Thea Harrison - Dragon Bound

“Back atcha, big guy,” she whispered.

After a few more moments he withdrew, giving her plenty of time to straighten. She looked up, way up at his long triangular head silhouetted against the afternoon sun. “You have,” he said, “two choices.”

“Choices are good.” She pushed to her feet, all of a sudden feeling tired and achy again. “Choices are better than orders.”

“You can ride,” he told her. “Or I can carry you.”

“Ride? Hot damn.” She shaded her eyes and eyed his enormous bulk. “That might be more excitement than I can deal with right now. I’m not seeing any seat belts up there.”

“You got it.” Giving her plenty of time to adjust, he wrapped the long claws of one foot around her with such precision he didn’t cause so much as a scratch or pinch. When he tilted his foot, she found she had quite a comfortable hollow in which to sit. He lifted her up so that he could look at her. “All right?”

“I’m feeling a little Fay Wray here, but otherwise it’s great,” she told him. “You know, if you weren’t a multibillionaire, you could make a good living as an elevator.”

He snorted a laugh. Then the world fell away as he leaped into the air. Anything else she might have said was lost in the beat of his huge wings, in her earsplitting shriek.

I take it all back, she shouted at him telepathically. She had no breath left from shrieking to try to speak out loud. Forget about producing Valium, or elevator and hairdresser careers. You could be the world’s only living roller coaster. Hey, I bet Six Flags would pay you a fortune.

I see the lunatic inhabiting your body is alive and well , he replied.

He banked and shifted direction as he sensed a passageway back to the human realm. She managed to suck in more breath to shriek again. I’m being serious now—I don’t think I can deal with this!

Tough , he told her. I’m not taking the chance of anything else going wrong. This is a nonstop flight to New York. Thank you for flying Cuelebre Airlines.

“You’re not funny!” she screamed out loud. Dragon laughter filled her head.

She huddled in his unbreakable grip, hands over her eyes. She discovered it wasn’t a smooth, seamless flight but one that had a rhythm from the beat of his wings. She also thought she would be freezing. She was in for another surprise as he kept a velvet blanket of Power wrapped around her. It protected her from the cold altitude and the wind.

She could sense the upswell of magic that marked a passageway back to the human dimension as they approached. She peeked through her fingers. Following a directional sense she didn’t share, he stretched his wings and they glided until they skimmed along just a hundred feet above a small canyon.

Are you able to open your eyes yet? he asked.

She told him, I’m looking.

A lot of passageways to Other lands are like this one. They’re couched in some kind of break in the physical landscape, he told her. If we flew just ten or fifteen feet higher, we wouldn’t be in the passageway.

Then we would stay in the Other land? she asked, as she became interested in spite of herself.

Correct. From the air, it’s like following a specific airstream. The passageway the Goblin brought us through was somewhat unusual, he explained. There was a break in the land but it was an old one worn down by time. It was barely visible even to my eyes.

Somewhere along the way the sun changed and became paler. The canyon shrank until it was a mere ravine tangled with underbrush. The quality of air changed as well. They had crossed over.

Can you tell where we are? she asked. She had forgotten her fear in the fascination of watching the land scroll by underneath.

North of where we were before. I’m more familiar with the landscape along the coast. I’ll know more when we hit the Atlantic . He gave the equivalent of a mental shrug. I’m more interested in finding out when we are and how much time has passed while we were in the Other land.

She had forgotten about that. She watched the landscape change as Dragos winged east. After about a half an hour or so, the blue line of the ocean appeared ahead of them. He wheeled to fly north alongside the land’s edge, climbing in altitude until the air felt thin to her. The cities and towns they flew over looked like a child’s toys.

There, he said. She looked up to see him nod to their left. That’s Virginia Beach. We’ve got a good couple hours’ flight ahead of us.

Oh, right. She drooped at the thought. And here I am without my magazines or paperback novel, and no money for an in-flight movie.

They fell silent. After a while, watching the coastline pass by between her dangling feet became so commonplace it was boring. She inspected the cut on her palm, which had sealed sometime during Dragos’s healing.

The scab already looked a week old. She picked at it without much interest, then turned her attention to the long, curved, black talons that surrounded her. She rubbed one, then tapped at it with a fingernail. It gleamed like obsidian and was no doubt harder than diamonds.

After that there was nothing left to do but kick her feet and obsess over the debacle that her life had become.

After everything, now she was headed back to New York in the grasp of the very creature she had been running away from. With whom, by the way, she had also had fantastic, mind-blowing sex.

That was a head bender all on its own, without considering all the many other disasters that had occurred. She peered up at Dragos and looked away again fast.

The memories of what they had done together were so intense she lost her breath every time she thought of them. Yet they seemed surreal at the same time, almost like they had happened to someone else. And she couldn’t quite connect the man who had been her lover with this splendid exotic creature who carried her with such care as he flew.

She propped her elbows on a talon and buried her face in her hands. Images from the last few days flashed across her inner eye. The confrontation with the Elves. Dragos getting shot. The car crash. The Goblin stronghold, the beating. The beautiful dream of her mother. The standoff on the plain.

She didn’t know what to make of all of it. She wanted that dark room to hide in until she figured everything out. Like in maybe ten years or so.

And it was really not good that she had come to the Fae King’s attention for sure this time. Front and center. He couldn’t know everything that had happened between her and Dragos. But they had escaped together. Now the Fae King had to have some questions about whether she had anything significant to do with Dragos’s transformation, questions he would want to have answered along with all the questions he might have had from before.

Way to stay under the radar and avoid scrutiny, dingbat. If he might have known something and been interested in her before, he sure as hell did now. She had no doubt she’d just shot right up to the Fae King’s Ten Most Wanted list. For all she knew they would be posting pictures of her in post offices and police stations and faxing them to the FBI.

She could always have plastic surgery and run away to live off the grid in a remote Mexican village. If she could collect the stuff from her three remaining caches and get out of town again. That wouldn’t stop magical detection, though. Dragos had already warned her he would find her if she tried to run.

What did that make her? She didn’t know. Was she his prisoner when they got back to New York? Was he serious about considering her his property now or had that been a joke? He had a strange sense of humor sometimes, so it was hard to tell.