Then a massive, scaly foot descended again. Strangely, she didn’t panic
Aurora was lifted from the ruined cabin of the truck and hoisted into the air. They rose above the tanker, the flames running greedily to meet the stricken vehicle.
And then it exploded.
The greedy fire front congregated on the tanker, lingering for a few moments before the gas tank of the truck detonated, setting off the tanker trailer behind it.
The explosion rocked Aurora’s world. The air was driven out of her lungs by the force of the blast;she closed her eyes, expecting at any second to be assailed by blackness and death. The world tilted as the dragon, still clutching her, performed a barrel-roll and wrapped her up in its wings like a cocoon.
Even the dragon, as big as it was, was knocked clean out of the air by the force of the blast. Holding the fragile form of Aurora tight to its scaled torso, it ploughed through a grove of trees, snapping them off at the bases like match-sticks. Branches and fir needles rained down. The enormous creature crashed into the earth like a small aircraft that had just been shot down. It ploughed a furrow, as wide as the truck that had just been obliterated, through the dirt and rocks.
Eventually, it came to rest on its side. Its wings fell limply open, revealing the shell-shocked figure of Aurora in its lifeless claws. The young woman tumbled out onto the grass; bruised, but very much alive. She staggered away from the giant reptilian creature, tottering a few steps and then sinking to her knees.
Whether intentionally, or through sheer dumb luck, the dragon had landed on a clear stretch of ground, away from the main fire front. There were only a few spot fires here, nibbling away at the dry undergrowth and running their sinuous, fiery fingers up the flanks of a few saplings.
Aurora turned back to the prone dragon. It was not moving, but she could see its great side moving slowly up and down; breathing rhythmically.
“Not dead,” she muttered. “Not dead.”
Even as she watched, the dragon started to shimmer. It was the same sort of phenomenon that Aurora had witnessed happen with the naked woman on Finn’s superyacht. A heat haze seemed to encapsulate the dragon – from its toothy snout all the way to the end of its spiked tail – and it blurred the creature’s outline, rippling and distorting it. As she gawked , spellbound, Aurora noticed that the dragon was shrinking in on itself. It all happened so slowly – and conversely, so quickly – that it was impossible for her eye to follow or focus on precisely what was happening. One moment there was a fully-formed dragon stretched out in the crater created by its fall; the next it was three-quarters of the size, then the wings had retracted and the neck and limbs shortened, and the following instant what had once been a dragon the size of a bus was now a naked man lying on his side and steaming gently.
“Finn!” Aurora cried, pushing herself to her feet and staggering over to the unconscious figure. She fell to her knees by his side and gently shook him. There was no response. She tried again. Still nothing. Having very little first-aid knowledge she resorted to pinching him hard under the arm. This, at least, elicited a moan.
Aurora’s smile of relief did not last long. Looking up, she observed that one of the spot fires was developing into quite a blaze and was creeping steadily nearer to where Finn lay incapacitated.
“Shit!” she said, wiping the sweat from her eyes. “Shit! Finn – wake up!”
The flames crept nearer, feeding off the short grass surrounding them, closing in on the naked form of the unconscious billionaire. Aurora looked at the fire, looked at the merciless tongues burning and charring everything around them. She could feel the heat on her face and, for a moment, she was back outside the barn on the night that her father had disappeared from her life.
There was only one thing for Aurora to do.
Somehow, she tapped into reserves of courage that she never knew she possessed. Aurora quashed her paralyzing fear of the flames. She hooked Finn’s arm over her shoulder and dragged him out of the path of the approaching fire. Painstakingly, inch by inch – with her eyes never leaving the flames – she pulled and heaved his inert body into a spot of relative safety. The effort was exhausting; Hawthorne’s muscular body must have weighed almost double what she did.
“Fuck, I’m done,” she panted, collapsing onto the ground next to him. “I’m done.”
The fire raged on, the smaller blaze only twenty or thirty feet away.
Aurora lay next to Hawthorne, took his face in her hands and stroked the sweat-soaked hair away from his forehead. There were tears in her eyes. Overheard there was a deep droning sound.
“Don’t you leave me,” she whispered to him. “Because I won’t leave you. You hear me?”
Then she kissed him. Kissed him long and deep, as if it was the last kiss she was ever likely to have.
The droning sound grew louder and louder and then, abruptly, Aurora and Finn were hit with a deluge of water from above. It was such a heavy and instantaneous rain that Aurora cried out in shock and pain.
Fortunately it was only the very edge of an aerial water drop that a low-flying firefighting aircraft had deployed right in the nick of time. The result of the drop was the almost total dampening of the fires in their vicinity, complete saturation of Aurora’s clothes, and the awakening of Finn.
The billionaire sat bolt upright and gasped. He looked wildly about him, noticing the soggy state of his immediate surroundings and the very wet, very alive Aurora next to him.
Aurora gave him a radiant smile.
“You’re alive,” he managed, wiping water from his face.
“As are you, it would appear,” she replied.
Finn reached out, tucked a strand of dripping blonde hair behind Aurora’s ear and stroked her cheek with shaking fingers. “Did I get the stop, drop and roll right?” he asked.
Aurora laughed from sheer relief and launched herself on Finn, who fell back into the mud and water of the crater.
“Don’t you ever do that again,” she murmured in between kisses.
“Well,” Finn growled back, running his hand up her soaking back, “maybe if you’d locked me up like I asked you in the first place…”
Aurora, her eyes the burning, straddled the naked man while around them the last of the fires sputtered and hissed. It was a heavenly moment in a hellish landscape.
“Don’t worry,” she said, leaning down and biting his bottom lip softly, “you’re going to be visiting quite a different vault every night from now on, Mr. Hawthorne.”
They kissed, the steam and the smoke swirled about them, and the two of them were hidden from view.
The End
Arousing a Dragon Page 14