Free The Dragon Tree by AC Kavich Page B

There he was.
                  Billy.
                  The dragon.
                 
                  Hiroki’s climb down from the rocky shelf was much easier than the climb from the plateau to the shelf. There were deep grooves running almost horizontally in the cliff. It made his descent nearly as easy as walking down a flight of stairs.
                  When he reached the rocky beach, he shuddered as an offensive image entered his mind: Eva lying on the jagged rocks below the cliff. If she fell straight down, she could not have fallen past the rocks into deeper water. Her body would be broken on those rocks, her raven hair across her face and her limbs nudged by the rising tide.
                  He couldn’t bear the thought. He didn’t have to.
                  “Hiro!”
                  He spun around to see the owner of the voice he knew so well. There she was. Eva! Her clothes were soaked through and there was a thin trickle of blood on her forehead, but even on her wobbly legs she was able to stumble toward him.
                  Hiroki forgot his own fatigue and sprinted to meet her. He wrapped her in his arms and lifted her of her feet, swinging her back and forth like a child. He wasn’t especially strong – not as strong as Billy or Aidan – but the exaltation he felt at seeing her alive and well gave him the strength of ten men.
                  “Okay, not too rough” she chuckled. “I’m pretty sore.”
                  “You’re not dead,” he muttered so softly it was almost a whisper.
                  “I’m not dead.” She kissed his cheek and pulled out of his firm embrace. “He saved me. Billy saved me.”
                  She turned and pointed at the creature – at Billy – lying in the shallow water. His tail and haunches were submerged, but one wing floated on the surf and his enormous head had plowed a trench in the rocky beach. His eyes were almost closed, but their lids fluttered as he rolled his head their direction and blinked.
                  “How do you know it’s him?” asked Hiroki. “You didn’t see. On the cliff, you didn’t see what was happening to him.”
                  “Help me get him out of the water.”
     
                  Eva hadn’t known she was good at holding her breath until she had to be good.
                  The dragon’s plunge into the bay displaced so much water that there was a momentary vacuum around her. She instinctively filled her lungs with air and closed her eyes as the water rushed back in from all sides and enveloped them both. It was roiling in all directions at once, like the inside of a washing machine. She was ripped from the dragon’s paw in the first few seconds and watched, amazed, as the mighty creature slipped deeper and out of view.
                  She kicked hard for the surface and broke through just as her air ran out. Gasping, she flattened her body and swam for the cliffs. She couldn’t see the beach above the cresting harbor whitecaps, but she was familiar enough with this body of water to pick a good line. Her tired legs gave out when the beach was in sight, and she crawled the rest of the way to solid ground.
                  The creature had returned from the depths of the water and had been swept up on the beach twenty yards to the north. The moonlight wasn’t strong enough for Eva to make out any detail, but the shapes she saw were unmistakable: she was looking at a dragon.
                  She should have been terrified, but her treacherous climb and perilous fall had cured her of fear – at least for the moment. She wrapped her arms around her torso to stave off the evening chill and stumbled up the beach toward her animal rescuer.
                  Teen feet away, she