Earth's Requiem(87)

“A wee bit,” he conceded.

“Come closer, child. I will not eat you. I promise.” Dewi lowered her snout and puffed a tiny flame Aislinn’s way.



I rode her in my dream…



“It was not a dream.” The dragon chuckled. Smoke curled from her nostrils. “Come.” She crooked a claw at Aislinn and then glanced over one shoulder to her broad back in clear invitation.

“I-I can’t,” Aislinn whispered.

“Och aye, ye can and ye will.” Fionn came up behind her, placed a hand on either side of her waist, and gave her a none-too-gentle shove. “Ye wouldna want to risk offending her. She is sacred to us.”

Aislinn’s heart pounded. She tried to swallow, but her mouth was dry as a riverbed after a year-long drought. The men parted to let her through. Heat engulfed her as she got closer to Dewi.

Aislinn laid a hand on the glittering scales. They were beautiful. Looking up at the huge body, she spied the two horns she’d grasped in her dream, but how on earth would she ever get to them? “Could one of you bring me that ladder over by the garage?” She barely recognized her voice as her own. It sounded thin and shaky.



One of the men stifled a laugh. “Come to the front, lass. She will pick you up.”

“Oh.” Aislinn let herself be herded to the proper position. When the dragon’s curved talons closed around her waist, she shut her eyes, afraid to look. What if she drops me?



“I could, but I won’t. Not unless you give me reason. Open those eyes. Put your hand on my shoulder and swing yourself up. Catch one of the horns on my back or my head if you need help.”

Aislinn felt awkward, but somehow, she ended up astride Dewi. She looked down at Rune, Bella, and the men. It was a long way to fall, and they hadn’t even left the ground yet. Fear thrummed a tattoo against her neck and chest. She tried to get herself under better control. This will be just like in my dream.



“Only better.” Dewi laughed and spread her enormous crimson wings. They were covered with leathery skin, not scales. A couple of pumps, and they were airborne. Aislinn held the horns at the base of Dewi’s neck in a death grip. She focused on a small pattern of scales right in front of her, terrified to look down. Even that felt like too much, so she squeezed her eyes shut tight.

“Your eyes are closed,” the dragon chided. “How will you ever learn to fight from my back if you cannot even open your eyes?”

“Is that why we’re doing this?”

“Do you know nothing of your ancestry?” Despite the wind rushing past them, Aislinn heard a note of incredulity in Dewi’s question.

“Not the ancestry you mean.” Aislinn forced her eyes open. At first, she looked outward, marveling at the vista of east central Nevada spread below her. Okay, this isn’t so bad. She realized she was breathing again. Her heartbeat, though far from normal, had slowed enough that she wasn’t worried about passing out and falling to her death. Dewi flew in large, lazy circles, with Marta’s house as an epicenter.

“Hang on.”

“Whoa, I was just getting comfortable.”

The dragon laughed again. “I know. But child, we do not have the luxury of you spending a hundred years learning to ride me. You will sit upon my back and lead the charge against the dark.”

“Me?” Aislinn’s voice came out as a squeak.



“And who else? When I ride to war, it is with one of your blood astride me. That is how it has always been.”

“Who was the last?”

“That would be Ian Gwinn MacLochlainn.”

“When?”

Dewi laughed. Fire belched from her mouth. Smoke swirled and eddied past Aislinn. “I do not keep track like you humans, but sometime during the seventeenth century. Or maybe it was the sixteenth.” The dragon banked, turning sharply first one way, then the other. After the initial swoop that left her stomach behind, Aislinn found it was rather like a carnival ride. She grinned, face plastered into the wind. “I think I’m going to like this.”

“Of course you will. You were made for this, as was your mother. Too bad she fled the Old Country before her magic ripened.” Something—maybe sadness, maybe disappointment—hung beneath Dewi’s words.

The circles tightened as they got closer to the ground. At what seemed like the last minute, Dewi spread her wings like huge sails, and they landed far more lightly than Aislinn would have thought possible.

She threw a leg over, prepared to slither down Dewi’s side, but the dragon reached back and plucked her down, depositing her into Fionn’s arms. “My scales are sharp,” Dewi said. “That would not have been a good way to dismount.”