Chapter Twenty-Two
Galen
I'd never experienced pain like the pressure of our dragon egg entering my ovipositor. I'd read every book they gave us about dragon eggs, but nothing said to stock up on organs, and none had mentioned sex as a method to stimulate my ovipositor so the egg would slide out.
Mac had helped me lay my egg, and he did it in such a delightful way, I'd forgotten about my pain until the end. Then, the pressure along the rim of my ovipositor had pushed me over the edge. My vision had whited out with relief and bliss, and the egg dropped out as I came. When my senses returned, we had two eggs in our nest, and Mac looked like he'd run a marathon.
The books had been clear on one point. I could conserve magic by assuming a kobold shape until the egg hatched. I loved this form almost as much as my dragon form. With it, I could hold Mac in my arms. Wings were great most of the time, but my wing claws were not as effective as hands. I wondered if I could partially shift between the two forms. It would probably look ridiculous, and the other dragons would laugh, but that had never stopped me.
When I roused myself from daydreams, I found Mac on his tablet. I'd almost left the device behind at my cave, thinking we wouldn't need it.
We didn't need it, but it was nice to have. It ate up the hours while we kept our eggs warm.
I'd expected Mac to watch his usual true crime documentaries and violent action movies, but our developing babies could hear inside their shells. He found a docuseries about Earth's animals, and we watched it together with our eggs.
"This is rather violent," I said after a lioness took down a gazelle and dragged it back to her young and the rest of their pride.
"It's no different from a dragon hunting a bovinji," he said.
I wanted to argue, but he was right. Seeing our pile of carcasses waiting to be dressed and cooked didn't give me the same gut reaction as watching the light go out of the prey's eyes.
"I'm glad I don't make eye contact with my prey," I grumbled. "I would have starved."
Mac laughed and patted my thigh. He opened his mouth like he wanted to say something but shook his head. "I'm glad you're alive."
We spent that first day wrapped around our eggs, the warming spell keeping all of us toasty in a corner of our nest. I gathered the bedding around us, so we weren't lying on the cold stone, and then we settled in for the long months. While the gestation cave wasn't cold, we were getting closer to the rainy season, where the clouds would hover over the mountains for days before the sun peaked out again.
My paragon and siblings visited us when promised. They entered the depression in the rocky floor made by thousands of dragons circling around their eggs in this same nest. They rummaged around in the bedding for some cushions and pillows for makeshift seating.
They seemed to enjoy their kobold/human hybrid forms as much as I liked mine. Lux chose a beta form instead of an alpha, and my paragon continued with a priestess form. Chance was an alpha kobold, like me. I had always felt closest to them growing up, too.
I hoped my siblings would stay, even after we hosted the dragon reunion. I wanted to relearn their personalities after such a long absence. "You will stay for the dragon reunion, won't you?"
"Wait," Mac said. "Since when are you planning a dragon reunion?"
"Since we arrived," Paragon said. "You've built such a lovely pavilion for us. Why wouldn't we want to celebrate it?"
"After your eggs hatch, of course," Lux said. "We want to throw a birthday party for them."
"And meet all the beta kobolds," Chance added. "And maybe watch them dance for us on their fields."
I had told them to stay away from the village until I could return with them. From this distance, I understood how they'd mistaken the recreation league games for dances of a sort.
"If we invited all betas, even the ones from the other villages, would they come?" I asked Mac.
"We can send the invitation and see," Mac said.
Only two other villages had supervising dragons, The Grid and The Drawbridge. Bale and Elder had been my only friends after my family left. Most of the other dragons lived far away from the kobolds now. After learning about the curse, it made sense that the villages without dragons also had no female kobolds.
"Tell them about fated mates," I said. "It will be one big mixer."
Mac grinned at me. "That would have gotten my attention." He grabbed his tablet and started a new email to all the village elders we'd visited over the past few years.
I had a hard time believing my family, the dragons who had burned entire kobold villages to the ground, were now planning to meet with all available kobold betas on Ignitas. For a moment, dread overwhelmed me. What if they intended to gather them for slaughter? It was my worst nightmare.
My paragon focused on me with their sharp glare. "Stop thinking that, this instant."
"You can read my mind, even in these forms?"
"You will, too, with time." They patted my shoulder and scooted closer to me. "Never again will I destroy what the kobolds have created. I acted rashly, I know. I was hurt when Goff left, and I didn't understand all the changes in the village. The first time I saw a motorized vehicle here, I thought they had replaced their dire weasels and dragonets, and it was only a matter of time before they replaced us, too."
"Replaced us?"
"There were only male and female kobolds before," Chance said. "When they split to alpha and omega pairings, and beta and female pairings, what need did they have for us?"
"When they said they no longer had time to worship us, I lost it." Paragon sighed. "I thought it was the end for us. And then Goff … left, and I burned every village between here and the Midnight Sea."
They had unshed tears in their eyes. I offered my hand, and they took it, holding it in both of theirs.
"He knew I would follow. He thought I would see the beauty in their villages, and it would stop me from destroying them." Tears left shiny streaks down their face. "I've lost him forever."
"Maybe not," Mac said. "If you truly want a kobold and dragon reunion, I'll share the information with all the villages we've visited. Maybe your mate will come."
They shook their head. "I doubt it. Not for me, anyway. He might visit our children, Chance, Lux, and Galen."
I hoped so. I wanted to meet him. I had dream-like memories of a kobold beta telling me stories and flying with me when I was younger. I needed to know if I'd made up an imaginary friend, or if I remembered my father.
After my family left for their own cave, Mac burrowed into his tablet, shoulders hunched and fingers pecking at the virtual keyboard. I left him to it. I released the spell I'd used to clothe myself and snuggled down with our eggs. This was different from the hours I'd spent moping before. Now, I felt only excitement for their arrival.
* * *
Every time I woke from a nap, I found Mac typing away on his tablet.
"Are you writing a book?" I asked after a full month of watching him work while I cradled our eggs close and fed the warming spell.
"I'm looking for your father," he said. He glanced up at me and his cheeks darkened with embarrassment. "That was supposed to be a secret."
I grinned. "I love secrets! Who shall we keep it from? My family?"
He turned a deeper shade of red. "I was keeping it from you, silly."
Oh. I didn't like the sound of that. "Why?"
"So you wouldn't be disappointed if I couldn't find him."
"I will never be disappointed in you," I promised. "Once we can travel again, I intend to find him myself."
While traveling with Rapture, I'd picked up on his method of interplanar travel. I needed more magic to practice, but I would start with a trip to the village farthest from The Spike and hone my trajectory until I could hop to places as close as The Grid with a single thought. I could also turn myself into a bus or airplane to carry my family on my back for vacations to Earth.
The thought of Earth vacations made me yearn. "Let's watch National Lampoon's Vacation again."
We snuggled down in the blankets, each curled around an egg. Mac propped his tablet against the stone wall at the edge of our nest, and we propped ourselves up on pillows until we wouldn't strain our necks. I fell asleep halfway through the movie, but I woke up when it stopped.
"Good night," Mac whispered as he kissed my forehead.
We had been sleeping in this same position, each wrapped around our eggs, but tonight, it didn't seem close enough.
"Cuddle?" I asked.
Mac slipped between me and our dragon egg and pulled our kobold egg to his chest. I helped him pile blankets and pillows around us to aid our warmth spell overnight.
Then, I snuggled up to my mate. I dropped the clothing spell to remove my shorts and leave me blessedly naked against Mac.
His soft pajama shorts were not a spell. They kept my thoughts from straying too far toward kissing every inch of Mac and making him beg me to fuck him.
We didn't have enough collective magic to raise a sound barrier spell over the eggs, and neither of us had enough energy to make love. That didn't stop me from shoving my cock between Mac's legs and pulling down the back of his shorts with my ovipositor.
Mac closed his thighs around my cock and moaned. "Behave, Galen."
"I want you," I whined. "Do you think my siblings will make good babysitters?"
"I hope so." Mac's movements rubbed just right against both my cock and the tip of my ovipositor. "I already want another vacation alone with you. One where we never leave the hotel room, and we don't know anyone around us for miles."
I wanted that, too. I drifted into a dream of a fantasy world, neither Ignitas nor Earth, but maybe the water plane where we'd vacationed in our youth. Water everywhere, white sandy beaches, and shade trees lining the beach as far as the eye could see. The best part, Mac and I were alone on that beach, with the sun as our only witness.
The longer we were on the beach with no distractions, the more I felt I was missing something, or someone. Definitely someone. I tried to focus on Mac, but the feeling grew steadily worse.
In the dream, Clementine came to my rescue. She ran down the beach, grabbed us both by the hand, and pulled us back to Ignitas.
"Wake up!"
In the dream, Clementine yelled it, but as I opened bleary eyes and pulled Mac closer to me, I swore I heard the simultaneously young and old voice of our little girl calling from her egg.
I nudged Mac awake. "The warming spell."
"It's out?" He sighed. "You haven't had enough bovinji meat."
I felt bad asking for meals Mac couldn't eat, but it was worse when he scolded me for not telling him how low my magic stores had become.
"I always feel weak," I said. "It's hard to tell when I'm weaker than usual."
"No excuse." Mac tapped on his tablet again, sending a request for Rapture to visit in the morning.
In the meantime, he and I huddled together, the eggs pressed between our chests. We covered ourselves with as many blankets as we could stand.
It wasn't a spell, but the blankets and the stone held our body heat. After a few minutes, our little tent became uncomfortably warm, even for me.
Mac's forehead beaded with sweat, and his heated gaze made the temperature rise a few more degrees.
"What?" I asked.
"Thank you for waking me up," he said. "You're doing all this on your own right now with your warmth spell and your body heat."
"There is no spell," I said. "I don't have any magic left."
"We have magic," Mac reminded me. "Together."
The warmth spell around the eggs flared to life again, but I didn't move, and neither did Mac. We stayed in the tight space of our blanket fort until morning.
Rapture arrived with a young bovinji in his claws shortly after sunrise. Once I had eaten, I returned to the blanket fort with Mac and the babies.
I couldn't explain it, but somehow, I knew using both our body heat and the warming spell would help the babies hatch faster. I didn't want to rush them, but I wanted to meet them so badly.
We still had months to go, but if we took even one day off their hatching time, it was worth it.