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Her mouth dropped open as delight filled her eyes.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Sofie
Raxnor smiled at me—really smiled at me—for the first time, and my stomach did a flip. It transformed his entire face, taking him from sternly handsome to heartthrob.
“Do you like it?” he asked.
“I love it!” I wanted to spin and throw my arms around him, but would he like that? He’d been so patient with me back when the lizard shuttle had found us, holding me close and soothing me in a way that didn’t seem part of his nature. I didn’t want to impose any more than I already had.
I faced forward again, letting the dragon distract me. Its long golden body had looked large until it opened its wings. They were huge—at least three times the size of the rest of it. Physics wasn’t my strong suit, but it made sense. An animal that size needed lots of surface area to its wings to get lift. “It’s magnificent! Will it really let us ride it?”
“This is a sanctuary the Tula have set aside for the dragons. But it takes a lot of meat to keep them fed. Tourists pay a lot for a dragon ride, and these great beasts are used to it.”
I glanced back at him again. “But you said humans were rare. Won’t the Tula running this place report me if they see me?”
“Who said they were going to see you?”
“You just said we’d have to pay for the dragon ride.”
“No, I didn’t.”
My eye widened. “We’re going tostealone?”
“Steal is a strong word.” His lips quirked in the ghost of a smile. “We’re going to borrow one for a bit. A dragon can carry us to the other side of the mountains in an hour. It would take us days to get there otherwise, and it’s far enough away from Senator Bila’s lands that Tark can come and pick us up in the shuttle.” Then his brow creased. “Does it bother you that we’re not paying? I have a friend who’s an excellent hacker. What if he has Senator Bila make a generous contribution to the sanctuary?”
“That sounds perfect!” I grinned at him. Prarr and Prurg’s mother had been icy when she’d found me in her office, turning away from me in contempt when I’d tried to explain I was a person. She wanted to spend money on things like buying humans? Well, the stone-cold bitch could afford to buy some dragon chow.
A dot on the far side of the valley separated from the outline of a mountain and moved up into the air. For a second, I thought it might be a dragon, but there weren’t any flapping wings.
“Good,” Raxnor said. “That’s the last employee shuttle leaving the valley. We can move now.”
I called for Lila, who’d lagged behind, snuffling at a crack in the rocks that probably held some kind of small lizard.
“Me come!”She raced toward me, her big purple eyes pleading as she slid to a halt at my feet.“Dinner?”
I repeated her request to Raxnor, who frowned. “Not yet. We need to do this while we still have some daylight left.”
“We’ll eat soon. First, we have to ride a dragon!”I pointed.
Her tail lashed from side to side.“Me no like big lizards.”
“This one’s going to help rescue us.”
Feline disdain filled my mind.
“We might have an issue with Lila,” I said as Raxnor led us along the ridgeline.
“You can carry her in the pack.”
“Oh, yeah!” I hadn’t thought of that. I spent the next ten minutes convincing her of how cool it would be as I followed Raxnor down a little dip, then up to the next peak. Thank god these were lower mountains.
The sun sank, sending orange streaking across the sky and setting the pink feldspar of the mountains aglow. We rounded a group of boulders, and there it was. The dragon.
Dios mío! That thing’s huge!
Its wings were folded, but even so, its head rose a good ten feet into the air, and its body was twice as long as that. It opened its mouth, huffing out a breath that blew my hair back.
