Page 96 of Dragon Cursed
He set it aside.He set it aside the way a soldier sets aside a wound he will treat after the battle, because the battle wasn’t over yet and Poppy wasn’t yetback, and the dragon turned its great head and poured the last of the fire it was permitted to pour into the two heartbeats that lived in his mate's body.
He bound them both.
He bound them as one and he bound them as two becausethiswasn’t sacrifice — this wasgift, given by a creature with three centuries of fire to spare and finally, at last, somewhere worth spending it.
The chamber went still.
The fire in his throat banked.
The green light at the center of the chamber — the dance of green and dark, balanced now and turning easily — softened to a low warm glow.
Mairin's voice, going as she went:
Be good to them, brother.Both of them.Live a long human life with your dragon's heart.We will see you on the other side, all of us.We will be waiting.
Mairin —
Goodbye, Alsander.Be happy.Live.
The voice went.
The last piece of his sister lifted away from the chamber it had been bound to for three centuries, and the chamber filled briefly with the scent of wildflowers — the kind she had braided into his dragon-form's mane when she was a girl — and then the smell was gone, and the green of the dance was gone, and the dark of Laoch was gone, and the chamber was only stone and water and Poppy.
Alsander shifted back.
The change was just as violent.Just as desperate.He was human again, naked and kneeling on the stone floor, gasping for air.
And she was alive.
Her chest was rising and falling.Steady.Slow.The pallor was gone from her skin.Her hand on his chest was warm again —warm, the way she had always been warm against him — and her eyelashes were fluttering against her cheek the way they fluttered when she was about to wake.
Her eyes opened.
They were changed.
They were shot through with veins of brilliant, shimmering gold.The mark of his fire.The mark of his claim.And— under the gold, threaded through it like a second light — a faint quietgreen.The line restored.
She blinked up at him.
"Alsander."
"Mo chroí." His voice was a wreck."Mo chroí, mo chuisle, mo bheatha —"
"I'm here.I'm — Alsander, I'mhere."
"You died."
"I —" Her brow furrowed."I think I did.I think — for a moment — "
"For a moment," he agreed, and he couldn’t say more because he was on her then, he wasonher, he couldn’t bear the not-touching for one more second, and his mouth came down on hers in a brutal, possessive kiss that had three hundred years of grief and one minute of having lost her in it.
She kissed him back.
She kissed him back with her whole body, with the small live trembling weight of her arms coming up around his neck, and the warmth of her mouth —warm,warm,warm— and the small wet sound she made into his mouth when he tasted her.
There was no thought.
No gentleness.No control.Only a frantic desperate need to feel her, to be inside her, to assure himself that she was real.That she was alive.
