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TWENTY-FOUR

The feeling of his mate clinging to his back...bliss. Well, it would be, if she wasn't screaming. Her fear doused his desire like a bucket of icy water.

He couldn't speak to her in this form, not unless the mating bond was complete. Then, legend said they'd be able to speak into each other's minds in a form of telepathy unique to fated mates.

If he could talk to her, he'd tell her there was no way she'd fall off, that his power would hold her steady on his back no matter what, because he couldn't let her go, now he'd found his mate.

Even in dragon form, his lip still burned from her bite.

The legends said a mating bite was the one wound that never healed, that would scar even a dragon shifter's scaly hide. But those few drops of blood exchanged in a mating bite would transform them both forever. There was the mind link, of course, but the legends also talked about rare bonds between shifters and humans, where the bond transformed the human into a full-blooded shifter, the equal of their mate.

Diana had done some research into human-shifter pairings, and she'd discovered that this was actually quite rare, and usually only when the human had shifter ancestry, like herself or the other girls at Mirror Academy, because ordinary humans couldn't be fated mates.

So if Eden truly was his mate, it was no surprise that by the time she stopped screaming, she'd also found a firm grip on his scales, perfectly positioned on his back to be sheltered from the worst of the wind, without fouling his wings or otherwise shifting his centre of gravity. Like she understood the mechanics of dragonflight perfectly, and was observing his technique so that she might emulate it, upon her own transformation.

A transformation Blaze could not deny her, for he'd give his fated mate everything. Blaze might not deserve a fairytale come true, but Eden did, and he was honour bound to give it to her.

The moment they landed.