Take her. Now!
Mine.
He thinks we won her in the battle and that she is now ours for the taking. I gently push Carla away from me, patting her on the side of the arm twice before letting her go.
My dragon can go right to hell.
I stand there with my hands at my sides, staring at a point somewhere over her head, because I cannot look at her and I cannot explain what just moved through me. I haven’t felt anything like this since my mate died years ago. My beast has never so much as lifted his head for a female since. Not once.
My dragon is back, and he’s making it known. Pity about the timing. I am also going to blame it on this fucked-up situation. It’s a combination of things, and that’s all. He’s been caged by those drugs for so long, and now he’s free, and there’s blood in the air and a female pressed against us. He doesn’t know what to do with himself. His blood is fired after the fight. His instincts are all riled up.
I know that has to be it.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “We need to get going.”
I keep my gaze pinned on the trees behind her. I’m trying hard not to look at her tits encased in soft pink lace. Her underwear is so sheer it may as well not be there. Her nipples are dark through the fabric, and the shadow of hair between her legs is visible through the lace of her panties.
My balls pull tight.
Fuck. No. Stop!
Shit. I can’t do this. No! I will my dick to stay down. To stay flaccid. This is the last thing this female needs.
I drag in a deep breath, trying to get a hold of myself, and that turns out to be the dumbest thing I’ve done all day because all I get is another nose full of her.
Fuuuuck!
She’s just been through an ordeal, and here I am getting turned on. I’m an asshole. A huge asshole. The biggest there is.
“I’m sorry,” I say, because once isn’t enough for what’s going on in my head right now. “Forgive me.”
“Why? You saved my life.” Her voice is small, but it’s steady. “I’m grateful, Magma. I don’t even have words for how grateful I am.”
My dragon wants me to put her on her knees and to rip her underwear off. It makes me just as bad as him…as that male.
“Don’t thank me yet.” I make myself look at her face, to keep my gaze there. “We’re a long way from safe. I need to get us out of here and back to Draig. I need to take a look at what we’re dealing with first.” I point at the ground between us. “Stay right where you are. Don’t move from this spot. I’ll be back in a minute. I need to get us out of here as a matter of urgency.”
She nods. Her arms come up to wrap around herself, and her eyes are huge and glassy. She looks petrified, which makes me feel so much worse.
I jog a short distance to a gap in the canopy, and I let the shift take me.
It rolls through fast – bone and wing and scale – and then I’m climbing, punching up through the branches and into the open sky.
The coastline is, as expected, still a war zone.
Reds are still fighting Reds for as far as I can see in both directions. It’s a churning mass of marked scales, claws, barbed tails and fangs. The feral males are rising from the jungle and trying to cross the water. The Mistveil guards are knocking them back, only to have more shoot out from the canopy. It’s mayhem.
I watch a big male take a hit to the wing and drop, spinning, and the canopy swallows him whole, maybe two miles from where I left Carla. Another gets driven back by three guardsworking together and crashes down into the green in a spray of shredded leaves.
The guards have red running through their scales, same as the convicts do. Red on red, every one of them, all the way down the line.
And then there’s me.
I am a bright iridescent green, the same green as my eyes, and up here against all that red, I might as well be a signal flare. There is no version of this where I fly out over that water unnoticed. A Draiger, deep in Mistveil territory, with a female clutched to his belly. They’d be on me before I cleared the mist. The chances of me getting her out by air are slim to none.
Fuck!
Maybe later, or tomorrow, but not right now. In fact, the air might be too risky, period.
