Fated for Firelizards

By SM Reine

Ancient dragons need human riders to repopulate. Any volunteers?

 

Brenan McAiden's first archaeological dig crumbles when she falls into the lap of a dragon. The entire drakkin race depends on Brenan becoming Cadok's queen and rider. Only they can save the world from destruction of humanity's creation…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Red Iris Books
• Release date: May 6, 2024
• ISBN: 9798223641605

SM Reine

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Book preview

Chapter 1

THE CAVE UNDER THIS TWEE IRISH VILLAGE

When I went into college, they warned me working as an archaeologist wouldn’t be a cool job. They warned me it would be tedious. They said it would be a lot of paperwork, long hours with a tiny brush, and future back surgery if I didn’t protect my posture.

It’s unrewarding work that contributes a tiny bit of information to the big story of human history. I think that’s what my first professor said exactly. Also, Nobody will ever care you were involved.

Obviously none of my professors were psychics.

Honestly, nobody I knew was a psychic back then.

Until I was already leading my first major dig, I didn’t know a single psychic.

The only people in my vicinity were sunburned, underpaid nerds, just like me: Brenan McAiden. Yes, it’s a girl’s name. First name means teardrop, second name means fire. Put together, the names meant wasted the best years of her twenties in college.

(My mother insisted they didn’t name me after Grandma’s dog, but Brenan was also Grandma’s dog’s name, so take that as you will.)

Personal history has shown I’m nothing to write home about. When you think about me, imagine a gawky, awkward, six-foot-tall perpetual student with more freckles than friends. I like my hair, which is messy in a cuter way than the rest of my life is messy. I like my freckles too. We won’t discuss how I feel about my chubby stomach and legs. It’s not feminist.

I’m cute, but looks aren’t my strong suit. It’s my feisty determination.

That’s what got me here, after all. A dig site in Ireland, with a grad student who reported only to me. We were doing the dirty work a lot of archaeologist graduates never had an opportunity to access, including a couple of my embittered professors. And we were doing it in a claustrophobic cave overseas, which was pretty cool.

The whole thing is just so weird, I said, pushing off some jaggy rocks to stand up. I couldn’t have reached the roof of the cavern if I stood on my toes, but I might have if I jumped. Professor Mulaney said the first analyses showed this place having no outside exposure for millions of years. But this looks Neolithic. Five thousand years, maybe.

Mulaney’s readings are obviously bad. We’ll redo everything, said Grainne.] I wouldn’t mind spending a few extra hours here. My assistant gazed wide-eyed at the cavern like it was something beautiful, rather than a soggy hole in the ground.

It was beautiful if you knew what you were looking at. Millions of years of geologic progress. To create these rippling layers of rock, heat, compression, chemistry, and erosion had happened on a scale incomprehensible to the human mind. It was like we’d found a hidden temple made by the Earth herself.

It would be more than a ‘few’ hours in the cave, I said. We might need weeks to replicate and verify Professor Mulaney’s work.

I’m willing, said Grainne.

Willingness isn’t exactly the issue. Water levels were rising week by week. The changing climate was hitting islands like Ireland extra-hard.

But wasn’t it important for us to take our time and get it right, regardless of external pressures? What was the point of rushing through the preservation process if we did equal damage as the ocean herself?

We should do everything possible for the village, I decided. They invited us here to help, and we agreed. They deserve the best.

You’re so selfless, said Grainne. I’m just thinking about how much I want to see everything. The answers we could find! But you? You’re thinking about the village.

They’ve been such wonderful hosts, I said. We hadn’t been in Cobhmare all that long, but it already felt like I knew the entire town. It was too new to be home. But I cared—I really, truly cared.

Grainne gazed dreamily at all the rocks surrounding us. I’d do anything to know everything about the past.

Let’s sleep on it and decide with tomorrow’s forecast. The storms were getting worse. You wouldn’t expect to detect the sea level rising just by spending a few weeks in the same village, but it felt like the waves crept further without ever retracting as much. High tide felt more ominous by the day.

Grainne said, I have a good feeling about the weather this week. Tonight’s messy, but tomorrow will be perfect.

I might not have known any psychics, but I totally believed her.

I had brought the biggest of the pumps into the cave earlier. Now I carried the biggest of the biggest deeper inside with its pipes slung over my shoulder. I kept an eye on the air quality meter in my other hand. So far, we were breathing perfect air.

How’s it looking? asked Grainne. She adjusted the floodlights to keep them lighting my path.

I stepped carefully around rocks that seemed deliberately placed. Beautiful, I said softly, breathlessly. Concentric circles. Igneous rock imported from somewhere more volcanic.

Or it came from Ireland four hundred eighty million years ago, said Grainne. Stopping, I turned back to look at her. She was totally serious for once.

Four hundred eighty million years? I asked.

She blushed. That’s when Ireland had volcanic activity. I don’t have the geologic history of every region memorized. Just like, being Irish-American, I was always interested in this place specifically. So I’ve done a ton of reading on random subjects. It makes me feel more connected.

I was only a year older than Grainne, but it felt like a chasm of experience between us. It wasn’t just that I cared more about Neolithic history than the Ordovician. It was how enthusiastically she talked about such a distant past, with passion for archaeology that academia hadn’t eaten alive.

I used to get so excited about the job, and damned be the bureaucracy that got in my way.

Where my department threw red tape, I cut straight through. I’d been disciplined twice for acting on the university’s behalf without my supervisor’s approval.

I didn’t lose any sleep over it. If I hadn’t interceded by duct taping myself to those excavation machines, we would have lost two important local archaeological sites to developers building storage units.

I had gotten a reputation as a headstrong bitch for good reason. The b-word was always a compliment when wielded against a woman.

But that kind of momentum took energy, and I was flagging.

I set down the big pump in the deepest part of the cave, near the back wall. The power cord ran all the way back to a generator that was in the town hall on the hillside. The evening’s storm is here, Grainne said. She peered out the passage we had reinforced. Her round, freckled face shined with fading sunlight. It’s late, too. We better head back to the inn for now.

Okay. We’re almost set up. I flipped a switch to start the pumps. All of them except that last one turned on. Grumbling, I moved along the power cord, looking for problems before reaching the unit itself again. This thing is misbehaving. Forget the inn—head to the pub. I’ll meet you there in five minutes.

You don’t have to tell me twice. Grainne took the ladder out of the hole. She called down, I’ll walk slow. Catch up with me. She hated being wet, and it was sprinkling rain again, so I knew she wouldn’t walk slowly at all. Grainne had surely already forgotten I existed.

Usually I could get the pump working again with a little so-called percussive maintenance, but banging my fist on the case didn’t do anything. I unplugged it and plugged it again. I flipped the power switch.

A second pump failed.

Oh dammit, I groaned, throwing my head back in despair.

There was no way I could leave the Cobhmare cave with two dead pumps on a rainy night. We’d never learn the mysteries of this strange, beautiful little cavern.

I kicked the pump real hard, using all my pent-up rage from unpaid student loans.

Thump!

Something shifted inside the machine.

It shook the floor.

Then the whole cave shook.

And then, before I could think to run, the ground broke under me. I cried out. The sound was stolen by thick layers of rock.

I scraped through the hole and felt the rush of falling.

Cold water met my body like a brick wall.

I was engulfed.

Since I’d just shouted, there was no air in my lungs, and I let out the last of it in a few desperate bubbles when I thrashed.

The water pulled hard at me.

I hadn’t fallen into some tepid pool, but some torrential, swirling pit determined to drag me into its center.

Kicking my legs did nothing.

I was a good swimmer, but it did nothing.

Sparkling in my vision warned me death was coming...

But he arrived first.

Something big plunged into the water over me, sending bubbles showering around us. I thought I saw a masculine face—handsome features, penetrating eyes, broad shoulders—but what touched my body was scaly and hard. The force pulling me out of chaos into safety felt a lot like a mix between a strongman’s arm and a serpent. I got a very good feel of the whole thing when my body was wrapped around it, arms and legs hugging that mighty figure, my cheek pressed to the soft ridges of scales.

Scales? Impossible.

When he kicked, the water obeyed him enough to get out of the way.

We dredged up out of the pool on a narrow, rocky shore illuminated by shiny blue crystals.

It was just enough light for me to see that I had been pulled out of a wide tide pool.

I gasped for air, gazing in horror at what had almost been my death—and the hole in the cavern roof above me that was now totally unreachable. It looked like the black mouth of a well. I was at the bottom where nobody could hear me scream.

I should have died.

Instead, I was sitting upright, dripping ocean water from my hair and clothes, gasping oxygen into my aching lungs, and gratefully alive.

Whoever saved me was also panting for breath underneath me.

There was just enough light from the mushrooms and the caves above to see my savior...

I was sitting on the chest of a dragon.

Chapter 2

THE DRAGON UNDER MY DIG SITE

Iknow what you’re thinking. Brenan McAiden has completely lost the plot. Right? You must be thinking that I actually drowned, or maybe that I just hit my head. Now I’m talking nonsense in the moments before death.

I mean, a dragon? In Cobhmare? Or anywhere, for that matter?

The world we live in is a little bit crazy. It’s just not dragons kind of crazy. It’s the year 2040, most cars are electric, sometimes rich people vacation in space, and half of the world’s forests have burned to a crisp while half the coasts are under water. Every time I turn on the news, I say to myself, Damn, that’s crazy, before I take another drink of coffee and go to my job like everything is normal.

Seeing a dragon, much less having my thighs braced on either side of the broad ribcage of a dragon, was this whole other level of crazy.

I could feel his freaking heartbeat through his breastbone.

What is happening right now? I asked, rubbing my eyes.

He lifted his head to look at me. He was definitely a he, although I couldn’t explain how I was confident in that gendering. It’s not like he had a square jaw, a beard, a strong brow, and a tattoo that says prefers he/him pronouns. But I was one hundred percent certain.

A dragon’s face was more like a plated serpent than human-shaped. He had a long nose ending in a hard bit of beak, eyes like black opals in the darkness, and a ruff of softer, feathery growths from his facial ridges. The position of his shoulders and forelegs gave me no doubt he would be quadrupedal once a confused archaeologist wasn’t pinning him down. Totally animal-looking.

Yet his eyes were way too intelligent. I couldn’t think of him like an animal at all.

More like I was meeting an alien.

Are you an alien? I croaked out. Not that it matters if you’re an alien—I just—am I representing all the humans on the planet right now?

Whatever the answer, he couldn’t seem to verbalize it in my language. He