To Desire a Dragon: (a.k.a. DRAGON HOOKER) (Venys Needs Men)

by Amanda Milo

  Her hands succeed in ripping me down from where I’m clutching her with everything I’ve got. I land hard on my rear, the grass cushion not enough to keep the breath from getting knocked out of me.

  “We need a man, Nalle!” she pants, looking down at me with something related to regret. “We haven’t had a child born to our tribe in years. Some of us are getting so old we won’t be able to have children if we don’t hurry.” There’s a desperation in her violet eyes. She extends her hand to me, offering to help me to my feet.

  Still sucking at wind, desperately trying to think of a way to stop the raid, I take it.

  Facing off with her, I see my tribeswomen with their backs to the boys’ lodge—and Glaive’s tribe has us surrounded, every woman looking grim but determined.

  Thankfully, no one is bleeding yet. But we’re no match for women of this size and skill.

  “Look,” Glaive shouts over the din of a hundred charged voices. “We’ll take good care of them. No one will trade us men, so we’re going to raise up boys. We have to. We don’t have a choice, Nalle. It’s not like a man is going to just drop out of the sky—”

  The whole earth shakes behind me as if a boulder has been catapulted to land at my back in the middle of the bare plains.

  Everyone around us screams.

  Seeing the opportunity to add my body to the wall of tribeswomen guarding the boys’ lodge, I push forward into the fray, shoving between towering women three times my height. “Back off! Let’s discuss the situation. No one needs to die today!”

  I don’t make it two steps before the Steppes women scramble. They scatter away from me looking terrified.

  Surprised, I try to recover quickly. I bring my hand up beside my mouth. “Good! Run! Glad you chose… to retreat… from...”

  Steam billows against my back, ruffling over the top of my head and past my sides.

  Just in front of me are, oh, twenty-five terrified faces, all belonging to my tribe.

  “There’s a dragon behind me, isn’t there?” I ask with dread.

  Stunned silent, they still stand sentry at the boys’ lodge. Brave of them. To answer my question, they nod.

  I don’t turn to face the dragon. Technically, you could say that I draw him away from the boys’ lodge, and from my fellow tribe ladies.

  I run like the dickens.

  An infuriated roar blows up behind me—and then the dragon begins chasing me through the village.

  Chickens squawk, sheep scatter, dogs bark, women scream, goats cry out.

  The dragon shouts, “STOHP! Pestiferous feemale, I wyll keeyp yoosayf! I dehmahnd yoo kaahm toome!”

  Lungs burning, I dive over the first fence I see… and regret my decision instantly.

  Feathered wings slap at me and fifteen sinister hisses and unbelievably loud honks make me go deaf.

  I’ve landed in the damn goose pen.

  “Cripes! Get! Off you! Mean birds!” I screech, ducking my head and covering myself with my arms, receiving pinches everywhere as I’m knocked about, being beaten with wings that leave deeper welts than a leather belt.

  Whummpf!

  Heat seethes around me. Immediately, the scent of broiling gooseflesh hits my nose.

  Goose shrieks and the sound of webbed feet slapping on soggy ground register to my ears—but hey, I do hear the chaos, meaning my poor ears haven’t gone tits up despite the abuse.

  (Some of the roasted geese disappear from where they fell around me. I ignore this because I don’t care that they’ve been turned into dragon snacks.)

  That is, until I’m hauled up and away from the ganders and geese who’ve assaulted me.

  I’m dropped without ceremony between the dragon’s sharp-clawed feet. Feathers puff up around me, softly falling back to the ground. The dragon doesn’t let go of the back of my tunic where his teeth have me in an unbreakable grip.

  Västra, a gentle-hearted tribeswoman of mine, rushes up to the goose pen and hauls out a white bird with wildly corkscrewed and curly feathers, perhaps the only damn bird who didn’t bite me. Sebastopols are nice like that. “Ingrid!” she cries in relief. “You’re okay!”

  “Sorry, Ingrid,” I say to the bird tiredly. After my flight down the mountain in the dark, not to mention my trek up the feckin thing, I’m beat—and from more than just goosewings. “I think your gander got toasted. Hope you pair with one who isn’t a right bastard next time.”

  Västra gives me a dirty look (she loved Ingrid’s gander too) but then her eyes swing to the beast behind me, and she backs away, her goose making all sorts of noise where it has its neck tucked under her arm, likely telling her how awful the goosecarnage was.

  With a fortifying breath, I look up at the carnage-maker, who’s finally let my tunic go.

  The dragon is staring down at me, his eyes peridot slits.

  I exhale weakly. And then I’m up on my feet and I’m running.

  ...For about three beats of a beetle’s wing. Then the dragon pounces on me, knocking me down flat.

  Women from what sounds like the whole freaking plains let out shouts of alarm, but no one breaks from their positions. And that’s a good thing: if anyone leaves the males unprotected to help me, it’ll make an instant opening for the boys to be stolen.

  Growling, sucking in breath from lungs that feel compressed from the dragon’s foot keeping me smushed down, I shout, “Where is Yatanak? I need to have a talk with him about ‘knee high!’”

  The dragon turns into a naked human man on top of me. He wrestles me up to my knees.

  “Let GO of me!” I screech as he grabs me by my braid to gain more control.

  “We arrr maytes—” he starts to growl “—yeht yooran from me! Durrring dane gerrr! Yoocuudav behn keeled! Bahd female.”

  His overlarge hand claps against my flank.

  My whole body jolts. “DID YOU JUST—” I try to wrench myself free “—HIT ME?”

  “Ooooh, old Yatanak’s arm is going to get a workout tonight,” one of my tribeswomen cackles. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m going to pretend I have this man giving me a swat for trying to run from him too. Unggh, I haven’t had a man pull my hair like that in so long...”

  Catcalls follow her words.

  And abruptly, the dragonman’s body heat and punishing hold disappears.

  Because every woman on the prairie has leaped on the virile specimen of maleness.

  “Good!” I huff. “You can keep that crazy bastard,” I complain, straightening my tunic, dusting off my tingling behind, and picking feathers off of myself. I fiddle with my braid, easing the spots that got tight when he used it as my damn bridle. “Wait til you see what he’s swinging. You’ll change your tune!”

  “Says you,” Halame, my tribesister, crows. “I don’t care if his jackstick squirts volcanic tar—just look at the size of it!”

  The dragonman is dragged to the ground and disappears under frenzied bodies. Women are climbing on him, fighting over him like he’s got the last poker left in the world.

  I grit my teeth. For some reason, irrationality is tugging me under its current; I feel strangely about the dragon. It’s more than the fact that his arrival saved us from bloodshed (and it did, because the Steppes Tribe were unlikely to leave peacefully and empty handed. And there’s no way we’d let our boys go without a fight).

  No, I feel… proprietary over the dragon. Which is conkers. Yet I can’t shake the notion that these women are fighting over what belongs to me.

  Plus it’s pretty awful to maul a person with sexual intentions. If that were a lone woman getting lost under a sea of men, it’d be a horrific sight. And it’s this uncomfortable realization that galvanizes my decision. Growling to myself, my hindquarters heated on one side from the stinging slap the dragon gave me, I bring up my cudgel. I figure I might as well use the broad side and take out as many Giant’s tribeswomen as I can while they’re preoccupied. And if it helps the anaconda with legs, then it helps the anaconda with legs.

&
nbsp; (Yes, I’m referring to the whole of him, not his one-eyed snake, although the description pretty much fits.)

  A cloud of blue-licked orange bursts the air.

  It’s energy fire. I’ve never seen it; I always thought it was the stuff of stories. It is the stuff of stories—dragon ones.

  Remember the old ‘snakebite’ punishment where someone grabs your arm with both hands and twists to friction-burn the skin? A burst of a dragon’s energy fire is said to feel like that—only magnified.

  Who knew he’d be able to defend himself with it in human form?

  Women shriek in pain. Another ball of blue explodes, rippling the air, and women fall away from the dragonman.

  Looking aggrieved, his hair mussed every which way, he rises to his feet, glaring menacingly at the women who probably felt him up a little, judging by the whimpered lamenting regarding the considerable steel in his pole.

  The idea that they touched him without his permission disgusts me.

  The fact that they put their hands on my dragon also makes me irrationally angry.

  It’s made the dragon angry too. Lip curled back, he roars, “GEHT GOHN. Leeve myy terrrtorrry!”

  His speech is all hisses and growls. But the more I hear him talk, the more it seems he’s approximating our language. He seems to concentrate extra hard on forming words, but then again, his lips are leagues shorter than they were when he was a dragon. No wonder he’s struggling. Still… I think I’m getting the hang of understanding him. It’s far easier while he’s not full dragon; his voice is less raspy and a different sort of growl.

  “What did he say?” June, one of my tribeswomen, asks. From out of nowhere, she’s procured a small vial of cooling liniment, and she’s applying it to the areas on her body that received friction-like burns.

  “Does it matter?” one of the Giant Steppes women replies, rubbing her skin where it’s puffed up and angry-looking from the energy fire. “We don’t need to understand him to ride him.”

  One of the Middle Plains ladies, her cheek red from the energy blast, is eyeballing every inch of the dragonman’s torso all the way down to his bulging thighs. She claps her hand over her energy-burned cheek, looking determined. “If you help us catch him, we’ll share him with you.”

  The Giant Steppes woman snorts. “So we do all the hard work and you get all the fun? No. We catch him, he’s ours.”

  HE’S MINE!

  I don’t realize that I’ve shouted this until everyone turns to me.

  And then the man turns back into a dragon. This time, when he opens his mouth, he breathes real fire.

  The women scream and start running. The dragon lets them escape. Technically, he herds them, looking stoic as he drives the Steppes tribe right out of our territory with strategically shot blasts.

  The Middle Plains Tribe doesn’t stick around. They take their man and get gone before my tribe can talk them out of leaving.

  My tribeswomen stare after them, most everyone looking beaten and dazed. “There went our chance for a man,” someone says sadly.

  “I wonder what he would have felt like,” Arkrona sighs.

  “Are the boys safe?” I croak.

  Sahlgren, staunching a bleeding wound at her head—one she got when the Giants’ tribe began to advance on us, not from the dragon—tries to nod. “The boys’ lodgehouse was never breached. And Cevilla kept Yatanak in his turf house. They were never the wiser that we have an adult man, even if he is decrepit.”

  Grimly, I nod to acknowledge that I heard her. “Good.”

  No one speaks as the dragon stalks back from chasing Steppes residents away.

  He prowls right for me, only stopping to scoop up a handful of whimsically curled feathers from where they’d dropped from me earlier. They look stark and strange curling over his clawed fist against his jet black scales. He shoves them at me like a bouquet of flowers.

  Tilting my head back, I cross my arms and meet his eyes, which are the same color as the flames you get when you thrust a new copper pot into the firepit.

  A fiery, furious green.

  CHAPTER 7

  HALKI

  “Your breath smells like burnt geese,” my mate informs me.

  More of my breath billows against her as I hiss out an exhale. I growl, and by the way she shivers, she might be able to feel the rumble of the sound in every vertebrae of her tightening spine.

  “Don’t drop my feathers,” I warn her. Then I catch her in my hands, making her clanswomen all scream.

  “QUIET,” I thunder.

  They shrink back.

  “Owwwgggh,” my mate protests, and I ease my grip in case I’m squishing her where I have her trapped.

  I carry her to where I initially landed in her camp, where I dropped her hairy hump skin and her short blade on the ground before shadowing her during the clan skirmish. When I take hold of her skin and weapon and press them into her keeping, she seems surprised that I thought to retrieve her belongings.

  My wings sweep out on either side of me, and I flex them, prepared to take flight.

  “Wait!” my mate cries, voice muffled until she discovers a gap between my fingers. “Don’t fly me back to your cave! I need to stay here. I need to find my brother!”

  Brother? Her sibling is lost?

  I close my wings. The rustling must tell her that I’ve acceded to her wish because I feel her sag into my palm. “Thank you,” she breathes.

  Elevated as I am in my natural form, the aerial view of her encampment is surprising; a myriad of domesticated creatures are penned in various places, there are twenty-two lodges made of timber poles and oiled leather, and sixteen longbuildings made out of staves and sod. Each roof is thatched. Each animal pen is secured by a simple gate. Furthermore, there are the beginnings of an outer wall being erected with spike-hewn timbers, but the thing is barely three-quarters finished.

  Humans are herd creatures, thus my mate is unlikely to be pleased if I spirit her away from her people. But if I claim my mate’s territory, I’ll have my work cut out for me. This isn’t exactly the most advantageous and defensible settlement.

  Perhaps her clan would be willing to relocate to the forests that ring Flame Pass. Not too close to our cave—I can’t entertain my own family without wanting to push them off a cliff. I imagine that I won’t feel any differently when it comes to my mate’s people.

  But for her, I will try. “Tell me about your lost sibling. Where was he last seen?” I find another pleasantly-shaped feather on the ground, and I gather it and shove it between my fingers for my mate to add to our collection. She fits the quill end with the rest of the strange spiralling string-like feathers, gripping them carefully in her fist.

  “He didn’t get lost lost. He was taken by the Qippik tribe. They’re going to use him like a stud!”

  She sounds deeply upset. My gut twists in reaction, and I glare around the plains, imagining a group of manhunters creeping up to steal male infants. “How old is the lad?”

  “Nineteen summers,” she says.

  You can determine the age of a unicorn by the number of spirals on his horn. Thus, they refer to their passages of time as ‘spirals,’ which vary depending on how fast the individual grows a new tier. Crested Merlin dragons count their age by seasons or solars. Beyond that, I don’t know how other creatures measure their accumulated days, but as there is only one summer per season, if I’m following my mate’s meaning correctly, her brother is no boy. He’s a man. A human man, and humans rarely form mate bonds out of necessity. This man has been brought into a camp of women who want to ride him endlessly for his seed.

  “Do human males suffer from red moon fever as dragons do?” I ask. If so, for the month of the blood moon, he may not mind his plight. It would give me time to woo my skittish drhema.

  There’s a long pause. “Fever? Dragons carry communicable diseases?”

  She sounds quite worried.

  “Do you have shaft chancre? Is that what’s wrong with your equipment?�
�� she gasps.

  Chanre? ‘Equipment?’ Confusion forces my brow scales so close they nearly touch. What a subject change. I thought she was worried for her sibling. “We do not have diseases. And there is absolutely nothing amiss about me. I’m a Crested Merlin. Now answer me. Are male humans driven with a wild moon-lust to breed?”

  There’s a very long pause as she has her turn eyeing me with confusion. “Moon lust… no! And he’s got to be chained up somewhere. This is not the sort of tribe you enjoy your time with. He’s being forced to service women who have a reputation for being cruel! I have to save him.”

  I myself would agree. However, there’s a fair chance that my mate’s sibling is not going to emerge with unrepairable damage from a brief stay of captivity. He’ll likely be angry, but he won’t be broken. “We will set out to rescue your kin at dawn.”

  She shifts on my hand. “‘We?’ You’ll come?” The hope in her voice is tinged with awe. It warms me, bows my chest with pride—and resolve. I would do anything if it would please my mate.

  “Yes, drhema. I will be at your side to rescue my new brother by affinity.” My dragon brothers by blood would be struck dumb with disbelief that I’m claiming a human for a sibling, but I’m driven to do anything and everything to secure all ties to my female.

  “We can’t leave now?”

  My wings sink to the level of the ground to deny her this, the only thing she’s asked of me (besides ordering me to let her go and leave her be; those requests I will not hear). “Drhema, you could not have slept at all last night as you made your dangerous mountain descent. I know I got no sleep as I lost my mind trailing you.”

  “What’s ‘drhema?’”

  “‘My cherished one.’ My mate. You.”

  To this, she falls quiet.

  Since she also doesn’t argue that she’s not weary, I take this as answer enough. We’ll both need rest before we journey in search of her sibling. Nodding to myself, I absently offer her another feather through the gap in my fingers, feeling pleasure lick my insides when she accepts it. And I ask what I’ve been pondering since she appeared. “How did you know to seek me out? Have you felt connected to me all this time?”