Her full lips moved, whispering human words. A single, senseless phrase:
“Loch Ness Monster.”
He stared at her incredulously. “Monster?” he repeated in disbelief, in his own language.
He was talking to her back. She was running, flat out, straight away from him, as if all the sharks of the sea were on her scent.
“Wait!” The air shook with the force of his roar. “What is wrong? Come back!”
She screamed in response, speeding up. He tried to follow, but his huge bulk was unwieldy out of water. Every shining, plated scale was like an iron weight; his clawed feet sank heavily into the mud.
Shift, idiot! his inner human howled at him.
For once, the feeble creature actually spoke sense. John shrank back into human form, scrambling up the sloping shore. In his haste, he momentarily forgot how to run on two legs, and promptly tripped over a rock. He fell, catching himself with an outflung hand.
His palm landed on something small and smooth. Something familiar.
“Wait!” he called out, picking up the pendant. His human voice was so weak in comparison to his true one. “Come back! You dropped your-“
He stopped, dead, staring at the pearl in his hand.
“Treasure,” he finished in a whisper.
She dropped her treasure.
She dropped her treasure.
No dragon, under the sea or above it, ever abandoned treasure. No matter what the circumstances. It was as unthinkable as abandoning a limb, or a child. John had seen sea dragons die rather than lose a treasure.
Yet she had dropped this one. The one that she had, not long ago, been quite willing to fight five angry men to defend…
John’s mind spun as if caught up in a whirlpool, facts fitting together to form the inescapable conclusion.
She hadn’t shifted to fight off her attackers. She hadn’t given any sign of understanding sea dragon speech. She’d fled in terror at the sight of him.
His mate wasn’t a sea dragon. More than that, she wasn’t even a shifter.
His mate was a human.
Chapter 4
Neridia was almost back to the pub before she realized her pearl pendant was gone.
Up until that point, she’d simply been running for her life, in the instinctive animal panic of a small creature fleeing from a much larger predator. The warm, friendly, normal glow from the pub windows called out to her like a beacon across a storm-tossed sea. Sobbing out loud in relief, she stumbled toward the door, reflexively clutching at her pearl pendant for comfort-
Only for her hand to encounter nothing but her own bare neck.
With a sinking feeling, Neridia remembered that she’d been holding the pearl in her hand when the…the creature had reared up out of the water.
And now she wasn’t.
I dropped it. I dropped Dad’s pearl.
The sheer awfulness of the realization brought her back to herself, clearing her blind terror. She leaned against the rough stone wall of the pub, gasping for breath, and tried to make sense of what had just happened.
That can’t have been real. I can’t really have seen…it.
But every detail was etched in her memory with crystal clarity. Water streaming from the glittering, indigo scales as that massive, horned head reared up, up out of the lake. The luminous, deep blue eyes, each bigger than her own torso, rising into the air like twin alien moons.