Still shocked at finding himself at an advantage, George flapped his wings. Fistfuls of sand, caught in his claws, rose with him as he pursued his opponent.
He flamed once, and again. Red flame engulfed the golden dragon.
It screamed and fell from the sky; a flaming meteor.
Like Prometheus, George thought.
Human again, George sat on the ground, naked, trembling, sweat-soaked, cold.
His opponent’s body burned, near the corpses of those he had defeated.
Sulfurous smoke stung George’s nose. He looked at the clothes the man-dragon had so carefully folded before the fight. He looked down at his own naked body.
He’d survived the fight, but no male survived the mating. He willed his legs to run. They didn’t obey. Drakes didn’t run from their females. They presented themselves to the slaughter as meekly as the humans offered drakes sacrifice.
The awareness of her presence—smelled and felt and sensed—enveloped him.
She pulled him to her as inexorably as though she had him bound hand and foot with unbreakable chains.
No humans remained inside the bar.
No male drakes, either.
Only the girl who stood under the strobe light, staring expectantly at the door. When she saw George, she smiled. “I was hoping you’d be the one left,” she said as she took his arm.
He shrugged. It was polite of her to lie. His was a polite executioner.
George escorted her outside.
She breathed in the sulfurous smoke. “Beautiful night, isn’t it?” she asked.
George nodded.
Overhead, straggling bits of cloud veiled moon and stars.
These were the last clouds, the last stars George would ever see. He’d seen both stars and clouds for the first time from the tower of his mother’s temple. Strange to human form then, he’d felt fragile and ridiculous and his silk robes had scratched his skin.
His mother had looked splendorous in pure white silk, her black hair loose down her back.
“Those lights,” he’d asked her. “Those lights there, what are they?”
And he remembered his mother’s laughing voice as she answered, “Why, the mating fires, cub. The mating fires of the divine dragons, lit in the moment of passion, when the female flames the male, that only her progeny might live.”
George closed his eyes and shook his head.
His beautiful, capricious mother had died when Alexander took Tyre. Her temple had been torn from its foundations. Scared into worm form, she’d been slain and thrown into the sea by Alexander who claimed to be half-serpent himself, and probably was.
Long before that, she’d sent George from her, to meet his destiny in the world of men. Over the centuries he’d been sailor and soldier, dancer and teacher, priest and slave. Finally, he’d run from both humans and drakes and hid in the unpeopled wastes, where he could be himself.
Now, he’d die.
He clutched his companion’s arm. Her skin felt colder than his, slick as finely woven satin.
This gilded female would flame him after he’d sired a new litter of dragons.
“Sit here,” she said. “And rest a while. And you’ll tell me of yourself, that I might tell the cubs about their father.” She sat on the sand, leaned against the cliff.
“There’s not much to tell,” he said. “I was born in Tyre in Phoenicia, so long ago that I can’t tell you the date.”
She raised arched eyebrows in questioning surprise. “One of the ancient ones?” Her voice was all breath and awe. “One of the worshiped ones?”
He shook his head, sighed. “No. I was born at the twilight of gods, when men grew ill-disposed to worshiping us. There were too many of us by then, too few of them. Human sacrifice… it didn’t happen that often. But my mother had a temple. Baalat, they called her.”
The golden haired girl-dragon laughed. Her long-nail scraped his bare arm and slid along it, bleeding pain and an odd excitement from every pore. “There will be gods again.” Her voice slid, honeyed, like silk upon velvet. “From you and I, there will be gods. New gods for humanity to worship in their temples. We’ll usher in a new era.”
George closed his eyes. “There are too many of us,” he said.
She laughed again. “No,” she said. “There are too many of them. They will be all too willing to sacrifice their fellows and mates. We’re the last ones. Our cubs will be the only drakes in the world and all humans their herd.”
“The only?”
She nodded. “The only. All of those were the only ones left of the males.” She made a sweeping gesture towards the strewn corpses. “In all the world.”
“But you’re only supposed to summon the males in your province,” he said. “You’re only supposed” He’d been halfway across the world, he remembered, living the life of a hermit in a sparsely populated forest. She’d called him, through snow and scorching sun. That meant”—You’re the only female?” he asked. “The only female left on Earth?”
She smiled. “We grew so few,” she said, “that mating calls became difficult. Our females, born of those weakened matings, didn’t have the power to summon males anymore. We dwindled. But II am one of the ancient ones. I went to sleep when Carthage burned, at Roman hands. I felt… had a premonition, so I hid. I’ve slept long beneath the sand of the desert. I knew one day I would be the only one left to keep our race alive. And I am. And I was powerful enough to call all of you, from all the Earth.”
A wind started blowing from the East, sweeping the ragged remnants of cloud ahead of it, leaving nothing but the bright pinpoints of stars against the deep, dark sky. It scattered sand over the corpses.
The only female, he thought, as her gilded claws touched him here and there, drawing now blood, now pleasure, in caresses that ignited his body without disturbing his mind’s ordered thought. The only female.
And George was the last male.
There might be just enough humans per dragon that humans would not resent them but worship them and set them up in temples, in the old way. They’d bring them victims to become burnt offerings to the drake’s majesty.
His children would live in splendor.
Yet, George squirmed uncomfortably. His mother had told him that drakes had come from elsewhere. They were aliens who could change their shape and mingle with the ruling species of the worlds they colonized.
An alien species, they had been.
An alien species they remained.
They could only survive by deceit and murder, by greed and power, by making themselves the rulers of a civilization they hadn’t built.
They didn’t belong to Earth.
The caresses of the female taunted George into transformation. Spasmodic cough shook him. His body changed.
His mind worked at fever pitch.
Maybe it was all for the best. The drakes were cunning. Maybe this time they would take good care of their human livestock. Maybe they’d even guide it into space travel, take it to the stars, to meet the celestial dragons George’s mother had dreamed of.
“We’re the last ones left, you know? From all the worlds and all the stars,” the female said. She stood, in human form, next to his jade-green girth. Her eyes sparkled with amusement.
“How do you know?” he asked, his voice was no longer human, but the sounds only another drake would understand.
“Because I am an ancient one. An ancient, ancient one.” She smiled, the smile of the serpent bent on temptation. “I came here, with the last party of drakes, from the stars. We were the last ones left there.” Her naked foot kicked derisively at the sand. “We brought civilization to this mud-ball. We dragged these pitiful apes up from their caves. They’ve been sorely remiss in their gratitude recently. But all that will change.”