Page 20 of The Longing

I lean back in my chair and prop my feet up on my desk, staring at the ceiling.

“I do not recall my mother or father. My earliest memories are of the inside of the castle well as a young Wyrm.” I smile to myself. “Plenty of time in the water, tadpoles to eat. It was good. Then I climbed out of the well and found my home.”

“But who taught you to read? To write?” Alice demands. “If there was no one here.”

“I taught myself,” I say, feeling confused again. “Didn’t you?”

“No, I went to school. I was taught with other human children. I had parents. I grew up around other humans until the plague came and took them, before the Faerie arrived to save us all,” she says, chewing the words and spitting them out.

I tuck one arm behind my head. “I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”

“You prefer to be alone?”

“It’s served me well.”

“Right up until the moment I was dropped in your lap,” Alice says. “And you’ve been told to make a baby in a month.” Her voice tails off and she turns her back on me.

“No one forces me, or my mate, to do anything,” I growl, on my feet in an instant. “I fought for Queen Mab in the Night Lands because it is what the Lambton Wyrm has always done. She might have disliked my decision to return, but it doesn’t mean I have to do what she says.”

“Then why the whole drama? Why the threats?”

I feel my guts twist, and it’s far, far worse than my pizzle reacting to her words. The female deserves to know the truth.

“When a Wyrm takes a mate, he has but one moon month to get her with child or there will be no other chance,” I respond. “His line will die out.”

“And what about the mate? The queen said I would die too.”

“Without a Wyrm to protect you,” I sigh, “a scrap like you would not last long in the Yeavering.”

“So, I don’t get to go back beyond the veil if I don’t get pregnant?” Alice says quietly. “You just abandon me in the Yeavering instead.”

A growl sits in my chest. For all this female is weird, soft, apparently without inbuilt weapons, and has a scent which sets my heart pounding.

I will never, ever abandon her.

ALICE

Fenrother growls to himself when I mention being abandoned in the Yeavering. If I thought I was going to get answers, all I have are questions.

It’s clear he’s been in isolation for most of his life when he wasn’t being used as some sort of dragon mercenary by the Faerie. Given most of what he knows comes from books which are simply not fit for the purpose, I’m wondering if he knows wrong from right at all.

Especially now I’ve explained to him exactly what sex is.Well done, Alice.

Fenrother’s tail flicks behind him as he watches me. I can’t avoid the predator behind his eyes. I can’t unsee the dinosaur which I woke to this morning.

“The Yeavering cannot have you, Alice,” he says, his voice dangerously low. “You are mine.”

I’m not sure why I run, but I do. Back out into the great hall, up the stairs, and into the bedroom, through to the bathroom where I shut the door.

I have no control over the locks in this place. Hell, I don’t have any control over whether I’m clothed or not. But I am damnsure I’m going to have control over whether I doanythingwith Fenrother.

And as for Queen Mab, she can go fuck herself. Admittedly I’ll probably end up being turned into an earthworm, or worse, but given my only living relative pulled a gun on me and then sold me to the Faerie, at least I’ll live out a quiet life ingesting soil.

As I slump on the stone floor and drop my head on my raised knees, I have to ask whether all of this is SO bad I would want to be an earthworm.

Yes, Fenrother has acted like a monster, but then that’s because he is one. A monster raised in isolation with only a handful of terrible books for company and instruction. He knows what he has been allowed to know, and I can’t imagine Queen Mab hasn’t had some sort of skeletal claw in the process.

I can still feel her bony hand around my neck and the terrible draught whistling past my hair from the long, long drop onto the hard ground below the battlements.

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