Dragul Dawn

by Marie Treanor

  “I dreamed about your wings. I dreamed I made you come just by stroking them.”

  “But think what a waste that would be.”

  “Good point,” she admitted, continuing to explore his wings with exquisite thoroughness.

  He said breathlessly, “Aren’t you tired?”

  “I’m half lupi. Didn’t you know we are insatiable?”

  He groaned again, with sheer joy. “Oh thank you, Goddess!”

  The girl grinned, lying flat upon him, so that her breasts pressed into his side while she fondled his wings.

  “These are amazing,” she observed. “Like bees’ wings underneath, and bats’ wings on the outside…” She tugged at one gently until he let her unfold it. “It’s even got vestigial limbs… did your people once have six limbs?”

  “We think so. Long before we began to record our history.”

  She glanced at him, and for the first time since he’d taken her in the sky, a troubled expression entered her eyes. “You would be quite an eye-opener for evolutionary and genetic scientists.” She tried to make it light, a joke, and yet he caught the deeper meaning.

  “You are very interested in these matters in your city, because of the genetic mutations.”

  She nodded.

  Aurel said, “Life is cycles within cycles. We are all of the Earth.”

  Her eyes widened. Then, entrancingly, they melted, and she bent her head and kissed his mouth as if she had no intention of ever leaving it -- an ambition he did his best to foster.

  At last however, she came up for air. “You went all philosophical on me,” she observed.

  “Is there something else you’d rather I do?”

  She laughed deep in her throat. “Whatever you want,” she said clearly, and that was when she had slid down his body, trailing kisses and teasing licks around his tight, hard stomach until she came to his throbbing cock. She took it into her mouth quite naturally, caressing, arousing with teeth and tongue and lips. Only when she moved, with the clear intention of taking him deeper to finish the job, did he feel compelled to stop her delicious attentions, dragging her up his body and rolling so that now he loomed over her.

  “Enough,” he said. “Now it’s my turn.”

  Holding her hands spread out like wings at either side of her, he proceeded to plunder her body with his mouth. He began with her throat and shoulders. Then he spent a long, long time on her breasts, teasing the taut, hard peaks of her dusky nipples, sucking on them, caressing with his tongue and his naked chest until she actually bucked under his body, pleading.

  Triumphantly, he slid lower, still holding on to her hands, covering her navel with his mouth and kissing it, sucking the skin right into his mouth. As if intrigued by a novel sensation, Beth lay still. Aurel pushed his tongue deep inside the navel, exciting himself almost beyond endurance. It was her deeper, wetter, hotter hole he was desperate to fill, with his tongue and his fingers and his cock.

  Catching the suggestiveness of his tongue, Beth moaned. “No more teasing, Aurel. Come inside me,” she whispered.

  “Of course. Eventually.”

  Unable to wait any longer, he slid lower yet, caressing her short curls with his mouth, tasting her delicious juices, seeking and finding her lower lips in a long, passionate kiss. She moaned again, her hips writhing, her fingers opening and closing on his, pulling at them in her urgency.

  It fed his own, making it harder and harder not to simply plunge into her hot welcoming depths and fuck her until they came. He wanted that very badly, but more than that, he wanted the greater, more exquisite pleasure of making it last. Of making sure her orgasm was the most intense of her life. And so, he released her from his lips and began to lick among her folds and valleys. Her cry of distress changed to whimpers of delight, but again he drew back before the pleasure could convulse her.

  Beneath him, his cock throbbed painfully. He let himself rub it against the bed with the rhythm of his thrusts as he pushed his tongue inside her. Her muscles held on to it, trying to keep it, but he wouldn’t give in.

  Instead, after a few thrusts that seemed to drive her wild, he let go of her hands and began to use his fingers as well as his mouth, caressing around her buttocks and thighs, before one hand held her bottom firmly and the fingers of the other played her pussy like a harp. He thrust two fingers inside her and felt her pussy contract around him.

  She shrieked with fury when he withdrew his fingers, but it was only to add a third, and at the same time he took the hard, swollen bud of her clitoris into his mouth and sucked it. She screamed with the force of it, writhing and bucking in his hold. He held her there, using his not inconsiderable experience as well as his telepathic powers to judge the rhythm of her orgasms and keep them springing to new life. But telepathy was a two-way force, and the intensity of her climax nearly sent him spiralling out of control. With a cry of his own that was more than part growl, he left her pussy and threw himself upon her, plunging his cock hard into her.

  She cried out, “Oh God!” Her pussy contracted helplessly around him as he thrust twice, three times and came with a roar into the wildest, most violent climax of his life. Released at last, his seed spurted high within her and he collapsed into her arms receiving her mouth as his body tore apart in pleasure.

  There had been some kind of recognition long ago, peering in the window of a stranger’s house in a strange city, at an unknown woman who was little more than a child. Too concerned then with his own very real grief and troubles, he had quickly forgotten the incident, so that when he met her again, he had not even known her. Not at once. That had come later, after the deeper lust had already hit him. He had brought her here to use her, to foster her sexual obsession until she was influenced strongly enough to do things his way, lie to her own people…

  Yet a few hours in her company and it was he who began to see the truth -- not just anticipating the moment he finally took her but discovering something he had stopped looking for.

  He hadn’t meant to rush the sexual experience. But finding her so aroused and vulnerable, leaking her need of him from every pore, he would have had to be cold as ice not to respond. And Aurel, however calculating, had never been that.

  Their first mating had told him all he needed to know. It wasn’t the novelty of fucking a human woman, it wasn’t even the tenderness of love, although both were present. It was the intensity, the knowledge, of coupling with his One.

  And he had no doubts that she felt it too. Beyond the excitement of finally screwing in reality the winged alien from her dreams, beyond the power of Dragul passion that obviously overwhelmed her at times, she too knew the rarity of what they had found. Aurel’s only problem would be to get her to admit it.

  Smiling into her mouth as the fire began to die back at last, he thought it might be a fun problem to solve.

  It wasn’t.

  * * *

  “Why don’t you stay?”

  She smiled into his chest, lazily catching his nipple on her tongue. “Stay in bed? Stay naked with you?”

  “Sounds good.”

  “It does,” she said regretfully. “But I must go back. Niall will send for a search party soon. And besides, I have to take your freshly contaminated samples back to the city.”

  “Send the samples with Niall, and then come back with me.”

  Her eyes closed. Unfortunately, so did her mind. He could have slid through her barriers easily enough, and once, perhaps he would have done so. But with his One there had to be trust, a trust that went beyond even his loyalty to his people, and his duty.

  Emotion filled him, clamouring for some kind of release, distracting him from the delicate balance of persuasion necessary here.

  She said shakily, “Don’t tempt me, Aurel. I have a life of my own, as you have yours. We’ve had our flying fuck and our lying fuck, and that’s all there will ever be for us.”

  “With your One, there is always more.”

  For some reason that brought tears to her eyes, t
hough she tried to hide them from him. “Then I hope you truly find your One…”

  “I have found her,” Aurel whispered. “You are my One.”

  Her eyes flew open. Her head jerked up so that she could see his face better. She looked startled, frightened. Behind her eyes passed an extraordinary array of emotions from joy to disbelief to tragedy.

  She touched his cheek with her fingers, butterfly-light. “You trust too easily,” she whispered. “I’m nobody’s One.”

  “I know you feel it.”

  “I feel… oh God, I don’t know what it is! You turn me upside down -- literally as often as not! -- churn me up… you’re more intense than anyone I’ve ever known, and it’s all mixed up with dreams I thought were adolescent fantasies. But I’m an adult now, and I know you can’t live on fantasies!”

  “The kingdom is not a fantasy. You know how real I am. You feel --”

  “You live forever,” she interrupted.

  He blinked. “What?”

  “You live forever! You’re already older than my pre-war country for God’s sake. You cannot possibly find anything in me that is not shallow and childish! Worse than that, if possible, is that I will grow old!”

  He frowned, brushing that aside. “You’re worrying about vanity…”

  “I’m worrying about death,” she said brutally.

  He caught a glimpse then of her confusion, made enough sense of it to pause and think beyond the need to batter down her arguments.

  Drawing breath, he said, “Death is an unknown. Even for Dragul. We cannot live our lives in fear of it. On a more specific level -- you are half vampire. You have no idea how long you will live. Here, with my people, the chances are you will become one of us. We are naturally --” He broke off, searching for the word, conveying it by thought to her mind.

  “Healers,” she said. “I know. But I’m not ill, Aurel -- I’m mortal. An ageing mortal. Trust me, you’re not going to want to do this with me when I’m seventy!”

  “Trust me,” he said steadily, “I am.”

  It was the truth. But even as he said it he knew there was no way she was going to believe it. It was too soon, too much to comprehend. She was still too rooted in the limitations of her own people to grasp the true power of Dragul love.

  Or was she?

  An arrested look crossed her face. Her eyes searched his as if looking however doubtfully for confirmation.

  He pressed his advantage. “Your father is a vampire who does not age. As a lupi, your mother does, yet they are still together.”

  It didn’t work. A frown of irritation crossed her face. “That’s irrelevant! In any case, do you have any idea how rare that is? Vampires don’t have relationships…”

  “Lupi mate for life.”

  “Which makes me a very mixed up kid! No one knows anything about me, Aurel -- I’m the first of my own kind, the first vampire-lupi half breed!”

  “I’ll take the risk,” he said quietly.

  Again she stared at him, conflicting desires and emotions flitting across her face, seeping from her mind. He knew he’d lost even before she spoke.

  “I won’t.”

  Chapter Eight

  Beth felt numb. As if both mind and feeling had closed down in the interests of self-preservation. Somewhere below the surface of ice churned pain, misery, loss and regret, too confused and mercifully too distant to sort out. On the same level she was aware of Aurel’s arms around her, of the warmth of his powerful body and the cutting ice of the wind and rain as they flew back toward the tether.

  But she didn’t feel these things. Not yet. Later, when she was home, perhaps it would be safe to let it out. To Michael or Eve, perhaps, her fellow half-breeds, or to her mother, still the dispenser of unconditional comfort…

  And yet she knew she would never do that either. She was compelled to secrecy, to keep to herself the most important thing that had ever happened to her personally. To say nothing of the greater discovery…

  She clung to the necessity of preserving the Dragul Kingdom. That alone was important. What was she, or even Aurel, compared to that? To stay would be to bring searchers from the City, who would inevitably discover the Dragul. All the formidable talents would be brought together -- her parents, Will, Lara, David and Katia, none of them would rest until she was found, and not for her scientific skills either. The knowledge should have been warming, and somewhere, perhaps it was. It wasn’t nothing to finally realize her value to others. It was just very little beside the one important issue -- that the Dragul should not go back to the darkness. That the City should not fight them.

  Looking down -- how easy it was to do that now -- she could see the ramshackle hamlet surrounding the tether, the tether itself stretching up like a huge monstrous stick into the atmosphere.

  Beth said, “You should put me down here. There may be people in the settlement.”

  Without comment of any kind, Aurel banked his wings and dropped. The unstoppable physical response of her diving stomach reminded her of the last time she had flown with Aurel, and what they had been doing. The memory tried to engulf her, drag her down. Ruthlessly, she squashed it. And yet if this was truly the last time she would have with Aurel…

  Slowly, she let her cheek fall on to his chest. Eyes closed, she inhaled his strange, exciting scent, absorbed the heat of his skin, the feel, the aura that was him. And then, before it tore her apart, she lifted her head and they came in to land.

  Once again, there had been no thread to bind them. He let her slide slowly to her feet, holding her gaze with his own. His eyes were serious, steady, otherwise unreadable. His mind was closed to her. He said nothing inside her head or out. And yet she knew what she had done to him.

  She whispered, “It doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”

  Reaching up, she grasped his shoulders, stood on tiptoe and pressed her lips to his. She gave him no chance to respond, simply slid from his hold and ran.

  Her heart was breaking too soon. She needed to get to Niall, preferably get all the way home before everything hit her.

  * * *

  It was change-over day at the settlement. Outside one of the houses, she said goodbye to the three technicians leaving to walk back to the City. They would cross with their replacements on the road in a couple of hours.

  “Is Niall still here?” she asked them.

  The technicians grinned. “He was getting pretty worried about you last night. I think he imagined he was going to get the blame for your disappearance and have all the fiends of the City after his blood.”

  Beth smiled sourly. “I’m sure you helped that belief along.”

  “Well, I tried, but Steve here insisted you could look after yourself and would be back in the morning. And see how right he was. You want us to wait for you, Beth?”

  “No, don’t worry -- we’ll try and catch up with you on the road.”

  Waving an airy hand at the technicians, she went off in search of Niall. In the house they’d used before, his backpack was standing ready to go, but there was no sign of him.

  Emerging into the open, ready to shout, she caught sight of his face at the window of the tether car. Well, it fascinated most people. She walked slowly toward the tether, no longer because the very sight of the thing made her feel sick and dizzy, but because she needed to get her story, and her plan straight.

  If Niall had been close enough to the Kingdom to get the same very low radiation readings as she had, she might have to find another way…

  Climbing the movable steps into the car, she called out, “Niall? It’s me, Beth. Everything OK?”

  There was a pause as she entered the main room. Niall emerged from the cock-pit, smiling. “Am I glad to see you! I thought you’d been eaten by wolves.”

  “Wolves wouldn’t eat me,” she said dryly, and he actually laughed -- a big improvement on the flustered look he had used to get whenever the City’s mutations were alluded to.

  “So how did you get on?” she asked brightly.


  “Great. How about you? What took you so long?”

  “Oh I just wandered too far… how were your readings?”

  “Nothing too bad, should be quite easy to clean up. What about yours?”

  Relief flooded her at his answer. He had discovered nothing unexpected. In the short term, settlement could be kept to the west, preferably along the coast and away from the Kingdom… She was sure the Dragul had ways of keeping their presence secret.

  “Pretty dire, actually. From about five miles west and north of here, everything’s badly contaminated. Maybe there was some mis-hit at the tether during the war, but something’s certainly done in the water, the soil, the air, everything. It would take us years to clean up to anything approaching acceptable standard.”

  As she spoke he had been wandering around the room, looking at work stations and dials. Now, as she finished, he glanced up at her. He was smiling again, and yet there was no warmth there -- had there ever been? It was the wintriest smile she’d ever seen.

  “What a terrible little liar you are, half-breed.”

  Shocked, she actually let him close the car door with quiet deliberation before she responded. “If you mean to insult me, arsehole, you’ll have to do better than that.”

  He took a step nearer. “How about freak and whore?”

  She laughed. “That’s pathetic, sweetie -- like you, I’m afraid.” And yet why “whore”? What did he know?

  His eyes flashed; he actually swung his arm back to hit her. She blocked it without thinking, kicking out at the same time, and Niall dropped like a stone.

  “Co-operation between us is over,” she said contemptuously. “Find your own way home. If you can.”

  Niall was scrambling furiously to his feet, rubbing his knee as if he couldn’t work out why it hurt so much.

  “Don’t even think about it,” she warned, reaching for the door. “Right now I wouldn’t care if I hurt you.”