This was ridiculous. Intellectually, he knew it was utterly ridiculous to be hiking into the mountains with a bunch of people he’d never even met before tonight. And, oh yeah, his long-lost father and brother. And his new… girlfriend? All because they wanted to prove to him that he was a dragon?

Jesus.

This wasn’t just ridiculous. This was insanity.

But he was going. Half of him was going because Isla had agreed to it. The other half of him was going because of the racing in his chest. The itch in his skin. The beast that he’d always known had lived inside of him.

He’d always chalked it up to energy. Or having a really strong instinctual side or some shit. He’d never in his life thought that there was literally a dragon living inside of him. But here he was, hiking into the woods to find a portal to the dragon realm. So it must make sense to him on some level.

His mom had been the final nail in the coffin. His mother was the most rational, most stoic person he’d ever met. And she was stone cold and clear-eyed when she’d told him that it was true. That his father and brother and he were all dragons.

He watched the group of them trot up the mountain. All the people he’d met the night before and a bunch of kids he hadn’t yet figured out who belonged to whom. He and Amos brought up the rear of the group. He supposed that it was some deeply-ingrained man thing that they wanted to make sure there were no stragglers. 

He knew that there was something here worth following. Some thread that rang true. Even if he hadn’t fully bought in yet. Something in Idris’s spidey senses tingled though. He knew that there was something they weren’t telling him.

On the drive up the mountain, they’d told him and Isla all about this bad dude, King Dalyer. He was the reason that the dragon realm was in such bad shape these days. Dalyer had apparently driven Idris’s mother and father out when she was pregnant with him. That’s why they’d come to the human realm in the first place. It wasn’t safe for them anymore.

And then when they’d realized that O was an oracle - they’d explained that part to them as well - his mother and father had known that they had to return him to the dragon realm so that he could live in peace. Even Idris had to admit that the human realm was no place to raise an oracle.

“That’s a good way for your kid to end up a homeless, heroin addict runaway,” Isla had said. And he couldn’t have said it better himself.

All that made sense to him. But he knew there was something they weren’t telling him. Something about him that was important. They all looked at him so urgently. So carefully. As if they were waiting for him to do something special or important. He just knew there was more to the story.

He didn’t want to push it though, for Isla’s sake as much as his. So far, she’d rolled with the punches amazingly well. Better than he had, actually. He didn’t want to do anything that might scare her off. The final straw.

He really wanted her with him. That much was clear. His bone deep need to protect her, care for her, that was less clear to him. It had come up quick. Although, he supposed he’d been guarding her for about a year. It was just that the last couple of days had moved quickly.

But no harm, no foul, because here she was, hiking in a pair of skin tight jeans and a little blue hoodie that hugged her curves and brought out the bloom in her cheeks.

He’d been surprised when he’d seen her in the morning light. He’d never seen her without makeup on before. She was so gorgeous it hurt him. Like a lightning bolt to the chest. She’d looked like springtime. Fresh. Young. Blooming. And so sexy it was a struggle to walk straight.

He couldn’t let himself think about what had happened last night. How she’d given herself to him. Fallen asleep with him. Slept like the dead and woken up with just the sweetest little sparkle in her eye. It was more than he could have possibly hoped for less than twelve hours after getting attacked by her piece of shit ex-boyfriend.

“We’re getting close!” O yelled from the front of the group, sniffing the air.

“He can sniff out the portals,” Mel, the redhead who was apparently paired up with O, said.

Her son, a nine- or ten-year-old named Ike, turned around. “He says they smell like pancakes, but he can’t be telling the truth. Right, Mom?”

Mel grinned at him. “Who the hell knows? In my experience, he only tells the truth about the important stuff. The rest is up for serious comedic interpretation.”

Idris listened stoically. He pretended like his heart wasn’t racing at the information. About his brother. Who was, apparently, real. And not a figment of his childish imagination.

He supposed that at some point he was probably going to be really pissed at his mother for lying to him all these years. But right now, he just had too much other shit on his list.

Like Isla’s ass, switching back and forth as she bounded up the path with the stamina of a real athlete.

“Damn, girl! Slow down. You’re making the rest of us look bad,” Lucy griped as Isla followed Ike’s path and hopped from one outlying boulder to the next. “How’d you get so fit?”

Isla grinned back over her shoulder, making Idris’s stomach flip. “Working the pole,” she said.

Mel and Lucy laughed while Amos gaped at her.

“I’ve heard that’s an amazing work out!” Mel exclaimed.

“It is,” Isla said. “But that’s not why I was doing it.”

“Why were you doing it?” Felice asked. And Idris tried to keep his head on straight. His mother was having a conversation with Isla, formerly Lala Royal, about stripping. That was fine. Everything was fine.

“Well,” Isla answered, bounding up that path. “I guess the cat’s out of the bag that I was on the run from a bad dude. So, honestly, any under the table work was what I was looking for. But also it is really validating in a lot of ways.”

“Sexually?” Mel asked and Ike groaned as he covered his eyes with one hand.

O turned around at the head of the group, cupping one hand ostentatiously to his ear. “What’s that, my dove? You’re talking about sexuality back there?”

Mel rolled her eyes at her man, a small, private smile playing at the corners of her mouth.

Isla laughed. And it was like the first time Idris heard it all over again. Musical. Joyful. Rare.

“Yeah, sexually, I guess,” Isla replied. “But stripping is almost more about power than sex.”

“Is that right?” Idris asked, finally chiming in, with enough spice in his voice that his mother was turning around, raising an eyebrow at him.

Amos chuckled behind him. “I assume that’s where you two met? City Lights?”

On the path ahead of them, Lucy turned then, a baby, whose name Idris hadn’t learned yet, strapped to her stomach. “You just happened to know the name of our local strip club, dear?” There was more than a little steel in her voice.

Amos grinned. “I’m a noticer, babe.”

Lucy rolled her eyes to the heavens and turned back to face front. “Apparently.”

“I don’t know what you’re so bent out of shape about,” O chimed in from the front. “That strip club is obviously up your alley, Luce. They employ plus-sized women.”

Lucy and Isla turned to one another to make some very meaningful eye contact while every man in the group besides O visibly winced.

“Jesus,” Idris muttered under his breath, feeling for his brother in the fury that was definitely about to rain down on him.

“Steady as she goes, son,” Donovan muttered.

“Excuse me?” Mel demanded of O.

Immediately recognizing that he’d wandered into enemy territory, O floundered. “I just meant that - uh - Isla is a curvy lady. You know. Similar to Lucy. And - ahem - you. My love.”

Mel’s eyebrows were non-existent, they were so far up her forehead.

“Um. Compliment taken?” Isla broke the tension. “Seeing as your girl is as curvy as I am, I assume you meant ‘normal women’ as opposed to ‘plus-sized women’.”

“Amen, sister,” Lucy chimed in.

“What were you saying about power?” Felice, a curvy woman herself, asked Isla.

Idris had to admit, he was pretty interested in that himself.

“Well,” Isla thought as she reached out a hand to Ike, helped him over a stream they were all fording. “There’s definitely something to holding a room captive. Whether you’re doing it with your charisma, or your body, or your words.”

“But isn’t it objectifying?” Lucy asked.

Isla deeply considered that question, he could tell by the way she paused, cocked her head, lost a little ground to the group. She made it up fast, legged her way up the mountain to make up for what she had lost.

“Sure,” Isla allowed. “But in a way, that says more about the men who came and watched me than it did about me.”

“What do you mean?” Mel asked, and Idris could have kissed her, he was so glad that she’d asked the question.

“I guess,” Isla said, “I guess that I mean that the men who came were so willing to be enthralled by me that I barely had to be there. My body is there, doing whatever I needed to do to get tips. But my mind is elsewhere, riding some pleasurable, humanizing wave. So, in that way, I was never theirs to be objectified.” She thought for a second. “Except for once. There was one time that I was really in it. And that was risky. Because it put me up for auction in a way that I’d never been before. But I did it. And it turned out great.”
“I hate to keep assuming here,” Amos said. “But I assume that you’re talking about some time or another that you’ve stripped for Idris.”

Idris turned and couldn’t help but grin at Amos. He just liked the dude. Straight talker. The two men seemed to be on the same wavelength.

“Ooooooh,” Ike said, grinning bright pink. It wasn’t clear exactly how much of this conversation he was following, but he definitely understood the part where Isla stripped for Idris.

“Oooooooooooooh,” imitated Drake, Amos and Lucy’s toddler.

“OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH,” followed up O.

Now Isla was the one rolling her eyes. But she couldn’t help but flash a smile back at Idris.

And he grinned, too. That grin lasted about another half mile, until O turned off the path, following his nose more than anything else.

“You find it?” Donovan called to his son through the brush.

“Yeah!” O called back. “And it looks like it leads to some easy ground. We’re all gonna be able to get through. Kids included.”

“The other portal we used to use was about 200 feet off the ground,” Mel informed Idris. “You had to jump off a cliff. And then instantly transform into a dragon to be able to fly and survive the drop. So, we obviously had to find a new one. For the kids. And, you know, you. Because you’ve never shifted before.”

“Wait a second. What?” Lucy asked, coming to a full stop and turning around to stare at her husband. “You took our son through a portal that was 200 feet above ground?”

“What’s that, hon?” Amos called, slowing his pace and hanging back even farther from the group.

Again, Idris just had to grin at him.

The group cleared the brush that O had already bushwhacked through and Idris and the others found themselves in a grove of pine trees, each about three or four feet away from each other. O was nowhere to be seen.

“Cool!” Ike yelled as he sprinted forward, backpack bopping on his back.

“Hotshot!” Mel yelled before sighing and pinching the bridge of her nose.

Her son had taken a flying leap through a slightly shimmery patch of air. And straight up disappeared.

Ike and O reappeared in the patch, just two floating heads, grinning winningly at Mel.

She didn’t wait on ceremony. She was through, following her men, immediately. And then all of them, except for Donovan, Idris, and Isla, were on the dragon realm side.

Donovan clapped a hand lightly on Idris’s shoulder. “We don’t know what it’ll feel like for you. The first time you go through.”

“You mean he might shift right away?” Isla asked, her eyes so big that Idris wanted to lean her back and kiss the breath out of her.

“Maybe,” Donovan shrugged. “Amos said that the first time Drake ever went through he shifted automatically. Like he couldn’t control it. Of course, shifters can be in human or dragon form when they’re in the dragon realm. But some of us infinitely prefer dragon form.”

“You do,” Idris guessed.

“Yeah. I stay in dragon form as much as possible.”

“So, you think there’s a good chance that I’ll just instantly transform the second that I’m through.”

Donovan just shrugged. “We’ll just have to see.” He stepped through the portal and Idris could see him waiting on the other side, still in his human form.

Idris turned to Isla. “You ready?”

She shrugged. “I guess. I’m ready to get the hell out of Ivan’s world.”

Idris took her hand and moved toward the portal but she was suddenly tugging him backwards. “Wait,” she said. “Before we go in, I have a question.”

He waited patiently. But when she didn’t say anything, he raised his eyebrows. “Yes?”

She was biting her lower lip, worrying it in such a way he was sure she barely knew she was doing it. “Well, it’s just that - why didn’t you fuck me last night?”

Idris kept the smile off his face. Not the moment for that. He didn’t want her to think he was mocking her. When he so deeply wasn’t. He took a deep internal breath and decided to answer the right way. Honestly. “It wasn’t the right time for that. You didn’t need to get fucked. You needed to feel good. A release.”

Her lip popped out of her mouth and she stared at him. Like he was a puzzle she was trying to assemble.

“I’m supposed to believe that you were just totally fine without getting yours?” She crossed her arms over her chest. “No motives? No questions asked?”

Not for the first time in the last 24 hours, he wanted to smash Ivan Ivanovich’s face into a hundred pieces. What a worthless piece of shit. “Yeah. You are.”

She blinked at him for a moment. “Just like that, huh?”

“No,” he said, his voice sharp and harsh. But not too much. Just enough to get her really listening. “Not just like that. You say it like it was easy for me. Like I didn’t stay up for an hour and a half after you fell asleep, just aching for you. You say it like the whole thing was some grand plan to take advantage of you or something. But it wasn’t. All I knew was that you were strung like a violin and about one second from bursting apart. I didn’t do that to fuck with your head, Isla. I did it to make you feel better.” He paced away from her one step. And then back. “Because when I fuck you, Isla, it’s gonna change your world. And your world had already been changed enough last night.”

It was more than he’d maybe ever said to her before. Maybe more than he’d ever said to anybody. And it had a flush growing in her cheeks. From anger or rage or adrenalin, he had no idea. But he didn’t care as long as she finally got the picture. He wasn’t trying to pull one over on her.

She didn’t say anything. Or shrug. Or nod. She simply turned and ducked into the shimmery space in the air, to join the others on the other side.

Idris sighed. He looked around at the woods. The human realm. He was going into another world. And what choice did he really have? His most important people had all just walked through the portal there like they were crossing the street.

Dragon or not, he needed to join his people over there. So, taking a deep breath, he stepped through. And pointedly tried to ignore all the stares.

They all stood in a similar grove of trees to the one they’d just stepped through, but the air was warmer, clearer somehow. The sky was a crisp blue. Not cloudy, the way it had been in the human realm.

They were alone, except for the chirping call of some lonely bird. The only one not staring at him was Isla, who was looking up at the sky, the trees, everywhere but him. Almost determinedly.

“You feel anything?” O asked, circling around the group to come closer to him.

Idris was uncomfortable with all the stares; they were like ants on his arm that he wanted to dust off. But other than that, the honest answer was not really.

“No.”

He tried to ignore the vaguely disappointed looks that rolled around the group. He knew they’d been expecting him to explode into a shift or something. But it just didn’t seem to be in him.

“Not surprising,” Donovan said, hitching his pack up onto his shoulder.

“Why?” Felice asked, reaching for his hand.

Idris tried to ignore the weird, metallic pang it gave him to see his mother reaching for the hand of a man. Even if he was his father.

“Well,” Donovan said, scratching at his five o clock shadow and eyeing something in the sky. “You gotta figure he’s been suppressing his dragon for years. His entire life. Pretending it wasn’t there because he didn’t believe that it could be there. That kind of training doesn’t just die because he’s back on home soil. We’re gonna have to teach the boy.”

With that, he turned and started hiking through the woods. The group followed behind him. And Idris felt the attention fade off of him.

His father’s words had soothed him a little. He checked himself head to toe. Did he feel any different in the dragon realm? Maybe. Tinglier?

But he was probably just imagining that.

The only choice he had left was just to follow the group.

That late afternoon, after an entire day of hiking, they finally made it to where they were going to stay for a while. And Idris had never seen his mother so excited. So giddy. Like a little girl.

“Donovan, you have GOT to be kidding me!” she squealed. His mother did not normally squeal. Yet here she was, literally clapping her hands with glee. “It looks just the same! Except for the extra floors of course.”

Idris stood looking at a sort of log cabin mansion. A little haphazard in design, perhaps. But sturdy enough. And sprawling. There had to be twenty rooms in that house.

“This is where I grew up,” O said, coming up behind Donovan. “Dad and I added on little by little. I think he’s still working on some rooms on the east end.”

“My mother. Our mother. Felice knows this place,” Idris stumbled. He wasn’t usually so off-kilter.

O glossed over it like he hadn’t even heard it. “Yeah, I think she and Dad lived here, in the original part when they first got together.” He pointed toward a tiny room at the entryway of the cabin.

It was funny. He could actually see his mother living there.

The group was let in to Donovan’s house and everyone was allowed to choose a few rooms to stay in.

Idris watched as Lucy and Amos and their three kids chose most of the rooms on the main floor. Mel and Ike and O chose some rooms toward the back of the house, where O’s old bedroom was.

Idris pointedly did not watch as his mother followed Donovan back to where Donovan’s room was.

And it left him and Isla in the rustic kitchen. He supposed there was running water, from the looks of the sink. And that looked like an icebox in the corner. And it was clean. But that was about it for amenities.

He wondered what Isla would think of that. He grabbed her hand and tugged her back to the stair case. He wanted a room with her. And he wanted it to be far away from everybody else.

They walked all the way up to the third floor. Skipping the second floor entirely. The bedroom they found was a peculiar shape. It had windows on three sides, a slanted ceiling and an old four poster bed.

“I love it!” Isla exclaimed, tossing her bag on the ground and flopping back on the bed.

Both Isla and Idris had picked up some clothes and supplies for the trip from the Target in the next town over that morning. They’d been nervous to be out and about in public, but neither had wanted to take this journey with zero supplies.

Idris was just about to throw his bag on the floor as well and lay himself out over Isla when he heard Amos’s voice call up the stairs to him.

“Let’s go, bouncer! We’ve got dragon lessons!”

Isla raised her eyes at him from where she lay. “This I gotta see.”

“Now you’re the one who gets to watch,” he said to her, straight-faced.

She grinned at him. “Let’s see if you can put on half the show that I can.”

Twenty minutes later, the sun was about two inches above the horizon and Idris found himself standing in the field out in front of Donovan’s house while these men he barely knew started stripping naked.

“Uhhhhh,” he said, glancing around as O whipped his shirt over his head like a helicopter. Amos and Donovan, much more discreet, simply tossed their shirts to the side. “What the fuck is going on?”

“You shift with your clothes on, you shred your clothes,” Amos said, simply. “Dragons are pretty comfortable with nudity. It’s a part of our daily life.”

Just then, his wife gave a long, loud whistle from the front porch where the women watched with beers. The kids all played inside.

Amos grinned a little. “The humans get a kick out of it though.”

Idris shrugged, knowing he had nothing to hide. He kind of wished that Isla and his mother weren’t sitting dead next to each other while he stripped down. But still, nothing to hide.

He stripped down, too. The men all stood there, completely naked.

“You have a tattoo of a dragon,” Amos said.

“I know,” Idris said. “Ironic, right? I’m an underground fighter. Or was, I guess. And that’s what they started calling me. They say I fight like I lay waste to my opponent. Burn him to the ground. Like a dragon.”

O and Donovan shared a moment of eye contact that tightened his chest for a moment. His father and brother knew one another so well. They could communicate without speaking. Although, he remembered, O was an oracle. Maybe he actually could communicate without speaking.

He shrugged off the feeling.

“Alright,” Idris said, dragging a hand over his hair. “Somebody explain how to do this.”

“The problem is,” Donovan said, scratching at his stubble. “It’s hard to explain because it’s something that all of us have been doing since we were babies. It’s like trying to explain how to talk. Or walk.”

Idris bit back his frustration and stayed quiet. Patient.

“I can explain it,” O said. “It’s kind of like, you know when you’re flying and you hit one pocket of air and then another and you-”

“That’s a dragon thing, O,” Amos interrupted. “He doesn’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh. Right,” O said. “How about when your scales all click into place and-”

“Dragon thing,” Amos interrupted again. “Look, Idris, it feels like that moment right when you’re falling asleep. And your brain is about to let you go there, so you just let go. And go there.”

“Yeah!” O exclaimed. “That’s exactly it.” And then he stretched his arms up and out in a decidedly feline gesture that had him shooting out in all directions. His skin changed to a sparkly turquoise blue as his scales erupted all over him and his tail shot out, curling around the group.

Idris felt his mouth drop open as O lowered an enormous eye, easily the size of an oven.

“See?” O’s dragon said. “Easy as pie.”

Idris turned and looked back at the porch to catch Isla’s eye. Her mouth was dropped straight open. But he couldn’t tell if she was looking at his naked body or O’s dragon.

“It’s not as easy for some of us,” Amos said.

“It hurts, you mean?” Idris asked.

“Sort of. It’s more like a difference of style. I think O dips his toes in the water and I cannonball in.”

“Show me,” Idris said, for a moment taken aback at the command in his own voice. But Amos didn’t seem to have noticed or taken offense.

Amos’s muscles bulged. A primal scream ripped out of his chest as he doubled in size. But he wasn’t growing, he was exploding. His amber green scales sparkled in the sun as Amos’s dragon immediately took to air. As if he had too much energy to stay on the ground. Amos did a quick loop in the air, low to the ground, before he landed.

Idris studied him. Moved past the raw awe of the two dragons in front of him. Amos was larger than O. O was sleeker and faster, with what looked like some pretty nasty battle scars on his left wing.

He took a few steps forward, studied the armadillo pattern of gorgeous, glossy scales on Amos’s flank. He didn’t touch though. They looked sharp enough that they could slice his finger right off.

“I take it you’re a fighter?” he asked Amos and the dragon did something as close as it could to a grin.

“Close enough,” his low voice rumbled over Idris like a distant earthquake.

Idris moved on to O, studying his brother’s scales. They were less regular than Amos’s. Less like armor. Their turquoise color was almost an illusion. Each one was more like a tiny rainbow that just happened to bend more toward turquoise. O stretched one of his legs out so that Idris could see the way the scales moved over one another. There was a lot of flexibility there.

“I take it you’re pretty agile?”

“Like a cat,” O’s huge dragon responded, raising one claw in the air and giving the air a scratch. “Meow.”

Idris couldn’t help but laugh at that one. And it surprised him. He wasn’t much of a laugher. The look of utter delight on O’s face had something twanging in Idris’s face. He wondered, for the first time, what it had been like for O to find out he had a brother. Had it been as disorienting for him?

“Now, let an old man show you how it’s done,” Donovan’s voice came from behind Idris.

He turned, and the man stood there for a moment, his muscles tensing. And then there wasn’t even a shift. It was like man one second, dragon the next. There was a flash of light, a wind from all the air he’d just displaced. But that was it. He was just there, celery green and glistening in the sun. He had scars and nicks. His face was narrower than Amos’s and his tail was longer. And even though he looked more like he was made for speed, he was obviously a fierce fighter.

Idris could tell just from Donovan’s stance that, even now, he was prepared for battle of any kind. And in fact, the old man’s eyes were scanning the skies in reflex. He took to the air, did a quick sweep of the perimeter and had Idris holding his breath. Donovan’s dragon was the closest thing to regal that Idris had ever seen. And not in a sit on your throne sort of way. But in a fight for your people sort of way.

“Alright,” Donovan said, coming to land by the other dragons. The ground quaked under his landing, like a semi truck had just touched down. Which, by the heft of him, Idris considered, it was probably an equivalent weight.

“My turn, huh?” Idris said, uncrossing his arms.

Donovan nodded. “Don’t force it. We have no idea if you’ll be able to do it right away or not. Just see if you can feel out for the edges of the feeling.”

Idris closed his eyes. He did what they asked. What they’d explained. He let his mind wander, drift, the way he did before sleep. He let his body feel the edges of the air around him. He felt where his muscles rested against his bones. He felt his skin, the hairs along his arms.

He knew time was passing. He could feel the dragons shifting around him. He knew frustration wasn’t the way to shift. He could just feel that forcing it wasn’t going to work. And he could be very, very patient. But could they? He was very aware of the eyes on him. He could feel Isla watching from the porch as if she were standing right next to him. She wandered through his mind the way she had when he’d been fighting.

Idris felt a hand on his shoulder and he opened his eyes, looked around. His mother was there. He shifted on his feet. It wasn’t his first choice to be dead ass naked right now, but, there it was. The dragons made him do it.

Those thoughts subsided instantly when he saw a tear in her eye. His mother never cried. She was the toughest woman he’d ever met. And if things got to her in that way, she’d never showed Idris.

“That’s the way he looked the first time I ever saw him.”

Idris saw that she was talking about Donovan. The dragon straightened under her gaze, like he was growing taller.

“He saved my life, you know?”

“You were falling through the air?” Idris asked, remembering the vision that O had shown him.

She nodded. “I fell through a portal. I would have died had he not been there to catch me.” She paused. “I’ll never forget that feeling. Of being in the air with him. The rush of it. The wind past your face, like the windows down on the highway. But ten times more intense because it’s everywhere at once. And when you’re in the air, you have the choice of going any direction, any angle. Not just forward or backward like a car.”

Idris felt something stirring inside him. Something instinctual that knew exactly what his mother was describing. His heart knew what she was talking about, even if his brain didn’t quite yet.

“His grace always surprised me,” Felice continued. “Because he’s sleek, sure. But that’s not the way he is in dragon form. He’s much more like a grizzly bear. And you should see him fight in the air. Jesus Criminy. It’s like a car crash on the highway.”

“Like a semi truck,” Idris supplied

“Exactly,” Felice agreed. She gazed at the dragons, thoughtful. One hand on her boy’s shoulder still. She could feel what was stirring in his chest. She could feel the electricity of his nature just as she’d felt it in Donovan. It was unstoppable.

“And he,” she continued, nodding toward O. “The way he just stretched into his shift, that doesn’t surprise me at all. That’s just the way he was as a little boy. I could see his dragon so clearly within him. He was like a dolphin. Smart and graceful and so playful. He would be a dragon just for the sheer joy of it. I could see that even then. The size, the grandeur, the glint of the light across his scales. Those were all things that would appeal to him about being a dragon.”

She was speaking to Idris, but her voice carried across the field. O was as still as his father, listening to her words like his life depended on it. And maybe it did, Idris considered. He’d grown up without a mother the same way that Idris had grown up without a father. He imagined that left a similar mark. Maybe not the same one, but a reciprocal one. The other half.

He thought about his mother’s words. The playfulness of being a dragon. Swooping through the air like a dolphin through the waves. The air around him felt warm, fuzzy, like his edges were blurring a little bit.

“And what about me?” he asked her. “Could you see my dragon as a boy?”

She looked up at him. “I could see it every day. I can see it now. It was the most clear to me who you were. What your nature was.”

“And what’s that?” he asked, but he almost didn’t need to. He thought he knew what his mother was going to say. Because he wasn’t learning it. He was finally, finally recognizing it.

She squeezed his shoulder. Stepped back away from him. The tears in her eyes were for him now, not for his father or brother. She looked only at him. At her boy, whom she’d raised almost completely on her own.

“You have always been a like a lion, my love.”

And with an exhale of extreme relief, like stepping into a warm room after too long in the cold, Idris felt his body let go of the tight rein of control he’d been keeping since the day he was born.

It was painful. Uncomfortable. Like rubbing out a charley horse over every inch of his body. But Idris focused his mind on a lion. On the roar, the sauntering, swaggering protection of his pack. He thought of the teeth. The duty. The blazing fight of leading.

And his body was expanding, racing, arming itself. He heard a roar echo out of his chest, like a volcano waking up after thousands of dormant years. He knew he shook the trees, the ground.

He was still transforming, growing, exploding. His body was still his. But as he ripped off the ground, he was also very, very different. His arms were both the claws in tight fists in front of him and the wings at his back. He could feel his human arms, somehow in all of those appendages.

And a tail, what a mindfuck. He whipped it around experimentally and realized that it was pretty much the most badass weapon he could imagine. Like an extremely wieldable mace.

He realized with something like ecstasy that his feet weren’t on the ground. His wings had instinctively brought him right up off the ground. He was up, beating at the air. Perhaps not extremely smoothly, but he was in the air. He was fucking flying.

He let out another roar. One that had been building in his chest for what felt like damn near thirty years. His jaw was heavy and strong and he felt like he could bite a tank in half. Maybe he could. He extended his claws and realized that they were as dexterous as fingers but almost a foot long each.

He wasn’t sure about how to land so he let himself drop with a thunderous bang. He saw the reverberation of it made his mother topple to her knees.

And then, with a sort of confusion, he realized that Amos, in dragon form, was bowing his head to him. Idris cast his gaze over toward O and then to Donovan. And both dragons quickly swept into a bow as his eyes hit them. Idris took a step back, confused.

And as he stepped back, one of his wings came into view. What color was it? How to describe that? Idris looked down at his chest, his flank, his tail. He was… clear? But refracting light in every direction. White light. Rainbow light. He was every color and no color at once. Simply bright. Painful almost to look at.

No wonder they were bowing their heads away from him. He didn’t dwell on it. He was a dragon. But more than that, he was finally in his true form. He felt it down to his bones. This was what he was supposed to be. What his body had always known he could be. Even if his brain hadn’t believed it. Idris felt a primal energy racing through him. He wanted all things animal.

He wanted to eat something delicious and cooked over a fire. He wanted to drink from a stream. He wanted to feel rain on his back. He wanted the wind of the thinnest part of the atmosphere. He wanted to hunt. To protect. He wanted to fly and fight. And fuck.

The thought struck him like an anvil. He turned to look at the porch where Isla stood. Staring at him, completely awestruck, her hands clasped in front of her chest, almost as if she were in prayer.

And then she was all he could see. All he could think of. He thought that without her, he might never change back into a man.

But there she was. So lovely that he was shifting before he’d even asked himself to. It felt like folding himself down. Taking off a suit of armor. Hanging up a gun, the way a cop might when he comes home.

It felt like coming home, to be in his human form. Not as exciting as the new world he’d discovered. But just as important.

His dragon blood didn’t cool though, as he strode across the field. His eyes on Isla. His heart pumped with the same animal need that he’d felt just moments before, in his dragon form. He needed her in a way he couldn’t begin to describe.

Not just man to woman. But the way an animal needs another to survive. To go on. For the species. The need of it, the frantic compulsion, was in his blood. He could taste it as he closed the distance between them. There was an electric snap flowing over him as he bounded up onto the porch.

Her eyes were humongous, her mouth popped open on a squeak and she took a shocked little half step away from him.

Nope.

He gripped her waist, scooped her up and over his shoulder. He kicked the door of the house open, kicked it closed and was through the house in seconds. And then he was slamming the door of their own room closed behind him.

He didn’t care what kind of scene he’d just created. He didn’t care that all of them were very, very clear on the fact that he’d just taken his girl upstairs to fuck her gorgeous brains out.

He didn’t care. All he cared about, all he saw, was the spread of her hair over the bed as he dropped her down. The desperate rise and fall of her breasts against her shirt. Her parted lips. Her eyes, hot and melting for him.

She was gasping, reaching for him, but he wasn’t having it. He couldn’t stand to be touched right now. He’d go off like a rocket. He needed to feel her.

Idris gripped her hips again, flipped her over so that she was on her hands and knees. He ran his hands over her once, from her neck, over her breasts and belly, cupping and sliding. He was rough, hurried by an unspeakable need to mate with her.

His hands nearly ripped the button off her jeans as he reached around her to rip her jeans over her hips. He didn’t bother taking her pants all the way off. He just ripped them down to her knees. He could do nothing beyond that.

Because he beheld the prettiest sight he’d ever seen in his life. Her round ass, pert and juicy. And her lovely pussy. Gold and pink and begging for him. He gave her ass a little slap, just to watch it bounce. She hissed through her teeth and turned to give him a saucy little smile. Her arousal written in every line of her face. The setting sun flung itself desperately to every corner it could reach and it lit a red flame in Isla’s hair. He’d never seen the red in it before. And it made him wild.

There was no stopping now. Idris’s hand immediately went to her exposed pussy, one finger tracing her hot seam.

And Jesus fuck, she was wet. Soaking. She moaned and pushed back, taking his finger inside her a little further. She was biting her lip, keeping her voice inside, but the time for that was over. His infinite patience was over.

He banded an arm around her waist and lifted her off the bed, his other hand still buried inside her. He set her on the floor on her hands and knees. He planted his own hands on either side of hers, so that his chest was to her back, his teeth at her ear. He enveloped her completely. She was trapped in the cage of his body. The human inside him screamed for him to slow down. He knew he was going too fast. But the dragon inside couldn’t be slowed.

He positioned his hips, found her wet, hot core and pushed the head of his cock into her just an inch. She moaned, biting her lips, biting back her pleasure.

A hundred images all raced through him. The scent of her, the race of wind on his face, what it felt like to expand, to shift, and then Isla. Just Isla. Her face when she came on his mouth. When she slid down the pole. Her eyes on his. Her body working just for him. That was before. Before she knew that she was his. And only his.

And that was the thought that had him slamming into her. Isla screamed, full body. No holding back. He pushed her a full foot forward on the ground, but he went with her, seated fully inside her. He knew he was big, but she’d taken him so well. Completely.

“You were made to take this cock,” he whispered into her ear when he nuzzled her, his teeth gritting against the intense pleasure. So potent it was almost pain.

“Yes,” she moaned and pushed back against him.

He was lost to her then. Lost to the feeling. Lost to what they were making between them. He rutted her like a beast. Thrusting and thrusting and pressing even further into her.

They inched across the ground with the force of their passion and he was groaning, growling as she screamed. These were no sexy, little pornstar moans. This was the full-bodied passion of a woman getting claimed. And he was. He was marking her. Mating her. Making her his in the only way his dragon knew how.

The man inside him knew that it was more nuanced than this. That he couldn’t just make her come on his cock and that was that. But his dragon didn’t care. Couldn’t look beyond. His dragon knew the opposite. That it actually was that simple. So he slammed into her again and again, all the care he’d shown her last night gone. Substituted for raw need and desire.

Her clothes twisted around her and helped him hold her in place. And then Idris groaned, roared almost at the exquisite torture of her pussy clamping down on his cock like a vice. Her head was thrown back, her back arching, her hands fisting at the floor as her body tightened like a flower bud. And then she bloomed, trembling, screaming.

Idris held her tightly, rutting her through it. And only when he felt her body go loose, relaxed and so wet, did he let himself go. Did he release every need, every instinct, every bit of the dragon that he was. He came like an animal.