A quiver shivered down his long length, but she didn’t pull back. She turned her whole body to him and laid her hand on his skin next to her lips.
“Moira....”
“Don’t say anything. Just take me. Please.”
His head rose to peer at her in the dark. “Are you sure?”
She extended her arm to embrace his huge side. “I’m sure. I don’t care what it costs. I’m here now, and I’ll stay here. I’m part of Kratak, just like you.”
He studied her in silence for a long time. Even when she lay on her side with her eyes closed, the patterns throbbed through her. They surrounded her every nerve and fiber. They blew out of her eye sockets and washed in and out of her lungs when she breathed. She breathed them against his skin, and they reflected back to seep into her flesh again.
She whispered into his skin, “Take me. Take me. I’m yours now.”
Faster than she could think, he whipped away. His tail whistled through the air, and his great wings battered around her. In an instant, he was on his feet with his long neck weaving his head back and forth in front of her.
By the glowing light of his skin and the starlight above, she watched in astonishment as the powerful neck withdrew down between his shoulders. His tail slithered over the ground and disappeared into his back. He folded his wings between his shoulders, and they became part of his body.
His whole body shrank before her eyes. His limbs straightened, his face flattened, and the spikes running along his spine dropped out of sight. Nothing remained of the red dragon until a tall, sturdy man stood in its place.
His brown hair hung down to his shoulders, and his feet stuck out bare under knee-length pants. His shirt had no sleeves and showed his shoulders rounded with muscle. A linen sash cut diagonally across his chest, and a patterned medallion hung in the center.
He gazed down at Moira with flashing silver eyes. A reddish pattern seethed under his skin. It rose to the surface just long enough to give a hint of its shifting shapes before it vanished.
Moira stared at him. “Who are you?”
He took a step closer to her. He towered a full head taller than she. “I couldn’t tell you before, Moira. You said yourself you were an enemy of our people. I couldn’t tell you until you gave yourself over of your own free will.”
She put out her hand to touch his skin. The colored pattern rose to meet her touch before it swirled away somewhere else. “What does all this mean?”
“You asked my name, and I couldn’t tell you before. I’m Rahni Harkniss. I’m Rowan Harkniss’s oldest son, but I’ve lived on this mountain nearly all my life. I always preferred to live as a dragon. I spent so much time in my dragon form, sometimes I forgot what being a man was like.”
She blinked. A thousand images flooded her mind. “You’re... you’re the dragon?”
“We all are. We can all shift from dragon to people and back again at will.”
“But you kept it secret. No one knows.”
“When the Allies first started making overtures to us, the patriarchs suspected they had a hidden agenda. They also suspected the Allies would turn hostile if we refused this research mission, so they accepted it. They decided to keep our true nature a secret. If relations between Kratak and the Allies turn violent, at least we’ll have that advantage over them. So, you see why I didn’t want you to know I was really a man underneath my dragon skin.”
“You’re....You’re....”
He drew closer. “You gave yourself to a dragon, Moira. Can you give yourself to a man?”
Her mind whirled. So, this was the real him. Rahni. That name whispered secrets to her soul. It imprinted the cosmic pattern on her for all time, and her transformation was complete. “I didn’t give myself to a dragon. I gave myself to you.”
Rahni put his arms around Moira and drew her against his chest. At close proximity, she smelled dragon, and the warmth poured off him to soften her flesh into his embrace. He pressed his lips to her hair, and his mesmerizing presence prickled down her scalp. The hair on her neck stood on end, and her skin tingled all over.
He cupped her chin to lift her mouth to his, and his saliva sent its passionate rapture gushing down her throat. Taking it through her skin transformed her world, but taking it through her mouth finished the job.
His presence filled her with explosions of complicated designs and combinations. Colors fought back and forth for her being. Competing patterns overlapped in search of any spare inch of her not already occupied by tendrils, fronds, sprouting plants, seething creatures, grimacing faces, tumbling waves, and every conceivable organic design.
She couldn’t keep up with them fast enough. She had no choice but to let them crash over her and take her far away from everything she understood and cherished. Life took her for its own. She was nothing but pure life.
He laid her down on the boughs, and his lips tugged and prodded her mouth open to receive his tongue. He stretched himself out at her side, and his hand ruffled the patterns warring across her skin. When he touched her, the pattern rose and surrounded his fingertips. When he moved to another place on her body, the pattern subsided and re-emerged somewhere else.
Patterns clouded her eyes so she couldn’t see, but in her mind’s eye, she saw her own pattern merge with his. The tendrils danced from his skin to hers and back again. He planted the seeds in her, and the sprouts wound around him to pull his skin into hers.
Where did he end and she begin? What was she? She could no longer tell. She knew nothing but the exploding pleasure of his touch, his warmth spreading through her and filling her from the inside with starbursts.
He rolled up on top of her, and their merger came to its completion. Every inch of her skin married with his to form one continuous pattern. Rahni. Rahni. Rahni.
The sound crashed in her ears. It made the most beautiful music she could imagine. It fulfilled her buried desire for him and made it real.
Somehow, somewhere, their clothes disappeared so they lay as man and woman under the stars. Nothing separated his pattern from hers but a thin cushion of air, and that disappeared in a film of hot juice.
It flowed from her pulsating lips to surround him in a loving embrace. It hugged him to draw him into her and make their union complete.
As soon as he got inside, sparkling fire raged along his massive shaft to fill her and answer her rising cries with his own blessed rapture. The pattern took over their movements and stroked her from the inside out. It pumped her full of his tree trunk shaft to explode out of her pores. She spread her arms to the universe, and the sparks flew from her fingertips.
She was that being in the tapestry. She was complete.
Chapter 5
Moira woke up ravenous the next morning. She sat up to find Rahni coiled around her in his dragon form. She paused only a moment before she laid her hand on his shoulder and kissed his scaly skin. Then she got out her bag of food and finished everything left inside it.
He watched her eat with his silver eyes. “I hope you don’t mind me like this. It’s easier for me.”
She swallowed the bread she was chewing. “I don’t mind. I fell in love with you like this.”
“You’re the first person who doesn’t mind. Everybody else wants me to come live in the Keep with the rest of the family.”
“I can understand that. It must be lonely out here all by yourself.”
“Lonely? Not at all. I was much more lonely in the Keep before I came up here.”
“When was that?”
“I was just a boy when I started staying away from home for days at a time. My mother didn’t like it at all. She asked my father to have a talk with me, but that only made it worse. I didn’t want to do anything but fly around and hunt. I wanted to live the rest of my life as a dragon.”
“And what about now?”
“Now that you’re here? I don’t know. I wasn’t expecting this.”
“Isn’t this why you brought me up here? Didn’t you want a mate?”
“I didn’t bring you here for that. I brought you here because you would have been dead if I hadn’t. And as for finding a mate, I never considered it until you started touching me that way. I like living alone.”
“Where does that leave me?”
He curled closer around her. “That leaves you with me. We’re here together, and no one can interfere with that.”
“What will happen to us? Will we stay up here forever?”
“I don’t think you would be happy with that.”
“No, I wouldn’t, and you wouldn’t be happy in the Keep.”
“I could be happy in the Keep if I had you to look forward to. I could fly around as much as I wanted to and come home to you instead of this mountain when I got tired.”
“Your mother will be beside herself that you found a mate.”
“I’m sure she will be.” He chuckled. “They all will be. The news will be all over the planet in a few days.”
“Why did they let you stay up here when our team landed out there? Why didn’t they try to hide you or something?”
“They never mentioned it.”
“Would you have hidden if they asked you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe, but no one asked. What did they say about me when you asked?”
“They didn’t say anything. Rose asked, but no one answered her. That could have been a mistake, because she’s a bulldog for finding out what she wants to know. Not answering her questions just makes her more determined to find out why no one will tell her what she wants to know.”
“What will you tell them about me when you get back?”
“Maybe I shouldn’t go back. Maybe we should stay here.”
“Forever?”
“I can think of worse places to be.”
At that moment, a high-pitched whine echoed over the mountains. A shiny ball of sunlight streaked through the sky and circled Harkniss Keep. Moira sat up straight and peered out of the nest. The bright object drifted toward the ground and landed in the same place the team alighted just a few days before.
Rahni lifted his head to take a look. “What is that?”
Moira hooked her arm over his neck and pulled him down. She hissed in his ear. “Stay out of sight. Don’t let them see you up here. It’s a rocket shuttle.”
“A what?”
“A space vehicle. One of those dropped us off here the other day. Don’t you remember?”
“So why is it here now? You’re supposed to stay on the planet for a year.”
The shuttle’s door swung upwards, and a tall woman with long blonde hair and a crisp blue uniform stepped out. She looked all around her, but she didn’t leave the shuttle’s side.
Moira groaned. “Oh, no!”
“What’s the matter? Who is it?”
“It’s General Duncan. She’s our commanding officer. She’s in charge of this mission.”
“What’s she doing here?”
“I don’t know, but it can’t be good. Something must have happened.”
“Like what?”
“Look. There’s Rose and Reyna coming out of the Keep to talk to her.”
Moira crouched low in the nest and watched two tiny figures emerge from the Keep entrance. They approached the shuttle, and all three women stood in conversation for a long time.
“What are they talking about?”
“General Duncan can only have come here for one reason, and that’s to abort the mission. She wouldn’t interfere for any other reason.”
“Why would she abort it when the Allies have put all this time and expense and planning into it?”
“Don’t you see? They reevaluated their strategy. They decided to forget the soft approach and escalate their conquest. They want this planet and they want it now, and forget the research.”
“Have you seen this happen before?”
“Only once, and it wasn’t pretty.”
“So, what happens now?”
“They’ll withdraw the teams. See? General Duncan is leaving, and Rose and Reyna are going back to the Keep. They’ll inform the rest of the team, and they’ll pack up and leave.”
“Why is General Duncan leaving without them?”
“She’s going to inform Team 2 at Assan Keep. Then she’ll come back here and pick everybody up.”
The rocket shuttle lifted off the ground and shrieked across the sky to the south. Rahni stood up and shook himself. “Well, that’s that, then. We have to arm for invasion. Oh, look. Here comes Damen.”
Moira followed his gaze down the other side of the mountain. Sure enough, she spotted a man running up the mountain side. He looked like a tiny insect at that distance.
Moira’s heart sank. This was the end of their pleasant isolation on the mountain. When the rest of the team left the planet, she would be left alone here in the new life she chose with Rahni. Then what?
In a few minutes, Damen would reach them and call them down to the Keep. The Krataks would arm for the Allies invasion, and she would advise them how best to combat the threat. She would make good on her promise to join the Krataks as an enemy of the Allies.
Rahni let out a sigh. “Well, that’s it then.” He was thinking the same thing. Just when they found each other, their whole world came crashing down.
Moira whirled around. She couldn’t let this happen. “Quick, Rahni! Fly away from here.”
His head shot up. “Fly away? I couldn’t leave you.”
“Take me with you. Let’s get out of here. Let’s not go back just yet. I’m not ready to face your family and everything else about to happen. Let’s fly away somewhere, away from all this.”
“We can’t escape by flying away. My people need me right now.”
“We don’t have to escape. Let’s just get out of here before your family finds out. I don’t want to run away. I just want a few more days, just the two of us. Please.”
He lowered his head and closed his eyes. Now they heard Damen’s feet rattling the stones down the hillside. He called out, “Rahni! Rahni!”
She ran to him and laid her cheek against his tough shoulder. “Please, Rahni. Let’s get off by ourselves, just for a little while longer.”
He let out a low rumble. “All right. Get on my back. We don’t have much time before the General comes back.”
Moira’s spirits soared. Rahni bent his head near her knee, and she put her foot between his ears. He boosted her up, and she swung her leg over his neck. He flexed his wings, and she found a comfortable seat between them.
With a few powerful beats of his wings, he took to the air. He swooped low over the mountain, down into a valley to the west where Damen wouldn’t see him.
Moira laid her chest along his back. Damen would find the nest empty. No one on her team would ever find out what happened to her. They would abandon her here. The planet’s all-consuming patterns would swallow her, and nothing of her former life would remain.
Rahni shot down a long canyon, far away from Harkniss Keep, before he soared up into the clear sky and headed north. Endless forests and trackless mountain ranges spread out below them. He covered hundreds of miles with every wing-stroke.
Moira crouched low across his neck to keep out of the wind. The air bit icy cold. It cut through her thin clothes. Nothing but Rahni’s skin kept her warm.
Chapter 6
The mountains fell away, and the landscape changed.
The rugged mountains turned to low hills worn away by harsh weather. No more jagged peaks stabbed the sky, and even these dwindled to rolling grasslands with few bushes and no tall trees.
In the distance, Moira saw a wide stretch of flat ocean. It grew and grew, but when Rahni swooped over it, it changed from an ocean to one continuous ice sheet. It covered the whole landscape with its bleak white mass.
Moira buried her face in Rahni’s shoulder, but he never stopped flying. He flew for the rest of the day and through the night. His wings kept Moira in place when she fell asleep so she didn’t fall off.
When she opened her eyes in the morning, blinding ice still covered the ground below them, but now, icy spires jutted against the sky. Mountains of ice cut upwards from the fields, and the air prickled with ice.
Rahni banked into the ice mountains. He careened between them faster than the eye could follow. He whizzed back and forth up a long ice river to the highest spire of all and dove straight into the mountainside.
Moira clamped her eyes shut, but at the last second, Rahni tilted his wings forward and braked to a stop. He stalled in mid-air, extended his claws, and landed on a flat ledge cut directly into the ice. He folded his wings and arched his neck to place his head near her foot. “We’re here. You can get down.”
She slid to the ground, and her foot slipped on the ice. “Where are we?”
Before she could answer, a flash of movement caught her eye. A dozen people, all dressed in the same ornate clothes she saw in Harkniss Keep, stepped through an opening in the ice and crossed the ledge toward her.
One powerful older man led the procession, with a younger one right behind him. After them came the women. The older man walked right past Moira and stopped in front of Rahni, but the dragon wasn’t there anymore. He shook hands with Rahni in his human form. “Welcome as always. I trust your mother is well.”
“She’s very well, thank you, Uncle. This is Moira.”
The man bent over Moira and pressed her hand. “Welcome to Prowiss Keep.”
“This is my uncle Connal. He’s my mother Fay’s brother. This is her home Keep, and these are all my relatives on my mother’s side.” Rahni turned to his uncle. “I’m afraid we aren’t here on a social visit. We bring news of a threat to our planet. I must speak to my uncle Royce right away.”
Connal frowned. “That may prove more difficult than it seems. Royce is very busy these days.”
“We must see him. The whole planet could be under threat.”
Connal waved toward the entrance. “You better come inside, in any case.”
Connal and Rahni headed the procession back inside the mountain. The opening in the ice wall turned into a black stone passage just like the ones Moira saw in Harkniss Keep. The whole structure resembled Harkniss Keep in every detail, except that many hundreds of people occupied it. Everywhere she turned, people clustered in conversation, engaged in work, and children of all ages played in the passages. Teenagers hurried back and forth together in groups.
Rhani (Dragons of Kratak Book 3) Page 4