Warriors of Wind and Ash - Page 104

So she butts it hard with her little horns.

The egg rolls over and our second hatchling tumbles out. This one has pronounced brow ridges and a sharper snout, indicating his chosen gender as male.

He squalls indignantly at being dumped out of the egg, and he scrambles to get back inside. His sister circles him with rebuking chirps, and when he tries to pull the big piece of eggshell back over the hole and seal himself in, she grabs it in her tiny jaws and chomps it into fragments.

“Oh god.” Serylla looks up at me, alarm and amusement in her gaze. “Are they fighting already?”

“They are.” I lower my nose to our daughter and nudge her away from her brother. She tumbles over in a roly-poly ball of spotted lavender skin.

“No scales yet,” comments Serylla.

“Those will grow in soon.” I stare down at the girl hatchling, who has pounced on my forepaw and is now gnawing one of my claws with her stubby teeth. “See if you can coax him out, Serylla. His wings need air.”

Serylla scoots over to the blue egg and begins speaking in low, soft tones. “We’ve been looking forward to meeting you, little one. Won’t you come out and stretch those pretty wings? I promise it’s safe. Your father and I won’t let anything happen to you.” She meets my eyes again, her gaze warm and reassuring. “We’re in this together for good, he and I. We’ve been through so much to be with you, and we won’t let you down, I swear.”

She keeps talking for a long time, but our son remains in his egg past noon. With great trepidation, I leave my little family alone for a short time so I can check on the clan. It’s a quick flight, less than an hour, and I’m tortured by panic the whole time. When I return, my heart floods with inexpressible relief at seeing Serylla, our daughter, and the blue egg still in the nest. It might be years before I can leave them alone for any length of time without fearing they’ll be stolen from me.

“He still won’t come out,” Serylla says. “Is this normal?”

“I don’t think so.” I prowl over to the nest and nudge the egg a little.

“Of course nothing is ‘normal’ anymore,” she muses. “We’re certainly not a normal dragon family.”

“No, we are not.”

“Does it bother you?” she asks uncertainly. “That I’m not the big, beautiful dragon life-mate you were supposed to have?”

Before answering, I shift into my human form. I snatch a blanket to wrap around myself before climbing into the nest and crawling over to kiss Serylla’s rosy mouth.

“You are the beautiful life-mate I was supposed to have,” I murmur against her lips.

She clasps her hands behind my neck and pulls me in for a deeper kiss. And when we break apart, there he is. Our son, sitting on his hind legs with his forepaws together, surveying us gravely.

“Oh,” Serylla whispers, as if she’s afraid she might startle him. “He came out!”

The hatchling’s brow ridges contract, and he prowls a little closer, cautiously, nostrils flaring. His sister starts to bound toward him in exuberant greeting, but I catch her in both hands and hold her back. She’s a surprisingly strong little creature, and the spines along her back dig painfully against my chest, but lucky for me, neither the spines nor her claws are very sharp yet.

“We’ll have to have lessons on how to behave around humans,” I say.

At the deep sound of my voice, she stops thrashing and goes still. I begin to hum softly, and she relaxes in my arms.

I lift my gaze to Serylla, eager for her to see the effect of my voice on our daughter, but she’s entirely enchanted, because the little blue dragon is crawling onto her lap. He’s tentative about it, but after a moment he flops down and closes his eyes. At first I think he has fallen asleep, but then he opens one eye just a crack to look at me, before shutting it again.

I chuckle, and the girl dragon chirps with delight.

“About feeding them,” Serylla says, wrinkling her nose. “Didn’t you tell me that dragons chew the food for their young and then—”

“I’ll do that part,” I assure her.

“Thank you.”

“And as for naming them… there will be a formal presentation to the clan at some point, and a visit to the hot springs when they’re three months old… but we can name them whatever you like, whenever you like.” My voice trembles a little, fragile with emotion. “I want to thank you for this, Serylla.”

“Ky.” She shakes her head. “All of this, with you, with them—it’s an adventure beyond what I dreamed of. I would have been bargained away, sold into an arranged marriage by my mother, trapped in some distant palace with people who didn’t care about me. Instead I have a whole new family—the dragons, the girls—and I have these two adorable, squishable babies, and I have you. And you, just you, would be enough, without everything else.”

I move closer to her, until we’re side by side, because I need to feel her. I need to have the smooth skin of her arm against mine, to feel wisps of her hair against my shoulder. When she tips her face up, I kiss her tenderly on the forehead.

We sit there, she and I, with our arms and hearts full of the life we created together. The new generation. The promise that dragons will continue to exist in this world.