THE MERMAID AND THE DRAGON

Amanda Milo

Copyright © 2020 Amanda Milo ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.  This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties.  Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited.  No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by an information and retrieval system without express written permission from the Author/Publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. This is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Edited by LY Services

DEDICATION

Yours If You Want It

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

EPILOGUE

NOTE FROM AMANDA

Books & Audiobooks by Amanda…

About the Author

DEDICATION

To R with all my love and half my bug spray. And to Destiny, who loves mermaids. You can’t read this story until you’re thirty, but if you grab it, I hope you remember summers spent dodging mosquitoes with us. May you always enjoy hiking with happy memories. ♥

Yours If You Want It

Do you ever click on a book and go, “What the heck did I download again?” Here be a book Summary for your convenience, cause I love ya:

Our coastline is craggy stone cliffs in the distance, warm beach sand when we want to really sunbathe, and the most vivid turquoise water you’ve ever laid your eyes upon.

Welcome to Titan’s Tears Cove, near the Titan volcano, and centered equidistant from the closest dragon-danger zones of Flame Pass and Ember Pass.

But they aren’t too close. Unlike the Gulf of Mermaids colony on the other side of Venys, our tribe is made up of only my sisters, and we are so quietly tucked away that we aren’t often hunted by anything here.

At least, that was the case until a lone dragon got too curious. And hungry.

Little do I know that I’m about to be snatched up for a dragon’s lunch. Another thing I’m clueless about? One touch of the wrong female to the wrong place on a dragon can strike a matebond for life.

Even if a bonding should be impossible. After all, how can a creature that soars through the sky—a dragon, for the high seas’ sake!—be forever-mated to a mermaid?

CHAPTER 1

ADELLA

Sunlight flashes off my scales as I soak in the rays. There’s nothing like feeling the cool refreshing water on my fins while the rest of me enjoys the unparalleled view of a cheery, cloudless sky. Tendrils of my hair trail off the rock I’m reclining on, floating across the water’s surface like rainbow-colored seaweed.

My sisters are sunning themselves on rocks nearby, everyone with full bellies thanks to the school of fish we came upon, and now the cry of sea birds lulls us into a gentle drowse. We’ve got a sweet breeze tickling our ears, and not one of us has a single care in the world.

A large shadow passes over me.

It’s so swift that it’s gone when my eyes pop open, but a chill cuts through my sunshine-induced haze.

Dragon.

Instinctively, I know it. “Did anyone else see—” I start to ask.

A ball of fire hurtles down from the sky.

Panicked, I slap my tail down with enough force to roll me off my rock, diving for safety, the shrieks and splashes from my sisters filling my ears—and then I can’t hear anything over the furious hiss of fire meeting water as flames blast across the waves and the rock tops we were resting on a breath before.

Recoiling from the water’s surface, we watch the fire dance over us like we’re under a glass ceiling. A quick glance around shows everyone is accounted for; the dragon did not claim one of us today. The gills on either side of my throat gape open as I gasp the biggest sigh of relief.

Massive clawed fingers close around me, and I’m snatched right out of the water.

A curdled scream bubbles up from my throat—and the dragon fumbles me, almost dropping me right back into the water. Because a mermaid’s song can be so beautiful it beguiles a sailor into a shipwreck, but a mermaid’s scream can burst a man’s eardrums.

I scream again and thrash like a caught fish, but rather than drop me, the dragon claps his other scaly hand around me, bringing me against the wall of his chest to keep me securely in his grasp. I push against him, shoving at the scales right over his heart no doubt, and—

A blinding spark of multi-colored light flares between us, heating my fingers, my hand, and traveling down my whole body.

What magic is this?

The dragon’s hands spasm.

“Ouch!” I yelp, because now my tail is caught—it’s being crushed and squeezed between his fingers.

I try to tug myself free, hating the pinch, terrified of what’s to come, and to my shock, the dragon loosens his fists enough to poke my flowing gossamer tail fins from between his fingers so that none of me is dangling on this flight.

I gulp and choke because I’m too panicked to close my gills so I can process the pure air. All I can think is dragons always burn their food to death. Why did this one take me alive?

For as long as any mermaid can remember, there’s been enmity between merfolk and dragon kind. At least the dragons in our corner of the world. Our cove is a peaceful place, nowhere near to the nest of dragons who live in the craggy clefts of Ember Pass, or Flame Pass, for that matter.

Yet we’ve lost countless sisters of the sea tribes to the marauding dragons.

Not expecting him to answer, I collapse into his cupped palm, his other palm forming a cage over me, and I cry, “Dragon! I am begging you—please let me go!”

His deep voice makes me shiver when he utters two words that nearly stop my heart. “I can’t.”

CHAPTER 2

THE DRAGON

I have made a terrible mistake. Never play with your food, the nestmasters warned us. And I never have. Find prey, coat it in flames, snatch it up, eat. The process is very simple, and I’ve never deviated.

But today, I ventured to the waters called Titan’s Tears, situated under an ancient volcano, where the meats are said to be the choicest of delicacies. I’ve never hunted mermaids before and I fumbled my chance when I flew over them, casting my shadow down. Like startled fish, they scattered. I blew flames but was too late.

But I saw one—this one, the one I’m so tenderly holding now—I saw her shimmer of hair just under the water. Her mane is a prism of colors, the whole spectrum, just like a sky’s bow after a rain.

Dragons love shimmery eye-catching things. How could I resist? I knew I could capture her if I reached under the water. It wasn’t dinner that drove me then; it was curiosity. I was compelled to catch her and have a see.

I had a moment where I wondered why none of my brethren go diving under the surface to catch mermaid delights. But that’s when my talons closed around her, that’s when I knew I wanted to keep her. Then she touched over my heart and the pair bond arced between us, and that’s when our fates became one.

The Elders teach us not to touch our food—but what they didn’t spell out for us when we were soft-scaled fledglings is the concern that if we touch our food, there’s a rare chance we could bond with it. Of course I learned the reason behind the rule when I got older, but I’ve played fast and loose before and never been caught in the bond yet.

In a perfect world, food would be very firmly separated from the category option of ‘mate.’ Nature wouldn’t pair me with a sheep, for example. Yet there are lots of edible items who could also activate a mate bond, and because of this, they’re avoided at all costs. Take a human for example. My dragonkin try to stay as far away as we can from the creatures to prevent accidental bonding. If you come upon one and you’re very hungry—cook it first, then pick it up. Never attempt to reverse the order because to be accidentally paired to a human is to limit your lifespan to that of your addlepated mate’s.

And all humans are addlepated. No dragon in his right mind wants to be latched to the two-legged food.

Yet here I am, in my right mind, and rather than cursing myself with a mere human, I’ve outdone myself by leagues. I’ve linked my soul to a half-human, half-fish.

This creature I’m holding is the stuff of fable and legend. I initially hunted her with the intention of consuming her body.

My mate was to be my dinner.

My stomach pitches, the heinousness of that momentary possibility literally revolting me now that she is my mate.

The mating bond is a strong thing between dragons.

But if a dragon ends up bonded to a creature other than a dragon, then the mate bond can be lopsided. The dragon will still adore their mate...

While the mate may feel nothing for her dragon at all.

The only crumb of comfort I have at the moment is that my mate is displaying plenty of feelings for me. Unfortunately, they are all expressions rooted in fear.

Fear of me.

I tell myself that it’s a start. Surely, a patient, devoted male can turn fear into love.

Carefully caught between my hands, my mate begins to weep. The sound of her sobs makes my heart squeeze painfully.

“Shhh,” I soothe. “I’m not going to hurt you,” I vow.

“Then take me back! Please, please, take me back to my sisters,” she pleads.

I hate to hear anything cry. I’ve returned fauns to their herds and a toddler troll to its home bridge, because I didn’t know it was so young, and the guilt wouldn’t let me eat it once I found out that I’d snatched a mere toddler from where it had been foraging beside its mother. This is why I try to never give my meals a chance to talk. My heart is sometimes too tender to listen to them cry only to fill my belly with them after. This is why I should always cook my food straightaway. But oi! In a good bit of news, now that I’m bonded I won’t activate with anything else. This is especially uplifting because sometimes I like a little kick to my food.

I’ve reached the rockface that is home to my home, and I beat my wings to give me lift as I extend my rear legs to catch the jut of rock that forms a landing perch. I try not to jostle my new mate, but she gasps and sobs harder, likely expecting her end to come soon now that we’ve landed.

The sound of my mate’s terrified tears heaps worlds of self-reproach on my head.

When a Crested Merlin dragon—that’s me—takes a natural mate, she’s our own kind, or near to it. When a dragon takes a human by accident—which doesn’t happen often, not in recent memory—well, for those pairings, a dragon can take on the form of a man to match his wingless, short-lived mate. The bond could (in theory, I suppose) be a happy one, with both the dragon in-man’s-form and it’s pitiable mate (human as it is) coexisting well enough. At least nature changes the dragon’s form to ensure that they match.

On that thought, dread slams me like a lodged casting.

...You don’t know what a casting is? You, dear reader, must not be a dragon. Or at least not dragonkin.

Crested Merlins like myself regurgitate the indigestible bits of our meals, called ‘castings.’ Basically, we hack up compacted balls of bones and feathers and fur bits that won’t pass through our systems. Crested Merlins also collect our pellets and store them. It’s a habit that’s filled nearly half of my cave, a collection I hoped to share proudly one day with my mate.

If nature turned my mate into a dragon, she would be awed at my saved castings.

But mermaids don’t change into dragons. And dragons...

My mate and I are doomed.

I cannot take on the form of half a fish.

I cannot live in the sea.

She can’t fly or even walk.

What have I done?

Carefully, I spread my hands until the beautiful half-woman, half-sea creature is revealed. I expect her eyes to be clenched tightly in terror, or for her to be glaring up at me with unadulterated hate.

Instead, her luminous eyes (also the glory of prisms, just like her riotously jewel-colored mane) meet mine. Her gaze is wet with heartbreak, her pretty countenance plaintive and sad. Perhaps she feels the bond between us as I do and knows what’s been done. What’s irrevocably been done.

Her third eyelids sweep over the surfaces of her eyes, forcing the tears forming there to spill down her cheeks, the saltwater trails hydrating her already sea-starved skin, but only where the liquid borne from her heart burns its paths.

I exhale a weighted breath, and she flinches. I swallow hard and ask, “What is your name?”

“Adella,” she replies uncertainly.

Adella. It’s a beautiful name. And the very meaning of her name is nobility of the seas.

“My name,” I tell my mate and not my dinner, “is Kalos.” It means great lover to his beloved, not that I’ve ever had a mate before to prove my name true.

I stare down at her fins.

Not that I can prove it to the lifemate I have now, either.

What. Have. I. DONE.

“Please—” she starts.

I cut her off, bringing my spread hands with her draped over my claw-tipped fingers, closer to my face. “Shh. Do not ask me to return you. I can’t let you go.”

She looks ready to burst into endless tears. “But why?”

“Because,” I confess, “we are mates.”

Her expression doesn’t change; no recognition crosses her face. “Why can’t you let me go if we’re friends?” she asks in a very faint voice.

“No, no.” Frustration leaves my gut feeling hot and sick. Even my mate’s word-meanings are not mine, not the ones of my people. We are so different in every way. But… it is done. We are mated. “Not ‘mate’ as in friend,” I clarify. “You are my mate as in my other bonded half. My drhema.” My cherished one, is what the endearment means. And I can already feel that I will cherish her. Deeply. Thoroughly. Forevermore.

She still stares up at me, and perhaps this expression on her face is disbelief, not a lack of comprehension. “How…” She chokes, sounding as absolutely horrified as I’m struggling not to feel.

Ruefully, I admit, “Because we touched, and apparently, your kind is alike enough to mine in this way that we’re mate-compatible.”

She sputters. “I am to you what a dragonfly is to a shark!”

“That’s harsh.”

Her eyes widen. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you—”

“Shark,” I muse. “Shark of the skies, I suppose. I like it.” I look down at her. “I meant that you were doing yourself a disservice. You are more ravishing than any dragonfly.”

This stops her words. She closes her mouth.

I sigh. “I am sorry too. I had no idea you’d put me at risk. There’s a reason dragons turn our food to charcoal before we handle it.”

She flinches, and I could kick myself.

“Krevk’d—I mean… you aren’t food to me now. You aren’t what I would have wanted for myself, to take as a mate, I mean—I was dancing around a caverock female dragon—” I bite my tongue to stop the explanation. Adella may be a woman-fish, but she is my woman-fish, and I won’t have her thinking I would pine for another now.

I won’t. The bond prevents it. I’ll never want another female for as long as I live.

...Not that this declaration will sound particularly meaningful if mermaids don’t share a dragon’s significant lifespan. I don’t even know. I don’t know much about mermaids at all; I’ve only heard of how exquisite they taste. I drum my claws in the air, which makes Adella’s body undulate prettily over my fingers. All her scales flash as her curves bounce and parts of her jiggle. I try not to get distracted. “It’s important to me that you know our bonding is as sacred as it was instantaneous. From the moment I made contact with you, I’m inclined to only you forevermore.”

Other dragons could be different, but this is the way of it for Crested Merlins like myself. We’re all more or less the same, jet black males and sloe-berry colored females, with flexible horn-frilled crests that fold against our necks. Our neck frills extend when we fight for territory—to make us look bigger, more threatening to other dragons—and also when we display for a potential mate.

Males of my dragonkind especially use our frills during our mating dances. Since we’re so attracted to color, it’s a mystery why our scales are so plain. Shiny, but plain. Our frills though lend us at least some ornamentation.

Mine puffs up around my neck without conscious thought, either hopeful that Adella will be wowed by its impressive size or she’ll find me more interesting to look upon and perhaps never ever look at another dragon because she found me and my significant crest so stunning.

Many creatures think dragons are monstrous, but I hope my mate doesn’t think me so. Towards her, I will strive to only show her love and cherishing and how much I’ll wish we could share lusty, lusty mating.

Instead of being wowed or enamored, I can’t tell if she even notices my attempt to woo her attention.

Her face has puckered like someone has spritzed her tail with lime wedges and smoked salts. “Is this supposed to make me feel better? You’d never have wanted me. You intended to have somebody else.”

My blink is long. What? My mind races as I try to consider what’s come out of my mouth. Crested Merlins aren’t the most social of dragonkind, which is to say I’m very poor at making conversation. You could say I have no skill whatsoever… evidenced by the fact that I’ve managed to offend my mate inside of our very first day together. Technically our first hour. Well done, Kalos.

Adella’s gaze is beginning to heat up. If she were a she-dragon, I’d say she looked dangerous. “You intended to eat me, but you made me your mate instead?” Her hands slap down on her knees… or… where her knees should be if she weren’t half of an aquatic thing. “Undo it!”

“I can’t,” I murmur, my snout nearing her face to get a better look at her. “Your eyes are really beautiful. Such color. So shiny...”

Ah. Oh, dear. Now here is the look of unadulterated indignation that I expected earlier. “What is the matter with you?!” she screeches.

I flinch. And I immediately make a note that it’s dangerous to anger my mate unless she develops a case of laryngitis. I’ve heard of a mermaid’s song; I didn’t know anything about their shrieks.

Deafening.

I tilt my hands until she slides into one of my palms. Then I tap the meat of my clawed hand carefully against my ear depression, hoping to stop the ringing. “I’m afraid I’m about to become quite fixated on your every lovely feature.” I would fixate on her lovely features anyway; even if she weren’t my mate, she is unaccountably lovely. “You see, I’m going into heat—soon,” I explain. “My heat will be drawn by the blood moon. All dragons suffer under its shine. And now that I have a mate, my instincts—”

“You don’t have anything!” she refutes, her voice trembling. “I can’t live out of the water!” she manages to caterwaul.

And basilisks-be-damned, but my ear depressions feel like they’re peeling. I stare down at her, absolutely stunned. This mermaid of mine has a scream that someone should have warned me of. It’s a horrific revelation. A cove of mermaids could take down a dragon if they knew their power.

“Look at me!” she cries. “I can feel my skin drying, feel my scales get tighter and tighter. It hurts to be out of the water for too long. You have to take me back!”

“Hurts?” My heart constricts. I raise one fingertip over her flashy scaled tail, hovering like I might pet her—but suddenly, I’m afraid to. The air currents as we soared… they felt amazing to me. I had no idea, none, that I was harming her. “What I’ve done… hurts you?”

More tears spill down her cheeks, draining the precious salty fluid she can’t spare to lose. “Yes. Please—please let me go.”

Carefully, I bring my thumb up to brush away her tears and try to stave the flow by holding my thumb in front of her eye socket.

It doesn’t work.

“What are you doing?” she asks, her voice watery as she tries to pull back.

“I’m trying to help you stop crying,” I tell her. “You can’t afford to spend your tears. Shhh, shhh.”

She slaps my thumb away. “Stop shushing me! We’re too different. You need to take me back to the cove!”

Feeling remorse settle like a lump in my gut, I close my hands over her once more.

“Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you…” she starts chanting, and I realize for the first time that I am a monster, just as many creatures might believe every dragon to be.

Because a male who knowingly breaks his mate’s heart can be nothing but a monster.

She peers through my fingers, staring up at me gratefully. Damn me. Looking into Adella’s eyes, I know without a doubt that it will shatter her to be parted from her home and family for the rest of her days. And I hate that I can’t let her go back to the place she most wants to be in all of the worlds.

Sorrowfully, I swallow hard. “I’m sorry, my little mate,” I tell her once more. “But I won’t ever let you go now that I have you. You see, I can’t live without you."

I close my wings and dive off the side of the mountain.

CHAPTER 3

ADELLA

He may think that he can’t live without me, but he’s going to have to give it a good dragon try. Because once he releases me into the sea, I’ll escape him. Dragons can swim, but mermaids can dive. I can wait out his shorter breath. I won’t be his air-dried pet forever like he seems to believe I need to be.

But when the dragon stops, it doesn’t seem like we’ve flown far enough to be back at Mermaid Cove already.

We’re not.

We’re at a mountain ravine with a small river’s pool.

A very small pool. “This is the smallest ravine I’ve ever seen.”

“That’s because it’s a gully,” the dragon says with a surprisingly recognizable grimace. I wouldn’t have thought that giant lizards could be emotive. He proves his features are quite flexible when his scaly brows crease and his mantle crest rises in clear curiosity. “When could you have seen a ravine?”

With his two horns that sprout on either side of his head, and his massive scaly jaws brimming with blade-sharp teeth, I should be terrified to be held in front of his face, but I’m not. His inquisitive eyes are the color of a glassy green sea, shimmering, vibrant, and in their depths, color-changing and vast and beautiful in a wild way.

I stare up at him, bemused despite myself. “If you ever travel beyond the reef barrier, the sea world gets even bigger. There are more mountains—with ravines visible from the coast—if you venture beyond the coves and gulfs.”

“You can climb over a coral reef?” he asks, like this is the height of wizardry.

“We can swim right under them,” I explain, barely stifling a watery laugh.

“Oh,” he says in wonder. He looks me up and down, spending extra time gazing at my not-so-glistening tail. The slight ridges on either side of his mouth pull low, like a frown. And suddenly, I know that’s exactly what he’s doing. These are his lips, I realize.

My gaze follows his, and we both stare down at my tail.

My appendage has turned a dry matte brown color, losing its wondrously glossy, reflective surface. “Right, you’d swim under, of course,” he says, nodding to himself. His great tail makes a horrible dry scuffing noise against the gully floor as he curls it around his feet. “Why are your scales turning… dull?” Carefully, he extends his hands and sets me in the gully’s water.

Even though he does it carefully, slowly, I still gasp.

Worriedly, his massive eyes—each one essentially the size of me—jump from my face back down to my lower half. “What ails?” he asks.

Stifling a shiver, I explain, “The water is chillier than what I’m used to.” I’m not from the North Sea clan to enjoy this sort of briskness slapping my scales. I flap my tail’s fin, cutting through the liquid, feeling it flow oddly. I test it with my hand, bringing my finger up to taste it.

My concerns are confirmed. “Dragon, this is—”

“Kalos.” His eyes turn an impossibly golden yellow. I didn’t know dragon’s eyes changed colors. “Please call me Kalos, Adella.”

Something flutters in my chest. I try to brush at it, and my movement draws his gaze to the seashells strapped on either side of my chest. “Kalos…” I try again. “This is freshwater.”

His eyes—so pale they’re nearly lemon quartz now—sink to my darkening tail. “You need salt?”

“I need to be in the sea,” I stress.

He sounds conflicted. “We must settle somewhere where I can hunt.” He scans the gully, his wings popping higher behind him like black mountain peaks. “I need a considerable amount of food in a day.”

He doesn’t say it, but there’s a special kind of game where I’m from. Hells, I am that game. And although I’d be hard pressed not to believe him that he won’t eat me—he could have swallowed me down by now, so many times over—thickening fear coats my stomach. “You can’t… you can’t eat my sisters.”

He drags his great clawed hand down his long face. “I won’t.” He locks his gaze to mine—gem-quality olivine green now. “I vow I’m done attempting to eat mermaids.”

“And mermen,” I prompt.

His eyes narrow to slits. “There are mermen?”

I blink up at him, watching two clouds of smoke roll out of his suddenly flared nostrils. I gesture to my sickly browning tail. “Kalos? Saltwater?”

At my use of his name, his features flash with something akin to fascination—but warmer, earthier. His eyes are warmer too: an instantaneous change to pure sunstone. “All right, my dear mate,” he says finally, his voice strangely rougher. Also strangely… genuine. “You have asked this of me, and this I will do. I will find you safe seawater.”

His words are clearly meant to be reassuring. But I can’t fail to notice that he didn’t promise to take me home.

CHAPTER 4

KALOS

I take my mate to a lagoon not far from her glorified seaside inlet—but a damned sight freer of mermen, and I make sure of it. While Adella rehydrates her scales (which turn from a dull muddy brown to a bright, burnished copper, beginning to flood with more and more colors the longer she soaks in saline) I leave her in the nearly coastal body of water and eat two unsuspecting mermen.

Everyone was right. Merfolk are delicious.

I’ve not been away from Adella for long, so when I return, I’m surprised to feel guilt tickling my stomach.

At least I think it’s guilt. I suppose I didn’t take the time to fully cook the mermen. Yes, I analyze the sensation, and with some relief, I confirm that the tickling is coming from my insides in the visceral sense, not the emotional one; it’s very distinctly a hand or two trying to paw my innards for mercy. Whew. Definitely just the fishmen, and once my stomach acids go to work on them, they won’t bother me anymore.

Hopping over a craggy beach-rock formation, I race for my mate. Bounding across the shallow water, loudly sending splashes every which way, I excitedly show Adella the sunfish that I caught for her. To my delight, my new mate has made quick work of collecting food for herself too—and more endearing, she’s kind and thoughtful enough to have made a pile of offerings for me. “Do you eat oysters?” she asks.

“I never have,” I tell her. My tail curls up happily behind me, slapping the water as it wags in pleasure over this gesture Adella has made towards me. I stare at her fondly. “I’ve heard their insides can hold treasure! But they are too small, too difficult to pry open.”

“I can open them for you,” she offers. “And they do sometimes hold treasure. But I’m afraid these here won’t go far to feed you,” she says sadly, gaze tracing my massive frame.

“I’ll be fine,” I promise, feeling every bit of weight the mermen add to my belly. I drop to my haunches and try to dispel the slightly guilty tang that’s attempting to batter my senses. “I’m beyond pleased that you thought to feed me at all. Please show me how you harvest your oysters.”

She does show me—and we collect two beautiful pearls, which she stores in her breast’s seashell cups, proving she offers the most glorious spot for safekeeping—and soon, she’s holding up an oyster for me to try opening with my claws. “You should be able to pry it open with your talons… yes! Like that.”

I flame-broil (or nostril-steam) my oysters; she eats hers raw. She also prefers to eat her fish raw, and with two mermen still twitching in my belly, I can’t stand in judgement against anyone who chooses not to thoroughly heat the life out of their meal before partaking in it.

Although the oyster meal has an enjoyable taste, it’s not long into the digestion process that I realize something is wrong. I don’t let it show, or at least I try not to show it, but I’m suddenly not feeling well. Certainly not feeling like myself.

When my belly scales start to heat though, I comprehend that it isn’t the mermen or the oysters at all.

I must be growing ill due to impending mate fever.

And this is bad. Because although a pair of Crested Merlin dragons will delight in a mate fever’s grip for an entire moon...

My mate is not a dragon. There will be no slaking of desire with her.

In fact, I’ll be burning in my fever all alone.

Rather than looking forward to a wild time of affection and an abundance of lovemaking with my female, I’m facing a hungering sickness that’s about to grow entirely worse.

CHAPTER 5

ADELLA

A cracking rumble registers so low in my eardrums that I’m certain I’m hearing the earth split open—but after it stops, I look around, gasping… and only see my dragon.

He’s perched high on a rock overlooking the reef barrier that forms the lagoon he’s placed me in, and his great horned head is cranked to the sky. As I watch, his jaws part, and another awful, terrifying, earth-shaking roar bursts from his throat.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!” I shout up at him, my hands clamped over my ears.

His head snaps down, his eyes pinned right on me. His claws flex, causing little bits of rock to crumble off his ledge and tumble down into the water. His gaze is clear and direct. “I’m warning away other dragons. I’m telling them I have a mate now, and to steer clear of me. Of us,” he amends, his chest puffing ever so slightly.

I bite my lip, lowering my hands. “How old are you?” I call.

His shoulders drop and his neck twists—although it’s so long, his head barely moves from its position. He gazes at me as if he’s measuring the reason behind my inquiry before he answers. “Fifty-two avalanches of the Ember Pass.”

I… don’t know for sure what age that is. But let’s say there is only one avalanche per season, in dragon years, this male is… young. Technically old enough to have hatched his own clutch of eggs and even tail-thwapped them out of the nest so he and his mate could replace them with a dozen more, but still, he seems sort of… young.

“I’m not a fledgling,” he says stiffly, leading me to believe that he might be sensitive about his few years, and thus lack of seasons and, therefore, world experience.

“I can see that,” I grant. “And spare a female her pride and let’s simply say I’m not a smolt anymore.” I’m a hundred and five king tides.

“Smolt,” he murmurs, a little bit of smoke puffing up from between his scaly lips as he repeats the unfamiliar word. “A baby mermaid?”

I smile. “Pretty much.”

The end of his tail bounces into a curl and rolls free, then repeats the movement, like he’s pleased and relaxed. Then I’d swear his mouth parts pull up in a smile, tossing a happy-dragon look at me before he throws his head back and lets out another awful, ground-shaking bellow.

“Would you STOP?” I holler.

His horns tilt sharply; he’s twisted his neck and his head waggles rapidly back and forth, like his dragon’s ears are ringing. “Stop what?” he asks, sounding strained—as if I’m the one being vexing.

“The roaring!”

His snout drops straight down, leaving his horns straight up and his eyes staring level at me. “I have to keep you safe.”

“No one could have missed your first roar. No dragon would dare take that kind of noise on. They certainly haven’t missed the rest of your bellowing—I’m willing to bet my life on it.”

His neck frill tightens against his throat. “If you’re wrong, you are betting your life on it.”

I stare up at him, widening my eyes. “Let’s take the chance.” Before you kill me with a heart attack, I don’t add.

The dragon’s nostril shields suck back with his inhale and whip forward when he snorts his exhale. He turns his nose up a little loftily, his tail snapping in the air and his claws causing more rock to crumble free of the perch he’s claimed for himself as he shifts his dark-scaled body. If he keeps squeezing his jut of rock, it’s going to crack and crash onto the beach, but I’m sure with his wings up and half-flared like they are that he can catch himself before he falls far, and surely before he hits the sand.

His crest flares and snaps back down, an ultra-rapid movement not unlike a shrug as he finally agrees. “Very well. Let’s hope you’re right that the warning calls were enough.”

Warning calls. Dear heavens.

He glances down and easily dives off his rock perch.

As he launches from it, it does indeed crack, the chunks tumbling down, killer boulders that slap and smack so deep in the sand they’re almost instantly buried by the impact.

The dragon pays this no mind, easily wading through the water towards me.

The seawater that he’s brought me to isn’t deep enough for me to fully submerge in, but it keeps the worst of the dryness away.

Still… I’m miserable.

The dragon tries to cheer me up. Once he’s reached my side, he raises his foot over my lap and opens his claws to reveal a gnarled, tubular branch of fulgurite.

“Lightning glass,” I say in wonder.

Sand is fused to the rock-hard bit of hollow glass, a naturally-occurring work of art when lightning bolts strike the beach.

When I don’t immediately take hold of the gift he’s holding aloft, the dragon sets it on my lap and noses it towards my belly button.

Before he can get there, the touch of the dragon’s snout over the hidden slit of my sex makes my tail fin flap.

To cover my reaction, I sit up straighter in the water and take hold of the present he was thoughtful enough to bring me. “Thank you,” I tell him.

“You’re welcome,” he replies. He’s eyeing my position in the water—he’s eyeing the clear lack of water here. “You need a better place than this to make a home,” he comments, clearly unhappy to see me poorly matched to my environment.

The fact that he notices my predicament and cares about my welfare is what’s been keeping me from shouting at him. I want to be returned home immediately. I need to be in the sea. But while at first I was afraid of my captor, now I’m reluctant to hurt this strange creature’s feelings.

He’s a dragon, but so far… he’s been a good one. He believes I’m his mate for now, and I’m hoping that because he sees me as an equal and not a meal, that he’ll come to his senses and take me home very soon.

“I’ll scout out a better spot,” the dragon vows, his wings folding back and his green eyes glowing with earnestness. “I only need to recover a little first.”

I scan him, wondering if the flights back and forth were that much of an exertion on his powerful body.

His wings bend outward as he bends his neck low—bowing to me, I discover before he leaves to patrol the area, his tail winding back and forth like a giant anaconda of darkness behind him.

A happy hiss erupts from him when he discovers a coastal cavern large enough for him to enter it, and he’s delighted to find a fresh water spring complete with cavefish hidden inside of the thing.

I’m amused as I watch him explore, and I find my gaze repeatedly going back to him while he makes his rounds, protecting this territory he has claimed.

My cheeks fire with a blush when the dragon gallops through the sea spray just to bring me a seashell, and I feel my heartbeat quicken when he returns to proudly bestow me with interesting bits of ship wreckage, because… well, for a mermaid, this is quite the courting gesture.

It used to be, anyway.

Mermen are such a rarity that they rarely form any sort of mate-pair anymore. Romantic gestures are a bit of a thing of the past for our kind.

That this dragon—Kalos, I silently refer to him in my mind—seems to enjoy collecting treasure to the degree I do is interesting. I too am inclined to hunt for whatever glitters, whatever I can hoard. And I happen to love seashells.

I clutch Kalos’s gifts to me, deciding that I’ll keep them even when he takes me back. Holding them makes me hungry to dig for my own treasure as well, and eventually, I can’t resist my own hunting in what little water I can patter around in. I’m pleased when Kalos expresses interest in what I find; he’s truly as enamored with flash as I am. “I think these are old coins,” he even muses in wonder as he digs through my little pile.

Unlike when one of my sisters touches my treasures, I don’t shriek at him not to steal anything. Not because I’m afraid of him, but because I… I don’t know anything about this creature, and yet I have the strangest desire to blindly trust him.

It’s peculiar.

In the afternoon, the ebb tide pulls the already low water entirely out of the bay, leaving nothing but the sandiest excuses for puddles. The positive side to this is that the oysters have nowhere to hide. We deplete their population by half just trying to satisfy the dragon’s stomach. I knew dragons had an appetite; I didn’t know they could empty half the ocean. It’s a good thing they live in the air and not the sea. Nothing would be spared. This thought has me gazing narrow-eyed at the quiet cliffs and the silent sky.

Not one gull in sight.

Did the dragon eat the seabirds?

An itching sensation on my lower half has me glancing down to see I’m already drying out. Morosely, I inch over until I’m submerged in the soft wet sand with the most water pooled in it.

Kalos’s shadow falls over me. Instinctively, I twitch. He doesn’t notice. “Is it normal for the tide to wash out like this? The whole bay is empty,” he exclaims, sounding shocked.

“Tides leave like this in many places,” I confirm. I bite my tongue to prevent myself from adding that my family’s cove doesn’t disappear. The waters fall low, sure, but they never empty, not like this place.

“What an unlucky phenomenon,” Kalos says. “I believe I’ve been told that funnel storms off of a coast can drain a bay. Perhaps it’s temporary.”

I nod because I know this to be true.

“Never had cause to see it before. Never had cause to much care—I’ve always avoided the coast if the skies look bad,” he continues, clearly perplexed. But then his dragon’s chin firms, and for the first time, I notice little spikes on it that form a short sort of leathery beard. It gives him a wiser, slightly older appearance than I first assumed. “I can no longer afford not to care.” He turns his gaze to me. “My mate needs her safe seawater.”

I say nothing, because I do need it. And I don’t address the part where he refers to me as his mate, because unlike him, I don’t feel any such bond. If he’s experiencing any sort of bonded drives and instincts, it’s entirely one-sided.

“You’ve been very quiet,” Kalos notes.

“I don’t have anything to add.”

“You don’t sing?” he asks, and if I’m not mistaken, there’s something besides curiosity in his voice. Longing, maybe.

It’s with sadness that I tell him, “Kalos, a mermaid only sings when she’s happy.”

CHAPTER 6

KALOS

The tide still hasn’t returned by the time night falls. To my dismay, the moon that rises in the sky is as red as the scarlet streaks in Adella’s gorgeous fall of drying hair.

But it isn’t as lovely a sight as her crimson sections of wild mane. Oh, it’s beautiful, to be sure. But not welcome. Because to see the red moon rise in the sky is to begin the full effects of heat.

Heat. I understand that word now. There’s fire in my lower belly, an incessant, angry drive that cannot be quenched.

This wouldn’t be a suffering I’d endure to this degree if I hadn’t captured this mermaid. If I were free to find a female dragon, I would not suffer this moon’s cruel effects at all.

I would revel in them.

But I have a mate, I cannot and will not go seeking any other—no matter that my taken female is not of my kind. We aren’t physically compatible but she is very likable, and surprisingly, we share several commonalities, and we’ve only known each other for the briefest of time. For however long our lives last, we will surely find more.

Still, I curse myself for the thousandth time for snatching a sea maiden. It was thoughtless, it was foolish, and now we are both suffering.

And to my utter shame, my mate is suffering. And whats more, if I hadn’t taken her, she wouldn’t be so unhappy as she clearly is.

Adella huddles in the meager leaving of water remaining here, and if I were feeling well, I would have flown her to a better location long before dark fell. I would think my eyes would be better honed at scoping out an appropriate seaside home for us now that I’ve had two practice runs. If my mate had needed a cave with the perfect number of exits and a large enough chamber free from drafts and water (which is the perfect location for Crested Merlin egg incubation), I would have known exactly where to settle us, but I’m new to my mate’s needs. And I’d leave right now and get her settled tonight—I have a sense of urgency that demands my mate get better care shown to her than this—but something isn’t right with me. My sense of balance even seems to be affected; my rear legs aren’t responding like they should, my body isn’t in sync with itself like it should be... I feel strange.

I don’t tell Adella, but when I call my wings to open, just for a stretch, they don’t spread.

This discovery sparks more than mere concern in me. This is no normal heat; if my system were responding to the moon’s fires, I would be burning for a female’s company sure—but I’d be damned ready and able to fly to find one.

All I can assume is that because I have broken the natural law of things and taken an otherworldly mate, then I have disrupted the natural happenings of my system entirely. Why should my system let me fly? I won’t be seeking out any winged mates. Not now, not ever.

I can still walk well enough though, so I approach my female with purpose. “Adella? I will carry you in my hand while we search for an appropriate settling place. We’ll move further down the coast.” I don’t offer the reason as to why I will be walking, and she doesn’t ask.

Instead, she shakes her head and scoops a handful of sand off to the side of herself, and I realize she’s digging a pit, searching out what water lies trapped under the sand’s surface. “Just rest for the night.” She spares me a glance. “You said you weren’t feeling quite right, and you don’t look it. You’re making a funny face.”

I frown at her. “This is my regular face. It isn’t funny.”

Her lips tug up, more of the shadow cast by a smile than the real thing, but it’s a welcome flash of humor all the same. “Whatever you say, dragon.”

“Kalos.”

“I should stay hydrated enough until the tide returns… Kalos,” she tells me kindly, continuing to dig.

That she’s being so solicitous in the face of such awful first-day matehood circumstances mortifies me. I don’t deserve her kindness, and it drives home the point that although she is a mermaid, something that my kind wouldn’t hesitate to consume, she is an entirely likable creature.

And I mean that beyond what she probably tastes like.

Even if matehood could be reversed—and it cannot be—I don’t believe I could ever swallow a sea maiden after this.

(I can definitely eat the mermen though. If you don’t count their surprisingly strong flailings, I didn’t so much as suffer indigestion.)

Part of me knows I should take Adella back to her cove, but a newly mated dragon does not share his mate. It isn’t safe, not even if the only threats are this mermaid’s siblings. Especially if those other females would attempt to turn my mate from me.

And why wouldn’t her sisters try to rescue her from a dragon’s clutches?

Surely they will take one look at her and attempt to swim her away. Concerningly in this scenario, mermaids can hold their breath in the deep far longer than a dragon can.

I wouldn’t be able to bring her back if she fled from me.

I can’t lose my mate now that I have her. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t enjoyed her for long; she is my mate. To lose her would destroy me.

But my greatest fear is that I would take her back to her family—satisfying my need to please her—only to feel my protective instincts flare, and in a mindless rage, I might decimate her sisters who try to take action to save her from me.

If I destroy her loved ones, Adella will hate me.

I want with everything that I am for her to be happy, but I need her to stay with me. We even curl up together to sleep, with me forming a living wall around Adella as she tries to keep herself submerged in the salt-encrusted pit I managed to shakily help her dig out.

Adella noticed my trembling limbs. I saw it in her worried gaze. But she didn’t press me to stop, and I wouldn’t have even if she’d asked. She needs the water, and something is more wrong with me than I knew. I’m glad I didn’t attempt to carry her out of here, because now I know I wouldn’t have succeeded. Not safely.

Before Adella nods off beside me, she may do it quietly, but my ears detect the hitches in her breathing.

She’s silently crying.

My heart strangles, the huge muscle torquing painfully enough that I rub at my chest scales to relieve the sensation.

On our first night of matehood, my female for life is not pleasured and satisfied as a new mate should be. This is unthinkable.

As her mate, especially during a mating fever, I should be devoting all of my attention to slaking our lusts and assuaging our driving needs. I’m not providing for her properly, and I only have myself to blame. As I lie curled around her, bringing my tail closer and closer until it touches her (and attempting not to feel a pang of sadness as she tries not to flinch at my tail’s touch), I vow to all that is dragon within me that at first light, I must be recovered enough to fly her to a new gulf or cove or bay where there’s enough damn seawater.

Without warning, I transform into a man.

It’s so sudden and so silent that I’m staring down at myself in shock, and Adella is none the wiser until she glances at me from the corner of her eye—and does a double take.

“Kalos?” she gasps—and it’s a question, as if she’s trying to reconcile how a man managed to sneak up on a full-grown dragon and soundlessly steal close to his mate.

“It’s me,” I confirm, drawing my eyes away from my scale-covered human hands with nearly blunt human claws. I cast an amazed glance around us—because everything just became gargantuan.

Either that, or I just shrank down to something vulnerably small.

I detest the very idea. I’m a dragon—I should never know the sensation of being small.

I should also never know what it feels like for any part of me to be vulnerable. And yet, between my very human legs, I have no scale-covered plating to protect a rather vulnerable spot, let alone hide my burgeoning desire for the female I’ve been snuggled beside.

Adella sees the evidence of my fever-stricken hunger and glances away, her eyes wide.

My eyes though are soon glued to the approximate place on a mermaid where a human man might couple with her. Adella has only the smallest front slit. I’ve never examined a merman’s tail-half beyond dangling him by the split end of it before dropping him down my gullet, but I’ve been told that they have a small spear-like copulatory organ called a gonopodium that folds out from the fins that grow on their fronts.

What this long-ago stored information tells me is that Adella is unlikely to welcome my advances when my own organ, even human-sized, is likely ten times as thick and large as a male of her kind, and from what I can see, too large to fit into her tiny slit.

And mating fever lasts a burning, fiery month.

I growl into my human hands, making Adella jump.

“Sorry,” I mutter, rubbing tiredly at my face. I think about testing my new limbs, likely the reason I’ve felt so uncoordinated half the day; it seems they move more independently than my dragon’s limbs do—but I decide against moving from this spot at all. If I rise, I’m afraid I’ll fall on Adella, in both senses of that phrase. I don’t want to excite myself by touching her further, and I’m not certain I can master human locomotion without some embarrassing flailing. I also don’t want to frighten her with advances she won’t want or can’t meet.

So I stay where I am, sitting half behind my mate, staring at her hungrily as she tries to keep her scales from drying out in this terrible place that does not meet her needs.

The reminder that I haven’t provided well for my female cools some of my ardor. Enough for me to grow aware of my human-form’s discomfort. Because if I thought my dragon self was less than enthusiastic about drowsing on packed wet sand while my mate keeps vigil in her pocket of necessary water, my new human form is equally thrilled at the prospect. My skin-like scales begin to itch in no time.

I want to roar. I want to rage. I settle for a tired sigh and a sorrowful apology to Adella. “If I could go back, I would not have cursed you with me. I vow that I will make you happy though, Adella. Just please… give me that chance.”

Listlessly, my mate nods.

CHAPTER 7

ADELLA

I wake up because my lower half feels so… wrong.

The red moon burns almost as brightly as the sun, illuminating everything in an unnatural glow. Blearily, I stare down, expecting to see the muddied water, but all I see are a pair of muddy legs.

Legs...

LEGS?!

I thrash sideways, panicked. Like a fish flips itself to escape a net, I instinctively employ the same maneuver…

And end up sprawling, my limbs flailing like a jellyfish’s tendrils do when they’re trapped on land. My body slaps into the sand.

“Adella?”

Startled at myself, my horrified gaze leaps to Kalos’s human face to see that I can read his expressions much better in his human form. He’s astonished.

He helps me stand—both of us clumsy as unicorn foals at first, shaky on our newly minted legs. It takes some coordination, but because he isn’t entirely new to having feet, just a human’s form, he manages well enough, and conversely, because he is new to having a human’s legs and feet, he can adequately understand where I’m failing to grasp my body’s new mechanics, and he is able to instruct me on how to commandeer myself until I’m walking right along with him.

He takes me to the cavern where he found the freshwater spring. His eyes are still a dragon’s eyes—slitted pupils and the brightness from his irises illuminates everywhere he turns his head. Even if this were not so, as a mermaid, I possess excellent night vision. It helps my kind when we’re hunting ships at night.

Kalos drinks greedily from the spring, and I find that I need the freshwater too. I find that it tastes good to me now, not bad.

I jump when I feel Kalos’s hand on my… thigh.

I have a thigh.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” he explains. “Does your skin feel like you must scratch at it?” He drags short claws over his arm as if he can’t help it, proving his scales are irritating him.

Mine skin is irritating me too.

I nod. “It feels stretched tight and… strange.”

Grimly, he bobs his chin, and bends to take me by my calves. He lifts each one gently, rinsing them in the spring’s water using the roughness of his human hands to get the sand and grit from my human legs.

He washes himself next.

And as I watch him running his large hands over his equally large, well-filled out, mature male body—and he catches me looking at him, my eyes heavy-lidded—his eyes widen comically… That’s when I suss out the reason I ever thought of Kalos as young: he’s wholesome.

He’s a full-grown man, and he certainly looks to be a full-grown dragon, when he’s in that form. He just happens to be an idealistic, sweet one.

A dragon. Considerate and attentive and sweet. Who would have thought?

The water has left me cold, and as I stand and wait for him to finish, gooseflesh breaks out on my skin like a human’s. As a mermaid, I’d be impervious to water of this temperature. I could swim, play, eat, and sleep in it.

The realization that I’ve changed makes me unbearably sad.

“Oh, no, shhh,” Kalos nearly squawks—even as he shushes me again, the twit—his brows nearly touching. He leans forward, trying to dash away my tears with his human thumbs. “No, please don’t cry. Adella, I’m so sorry—please don’t cry.”

But I can’t help it. I start to sob.

“Och,” Kalos says, swallowing thickly. “My poor half-of-my-heart.” He wraps his arms around me and brings me in to his warm chest.

His hot chest, actually. I’m not sure how he can be so warm when I’m suddenly so cold, but I cling to him, soaking in his heat.

Kalos groans.

And I freeze. Because while I’m seeking comfort, Kalos is experiencing something very different, if the rising hardness against my hip is anything to judge by.

“Ignore it,” Kalos says shakily, rubbing his hand briskly up and down my ribs and waist, trying to bring warmth into me. “Krevk’d, if I could fly, I would take us out of here in an instant. Get you somewhere you could be warm. I would…” He makes a sound that isn’t really a laugh, because there is no trace of humor in it. “I was going to say I’d start a great fire. Creator, I should be able to do at least that much as a man—and I don’t even know how.”

His forehead thuds against my shoulder, making me jump.

“Didn’t mean to scare you,” he mumbles. “Just… counting my failings as a mate and finding them too numerous to bear.”

Tentatively, I pat his chest. “I believe that you mean well, Kalos.”

At my use of his name, he shudders. Then his lips find my shoulder blade, and he leaves a light touch of them against my skin and says, “I vow to you that I do mean well. And if I can get us through tonight, I promise I will learn ways to do better. For you. For both of us.”

He looks at me then, straight at me, and I see determination, and steel... and a longing like I’ve never experienced before.

As a mermaid, I am a lover of men. Sailors, mostly, and whatever fisherman stumbles to our coastline—men who take one look at the nubile young women in the water and start counting their lucky stars. Those men see our faces and breasts and are filled with temporary lusts.

My dragon sees me as more entrancing than a shiny-winged insect (I smile when I think of our shark-and-dragonfly discussion), but I’m really not sure what he considers beautiful beyond that. He seems to see me, Adella, and not just a pretty face or pert breasts barely covered behind seashells. He doesn’t know me, but he’s made it more than clear that he desperately wants the chance to show me that he can be a good mate to me.

He hasn’t had the easiest day either. For him, I’m the biggest mistake of his life. I could leave him now and never look back. He will pine for me forever, if his claim of matehood to me is to be believed. Rather than curse his luck, he’s trying to make the best of this. He’s failing, and it’s upsetting him.

He could use comfort, as could I. “Kalos?” I ask.

His eyes have not wavered from gazing into mine. It’s a little intoxicating. “Hmm?”

I slip out of my seashells, pressing my breasts against his chest. I almost smile at his stunned expression as my nipples drag over his skin. He must be more sensitive now than he ever could be in his dragon form.

“Would you lie with me?”

Instead of leaping at my offer, Kalos blinks down at me like he’s trying to wake himself up from a dream, even a pleasant one. His gaze skips around us, lips slightly parted on account of his jaw falling slack, and he takes in our surroundings like he can’t quite believe we’re here, or that I’ve asked him if he’d like to spend this night in my arms.

He snorts in his apparent disbelief, and I have to grin as there’s the tiniest puff of dragonsmoke.

I reach up and take his face in my hands. “I’m asking you if you want to comfort me. I was thinking that you’d like a little succor yourself.”

Purpose and resolve chase over his face before his mouth sets in a solemn line. “I would like this very much.”

And the man who believes himself to be my mate dips his head and meets his mouth to mine.

CHAPTER 8

KALOS

My cock, even with my body in this form, does not quite belong to a human man, I don’t think. Mine is ridged, with oil-glands along the sides and two feathery extensions at the end for tickling my mate’s inner channel.

They’re waving towards her now, hungry. And skydrakes above, I want to sink into this female like I have never wanted anything else in all my lifespan.

I grab myself at the base and angle the tip for her opening, grasping her hip with my other hand and bending my knees to bring our bodies more in line.

Adella catches my wrist and pushes my hand away from my cock. “No, Kalos.”

My gaze locks to hers and I stare at her in mist-minded confusion. I’m completely at a loss for what she was asking for if not this. “No?” Lust makes my tongue thick.

“Not yet,” she replies, laughter lacing her words. And she takes my fingers and uses me to pet herself from her breasts all the way down her stomach.

“Oh,” I utter, my voice rougher than I intend. All along the length of her belly, she is silk.

She guides me lower still, and I find that there’s something softer than silk. The petals on the most exotic of flowers, maybe. I wouldn’t know; I’ve never touched a flower with digits sensitive enough. But I’m thanking all that is holy that I’m able to touch and sense the beauty of this one right here.

Adella’s eyes slide shut as we brush over a small knot of flesh that lies hidden between her legs. I think it’s the strangest thing, and I want a closer look at it, but I’m not sure if it’s polite at this point to ask for permission. For now, I follow her lead as she helps me tease her here, before she instructs me to sink my fingers inside her slit.

I’m surprised to find her slick. Dragon females—at least my kind’s females—are not. Lubrication comes from the male’s organ. I’m even more surprised that, when my other hand strokes her ribs, the channel inside of her floods with more moisture. Just from her outside-skin being affectionately brushed!

“You are amazing,” I breathe, looking deeply into her eyes.

Her smile for me is like the sun. “Thank you.”

She encourages me to find her knot of flesh again, and she shows me how to strum it with my slickened fingers.

And for the first time ever, I hear a mermaid’s song. My female is so pleased that she sings for me. I could bellow my pride from the highest cliffs.

Her song is more breathy moans than lyrics and words, but every sound she makes is literal music in my ears and I’m dedicated to learning how to make her sing like this for me all of the time. With her mermaid’s voice, her siren-like notes make me drunk as she receives more and more sensual gratification. She comes apart in my hands again and again, until I’m thrusting against her side, driven wild as she spills her excitement onto my pleasure-giving hands.

Suddenly, she drops to her knees and takes my aching cock into her mouth, lips opening over my crown and sucking.

I can’t stop myself from instinctively pitching my hips forward. You could threaten me with every punishment known to dragonkind, and I’d have sunk my hands in her glorious hair and used her even more glorious mouth.

Luckily, Adella isn’t shocked or offended. She even prepared for this contingency, it seems, because she’s wrapped a fist at my shaft’s base, and when I would crudely thrust at her with abandon, her hands’ grip on me prevented my shaft from shoving further than she can take.

She hums around my length, making my eyes roll back in my head. Her tongue grips and slides around my ridges and oil-glands, tasting, flicking, rubbing, licking, sucking.

She’s giving me pleasure like I’ve never had, sensation that I never could have imagined, and the stark shock of such an act—one I have never heard of a dragon partaking of in all my days—adds a titillating, sordid thrill that drags me right to the precipice.

“ADELLA!” I roar, deafening myself and likely her too as my voice echoes around the cave walls.

When I dazedly gaze down, it’s to find her gazing up at me, a smile on her stretched lips—and then she closes one eye, the lashes sweeping down attractively.

My siren just winked at me. Could she make me more sexually aroused?

She sucks my cock straight into her throat.

My. Entire. Cock.

I spray cum. I spray cum everywhere.

Adella pulls back, laughing and sputtering—and then she begins lapping at my shaft like I’m spilling bespelled honey. “Next time...” she starts to say, before she trails off, staring at my cock as it grows even harder in the grip of her incredible hands, no longer able to so much as bend. The two feather extensions on the end stand straight up—and start to wiggle at her invitingly.

“You’re ready again already?” she asks in wonder.

Starved for her, I slide my hands under her arms and raise her up until she can wrap her legs around my hips. “I vow that there will never be a time I’m not wanting you, Adella—and right now, I want nothing more in all of the realms than to be inside of you. Please.”

She wraps her arms behind my neck and surprises me by kissing me on the strange length of my short human nose. “Well, if this is what you need… as you believe you are my mate,” she tests out, making my cock jump and slap her ass, which makes her giggle, “Then take me,” she finishes, her rainbow-colored eyes focused on mine.

I walk her to the cave’s wall but can’t find a smooth spot. Swallowing down a growl, I resolve to hold her just like this, embracing my mate while standing.

She reaches between us to position me, and when my cock nudges inside of her…

“Adella,” I groan, my forehead sliding against hers.

She separates her face from mine though, throwing her head back, gasping as all of me enters her swollen channel.

I take her by the hips, loving the way her fingers dig into my shoulders to hold on as I almost drag her off of me—then I slam her down, seating her fully on my greedy shaft.

“Kalos!” she cries.

I freeze. “Did I hurt you?” Frying satyrs, no…

Panting, Adella grabs me by my human ears and growls, “Do it again.”

Smiling with relief, I do as my mate orders. I draw her up and down my length, her wetness or mine—both, I suppose—making her glide smooth, and yet somehow, there’s a friction that is all but blowing my mind. I could do this forever.

I’m fucking her until she’s keening louder than she did when my fingers pleasured her. Unlike her angry sea maiden shrieks that tortured my eardrums, her cries of rapture caress their melodies into my ears. And if you can believe it, the beauty of her voice is nothing compared to what her core does while it has my cock in her most sensual grip. Her insides flutter and clamp down on me when she comes, and each kick of my cock sets her limbs to trembling.

I’m determined to make this last all night—and I slow my strokes to draw our second time together out for eternity.

She moans my name, rakes her claws up my back, making me hiss and buck into her hard enough to make her keen prettily. We make love, two strangers learning each other with the goal of mutual pleasure, again and again. She shows me creative ways that we can enjoy each other; front to front like this, with her hands hooked over my shoulders she can enthusiastically grind against me. When she convinces me to pull out and set her on her feet, she bends over, grasps her ankles and lets me take her from behind, and I almost lose my mind as I smooth my hands down her back to her small shoulders, jerk her upright, grab her tits, and pound into her.

When she braces her hands on the cave wall, I piston inside her and grip her hips with brutal need. We enjoy and explore and make love so much that my cum floods out of her and thoroughly splatters our thighs, dripping down from our joining point and onto the cave floor.

We’re caught in the fever all night.

My mate is as lusty as any dragon—which is incredible when I consider that she has no moon-fever to drive her. This is all her. She is perfection. I find a sandy spot on the cavern floor and drop to my back. Adella rides me, making, in turns, languid rocks of her pelvis against mine, stimulating that spot on herself that makes her whimper my name most beautifully, and furious bucks that steal her breath and make me growl.

When her climax hits, she collapses over me, her hair a breathtakingly lovely, wild, tangled blanket of colors covering my face and chest and arms.

I love it.

I love everything about my mate.

Feeling the silkiness of her hair is dangerous, though. I mean only to catch a tendril, but soon I’ve gathered an entire fistful off it.

Adella’s channel squeezes me mightily. She likes her hair caught in my fist.

“Kalos,” she pants, sounding delighted. She sits up on top of me. “I really, really like you.”

In one move, I flip her onto her back—

(It’s worth her shriek, her ear-damaging shriek.)

—and immediately, I’m behind her, positioning her on her hands and knees, arranging her so that she’s submitting to me like a pen dragon braces for her frenzied cob mate.

I wrap her hair around my fist, jerking her head back as I mount her, my shaft shoving between her swollen folds, the deep thrust forcing her to arch her back for me and raise up on her forefingers to support herself as I roughly keep control of her hair.

I plant a hand beside one of hers, falling over her, still clutching her mane like I intend to keep it.

She’s gasping and trembling but she doesn’t tell me to stop, and I can sense her excitement. It matches mine perfectly.

I bite her nape, bite her hard enough to leave a mark—and then I lave the sting away with my tongue as she shudders under me, her rump shimmying and dancing, cushioning my tensed lower stomach, enticing me to feed her thoroughly abused slit more of my cock.

Finally releasing her mane, I clamp my arm between her breasts, catching hold of her shoulder, and pound into her until she comes, screaming song notes.

When she oozes onto her front, her hips only in the air because I’ve got ahold of them and my thighs are trapping her knees, making her back half stay upright, I pet her sweat-slick spine, loving her smoothness. Loving her swells and curves and the way she jiggles when I pound her.

“Adella, my drhema,” I purr to her. “You are the best mate a male could ever have, and I am proud to call you mine.”

She flops her weight onto one shoulder, rolling herself as much as our joined bodies will allow, and lazily spits her hair out of her mouth. She eyes me with a sincere but hungry expression on her flushed and fetching face. “Kalos,” she pants. “I’m… glad to have you right now too.” Her words are measured, like she feels she should make a similar declaration, even if she can’t give hers the same weight. “Now fuck me.”

CHAPTER 9

ADELLA

Much to my surprise—and much, much, much to my pleasure, Kalos’s moon-induced heat doesn’t let up. It’s worse for him when the red sphere shows brightest in the night sky, burning down on him, but there is no part of the following sun-reigning daytimes when he isn’t desiring to chase me, enter me, his cock seeking relief.

And this, for me, is paradise.

Do you know the reason mermaids hunt ships? Because ships carry men who are starved for the sight of something softer, prettier than their fellow sailors whom they’ve been cooped up with for leagues. A ship that can satisfy a lagoon’s worth of mermaids gets led on a safe path back to the sea. Sailors who don’t satisfy us end up on the rocks.

There is a graveyard of shipwrecks along our rock-ridden coastline.

Which isn’t all bad, as far as we’re concerned. Wrecked ships mean treasure hunting for eternity. But it leaves us forever seeking that next crew of males, eternally hoping the next ship to sail into our waters can satiate us.

In Kalos, however, I have all the man that I need. It’s a heady discovery, and it thrills him when he finds that I’m just as excited to take him as he is to have me. I think at first that he mistakes me to be a shy maiden. In no time, I set him straight.

Water doesn’t return to the little cove, the tide drying up so thoroughly it’s a literal marvel. So we make the cave our nighttime home, and we drink and bathe in the freshwater it provides. I teach him to catch the blind cavefish with human hands, because this I know very well how to do, as I’ve had human hands all my life. And luckily, there is seemingly no end to the see-through fish because Kalos still requires an unbelievable amount of food.

Although perhaps this is partially due to his rigorous, constant workouts. We have so much sex. We have sex again and again, until it turns into something… more.

Soon, I’m not only racing after relief when he’s over me, under me, inside me. I’m forging… a connection.

Connection that only seems to grow stronger and stronger. We don’t only have sex; we’re doing more than merely the mechanics, as pleasurable as the mere mechanics are. Even when our bodies aren’t linked, we stay together, soft whispers and purrs and rumbles between us as we learn each other. During the day, we venture further and further from the cave, Kalos hunting, him allowing himself to be led ever further in the direction of my cove, until we’ve traveled so far that we set ourselves up in a new cave. It feels like a victory, one step closer to my home, although in reality I know it will take us an age to get there on foot. Especially with the rate we’re mating rather than traveling. When our lusts are temporarily slaked, we talk. Kalos asks me about my sisters, and I ask him what it was like to grow up as a dragon.

I have seven sisters: Katiana, Patrice, Nerissa, Pearl, Sirena, Ianthe, and Nixie. We steal each other’s shells and combs and any trinkets we think we can get away with and we screech at each other until the seagulls take flight out of self-preservation. But we’re also loyal to each other, we love one another like only a sister can, and nobody understands me like my sisters do.

Although… I think Kalos is quickly getting close.

Kalos was one of the few eggs his parents managed to hatch. Despite Crested Merlins laying clutches and clutches of eggs, it’s a myth that they hatch out masses of baby dragons in their well-protected lairs. Which makes sense, because the world would be overrun with a sky full of crested dragons otherwise. It can take a dozen moons for a single egg to hatch, or tens of dozens of moons. It’s all up to the egg in question, and when the hatchling is ready to break free of its calcium crystal-shelled cage.

Parents dote lovingly on their offspring until the dragonling comes of age to care for himself. Then his parents kick him (and his siblings, if he has any) out of the nest—literally shove him off a cliff—and send him soaring through the air to figure life out from then on alone.

Kalos has several siblings who have hatched out over the solars, and his drakon (his sire) and his drakaina (his dam) are more involved than most dragon parents. That is to say they didn’t punt Kalos out of the nest.

It was his brothers who did that to him.

Kalos was a late-hatch egg, and his older brothers took great delight in teaching him and their younger siblings how to fly.

Young dragons are usually schooled by nestmasters: Elder dragons who sort of herd all the young ones together and beat all the necessary learning into their heads by sheer repetition and persistence. Sums, fire writing, that sort of thing.

I’m glad I wasn’t born a dragon.

Kalos is very curious about the bond I have with my sisters. He doesn’t share anything like it with his brothers, although he supposes that other dragons might feel differently about their siblings.

The more he shares about his youth, the more protective of him I feel. Learning about Kalos, and having him want to learn everything about me in return changes me.

And the way he treats me! The tugs I feel in my chest when he kisses all the parts of my body so tenderly are foreign and strange. He doesn’t want to simply use me like all the men of the past; he wants to lovingly treasure me until my body can’t live without his.

I’m afraid he’s captured me in a way I never could have imagined.

Even when we’re setting out to do something as simple as gathering our food, he uses every opportunity he can to interlace our fingers, connecting us with our hands if we can’t be fitted together in other ways—and it seems like such a small thing. It’s not. He’s doing something to my heart.

He’s growing on it, like a barnacle.

I’ve got him on his back, and I’m pleasuring him with my mouth as he feasts between my legs. Taking a man in my mouth has always been a means to an end for me—I want a man hard? This is the quickest way to get him there. But with Kalos, I love pleasing him this way. He pets my sides and squeezes my flanks and growls his contentment, even though it sounds less like contentedness and more like he’s being tortured, and he says the nicest things about every one of my features.

Having him manhandle me to sit me over his own face was a surprise though. A pleasant, pleasant surprise. It’s so good it’s distracting. Every time he sets in with his licking and sucking, it throws off my concentration so that all I’m able to do is mindlessly pump his shaft with my hands, barely able to keep my lips around him.

The soft flares of whatever stands erect from the head of his cock tickle the roof of my mouth like they’re encouraging me to pay them attention.

I try to oblige. They’ve certainly been wonderful to me. I’ve never felt anything like them before, not their extra strokes when they’re between my legs with each of his cock’s thrusts, not the way they curl over and pummel a special spot of nerves inside me. Whatever these things are, they’ve made it their job to bring me pleasure, and I’d like to return the favor.

I curl my tongue over them, flattening them, and suck.

Kalos sits bolt upright.

This makes me pop off of him as I tumble into his lap.

He scrambles to have my mouth back on him. “Basilisk’s balls—sorry! Please, Adella, whatever you just did…”

He’s staring down at me like I work magic.

Snickering, I fit my mouth over the head of his cock again and tongue his adornments.

Kalos snarls and gathers my hair, trying to see my face. When we make eye contact, he can’t help the excited buck of his hips.

It shoves his cock down my throat.

“Ffff—fuck the Great Wyvern!” he shouts, trying unsuccessfully to squelch his exclamations by biting his lip. Then he gently takes me by the chin and draws me off of him, petting my cheek, “My lovely mate, I’m sorry. Do the… please suck my cock feathers again, I beg you.”

Cock feathers? “Is that what you call them?” I ask around them as they wriggle against my tongue.

The vibration of my words is too much for them though—or too much for Kalos. His face screws up, and he can’t even give me a warning before he bursts in my mouth.

His cum spews out of my lips and down my front, dripping over my breasts and chest and arms.

But like every time with Kalos, his cock’s culmination is no end to the game. He’s harder, and he needs me—the fire in his eyes as he stares down at me in wonder tells me that I’m about to be flipped over and fucked until I sing his name.

I swallow the cum that managed to stay in my mouth, swallowing right around his cock as it rests on my tongue, and then I smile up at him.

Two heartbeats later and my cheek is against the cave floor, and Kalos’s cock is pounding between my legs hard enough to make the stalactites tremble.

I sing for him for the rest of the night. For many, many nights. The blood moon’s waning comes almost as a shock, because being sexually ravished and wholly at a dragon’s mercy during his mating fury is exactly as delicious as you’d imagine. I never want it to end.

But when the heat is gone, he doesn’t turn cold or disinterested. And my heart trusts him enough to make me do the most asinine thing.

I develop feelings for him.

CHAPTER 10

KALOS

Light had barely begun to touch the mouth of the latest cave we’ve called home by the time I finished waking Adella up with my head between her legs.

Then I’d lain over her lower half, my arms folded, enjoying the view of her sated body sprawled under me, every one of her muscles gone slack.

She’d smiled at me, saying, “You look so proud of yourself right now.”

I’d kissed her belly, making her silky-soft flesh here jump under my lip’s touch. “I am proud of myself. I’ve pleased the woman I love.”

Adella’s eyes had filled with shimmer. That was when she blurted out, “Kalos, I love you too.”

Then she’d looked like she’d stepped on an Elder’s tail. Her eyes had rounded, her mouth fell open. “No…” she’d breathed to herself, like she couldn’t believe what she just uttered.

But she said it.

She meant it.

I sit up in a rush. And when she tries to crab-walk to get out from under me, I land on her, trapping her, catching her by the wrists and throwing her arms above her head.

She opens her legs to (and she doesn’t have to work hard at this, krevk’d) encourage my cock to become more interested in being welcomed inside her body rather than discussing this development that I’ve prayed for. That she’s fought so damned hard against.

But I refuse to be distracted.

(My cock notches at her opening and my vision goes supernova—but I lick her collarbone and nip her until I have enough control not to thrust inside of her.)

“Adella,” I start.

“I didn’t mean it!” she shouts, her eyes looking everywhere but at my face.

“Why are you afraid that you’ve admitted this?” I ask, truly perplexed—and if I’m being honest, I’m also trying not to feel like she’s jamming a sword between my fourth and fifth ribs every time she tries to deny her feelings for me and distance herself.

Adella must see the pain of her rejection coloring my face though, because she winces, her eyes squeezing shut. “It’s not you, Kalos. It’s…” She bites her lip and shakes her head vehemently. “If a mermaid falls in love, she follows the man anywhere.” She frowns, glossy eyes meeting mine, looking nearly as stricken as that first day when I told her that I was her mate.

I suppose it is almost exactly the same, because I think she’s realizing that she’s also truly mine.

“I’ll never see my sisters again,” she whispers brokenly. “I’ll never race the sea with them like before. Even if I could, it’ll never be the same again. I’ll always want to be with you instead.”

Releasing one of her wrists, I bring my fingers down to trace the sides of her face, teasing her hair from where it sticks to the dampened corners of her eyes, her cheek. “Then it’s really only fair. Because if I had my wings back right now, I would never fly away from you. Fly with you, but never away, Adella. You’re mine, and I don’t care if you’re not ready yet to hear this—but I’m proud that you’ve claimed me as yours.”

My words seem to stun her. “I can’t believe I’ve claimed a dragon.”

I move in to nuzzle her lips. “And yet you have,” I say against them smugly. My hand wraps possessively over the swollen, honey-dripping mess that she’s let me make between her legs. Again. “Thoroughly.”

She pinches me in the side. “You don’t have to smirk that little smirk when you announce it!”

“I didn’t.” There wasn’t anything ‘little’ about it. There is nothing little about me. I knock her knees apart, intent on proving it as many times as she’d like.

“You did too! I can feel it against my—”

I steal a kiss.

“Lips,” she finishes, trying not to smile. “And—”

I kiss her again. Instead of giving her a chance to speak, I say right against her mouth, “Let’s go back to your cove.”

Adella goes still under me. She even stops trying to hitch her thighs higher over my back so that my cock takes more of her cunt. “What did you say?” she breathes.

I move my kisses down her throat, my aim for the muscle pounding like a wild thing just below her breastbone. “If you were a dragon, I’d say that it’s time to join our families. We’re committed to each other. And mate-territoriality is for early love. We’re an established pair. It’s safe now.”

“Committed,” she repeats, like the meaning of the word means caged, not dedicated loyalty between loving mates.

But my mate is not a dragon, I know now to remind myself. We’ve had many days together, many discussions. She isn’t instantly going to think as a female dragon would, or come to any of the conclusions that I would think natural.

But she’s still a female.

She’s still my female.

And she has finally declared that she loves me.

I kiss over her heart, my eyes falling shut when her fingers card through my hair, her nails gliding up my scalp, even if her movements are a little jerky, belying her uncertainty over the depth of her feelings for me, her fear. But at my groan, she relaxes. She scritches me with purpose, and—scorched and lemon-zested sheep! I love it when she does this.

I bite her breast, making her shriek in surprise, and shove inside of her, taking her up on the invitation she thought she was secretly going to distract me with.

But this time, when she’s near to coming, I stop.

I even—much to my agony as well as hers—force myself to pull out of her.

“What are you doing?” she cries in frustration, her fingernails attempting to shred my shoulder muscles.

I wait until I have her eyes, then I say, “You’re mine. I’m yours. I want to hear you say it without panicking this time.”

Mulishly, she shakes her head in refusal.

I grin down at her, and with slow teases of my hips, I find my way inside her again, pumping until her mouth falls open, thrusting into her slowly. “My Adella, my love. I didn’t think there was anything I wanted more than to make you come.”

I pull out.

Adella sucks in a deep breath, her eyes showing all her caginess. “Kalos. Don’t do this.”

I slide down her body, my shoulders forcing her thighs to stay spread, my arm locking over her hips, pinning her in place for me. “All you need to do is tell me how you feel. That’s what I want more than anything. Then you get to come.”

Her eyes are narrow slits. “Right now, I don’t think you really want to hear how I feel about you.”

I kiss her mons, then nuzzle it with my nose, making her breath whoosh out of her in anticipation. I roll my eyes up to hers. “Just remember. Three words and I’ll make you come so hard you won’t remember your name.”

“You are horrible. How about those three words?” she asks tightly.

Grinning, I tease my tongue at the beginning of her cleft. “Sorry.” I lap her, making her thighs shiver. “You’ll need to try again. Those aren’t the three words I’m waiting to hear.”

My tongue has been training for the length of a lunar cycle, and I know exactly how to please my female.

By now, I’ve built the oral strength to last all night, and we do. Of course, it helps that I take little breaks at all the most inconvenient moments.

“You scaly bastard!” Adella screams at one point when I’ve worked her up until I have to pin her wrists to stop her from ripping out her own hair.

Wyvern knows she’s already tried to rip out mine.

Kissing her twitching thigh, I murmur, “No, my love, I’m sorry—those still aren’t the right three words.” I clutch her wrists in one hand and move for the spot between her legs that is looking like it’s just about licked sore.

My lips are teasing her puffy, swollen hood, pulling it, my ears tuned to her furious curses when she finally cries, “All right! You win—Kalos, I love you.” She tries to kick me, but her legs are too weak for her to give me any kind of power when her foot lands on the meat of my shoulder. “I love you, you prick! Now please, for the love of the sea, let me come!”

I surge up her body and take her mouth, tasting the sweetness here as my tangy saliva from mauling her body mingles between us, making her even more wild. “My cock, my fingers, or my mouth?” I murmur to her, shoving my forearm under her, dragging her against me.

Her fists grip my hair; my sore scalp protests, but my body loves it, craves her roughness. Adella loves me. “You,” she growls, “owe me all of those things until I come so hard I don’t remember your name.”

I laugh softly against her lips, my eyes shining into her rainbow-marked ones. “Love, let’s be honest. When I make you come, you’ll be screaming my name.”

Technically, we’re both wrong. She sings it. And it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.

CHAPTER 11

ADELLA

Dragons are sneaky. Especially the dragon I happen to love. Still, I hold his hand and I march with my head high, walking a faded footpath that takes us right to the water’s edge at the cove. It took us days to reach, but not nearly as many as I expected it would. Seems my constant nudging and edging of Kalos in this general direction got us farther than I ever thought. And he let me have my way because all he wants is to see me happy, just as long as I’m happy with him.

Screams fill the air when my sisters see me.

“Your tail!” Sirena cries. Her bright poppy-hued hair and marigold scales sparkle as brilliantly as ever.

“Look at those freakish legs!” Katiana laments. She’s rose and amethyst and beauty.

“My stars, I think your legs make your ass look even bigger,” Ianthe comments.

I sputter. “Oh, you’ll pay for that.”

“Did you piss off a dark elf?” Pearl cries. “How did this happen?”

I blow her a kiss. “You are the only sister I love. Thank you for caring.”

Nerissa, my raven-haired, raven-scaled sister, splashes them with water. “Hey, now—this is cause for a celebration.”

Everyone’s shocked gaze flies to her.

She gestures to me. “Remember when Adella had the prettiest fins?” She smiles, her eyes shimmering. “Not anymore. Now the rest of us have a chance to lay a man first!”

Playful agreements ring out, mostly to cover their pity as they glance back at my tail-less self.

I appreciate their teasing, their making light of my change, and I welcome it with open arms. “Ugh! You sea witches,” I shout at them, laughing.

And I don’t know how they could have missed him, but all at once, everyone’s attention swings to the man holding my hand. The dragon who stands proudly at my side, in human form.

“And who have you brought with you?” Nixie asks breathily.

“Never mind—who needs to know his name?” Patrice licks her lips.

“And look at his eyes,” Ianthe purrs. “That’s no regular man,” she says, tossing back her mahogany tresses that gleam so prettily.

My hackles raise at all of them.

“Sea cows’ tits—look at his dick!” Patrice cries. Her nephrite-colored eyes fly to me. “Can my tail tangle with him first?” Her hand reaches behind her to the clasp of her seashells.

It sets off the rest of them taking off their tops to better show off their assets.

Kalos nearly freezes into a stone statue beside me.

With a siren’s screech of fury, I lunge out of Kalos’s grasp and fling myself into the water, intending to permanently tie their seashells to their bodies, probably with lengths of their own hair. Hair I’m going to shear off even if I have to chew through it.

Instead, the slap of the seawater as I dive in makes me gasp. Everything below my belly button tingles—and most alarmingly, my ankles snap together and fuse. It isn’t a pleasant sensation, and I’m scared until my oh-so-missed tail-scales erupt over my lower half. Their shine and flash of color is blinding and welcome.

“Adella!” Kalos shouts, dropping into the water and making splashes big enough to better fit his real form. “Where are you hurt?”

I realize I’m floating, motionless. I tread water with my hands as my tail finishes forming under the water. I beam up at the man who’s rushed to crouch over me. “I’m all right! Kalos,” I breathe in wonder. “I’m turning back into a mermaid.”

Kalos’s face falls, and he stares around us, at the glorious seawater we’re wading in, like it’s poison. His eyes, when they meet mine again, are dead serious. “If you didn’t look so happy, my mate, I’d—”

My sisters shriek, “You’re MATED?!”

“—To that hunk?”

“—We’re still sharing him, though, right?”

“No! There’s no sharing!” I holler. “Kalos belongs to me!” I’m snarling the words, but the declaration brings a massive grin to Kalos’s face. He drops deeper into the water beside me, and his arms come around my middle and squeeze me for dear life, making us both sink until I flex my tail.

My tail! Oh, how I’ve missed it! I sigh happily and lean back against my mate.

“Where did you find him?” Pearl asks. “And how did you escape the dragon?”

“This is the dragon—” I start to say.

And then Kalos twitches against me and grunts.

And I just know. I spin around, sliding out of his surprised arms and ducking under the water—and I catch Sirena and Katiana each with hands full of Kalos’s anatomy that belong strictly to me.

Kalos manages to haul me out of the water with him before I rip out more than a few handfuls of their hair.

CHAPTER 12

ADELLA

Kalos was so uncomfortable being ogled (and fondled) that he fashioned a loincloth to cover himself. This act also saved my sisters because I was having visions of blinding the lot of them in a jealous rage—which is a completely alien reaction for any mermaids let alone my sisters and me, who have shared countless willing men.

The key being ‘willing.’ Because Kalos has no interest in being shared. And stars above, I love him even more for that. Me, a mermaid who’s never thought twice about sharing a man, is willing to attack my own sisters to protect my man.

The dragon I love.

Kalos is thrilled at my raging possessiveness, although he never teases or baits me—he understands that the way I feel about my sisters’ hunger for him is no laughing matter. Not to me. But it isn’t a laughing matter for him either. My dragon is quite shy.

Although, even with his natural reticence while surrounded by slavering women other than me, I’m able to introduce him to the bliss of cove sunning, sharing my rock with him just as soon as I shove my sister Ianthe off of it, the thieving sea cow.

We’re drowsing, replete after stealing away for a good hard session of lovemaking, when suddenly, a shadow swoops over us.

“DRAGON!” Pearl screams, and everyone dives for the water.

My reflexes have been broken; I don’t dive.

Kalos, though, is struck by fear enough for the both of us. He throws me into the water.

Or that’s what it seems like. It’s only later that I put it together that I was catapulted off our rock not because he chucked me off of it, but because his body expanded so fast I was flung aside.

At the first hint of danger, at the very first threat to my safety, Kalos erupted into his dragon form.

And his dragon half is not only defending his mate, which is enough to make him bellow in rage—Kalos’s dragon side is serious about territory too, and as far as he’s concerned, all of our cove is now his and under his protection.

My sisters whoop as Kalos aims the first of a volley of unerring blasts at the very bewildered dragon who dared to hunt our Titan’s Tears Cove.

Kalos chases the trespasser to the cliffs. The other dragon, a great black Crested Merlin almost the same size as Kalos is, lands heavily on the rocky hillside, and barks, “What has gotten into you?”

He shouts at him like he knows him, and I realize that Kalos has friends and maybe a whole family of his own. A whole family he would probably be proud for me to meet, if I care to dry myself off, grow some legs, and go meet them.

He’s been so good about being here with me and my sisters that I decide if he wants me to meet his family, I will.

Kalos faces off, looking like an angrier twin to the towering serpent he’s cornered, and snarls, “THIS COVE IS MINE.”

“Since when?” the other dragon asks, clearly perplexed.

“Since I took a mate of mermaid kind,” Kalos explains. “There will be no more hunting of mermaids,” he orders.

The other dragon gapes at him. “You mated a mermaid?”

He says it like, You mated a radish?

Kalos glowers at him.

The other dragon holds up one heavily clawed hand. “All right. No more hunting here.”

Kalos grumbles something to him.

“What did he say?” Nerissa asks.

Ianthe says, blinking, “I think he just told him that mermen are still fine to eat.”

My sisters all turn on me.

I gasp, and jump to defend the man I mated. “Kalos wouldn’t eat mermen!”

“Are you sure?” Katiana drawls, her brow raised, clearly not moved by my vehemence. “Because two mermen were sent from the Ice Cove, but they never got here.”

“Then they were stolen by naiads!” I spit. Which is possible. Naiads are pretty little sea women who love mermen. We’ll get back the men they stole, eventually. When the next generation of half-mer, half-naiads are growing in their mother’s bellies.

Kalos brushes me with his nose. He’s not in the water; his big body is leaning out over it, his long neck stretched. “What are you ladies arguing about now?”

I glance over to see that the other dragon is still there, staring at Kalos like he’s lost his mind. I ignore the other dragon and focus on the way my sisters are looking peeved about their mermen accusation. I consider the best way to exonerate Kalos, but Nixie beats me to it, bypassing the careful line of questioning I’d been preparing, and instead blurts an accusing, “Did you crisp two mermen?”

“No,” Kalos says. No hesitation.

I breathe a sigh of relief.

My sisters, though, look upon him with suspicion.

That is, until Kalos calls to the other dragon, “If you’re looking for a mate, I highly recommend a mermaid. I know of a few candidates, if you’re interested.”

My sisters begin fighting each other to get to the shoreline while fascination and horror mingle on the dragon’s face. It’s a total toss-up if he’s going to fly away or get close enough to the edge to get dragged under. If he thinks my sisters aren’t strong enough to take him down, he’s mistaken. Give us a nicely rocking wave, and a tribe of mermaids can capsize a good-sized ship.

I turn from the spectacle and wrap my arms around my own dragon, careful not to stab myself in the elbow with the spikes that sit over each of his nostrils and in the middle of his nose. “Thank you for protecting us.”

Face knocking against my arms as his lower jaw moves as he speaks, Kalos says, “You are my mate, Adella. Your people are now my people. I will always protect you.”

With my sisters’ frustrated screams echoing around the cove as they try to catch the only eligible male in their vicinity (who is backing up but not flying off yet, giving them hope as they try to beach themselves to reach him), I kiss Kalos on the big scale set square between his eyes and vow, “I love you, my dark dragon.”

Nuzzling into my side, Kalos releases a rumbling purr and responds, “I love you more, my maiden of the sea.”

CHAPTER 13

ADELLA

“Why’s he coughing?” Pearl asks, sounding concerned.

“Oh,” I say quickly, “he’s fine. Just leave him to it.” I silently beg Kalos to move further away from the shore.

He doesn’t.

His great midnight-scaled back arches as he heaves. His neck extends with his rough retching spasm, followed by an unsettling choppy cough. And a distinct gagging. Hllllugggh!

“EWW! He’s puking!”  Nerissa cries. “It… it looks like a turd! Right on our beach!” She turns to me, horrified. “The first time it rains, it’s going to wash right in here!”

I sigh. “It’s not a turd. It’s called a ‘casting.’ It’s made of all the bits of things his system won’t digest. He has to hork them back up.”

Everyone looks at me like this is madness. Well, almost everyone is looking at me. Patrice is evidently watching Kalos because she exclaims, “Why is he picking up his turd?”

“It’s not a turd!” I shout.

I don’t glance behind me to watch Kalos… because I already know what he’s doing. I groan as my sisters watch my oblivious dragon pick up his own casting in his mouth (it’s surprisingly dry, for the record. Like a compacted ball of… well? Coughed up hair and feathers and bone bits) and he starts walking it proudly down the path.

“What the hell is he doing with it?” Sirena asks, sounding truly perplexed.

Patrice’s voice is angled away from us when she calls, “Cu, Bossie, Cu Bossie! Come Bossie!”

We ignore her and Sirena is still looking absolutely confused about Kalos’s regorging quirk. And who can blame her? Even I still think it’s beyond strange, and I’ve been trying to hide this habit of his since he first called me over to admire one of his regurgitations.

(Yes. Dragons are very proud of what their systems can’t eat. Since it happens to be so very little compared to what they swallow, I suppose it is quite a marvel.)

I knew my sisters would never understand. “You see, dragons collect them. What he’s doing is completely normal.”

“And what is he doing?” Katiana prompts, staring at me as if I’ve lost my mind.

I sigh. “He’s got a little cave where he’s storing his castings. And stop gaping. It’s not strange for dragons!”

“Well it’s damn strange for mermaids,” Ianthe points out. And she’s not wrong.

“Come Bossie!” Patrice hollers again.

“But I’m mated to a dragon now, so we’re accepting it,” I inform Ianthe.

Kalos bounds back into view, casting gone and squirreled away with his other self-made ‘treasures,’ thankfully. “Adella!” he calls, spotting me. All my sisters scatter as he crashes into the water, plodding right up to me as inelegant and lumbering as a flippered loch creature.

I eye the invisible avoidance-perimeter my sisters are giving Kalos, and my brow rises slowly. I give my mate a considering look. “I’ve just decided that I adore your casting collection.”

Kalos’s dragon visage brightens. Not in color, it’s more an uplift to his scaly mouth and his jutting dragon brows. “Really? What wonderful news! I would like to show you my newest—”

And he begins to extoll the virtues of his latest casting-contents, which include lots of fish scales and feathers, because he’s been cleaning the skies of seabirds… something my sisters don’t approve of.

I try to shush him as he reveals his casting’s contents, but it’s too late. My sisters are glowering at us.

“Oi,” I admonish them. “He’s keeping us safe. And he has to eat.”

“He ate our sea cow, didn’t he?!” Patrice screams.

Oh no. I try to shutter my stunned expression, but I’m pretty certain I fail.

I sigh, my arms crossing over the shells on my breasts as I look to my shame-faced mate. It would be one thing if this was his first transgression, but Kalos has frightened away our fish, eaten our dolphins, swallowed down our rays, sucked our starfish off their rocks, and now if it’s true that our gentle sea cow is missing... If he’s responsible for her disappearance, then the only thing Kalos hasn’t devoured are our sea otters.

(But only because he tried to eat one, and the entire romp of otters chased him.)

He was covered in so many little bites by the time he managed to flap his way out of the water and into the safety of the sky that he declared the animals wretched and vowed to burn them all the next time he saw them.

My sisters and I intervened.

But our last sea cow? “Kalos…” I chastise.

“I was hungry and she came right up to me,” he explains.

“Because she was tame!” Patrice sobs.

“I’m sorry!” Kalos insists. He’s stricken to see Patrice so overwrought. He keeps himself low as he stretches his neck out over the water, truly apologetic. “I didn’t know the thing was off limits.” He casts a gimlet eye over my sisters. “If you listened to their shrieking, it seems everything in this cove is off limits.”

“It IS!” they screech in unison, making him flinch and pound his ear depressions with his tail.

“Maybe…” I start. “Kalos, maybe it’s time for new hunting grounds.”

Kalos shoots to his full height, his crest frill fanning full out and beginning to shake with his sudden, turbulent emotions. “Burn that thought! I will never leave you—”

“I’m not suggesting that you do,” I cut in, smoothing my hand over his scaly snout, trying to quell the rising panic he’s clearly experiencing. “Kalos, I’m saying it’s time for us to leave.”

Now it’s my sisters who panic. “Adella, no!”

“You can’t leave…”

“You just came back!”

I hunch a shoulder, feeling a pang at the thought of separating from them. “It won’t be for forever.” I paddle in a circle, meeting each of their eyes. “But we really can’t stay much longer, can we? Kalos needs to eat more in a day than all of these waters can spare to feed him.” I open my arms to my dragon, and he fits his nose against my chest, our version of a hug. “Besides, it’s time I met my dragons-in-law.”

Kalos goes tense. Smoke puffs out from under my arms as he exhales. “Adella?”

I pat his spiked jaw. “I know you’ll keep them from eating me.”

“Damned right I will,” he growls.

“Then see? It’s fine.” I release him and sink into the water, swimming for the shore.

Kalos plucks me up before I get there, and we both gaze down at my tail, sparkling with water droplets and reflecting sunshine.

“I’m going to miss this,” he says with a sigh. His eyes begin to burn with wicked heat.

The edges of my slit begin to turn puffy and ache, responding just to this look in his eye. Because we learned that when Kalos turns into a human man, I don’t have to turn into a human woman. We just need a little privacy, and in the water or on the beach, Kalos can sink himself inside my slit just fiiine while I’m in merform. He’s so big, bigger than any man I’ve ever taken before, that it feels impossibly tight to the point of seeming naughty—and it drives us wild.

Kalos has to shake himself, setting me down on the sand and gazing around us, at my sisters who line up along the shoreline, watching us sadly. “I’ll bring her back,” he vows.

“You’d better,” Katiana complains, sounding bitter.

“Yeah, you’ve already made all our men disappear. Now you’re stealing off with our sister again,” Nixie accuses. The words would seem harsh and accusing but she sounds more glum and sad than anything.

Regardless, I’m moved to defend him. “He didn’t make any men disappear!” I fume. I look to Kalos, waiting for him to say something, but he’s peering at Nixie like he’s lost in thought.

“It would make you happy to have males of your own?” Kalos asks.

My sisters stare at him. “You mean like… we get to keep a male only for ourselves?”

There’s a lovely sort of longing in her voice, and Kalos’s chest swells with purpose. He uses his nose to nudge me back towards the water. “Change of plans for the moment.” He scans my sisters. “I will return with a male for each of you.”

My sisters’ eyes have all gone round. Heck, mine have too. “How?” I ask. “Where will you find them? There aren’t many mermen. Mertribes have to share them.”

Kalos casts a considering look at my siblings. “But you could be happy with a male who wasn’t a merman, yes? Do you have any races or species you’re averse to, or fear, or disfavor?”

“Besides dragons?” Sirena drawls playfully. She doesn’t mean it; she was so ready to capture that dragon who tried to hunt here. If he hadn’t flown away looking so terrified, she absolutely would have claimed him.

So I light-heartedly slap her with my tail fins for teasing Kalos.

She squeals and splashes me with water, then turns back to Kalos.

Kalos’s neck crest puffs out and collapses, his version of a shrug. “Oh, I can bring you something besides dragons.” He reaches out to give one last nuzzle to my hair—and when some of it tangles and clings to the roughness of his scales, he brings his claws up out of the water and brushes the strands free. Some of them naturally pull loose though, resulting in Kalos making a whirring purr of a noise.

He gathers all of the freed strands carefully in his claws.

“Oh, Triton’s beard. He’s going to make his hairy ball bigger,” Patrice complains, rolling her eyes and lying back in the water.

“You wouldn’t think he could make his balls bigger,” Pearl snickers, referring to the fact that Kalos’s sack in human form is rather healthy sized. He’s quite well-endowed all over.

“Shut up,” I warn them, and watch as Kalos ignores his onlookers and moves to a wadded collection of my hairs off to the side of the beach. Whatever hairs of mine that he combs loose with his claws… he’s been keeping them. I had no idea before I mated a dragon that they keep everything they find pretty: precious metals, pretty rocks, mermaid hair, their vomit-pellets.

Dragons are charming, really.

I should be more disgusted, but I must be completely crazy for my dragon. I find it sweet.

Using gentle movements, Kalos winds the new hairs just-so around my rainbow hairball.

My sisters watch him with various expressions. Some still looking a little repulsed, but I don’t let them fool me—they all find Kalos’s obvious adoration of me just as heart-melting as I do.

“When exactly did you say you were going to bring us men in exchange for stealing Adella away?” Katiana prompts.

Kalos sets his—yes, sigh—hairy ball down and says agreeably. “Right now.”

With a farewell snap of his tail to me, he flies off.

***

He returns with an ogre.

An honest-to-octopuses ogre. “Kalos,” I cry, shocked.

If possible, the ogre looks even more bewildered than me and my sisters are. Of course, for his part, he probably thought he was about to be eaten by a dragon, not sacrificed to a cove of mermaids.

“He looks like you pulled him out of a swamp,” Patrice says with dismay. “He’s filthy!”

“I did pull him out of a swamp,” Kalos explains, frowning at her, “because that’s where you find ogres. Deep in the forest bogs at the foot of the mountains.” His look at Patrice clearly says his abundant patience is getting tested. “But you are familiar with the cleansing properties of saltwater, yes? Wash him. Or perhaps, given the opportunity to have clean water for once, you’ll find this male will bathe himself.”

As Kalos sets him on the beach, keeping his front talons firmly sunk into the ogre’s thick green-skinned shoulder, the ogre stares at the beautiful and comely collection of mermaids before him, and the thick thatch of gnarled hair between his legs isn’t nearly enough to hide what comes jutting out of it.

“HE’S MINE!” Nerissa screeches, dragging herself out of the water and flapping her hands over her fins like the airflow will make her scales transform into human feet—and split human legs—faster. She’s followed by furious screams from our other sisters as they begin to fight to beach themselves and argue over who gets to keep him.

“Do you want to share him,” Kalos asks hesitantly, letting the ogre go and watching him to make sure the male doesn’t escape—as if he would. The ogre looks stunned, like he’s sure he’s dreaming or died and gone to heaven. “Or should I bring you the next male I find?”

“Bring us more!” Ianthe orders, pointing her finger at him. “You owe us for our sea cow!”

“And the dolphins,” Pearl adds.

“And my pet seagull,” Nerissa growls.

(She was really upset when her bird disappeared, but I still maintain that Scuttle could have flown to nesting grounds on another beach somewhere. We don’t know that Kalos ate him specifically—gulls all look alike!)

Kalos inclines his head at them, and just before he spreads his wings, he sends me a rueful look.

I blow him a kiss.

***

Two towering trolls, one thrilled satyr, a dark elf, a dwarf, and… a furry little animal.

“What the hells is that?” Sirena asks. “Is it… dead?”

Kalos nudges it with his tail. “Change, idiot.” To Sirena, he answers, “He’s not dead. He’s a wereopossum.”

Sirena frowns and glances at the furry grey and white and brown carcass. She’s been sitting with her new knees to her chest, but she drops them to the side and leans forward to better see the animal, her breasts almost spilling out of her seashells. “Poor little fellow. Look at all those teeth! It looks like he’s grimacing, like he might be in pain, or scared. Kalos, you’re a dragon and you swooped him into the sky. How terrified he must be. Are you certain it’s not just a regular opossum—”

The animal’s eyes crack open and he takes one look at my sister’s abundant tits and he shapeshifts into a man.

Kalos nods. “There you go.”

Sirena smiles as she gets a look at what the naked shapeshifter is packing. She tosses a grin at my mate. “THANK YOU! You are the best dragon-in-law EVER!”

EPILOGUE

Speaking of dragons-in-law, today is the day I finally got to meet mine. Kalos and I arrived early in the day, and were his parents ever surprised to see us.

His drakaina (his dam)—a dull-scaled purple-blue mottled Crested Merlin—had gaped. “You let a human touch you?”

Kalos had kept his tail wrapped around my shoulders as he leaned forward and butted his head against his drakaina’s. “I would never touch a human,” he promises. Then his smile turns sheepish. “I wanted to taste a mermaid,” he admits.

His drakaina’s wide eyes shutter and she deadpans, “You forgot to crisp her first.”

“I got excited and didn’t crisp her first,” he agrees. “And we both gained humanlike forms just before the blood moon.”

“Good thing you timed this visit well after the blood moon,” a loud voice booms, and a dragon bigger and shinier than Kalos enters the cavern through an antechamber. “Your drakaina and I would have scarred you for life while we enjoyed our own blood moon celebrations.”

“Each and every night,” his drakaina agrees. “And day. After day, after day...” Her smile is a touch evil.

Kalos is grimacing, his neck scrunched in a tight ‘S.’ “No more information, please.”

I pat his side, sympathetic.

His tail winds around me tighter.

“Mykonos,” says Kalos’s Drakaina, “come meet Kalos’s mate. He says she’s a mermaid.” Her voice goes reedy when she tells him what I am. But when she looks down at me, her face isn’t unkind. “I’m Corfu.”

“I’m Adella,” I tell them, and I bow a little to be polite.

“I could have guessed she was a sea maiden,” Mykonos announces.

“Really? How?” his wife asks, twisting her neck to see him past her wing.

He gestures at me with his tail. “The seashells strapped to her, ah—her chest. They sort of give her away.”

Corfu cocks her head. “Really? I thought the grass skirt makes her look like one of those girls who dance at the bottom of the volcano. You know the ones I mean? The ones you like to watch?”

Mykonos’ eyes change from light yellow to an abashed orange. “I recall seeing some humans dance there once or twice.”

Corfu snorts, little peaks of fire popping up under the smoke and she shakes her head. “He never bites me harder than after he’s watched them dance.”

Kalos gags, and for the first time, it has nothing to do with his biological need to expel select sections of stomach contents. In fact, he looks so green at the idea of his sire breeding-biting his mother, he may not ever eat again.

Corfu is grinning like she knows exactly what she’s done to her offspring. “Nice to meet you, Adella. Welcome to our cave. Normally we’d show guests our castings collection, but since you’re not dragon, I’m not sure you’d have much interest…?”

I shake my head. “Thank you, but his castings collection isn’t my favorite treasure of your son’s.”

“Judging by the way his tail keeps feeling up your behind, I’m guessing you two are more interested in his jewels,” another voice pipes up, a new dragon this time. He’s shiny black, and unlike Kalos but just like Kalos’ mom, this dragon has an ornate grouping of horns coming off its skull like a headdress. “Mmm-mm!—damn, Kalos, I bet mermaid tastes good,” he says, looking me up and down.

Kalos growls.

Corfu’s tail comes up just as Mykonos’ tail does the same, and the new dragon gets whacked twice for his smart mouth.

“Adella,” Kalos murmurs, “this is one of my brothers. He lives in the caves just down the cliffside.”

“Nice to meet you,” I tell the new dragon. “You must be Sifnos.”

The dragon looks me up and down with some surprise that has nothing to do with my species. “I am.” He glances at Kalos then back to me. “Have you by chance come upon any of our other siblings?”

Kalos shakes his head. “No.” He glances at his drakon and his drakaina. “Where is everybody?”

Mykonos doesn’t seem to notice. He’s shaking his head. “No one has seen them. They all disappeared around the time of the Blood Moon.”

Corfu’s lip scales pull down in a frown, and I get the sense that the pair misses their children. “We hope they’re all so happily settled they just haven’t been able to visit.”

“Probably for the best you’ve not crossed any. Damndest thing, I could have sworn I saw Halki a few lunations back, and he was trying to hunt me,” Sifnos informs everyone.

“Why would he do that?” his dam sputters, shaking her head, clearly not putting weight to the possibility.

Sifnos and Kalos give each other meaningful looks. Obviously both of them believe this brother of theirs is capable of stalking his own sibling for some reason.

It makes me feel sorry for Kalos, that he doesn’t enjoy the relationship with his brothers that I do with my sisters.

“What’s wrong?” Kalos whispers in my ear before he drags his face across the top of my head, rubbing my scent all over his scales.

That’s what he admitted to me one day, when I commented that he must love the feel of my hair. And he does, he confirmed—but it’s really my scent that he’s after.

When I swooned a little at the thought, I knew I was a goner for this dragon.

“Nothing,” I tell him. “I’m just… I feel a little bad for you that you haven’t experienced the sort of sibling relationship that I’m so glad I have. I’d want that for you, if I could make it happen,” I tell him.

Kalos, who had been leading me deeper into his parents’ den, stops walking, and his parents and his curious brother glance at us but they keep moving further into the cave, allowing us a moment of privacy. Kalos’s tail curls around my legs. “Adella, you have made it happen. You’ve given me seven crazy sisters.”

“Crazy!” I start to gasp—but at his don’t unicorn-shit me look, I give him a conciliatory nod. “All right, they are all a bit mental. I’m the normal one.”

“You are the exception,” Kalos agrees dutifully and loyally, warming my forehead with his hot breath and rough tongue—a dragon’s kiss. He draws my hairs out of his mouth and ties the loose strand around his claw for safekeeping. It’s sure to be added to his ball of hairs later. “Ready to get to know my lunatic family?”

“We can hear you,” Corfu calls.

“Ready to get to know my lunatic brother and drakon and my wonderful drakaina?” Kalos asks, louder.

“Better,” his drakaina calls back.

“Smooth,” his brother calls too.

“I’m moving out,” his sire announces tiredly. “Or I’m taking up drinking honey mead.”

“And how will you get that?” Corfu asks. “You’d have to sell a body’s worth of dragon blood to get ahold of any of that drink.”

“Surely we can sacrifice one of the children. Only one of them’s turned up mated. We have a whole clutch of spares, for Wyvern’s sake.”

“Oh all right,” Corfu agrees. “Bring me back some mead too, dear.”

Their playfully dysfunctional banter reminds me so much of my beloved sisters that I grin and grip Kalos’s face in my hands. “I can’t wait to get to know your family, my love.”

Kalos’s eyes are the deepest meadow-green. “Good.” He bites his lip, looking sweetly hesitant, his sharp teeth pillowed to perfection on his sexy lower lip. “And... if my family asks me what raw mermen taste like, could you grant me a favor and cover your ears?”

I groan into my hands, horrified to have every suspicion confirmed.

“Shh, shhhh,” Kalos soothes, nuzzling me a little frantically. “I made up for eating those males by gifting the cove with wereopossum and trolls! Everyone’s happy!” He winces a little and his big eyes blink at me imploringly. “Except for a couple mermen.”

I sigh and throw my arms around his snout. “You’re lucky that my sisters accepted your man-gifts.”

He sighs a huge puff of smoke and starts to snuggle deeper into my arms’ embrace. But then his whole body goes rigid.

And with dread, I can sense someone—no, something is behind me. Something huge.

“Kalos,” I whisper. “Is one of your nicer brothers behind me?”

“I don’t have any nice brothers,” Kalos warns, his voice dangerously low before he snatches me in his claws and drags me against his chest.

I glance over my shoulder to see another Crested Merlin, one even more frightening-looking than Kalos in his dragon form, if possible.

He fills up the whole opening to the cave, blocking our exit. Kalos’s frill starts to rattle along the edges, although it doesn’t extend in threat… Yet.

“Hi,” the dragon says. And then he smiles at us both and opens his hands to reveal a human woman dressed in animal skins and bone beads.

“You mated a human?” Kalos says in wonder.

“Don’t sound so shocked,” the other dragon huffs, fire streaking out from under his lips. He plants a hand protectively between his woman and us like he’s blocking Kalos’s disbelief from offending her. “Clearly, I’m not the only one who was touching people.” To me he says, “This is my beloved drhema, Nalle. I’m Halki.” He smirks down at her fondly. “Aren’t you lucky? You have yet another sister you can claim.”

Sister. It makes my heart jump to think that I suddenly have a brand new sister by marriage. And she looks nice enough. That, and she’s never stolen my combs or hogged my sunning rock. I like her best already.

I peel myself out of Kalos’s clutching grasp enough to wave to Nalle. “I’m Adella. And I’m actually a mermaid.”

“Really?” Nalle cries, looking amazed, shocked.

And wow, it’s nice to have someone react with something other than horror. I really like my new sister-in-law already.

But then her eyes widen and she whirls around, her hand flying to her dragon’s mouth, trying to cover it.

Halki easily speaks around her attempt though. He exclaims in wonder, “We just ate a merman!”

My mate’s tail claps against the cave floor and curls around me.

Nalle sucks in her lips, her gaze flying to mine. “We are so sorry, Adella. If we’d known, we never would have—”

“Don’t speak for me, woman,” Halki protests, eyeing me in a new way. “I regret nothing. That fish-man was delicious!”

I stare at him in stony silence.

Kalos nudges me with his nose and loudly whispers, “See?”

THE END ♥

NOTE FROM AMANDA

I’m so happy you read Kalos and Adella’s story! =D Did you like it? I really hope you had fun! <3 (I sure snickered while writing it. Especially when Kalos toes (tails?) the wereopossum. I don’t know why…) If you get a chance to share a review to let others know if it’s worth their reading time or not, I dearly appreciate you going above and beyond! You’ve already spent time with me reading my words: thank you so much! <3 <3

This book essentially happened by accident. I knew I wanted Dragon Hooker, that one was set in stone the moment I thought of a woman trying to capture a dragon to save her tribe. But then Naomi Lucas drew a map of our fictional world of Venys, and she wrote Gulf of Mermaids as a location on one of the seaside inlets.

I told her “I'm absolutely entranced... I think my dragon eats mermaids.”

;D My mermaids are parked near the volcano because that was my section of the map, and my little family of Crested Merlin dragons live in that mountain range for a tidy meet-up between womanfish and frilled flying lizard. And so The Mermaid and the Dragon was born. <3 Thanks Naomi Lucas!!! =D

(If you’re thinking “What the heck is Dragon Hooker?”--it’s Halki & Nalle’s book: https://amzn.to/2MKtmS1 )

If you’ve read both stories and you’re scratching your head wondering “What is Amanda’s fascination with dragon vomit?”--that’s a fair question, and I blame falconry. I Love falconry.

DO YOU WANT SOME bird-vomit trivia? =D???

(What you mean ‘no?’)

Casting not only refers to the regurgitated pellet that falcons cough up after eating, casting is a term applied to the act of feeding falcons and hawks roughage in the form of cotton or plumage. These inedibles travel to the bird’s crop where bones and fur would normally be moved. It does the job of the more natural forms of roughage, cleaning out the animal’s gorge during the storage process. When the hawk casts them out, they should be clean. If they aren’t, or worse, if they’re stained or coated in mucus, the keeper knows their bird is sick.

Kinda nifty! Aren’t you glad you read this far to walk away with that? ME TOO, thanks for hanging with me! =D (Those minutes of your life… you’ll never get them back. But the image of a Red Tail vomiting up cotton could stick with you for life. You’re welcome. <3)

Name trivia!

Adella’s sisters were originally given placeholders à la Ariel’s sisters in the Disney movie Ariel, but for legal & creative reasons, I gave them proper names with some meaning behind them.

Nerissa means Water

Pearl means Ocean jewel

Sirena is the Spanish word for Mermaid

Ianthe means Ocean nymph

Nixie is Water dwelling spirit

Ava was almost used. It means River goddess.

Location, Location, Location.

Adella’s cove was inspired by Portimão, Portugal’s coastline. Gorgeous!!

How do you call a Sea Cow?

‘Cu Bossie’ is farmer slang for “Come in, Cows.” When we lived in Wisconsin, we heard this called all the time, a multi-generational dinner bell for bovines through the ages. Now? We haven’t heard it in years. It’s sad to think this dairy-farmer standard might be disappearing.

That’s a wrap!

Thank you again for reading The Mermaid and the Dragon. SO MANY HUGS for joining me on this adventure!

Love,

Amanda ♥

Books & Audiobooks by Amanda…

Are you wondering what else I’ve written? BLESS YOU! I hope whatever you grab, that you have FUN ♥ *GIANT HUG*

Stolen by an Alien—Arokh and Angie’s story ebook: https://amzn.to/2A6sH9T

This book is also available in Audio, narrated by the talented Nick Cracknell: https://adbl.co/2N7WXHF

Rescued by an Alien—Zadeon and Callie’s story ebook: http://amzn.to/2EZEitg

Audiobook voiced by Nick Cracknell: https://adbl.co/2Nx8WxR

(WARNING: This one has some Dark times. This couple’s love is beautiful though, and they get their Happily Ever After.)

Won by an Alien—Brax, Tara, and Tac’Mot’s story is here: http://amzn.to/2FeuFGl

Audiobook narrated by Teddy Hamilton and Callie Dalton: https://amzn.to/2zUkHWu

(If you had to classify this one, it’s almost Reverse Harem. This is an MFM book, which means there are two (alien) guys and one woman but it’s not *quite* menage, because Brax is a Rakhii, and you know this means he doesn’t share his female. Slight problem: his female is bonded to Tac’Mot.)

Craved by an Alien—Dohrein and Gracie’s story: https://amzn.to/2Qn4lwo

Audiobook voiced by Nick Cracknell: https://adbl.co/2s6gN96

The Alien Nanny for Christmas—Mitteeku & Gwen’s love story stands alone but has some cute Easter eggs for those who’ve followed the Stolen universe: https://amzn.to/3cMfEcu

Blind Fall, the standalone story that answers the question you’ve all been asking me: “Is the guide dog okay?”

Spoiler: She’s MORE than okay. ♥ This is Breslin and Sanna’s story. If you read this one, I hope you have fun.

https://amzn.to/2PvoaAm

Audiobook narrated by Teddy Hamilton and Callie Dalton: https://amzn.to/2WImX17

Beth’s Stable, a reverse harem romance for movie-lovers. Just trust me. ;)

https://amzn.to/2ZFxyLx

A fun side project *Not* related to the Stolen series:

Valos of Sonhadra Series

Alluvial, Book 1: https://amzn.to/2OhfX33

Tempest, Book 2, written by Poppy Rhys: https://amzn.to/2uPfihv

Galvanizing Sol, Book 3, by Amanda Milo & Poppy Rhys: https://amzn.to/2AgxDZE

Another side project:

Contaminated, a Cosmic Fairy Tale https://amzn.to/36RFbhS

(Erreck and Nancy’s story, which features Simmi as a lovably gruff secondary character.)

Contagion: Simmi’s standalone, germphobic HEA story https://amzn.to/2ElEVuk

The Pet Project: https://amzn.to/2UAU3ff

The Pet Project: Unnatural Selection https://amzn.to/2URRAxl

The Pet Project: JoAyyn https://amzn.to/2ybVHfV

DragonTribe Books:

To Desire a Dragon (a.k.a. DRAGON HOOKER): https://amzn.to/36opdMx

Mermaid and the Dragon:

And a random coloring book that I drew for fun :D https://amzn.to/2MSk3Pu

About the Author

Amanda Milo is a collector of the randomest trivia. Did you know that Kiwi fruit plants have separate genders? You need both in order to make Kiwi fruits happen. Isn’t that cool??

She’s concerned about river otter bite pressure—she hasn’t had a chance to test this out, but frankly, this is the part that’s holding her back from appropriating and testing the relocation (aka wildlife theft) of a small family of adorable river otters.

...To the bathtub. (They’re basically like slick-furred rubber duckies, but with lots of teeth, right? Right.)

Extended contemplation of this plan has led to the permission to adopt more ferrets, which makes her very happy. So does her extensive, wacky-patterned, thigh-high sock collection—though ferrets, it must be noted, do not play well with pretty socks. The crazy, clawed thieves!

She invites you to hang out with her in the Amanda Milo’s Minions Facebook group. (She didn’t name the group! XD Readers have great senses of humor!)

Thank you for picking up this book. Amanda hopes that you had a lovely time. ♥