Dragul Dawn
Marie Treanor
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Copyright ©2007 Marie Treanor
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ISBN: 978-1-59596-701-5
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Editor: Crystal Esau
Cover Artist: Zuri
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Dragul Dawn
Marie Treanor
The Dragul are as old as the Earth. Once, they retreated before the ignorant onslaught of men. But now they’re back.
As the world recovers from nuclear holocaust, two cities vie for the right to colonize the empty Highlands. Beth, a restless scientist from the City of the Damned, is sent to test the environment. When she encounters the living embodiment of her erotic dreams -- a golden, winged man -- her whole life is thrown into confusion.
Aurel is the powerful Keeper of the Laws for the rebel Dragul Kingdom. He will use any means to prevent colonization, including the sexual disturbance he causes in Beth…
Prologue
The shadow outside spread its wings across her bedroom window, filling her with intense joy. She sat up in bed, smiling her welcome, and the shadow folded and shimmered through the darkness until it rested instead on the inside.
Not a huge bat or a rare golden eagle as she had once stupidly imagined him, but a beautiful, winged man -- her winged man, totally and gorgeously naked.
Gracefully, he folded his wings behind him like a cloak, and stood very still, consuming her with his dark, grey eyes. Eyes that glistened with lust and power in equal measure. Eyes that melted her with memory and anticipation.
Instinctively, she reached up her trembling arms for him, urgent, pleading, and he smiled, moving at last toward her with slow, sensuous grace.
The bed sank under his weight, but he didn’t allow her embrace. Instead, he took both her hands and laid them on his hot, hard cock. Her breath caught. Without intending to, she wrapped her hands more securely around the huge, still-growing shaft and squeezed. A faint twitch of the lips was the only acknowledgement he gave. His own hands had already pulled open the tie of her night shirt, exposing her breasts.
With slow deliberation, he reached out to stroke her nipple. Instantly, it hardened into a begging peak. He lowered his golden head and covered it with his mouth, languorously sucking. At the same time, he took her other breast in his hand and kneaded it until she moaned aloud, tugging his cock in unconscious reflex.
He moved then, with easy, overwhelming strength that brushed aside her hands and brooked no argument -- not that he was getting one. Fluidly, he pressed her back into the pillows and covered her with his big body, parting her legs with his knee so that he could push his massive cock inside her.
She gasped at the first contact, whimpered as he entered her, then moaned with sheer, unbearable pleasure as he slid slowly all the way inside. Always, it was this way when he came to her. His hands set her on fire. She began to come as soon as he touched her pussy. Yet he carried on pleasuring her as he did now, stirring her in leisurely fashion with the circular caresses of his cock, while he dragged his teeth across her throat to tease and bite her nape. And all the while, his bold, sensitive fingers plundered her breasts.
Deep in the throes of the orgasm that seemed to go on forever, she raked her fingers through his hair, pulling it loose from the thread that confined it, and driving on around his neck and shoulders to his back. She found his wings, hard and leathery to the touch, and for the first time, his breath quickened obviously. He thrust into her a little harder, and her convulsing pussy tried to hold him, massage him. Her pleasure heightened impossibly, engulfing her in another tidal wave. Crying out, she reached below his wing to that gossamer soft underside, delicate as a bee’s wing, and stroked.
A sound like a growl came from his throat. He ground his hips so closely into hers, she thought they would merge. Pressing back, she grasped some remaining self-control and squeezed him. He groaned as he pulled back and thrust, pulled back and thrust, slowly still, yet with new, determined power that ravished her all over again. Still caressing his gorgeous wing with one hand, she reached further down with her other until she found his tight, thrusting buttocks and pressed him into her as she bucked her hips upward into his.
She cried out again as his teeth nipped her neck, burying her own in the hot, damp skin of his shoulder. His rhythm increased, pounding her as she lay helpless beneath him in a massive avalanche of bliss. When his groans of pleasure became that ultimate shout of triumph, it was so loud she was sure her parents would hear, and yet she could no more think of stopping him, or herself, than she could give up breathing.
Slowly, he lifted his mouth from her neck, his face still clouded with passion, his eyes misted and blind with sexual pleasure as they gazed down into hers. But only when the embers of the fire died down did he finally lower his head once more and take her mouth in his for a first kiss.
It was enough to seduce her sated body once more. Feeling it, he smiled against her lips, licked them, drove his tongue into her mouth.
“Again,” he commanded, his deep, low voice sending fresh shivers of anticipation coursing through her entire body, coming to rest at last on the part of her that gripped his still bone-hard shaft. His hand swept down the length of her thigh and back up on the inside until his fingers found her pussy and teased around the skin that wrapped him. “I’m going to make you come again.”
A moan broke from her mouth into his, half anticipation, half plea. Words, it seemed, were beyond her.
And then the light snapped on.
Her mother’s voice said, “Beth? Are you all right?”
Her heart thundered in her breast. Her nipples ached. Between her legs was wetness, hot pleasure and raging desire. But her arms were empty.
“Beth?”
Under her mother’s concern, she had to squeeze her eyes shut and pretend it was the light that bothered her.
“I’m sorry,” she managed. “I was dreaming.”
“Again?” Frowning, April sank down on the bed, in exactly the spot he had first sat. “What was it this time?”
A pause, then: “I don’t remember. I never remember.”
But she did. She always remembered. Every look, every tiny caress, every massive pleasure. The trouble was, she couldn’t go on like this, living vicariously through wild, sexy dreams. She needed a real lover. It was time to forget the shadow, her beautiful winged man, and move on.
And fortunately, she was not the helpless, passive slave to passion that she always was in her dreams. She was strong, the daughter of two gifted parents, and she knew how to forget. All she really needed was the will.
Chapter One
“I must say, you’re not what I expected.”
Crouched on the ground to pack up the last of her equipment, Beth cast the speaker a quizzical look. “Because I don’t have two heads or bark like a dog?”
Niall flushed slightly in the pale light of the early dawn. It made him quit
e appealing. “Well, you must know you City dwellers have a reputation for -- er -- strangeness.”
With a lop-sided smile, Beth stood up. “Use the m-word, Niall. Where I come from, it’s not an insult.”
“Especially when you’re not,” Niall said hastily. “Mutant, I mean.”
“I know what you mean.” And you still might be surprised to run across my old mum during a full moon.
Reaching up, she dragged her fair hair back behind her head and wound an old blue ribbon around it with the ease of long practice. She was aware of his lingering gaze, half-fascinated, half-admiring. It was how he’d regarded her since they’d first met in the inn outside the City and begun their northward journey. She wouldn’t have minded, if it hadn’t been for the hint of fear behind the eyes that somehow had never dissipated, even with three days spent in her unthreatening company.
She dropped her arms to her side and reached for her bag. As she swung it onto her back, she couldn’t help glancing up at the tether. A technician she knew well stood in the open doorway of the carriage, clip-board in hand. He lifted it to her in salute and she smiled, dipping her head in return.
“Amazing thing,” Niall murmured. He too stared upward at the tall construction disappearing into the distant sky. Beth, who never looked beyond the height at which the car now stood, turned away. Just thinking how high it went made her dizzy.
A small settlement had grown up around the space elevator. There were only a few houses, temporary homes for the scientists and technicians who took turns to maintain the tether and monitor the atmosphere, occasionally sending more ionized gasses up to further clean the sky.
Without the tether, it was hard to see how she could have watched the sun rise this morning. Without it, the world would still be in permanent darkness and anarchy.
“Yes,” she agreed briefly. The very thought of her father going up in it the first time still made her feel physically sick. “So -- are you ready for this?”
“Sure.”
“Good. Let’s do it as quickly as possible then. You take the west side and I’ll take the east. Or the other way round,” she finished dryly, at the unhappy expression which dawned on his square, handsome face.
“I think we’d be better doing it together,” he said carefully.
“Why? Collecting samples is hardly a two-person job! No point in one of us going along just to twiddle our thumbs or -- oh. I see.” Understanding, she gave a sardonic grin. “You want to make sure I can do it properly? Because I didn’t go to school, or university, whatever you call it, in your Dome? You think I’m just along because the City has jurisdiction over this land, not because I’m any kind of scientist?”
“Beth, I didn’t mean to imply any such --”
She smiled. “Yes you did.” She shrugged. “You’ll just have to take my word for it, Niall. I’ve been measuring radiation poisoning of one kind or another for most of my life. I’ll meet you back here tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” Now he was genuinely startled. “You plan to sleep out there?”
Beth laughed. “Why not? There’s nothing to be afraid of -- no one’s lived here for more than fifty years! Even the animals moved out. You’ve got your sleeping bag, haven’t you? Cheer up, you’ll be home in a week.”
And with that, she strode away from him, heading directly for the hills.
Niall watched her go with mingled resentment and frustration. She was right: he wasn’t used to working outside, away from what he regarded as safety. It might have been true that nothing lived in the country beyond the tether anymore, but that didn’t make it seem any safer to him.
Nor did it seem safe for her. A slip of a girl, not even a scientist, whatever she was pretending to him. So she could use the antiquated instruments in her bag, take accurate enough readings from them -- if they worked reliably -- and collect samples without knowingly contaminating them. But -- she was just a girl without any training. A girl whose parents, he had heard, had powerful influence in the City of the Damned, the only city that still held out against the Dome’s superior leadership.
The City thought that because it had discovered the tether and sent up the first cleansing ionized gas that it should remain at best independent. At worst, a rival power.
And let’s face it, Niall thought grimly, no one but the Dome should be allowed to keep possession of so valuable a commodity as the tether…
* * *
Beth strode out with some purpose, as if trying to shake the dust of Niall’s amiable disparagement from her feet. She knew it was laughable. She had grown up among people so remarkable that she’d learned very quickly how to tell the seed from the chaff, the ordinary from the special. And Niall, she knew to be merely ordinary. And yet she’d wanted him to like her, to value her. Pathetic as it might sound. No doubt that too came from growing up among people so very remarkable.
Laughing at herself, she walked into the pale, golden gleam of the rising sun as it peeped between the summits of the eastern hills. She raised her hand to shield her eyes and gazed directly into it.
Her step faltered.
Someone stood at the top of the hill.
This land is empty!
Yet there he stood. A tall, slender figure with a glowing golden aura like a halo around his head, something like a black cloak falling from his shoulders to his ankles. A shape peculiarly familiar to her.
Her heart lurched. In an old, self-protective gesture from childhood, one hand flew to her throat, the other to her stomach.
She blinked, shaking her head to clear it. And when she opened her eyes, the figure had gone.
“You’re dreaming, Beth,” she chided herself.
Yet why should she think of that dream now? She hadn’t had it for years, not since she’d chosen not to. The beautiful, sexy man with the cloak-like wings was a fantasy of her seventeen-year-old self, not the reality of a grown woman, a scientist who knew she was at least the equal of “Doctor Niall” from the Dome.
Several hours later, she placed her third soil sample away in her bag, and walked thoughtfully down to the stream. She began to think that maybe she should have let Niall come with her, if only to have access to his newer instruments, for she doubted now that hers were working. According to them, there was no excess radiation in the soil or the plant-life. None at all. Which was so unlikely as to be impossible.
Even if this area had escaped the worst exposure of the war, it had still sustained enough damage to send the people who’d once lived here scurrying for cover. Now, it was not contaminated at all, not even as much as the area around the tether which had been deliberately treated. No one had treated the hills, and yet they were clean.
According to her ancient instrument. No doubt a proper laboratory test of the samples would tell a different story.
The stream, when she came to it, looked pure and sparkly in the mid-day sunshine, so much so that Beth knew a powerful urge to taste it. Smiling to herself, she scooped some into a jar, closed the lid and put it in her bag. Running the counter over the surrounding ground, hovering it over the stream itself, produced the same silence. No radiation.
Getting to her feet, she followed the stream uphill, counter still in hand, still getting nothing. Meaning to take another sample when she found the stream’s source, she paused to look around her.
It was beautiful up here, peaceful, silent apart from the singing birds… And if there were birds, maybe there were animals too. Maybe wolves… No one working at the tether had ever seen any sign of other living creatures beyond the tether, but despite what she’d said to Niall, that was hardly conclusive proof. On their journey together she had made sure he knew enough to light a fire when camping out -- she just hoped he bothered without her to nag him.
Without warning, someone else’s pain invaded the rambling of her thoughts. Pain, and fear, and a pitiful call for help, rising to a crescendo that made her gasp, and then fading quickly away to silence, as if to sleep. Or death.
Shit.
Well, she’d discovered one thing -- there was life out here. That wasn’t Niall’s pain she sensed. Nor was it an animal’s. In fact, she wasn’t sure what it was; its thoughts were curiously un-verbal…
Cursing under her breath, Beth tried to concentrate her feeble powers of telepathy, to re-connect, to find the source. Eyes closed, she wished for the first time that she’d tried harder at this, spent more time with Will…
It was close. She sensed that much, a quiet despair fluttering outward without clear intention or destination. Beth moved quickly up the hill, over uneven clumps of coarse grass and springy heather, using her eyes as well as her head to seek.
Approaching the summit, her step faltered. Slowly, she drew in her breath.
Below her stretched a lush, green valley, with tall trees scattered in pleasing clumps. Two broad streams converged in a bubbling third, which led on into another valley that she could only glimpse. Somehow, she didn’t need instruments or samples to tell her that this land was not only clean -- it was pure. The very air was different, clear, bright, almost palpable.
“Jesus,” she whispered. Something had happened here, something was happening here…
“Hello?” she called out. “Where are you?”
A wild fluttering of the frightened mind reached out to her with blind instinct, and then, just as quickly, was dragged back as if deliberately silenced. It didn’t matter, it was enough. Beth ran back down, but away from the stream now, over a clump of hillocks -- and there she found the child.
It was a boy, maybe eight or nine years old.
Half sitting, half lying between two hillocks that hid him from easy sight, he stared up at her, white-faced, blocking his mind, although pain and fear still trickled out of him like tears.
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