That is what’s missing,she thought, angular brows drawing together. Her hair, snowy white with an undertone of lavender and long enough to brush the backs of her calves, swayed in the wind.This dwelling is empty without my Chosen.
That’s what Valerie used to say when Constantin would leave for a day or two, fulfilling his role as a member of Taveas’s council. When Hele was still new, her English rudimentary and her knowledge of relationships even worse, she asked what it was that Valerie and Constantin were, what aChosenwas.
“A Chosen is a dragon’s mate,”her mother explained, raking her claws through Hele’s fall of hair in soothing strokes.“A mate is someone you love differently than a friend, or a clanmate. They are both of those things, but also more. For a dragon, a Chosen is someone you wish to be with above all others, for the rest of your lives. You only Choose once, and when you do, that person becomes the center of your world.”
She’d gone on to explain nesting, offspring, sex, and other intimacies that Hele struggled to wrap her head around. Still, Vael’s face lingered in her mind during the entire conversation. She remembered him staring down at her in the dark. His proud horns. His sharp teeth. The spicy scent of him and the soft rumble of his voice.
Hele thought of the days when he held herconstantly.He had not done so since she joined her family. He hadn’t so much as grazed her with a claw, or curled his tail around her ankle. Hecertainlyhadn’t enclosed her in his wings again, which she now understood to be a startlingly intimate thing to do. Only mates and offspring were trusted with a dragon’s embrace.
He must want me as a mate,she told herself as she slipped the straps of her dress off of her narrow shoulders.He embraced me. I want him to do it again.
Now that she had her own nest, her own dwelling, she would Choose him. It was time tolive,and the part of life she desperately wanted to experience was romantic love. She wanted that intimacy. She wanted that feeling of safety and stillness she so briefly experienced. She was ravenously curious about sex, and she wanted to explore the subject with only one dragon.
Her dress slid down her body to pool around her feet. As usual, she wore nothing underneath. Hele loved the billowy feeling of a long dress, but her skin crawled when she attempted to wear anything tighter.
Kicking the loose fabric back into the apartment, she took a moment to simply stand there on her perch, her skin bare and her lungs full of cold, wet air.
The only way this would be better was if Vael were here.
Shaking off the thought, she padded her way over to the edge of the perch. Her apartment was on the fiftieth floor. Staring down at the grounds made her stomach drop, but in the delicious, exhilarating way that all beings who soared the sky not only loved, but chased.
A thought, a burst of magic as easy and natural as an exhale, and she was released from her physical form.
Hele streaked across the sky. She bounced between the low-slung clouds, darkening them even as electricity snapped in her wake. It was not quite the same as the vastness of before, but it was close.
She tended to lose track of time when she wandered, so it did not surprise her that when she spotted the flash of a familiar wing, darkened with the dragonish nocturnal pigment shift that disguised them against the night sky, the warm colors of sunset had long faded.
Her heart did not race at the sight of Vael’s massive form cutting through the clouds because she did not have one. Instead, her exhilaration came through as a flurry of lightning strikes all around him. They grazed his powerful body like illuminated fingertips.
A powerful, arrow-shaped head lifted, peering up into the clouds. His wings extended and pushed forward, briefly halting his momentum just long enough to look around.
Overjoyed at the sight of her mate, Hele dove around him, her body just a smear of light against the roiling clouds.
A familiar, rumbling chuff was her greeting. It was perhaps slightly rougher than normal, but she didn’t think anything of it. When he lifted a foreclaw to indicate she should follow him down to the craggy shore, she didn’t hesitate.
He landed before she did. Weighing several tons, Vael’s shifted- form hit the rocky shore with a tree-rattlingthwump!
Hele touched the ground much more gently. With a thought, she arrowed down and, a second before she reached the rocks, her form coalesced into flesh once more. Her skin glowed in the dark like the lingering flash of a lightning bolt. It didn’t bother her that she was bare before him. Dragons often wore nothing at all, since most people didn’t go through the hassle and expense of having their clothing woven with sigils, allowing them to disappear and reappear with a shift.
When her magnificent dragon changed his form, she was a little disappointed to see that he was in his combat gear, which he wore whenever he was on duty guarding Taevas. She hungered to see all that gorgeous skin, every slab of thick muscle. She loved that in the day his skin was that deep, beautiful green and at night a purple so dark, it looked like he was swathed in starless night sky. She wanted to run her fingers over every inch.
Her research had named this feeling asattraction.Lust. Touch-hunger. She wanted tofeelVael in a way she wanted to feel no one else.
She bubbled with the need to be near him. Anticipation made her hair stand up around her in a snapping, sizzling cloud of electricity. Hele took a step forward, pebbles shifting under her bare soles, and opened her mouth to tell him what she had decided.
“Hele, what in the gods names are you doing out here by yourself?” Vael’s voice was tight, his brows lowered over glittering green eyes.
Her step stuttered. Instead of stopping with her usual quick, liquid grace, she stumbled on the stones. Surprise made her blink when she asked, “I… what? I was wandering.”
Vael’s lips, lush and soft-looking, pressed into a thin line. “You usually wander with Alex or your parents. Why are you by yourself so late?”
She bristled. It rubbed against her grain, the assumption that she needed her family to coddle her. Somewhere deep in her subconscious, she knew that it wasvitalher Chosen not see her as someone to be swaddled, but as the independent, powerful being she knew herself to be.
“I don’t need a babysitter,” she argued, chin jutting.
Vael cut his eyes away from her as he scrubbed a hand over his mouth. “No, you don’t. You’re not a baby. But you still shouldn’t fly by yourself yet. What if something happened to you?” Was it her imagination, or did his expression tense when he said that?Gods, I wish I could understand faces better.
His wings flexed outward, huge and semi-translucent where the membrane stretched tight between bones, before they snapped back into a tight bundle against his armored spine. Her dragon made that chuffing sound again before his eyes swung back to her. They stayed studiously on her face, never dipping below her chin. More gently, he rumbled,“T?ht,you should fly back to the nest. Your parents will worry if you are gone too long.”
