To Tame a Dragon - Tiffany Roberts Page 0,5
across the walls and floor. As the Heat reached its peak that night, he found himself contorting his body to furiously stroke his shaft with his fingers.
Shame fluttered around the edges of his mind, but it couldn’t find entry. Whether it was held back by his lingering pride or the Heat’s strengthening influence, he could not say.
He knew only that the rasp of his scales against his cock hurt, and it felt so, so good.
He couldn’t bring himself to rest on the next day. The Red Heat barely faded with the morning, leaving him to continue his aimless pacing, dragging his underside over the floor. Without thinking, he clawed chunks of stone from the walls and scattered sand with his tail.
This was no lair—it was a cage, a prison, a tomb, and he needed to leave, to get out. He needed to be free, to roar his mating call into the sky and hear it echo off the mountains.
Falthyris snapped his jaws and shook himself hard. He wouldn’t go, wouldn’t surrender.
A fresh ache pulsed through his cock, strong enough to make his knees weak. The Lord of the Shimmering Peaks would not submit to such base urges.
But with nightfall came a resurgence of the Red Heat, which quickly built to a new, terrible climax. Falthyris’s body trembled as the Heat forced its way ever deeper. Whatever subtlety it had possessed the first couple nights was gone now; it had already gained enough power to no longer require subtlety.
He thrashed his tail and swung his claws, gnashed his teeth and spewed licks of fire, but his fury was impotent. The Red Heat pressed its invasive fingers deeper into Falthyris’s mind, tightening its hold on him.
“No,” he growled, “I do not yield.”
Yet when his tongue flicked out, he tasted a new scent on the air, one even more difficult to ignore than the Heat.
Female.
He shuddered again, his every muscle going rigid, his claws slicing into stone. Whatever resistance he would’ve offered the comet was swept away on a wave of crimson heat.
Falthyris the Golden, the Conqueror, Scourge of Sands and Lord of the Shimmering Peaks, surged forward to claw his way out of his lair, kicking up sand and shattering stone. There was room only for a single conscious thought in his mind as he burst into the night air.
Dragonsbane has finally won.
3
Elliya dropped to her knees onto the soft grass growing along the riverbank. Setting her stone headed spear down, she bent forward and plunged her hands into the cool water, drinking handful after handful, relishing the relief it provided her dry mouth and parched throat. Rivulets ran down her neck and the front of her robe, soothing her heated skin. Though the sun had set some time earlier, the air still held a hint of the day’s stifling warmth, and she’d been traveling for a long while.
Once she had drunk as much as her belly could hold, she sat back on her heels, tilted her head back, and looked up at the night sky. The desert breeze wafted over her, caressing her skin and flowing through the loose strands of her hair.
The Blood Moon hung low in the sky, and the Red Star burned above it, impossible to miss amidst the other stars that twinkled in white and palest blue. Traversing this land—where the Forsaken Sands butted up against the Shimmering Peaks—with the Red Star overhead had been as surreal as it had been frightening.
Elliya had seen a great many animals over the last few days, most of which had been familiar to her. Their behaviors, however, had been unnatural. Creatures that usually emerged from hiding only in the depths of night had been out in broad daylight. Creatures that usually remained solitary had been gathering in frenzied groups, mating as though maddened.
And they were maddened. That was the power of the Red Star, that was its curse. She’d seen normally docile beasts battling one another viciously, had seen territorial battles between creatures that typically ignored one another, had seen blood. A time or two, she herself had caught the attention of uncharacteristically aggressive animals. Her escapes had been narrow.
It had required all the skills she’d learned over her years of hunting to make it this far without incident, and using those skills had felt so strange without the other huntresses. But a dragon was not the usual sort of prey she and her sisters hunted. According to the old stories, claiming a dragon required a particular subtlety, required seduction.