Free Marked by the Dragon King by Caroline Hale Page B

mine and start traveling down my neck, leaving a scorching trail behind them. My eyes flutter open as he gropes me and I gasp, only partially from the shock of feeling his hot mouth close around my nipple.
    Stars. Everywhere stars. The mist around us has all but disappeared and what remains looks more like steam than the cloud it must have been. We’re in the sky. I manage to crane my neck to look downward right as the last patch of fog at our feet evaporates.
    “Ash!” I scream, clutching him. He senses my fear immediately and stops mauling me, bringing his face to mine for a single instant until the hazy floor fades and we start falling, the air whipping around us.
    “I’ll catch you,” he yells, squeezing my hands reassuringly before he pushes me away from the flames that engulf his body.
    I’m plunging toward the earth alone, my fingers frantically grasping at nothing as I screech into the night. Where is he? My wordless question is answered a heartbeat later when I look up and see the black dragon’s claws stretching out as he roars.
    The talons wrap around my waist gently, stopping my descent in an instant. Ash holds me against the mark on his scaled chest as his wings cut loudly through the air until we’re hovering and looking down at city lights.
    “Were we in a cloud?” he asks. His voice is so powerful it shakes my entire body.
    “I think so,” I reply. How am I going to explain all of this to him?
    “Lindy… The lights… Is that a battle? What are those paths?”
    My stomach sinks as his questions confirm my suspicions that he has no idea he’s been imprisoned for a very, very long time. “It’s not a war, Ash. It’s a city. The paths are roads.”
    “A city?” he exclaims. “But how… There’s so much light.”
    “Ash, I can explain, well, sort of. Can you fly down over there?” I suggest, pointing toward my apartment building. “That’s where I live.”
    “But I live… I don’t recognize any of this, Melinda. Where are we?”
    There is no way I’m telling him that the entire world has changed because he’s been trapped for thousands of years until our feet are safely on the ground. “Ash…”
    His head whips to the side a moment before I hear the sound of an approaching jet engine. “What is that?” he asks, tilting his body upward so that I can see it.
    “It’s a plane. And, no it’s not some kind of combat magic or anything like that. Planes can only fly in straight lines, so you’ll have to move out of its way, it can’t get around you.”
    “We’ll see about that.”
    Great. “It’s a machine that can’t hurt us,” I assure him, feeling his chest puff up beside me as I watch his eyes narrow skeptically. “It’s full of helpless humans that will die if the pilot sees you and crashes trying to change course while he’s trying to land.”
    “What?” he exclaims.
    “Asher, please. I’m not used to being this high up. Please just take us down.”
    “I won’t drop you,” he replies, flying lower as the plane zooms by overhead. He turns around and watches it land. “This isn’t right, none of it makes any sense.”
    “I know. It will be fine,” I say, unsure whether or not I’m lying. “I want to go home, please just take us down over there.”
    “But I need to go home, too. I need to see my father, he’s…” Asher’s wings stop flapping for a moment, sending us into a terrifying freefall until he recovers. “That’s right. He already died. How could I have forgotten that?”
    “It’s not your fault.”
    “He’s gone. And that makes me…” His dragon eyes blink wildly before they start scanning the terrain below us. “There was a Coronation, but... I’m surely late by now. Where is the Great Gate?”
    The Great Gate? Holy shit, that burned to the ground a thousand years ago, even before magicfolk went Underground. “It’s guarded so humans can’t find it,” I lie. “I go to the city through catacombs now, it’s easier.” Shit! The