Mouse was still barking. Cara tore her gaze away from the dragon and saw that Mouse was dancing around in front of him, barking and wagging his tail, exactly as if he expected to be petted.
She suddenly remembered Gus saying, Ilie is different, and Ilie is more a Dragomir than any of us.
“Dragomir,” she repeated, finally getting it. She took a shaky step forward and then another.
The dragon dropped his gaze, ducking his massive head down to nudge affectionately at Mouse. The dog promptly rolled over, wriggling around on his back and still wagging his tail. The dragon obligingly rubbed his belly.
No, not the dragon. Ilie.
“Ilie,” Cara said out loud, and the dragon looked at her again. “It’s you, isn’t it? Gus is your brother. You’re Ilie.”
I am. The dragon’s mouth didn’t move, and the voice sounded human—serious and careful, but human. She heard it perfectly clearly and she knew she wasn’t really hearing it at all.
Cara laughed, from a combination of nerves and sheer delighted fascination.
You wanted adventure, she thought. You thought you felt like a princess from a fairy tale.
Gus’s brother was a dragon. Which probably meant that Gus himself…
Cara heard a roar, far away but coming closer, and Ilie spread his wings wide as she turned to look. She heard his voice, anxious and confused. Gus? She said—
The roar sounded again, so close she covered her ears, and she heard a voice that was unmistakably Gus, but furious as she couldn’t have imagined him. Get away from her!
She heard the beat of great wings, and then a silver-gray dragon, even bigger than Ilie, was dropping into the clearing like a hawk diving at its prey. The dragon’s claws were extended, his mouth open to show enormous teeth. He was throwing himself straight at Ilie, who was backing away, trying to make himself small, crying out in Cara’s mind, Gus, please!
Cara didn’t think. She threw herself in front of Ilie, spreading her arms wide as if she could shield someone the size of an RV with just her body.
Gus’s dive turned to an awkward tumble at the last second as he reversed direction to avoid hitting her. He came so close she could see every individual tooth and his gray eyes, wide with fury giving way to horror. He hit the ground so hard that it shook, and Cara stumbled back against Ilie as Gus righted himself. There was a frozen second where no one moved, and Cara could hear herself and two dragons breathing, and Mouse whining near her feet where he was cowering against Ilie’s body.
Then Gus roared again, and under and over the deafening sound she could hear him saying, She’s mine! Don’t touch her!
Cara flushed with fury and threw the only thing she had in hand—the bouquet of flowers, which hit Gus and shattered against his dragon snout into a hundred bits of bright orange and pink and green. “She’s right here! And how dare you attack Ilie when he was just talking to me!”
Gus reared back, looking down at her like he was shocked that she’d dared to argue with him, and Cara couldn’t take it anymore. She turned away from both of them and ran up the trail as fast as her legs could carry her, and Mouse ran by her side, his usual happy barking silenced.
From behind her she heard the sound of enormous wings. She tore off the trail into the trees and ran blindly into the woods where nothing as big as a dragon could follow. Her headlong flight seemed to go on and on, but she knew she hadn’t gone very far when she had to stop, gasping for breath and clutching a tree to stay upright.
What had just happened? How had she gone so fast from feeling like a princess down in the town, thinking about marrying a man she’d just met, to meeting a dragon to throwing herself between two dragons? And one of them was Gus? She felt tears stinging her eyes as she struggled to catch her breath.
Mouse came to lean against her leg, whining softly again. Cara dropped down to her knees to hug him. He’d been scared, too, but he’d stayed beside her.
Cara?
Cara jumped to her feet, but Gus was nowhere in sight. His voice sounded soft and hesitant, apologetic.
I’m so sorry, he said gently. Will you come and talk to me?
Cara looked around—and up—but didn’t see a sign of either the Gus she knew or the huge gray dragon. She thought about telling him to leave her alone, but she wanted to understand what had happened. And, she realized, she had no idea where she was.
“Where?”
Mouse will bring you, Gus told her.
Cara looked down. Mouse’s ears pricked forward, his tail coming up from its fearful tuck. He looked up at her and then started picking his way through the trees. It wasn’t his joyful race toward Ilie, but he wasn’t hesitating, either.
“I’m coming,” Cara said. “And you’d better be ready to explain some things.”
Anything you want, Gus promised, and then Mouse barked and darted ahead of her a little way. Cara realized they were coming up to another clearing.
For a moment she thought Gus was there already, sitting with his wings spread in the middle of the open space. But as she came closer she realized that this gray dragon was made of stone. She walked over to it, barely noticing when Mouse trotted away.
It wasn’t only a stone dragon—there was a sculpture of a woman perched on the dragon’s foreleg, sheltered under his wing. The carving was beautifully detailed, life-sized. Cara felt she was looking right into a person’s face, a woman maybe twenty years older than herself, and she could recognize the woman’s resemblance to Gus.
Was this his mother? And the dragon—his father?
She heard wings, and saw Gus land at the edge of the clearing. She stayed where she was, under the stone dragon’s wing, and watched him walk closer.
He was a little awkward on the ground, his wings and tail bobbing, his head held low. She had no doubt he could have covered the distance in a single leap, one flap of his wings, but he walked slowly to her, giving her time to study the softly shiny gray of his scales. She could see a fine, glittery line of gold around the base of his neck that seemed to be the same chains she’d seen around his neck in human shape; there was a tracing of gold around his foreleg too.
Of course he loved shiny things. Of course he hoarded them. Gus was a dragon.
When he’d reached her he curled down small—well, as small as he could. He brought his head down low enough to look her in the eyes.
I want to thank you, first, he said. For stopping me from hurting Ilie. I never would have forgiven myself.
It wasn’t what she’d expected him to say. “Oh. Well. Anyone would—”
No, he said. Anyone would run the hell away from two full-grown dragons. Anyone would scream and hide from the monsters in front of her. Anyone would assume one dragon could hold his own against another and get herself out of the way. You were incredibly brave.
“Why did you do it?” she asked, shaking her head at the thought of herself being brave, instead of just impetuous and half-crazy. When she left her safe life behind, she’d never expected to go this far in the other direction.
“Why would you attack him? He’s your little brother. You love him, I know you do.”
Gus ducked his head, his wings coming forward in something like a shrug, or maybe like he wanted to hide himself with them, before he lowered them again.
He was too close to you. I—the dragon in me—I recognized you as my mate from the moment we met. It makes me need to know you’re mine—but you’re not yet. My dragon can’t stand the thought that another dragon might steal you away. I know better, but I’m not always good at acting like a civilized human being—or any kind of human being. Not when it comes to my dragon instincts.