alive.
But her instincts seemed at war—one part of her wanted to ease closer, to bask in his heat, while another recognized him as a predator that could kill her in an instant. Nothing she had experienced, nothing the elder huntresses had taught her, had prepared her to be face-to-face with a dragon.
Leyloni forced herself to take a couple steps back, twisting again to keep her body between the dragon and Serek.
Her gaze locked with the dragon’s. Those violet orbs swirled with impossible intensity, and she felt them urging her closer, felt their pull as surely as if there were a rope around her middle and he was tugging on it gently. Heat sparked low in her belly, a tiny but undeniable flame.
She could not guess at what forces had been at work to put her in this dragon’s path, could not guess at what fate or Mother Eurynome had in store for her. But somehow Leyloni knew this was where she was meant to be.
3
Arysteon extended his tongue, sampling the familiar scents of his lair—but his focus was on the new scents. The human scents. He pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth, savoring the female’s sweet, floral flavor, which bore just a hint of exotic fruit. That had been what lured him to these humans initially. Her fragrance, at once so in harmony with the others of the forest and so unique amongst them, had been the bait that attracted him—not the hatchling’s cries.
Those cries persisted even now. They’d weakened significantly and had thankfully lost the piercing quality they’d possessed at their height, but the lair’s stone walls had granted them a new resonance.
Arysteon’s mind swiftly returned to the female’s scent. Something about it being present here, about it slowly permeating his lair, produced a warm, tingling sensation in his chest—a sensation that pulsed straight down to his loins. There was a female in his lair. What did it matter that she was not a dragoness? He’d not seen a female of his own kind in over two hundred years.
He stared down at the wet, shivering humans. A puddle was forming around the female’s hide-covered feet, turning the thin layer of dirt and dust atop the floor into mud. She stared right back at him, clutching her hatchling close. Her pupils were dilated, her skin was pale but for the tiny brown specks scattered across it, and her pale green eyes were unwavering.
There was a soft, alluring beauty to her face unlike anything Arysteon had ever seen, even amongst the humans with whom he’d interacted in the past. He’d never found her kind either attractive or repulsive, much in the same way he’d never thought of any animals in such a fashion.
But humans weren’t animals, and Arysteon had been alone for many, many years…
She was so unlike a dragon, was in so many ways his opposite, but he could not deny that he was drawn to her.
What madness has overcome me?
He had stalked this female and her hatchling through the woods for hours, tracking them first by her enticing scent, then by their sounds, and finally by sight. A single word had echoed through his mind when he had first seen her, a word he could not silence—a word that was still reverberating within him.
Mine.
“What more do you require, human?” he asked, admiring the faint glow cast upon her by his eyes.
She pressed her lips together and steadied herself. “Fire. I-I need to make a fire.”
His spark crackled in his chest, sending a charged pulse through his body. His lightning could easily ignite a fire, but doing so without harming these humans would require significant delicacy and control. It was the sort of challenge he’d not faced in a long while.
He found himself eager to meet that challenge.
Eager to provide for her.
Arysteon tipped his snout downward. “Will the debris on the floor make suitable fuel?”
The female angled her face down and glanced from side to side. “I cannot see. It is too dark.”
Keeping his head low, Arysteon bent his neck to look back. His body was blocking almost all the gray, gloomy light from outside, shrouding the chamber in what must’ve been almost complete darkness for the humans. He’d forgotten how poor their eyesight was in the dark.
When he was younger, he had always marveled at the stories of the prosperity humans had once enjoyed, and this place was testament to that prosperity. Something about those stories had seemed too fantastical to be true. But now was