Page 66 of The Dragon at the End of This Pregnancy

I almost dropped my tablet on the floor when the priestess responded saying even more betas wanted to take part, if they could be mated to a dragon. Apparently, I wasn't the only beta kobold with a death wish.

While half my friends at the fortress still thought that about me, I knew better. Galen would never hurt me. When we flew, they locked me in place with a spell tighter than a seatbelt. In all the time I'd known Galen, they'd never hurt me on purpose.

They'd spent so long alone, I often felt like their teacher and mentor, though they were far older than me. Galen listened to me and made an effort to change, which was a pleasant surprise. I'd expected them to ignore me, or have a "might is right" attitude, but they were intelligent and considerate, two things I'd been taught dragons were not.

I wanted to repay their kindness with a surprise of my own. I had gotten a few responses about Goff's whereabouts in my search, but no one had an email address for him. "He's older than email," a beta from The Meadows said. "The only way to get ahold of him is to knock on his door."

"Do you have anyone willing to do that for me?" I asked.

The response made me laugh. "You got any extra dragonets flying around? I might find it in my heart to check on him, if you do."

I sent a quick message to Han and Sunny. The young beta agreed to let his babies go if it meant a chance to reunite Galen with their father. I was so proud of him. He was already well on his way to becoming a dragonet trainer.

I emailed my contact out west to offer the final bargain. "If you can convince Goff to come to The Spike for a dragon reunion, you'll have two dragonets."

I only hoped it worked.

* * *

Galen's nesting instincts hit hard in the final month. They started rattling off items we would need to keep the babies safe, warm, and fed. I emailed a new list to the fortress every day, asking them to store the items for us in one of the dry caverns in the grotto until we could retrieve them after our eggs hatched.

I almost thought I was immune to nesting, and then the urge gripped me. I wanted to return to our cave and make it safer for hatchlings. I needed to put a lock on our meat cooler, sweep the entrance so there weren't any leftover bone shards from the last pile Galen pushed off the mountain, and …

"When do baby dragons start flying?" I asked Galen.

"After their first molt."

I only had a few months to move the bone pile further away, or we would have a dragon baby foraging for rotten meat.

"Rotten meat is good for babies," Galen said, answering my thought. Their ability grew stronger by the day. I should have been used to it by now, but it still freaked me out. "They will have an iron stomach by their second molt."

"If they survive," I muttered.

"Stop worrying," Galen said. "Look how beautiful our eggs are, huddled together."

The dragon egg was roughly twice the size of our kobold egg, which was larger than any I'd seen before. I'd heard Punky's and Tuft's eggs had been huge from the sunlight, but we'd tucked ours inside the blanket fort most of the time to keep them warm.

"The shells are glowing," I noticed.

"We're getting close," Galen assured me. "Less than a week now."

I placed a hand on each egg and whispered, "I can't wait to meet them."

"Neither can I." Galen's voice rumbled in their chest, and the dragon egg gave a little shake.

"Did you see that?"

We both watched intently for several minutes, but nothing happened. After a quarter-hour, Galen frowned at the dragon egg and said sternly, "They wanted to play with us, but they wore themself out."

They snorted a laugh at our dragon child's expense, and smoke filled our little enclosure, making me cough. Once we aired out the blanket fort, even the glow from the eggs seemed less intense. They were sleeping once more.

ChapterTwenty-Four

Galen

I must have scaredour eggs with the burst of smoke. Just when I thought they were about to hatch, they went back to sleep inside their shells to wait for another day.

They were getting so big, it was hard to reach Mac on his side of our blanket fort. The weather on Ignitas never strayed far from comfortable, but the heat inside our little egg incubator was getting to me. Both Mac and I had been drinking more water than usual, but that only meant we had to pee more. Every time I got up, I worried I would miss the first tremor of a crack.

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