He hauled himself into his dragon form like pulling on a thick winter coat. The air twisted around him, blurring his changing form at the same moment his dragon sent an aggravated memory into his mind.
Maya, hiding from him, her eyes wide with trepidation as a horde of Blackburns transformed into dragons all around her.
He tried to stop his transformation, but it was too late. His dragon form erupted in a whirl of gilded shadows and he was suddenly staring down at Maya from double her height.
He held utterly still, terrified of what he would see in her eyes.Fool, he berated himself, all the angrier for how useless it was.Show her what’s on offer? You’re just reminding her of the worst thing you ever did to her!
The night he’d followed her as she ran away from him. He’d been desperate to protect her, finally understanding that sheneededprotection, that her life was not the bubble of bliss she’d pretended it was. That it was actually crumbling all around her.
He hadn’t been able to shake off his cousins. So they had all been there when he finally caught up with her.
They had all shifted. And she hadn’t seen the Blackburn dragon clan coming to protect her.
She’d seen them hunting her down.
*Maya—*No. Shit and double shit. She wasn’t a shifter; he couldn’t talk to her like this. what had he been thinking?
Not thinking at all, his dragon suggested, the mental equivalent of talking out the side of its mouth so it didn’t move a single muscle.
Maya’s face was tipped up towards him. She seemed so small to him in this form. Small and delicate.
His claws tightened on the sidewalk. He had to shift back. His clothes were scattered on the ground all around. Excellent. He could scramble around picking them up and perhaps the sheer humiliation would amuse her enough to forget how terrified she was at the reminder of his dragon form.
Then she lifted one hand and pressed it against his foreleg.
He was already frozen in place. Now he couldn’t even breathe. She touched him? She willingly touched him?
Even his magic was frozen. A fucking miracle.
“I wasn’t expecting that,” she murmured. She didn’t sound terrified. She sounded like she was keeping something back, but it wasn’t terror. Corin blinked slowly, refocusing on her face.
She looked—she looked…
“And you even managed to keep hold of the picnic basket,” she said dryly. Her mouth was curving. A smile?! “Do you need me to pick up your clothes…?”
Absolutely not. He swept his tail out in an arc, collecting what was left of his outfit. Her smile quirked into genuine amusement.
“All right, then,” she said quietly, as though speaking as much to herself as to him. “Let’s go.”
He had never let anyone ride him before.
If he had planned this, he would have done it differently. He would have rehearsed.Notin front of an audience, and not dangling a picnic basket and cooler from one claw and a bundle of clothes in the other. But somehow, despite the interested looks directed their way, he didn’t prickle with prideful self-consciousness as Maya put her other hand on his flank, then one foot on his statue-like leg and then the other, and clambered up onto his back.
She wasn’t scared of him.
His dragon shook out its wings—carefully, so it didn’t even ruffle the hairs on its precious rider’s head—and waited until Maya was sitting firmly on its shoulders, her arms tight around its neck. Then it leaped into the air.
Flying was one of the few simple joys in many dragons’ lives. For duskfire dragons, that joy was permanently alloyed by their magic. But so long as he didn’t wreathe himself in his power to hide from view, he could enjoy the experience as though he were any other dragon.
In the air, using no power but his wings, there was nothing to navigate except updrafts and downdrafts. The interplay of light and heat and moisture told his wings when to flex, when to curl, when to beat once, twice to rise above the sparkling waves and drift like an albatross around the battered cliffs to the tiny beach hidden behind them.
Averytiny beach. He landed with his fore-claws on soft sand and his back legs in the water, which was far colder than its daintily sparkling appearance had led him to expect. Maya sat up and he shifted with a grace he’d only ever employed to threaten rival shifters: utterly controlled, settling his human feet on the sand as shadows led her hand to his, floating her gently to the ground.
She looked up at him and her eyes were shining brighter than gold.
And then she spun one hundred and eighty degrees away from him.
“Um?!” she said, and it took his brain a moment to process the alarm in her voice. “I’ll—picnic. You—clothes?”
