Ashes and Flame

by Aiden Bates

  But here it was.

  I reached up and removed the strap from my shoulder. Let the bag fall, as unburned as we were.

  “Mate,” I breathed.

  He kissed my neck, my ear, my cheek—my lips. “Mate,” he agreed. “Say yes. Please.”

  I swallowed, gave a weak nod, then a stronger one. “Okay. Okay—yes. I’ll be your mate.”

  I thought that he would bite me, then and there. That he would claim me and we would... I don’t know. Get on with being mates?

  Instead, he kissed me hard and deep, his tongue driving into my mouth. It was aggressive, forceful, overwhelming. It stole my breath, made the fire burn brighter. He pulled me, and I followed him to the ground. His hands were insistent and strong, and he pulled me up along his stomach, his chest, until finally he braced me over his face.

  Then his tongue found my hole, and dove deep, probing and lashing. The fire around us turned blue-white, incandescent. I couldn’t see beyond it. We seemed to burn in the heart of a star, the whole of creation on fire around us. I arched my back, grabbed his knees to keep from falling, and rode his mouth as he devoured me, bit me, licked me, slicked me up faster than the fire burned his spit away. I writhed, squirmed, and thought I would have bruises from the grip of his fingers digging into my hips and ass to hold me in position.

  It went on until every breath I let out was a wail of pleasure, until parts of me had turned liquid, and I had no control over my nerves. And when I began to think that he could finish me like this, just with his tongue, just by teasing and punishing that bare square inch of skin and nerves, he urged me to his cock and pressed the head of it to my opening. I reached back, steadied him, milked up to earn a gush of precum to add to his spit before the fire dried it, and then sank down onto him with a howl.

  The pain didn’t last long. The stretch of taking him hurt, but the ache was consumed in the fire like everything else, until the ground below us began to vitrify, melting to a pool of glass around us. He drove deep, until I felt his knot swelling. I pushed with him, pressing down, trying to take all of him. He roared, pawed at my hips, pulled at my shoulder, and bucked, lifting his hips from the burning earth until he was inside me, swelling fast.

  That knot hit my prostate, and with a snarl and a fierce, toothy grin, my dragon—my mate even if he hadn’t bitten me yet—hammered into me. “Burn,” he shouted over the fire. “Burn for me, beautiful boy!”

  I screamed, rode him, worked my prostate against his knot, squeezed tight around him. “Daddy,” I wailed. “Fuck... it’s... it feels too... too good...”

  “You’re so fucking hot,” he called back. “Burn brighter, baby. Burn hotter. Take me. Fucking take me, take everything. Burn all of it.”

  I bounced on him as his hips tossed me, his knot pulling at the inside of me but too swollen to escape. Every pulse of his body drove me wilder. I looked down, saw the light in his eyes, saw his scales emerging, first glinting in the flower of fire that danced around us, matching our movements, and then glowing. His muscles bulged. His jaw widened. Eyebrows became a line of thin, smooth scales that pressed out into short spines. Inside me, his cock grew with him, reaching deeper, swelling wider, until I wasn’t sure I could take more. But his knot jammed against my gland and worked it deeper, and the pressure was too much.

  He threw his half-saurian head back. And bucked into me. I felt him swell and jerk. Even in this heat, I felt the splash of him inside me. I clawed at the scales of his belly, and gave a long, high-pitched cry of that mixed fear, relief, and pleasure as my cock jerked, and gave up a stifled trickle. Molten pleasure pounded my nerves, shook my bones, burned what couldn’t be burned.

  The fire turned white, and blinding. I couldn’t see Rez when he surged up and wrapped his arms around me. I didn’t see his eyes when he kissed me. I couldn’t hear the word that vibrated against my neck when he nudged my head to one side. But I felt it when he bit me.

  The moment his jaws clamped down, his cock jerked inside me, and another gush of warmth filled me. A bolt of tender lightning seared through me, struck my gut, at the place where Laleh had reached in and pulled out a piece of my soul. The creeping, tingling, inaccessible ache that she’d left behind soothed, grew warm, and calmed. Something fit into place, and in a flash of relief, I knew what it meant to be whole.

  I clung to Rez, I rode him, squeezed him. I let his knot work against me, drive me over again. I wept boiling tears, and pressed my cheek to his scaled neck and sobbed with the force of the joy that filled me.

  I wasn’t alone. I knew it like I had never known it before. Like I never imagined I would feel it.

  I was his now.

  And now that I knew it, nothing else mattered.

  23

  Rez

  When the fire finally flickered and sighed and faded away from us, I lay on my back on a bed of fused rock and sand, my scales still incandescent from Daniel’s magic as they withdrew slowly from my skin. Daniel’s knees held me tight at the waist, his breathing easy and deep as he curled against my chest. Nix had told me what it was like to have a mate. To have claimed Mikhail. Like he had a new limb. A new part of him that he recognized as clearly as he recognized his own face in the mirror, or his own hand when he looked down at it. A kind of certainty that went far beyond words, beyond feelings even, and certainly beyond conscious thought or awareness. It just was. Now and forever.

  Holding Daniel didn’t feel like holding another person now. It felt like holding myself together. As if letting him go would be the same thing as letting my arm fall off.

  It took time for my eyes to clear, and when they did, I looked around us to discover that we were on a kind of small mesa, maybe a few inches high, in the midst of a blackened, shiny crater maybe thirty feet wide. The edge of it nearly reached our little camp.

  For a moment, I imagined a crater like this in the weyr. Maybe Daniel was right. Maybe there was no future for us there. We’d figure it out, though, one way or another. I knew that, and that was enough for the moment.

  It took a long time for my knot to relax. Long enough that the sun began to set. When I finally pulled out of him, he was asleep on my chest, and I gave him a gentle nudge to rouse him. “Wake up, mate,” I murmured, stroking his hair and his back. “Hey—how you feeling?”

  He pushed against my chest to sit up, and looked down at me with an uncertain sort of smile. “It’s you.”

  I grinned. “Yeah. Still. You think it was someone else?”

  “No, not that,” he said, and swept his hair behind his ear and then over his shoulder and his brow furrowed. “But… you’re different.”

  “So are you,” I told him, and trailed my fingers over his chest, and along his shoulder where I’d bitten him. “We both are. We’re mates now. You’re probably feeling what I am. Like you’re—”

  “Part of me,” he breathed. “I didn’t know it would feel like that.”

  “Neither did I,” I admitted. “It’s not the sort of thing that’s easy to put into words, so… no one really knows until they do it, I guess.”

  “Do you regret it?” he asked.

  I pushed, careful not to topple us off our little mesa, and slipped my arms around his waist to steady him on my lap. “Daniel. Of course not. You don’t, do you?”

  He shook his head slowly, his eyes still almost glowing with wonder. “No. I kind of feel like I really see you. Like I didn’t before. Not really. And I can sort of tell that you see me, too.”

  I brushed my nose against his. “Promise you, Daniel,” I said softly against his lips, “from now on, you’ll never be alone. You’ll have me always.”

  “I know,” he said, his voice thick. “Fuck. Rez… I… I love you. I did before, I just—”

  “It’s okay,” I chuckled, and kissed him, and if circumstances were different I’d have laid him down on something soft to make love to him all over again. “You don’t ever have to explain to me. All I need from you, sweet boy, is to just let me love you and make you ha
ppy. As much as I can.”

  He nodded. “Okay. If you’ll let me, then, I guess I can agree to that.”

  He looked around finally, and exhaled a long breath that I thought made him seem almost impressed with himself. “I did this?”

  “You were inspired, I guess,” I said, and winked at him, growled, and kissed his collarbone. “Guess it’s like you said—rub two sticks together…”

  He gasped at my kisses, laughed softly for me, and ultimately cleared his throat. “Well, I… think I may need to dig a hole somewhere? Help me get back to camp, I don’t think my knees are ready to walk.”

  “I got you,” I told him, and hauled him up and around my waist as I rose and staggered across the blast site and back to camp with him in my arms.

  “That’s… big,” Daniel breathed as we left the crater. “I can’t believe it didn’t kill us or something.”

  Honestly, I was a little surprised myself. I was fireproof, of course—but only to a point. For a bit there, it had seemed like we were in the heart of a star. And the kind of heat that could do what Daniel did…

  There had been something else to it. Had to have been. But what it was, I couldn’t possibly have even tried to explain. Maybe Amy, if we asked her, or some other mage. All I knew was that there was potential in Daniel that would have been terrifying if I didn’t think it was the most beautiful, special thing in existence.

  My own little star, around which I would revolve until I died, breathing in the light that he shined. It was hard to be afraid of that.

  I set him down where the fire had first started. The rocks were singed, and the hunks of campfire fuel I’d used to cook were ashes that blew away on a breeze. The grill was ruined, half of it wilted like a flower in the dry heat. “Damn,” he muttered when he saw it, and shot me an apologetic glance. “Sorry. Shit, did the dummy tent—”

  I pointed. “Still in one piece. Don’t think anything’s been messed up. But—it’s getting dark. We should probably hurry and make sure we’re prepared, just in case we have a visitor. Although, if I saw a display like that, frankly I’d run back to my boss and tell him to go fuck himself.”

  “Not if you knew how I felt,” he said as he dipped into the bag of general supplies and shyly extracted a small camp shovel and a pack of toilet paper. “I don’t think I could burn dry kindling at the moment. Um… I’ll be back. Don’t like—sniff, or listen or anything.”

  I snorted, rolled my eyes and waved him off, and watched him trot naked and beautiful off into the desert behind our tent.

  Afterglow still had me in its grip, teasing me with a pleasant soreness in my cock, and a dull, distant ache in my drained balls. But it mixed together with mounting tension as I looked around the camp and gave the dummy tent long consideration. It would work. The plan would go off without a hitch. It had to. Even if we had to sit out here for another week, the djinn would have to come eventually—that, or give up.

  But we weren’t really set up for another week. And even if I could hunt, and we could cook our own meat without much trouble—doing it would mean leaving Daniel while I did.

  What we needed was more than just a trap and an opportunity. We needed a lure. Something that would be too enticing for the bastard to ignore. I looked down at Daniel’s bag—as untouched by the fire as we were. For the first time since I’d known him, he had set it down and walked away from it. That meant something, maybe. Maybe it was just trust. Maybe something more. I didn’t know.

  But I did know that it was the book the djinn really wanted.

  “I… don’t know,” Daniel said a bit later, as the sun finally began to slip down and out of sight, and I made my proposal. He’d picked the bag back up after he got dressed in his last set of clothes that weren’t burnt to shit. Now, it rested on his lap, his fingers picking at the seams as he looked down at it. “I mean… if it doesn’t work, or something I don’t expect happens—I’ve never tried to trap a djinn before, if I did it wrong, it could grab the book and run. I don’t know what happens if I can’t get to it, if I can’t keep reading, but I don’t think it will be good.”

  “All right,” I said, my hands up. “But… what if this thing doesn’t have a timeframe to work on? What if it can wait us out? We could be here a long, long time. And I’m okay with that—but we’ll always be waiting, looking over our shoulders, expecting it to drop on us any second. I’ll probably have some warning, but that waiting and running has already worn you down. We’ve got to find a way to make it our fight.”

  He sighed, and watched the small fire I’d made as it crackled in the cooling evening. Neither of us really needed the warmth, but only one of us could see in the dark. “I know that you’re right,” he said. “It’s just a big risk. Bigger than any I’ve taken.”

  “You just took a giant risk on me,” I pointed out.

  He smiled. “Yeah. Well… I don’t know I’d call it that. You’re a pretty sure bet. Even if you do make bad decisions.”

  I let him have that, but only because he flashed me that pretty smile to go with it. “Do you trust me?”

  He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he stared down at the bag for a long moment. But at length, he looked up, and nodded. “I trust that you’ll look out for me,” he said. “And that you won’t hurt me. But I’m worried that we don’t know enough about it. How it will come, how it fights. I’ve never faced it head on, Rez. I always run, and hide, and pull some trick that can buy me a few days. We know it’s nervous about you, and that it was probably nervous about Amy. It’s not that I don’t trust your plan, but… I think that if we’re going to draw it out, we need more than just good bait. We need to give it the opportunity. Make it think that if it strikes, it can get what it wants. I think we can do that without risking the book.”

  “If you have a plan, I’m all ears,” I said.

  He held his breath, bit his lip, and gave me a look that said I wasn’t going to like his suggestion. “I think you have to leave me alone.”

  “Any plan but that,” I said firmly. “No way am I leaving you, that’s out of the question, we can—”

  “Just hear me out,” he said. “Look… we’re mates now. I didn’t know what that would mean when you asked me, to be honest, but I’m glad that you claimed me. I’m glad that I belong. To you. That you belong to me. And I think that if we have to live our lives out here, away from everyone and everything, then it wouldn’t matter because as long as I’m with you, I will always feel that—that I’m not alone. That I have you. That will be enough. Gods know, it’s more than I’ve ever had before. But I do want more than that. And you made the right point. We’ll always be waiting. Everything about our life together, our love—it will all be stained by that fear. I want to be done. I want this to be over. Even if there will be other fights to fight, this one I’ve run away from long enough, and for the first time I feel like maybe I can actually fight back. Give me that chance, Rez.”

  My stomach twisted with worry about what he would say, but he wasn’t wrong. It was our fight now, but he’d been at it a lot longer. And he wasn’t helpless now. He’d managed to tap his potential, find his confidence and his worth—both things that I wanted for him. So now that he wanted to use them, what was I supposed to do? Keep him under my wing by force? “Tell me exactly what the plan would be,” I said slowly. “I’m not agreeing, but… I’m listening.”

  He smiled, and put a hand on my knee. “Thank you.” His eyes drifted up to the sky, where there were the first hints of clouds off to the south and east that looked heavy enough to make it to us, if they were fast. “How long can you stay up there? And how fast are you? How high can you go?”

  I grimaced, pretty sure I had an idea of where he was going with that line of questioning. But I answered honestly. “If the air’s good,” I said, “a long time. And I’m very fast. And I can go high. High enough. What do you want to do?”

  Daniel’s grin was wide, and fierce. “I want to burn bright enough to see from miles away.”
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br />   24

  Daniel

  When I explained my plan to Rez, I had been confident. I had stayed confident while I argued the merits, and laid out my thinking, and painstakingly addressed every question and detail. It wasn’t that complicated a plan, but for all his straightforward mindset usually seemed to grasp things in simple terms, Rez could really overcomplicate something when he put his mind to it. Still, I got him to agree to it eventually.

  Now that I was sitting in the desert in a tent on my own, the darkness seemed louder than it had been for all the nights we’d been out here. Every brush of a breeze against the tent made my heart race. The distant, occasional warble of a coyote set my teeth on edge. I sat stiff in the middle of the tent, on my knees, fighting the urge to shiver. I couldn’t afford to give in to fear. Not right now, and not for the time it took for this to work.

  We’d agreed—Rez could give me about fifty hours. That was as long as he could stay airborne, if he occasionally dipped down about ten thousand feet to catch his breath. He was almost four miles high, precariously close to commercial airspace, and taking a long circuit around. He was sleek in his dragon form, his scales smooth, his body shaped like a thick torpedo. Even so, it took over a minute to reach the ground from that height.

  A lot could happen in a minute.

  I closed my eyes, and took myself through every bit of exercise and advice that Amy had suggested. I was not my emotions. I was an observer, standing some distance away, watching them, selecting them consciously. It helped. I wasn’t in any danger of spontaneous combustion, but it was one thing to get my fire burning when I was safe and doing mental exercises to stir up this or that feeling for fuel. Faced with real danger, with a real need for that power, I wasn’t as confident as I had made myself sound to Rez.