Page 39 of Driven By Dragonblood
“Trust me?” she asked, even though she was already aware of the answer to that question as well.
I offered her a verbal answer anyway. “Yes.”
“Then let go, my beta, and we will fly.”
My hold on the railing released, and we fell back into the air, a double shot of adrenaline crashing through my system. Breath caught, heart in my throat and unable to scream, I clenched my eyes shut as the ground rushed to meet us.
So much for my raging hard-on.
Death or Lockwood, here we come.
The energy linking Prim and me together rippled—muscles far beyond my Prim tightened around my waist—and a rush of flapping, like a thousand birds at once, shot us upward, leaving my heart in my toes.
I swallowed against rising bile as I forced my eyelidsopen, gasping for oxygen as the wind abused my face. Shimmering gold scales covered the warm dragon leg I clutched at with a death grip. Dark talons, sharp as fuck, wrapped around my body in a gentle hold, keeping me from hurtling to my death to the earth far below.
“Goddamn!” I laughed, my heart throbbing inside my chest. “Fucking hell!”
I lifted my head to find the stars overhead blacked out—by a graceful neck. Every flap of Prim’s wings took us higher beyond where I’d ever gone on foot. The lights of town twinkled far below, and overwhelming giddiness, fuckingdelight, had me whooping like a five-year-old on his first roller-coaster ride.
She banked, and I swallowed against the damn bile again.
Would I ever learn to shift and fly?
Did Patrick wonder about the same—did he even know what he was? Even more, would he ever accept what was destined for the three of us?
Forcing aside the sobering thoughts didn’t come easily, but determination to enjoy my first flight, the talons of my fierce female dragon cradling me in safety, eventually lessened my unease.
Fate dictated a polyamorous relationship lay in my future, and even though I’d never been with a guy, the way Patrick turned me on assured me that I would enjoy whatever our physical relationship looked like.
I hoped he could be made to see the truth, or this sense of abandonment in my chest and the same emanating through the energy linking me to Prim would haunt us both until we rested with the stars like she’d promised we would one day do.
Chapter 16
Patrick
With no clients demanding my presence at my office on Main Street this morning, I sat at my kitchen table, a second pot of coffee brewing. I’d been searching online for hours, scribbling down notes and crossing some out as other sources changed the way my mind sought to explain what I’d seen, felt, andheardfrom the golden goddess’s hauntingly delicious mouth.
Dragonblood.
Even repeating the word in my head caused the darkness to swell inside me, pressing against the walls containing it.
Driven to find an answer beyond madness, which I refused to accept, I hardly got up from the chair the rest of the day. I ordered takeout so I wouldn’t have to waste time cooking. I also ended up shutting off my cell, since Jessie texted and tried calling, begging me to answer, saying she had been wrong about the Dear John letter she’d left me.
I couldn’t be bothered to care, and since she or her sister had retrieved Jessie’s shit off my porch as I’d demanded, I finally blocked her number and all thoughts of her from my mind.
My search for the dragonblood nonsense the golden goddess had whispered didn’t bring up any specifics, but digging deeper had taken me to an old blog, one no longer active, filled with Native American stories supposedly passed from generation to generation.
Were they a wannabe author obsessed with fantasy or a sincere old man trying to capture his past before their nation’s lore faded into obscurity?
Whatever the truth, their words acted like a soothing balm to my unrest. A sense of rightness pushed me forward in finding the owner of the blog. I made a dozen calls, dug a little deeper, and finally reached the young woman responsible for uploading her grandfather’s stories, where others could access them.
“He’s been telling these tales to me since I can remember,” she said a short time into our conversation, once I explained I was a doctor researching patients’ inner voices.
“Do you know how much is based on fact?”
The young woman sighed. “I’m a dreamer, so I would love to tell you the stories of the dragons helping to see my ancestors through the bad winters are true. Imagine if they were?” She laughed lightly, and that sense of being on the right path took on more substance in my mind, even though she seemed to dismiss the supposed history of her people.
“There’s never been any evidence of such beasts,” I said, more for my own sanity than to refute her stories.
