ground, I tried to pretend I was nothing but a dark bolder, and I watched her until the sun was nearly down. When she began her journey home, I followed her as far as I thought I could without being captured by her tribe. And the next day and the next, I found her playing in the grasses again by her lonesome, and with a predator’s ability to hide in plain sight, I watched her again and again.
I only stopped when I was forced to. My drakon and drakaina (my sire and dam) were horrified to learn how close I came to a human.
“Isn’t it strange that you would find me all these suns and moons later?” I murmur aloud. “I was sure you never knew I was there. Why have you sought my company?”
Eyes the color of sun-warmed rock meet mine and flick to my mouth. To where my teeth points aren’t covered by my lip scales.
I cock my head. “Why do I have the sense that you can’t follow a single word I say?”
Her gaze flashes to mine again, and then she’s back to watching my mouth. Her chest is rising and falling, and I focus on the way her nose, framed by two small, nearly see-through membranes, flares. I’ve heard that humans have the worst senses—of smell and of sight and hearing, too. I wonder if that’s true of this human.
Her eyes dart to the side. In the space of a moment, I get the sense she’s preparing to escape me. She tenses—her intent very plain, although it seems she isn’t aware of that.
You must eat a lot of green things. You’d make a terrible hunter.
When she ducks my thumb claw and tries to run, I’m ready. I simply clap my folded hands over her, squishing her to the cave floor.
She screeches and I feel pressure on my thumb.
Is she trying to bite me?
Ha! This is exactly like my mouse-hunting days. The same effectiveness for this mouse too.
Amused, I sweep my hands towards myself, making her whole body slide across the cave’s stone floor. She hollers and shoves at my top hand, even kicking me, I think. Once she’s tucked to my chest again, I carefully raise my hands and curl my neck back so that I can peer down at her.
She opens her jaws to spit out the mouthful of my digit like I taste bad to her.
How bizarre, because I’m almost certain she wouldn’t taste bad to me.
She throws out her arm to slap at me.
Her hand lands right over my heart.
Lightning arcs between us.
The blinding flash is an arrow of pain. I bellow in shock.
Fire burns through my body—and dimly, I hear her yell too.
This I don’t like at all. My tail lashes the air. It’s a phantom stab to my heart, a further shredding of my already malfunctioning system to hear her pain, but I’m unable to do anything to help.
With spasms racking me, I try to draw my hands and claws against myself and far away from her, keeping her safe from the danger I pose, hopefully. My wings slap out and crumple, the thinly-scaled skin catching on the rough rock of the cave walls, my wing talons digging in as if they want to help fly me out of this pain. My long body tries to curl in on itself, and I collapse on my side, blinded and deafened and feeling all of my bones aching.
What is happening to me?
She touched my heart. A human touched right over my heart.
My femurs feel like they’re being compressed. Each and every one of my bones begins to feel a similar squeeze. And I know without a doubt what’s happening.
I’m turning into one of her kind.
CHAPTER 4
HALKI
Even as my body contorts into something so many times smaller than is natural, I’m almost frantic, wondering if my female—my mate, the female who enchants my eye, my drhema—is still here. If she’s waiting for me to finish my change into the form that will complement hers.
Through eyes slitted with pain, I try to raise my neck—and my head lifts with barely any effort expended because my long, heavy neck is no more. My skull is damn near attached directly to my shoulders.
Fried satyrs, it feels odd.
But my female is at my side. She waited for me.
She’s trying to back away, but I have her shackled in place by my tail. Thank all that glitters that she couldn’t leave—and that my tail hasn’t disappeared yet. Maybe it