Extract: 'The Dragon's Bride'

'The Dragon's Bride' appears in Cruel Enchantment, my short story collection.


‘Tell me,’ said Oromon; 'are you considered attractive by the standards of your people?'

Sheldi looked down at herself, at the firm curves so generous that they were almost a joke. Noblewomen of the city aspired to be tiny and fragile. She remembered the barbed ‘She has the physique of a dancing girl, not of a lady!’ hissed deliberately just within her hearing, a lifetime away. ‘Actually, I’m thought to be too tall,’ she told the dragon.

‘Not now,’ said Oromon, bringing his head in close to her. His hot breath whistled around her feet. Suddenly his tongue – forked like a snake’s and pale blue – slid from between the mesh of his teeth and flickered up the line of her stomach. Sheldi gasped and put out her hand without thinking onto the scaled ridge between his nostrils. It was warm.

‘What are you doing?’ she whispered.

‘Smelling you,’ he replied. ‘Kneel down: you will be more stable. It’s necessary,’ he added as she obeyed helplessly: ‘My people have excellent hearing and vision, but a poor sense of smell. And the scent of your kind is not very like that of my own. But close enough. Ahh.’

His tongue brushed across her breasts, moving in and out of his mouth, tracing a path across her shivering skin from throat to belly, exploring under her arms and across her lips. Sheldi shut her eyes and submitted, yielding to the dry, delicate touch. When it slid between her parted thighs she made no sound, though her eyes flew open. She felt the tip of the tongue questing in the moist folds of her flesh and realised with silent shock how adroit a forked tongue could be at parting and spreading that flesh.

‘Open your legs,’ breathed Oromon, withdrawing for a moment, and when she complied her returned to probe deeper. And she was wet, she suddenly knew: soaking wet. His tongue was drawing slick trails of moisture down from her vagina across her thighs and she could smell herself. She flushed with shame. The dragon-tongue slipped into the hot passage of her sex, flexed there and withdrew – and Sheldi bit down on a tiny moan.

‘Not entirely unpleasant, then,’ Oromon chuckled; then when she refused to reply he stabbed again with a teasing caress that jerked a cry from her lips and left her shaking.

‘Oh please,’ she whispered.