and had just been handed the impossibility oftwo.
He didn’t have time to feel it properly.
