Just then, his ears wanted to be mangos and feel her nibble.
Ember rummaged in her huge purse, grabbing a stick of red chalk and a knife. “When I say go, I need you to jump back, okay big guy? I’m going to vacuum this elemental into the bottle. I kind of downplayed it when I said that I couldn’t trap an elemental in a bottle if it didn’t want to go in. I sort-of can. It won’t hold him forever, but we can take him out somewhere so he won’t endanger people.”
Wyvern nodded all by himself, and Cai was impressed. Wyvern rarely responded to anyone.
Anyone except Ember, evidently.
Yeah, and Cai knew why. The dragon chose the dragonmate.
She scrawled a circle and symbols on the ground with her scarlet chalk, replaced the empty elemental bottle in the middle, and slashed the back of her arm with the knife. Her blood dripped onto the circle and bottle.
Cai flinched forward, wanting to stop her from hurting herself.
Wyvern growled.
Ember squeezed her arm, dribbling more welling blood onto the chalked runes and over the bottle. “I have to. Just stop. It’ll work.”
His dragon could sense magic, and snapping energy filled the circle and space.
But it was an itchy, uncaring energy, one that would force the elemental into the bottle. It was an energy full of psychopathic anger and selfishness.
Cai recoiled, tasting the evil magic through his dragon’s senses. The same bitterness used to roll off of his mother when she got angry.
When his mother had been nice, a brittle, glass shell had contained her anger and thoughtlessness.
The dragon inhaled deeply, examining the scents.
The evil magic wasn’t coming from within Ember, Cai realized. Her power poured into the circle from her body, but her magic was a raw, clear force.
The circle twisted it and formed it into an evil cyclone, tainting it red.
“Get ready,” she called out as her fingers wove into delicate positions, shaping the malignant magic.
Cai held the dragon’s mind, ready to leap aside.
Wyvern was unsteady on his feet, rocked back by the snarling evil of the circle’s magic. Taking control of him was easier than it should have been.
Ember yelled, “One, two, three, go!”
Cai leaped aside, his dragon form rolling away in the whipping wind.
Above them, the blackened sky was shot through with bright lightning bolts. Thunder cracked and roared away through the dark clouds that were turning emerald green. The wind dragged at Wyvern’s wings and filled the air with stinging dust and flying trash. No rain fell from the dry thunderstorm.
Out on the Strip, beyond the fountain where the sea serpents were hiding under the water and Wyvern could hear their anxious snorting about the storm, the naturals ran for shelter, pointing at the clouds.
The supernaturals out there saw a rogue air elemental filling the sky with chaos and fury and a snarling dragon ready to blast dragonfire, and they sprinted to get the hell out of there. A fae woman slung a toddler up in her arms and ran, and a day-going vampire knocked a natural man over in his terror.
When elementals went rogue, people died. This elemental might turn into a mile-wide, F5 tornado or a cold-air downburst that could smash a building flat. If they had been near the ocean, it might have built itself into a hurricane.
But it was becoming something large, destructive, and dangerous right that very minute.
Lightning struck the street outside, cracking the air with a roar.
Wyvern came up on his hind legs ready for a fight. He roared, adding to the insanity of the storm.
At his feet, near his ivory talons, Ember shouted words of power that rolled through the air.
The seething energy in the circle boiled outward and upward, piercing the air with spikes of magic.
The air elemental fought back. The thunderheads surged and collided, throwing lightning bolts through the air and into the ground. Electricity crackled. Ozone stung Wyvern’s nose, and he pawed at it while Cai held him back from rescuing Ember.
Wind whipped Ember’s hair around her head.
She looked like a goddess of the whirlwind.
Wyvern held out his wings, breaking the wind that threatened to blow Ember off her feet as her magic battled the air elemental. Cai could feel the energy pouring out of her, into the circle, and through the air to splash against the looming cyclone.
Finally, after an enormous amount of magic had tumbled through the space, the air elemental weakened.
The stormclouds folded in on themselves, and the lightning grew weaker with each blast.
Ember gathered herself, wove more arcane symbols in the air with her fingers, and spoke words that reverberated through the wind.
The air elemental shrank.
The tornado it had formed huddled lower, fighting feebly, and her magic shoved it into the empty bottle.
Ember dived for the stopper and crammed it into the vial’s mouth.
The last cloud wisps dissipated in the blazing desert sunlight.
Wind-blown trash settled to the cement.
The bottle jittered on the cement, bouncing like it might explode at any moment.
The knife cut on her arm had clotted. Dark, dried blood streaked her arm and clothes.
Horror slammed through him. Transformation licked at the edges of his vision as he wanted to hold her, protect her, and comfort her after this strange and terrible battle.
Ember looked up at Wyvern and Cai. “I have to get it out of town right now. I need to get it out into the desert, where I can set it free. It’ll be safe out there. It’s not safe to keep it here, for it or people.”
Cai took hold of the dragon’s internal reins and extended his massive foreleg, moving his wings out of the way and bowing his head.
Ember tucked the bottle in her bra, slung her purse over her shoulder, and climbed up his leg to reach his spinal plates like she was grabbing the mane of a horse and swinging into the saddle.
Just a moment of the memory when her thighs had straddled Cai’s hips in the ballroom flashed through Cai’s mind, but he shook his dragonish head and set it aside. He shouldn’t transform back into a human just then, no matter how alluring this gorgeous witch was.
Wyvern leaped into the clear sky, and with a few strokes of his powerful wings, shot into the blue expanse over Las Vegas.
Cave
WYVERN beat his wings against the wide, blue sky and flew with Ember clinging to his back.
Below them, the huge casinos on the Strip blocked in the street with their towers and odd protrusions like the roller coaster and the mini-Eiffel Tower. The massive dragon banked and headed out toward the open desert.
Beyond the casino zone and the downtown municipal area, Las Vegas became a low-lying city of ranch-style houses, xeriscaped yards, and the desert beyond. Flying over it felt like the sienna earth stretched forever, finally ending in a horizon stubbled with rocky hills.
The dragon’s shadow floated over the ground as they sped through the sky, flowing over the cacti and boulders.
Near Wyvern’s shoulder, Ember whooped and was looking around, swaying slightly. When he wheeled around the last of the hot updrafts from the city’s asphalt and sped out into the open, she leaned with him like she was riding a motorcycle.
Cai relaxed. If she had fallen off his back, he would have dived and caught her, but his options for catching her were his fangs and his talons because his spinal plates were too sharp to attempt a swoop to land her on his back. Staying in the proverbial saddle was the best choice.
After a half an hour of soaring, Wyvern flapped to a stop on the top of a stony cliff pockmarked with caves. Late-afternoon sunshine bathed the valley below them, painting it scarlet and sage.
Ember slid down his side as she dismounted, her body sliding down his dragon flesh—and even that was sexy as hell—and she said, “Wow, this is beautiful.”
Wyvern turned and regarded her, scenting the blood from her
arm as he chuffed. He didn’t like it when she was hurt. Chomping and blasting her enemies filled him.
He shoved her with his nose.
She stumbled backward. “Whoa! What?” When she said that, she raised her arms to ward him off.
Wyvern tapped her hurt arm with his nose, lifting it higher, and inspected the wound. He growled.
“What, this? It’ll scab over in a minute,” she said, pointing to the knife cut. Fresh blood ran down her arm in rivulets. “Or, you know, a few days. I might need some stitches.”
Wyvern’s lips retracted over his fangs, and he growled more loudly, rumbling his entire body.
“Nice dragon?” Ember asked, backing away from him.
Cai took control, lest anger overwhelm his dragon.
Wyvern retreated, and Cai transformed back into his human incarnation.
While staring at the rusty pebbles and sand under his fingertips and bare knees, he realized where he was. Dear Dragon Lords, why had Wyvern set them down here?
Because he knew this place was safe, of course.
Lords, Cai wished that Wyvern had chosen any other damn rock to land on.
He adjusted his thigh, fig-leafing his dick and nuts from Ember’s view. “I, uh, didn’t bring my backpack. I’m just going to dodge behind a rock or something. Could you turn around?”
Cloth wrapped around his arms and legs, growing out of the air and curling around his body.
When he looked up, Ember was holding out her hands toward him but looking away, her eyes squeezed shut.
“Thanks!” he said, sounding as cheerful as he could, under the circumstances. “Let me see your arm.”
She turned her arm over, the edges of the knife wound gaping as she did. “Like I told the dragon, it’ll be fine.”
“I can heal it.”
“You can?”
He raised her wrist to his lips.
She raised her eyebrows. “I didn’t know dragons liked blood. It’s kind of vampiric.”
“It’s not the blood,” he said, examining where her skin was sliced. He didn’t want to bond it in the wrong places.
“Look, I don’t judge. If that’s your kink—”
He closed his lips over the wound, letting a little of his dragon venom flow. The coppery salt of her blood mixed with the tang in his mouth.
“Oh, wow,” Ember said, her knees buckling.
Cai caught her around her waist with his mouth still locked over the back of her wrist. He didn’t want to get too much venom inside the wound. He wasn’t trying to bite her, but just enough of his venom would heal her wound.
Her lips touched his throat, and she whispered his name against his skin.
Cai kept his head and sucked gently at her slice on her arm, pulling the edges of the wound together with his mouth as his venom healed her.
As he cradled her against his side, she moaned softly near his ear, and her breath rustled on his neck.
He knew it would be easy to seduce her as his venom rushed in her blood and her arms tightened around him. She whispered his name again, begging, and he tightened his fingers on her waist.
No, not a dirty afternoon screw on a rock, and not like this, either. He wanted her to remember and feel every moment of his touch.
Under his lips, the last of her skin smoothed over and was whole again.
He kissed the inside of her wrist one last time before he lowered her arm from his lips.
“Oh.” She sagged against him. “It doesn’t hurt anymore.”
“Nope.” He turned her arm over and showed her. “All healed up.”
“Wow.” She inspected the scar that traced a faint line up her arm. “I get keloids sometimes, and this is so well-healed.”
He shrugged. “Dragons have some magic.”
She looked up at him, smiling, and he loved seeing that.
Her pupils were still a little wide in her dark eyes, though.
He liked seeing that, too. It looked like she wanted him.
Time enough for that, later.
“Okay, well, time to do what we came here for.” She dug around in her voluptuous bosom for the elemental’s bottle and held it out. “We just need to let this guy go. I hate doing this, but a feral elemental like this one will be happier out here than in a home. He’s more like a wild coyote who wandered into a city than a domesticated cat. I can tell that he’s not tamable.”
Cai nodded. “If anything ever happened to my soul, my dragon animus would take over. He’d be happiest flying free and crouching on top of a hoard in a Rocky Mountain cave.”
He glanced behind himself at the slash-like opening in the side of the sandstone mountain.
Not that cave.
“Dragons really do have hoards?” she asked.
He nodded. “We’re like magpies with expensive taste.”
“Does your dragon have a name?” she asked.
“Wyvern,” he said, feeling vulnerable about saying it.
“Like your last name.”
He nodded. Many dragons had unique names, but dragon nobility had their own naming conventions. “Among other things.”
Ember sighed. “Okay, here we go.”
She loosened the stopper from the bottle, spoke a charm over it that stripped the magical wards off the sides of vial, and threw the bottle in a high, long arc out into the valley far below.
At the apex of the vial’s flight, the stopper popped out, and the air elemental unwound itself from the vial. It roared, blasting with lightning and dragging stinging dust from the rocks below, and sped away.
The last gusts of wind faded.
Ember sighed. “It was the right thing to do.”
Cai nodded. “Yes, it was, and you were amazing. You didn’t get mad at it.”
Ember blinked rapidly like she was processing that data. “Well, of course not. It wasn’t his fault. Those two elems have had a tough time of it, the last few years. He was just reacting. The other one has a chance of being tamed. Getting mad at this guy wouldn’t have helped, and it would probably have made the situation worse. And he didn’t mean it. He wasn’t mad at me. He was mad at the world.”
Out in the slot valley below the cliff, the elemental bounced against the rocks, stirring up a hail of pebbles against the boulders.
Cai said, “My mom got mad a lot when I was growing up.”
Ember winced. “Oh, jeez.”
“All the time, every day, about something. If I didn’t do something to cause it, she’d get mad anyway.”
Ember looked at the ground. “Some moms are like that.”
“She was like that a lot. I don’t talk about her much.”
“Do you talk to her these days?”
“Not since I was twenty, when she left. Dragons mature slowly, physically and emotionally. The human age equivalent is around fifteen years old.”
“You haven’t talked to her since?”
“Never.”
Ember looped her arm through his elbow. “Is she still alive?”
Cai pondered the searing desert. “I think so. I haven’t heard anything different, anyway. I hunted her down on the internet a few years ago, and she was alive, then. Someone probably would have heard about it if she’d died and told me.”
Ember threaded her arm around his waist, a comforting, solid weight, and he wrapped his arm around her, too. She said, “My father ran off when I was a little kid. I don’t know where he is, either.”
A cold breeze blew through the valley, sneaking under Cai’s clothes and touching his spine with frost. He asked, “What happens when a person leaves a witch like that?”
“My mom was sad for a while, but she’s a strong woman. She put herself back together, mostly. But she didn’t get married again or anything. She has other people. She has other plans.”
“So, she’s all right.”
“Yeah,” Ember said, a slight smile on her lips. “Yeah, she’s all right. Did something happen to your mom?”
“No, she just walked away. There w
ere too many fights. She wasn’t a warm person. Leaving that way is unheard of in dragon society. It wasn’t so much of a scandal as complete, utter shock. I wasn’t ostracized at all. Indeed, people rallied around my father and me to support us to an amazing extent. And then, my father died.”
After that last, awful fight, when his mother had walked out of their house and driven away, his father had gone downhill quickly. The dragon den’s healer had come by a few days later and examined his father’s darkening eyes, his exhaustion and enfeeblement, and had gently broken it to them that the mating bond had severed.
Severed.
The word still echoed in Cai’s head.
His father had begun putting his affairs in order that night, knowing he didn’t have long.
Dragons don’t survive a severing.
Ember’s arm tightened around his waist. “I’m so sorry.”
“And I became the Duke of Wyvern.”
She glanced up at him. “I didn’t know the world still had dukes.”
“Imagine that.”
“What’s it mean, in real terms? Are you telling me that you have to marry a dragon princess?”
He laughed. “Not unless she was my fated mate.”
Cai knew that there was no dragon princess out there who was his fated mate. His fated mate was sitting right next to him on a desert rock.
He just didn’t know how to tell Ember that.
She said, “A girl I knew in high school was a bear shifter. They have a dating service because bears are too shy to talk to each other.”
He laughed again, and it felt good to laugh. That cave back there brought back all sorts of things he didn’t have time to feel, just then. “That’s not how fated mates work for dragons.”
“Fated mates?” Ember echoed.
“Yep.”
“That’s some weird magic.”
“It really is.”
“Speaking of magic—” She looked up at him, a furtive glance full of worry. “So, I had to use black magic to trap the air elemental, and it worked. I was kind of surprised at how well it worked, but it was some dark magic.”
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