Chapter 19

nineteen

SAMMY

I wish someone had told me that dragon hatchlings are nothing like human babies. From the very first day we brought him home, Zan has been a terror who moves at the speed of light. He was born with a full range of movement, allowing him to skitter away the second I turn my attention to something else. Zak spends an inordinate amount of time looking through caves for him.

When the hatchling nurses, he grabs onto my boobs with his tiny hands, now starting to grow tiny claws, and sucks for all he’s worth. I cringe as he digs in, and we start putting little mittens on him so he can’t do any damage.

Soon, I’ve healed enough that I can bring Zakarion inside me again, and we both moan with bliss as we’re reunited. Nothing will ever feel as good as one—or both—of his cocks, with their nubs and swells, pushing inside me. It’s been so long that Zak goes off early, as he has the tendency to do, but he always gets hard for me again. Then he plunders me for everything I’m worth, murmuring how much he loves me in my ear.

How many memories we’ll make together. How wonderful of a life we’ll have.

Zan grows quickly, and after only six months, he’s developed enough razor-sharp little teeth that he can eat the meat that Zakarion brings back from his hunts. Thank goodness, because I couldn’t take feeding him myself anymore. He comes with me now on my adventures, perched on my shoulder as we explore everything the natural world has to offer us.

My friends have particularly taken to the baby, holding him in their arms like a wriggly cat. Sometimes he gets feisty and bites, until Zakarion scolds him. Then Zan flattens his wings and pouts, but soon learns to keep his teeth to himself.

When he’s a year old, he’s grown too big for me to carry on my own. Now he hikes alongside me, his little legs trying to keep up with mine. By a year and a half, he’s started babbling, and I try to teach him sign language to help him communicate with us. He takes well to it, and I find my toddler dragon has many demands to make.

By the time he’s two, I’ve finally forgotten enough about the day Zan was born to consider another one.

Zakarion raises his brows when I tell him that I’m pondering it.

“I didn’t think you’d want that,” he says, voice tinged with hopefulness. “But I will happily seed you with many, many hatchlings.”

“Well, let’s start at two.” I giggle. “They’re quite a lot to handle. Then we can talk about more.”

On the night of the full moon, we put Zan to bed, and then my dragon carries me up into the sky. There, bathed in ethereal light, he plunges inside me, both of us crying our pleasure into the night. He fills me thoroughly, until he’s dripping out of me from this great height, and slowly he brings us back to earth.

We make memory after memory, and it isn’t long before we’re pregnant with another hatchling.

One night, after Zakarion finishes reading from the notebook to Zan, we curl up in our nest with a new life growing inside me.

“I love you,” I tell my dragon, wrapping my arms around his long neck. I don’t know how much time we have together, and neither does he—but we will treasure every last moment of it.

He bends his head down to hook his chin over my shoulder. “Sammy,” he murmurs, stroking my back with his claws. “I don’t even think ‘love’ describes how I feel about you.”

I scoff. “Always have to outdo me.”

He chuckles and draws me into his warm chest, his fire radiating from inside.

Zakarion

My life with Sammy is far more magical, filled with laughter and love and desire, than I could have ever dreamed. I share everything with our hatchlings: the story of my long life and all the lives that came before me, of all the treasures we acquired and then sent home to where they belong. Zan becomes a marvelous adult, and is soon old enough to venture out on his own and discover everything the world holds for him—something I never did. He is curious about all the marvelous places represented in our stories, and pledges to learn everything he can. He will find other dragons, and seek to preserve our history.

It is hard for us to let him go, but we have given him every tool possible, and we have to believe that he’ll thrive.

Time slows as our hatchlings grow up and then move out one by one, and the mountain becomes quiet again. I never could have imagined a life so full for myself, and as twilight falls, I am grateful for its shade.

Every night, I hold my Sammy in my arms, and tell her just how much she means to me—how she is my everything.

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR READING!