Page 12 of Crash Landed with My Weredragon

Khrelan held his gaze for a long moment. Then he did something Toren didn't expect. He uncrossed his arms. The rigid posture softened by one degree. It wasn't agreement. It was the concession of a man who'd made his objection and respected the response.

"I'll follow your lead," Khrelan said. "But if this goes wrong; if the D'Karr sees this as a betrayal, I won't go down with you. I'll protect myself and Auren. You and your human are on your own."

"Understood."

Khrelan left. The cave was quiet. Outside, the twin suns had set, and the stars filled the sky with the cold, indifferent beauty that Toren had come to associate with Ceylara's nights.

He thought about Marina. About the wave across the field. About the crooked smile and the terrible coffee and the way she'd said "Let me talk to my crew" with the careful authority of someone who took the weight of other people's lives seriously.

He thought about his father. About the obsidian council chamber and the gold-scaled king who ruled from a throne carved into volcanic rock. About what would happen when Boradrith learned that his son had not only made contact with humans but had fallen for one.

Fallen. The word arrived in his mind without permission, and he let it stay. There was no point in fighting it. He'd watched enough human movies to know that fighting this particular feeling never worked. The characters who tried always ended up in the same place as the ones who didn't; they just wasted more time getting there.

Toren, prince of Dobromia, lay on the stone floor of a cave on an alien planet and stared at the stars through the entrance and thought about a woman with red hair, and he didn't fight it.

He let it land.

*** Auren ***

The mineral survey the next day produced two useful discoveries and one disaster.

The first discovery was a vein of titanium alloy in the cliff face about a mile northeast of the ship. Rowan examined the samples with barely contained excitement. "This could work," he kept saying, turning the chunks of dark metal in his careful hands. "If the composition holds deeper in the vein, I can fabricate a coupling. Not elegant, but functional."

The second discovery was a freshwater spring. Not water by human standards. It was heavy with dissolved minerals and had a faintly sulfuric taste, but Dr. Vasquez confirmed it was safe to drink after processing. The crew's water recyclers had been running at capacity since the crash. A natural source took the pressure off considerably.

The disaster was Auren.

They were crossing a thermal plain south of the spring when Auren, walking in near-human form beside Athena, attempted to demonstrate his fire-breathing in what he apparently considered an impressive fashion. He inhaled, turned to face the open terrain, and exhaled a plume of flame that was, admittedly, spectacular. It was also aimed directly at a nest of tube worms that nobody had noticed.

The worms exploded. Not metaphorically. The acid stored in their bodies reacted with the heat and the tubes burst like organic grenades. Acid sprayed in a ten-yard radius. Everyone dove for cover.

"Get down!" Athena shouted, tackling Peter behind a rock. Marina dropped flat. Toren threw a wing over Dr. Patel, who'd frozen in place.

Auren stood in the middle of the acid rain, gray scales hissing where the droplets hit, looking as though the ground had personally betrayed him.

"I didn't know they did that," he said.

"YOU DIDN'T KNOW THEY EXPLODED?" Athena was on her feet, acid smoking on her jacket, fury radiating from every pore. "You breathed fire at an unknown organism on an alien planet without checking if it was EXPLOSIVE?"

"In my defense…"

"There is no defense! There is no universe in which breathing fire at something you don't understand is defensible!"

"Athena," Marina called from the ground. "Are you hurt?"

"I'm fine. My jacket isn't. And this idiot is going to replace it." She jabbed a finger at Auren, who had the grace to look genuinely apologetic.

"I will replace it. I will get you ten jackets. I will get you the finest garments on Dobromia"

"I don't want Dobromian garments. I want you to stop setting things on fire without asking first."

"To be fair," Peter offered from behind the rock, "he also set the Drog on fire yesterday, and nobody complained about that."

"The Drog was trying to eat us, Peter. The tube worms were just sitting there."

Toren helped Patel to her feet. The biologist was pale but uninjured, her data tablet clutched to her chest like a life preserver. "Are you all right?" he asked.

"I'm going to need a much larger sample container," Patel replied, staring at the scattered remains of the tube worm nest with the wild-eyed fascination of a scientist who'd just witnessed something unprecedented and was already composing the paper in her head.