Page 13 of Wings of Frost and Fury (Merciless Dragons #4)
The dragon is an experiment I can’t resist—a chance I might not ever have again.
He’s immense, with broad shoulders cloaked in dark gray scales, the color of charred coal.
His neck is unusually long, even for a dragon, almost snakelike, with flat triangular spikes running along his spine.
Two long horns rear up from the crest of his skull.
He has a tapered muzzle and jaws full of narrow, needle-like teeth, thinner and rounder than those of other dragons I’ve seen.
To be fair, up to this point I’ve only glimpsed dragons from a distance or seen sketches in books.
A year after I was banished from court, my father sent me a letter, in which he mentioned a circus that he hired to put on a show for the royals.
The performers had a hatchling dragon with them, and he thought Serylla, the little princess, would enjoy seeing it.
But Serylla sobbed so heartbrokenly over its captivity that the Queen had to send the troupe away .
I was never sure why my father told me that. But I was so fucking proud of the princess.
“Don’t let them spoil you,” I whispered, touching her name with a fingertip. Then I folded up the letter and tucked it away.
Now I’m holding two dragons captive, though it’s not for my own entertainment. Well… perhaps I do find it entertaining, but that’s not my primary goal.
I’ve been wanting the chance to make a difference. That’s what I was thinking about, sitting there on the bench in front of my cottage, at the very moment I noticed those two giant beasts hovering high above me. Of course I spotted them. Stealth is not a strong point for any dragon.
Their appearance frightened me a little, but it excited me more, especially after the younger dragon declared their purpose here. They were like a gift from fate. The opportunity I’ve been wanting, to make a difference on my own terms.
My father ruined the dragons’ chances of survival, and they have retaliated by taking humans—though apparently they don’t plan to kill their captives.
I’m not certain what the dragon prince wants me to transform, though I have a theory.
Whether I’m right or not, it couldn’t hurt to have a backup plan.
And since I haven’t done a transformation in a while, it’s advisable to practice a little before I accompany the dragons to their domain.
I’ve decided that if the occasion calls for it, and there seems to be no other recourse, I’ll transform the dragon prince into a human so he and I can meet on equal footing and discuss peaceful solutions.
But I can’t risk performing an untested spell on him.
Such a complicated enchantment could kill him if it’s not done correctly, and it wouldn’t be ideal to begin negotiations by accidentally murdering the dragons’ prince.
They would kill me, and probably devour their captives as well.
I’ll practice on this dragon—the sweet, submissive one. The one who thinks he’s bad .
“How do you feel, inside?” I ask him. “When you think of your soul, your spirit, your inner being—what is it like?”
He ponders for a moment. “It is a great hollow, full of darkness and broken pieces. And it is cold, like frost-fire.” He snarls a little after the confession, as if he regrets his honesty.
“What would you like to feel instead?” I walk alongside him, running my hand over the skin of his wing. He shivers and whips his head around to look at me. I stare into those eyes of his—ice-blue fire, glowing like twin azure stars.
“I want to feel warm and bright and golden.” His long tongue flickers between his jaws as his gaze pierces deeper into mine. His voice is rich and soft, curling around me like the plushest of blankets. “I crave beauty and strength and confidence.”
The deep longing and tenderness in his tone vibrates through my flesh, and I can feel my pulse kicking up, heated blood rising to my face.
Is he talking about what he wants from himself, or is he talking about me ? He’s looking at me like I’ve suddenly become the most important thing in his world. It’s disconcerting, and I have the sense that it’s not just because his prince has summoned me.
This dragon of the hollow, broken, frost-fire heart views me with devouring eyes, with a ravenous wonder and a fervent heat that unnerves me to my core.
I’m not frightened of him, exactly. I’m flattered, I suppose.
Intrigued. Weighed down by the monumental news he has brought, by the grief of Verda’s loss and my torn feelings about my father’s death.
I can’t yet parse my emotions about the terrible thing my father did before he died.
Nor do I understand why the eyes of the gigantic gray dragon feel like portals through which I could escape everything I’ve endured and step into something altogether new and wild and lovely .
His reply echoes in my head, and I have to forcibly remind myself that I needed the information to shape the spell I plan to cast. He wants to feel warm and bright and golden. He wants beauty and strength and confidence.
“An excellent answer,” I reply as brightly as I can, even though I feel shaken.
My hand trembles as I write the spell, even more so because he’s watching me closely.
The charm I cast earlier only protects me from a dragon’s innate magic, like this great beast’s frost-fire.
If he wanted to carve me up with his talons or swallow me whole, he could.
But he sits there on his haunches, breathing heavily, gazing at me, waiting for me to do anything I want to him.
I could kill him, and he would let me.
Why is that so alluring?
In the lines of the spell, I make him as beautiful as he wants to be, warm and golden and sweet, strong of body, with the potential for the pleasure he craves. I tell myself I’m not doing it for selfish reasons. I make an internal vow not to fuck him after his transformation.
But is a vow to myself really binding? I have a feeling that a self-promise is about as durable as frost, that it will dissolve if the human version of this dragon smiles at me.
This is for practice, a spell to be used for diplomatic purposes if I’m desperate, I tell myself as I mark the casting circle and place the crystals.
Since the spell isn’t meant to last more than a handful of hours, I don’t need much physical material from him. A bit of saliva will do.
I request him to lick two of the crystals, and he does it without question.
With a diamond knife, one of my most prized possessions, I chip a few shavings off one of the rings I’m wearing, which bears a large eclipse gem.
Then I seat myself in the center of the casting circle, with the spell I wrote in my lap .
The dragon watches my preparations nervously. “Will it hurt?”
“You’ll be fine.”
“That’s not what I meant. Will it hurt you ?”
My gaze snaps up to his. I’m left wordless for a moment, a state that’s highly unusual for me.
“It won’t harm me at all,” I manage to say. “Now I need you to be very quiet while I do this.”
Condensing a large creature into a smaller form is actually easier than one might think.
I read the spell aloud, moving the elements to their correct places along the casting circle as I reach the applicable lines of the spell.
Tendrils of glowing purple light unfurl from the center of my chest, joining with each of the crystals in the casting circle.
Drawing upon that exuded energy, I fold away his dragon self, with all its powers.
His personality and his mind will remain the same.
His new flesh takes form in an instant, following the rubric I wrote into the spell.
My imagination and my intent fill in the gaps, creating wholeness, firmness, completing his face with features I find appealing.
He resembles one of the first men I ever slept with—an innkeeper I met during my travels, not long after my banishment.
The innkeeper’s name was Haljax. He and I bonded because he was also banished from Court. He once served the Queen as a palace guard; in fact, he used to be one of her favorites. When I met him, he’d been running a shabby country inn for several years.
I was only nineteen. I didn’t care that he was ten years older than me.
I preferred his experienced touch to that of younger men who would clumsily paw at my pussy and expect me to orgasm from their awkward ministrations.
That night with him was the best sex I’d ever had.
But the next morning, when I archly suggested that I might like to stay awhile, Haljax told me I should move on .
“Your presence here could bring trouble,” he said. “I prefer my life like it is—quiet. I don’t want to draw any attention from the Court. We made a good memory. Let’s leave it at that.”
His rejection hurt more deeply than I let on, because at the time I was newly banished, aching for somewhere to belong and someone to trust. The pain of Katlee’s death was an infected wound that had turned my heart tender and feverish. I was desperate for relief.
Now as I stare at the dragon’s human form, it’s as if I’m looking sixteen years into the past, seeing the face of that handsome blond innkeeper—except there are slight differences in the angle of his brows, the bridge of his nose.
The dragon’s jawline is better, and his eyes aren’t green—they’re the color of a stormy sky, a perfect shade of deep, smoky blue.
He’s taller and better endowed, with a cock of the exact shape and length that I find most appealing.
There’s something else different about him, too… something indefinable. The spirit inside the body and the soul behind the eyes do not come from Haljax—they belong to the great frost-fire dragon, the gentle giant who has obeyed every order of mine and who sat quietly while I performed my spell.
“Hello, there,” I say softly.
The man I created stares at me… and then he topples over.