Lucas shot right past and laughed as he did so.
“This iss so much betters thans walking.”
His shouted words drifted back to her as she hurried to catch up. They were disconcerting, because along with her body—albeit much smaller—he also had acquired her voice.
He was wobbly as hell, and his movements erratic, but he had no problem catching a thermal and letting it carry him through the next patch of cloud.
“Don’t gets toos cocky,” Aria warned as she moved up alongside him. “Ors you’ll ends up asss fertilizer.”
“Ass fertilizer? Dragon sspeak hass its owns charms.”
He banked unsteadily, but with increasing confidence, and Aria went with him. Then he folded his wings and shed height. Her heart accelerated as she followed.
When he leveled out without issue, she took a deep breath. And realized, suddenly, that her heart still raced—and it wasn’t apprehension that caused it. Soaring and flapping alongside another Dragon was something she hadn’t done since Danao died. Her life in the sky had become a solitary venture.
But even inexperienced, Lucas’s obvious joy in it lightened her own heart. She traced a lazy spiral around him, dipping into the clouds and trailing the vapor from her wingtips. It caught in the moonlight and gilded her spontaneous artwork in silver.
Lucas’s eyes widened as he angled his wings to fly through the center of it. “Beautiful,” he said as she passed by him. But when she rolled an eye back to him, he was staring at her, not the vapor.
It filled something deep inside, something she usually kept walled off from the world. For the second time in just an hour, she dared to let herselffeel...
Feel?What the shards was wrong with her? She’d kissed Nikolai, and now flirted with Lucas? This had to be just a pheromone induced thing. And all current evidence to the contrary, Lucas was not a Dragon. He couldn’t give her what her biology craved.
If this was due to pheromones, she needed to find that herbal concoction. And soon.
“Heys. I thinks that mights be ours destination.”
Lucas’s voice snapped her out of her thoughts. Below them lay a settlement. They’d flown over a much smaller one a few minutes into their flight, but by Aria’s estimation of how far they’d come, this was likely the right place.
“Grabs holds of mys tail,” she ordered.
“Why? I doings goods.”
“Landing iss tricky. Yous coulds go splat.”
He eyed her. “I coulds makes yous go splat.”
So he had realized how much he threw her off balance. “I cans handles it.”
He tossed his long head. Was that really how she expressed herself, or was that his own innovation? “Just tells mes whats to do.”
Great. A few thermals and the guy figured he could handle landing. Most injuries occurred on landings; they were tricky as hell. And flight muscles took a while to strengthen—he’d already be pushing their limits.
She scanned the ground below. The town had literally been hacked out of the swamp, the trees and bog came right up to the edges of the last house and the moonlight glistened off wet patches along the unpaved thoroughfares. The place looked primitive. Did it really have a gate?
Lucas offered his own verdict. “Virgin.”
She agreed. That meant it might be unaware of the existence of realms or realm travelers. If he was right, their job just became a lot more difficult. The gateway, and the gatekeeper, would be hidden somewhere amid all this.
They would have to tackle that once down on the ground. But getting them there promised to be treacherous. If the town was virgin, Dragons landing within its limits were too big a risk, even in the middle of the night. And outside of it, there were no nice, large, soft areas for a fledgling Dragon to crash land. Only densely overgrown swampland loaded with bristly branches.
She took them in another circle above the town.
“Can’ts use thes streets,” Lucas commented. He obviously had come to the same conclusions as herself.
“No,” she agreed, banking away from the town and back over the swamp. She briefly considered a pond she found just west of town, but remembered the octopus predator and moved on.
Finally, she located a rock ridge. It wasn’t big, but it poked up between the dense trees. A tricky landing, though. No way she was going to try coaching him through it. And she had her doubts that he would see things in a reasonable light.
