Danil’s Mate(65)
He stretched his wings out behind him and Lucy gasped. They had to be at least twenty feet long and eight feet high at their tallest part. With a great stirring of the air, he beat his wings, once, twice and he was airborne. For such a large creature, he flew with incredible grace, first gaining altitude and then speed as he dipped and soared through the air. Lucy tracked his movements across the sky, her head whipping from one side the next.
It almost looked as if he were dipping in between the stars, but that must have been an illusion. She watched in utter joy and amazement. It looked like he really had needed to shift. He both danced and dipped as if he were immensely enjoying it. But he also performed the quick, methodical sprints of a dedicated runner. Someone who exercised for sanity.
She pulled the fur coat around her and laid down on the stone roof. The stars spun above her and her eyes grew heavy as the great creature disappeared into the deep black of the sky, only to reappear with a flash of the moonlight on his scales. For all the intensity of the last few hours, she’d never felt a peace like this.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Amos hadn’t been lying to Lucy when he told her that things were clearer when he was in dragon form. Issues that had gray, blurry lines suddenly crystallized. They became defined as his predominant feelings took over and the smaller, complicating ones fell away.
Amos swooped in and out of the air pockets, letting the currents guide his path. The air was crystal cold and fresh so high up in the sky. He opened his enormous, vicious teeth and let a wisp of a cloud slide over his tongue. Flipping over in the air, he executed a fierce dive, plummeting back toward earth, and it seemed, toward his fate.
What had seemed so confusing to him in his human form became vividly clear to him. But it was hard to look at, almost like opening his eyes to the bright sun after spending years in a dark cave.
On the one side of his life was the King. And on the other was Lucy. In his human form, when he thought of them, he stood in the middle tugged back and forth over his loyalty to them. But in his dragon form, he stood in the middle only to protect Lucy.
The King was his past. Lucy was his future. As short of a future as that might be, he chose her. He’d choose her again and again. He knew what that meant. He knew what Lucy meant to him. If she were a dragon, he’d assume that he meant the same to her. But as she was human, he didn’t know. How did humans fall in love? It seemed like sometimes they didn’t even know if they were or not.
By the time Amos’s wings grew tired and he was ready to shift back to his human form, he wasn’t confused anymore. But he was sad. His whole identity was tied up in loyalty to the King. His father’s identity as well.
As he plummeted back toward the roof of the fortress where Lucy waited for him, he began to transform in mid air. It was something he’d taught himself to do as a kid. He landed gently on his human feet, his wings folding up into nothing and he was full human again. He missed his father. Having the same mission, the same job as he had always connected Amos to the memory of his dad. He suddenly felt naked without it.
Not to mention the fact that he was actually naked on the rooftop. And it was cold. He hurried back over to where he’d lain his clothes. He expected Lucy to make some comment about it, but he realized that she’d fallen asleep, her coat covering her like a blanket.
She amazed him. He’d never met a stronger person in his entire life. How she was reconciling all of this in her mind he’d never know. All he knew was that now that he’d seen her spirit, there was no un-seeing it. There was no turning away from her.
Fully dressed now, Amos bent and picked her up. He carefully padded back through the castle, keeping an eye out for anyone who might see them. A shaft of moonlight splashed in from a window. Amos was so absorbed in the color it turned Lucy’s hair that he didn’t notice Zara peeking at them from behind a red tapestry. A small smile ghosted over her serious face and she sighed as she melted back into her room.
Lucy awoke as Amos lowered her onto the bed. She sat up to gently tug her arms free of the fur coat. Amos tossed it over a chair and pulled back the covers for her to crawl under. She held her arms out to him and he only hesitated for a second before kicking off his shoes and pants, shrugging out of his shirt, and crawling in beside her.
Her head instantly came to rest on his chest.
“Did things become clearer for you in your dragon form?” she asked.
“Yes.” He nodded, not sure how to talk to her about what he’d come to understand. That he was pledging himself to her for as long as he lived. She waited expectantly but he wasn’t quite ready to get into the details. “I’ve never fallen asleep next to a woman before.”