The Time Weaver

clouds above us. Excitement bubbled through me. I squeezed my thighs harder around him and his head jerked forward. I just had time to wrap my other hand in his mane as he launched from the roof.

It was almost as thrilling as the kiss.

 He tried to fly smoothly. He tried not to jostle her, to soar slowly and evenly into the pitch of sky above the city haze. But ascension required wing movement; it was impossible not to buck. She would be strong—she was drakon, so of course she would be strong—and he felt the tug of her weight through her hands, the pressure of her legs hugging him, somehow both arousingly muscular and troublingly frail.

Anyone riding his back would feel slight, he told himself. She had a good grip. She would not loosen it.

The dry air below them changed rapidly into humidity, and then to the first of the clouds. Sandu pierced through them without hesitation. The cove of the storm amassed miles away yet; the vapor around them now was merely damp and chilly. He felt no threat of electric charge.

Water beaded his muzzle, caught in his lashes; the air finally tasted clean, nothing of mankind. Yet he remembered, belatedly, Honor's concern about breathing. With a jet of warmer air supporting him in a glide, Alexandru glanced back at her.

She shone with moisture, her skin agleam against the purpled mist, her hair still bright as a beacon, even after all these years. The sheath of cloth molding to her figure had gone transparent. Her eyes were closed, and she was smiling.

He tipped gently to the right, following the airstream, then climbed higher, breaking free of the cloud.

Starlight, moonlight, a cloudscape below them like cottony thistles blown about, peaceful and silent. He stretched his wings fully then, willing to drift, to let the shifting winds move him.

Daybreak wasn't far off. He felt that as clearly as he did the winds, a subtle quickening in his blood, dampened now, but it would begin to peak. He'd been aloft to witness the rising sun more times than he could remember, but he'd always been home in his mountains then.

A dragon descending to land at Zaharen Yce was nothing extraordinary at all. A dragon descending over the tame skies of Barcelona would cause a frenzy. People fleeing, animals rampaging, the press; even in this seaport town, far from the heart of Europe, there would be press.

He considered it. Decided they had time yet.

The clouds below slowly changed their aspect, growing thicker and more ragged. In the not too far distance lightning forked, sparking light in distinct segments, transforming what would appear to be a smooth bump of violet into boils of darker violence.

Sandu angled right again.

He'd been keeping his ears ticked back toward Honor, listening to the sound of her respiration, alert to any change. So he heard the difference in her before she moved: a suspension of breath, a soft rushed release. She came forward, crawling to do it, fist over fist through his mane. He felt her face press against his neck and—God, he was sure of it—her lips against his scales. She kissed him, nuzzled him, then crept even more forward with her legs tight around him, the hot center of her almost burning, and said, very throaty, 'Higher.'

He must be mad. He must be delusional, because all he could think was how he didn't want her to move back, how if anything he wanted to feel those legs go tighter still, that space between them pressed hard against him, the incredible hot burn of her sex. So he cocked his wings and caught the next jet that blasted by, a sudden wild lifting that shot them fifty feet in seconds, if he had to guess.

Honor laughed. She screamed and laughed and he bared his teeth at her exhilaration; if he could have laughed with her, he would have. She kissed him again, still laughing, rubbing her face to him, and when the next whoosh of storm-scented air pushed against his belly he rode it. She screamed and he rode it, and it registered on him only a second too late that she was screaming from below him now.

She'd lost her grip.

He was a prince and a peasant and a leader of dark fairy-tale fiends; at the age of sixteen he'd taken the life of the first formal challenger to his rule, and by nineteen he'd killed three. Whatever terrible, trembling edge of fear still dwelled within him had been long ago pressed flat by his greater will to win.

Alexandru did not panic at the loss of the dragon-girl on his back. Instead, with a cool and calculated calm, he arrowed after her.

Wings folded, neck stretched, his eyes gone to slits. He heard her now, even though she'd stopped screaming. He heard her nightgown snapping and tearing around her, the length of her hair making a noise like tremendous static, like the lightning behind them. Her arms were stretched up toward him, her fingers splayed. Her mouth was open, a silent cry.

She flipped about and the nightgown ripped free. It whipped past him and just missed entangling with his legs, but Sandu had no time for that, he was gaining on her, he was sleek and made for velocity, and she was small and tumbling. He was going to catch her. He was going —

The sea was a white-peaked, infinite floor, rushing closer with stomach-clenching speed. If she hit it, it was going to be like stone. It would smash her apart. There would be no recovery, no second chances. So he was .. .not ... going ... to miss—

He snared her with his right front claws, the abrupt change in his equilibrium wrenching him sideways, reeling them into a loop before he could recover. The sea became a smear of gunmetal and foam, the tang of bitter salt filled his mouth and nose, choking, but then he was in control again, flinging them both higher to the safety of the open air.

Alexandru wasn't actually certain which part of her he'd caught, only that he had caught her, and her hands were clutching at his leg, and her hair now streamed up and around his chest. After he stabilized he peered down at her, hoping he'd not pierced her with a talon.

He had her at the waist. Naked Honor was half-wrapped around his foreleg, her cheek and torso hard against him.

And she was laughing.

They returned to her roof. There seemed to be no better location to land besides the flat fields plowed in rectangles beyond the city, but landing out there would mean having to figure a way for them both to get back to the Gothic Quarter somehow at dawn, without clothing or coin or anything else. He considered leaving her there, returning as smoke to the cathedral and then hiring a carriage back to her—if he could locate a carriage; if he could secure one without horrifying the horses or chickens or sheep or any of the other myriad of cattle being transported along the streets—but by the time the sky was beginning to bleed scarlet at the horizon, Honor Carlisle was already pointing downward toward her bell tower, tugging at his leg.

There truly was not room to safely alight. Dangling a live female at the same time made things rather worse. Still, he forced a gradual descent, his wings beating frantic, rushing grit from the tiles and he thought,hummingbird hummingbird, as he managed nearly a hover until her feet found purchase.

The second she dropped to her knees, he went to smoke. The relief was stupendous.

He Turned back to man as she watched, still standing on the sloped tiles. He Turned below her, for her safety, then took her hand and guided her back to the bell tower. She seemed unperturbed by the loss of her nightgown. When he gave her his shirt, she accepted it with a nod but didn't put it on.

Sandu discovered his arms and legs curiously weak. Electric snaps were shooting outward from his spine to his rib cage, both painful and not; even his skin seemed foreign to him, too tight, as if he'd shifted back into the wrong shape. When he looked at Honor all of these sensations intensified, and the notion that he was no longer himself, that he had changed into something new and unpleasantly alien, anchored into his thoughts.

Aside from the drag of her weight, he hadn't been able to feel her at all in his claws, not her skin or her heat. He might have grievously injured her and not known it. He might have actually cut her in two. A dragon's claws were beyond sharp, they were harder than steel and meant to slay, to gouge both flesh and solid rock. It was a goddamned miracle he hadn't hurt her, but she didn't even seem bruised.

The bleed of sky beyond the rooftops became flame, and the stars singing above him began, one by one, to disappear into a rising sheer blue.

He noticed his breeches on the tower floor and turned his back to her to put them on. He sincerely hoped she'd at least have the sense to hold the damned shirt up to her chest when he turned back around.