Chapter Three
Mac
Three years later
I was so glad to be home. I loved visiting the other kobold villages, but we'd been gone for six months. Every time we returned, it was nice to skip the bustle of the fortress and slip into Galen's cave to relax.
I dropped my travel backpack by the massive nest at the back of the cave and sat down on the stone floor to yank off my hiking boots, extra careful not to jar my talons. Once my sore feet were free, I leaned back on the soft pile of blankets and throw pillows Galen had amassed over the years and huffed a happy sigh.
Home, yet after the last several months of travel across Ignitas with Galen, I knew the truth. Galen was my home. I was falling more in love with them by the day, and they were oblivious.
They expected to be worshipped. They damn near demanded my complete devotion. They didn't recognize my actions as love, only obedience.
"Mac?"
The way Galen growled my name had always made my stomach feel light, like it was going to float out of my body. After a few years by their side, I could now tell when my dragon was happy. They were glad to be home, and they'd practically begged me to stay the night with them.
They found me already in their nest and let out another happy sound deep in their throat. "There you are. I thought you'd left."
"I told you I would stay. I meant it."
"Yes. You are always true to your word." They curled around me, tightening the circle until they had flattened the ring of blankets and pillows around me and replaced the bedding with their body instead.
They protected me from their sharp scales with a thin magic shield while they moved. They dropped it once they settled, allowing me to rest my head against their warm and pliant scales. It never ceased to amaze me how comfortable and comforting it was to lie with my back pressed to them.
"Tell me about Earth again," Galen rumbled. They'd stopped asking about it while we visited the other villages, but dragons were creatures of habit, and our familiar surroundings must have refreshed their memory.
"Well, it's more populous than Ignitas, by far." Overcrowded, in my opinion. I'd enjoyed my trips to Earth with Lark and his dire weasel, Odessa, and even with another alpha, Weld, and my dragonets in training, but I would never want to live there. Our alphas and omegas had lived there from the time they were newborns until their twenty-fifth birthdays. I'd only visited to bring our alpha and omega changelings home.
"I don't really know any humans," I shared. "I've visited Lark's adoptive parents several times, but they knew about us, so they didn't freak out."
"Is freaking out a thing humans do often?" Galen knew what I meant by the term "freaking out," because they claimed that's what many of the kobold omegas had done when they'd first been introduced. Galen had higher esteem for Punky and Tuft, omegas who had both stood their ground and not wet their pants at the sight of my hulking black dragon.
My dragon, who was not as large as usual, and shrinking by the second. "What are you doing?" I asked.
"Testing my magic." They rocked their head on their long neck, rolled it around once, and shrank further. I had no other way to explain it. They shrank until they were a little taller than me, and broader. My back was now propped against two kobold feet, though the talons were longer and sharper than mine. Their horns had shrunk, too, but they remained on top of their head, angled backward in an aerodynamic way for a dragon but conspicuous on a kobold. We didn't have horns.
"What do you think?" they asked. "Would I pass for human?"
I laughed. "Absolutely not."
Their face had much more expression in this form, and the way they scrunched their nose made me think somehow I'd insulted their parents. Had they been making that face at me all these years, and I'd unknowingly hurt their feelings?
"What's wrong?" I asked.
"How can I pass for human?"
"You'd have to know what a human looks like first. I'm not human."
Galen leaned toward me and gave me a full-body sniff that put us face-to-face. "You're not a kobold, either."
I chuckled. We'd been over this. "Kobold/human hybrid."
They flipped their feet out from under me and lunged, pulling themself onto my lap, straddling my legs, and pinning me to the flattened pillows. "What do humans look like? Show me."
The tips of their blunted nails dug into my scalp behind my ears. It reminded me of the Vulcan mind meld.
I didn't grow up on Earth, but I had watched every human movie I could find. If it was science fiction or fantasy related, I'd seen it, even parodies like Space Balls. I'd seen them all, and I'd loved them.
I wished I had my phone and tablet with me, but I'd left them behind in case the kobold villages we visited didn't have human technology. I shouldn't have been concerned. Most had their own version of magic-powered media. Their alphas and omegas had been to Earth, too, thanks to the old changeling circle.
Galen snorted, which wasn't nearly as intimidating in their kobold form. My cock reacted to their proximity, same as always.
This was the first time I held them in my lap, though, and very naked, and looking every bit like an adult kobold alpha with an extra appendage between their legs. Beside their large but flaccid cock lay their ovipositor. They were usually contained in a veil of magic for aerodynamics. Now, with them shrunk down to kobold size, it took all my willpower to keep my gaze on Galen's face.
They sniffed me again and grinned. "You smell aroused. I want that, too, but first, you need to show me what humans look like. Close your eyes and imagine them clearly."
I shouldn't even like the dumpster fire human who popped into my mind, but I couldn't stop myself. He'd played my favorite character of all time, a swashbuckling, conniving space pirate. In real life, his actions were far from attractive, but on my tablet, he was a god among men.
"Ooh. You like the look of this human, but you dislike them as a person."
"How are you able to read my mind?" I asked.
"I can always smell your thoughts when I am a dragon. It's harder now. I must touch you like this. Or maybe you want me to touch you the way he touches his partner?"
"Maybe not?—"
Yes, it was exactly like this. The dashing young hero had hurled an insult at the space pirate, and the pirate had responded with a silencing kiss.
Galen's kiss was chaste, a soft press of lips like the one I'd memorized from too many rewatches of the same movie.
The difference was, Galen kept kissing me, and it turned into so much more. It felt different, like our faces had changed shape, flattened so we could press our mouths together more deeply, and so Galen's tongue could easily glide across my bottom lip, demanding entrance. I opened for them, falling back even further against the pillows as they plundered my mouth.
They tasted like smoke and amber, and they were liquid flame in my arms. I wanted more of this, more of them, all of it. This was far more than I'd ever thought possible. I'd been dreaming of fucking a giant dragon for years now, and to think, they'd had the ability to morph into a kobold-sized creature this whole time.
Galen broke the kiss with a sharp laugh. "Not this whole time." Their lips moved against mine as they spoke. "I had my final molt while we were away."
I'd noticed their scales flaking on our last trip from The Grid, our nearest neighbor to the west, to The Drawbridge farther southwest. When we arrived, they shut themself up in a cave with the resident dragon, Elder, while I worked with their priestesses for a few days. I assumed they were ill. When they emerged, they looked the same, though their scales had been glossier. We never spoke about it afterward.
"What does that mean, exactly?" I asked.
"I am ready to mate with you now."
I nearly choked on my tongue. "What?"
"I have known you were my fated mate since the first time I smelled you on Lark and Punky."
I'd been nowhere near the pair on the day they'd first visited the dragon cave.
"You raised the dragonet they rode to see me."
It was uncanny how Galen kept answering my unspoken thoughts. It made the hairs at my nape rise.
"You made several trips to Earth with the alpha," they continued, "and you were part of the extraction team for the omega. My sense of smell is far stronger than yours, my little kobold. I knew you were my mate before I met you."
"And then I agreed to serve you."
Galen wrapped their arms around my shoulders and squeezed me with far more strength than a kobold alpha would have. "Yes, and then our mate bond began in earnest."
They weren't wrong. My stripes had darkened over the years, from beta brown to black, and now the black scales glowed a deep blue like my dragon in the sunlight.
"We are fated mates," Galen said.
"Mates?" My voice cracked.
That was news to me. As a beta, I'd been raised to believe I wouldn't have a fated mate. Once, betas were the only males of our species, but then we'd evolved into alphas and omegas to further the race. With our females infertile and fewer born each birth cycle, betas had become obsolete.
By the time I was born, it was my duty to serve the rest of kobold kind as best I could. I'd fallen into my career when I'd stumbled on a baby dragonet clutch as a child. I bonded with all five of the cute little babies, no bigger than pigeons, and led them to our home in the grotto. I'd worked in the dragonet barn ever since, my only time off when Galen asked me to accompany them on trips to our neighboring villages.
I'd wanted Galen since I met them. I didn't know what to think about the prospect of fated mates, though.
"Now that I have molted, and we have returned home, I want to mate with you." They pulled back farther, and I got a good look at their purple eyes in my former celebrity crush's face. Their words seemed too good to be true. "But only after I see how the other half of your kind lives. I must visit this Earth plane to see humans for myself."
There it was. My elation turned to dread so quickly, I tasted bile in the back of my throat. Not only did I need to prove myself to my dragon, I also needed to show them all of humanity was worthy, too.
Galen returned to dragon size, then, curling around me and releasing the spell that had made me look human.
I nestled against their side and pulled my knees to my chest in an attempt to calm my fears. "I'll meet with Priestess Alma in the morning to make arrangements."
I didn't know enough about Earth to take Galen there by myself. I hoped the priestess could spare an alpha or omega, anyone who had lived there for longer than a few days.
* * *
Priestess Alma greeted me with a hug. "Mac! It's been months! It's so good to see you."
Her sleeveless dress matched the brilliant white of her scales. Unlike Olaf, an elder beta at The Grid, she didn't look her age. She'd been our head priestess for half a century, and alive for at least twice as long. Her skin remained supple and firm over her muscular frame, her gaze shone with the vibrancy of youth, and her mind was sharper than mine on most days.
As the fortress's oldest female kobold/human hybrid and head priestess, Priestess Alma was revered among the betas. I'd never crushed on her the way my littermates did. Instead of going to the brothels to lie with the females there, I'd offered myself to unmated alphas to scratch the itch instead.
Never the same one twice, though. I knew better than to get attached. At least I knew now why I'd gotten so attached to Galen. We were fated mates. How was I supposed to bring that up in conversation with someone I'd always thought of as my grandmother?
I took a seat by her desk at the back of the classroom. I guessed it was there for students who needed one-on-one help.
I hadn't spent much time in the omega classrooms. Ours were on the opposite side of the fortress. Now, those classrooms thrived, when before they had been dwindling. It was wonderful to see betas integrated with alpha and omega children when I walked by. The contrast of bright and dark hair with all the brown was a welcome sight.
There weren't enough females, though. Punky and Lark's daughter Clementine was the first born in the last thirty years.
Priestess Alma's frown deepened the longer she stared at me. "You look like an omega."
I shook my head. "My stripes are too dark."
"No signs of slick?"
"None."
She frowned. "Our records on dragon reproduction were destroyed in the fires. Has the dragon mentioned mating to you?"
Gods, I'd been back all of twelve hours, and already I was getting the same mating talk our unmated alphas and omegas received when they started showing signs of imprinting on a mate. Did she think of nothing else? It was even more embarrassing to admit that was exactly why I was here, and this was the segue I needed to broach the subject.
"They have. That's why I needed to meet with you. They want to travel to Earth."
That stopped her line of questioning. "Earth? Why?"
"They want to see how humans live, to determine if we have adequate breeding stock."
She blinked. "Do you think?—"
"They mentioned I'm their fated mate."
"Oh, Mac." She leaned forward over her desk. "That's wonderful!"
"It is?" I wanted Galen, but mating was altogether different. Did we want another dragon in the world? They'd already tried to destroy us once. What if our child, my child, finished the job their ancestors started?
"We worried your love was unrequited."
"We?" I hated the thought of other kobolds discussing my relationship with Galen behind my back. It wasn't any of their business.
"Lark worries about you. He worries about Weld, too."
I'd traveled to Earth on extraction missions with both Lark and Weld and considered both alphas my friends. Friends could worry about me, I supposed.
The priestess might also be worried about Weld, I realized. The green-striped alpha had moved from the fortress for some distance from his fated omega, Robin, another of Lark and Punky's clutch.
"Weld has moved on to the village Galen calls The Valley," I said, taking the opportunity to steer the subject further from mating. "He's teaching them how to grow crops with magic the way we do here."
She nodded. "We've had a few emails from him already."
Right. I probably should have sent emails, but I'd left my tablet at home. "I'm so sorry," I said.
"You sent the important news through the new teachers you found."
She was still hunched over her desk. It was only a few more inches for her to reach out and pat my hand where it rested on the edge. "Lark will be overjoyed to hear Galen is your mate. You and Galen can tell him all about it when you travel to Earth with him. He and Punky are taking the children to see Punky's family in Iowa tomorrow."
"Tomorrow." I chuckled at the sheer serendipity. Not only were we operating within Galen's timeline (everything always right now), we were also going with my two favorite villagers and their adorable family. "That's perfect."
She grinned. "Our resident dragon is impatient, I take it?"
"You could say that. They would take offense, but it's true."
She stood and walked me to the door of her classroom. "Lark will break for lunch soon. Do you want to ride with them, or do you want to take a dragonet?"
"Are there any available?" I asked. "I don't want to frighten Odessa." While Lark's dire weasel had put up a brave front on the field on Reemergence Day, dire weasels and dragons did not mix well. Dragonets, like kobolds, had evolved from dragons. It would be easier to convince a dragonet to let us ride on their back in our human forms.
"You can check the stables after we talk with Lark."
I needed to visit my coworkers, anyway. I'd stayed away too long already, and now I had to plan another absence.
Everything was moving along so quickly, I worried I wouldn't have time to plan for the trip to Earth. Before I met Galen, I had planned everything down to the smallest detail. Since then? Not so much.