Page 94 of Catastrophe

“Leave?” I slurred.

I’m sick. What’s going on?

“We need to get somewhere a dragon can spread his wings. Now,” Zaide continued, and I couldn’t respond. I shuddered and my skin rippled with scales as nausea rolled in my stomach.

“Dralie, what the hell?”

“Mate.” Dralie said in a voice completely unlike his own. It was deep and commanding. “Mate.”

Noise and chaos surrounded me, but I couldn’t hear it. I sank into my mind to talk to the drakorian freaking out. I was barely aware that I was being moved. Colors passed in a haze and I shut my eyes as dizziness rocked me.

“Yes. Yes. She’s our mate, so I don’t want to squish her or incinerate her, so can you get a hold of yourself, please?”

“Changing to show her form. Show hoard. She needs to accept our hoard,” Dralie rambled.

I opened my eyes just as Zaide tossed me into water like a skimmed rock and Dralie took advantage of my distraction to push me out of the way. We shifted. My bones snapped and reformed, my back tore as I sprouted wings and this time I felt all of it.

I roared, spitting flames into the sky and waving my wings as the transformation completed. Mud squished under our feet and our wings picked up pools of water as we flapped them to steady ourselves.

“We are in water. Why are we in water?” Dralie asked back to his normal self again.

“Why are we a dragon, Dralie? We could have killed everyone.”

He sounded a little sheepish. “It’s a reaction to meeting our mate. I’ve never found a mate before, so I didn’t know the reaction would be as …”

“Explosive?” I asked.

“Quite. I hope I haven’t scared her.” He looked at her as she stood on the dock, wringing her hands nervously. “We need to take her to our hoard and prove we will be a good provider.”

“We don’t have a hoard.”

He gasped, then panicked and rambled. “You are right. We have only just emerged. Finding our mate so soon is unprecedented. What will we do? We cannot bond without her acceptance of the bond.”

“She’s my familiar. We bonded already. You can’t feel it?”

“Yours, yes. But she is also mine. My mate. But I can’t feel your bond. She and I have not bonded. She must accept me.”

“You can’t bite her or something? Pretty sure that’s a werewolf thing. But you have bigger teeth, so maybe a nibble?”

“Charlie?” her voice was like a symbol chime and everything seemed to fade away until all I could focus on was her. She was in the water, her hair fanned around her like a halo as she swam toward us. But we’d kicked up so much mud with our flapping and stomping that the lake water was almost black and Dralie didn’t like that our mate was in it. Our tail whipped under the water to lift her. Her small body rested on our tail, her t-shirt clinging to her body and her legs streaked with mud. She shivered as she looked up at us with wide eyes.

“Mate.” Dralie repeated, not demanding but as a reverent whisper.

“Oh hello,” she seemed surprised to hear another voice. “Who are you?”

“Charlie named me Dralie, my mate. It is an honor to meet you.” Dralie said respectfully, giving Zaide a run for his money.

“How original,” she muttered.

“In my defense, I just woke up as a dragon and didn’t have a huge amount of time to decide on a name before the identity crisis set in.” I huffed.

“Charlie, you’re here too?” She asked.

“Where else would I be?” I muttered.

“I don’t know.” She shook her head and searched our eyes. “You were talking to each other? Is that why you aren’t moving?”

“Did you toss us into a lake?” I asked, ignoring her questions.

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