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“Let me surprise you.”
“I’m kind of over surprises.” And Auryn’s surprises were usually theworstpossible surprises. Even when we’d been dating, his “surprises” had, at best, beenyou shouldn’t have… no, really. You SHOULDN’T have. Dragons didn’t do spontaneity well.
He tightened his elbow, drawing me closer. “You will like this one.”
It was impossible to resist him when he went on a cosmic charm offensive. “Okay. But this better be good.”
“It is.”
“Damn, sir, setting those expectationshigh.”
We headed down the apartment-area of West where Kira lived, then the slightly less fancy part of the apartment area, where Keon’s little one-room body-storage-box had been, and then the narrow, twisted ally ways that housed little artisan shops and such. Akoni’s old dive bar—which he had turned over to another dragon—was where we seemed to be headed, except Auryn led me down the narrow passage next to it and to the waterway just behind it.
Auryn, balancing on the narrow stone edge of the waterway, ducked into the culvert, instantly disappearing into the dark.
I braced myself with one hand on the roof of the culvert and ducked my head into the shadows. “You know, I drew the line at chasing you across the world. What makes you think I’m chasing you into a Lemurian sewer?”
He ducked out of the darkness, his face inches from mine. “Because it’s how we met.”
“Please. I didn’t chaseyouinto a sewer.Youwaded into the sewer to chaseme.”
That wasn’t exactly what had happened. I’d been knee-deep in sewage from a burst main in the hospital basement while a senior engineer told me to poke around more (I, being the worthless intern and delegated to such prize tasks), and Auryn had drawn the short straw to go down to the basement and get an update. He’d been on the grating half a story above me. He’d made a lot of excuses to hang around for “concrete updates” until my senior had chased him the fuck away. So Auryn had stalked me into the showers to ask for a date.
He pressed his lips to mine. A shiver of cold, burning pain flitted through both of us, then eased, followed by something exquisite and aching. He didn’t pull back, and instead moved closer, brushing my lips with his tongue. Another exquisite, aching shiver, and a slow, mingling sensation. I met his tongue, with just the tip of mine, tentatively, waiting for a crush of pain.
He swung closer and more of his tongue dipped between my lips, brushed along mine.
The burning cold intensified.
I pulled back, breathless. “Fine. But only because I’ve been in worse places chasing worse objectives.”
“Recently, in fact.” He disappeared back into the darkness.
The culvert was accessible by a very narrow stone ledge. I pressed my hip into the side and kept one hand up to feel the ceiling ahead of me, and one hand just ahead of my left hip. Ten steps and I was in total darkness.
I sensed Auryn before I bumped into him.
Then a flicker of swirling, molten light illuminated the area, and Auryn, gold and remote like a star, came into view, the ball of light hovering over his palm, fed by tendrils that rose off his wrist. He tossed it into the air.
The only sound was the water rushing down the culvert, which got louder and more echo-y as the culvert bent downward. It probably led to some water recycling or processing infrastructure from the sounds. But the path divided into two, with a small triangular barrier to divert the water flow to either side. There was an illuminated panel, presumably indicating flow rates and who knew what else.
“You didn’t bring me down here to show me Lemurian infrastructure that Mayriel willneverlet me touch,” I told Auryn over the sound of the water.
He pointed up.
“Um...” Some enterprising dragons, untold eons earlier, had strung some cables—possibly stolen from the ship lab Jahlim wove the gills in—across the ceiling. The cables were strung from my side to the triangle barrier to the other side of the culvert.
Auryn jumped, caught the cable, and hand-over-handed it across the fifteen-foot culvert of racing water.
He was trusting an awful lot to my upper body strength. Mayriel was not going to be happy if I ended up in Lemuria’s sewer system. Would I be able to wave at Akoni as I passed through the pipes?
Riiighttt….
“Am I supposed to fly?” I shouted over the running water.
He gestured for me to hurry up.
I grabbed the cable. I gave a few tentative swings to test my strength.
