The Fly House (The UtopYA Collection) (24 page)

***

Maeve wasn't stupid.  She knew Diem was thinking of taking her up on his dragon by the smirk on his face.  How else would he be able to show her the lay of the land?  He probably hoped she'd cower, but there was no way she was going to do that.  If that's what he was expecting, then he was going to be sitting at the Disappointment Bus Stop for the remainder of this ride. 

Maeve marched out behind Diem, ready to stand in the direct flame of a pissed off dragon and get roasted like a campfire weenie, if she had to.  She'd let her skin bubble up and blow off before she'd let him see her blink.

"You really want to see what's out there?" he said.  The teasing tone made her want to kick him in the gut.  Or lower.  Lucky for him, she was distracted by the sight of her boots lying in the dirt a few steps away.  She stalked over to retrieve them, without giving Diem a sideways glance.

Maeve heard the dragon stir as she staggered, trying to yank on her boots.  Her hands were shaking as she hopped, desperate to cram her foot down into it before she had to face the dragon, but it was too late.  She felt the heat radiating from its breath at her back, felt the eyes of it pressing down on her.  Maeve siphoned a breath of her own and tried to steady her hands.  She shoved the ball of her foot down into the steel cave of the boot's toe box, her digits cramping on impact, although she refused to even wince. 

She reached for her other boot, feeling the shift in the air as the dragon inhaled.  It was getting ready to cook her, she knew it.  Her grip tightened at the very top edge of the leather as she forced her thoughts down into the dark cavern of the leather footwear along with her foot.  These boots made her brave.  Brave Maeve.  These boots were her armor.  Fuck the dragon.

The buckles clinked.  Maeve stomped her feet down, adjusting them and settling her soles into the imprints her feet had pressed into the sole's liner long ago.  She was ready to die as she turned around to face Diem's dragon
—

Except that the dragon wasn't hovering over her.  Its head lay flat on the ground, it's large eyes shining as it stared at Maeve.  Large eyes that reminded Maeve of a puppy in a pet store window.  What the hell was this? 

She glanced at Diem.

"This is my dragon, Forge," he said, although he seemed a little shocked by the beast's actions too.  He scrubbed the back of his neck.  "I thought I'd take you up, so you can see for yourself that I'm telling you the truth."

No, those words weren't bitter, Maeve thought.  They were downright acidic.  Questioning his honesty had upset him a lot more than she'd expected.  But Maeve wasn't going to sit around worrying about that, when he was trying to intimidate her with the size of his dragon.  She put her hands on her hips.

"Well?" she said.  "Are you going to show me how to drive this thing or what?"

"Drive it?" His brows spiked.

"Operate it?  Fly it?  What do you do with a dragon?"

"I guide it."

"Well then, show me how you guide it," she said.  His smirk was gone.  But he had replaced it with a sly grin.

"I'll guide it, you'll ride it," he said.  "She wouldn't allow you to guide her."

"Of course not," Maeve said with a roll of her eyes. 

"It's true," Diem said.  "Most dragons will kill a man that tries to even mount them, if it is not the dragon's master."

"If a man tries," Maeve pointed out.  "It's because men think they can mount anything they want, even things more powerful than they are."

That shut him up.  Maybe he finally got the point.

Maeve followed him, around the dragon's head, to the animal's neck.  There were two of the rope contraptions, just like the one he'd used to tie her wrists together and bind her to the wall.  This was what they were actually meant for.  Riding dragons. 

The rope slipped beneath the plates on the dragon's neck and when it breathed, the iridescent plates grit together, hiding the rope.  The plate colors were magnificent, but Maeve couldn't show her awe as she stared at the creature because she was only one part amazed.  The other three parts were scared shitless. 

The winding neck looked like an anaconda on steroids and
every time the animal breathed, those plates ground and squeaked like it was grinding down the bones of an enormous mouse instead of just getting a lung full of air.  If a dragon even had lungs—she didn't know.  She hadn't taken that anatomy class.

"This is how you ride a dragon," Diem said.  He slipped a leg over the dragon's neck as if it were a fat horse and picked up the rope. "For your first time, and because you don't have any upper body strength, you'll ride closer to the body than the head.  You wrap the guide rein around your wrist, like this, and you can use the other arm to hang onto my waist."

Maeve gave him a dry grin.  "No thanks.  I'm sure I'll do fine just hanging onto the rope."

She had been willing to be roasted like a peanut and now she had to be willing to go skydiving without a parachute too.  Maeve watched him bind his hand, snaking the rope around his left wrist and over his palm, securing it.  She saw the tiny barbs of the neck plates digging into the rope, holding it tight in place, but it was damn hard to believe that a rope around her hand would be a secure-enough safety measure.  Roller coasters usually had drop-down safety bars, restraints, straps or harnesses
—seat belts, at the very least.  But this was a dragon, hurdling through the troposphere and all Maeve had, to protect her from plummeting to her death, was a wrist strap.  These morons put all their faith in one delicate little crosshatch of bones.  Her whole damn hand could come off and what then?

She slung her leg over the dragon's neck, behind the other guide rein.  With Diem in front of her and her being closer to the body, it seemed like he would either block some of the wind or be first to blow off the beast.  She imagined herself laughing wildly as he flew past her in an air current.  Then she realized how totally fucked that would leave her and her anxiety crept up all over again.

But hell if she was going to let it show. 

Diem was twisted in his spot, watching as she wound the rope around her own left wrist and hand.  He gave her a satisfied nod when she was finished.  She held back her smile.  Not because it was smug
—that she would have let him have completely—but she stifled it because she realized she was actually getting off on a pat on the head from him.  How weak.

"Hold onto her by squeezing your legs together," he said.  For a moment, Maeve was lost in how gentle and soft Diem's voice was.  A whole new picture suddenly blew up in her mind:  the two of them, naked, lying scissored side by side.  Her top leg over his, she squeezed him to her as he penetrated her.

Maeve gasped and the vision vanished.  

"You don't have to be scared," he said, his voice silky. 

"Last thing I am is scared." She tugged on the guide rein to prove the lie.

"Alright," he said.  Maeve felt the panic rattle up her spine. 

"I just hang on to this rope?"

"That's it.  Squeeze your legs and hang onto the rope.  I'll take care of the rest."  He smiled
—the smugness had returned.  "You sure you can do this?"

Hell no, she wasn't sure.  She was breaking out in a cold sweat just looking up at the night sky.  Maeve the Brave or not, she was sure a fucking Viking would've shit himself at the prospect of catapulting into the air on the back of winged lizard for the first time. 

The moon was about to get a whole lot closer. 

She'd never even liked flying first class on a jumbo jet, and here she was, going up without even the safety of a plane around her.  But there was no way she was saying any of that.  No way she was showing it.  Maeve's spine went stick-straight. 

"Are we just going to sit here and talk all night, or are we going?" she asked.

"Let's go then," Diem said.  He settled in front of her, his back seven inches from her face.  Maeve traced it from his thick hair, to his massive shoulders, down the cords of tapering muscles visible through his shirt, all the way to his waist.  She'd ridden motorcycles before, hanging onto a man's waist, sealing herself to his back
—but this wasn't like that.  There was no fucking way that she was grabbing hold of his waist.  It would be another victory for him and he'd already gotten one up on her. 

Diem whistled and the dragon reared up.  Maeve's back wedged into the crease where the animal's neck and body met.  There was no runway, no gradual incline.  The dragon's great wings opened and pushed down with one beat that shot them straight into the night sky.

Maeve clamped her mouth shut on the scream, white knuckling the guide rein and squeezing her knees so hard that she thought they might shatter around the dragon's neck plates.  Her guts splashed against her spine. 

The dragon ascended like a jet, except there was no rattling, no cabin.  Exposed, she heard the dragon's plates fold back against the air pressure like enormous, wind chimes.  It would be a beautiful sound if her body didn't feel like a puddle spreading helplessly across the dragon's flanks
—a bubble of liquid blown flat by a breath aimed through a straw. 

She couldn't imagine what the pressure would be like if Diem's broad back wasn't shielding her from most of the blast.  He hadn't even moved.  Tilted only slightly forward, his grip and posture were sure as the dragon jettisoned them toward the moon.

Once they evened out, the beast's wings remained open like jagged movie screens, pale and milky in the moonlight.  Maeve pulled herself up straight as Forge glided in a smooth, horizontal trail across the clouds.  Diem whistled and the dragon's head lifted at just the right angle to cut the air stream. 

"Can you hear me?" Diem asked. 

"Yes.  How come I can breath up here?" Maeve tried to sound composed, but her voice bounced with the adrenaline racing through her.  She couldn't look down.  Her lungs should be shriveling up like raisins.  This wasn't possible.  Then again, she was riding on the back of the dragon.  It was ludicrous from end to end.

"We're not that high up," Diem said.  "There is oxygen up here, but the
gorne protects your lungs from the air pressure."

"Gorne?"

"The food I fed you," he said.  Good thing his back was still mostly to her, because she didn't want him being smug about how she was blushing.  I fed you.  Her mind flashed back to his fingers in her mouth, the warmth of them, the taste of the food, the way his eyelashes drooped wearily as he watched her mouth...except he hadn't been tired.  She could at least assure herself of that.  He had proved it later, with his flex battering against her thigh.  He pointed down.  "You see what is down there?"

Maeve rode the
Ferris wheel once.  She was six or seven and was with one of her early caregivers—a girl named Sondra, who only lasted two weeks.  At the top of the wheel, Maeve had barfed the cherry slushy down the front of her shirt.  It wasn't her fault.  Sondra kept squealing, Look down! Oh my God we're so far up!  What if it breaks, Maeve?  We'll have to climb down!  Maeve's stomach had turned over and over, like a clunking car battery, until the acid crept into her throat.  Sondra cussed her out for yakking slushy all over.

It was the same feeling for Maeve as the dragon's wings tugged them through the sky.  She couldn't will herself to look down, no matter how much she wanted to inspect the landscape for familiar shadows.  All she could do was scan the horizon and the prickly, emergent layer of the forests. 

The foliage all appeared distinctly foreign.  No, not even just foreign.  Foreign should still be recognizable.  These leaves were like huge maple leaves, the size of platters.  Some leaves reflected like mirrors, making it appear that the dragon was gliding over a lake instead of a forest.  It was disorienting.  The glances she took made her stomach lurch.  This sure as hell wasn't Lancaster.

"I've seen enough," she said.

"Are you sure?  We haven't even gone a distance."

"I've seen enough."

"I can take you the length of the Fly House's lot.  Wouldn't you like to be sure we're not hiding your world somewhere down there?"

"No."

Diem shook his head, looking off over the trees below as if there were no way in the world she could really want to end the ride so quickly.  Maybe that was accurate too, though.  Landing seemed like it could be an even more terrifying proposition than taking off. 

He twisted to glance at her.  "Is it because you are scared?"

"No," she snapped.  Embarrassed at the truth, she pressed her right knee into the dragon, concentrating on the bruising pressure instead of the dark blood that she felt staining her face. 

The dragon banked a sudden, hard right. 

Maeve screamed, her rear end lifting off the dragon's plates, as she got an eyeful of the world below.  The forest spread out forever; a speck of lighted clearing flickered in the far distance.  Aside from some gaps, there seemed to be nothing but an uneven rug of tree tops for miles.  The wind blasted against her.  Maeve struggled to get her seating.  She screamed again as Diem crouched low, his grip strong, his knees digging into the dragon's neck plates, pushing them aside. 

Maeve tried to swallow down her heart as she pinched her eyes shut.