Concentrate, soldier. He must relearn the discipline of staying on point. The small, orb-shaped eye guarded the grand temple entrance, giving him no clear exit without discovery. From what he remembered of the technology, the eyes saw everything. They discerned movement and sound with the senses of the most highly developed dragon.
There would be no sneaking past. Tharius contemplated an attack, but first he must ascertain if it had backup outside. He might fell one, perhaps two, before they returned the attack and he respected their might, even as he reviled the power they commanded.
This close to the female, he should hear her breathing, blood threading through veins, using only his dragon senses. Pray that it was his weakness keeping her so silent to him, not her demise.
Act now. If you’ve depleted her again, she needs you out there now.
He factored the power of two floating eyes into his attack strategy. Even at half strength, he’d easily take down the orb hovering at the entrance. If there was a second, then lunge swiftly, and hope it didn’t flash out of range. No hope of shifting that quickly to a flying dragon in this state.
Any more of the devices, and they’d have him.
He’d have preferred to lie low. If he showed himself, those commanding the eye would see him. Step onto that courtyard, and he gave them a reason to hound him until captured or killed. Some dragons might abandon a helpless female and slink away to save their own hides. Not him. Life not only gave life, it bound life, too.
Till their last breath he and this female remained joined as one, their life forces entwined.
Leaving Claudia to die would be like abandoning everything he fought for.
No weapons, no missiles, littering the chamber floor by which to take out the orb-shaped eye by stealth. No matter how fast he moved, how fast he threw, it would see him. This, he remembered well. Sheets of blinding rain gave only a little cover.
He thought of Claudia enduring the downpour. Rain, cold, or hail, the elements were of no consequence to a dragon. But the indigenous population of the moon had grumbled and huddled against the cold, disliked the wet, and hibernated when the snows came. Weather often made them cough and sneeze and take to their beds, raving with fever.
Did her people do the same? Was she out there, shivering and perhaps taking sick from the pounding rain?
He’d rested enough. Part shift was a tried-and-tested military strategy, giving him the best of both the beings he harboured inside. Tharius coiled his strength and his will into tight knots, balled his good fist, and waited for the flow of Seg’era, the hormone meant to deaden pain in the heat of battle. Called forth with intent, it numbed an injury enough for a wounded soldier to fly or run to safety.
Nothing. No sign of his natural anaesthetic. He used up his supply to no avail when the invaders’ weapons took him down. No matter. Without further thought, Tharius sprang across the chamber and directly into the path of the eye.
It saw him coming and spun around, whirling in place so fast it became an oscillating blur. A defensive move he’d often seen on the battlefield. The blur of motion increased their defences, inflicted more damage on any attacker foolish enough to use his bare hands as a weapon.
A single blow shattered it into a shower of shards, taking the skin from his knuckles with it. The pain barely registered. Two injured hands now, but fired inside with enough rage to take down the mountain itself. Ducking under the raining splinters, he saw no more need of stealth. Reports were the eyes captured the image of anything in its radius, no matter how swiftly its prey moved. He could only hope they’d mistake him for a wyvern. One of their own gone rogue and harbouring a grudge.
Bursting out onto the courtyard, he dived into rain, now calming its furious downpour in deference to the slim sunbeams pouring through breaking cloud. Bright sunlight illuminated the raindrops, scattering prisms of colour over the wet stones, bouncing off the patchy, wet scales adorning his skin to throw his family colours of blues and purples into the mix.
Claudia huddled, on a broken wall, cheek pressed to the stones, eyes wide and startled. An angular eye, above her and behind the wall, reflected his family colours right back at him.
No mistaking him for a wyvern, now.
Weapon, he needed a weapon. At full strength, he’d heave a small tree from the ground and use the reach to smash the eye out of the sky. In his former life, his hand followed his eye without fail. The bralla always made groad. They all wanted him on their team.
A million sensations flew through him, over him. A broken dam of memories and remembered feelings, like the grit pricking his bared soles, rain-slicked hair sticking to his shoulders and back. Air, pungent and sweet filled his lungs. While the wind stirred branches and fallen leaves to secret whisperings.
He was home again, and ready for battle once more.
The corners. They’re more vulnerable if you hit the corners.
Claudia crept into his head. His dragon shoved forward. Imperious, demanding.
If you have energy to spare, send it now, female. The invaders know we’re here. I will get you to battle command and keep you safe.
Claudia nodded, an almost imperceptible movement of her head. Staying down as he wanted, but dangerously near to the shrapnel zone.
Weak, but take it… Take what you need.
He sensed the hesitation. Twice now he almost drained her, this time might be the last. Tharius reined in his dragon with a sharp command. It took little notice, sending out greedy feelers for the energy rippling between them in a wavering invisible line.
He read her intent to send whatever energy she might spare. Saw the flare of her eyes, felt the small jolt as she took in his appearance.
It shocked her, no mistaking that.
It’s like a wyvern in half-shift. She must have encountered wyverns in that state.
Claudia, don’t be afraid.
I’m not. Can you take the cameras down?
Cover your head. I can fell the camera with a rock.
He knew about the vulnerable corners. Likely, the invaders had corrected that weakness in his two hundred years asleep. The eye waited for his move, watching with an almost cynical interest.
Odd how these mechanical contraptions took on the aspects of sentient beings, at times.
No rocks large enough scattered about the courtyard, only flat slabs embedded into the mountain plateau. The low walls at the courtyard edge were of dry stone construction, put together like an interlocking puzzle. One might be large enough. Tharius chose his missile, grasping a flat coping stone with his flayed fingers. Claudia pressed into the wall, both hands covering her head.
The flat stone spun at the eye, flying on past to land somewhere behind the wall. A calculated miss to throw it off balance, giving him time to secure a thinner, more nimble stone to slice into a corner blinking with coloured lights.
Claudia rolled from the wall, tucking into its protective shadow. They made a good team.
Or did she simply fall?
Cut the connection, I’m losing focus. He couldn’t think of her now.
No control over it, sorry.
The rock bounced off the corner, landing perilously close to where Claudia had been sprawled. A thousand dark oaths spun through his mind, a hit like that had never failed to incapacitate the smaller, angular eyes.
Claudia and a hefty dose of dragon pride stopped him from running. As a soldier, he did not fear death in battle. Once the invaders came, he lived daily with this resignation to his fate, praying only that he never disgraced the Chatra marks adorning his body and that the gods sent swift wings to bear him to the other plane.
He’d honoured the marks. Waited in vain for transition. Now given this second chance at vengeance, his male side found a strange reluctance to re-take the path of martyrdom. With no backup from his troops, saving Claudia fell to him alone. And for that, he must live.
Why didn’t it go down when he’d hit at its most vulnerable point? Were the angular eyes so much stronger, no
w?
The camera swooped, screeching out a high-pitched whine that made the stones, every cell in his body, vibrate.
For one long breath, it seemed to look him directly in the eye. No dragon stood down from a direct challenge. His dragon gave right back, eye colour deepening to a purple so dark it was almost black.
Tharius, get down.
He went rigid instead, the dragon too strong for the emerging male to control. Its aura ghosted around him, giving that familiar sense of false security.
“Another blue? Interesting…”
The thin whine of the voice startled him. Not Claudia. Another voice speaking his tongue.
His gaze flicked from left to right, looking for hidden assailants. No one. A blast of incomprehensible sound blasted from the eye, so keen he slapped his good hand over one ear.
It was the box speaking. Move, Tharius, move. He reacted instinctively to the emphatic voice of Claudia’s command, throwing himself sideways at the wall bounding the point where the courtyard dropped vertically into a deep chasm. She’d make a good battle commander. Skin flayed from his shoulders and thighs as he skidded into the shelter of the wall. Only the mitigating half-shift, the leathery, dragon skin, stopped him scraping down to muscle and bone.
That thing was about to blow. But it spoke. During the wars the eyes watched and sometimes made small bleeps and crackles, but this one spoke to him.
Another blue, it said. His family colours. They had seen another blue, like him.
The camera whine rattled the very mountain itself, and then it splintered and exploded into a metal downpour.
Chapter Ten
He was…magnificent.
Claudia waited for the last of the shrapnel to fall, more stunned by the vision of Tharius as half dragon, half man than the two explosions charging the space between them, setting every one of her nerve endings alight.
Uncurling carefully, she breathed in the electric energy, tapping into the invisible waves hanging on the air. A useful trick taught to her by a guru she met on a trek in the Himalayas. She shook her head against the ringing in her ears, and sought out Tharius, pressed into the low wall fronting a sheer drop.
He tried to shift too soon after waking. Typical male.
Moving, raising his head, his purple gaze met hers and she could only stare, her mind grappling for words to describe the powerful giant whose skin glimmered with patches of iridescent blues, highlighting the inked swirls covering his arms, chest and hips.
Her gaze fell lower as he stood to his full height.
The very naked giant.
Her eyes must look wide as the full moons. She smiled and dipped her head to check for shrapnel injuries. That camera exploded too close for comfort, but Tharius made the right call. His shadow loomed over her.
What did she call him in this state? Wyverns employed the Inkabutu when they needed the strength of the creature and the dexterity and proportions of the male. She had so many questions, making communication crucial. Tharius crouched at her side, one hand reaching out to touch her cheek so gently it whispered a question onto her skin.
“Are you hurt, female Claudia?”
“I’m fine.” Stop staring. You’ve seen a naked man before. The thought flitted through her mind and she saw the moment it jumped between them and settled in his. The almost luminous, purple eyes narrowed in confusion, as if trying to work out what she said. Whether her flustered panic was because of the explosion, or something new.
Okay, no avoiding that gloriously naked body. How many times had she seen the wyverns shifted and strutting straight from the brothel tents to the campfire to help themselves to ale after their exertions?
No need to play the coy maiden, but heavens, a man like Tharius, charged with such rampant sexual energy, would make any woman look.
It’s the drama. How any male would respond to this level of danger.
“Tharius, we should go.” She pointed to the path flanking the courtyard. The temple sat on a plateau, and behind it the mountain rose in another stiff climb to the peaks. A path wound around the higher slopes, dipping down to a forested area of muted purples and greens.
Tharius’s eyes lifted, following the line of her arm. A slight movement of his head, which she chose to interpret as a nod, and he turned his attention back to her.
“You fear the flying eyes? You need not. I can kill them.”
“More will come. More than you can kill.” Claudia huffed out her frustration. How to make him understand? He showed no surprise at seeing the orb, or the larger square box. Attacked like a man used to disabling them. The only flash of surprise was when the box spoke to him.
The fingers curved over her cheek and chin, moving lower to trace the line of her neck.
Learning her by touch.
Tharius cupped her shoulder, staring at his hand as if fitting it carefully to her shape. Claudia swallowed down the sudden zing of sparks low in her belly.
Adrenaline. Not because she had a dragon-man putting her in thrall to him with the merest tips of his fingers.
A moment. Just a moment to process and fit what she was seeing with the fragments of Tharius floating around her head.
A man’s eyes, but the deepest shade of purple, the black pupils long slits, not round like a human. A strong nose, a man’s mouth, filled with curved sharpened teeth that spoke unmistakeably of what he was. She was used to the wyverns shifting in front of the camp women, showing off their ability to be both beast and male, and sometimes hybrid. No comparison. They were never this beautiful.
In male form, dragon, or in between, the wyvern had good cause to envy their dragon cousins.
“And you? You’ve skinned your knuckles...”
Tharius tipped his head, eyes crinkling, as if trying to make sense of her words. His fingers came to rest flat against the hollow at the base of her throat where her pulse beat out a crazy tune. Deftly, he flicked open the ties securing the cloak, smoothing it from the scooped neck of her simple gown.
“I do not understand your tongue. You must learn mine.”
In this shape, she saw how the broken wing affected his male form. His right arm hung close to his side, the fingers twisted into a frozen fist.
Friction burns glowed over his biceps and thighs from the skid across the courtyard. The healer in her reached out almost without thought.
“Your skin. Let me send you healing.”
She meant later. When they were away from here and hidden from the Corporation spies. But the burn in his dark gaze, the slow turn of his head towards her seeking fingers, said now, do it now.
Healing energy flowed from her palm, seeking out his hurt. Familiar warmth radiated between them, heating and drawing them together. Tharius tipped back his head, exposing the long line of his throat, the corded tendons in perfect trust. So close, the hard line of his cock teased her thigh.
No denying the connection went further than mind reading and healing. Intense sensuality radiated from every pore, from the way he looked at her, the slow exploration of his touch.
When he lowered his head, she caught his eye. Tharius nodded, his mouth stretching slightly to reveal his shortened dragon teeth. His fingers slid lower, over the stiff hide gown, brushing her breast. He squeezed gently, encouraging her to lean into his touch.
“We really ought to be moving.” Her gaze fell to the pack, lying discarded on the courtyard stones.
“You are much like our females in shifted form. Like the beings who worshipped us as gods. Your skin vibrates against my touch. Your blood sings, yet not from fear.”
“You don’t frighten me, Tharius.”
You just get me really hot and bothered. And stop that, we have to move.
I get you... The thought trailed off. As if he half understood. “My mate’s heart pounded when I touched her. Yet, I never felt this quickening, this flow of my essence into another.”
Of course he had a mate. A man like this wouldn’t be sitting on the shelf for long.
&nbs
p; “It’s probably the healing.” Not the most pleasant side effect of her work, but she’d learned how to cope with the men whose bodies decided another part of them entirely needed healing, and weren’t shy about letting her know.
“It is sometimes so between the Draegon.” Tharius laughed - a low, rusty sound. His teeth flashed in the brightening sunshine. “Those were the lucky ones. Tell me, female Claudia, why do I sense dragon in you?”
“You feel it?”
“Why do I feel the heat of an ember deep inside you? It should not be.”
Claudia shrugged and raised both hands. How could she explain something she didn’t understand herself?
“No matter, we will explore this further, female. Now, you are distracting me, when we must leave this place.”
“I’m distracting you?” Tharius let go, extending his good hand to help her up. No visible signs of any healing to his injured arm. That was going to take some work.
“You would deny that this connection between us is more than lust?” He hauled her upright with no more effort than he might expend lifting a feather. The cloak lay sodden on the damp stones.
“You’re the second person to tell me I might have dragon in me. Forgive me for taking a while to come to terms with that. Take the cloak, Tharius. You can’t wander around naked.”
Tharius fingered the roughly woven cloth. Thrust it back at her. “You wish me to wear this? Why, when you are of such a delicate nature, and I have no need of it?”
Because that giant cock of yours is blowing my mind. Making me think things I shouldn’t.
Tharius looked down, frowned.
“It might draw undue attention to us.” She pushed the cloak at him, refusing to take it back. “Cloak,” she said deliberately. “This is a cloak.”
“Clo-ak?” He took it from her, eyeing it with distrust. “I need you, Claudia. Need your powers. You must not sicken on me.”
“Caobere? Is that how you say it in your dragon tongue? It was difficult to pick out the shadows of his words, the sound of them in his own tongue, when the translation chip rendered everything into English or Italian.
STONE DRAGON: A Prison Moon Series Romance Novel Page 10