“Good call bringing that.” His voice carried no mockery or amusement. He said it the way someone might compliment a hiker for packing a first-aid kit.
“I learn from experience.” I stopped about ten feet from him.
Kade gave Lucan a brief nod, then walked to Reese, who leaned against the front of her truck. They moved to stand near the driver’s side, close enough to see the clearing, far enoughto give us room. Reese caught my eye and offered a small, encouraging lift of her chin.
Having them there loosened the knot in my stomach by a fraction. At the very least, I had two people who could drive me to a hospital if I completely lost my grip on reality.
Lucan’s eyes held mine. The morning sun caught them, and I could swear there was a violet thread woven through the blue iris. He took a slow breath. “Once you see this, there’s no going back to the way things were.”
It felt like a hand was pressing against my sternum from the inside. I resisted the urge to rub it again. I’d already done that once, and the way his eyes had tracked the movement told me he’d noticed.
“The way things were wasn’t exactly working out for me.” I kept my tone dry, even though my heart hammered so hard I could feel it in my teeth.
He stepped backward, moving toward the center of the clearing. The grass reached his shins, and sunlight poured over his shoulders, catching every ridge of muscle.
He stopped about thirty feet from me and turned to face me fully.
My fingers tightened around the bear spray until the plastic bit into my palm. I knew I wasn’t going to use it with a strange certainty. I gripped it because it was the only thing in the clearing that still felt real.
The forest had gone quiet. Even the breeze stilled, like the trees themselves were holding their breath.
Lucan held my gaze across the distance. His chest expanded with one long, measured inhale. “Don’t run,” he said gently, like a request he knew he had no right to make.
My jaw clenched. My knees locked. Every synapse in my brain fired conflicting signals, screaming to flee and demanding I stay rooted to this exact spot.
I gave him a single, firm nod.
In one breath, he was a man. The next, he was gone.
A dragon filled the space where Lucan had been. There was no shimmer, no slow transformation, no Hollywood morph where bones cracked and skin rippled. One blink. That was all it took.
I had blinked, and thirty feet away stood a creature that redefined every dimension of the clearing.
He was enormous. The word felt pathetic the moment my brain supplied it because “enormous” was for trucks and buildings and things that still fit inside the framework of a normal day.
This was something else entirely. His body stretched longer than Reese’s truck, and his wings, folded tight against his sides, hinted at a span that could blot out the morning sun. Scales covered every inch of him, deep purple so dark it looked almost black in the shadows beneath his jaw. His head alone was practically the size of my entire car.
The bear spray canister hit the grass at my feet. I didn’t drop it on purpose. My fingers simply stopped working, the signals from my brain dissolving somewhere past my wrists as every ounce of processing power rerouted to my eyes. I heard the dull thud of plastic against dirt and could not make my hands care.
My lungs locked. My mouth hung open. A sound came out of me, high and thin, the noise a person makes when the floor disappears and the fall hasn’t started yet.
He was right there. Maybe fifteen feet away now that his body took up so much space. Each exhale from his nostrils stirred the grass in a wave that reached my ankles.
I could smell him, woodsmoke and pine and something hot, like sun-baked stone. His eyes found mine. They were still unmistakably Lucan’s, except now they burned with violet light from the inside, pupils slitted vertically against glowing irises.
Those eyes watched me with a stillness that had no business belonging to something that large.
I felt small. Small in a way I hadn’t felt since childhood, when the world towered above me and I couldn’t reach the counter or unlock the front door. My body understood the message before my brain translated it. I was soft and breakable, and the creature in front of me could end me with a careless flick of his tail.
My knees trembled. Tears burned the corners of my eyes, and I couldn’t have told anyone why.
Then a thought arrived, quiet and clear, slicing through every wall of panic like a blade through smoke.
He could have taken the knife back at any point.
He wasthis. This massive beast with claws that gouged furrows in packed earth and jaws that could snap a pine tree like a toothpick. He could have walked into my campsite, reclaimed his property, and I would have been powerless to do anything except watch.
He could have claimedme.
