Page 94 of Taloned Heart

He met her with a hard thud of their bodies striking against each other. He gathered her up into his arms, both of them breathless as all the fear of the past few weeks melted out of them. They were together again. They were both alive, and they’d both done what they said they would.

“You are well?” he asked into her hair, his lips pressed tight against her head.

“I am well.” She held him harder, her fingers digging into the muscles of his back. “Everything happened as expected?”

“Nothing happened as expected, but we will have time for me to tell you about it all.” He drew back to stare down at her, his eyes missing nothing as they narrowed. “You haven’t been sleeping.”

“I’ve been gathering an army.”

“Or eating.” He pinched her thin arm.

Lore rolled her eyes. “I’ve been eating when I can. Do you think it’s easy to gather everyone up in two weeks?”

“I think you can do anything you set your mind to.” He dropped his face to where her shoulder and neck met, inhaling her scent deeply before sighing. His voice was low, only for her ears, as he growled, “As much as I’d like my time alone with you, your children have been clamoring in my ear for hours now about how excited they are to see you.”

“Our children,” she corrected with a snort, but he shook his head with a wry grin.

“When they annoy me, they are your children, elf.” And obviously they had annoyed him far too much because she could see the anger still simmering, cold and quiet underneath his usually calm demeanor.

“Ah, well. Then I better gather them up.” Flashing him a bright grin, she strode around him and opened her arms wide.

And just as they had when she’d first arrived on the dragon isle, her children swarmed her. They were much larger than they’d been back then, and all she could see was a flash of scales and thin wings, their bodies coiled and tangling around each other as they both tried to get closer to her.

But they were never so close that they might hurt her. They never miss-stepped or tromped on her foot or even so much as nudged her off balance. Instead, they were aware of their mouths as they shouted at each other about who would tell her what they’d learned in the crystals first.

Lore tilted her head back and laughed. The sound ripped out of her form, joy and happiness and utter bliss that they were here and they hadn’t changed even though she’d had asked the impossible of them. Her children were still just as ridiculous and wonderful as they’d always been and, oh, she had missed them.

“Enough!” she said, clapping her hands loud to get their attention. “You are both far too large for such antics! Change, now. So I can hug you and then hit you both over the head for annoying your father.”

“That wasn’t me!” Nyx insisted, pulling away from the tangle of dragons to glare at her brother. “You know Hyperion doesn’t ever shut up! It was him the entire time. All he wanted to talk about was trees and forests and saplings that leak syrup in the spring.”

“It wasn’t me!” Hyperion reared up, his beard twitching with anger before he snorted a ball of fire out at her. “Father likes to hear my stories about the forest and he was the one who came with me to get my new memories! Of course, he wants to hear about what I found and what good that will do all of us.”

“He wanted to hear about battle tactics and what you learned from your ancestors, not how to grow more trees!” Nyx stomped her foot on the ground, and then flared her wing wide and knocked her brother over.

Ah, so it wasn’t that their children had been annoying Abraxas, but that he was tired of getting in between their squabbles. Clearly, even though they had found more crystals and absorbed those memories, her children were still very much... children.

A deep sigh echoed beside her, and she felt Draven step up beside her. His arms crossed over his chest, his eyes ruefully watching the two siblings lunge at each other so hard that the ground shook with their anger.

“They’ve been like this the entire journey,” he said, shaking his head with amusement. “They knocked each other out of the sky twice and Abraxas had to help them out of the sea. The man has an impressive amount of patience.”

“You knew that.” She nudged him with her shoulder, a grin on her face. “He had more than enough patience with you.”

Draven tsked. “He had to have patience with me. He knew someday I’d end up marrying his daughter and if he wasn’t nice, I wouldn’t let him see his grandbabies.”

“Babies?” Lore arched a brow. “I’m not sure it works like that.”

“Eh, adopted children are still children.” Draven shrugged and his eyes turned back toward Nyx who currently had her brother pinned to the ground by the throat while she still somehow snarled more insults. “She has to grow a lot more before then, though.”

“You’ll be waiting a long time.”

He nodded. “It’ll be worth the wait.”

And her heart cracked right in two. This elf had done so much for her family. He’d trusted her, traveled with her, kept her safe, fought by her side, and now he was willing to wait years for her daughter to grow.

Damn it. Those tears were back, and she didn’t know what to do with them now.

Wiping a hand underneath her eyes, she wrapped an arm around Draven’s waist and tugged him close. “It’s good to have you back. To see you alive and well. I told your mother what you asked me to, and I thought she was about ready to snap. What in the world is a knife in the shadows?”

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