Page 64 of The Dragon at the End of This Pregnancy

I nudged Mac awake. "The warming spell."

"It's out?" He sighed. "You haven't had enough bovinji meat."

I felt bad asking for meals Mac couldn't eat, but it was worse when he scolded me for not telling him how low my magic stores had become.

"I always feel weak," I said. "It's hard to tell when I'm weaker than usual."

"No excuse." Mac tapped on his tablet again, sending a request for Rapture to visit in the morning.

In the meantime, he and I huddled together, the eggs pressed between our chests. We covered ourselves with as many blankets as we could stand.

It wasn't a spell, but the blankets and the stone held our body heat. After a few minutes, our little tent became uncomfortably warm, even for me.

Mac's forehead beaded with sweat, and his heated gaze made the temperature rise a few more degrees.

"What?" I asked.

"Thank you for waking me up," he said. "You're doing all this on your own right now with your warmth spell and your body heat."

"There is no spell," I said. "I don't have any magic left."

"We have magic," Mac reminded me. "Together."

The warmth spell around the eggs flared to life again, but I didn't move, and neither did Mac. We stayed in the tight space of our blanket fort until morning.

Rapture arrived with a young bovinji in his claws shortly after sunrise. Once I had eaten, I returned to the blanket fort with Mac and the babies.

I couldn't explain it, but somehow, I knew using both our body heat and the warming spell would help the babies hatch faster. I didn't want to rush them, but I wanted to meet them so badly.

We still had months to go, but if we took even one day off their hatching time, it was worth it.

ChapterTwenty-Three

Mac

A few days later,Galen's paragon and siblings brought giant cuts of raw bovinji. As loath as I was to leave our blanket fort, they asked me to cook them over my camp stove while they chatted. I couldn't refuse.

Galen tucked the blankets around themself and the babies so all their family could see was their snout and eyes. They looked like a fluffy worm, and the blankets were their chrysalis.

I flipped the meat twice, leaving it a touch red in the middle, just the way Galen liked it. I seasoned it the way I always did for special occasions, forgetting I was cooking for Galen's family for the first time.

Galen barely moved to eat, and no one complained when they ate off their plate like a dog and chewed on the bones while we sat and ate with our fingers like civilized folk.

"What are these flecks of green on top of my food?" Chance asked after taking their first bite.

"Tastes delicious," Lux said, jabbing an elbow into Chance's alpha kobold chest.

"Mac always uses seasoning for me," Galen said. "These are my favorites, so far. He said there are many more varieties to try on Earth."

For a moment, I thought Galen's paragon would spit their food out on their plate. They swallowed hard and glared at me. "You are feeding us human spices?" Their tone implied I had given them illicit drugs.

"Basil, thyme, and rosemary," I said. "They didn't come from Earth. We grow them in our herb garden here at the fortress."

Their paragon relaxed at that, though they squinted at the hamburger I'd cooked for myself. "Where are your spices?"

I didn't usually put spices on hamburger, choosing instead to slather it with ketchup, yellow mustard, and a layer of pickles, but I made a show of dousing it with black pepper and a dash of the other spices I named for them before I covered it with my usual condiments.

Despite their concerns, the dragons ate their spiced meat and even licked their plates clean. After dinner, when I picked up the dishes, Galen's paragon leaned toward them.

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