Page 8 of Pierce

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Pierce

It is her.

She is the one.

Things were so much simpler for my dragon.

When I thought like my dragon, everything was black and white. Good and bad. There were no shades of gray, no nuances, no weighing of the facts. Yes or no. Right or wrong. The end.

Which was what made it so simple for him when he announced that the girl on my back was my fated mate. The one we had been waiting for.

My human brain cried out in protest.

No way. After a thousand years on this side of the world? My fated mate is back in the father country, back where the clan once lived. How could she possibly be here?

The dragon roared in response. This is her. She is the one.

He was never one to mince words. He knew what was, and that was that. There was no reasoning with him, no making him understand that what he claimed was impossible.

All of us, my family and I, had come to an unspoken understanding many years earlier, when it was clear we would live our lives away from the rest of the world.

When we realized that bringing anyone else into the caves would mean bringing them close to that treasure—a treasure that we’d never even seen—we had been tasked with protecting.

No one could be brought to the caves. It simply couldn’t be done. The risk was far too great. It would mean allowing an outsider to know our secrets and possibly share those secrets with other outsiders.

It could mean failing our mission—and none of us took that sort of thing lightly. We were given a duty, and we were going to see it through.

It was like a common language for all of us when we understood nothing else about each other, when our personalities clashed as they were likely to do after a millennium of living together. When all else failed, we understood our duty.

Things had gone well, for the most part.

Until this very day.

No. Things will still go well.

It wasn’t easy to think as my human self while I was in my dragon form. His consciousness threatened to overtake mine and very easily could if I allowed myself to let go. Sometimes I did, just for the hell of it. When thinking as a human was too much for me to bear. It came in handy whenever it was my turn to guard the cave for a day.

There was no sense in contemplating life as a human while lumbering around in front of the cave’s mouth.

I fought my dragon as I climbed up the mountainside, close to home by now.

She was still on my back and, except for a few minutes of wakefulness, had missed almost the entire flight. That was for the better. She might have fallen off in a panic otherwise.

I only heard one or two screams. Her weight was still firm against my back, heavy in unconsciousness.

What to do with her?I couldn’t take her home, that was a fact.

But I couldn’t leave her lying on the mountain, either. She had a head injury, and I hadn’t had the chance to see what the fall from the cliff did to her.

I remembered her hitting the boulder just after I lost my grip. She might die from exposure even if her wounds didn’t kill her.

The nearest hospital was miles away, and the only road down the mountain was washed out. How was I supposed to explain getting her to the hospital?

How could I walk up to the emergency room as a human, naked, holding her draped over my arms? I’d earn myself a trip to the psych ward while I was at it.

Take her. Make her ours.

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