WYVERN beat his wings against the wide, blue sky and flew with Ember clinging to his back.
Below them, the huge casinos on the Strip blocked in the street with their towers and odd protrusions like the roller coaster and the mini-Eiffel Tower. The massive dragon banked and headed out toward the open desert.
Beyond the casino zone and the downtown municipal area, Las Vegas became a low-lying city of ranch-style houses, xeriscaped yards, and the desert beyond. Flying over it felt like the sienna earth stretched forever, finally ending in a horizon stubbled with rocky hills.
The dragon’s shadow floated over the ground as they sped through the sky, flowing over the cacti and boulders.
Near Wyvern’s shoulder, Ember whooped and was looking around, swaying slightly. When he wheeled around the last of the hot updrafts from the city’s asphalt and sped out into the open, she leaned with him like she was riding a motorcycle.
Cai relaxed. If she had fallen off his back, he would have dived and caught her, but his options for catching her were his fangs and his talons because his spinal plates were too sharp to attempt a swoop to land her on his back. Staying in the proverbial saddle was the best choice.
After a half an hour of soaring, Wyvern flapped to a stop on the top of a stony cliff pockmarked with caves. Late-afternoon sunshine bathed the valley below them, painting it scarlet and sage.
Ember slid down his side as she dismounted, her body sliding down his dragon flesh—and even that was sexy as hell—and she said, “Wow, this is beautiful.”
Wyvern turned and regarded her, scenting the blood from her arm as he chuffed. He didn’t like it when she was hurt. Chomping and blasting her enemies filled him.
He shoved her with his nose.
She stumbled backward. “Whoa! What?” When she said that, she raised her arms to ward him off.
Wyvern tapped her hurt arm with his nose, lifting it higher, and inspected the wound. He growled.
“What, this? It’ll scab over in a minute,” she said, pointing to the knife cut. Fresh blood ran down her arm in rivulets. “Or, you know, a few days. I might need some stitches.”
Wyvern’s lips retracted over his fangs, and he growled more loudly, rumbling his entire body.
“Nice dragon?” Ember asked, backing away from him.
Cai took control, lest anger overwhelm his dragon.
Wyvern retreated, and Cai transformed back into his human incarnation.
While staring at the rusty pebbles and sand under his fingertips and bare knees, he realized where he was. Dear Dragon Lords, why had Wyvern set them down here?
Because he knew this place was safe, of course.
Lords, Cai wished that Wyvern had chosen any other damn rock to land on.
He adjusted his thigh, fig-leafing his dick and nuts from Ember’s view. “I, uh, didn’t bring my backpack. I’m just going to dodge behind a rock or something. Could you turn around?”
Cloth wrapped around his arms and legs, growing out of the air and curling around his body.
When he looked up, Ember was holding out her hands toward him but looking away, her eyes squeezed shut.
“Thanks!” he said, sounding as cheerful as he could, under the circumstances. “Let me see your arm.”
She turned her arm over, the edges of the knife wound gaping as she did. “Like I told the dragon, it’ll be fine.”
“I can heal it.”
“You can?”
He raised her wrist to his lips.
She raised her eyebrows. “I didn’t know dragons liked blood. It’s kind of vampiric.”
“It’s not the blood,” he said, examining where her skin was sliced. He didn’t want to bond it in the wrong places.
“Look, I don’t judge. If that’s your kink—”
He closed his lips over the wound, letting a little of his dragon venom flow. The coppery salt of her blood mixed with the tang in his mouth.
“Oh, wow,” Ember said, her knees buckling.
Cai caught her around her waist with his mouth still locked over the back of her wrist. He didn’t want to get too much venom inside the wound. He wasn’t trying to bite her, but just enough of his venom would heal her wound.
Her lips touched his throat, and she whispered his name against his skin.
Cai kept his head and sucked gently at her slice on her arm, pulling the edges of the wound together with his mouth as his venom healed her.
As he cradled her against his side, she moaned softly near his ear, and her breath rustled on his neck.
He knew it would be easy to seduce her as his venom rushed in her blood and her arms tightened around him. She whispered his name again, begging, and he tightened his fingers on her waist.
No, not a dirty afternoon screw on a rock, and not like this, either. He wanted her to remember and feel every moment of his touch.
Under his lips, the last of her skin smoothed over and was whole again.
He kissed the inside of her wrist one last time before he lowered her arm from his lips.
“Oh.” She sagged against him. “It doesn’t hurt anymore.”
“Nope.” He turned her arm over and showed her. “All healed up.”
“Wow.” She inspected the scar that traced a faint line up her arm. “I get keloids sometimes, and this is so well-healed.”
He shrugged. “Dragons have some magic.”
She looked up at him, smiling, and he loved seeing that.
Her pupils were still a little wide in her dark eyes, though.
He liked seeing that, too. It looked like she wanted him.
Time enough for that, later.
“Okay, well, time to do what we came here for.” She dug around in her voluptuous bosom for the elemental’s bottle and held it out. “We just need to let this guy go. I hate doing this, but a feral elemental like this one will be happier out here than in a home. He’s more like a wild coyote who wandered into a city than a domesticated cat. I can tell that he’s not tamable.”
Cai nodded. “If anything ever happened to my soul, my dragon animus would take over. He’d be happiest flying free and crouching on top of a hoard in a Rocky Mountain cave.”
He glanced behind himself at the slash-like opening in the side of the sandstone mountain.
Not that cave.
“Dragons really do have hoards?” she asked.
He nodded. “We’re like magpies with expensive taste.”
“Does your dragon have a name?” she asked.
“Wyvern,” he said, feeling vulnerable about saying it.
“Like your last name.”
He nodded. Many dragons had unique names, but dragon nobility had their own naming conventions. “Among other things.”
Ember sighed. “Okay, here we go.”
She loosened the stopper from the bottle, spoke a charm over it that stripped the magical wards off the sides of vial, and threw the bottle in a high, long arc out into the valley far below.
At the apex of the vial’s flight, the stopper popped out, and the air elemental unwound itself from the vial. It roared, blasting with lightning and dragging stinging dust from the rocks below, and sped away.
The last gusts of wind faded.
Ember sighed. “It was the right thing to do.”
Cai nodded. “Yes, it was, and you were amazing. You didn’t get mad at it.”
Ember blinked rapidly like she was processing that data. “Well, of course not. It wasn’t his fault. Those two elems have had a tough time of it, the last few years. He was just reacting. The other one has a chance of being tamed. Getting mad at this guy wouldn’t have helped, and it would probably have made the situation worse. And he didn’t mean it. He wasn’t mad at me. He was mad at the world.”
Out in the slot valley below the cliff, the elemental bounced against the rocks, stirring up a hail of pebbles against the boulders.
Cai said, “My mom got mad a lot when I was growing up.”
Ember winced. “Oh, jeez.”
“All the time, every day, about something. If I didn’t do something to cause it, she’d get mad anyway.”
Ember looked at the ground. “Some moms are like that.”
“She was like that a lot. I don’t talk about her much.”
“Do you talk to her these days?”
“Not since I was twenty, when she left. Dragons mature slowly, physically and emotionally. The human age equivalent is around fifteen years old.”
“You haven’t talked to her since?”
“Never.”
Ember looped her arm through his elbow. “Is she still alive?”
Cai pondered the searing desert. “I think so. I haven’t heard anything different, anyway. I hunted her down on the internet a few years ago, and she was alive, then. Someone probably would have heard about it if she’d died and told me.”
Ember threaded her arm around his waist, a comforting, solid weight, and he wrapped his arm around her, too. She said, “My father ran off when I was a little kid. I don’t know where he is, either.”
A cold breeze blew through the valley, sneaking under Cai’s clothes and touching his spine with frost. He asked, “What happens when a person leaves a witch like that?”
“My mom was sad for a while, but she’s a strong woman. She put herself back together, mostly. But she didn’t get married again or anything. She has other people. She has other plans.”
“So, she’s all right.”
“Yeah,” Ember said, a slight smile on her lips. “Yeah, she’s all right. Did something happen to your mom?”
“No, she just walked away. There were too many fights. She wasn’t a warm person. Leaving that way is unheard of in dragon society. It wasn’t so much of a scandal as complete, utter shock. I wasn’t ostracized at all. Indeed, people rallied around my father and me to support us to an amazing extent. And then, my father died.”
After that last, awful fight, when his mother had walked out of their house and driven away, his father had gone downhill quickly. The dragon den’s healer had come by a few days later and examined his father’s darkening eyes, his exhaustion and enfeeblement, and had gently broken it to them that the mating bond had severed.
Severed.
The word still echoed in Cai’s head.
His father had begun putting his affairs in order that night, knowing he didn’t have long.
Dragons don’t survive a severing.
Ember’s arm tightened around his waist. “I’m so sorry.”
“And I became the Duke of Wyvern.”
She glanced up at him. “I didn’t know the world still had dukes.”
“Imagine that.”
“What’s it mean, in real terms? Are you telling me that you have to marry a dragon princess?”
He laughed. “Not unless she was my fated mate.”
Cai knew that there was no dragon princess out there who was his fated mate. His fated mate was sitting right next to him on a desert rock.
He just didn’t know how to tell Ember that.
She said, “A girl I knew in high school was a bear shifter. They have a dating service because bears are too shy to talk to each other.”
He laughed again, and it felt good to laugh. That cave back there brought back all sorts of things he didn’t have time to feel, just then. “That’s not how fated mates work for dragons.”
“Fated mates?” Ember echoed.
“Yep.”
“That’s some weird magic.”
“It really is.”
“Speaking of magic—” She looked up at him, a furtive glance full of worry. “So, I had to use black magic to trap the air elemental, and it worked. I was kind of surprised at how well it worked, but it was some dark magic.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, I sensed that.”
“I thought shifters couldn’t see witchcraft.”
Cai gestured with his hands, making an awkward movement that looked like he was weighing stones with his palms. His other hand peeked out from around Ember’s waist. “I can see it when Wyvern’s in control. When I’m in my human form, it’s more like sensing it. I can feel it.”
“So, Wyvern saw everything,” Ember said, her voice flat and upset.
“He saw a river of transparent magic pouring out of you like a fountain, and then the circle you’d cast changed it to a blood-red whirlwind.”
She blinked, looking up at him. “You can see it.”
Cai winked at her. “After the circle changed the magic, it smelled like roses.”
“It what?” Then she chuckled. “Oh, right. Allergy-inducing, rose-scented black magic.”
“Society must frown on that kind of magic—”
“Ya think?”
“—but I thought it was amazing. You’re right. He’ll be happier out there. He’ll live his life the way he was meant to, but you had to hurt yourself to do it for him. Did it cost you more than your blood?”
“Yeah.” Ember eased herself to the ground and dangled her feet over the edge of the cliff. “Yeah, it did.”
Cai sat beside her and rested back on his arms. If she fell over, Wyvern would pop out, swoop down, and catch her before she bruised her pretty bum on even one rock. “Are you all right?”
“I will be. It makes me a little sick.” Ember shifted and leaned against him.
He curled his arm around her waist and rested his fingers on her hip. He turned his head and kissed her temple.
She sighed against him, and he hugged her to his side.
Ember said, “You never told me you had a white dragon.”
He shrugged. “I’m just your average, garden-variety St. George-class drake. He’s just pretty.”
“I think your dragon is beautiful. He shines in the sun.”
Cai considered not saying anything for a moment, but he mentioned, “There’s a name for a particular sub-variety of white dragon that looks like mine does.”
“Something other than ‘a white dragon?’”
“Like you call a golden horse with a blond mane and tail a ‘palomino.’ There’s, you know, nomenclature.”
“So what do you call your not-a-white dragon?”
“He’s called a crystal dragon because he’s covered in diamonds.”
Ember nodded. “I thought they were diamonds. Wow. And you grow them?”
“Yeah, kind of like how snails grow calcium carbonate shells, I grow crystalized carbon. When I lose a scale, a new one grows in like a fingernail.”
“Was the jewelry you gave me made out of your toenail clippings?”
He laughed. “My talons are typical claw material, but no. I bought your jewelry pre-made at the Tiffany and Company store in the Dragon’s Den casino. They’re store-boughts, not homemade.”
She cuddled against his side. “So, you’re like the Fabergé egg of dragons.”
He laughed. “Sure.”
“Did the egg you hatched out of have diamonds and enamel and stuff on it?”
He looked at her. “You’re joking, right?
She blinked. “You’re a reptile. Reptiles lay eggs, right?”
“I’m a supernatural shifter, but I’m mostly, sort-of, essentially human. I was born the usual way. From my mother. My human mother. After she was pregnant. The swat on the butt and the crying. All the usual baby-birthing stuff. You know about how babies are made, right?”
“Jeez, Cai.”
“Well, with the whole virgin thing—” he said.
“It doesn’t mean I didn’t take high school health class!”
“At our high school, the supernatural health class was sorely lacking. They told us nothing except to keep our dragons in our pants until we went into the fever and mated.”
She grimaced. “Oh, wow. Abstinence-only sex ed.”
“Yeah, it’s a good thing we can’t get a woman pregnant unless we’re mated, because otherwise there would have been a whole bunch of little dragonlings running around Los Angeles during my generation. Math, alone, would have had hundreds. I work in the entertainment industry, and I think he was a manwhore.”
Ember was laughing. Cai could sit there on that rock and listen to her laugh all night long.
He continued, “I mean, they told us nothing. It’s a good thing my dad heard me spout some nonsense and sat me down for a frighteningly informative discussion in his office.”
She was still laughing, and her soft body shook where she was pressed against his side. “That must have been awkward.”
“‘Awkward’ does not begin to cover it. He had a bottle of scotch sitting on his desk, and every time I said something stupid, he’d pour himself a shot. He staggered out of his office and collapsed on his bed, and dragons have high metabolisms for flammable liquids. We boil off half the ethanol in a drink before it hits our bloodstreams.”
“Oh, the poor guy!”
“It’s one of my favorite memories of my dad. But yeah, he told me things I can never unhear.”
She laughed. “Like what?”
“Well, when one has a dragonling, whichever parent is the dragon has to breathe the dragon soul into the baby soon after birth, so that would have been my father. Supposedly, there’s some way to tweak the dragon magic to choose what kind of dragon soul your kid gets, but I don’t know if he chose that I would be a crystal dragon or not.”
Ember mused, “Your hide would be worth a lot of money if you were dead.”
“That is a seriously rose-scented sense of humor you’ve got there, and it is one of the reasons why Wyvern doesn’t come out in human society much.”
“It doesn’t even matter. The naturals would convince themselves he was a horse wearing a rhinestone blanket or something.”
Cai laughed harder. “Or a UFO. Dragons get mistaken for alien spaceships a lot when we’re flying.”
He cuddled her more closely to his side and pressed his lips against her temple again. “I really like you,” he whispered.
“I like you,” she said, “too,” but she said it slowly, too slowly.
Well, maybe in another few days, they could have a conversation, a really important one.
One that his father had tried to prepare him for that evening, when his father had killed two bottles of scotch to explain the facts of dragonish life to Cai.
Maybe.
If they had time.
His skin was starting to itch, to burn.
His mind felt clouded with lethargy and tremors.
This mating fever would turn into the mating frenzy soon.
And then, worse.
Maybe he could talk to Ember when they went out that weekend, maybe over supper, before he took her upstairs to the penthouse and showed her everything he wanted from her.
Maybe.
They sat like that for a little while, watching the air elemental swirl dust devils down the canyon, bouncing from rocky prominence to stony boulder, until it was out of sight.
Cai transformed back into his dragon, shredding those clothes she’d poofed up for him with the promise that it was no trouble for her to whip him up some new ones back in Las Vegas, and he flew back to the casino with her resting against his spine and her arms around his neck.