Staring up at the enormous cobalt dragon, I couldn’t fathomkillinghim. He was beautiful, shining in the sun.
He reared up, and when he spat a gout of blue fire at me, I threw up my hand. His flames broke around me in a heated sapphire swirl. He?—
I stood there, stunned, half aware I’d almost died, but mostly awestricken by the glittering blue mass of him. The power as his muscles bunched.
No wonder the dragons had kept us under their giant clawed feet for so long. These beings—it was so easy to believe they were born from the moons. They weren’t of this world.
And while I was stuck, unable to move, the dragon spread its wings, leapt forward, and clutched me up in his enormous paws.
The air swirled around me, cool in my lungs when I breathed in. A strange serenity wrapped around me as we rose, and I turned my head to look at the earth shrinking below us.
The village was smaller and smaller, and then disappeared entirely.
That didn’t matter, because I saw the blue of the sky like it was all that existed in the universe. I saw the tops of the clouds as the dragon flew higher.
It wasn’t entirely lost on me that the dragon would drop me at some point, and if I could not summon the wind to slow my descent, I’d break against the earth below us. It was just a matter of time and distance, but even knowing that, I couldn’t think of it for long when I saw the world from a whole new perspective.
In time, the dragon folded in his wings and dove toward the ground. Still, he held me tight in both hands, clutching me closer to his chest as the wind resistance grew.
He landed, and when he set me down, I staggered. I’d expected to fall to my death, and there I stood, gaping like a frog.
Between one blink and the next, the dragon shifted back.
He was over six feet tall, with black hair that hung around his shoulders and eyes that gleamed bluer than the skies we’d flown through.
More importantly, he was naked. I?—
I hadn’t read about that, but it made sense. I’d just never considered that on two legs, they’d be, well, nude. But it wasn’t like the books in the Spires library would discuss the peculiar allure of a dragon’s skin, or how easy it was to imagine the sun bouncing off gleaming scales when taking in even their two-legged forms.
His skin was a deep gold, like he’d spent much of his time on the coast where there was little shade to protect him. His chest was peppered with dark hair, and while his muscles were well sculpted, he did not look like a man who had plenty.
Well, except for between his legs, where his cock hung heavily. I was staring at it when he stalked forward and ripped my forgotten sword from my grip. He tossed it aside with a snarl.
Far be it from me to attack an unarmed man, much less an unclothed one.
He was glaring when I met his eye again.
“I thought you’d drop me,” I admitted with a wry grin.
The man snorted, and I could easily imagine the steam coming from a great dragon’s snout as he did it. “So you could take me down with you?”
My brow pinched. “I—” Take him down with me? I was fairly certain I’d be fully occupied trying to keep myself alive while I plummeted to almost-certain death. “It hadn’t occurred to me.”
“Of course,” he sneered.
When he stepped away, one of the other men offered him a cloak to wrap around himself. Each of them had one, but the way they wore them, hanging loose over their chests, made I seem less like they were for any sense of propriety than a simplematter of protecting their vulnerable human-like bodies from the elements.
There were four of them, none armed, but if I had claws, I wouldn’t need a sword either.
I swallowed. “Did you bring me all the way here just to kill me?”
The blue-eyed dragon’s shoulders tensed. A smaller one with dark blue eyes and sandy brown hair stuck his chin out and rounded on me. “Why shouldn’t we? You meant to harm us.”
My mouth twisted. He had a fair point.
I had.
It wasn’t personal, but I didn’t think that’d weigh in my favor. If I told them I’d been sent to kill them, the wisest thing they could do was put me down.
