Page 39 of Captured in Love
A dragon lies in the shallow canal, his eyes closed, the water sluicing over and around him. Large red patches on his body vaguely match the worst of Isak’s burns—only now they show as chunks of dragon skin that’s missing scales. A great huff of breath escapes his nostrils, then he lowers his head underwater and remains there.
“Is he drowning?” I whisper. “Should we get him out?”
Not that I have any idea how to accomplish that. He’shuge!
Raphaël shakes his head. “Look at what’s behind his jaw.”
I take a step closer even though Levi tugs me back. Dark slits in Isak’s upper neck open and close rhythmically, and he doesn’t seem to be in any distress.
“He has gills!” I exclaim.
Levi apparently loses the battle between caution and curiosity, because he edges closer as well. “His feet are webbed. So he’s…what? A sea dragon?”
“He must be,” I muse, studying Isak’s long, sinuous body covered in ice-blue scales. “Oh, he must have passed through the tunnel before us. He probably scraped off some of his scales on that grille.” Then a thought occurs to me, and my body goes cold. “Levi. He’s adragon. And we’re witches. I don’t think we should be here when he wakes up.”
All the tales about our ancient enemies bubble to the surface, stories we listened to as kids, lessons we learned in school. Whatever Isak is doing here is none of our business. He’s much too powerful for the three of us to take on, especially since neither Levi nor I are skilled in offensive magic. We’re also burned out on magic, largely because we saved Isak’s scaly butt from that spell.
Raphaël might stand a chance against him, but I don’t want to put him in that position.
I turn away from the canal. There are plenty of places to hide, but we have to get that fucking token from the volcano before we can leave. I have next to no power left, and as I already learned, the single defensive spell I can perform on the fly doesn’t work properly on Isak. It barely shocked him in his human form, and I don’t doubt that he’s much more impervious to magic as a dragon.
“Come on, guys, let’s go before he realizes we saw him in this form,” I say urgently.
A thought occurs to me—as a witch, I should probably try to get rid of the dragon. That’s what our ancestors did, generations of witches who fought against dragonkind. And he’s already down, incapacitated and unconscious.
But I can’t. There’s no way I could attack a defenseless Isak. Unless he made a move against us, I couldn’t hurt him at all.
Levi reluctantly steps in my direction, but Raphaël stays at the edge of the canal.
“I don’t think he’d hurt you,” he says, pensive. “He has known what you are since the beginning. He’s had several opportunities to do you harm, and all he’s done is help.”
That stops me in my tracks. And has me feeling like the worst idiot. Raphaël is right. But our culture has painted dragons as monsters who would destroy us all if given the chance. The witches won the bloody wars by sheer numbers and exterminated all dragon clans during the Great Witch Wars of the twentieth century.
Yet Isak here is living proof that at least some of those stories were wrong. He helped Raphaël and Levi save me from the caved-in tunnel in Egypt and gave us a ride from the desert. Then he showed up on my doorstep at the guesthouse, where he could have easily overpowered me if I’m being completely honest.
Instead, he chose to kiss me.
I groan and lean against the wall of the nearest building. I’m too tired to think properly, too drained to deal with a revelation of this magnitude. I’d thought Isak was a witch—or maybe a very cunning human who managed to con his way into the Ballendial Games, much like we had. Instead, it turns out he’s a mythological creature that’s supposed to be extinct.
A headache pounds in my skull, the result of stress, dehydration, and overusing my magic.
“What do we do?” I ask. “We can leave him here, grab the token, and check on him on our way out?”
Even as I say the words, they sound wrong in my mouth. I can’t leave here until I’m sure Isak is okay. But what isokayfor a sea dragon?
Instead of leaving, I peer at the still form in the canal again. There’s no way I can leave withoutsomeconfirmation that he’ll live. Fuck, I wish our history lessons were more detailed and useful, and less geared toward celebrating the victors of a genocidal war.
Levi leans on the wall next to me and gives me a sideways glance. “As much as I hate to say it, this is pretty fucking cool.”
“What, nearly dying several times over?” I return dryly.
He nudges me with his hip. “No, learning that dragons still exist.”
“You said you wanted to become a dragon slayer,” I remind him.
Levi scrubs a hand over his short hair. “Eh, I was a dumb kid, what can I say.”
That’s not true, and I would argue with him about that, but I don’t want to make this moment even more difficult than it is. Silently, I reach for his hand and squeeze his fingers. He squeezes back, and the corner of his mouth turns up in a small smile.
