Baby From Frost by Ashe Moon
8
Raka
The next morning,Oli, Shen, and I went back to the lodging for breakfast. I introduced Shen to Delos’s flight and asked if he wouldn’t mind putting together a map of sightseeing around Stonvale. Altair, who seemed to be the flight’s leader, asked me for a map of the city so that he could visit the fire flight stations. Thomas was interested too, but Grayson, who seemed more exhausted by his pregnancy than Thomas, volunteered to stay behind.
“I need to watch after Dalia,” Grayson said. “And, to be honest, I’d rather explore the Librarium’s garden. I don’t want to move around too much right now.”
Oli went to Delos and asked him to take him flying again, and I felt my heart melt seeing them together. Delos looked so happy, but I also could see that he was struggling with how to express his affection for Oli. I could see he was holding back and restraining his affections.
What Delos had said to me had been in my mind, the same with what Shen had said. I felt like I was standing at the edge of a precipice. I knew what I was afraid of, but just knowing wasn’t enough to lose the fear. I was frozen, wanting to let go but unable to break free. Why was it so damn hard for me to give over my trust? To allow the idea that someone else could keep me and Oli safe?
Delos left with Oli to go flying for a little while, leaving Shen and me with Rainor. The colossal alpha was not at all what I expected from when Delos had told me about his lore-obsessed flight mate.
“So, this is the Grand Librarium,” Rainor said, craning his neck to take in the spectacular first view of the Librarium’s main atrium. “Fantastic!” He laughed, his voice echoed through the silence, and about ten different scholars jolted up from what they were doing to shush him.
“Are you always this loud?” Shen said with an amused smirk. “I feel for Thomas.”
“He loves my enthusiasm,” Rainor said. “And who wouldn’t be enthusiastic about this place? Wow!”
“Does Old Shore Port have a Fraternity of Archivists?” I asked Shen.
“You know, I’m not sure. I never checked. The place hardly exists on a map.”
“Hold on, Sparks,” Rainor said, using the nickname he’d given Shen after learning he was a thunder dragon. “That’s my home you’re talking about. Are you calling it a tiny, nowhere, backwater town?
“Yes.”
Rainor shrugged. “Fair enough.”
After picking up the keys, we went to the hall, collected the book from its cabinet, and signed off on a private study room for us to use exclusively for however many days we needed to complete the work. Raka dumped his reference material onto the table and then reverently took the old book from me, examined it, and took a sniff of the worn binding.
“Lovely,” he said. “Don’t you love the smell of old books?”
“Nothing can compare,” Shen said.
Unlike Shen, I hadn’t spent my entire life surrounded by them. I had no fondness for old books—if anything, they were just a reminder of circumstances I couldn’t escape from. Or, at least, I hadn't thought I could escape from.
When I’d gotten home after meeting the flight the night before, I’d spent a few hours sitting with Shen telling him about how Delos had taught Oli how to use his dragon form. Once again, he’d pressed me to leave this life behind. I told him I was struggling with the idea. It was like there was a physical barrier stopping me every time I tried to think about it. My heart would pound, I’d start pouring sweat, and my stomach felt like it was twisting itself into knots. It’d happened when Delos was showing Oli how to fly. I’d quietly tried focusing on my dragon energy to see if I could call it out—it’d been over a decade since I’d last shifted—but the anxiety overwhelmed me first.
The book was small in Rainor’s brawny palm, but he was gentle handling it, almost delicate.
“You work like a custodian or an archivist,” I observed. “You know how to handle your books.”
“There’s a small community of people back home who venerate old manuscripts like they do at the Librariums. Mostly humans, few dragons.”
“You don’t find many fire drakes in the Fraternity,” Shen said. “The archivists tend to be biased against them.”
Rainor nodded. “The thought is that we’ll accidentally burn the books or something. Absolute idiocy, as usual. Let’s see what we’ve got here…” He turned through the book, his brow furrowed. “Huh. Wow.”
“So, you can read it?” I asked.
He grinned. “Nope. Not immediately, anyway. I can figure it out. It’s just going to take some time.”
Rainor spread his reference books open on the table, and Shen and I helped him with the translation, mostly assisting him with finding other reference material from the archives and making copies of notes and passages. Luckily, Rainor was able to figure out he didn’t need to read the entire thing, which would’ve taken ages, and found the specific section that contained the information on human-dragon birthing. We worked for a little over an hour before he asked Shen to find him a specific book on herb lore.
“I’ll help you,” I said, getting up, but Rainor stopped me.
“No, hold on. I need you to help me out with these copies.”
“I’ll get some tea for us while I’m out,” Shen said and left.
Rainor and I worked quietly for a while with nothing but the turning of parchment and scratching of pens on rough paper filling the air. Then, Rainor said, “You know, I was fully prepared to hate your ass.”
“What?”
“Delos suffered a lot because of you, you know that? Ever since the day I met him, he’s been suffering. And I don’t like people who hurt those I love.”
He looked up at me from the book, and it seemed like his eyes were on fire. I looked back at him steadily, knowing that I was fully deserving of anything he had to say to me.
“I don’t know what you and Delos have discussed, but you better make sure he knows where you stand because you can be damn certain that he’s still in love with you. And if you break his heart again…you can forget being afraid of your family or whoever because you’ll have to deal with me and Altair.” Then he smiled, and the flames in his eyes cooled and softened. “Which would be a shame, because I actually really like you. I can see why Delos feels the way he does about you.”
I nodded to him and felt on the verge of tears, not because I was afraid or anything like that—but because for the first time, I truly understood the bond they shared. What Delos meant by family we choose—and how a family could be. And feeling Rainor’s love for him, I felt something click into place inside of me.
A knock on the door, and when it opened, Oli walked inside carefully holding a tray of teacups. Delos came in behind him with a kettle, followed by Shen with a few books under his arm.
“Look who I picked up,” said Shen. “Here you go, big guy. Is this what you needed?” He put the books on the table.
“You brought both volumes? Sparks, you’re the best. Someone promote this guy to lead archivist.”
“Sparks?” Delos said, puzzled.
“Shen and Rainor are best friends now,” I said.
Oli helpfully passed the teacups out to everyone and carefully filled each one, biting his lip with concentration.
“How was flying?” I asked.
“He’s doing really well,” said Delos. “Oli has no fear.”
“Sounds like we could have a young firefighter in the making,” Rainor said.
Oli puffed up proudly when he heard this. “I’m gonna go practice,” he announced.
Then we got back to work, and as the hours passed, the information resolved piece by piece, slowly becoming clearer. Delos pored over a long list of herbs and roots, while Shen and I helped Rainor convert Dragotic measurements into the common human measuring system. We lost track of time and only realized it was late when Oli came back complaining that he was hungry.
“We’d better go check on the others,” said Rainor with a massive yawn. “My brain is at its limit.”
Grayson and Thomas were both in an odd flurry of unrest when we walked into the tavern apartment. Thomas was in the middle of doing squats in the living room, muttering to himself like he was trying to remember something important. Grayson was laid out on the couch, a wet towel over his eyes and Dalia cuddled up to him, asleep. Altair was at the kitchen table staring out the window, a glass of firewater next to his hand.
“Everything good?” Rainor asked cautiously.
We found out that while they were touring the fire stations, Thomas had put one of the firefighter recruits into a headlock when he’d accidentally brushed against his pregnant belly. He’d then broken down crying, saying that the home wasn’t ready, that they had to get back. They’d come back to the apartment and found Grayson had organized everyone’s luggage, made the beds to perfection, and was polishing the floor with one of Altair’s shirts.
“It took me hours to calm them down,” Altair muttered. He looked traumatized.
“I’m fine, really,” Thomas said. “My back only feels like it’s on fire, I can’t stop noticing every speck of dust, and I’m on the verge of choking out the next poor son-of-a-bitch who gets too close to my belly, but I’m fine.”
Even Rainor looked a little afraid, and he turned to us and said, “Yeah, when he’s like this, I just tend to go stand in the corner…”
But Shen, always the no-nonsense nurturer, immediately went and put tea on the stove, drew a bath, and asked Delos if he could come up with a cooling salve. He then managed to gently talk Thomas out of his state and led him to the bath.
“I’m sorry,” Grayson said wearily. Dalia woke up from her nap and was excited to see Oli there, and it didn’t take long before the two of them went off to go play in Delos’s room.
“Nothing to be sorry about,” said Altair. “We all had a consensus that getting you two out might help calm you down. We didn’t know it’d make things worse.”
Shen popped back in. “You’re both in a nesting phase. I’m surprised you alphas didn’t expect this to happen. It’s part of a normal dragon pregnancy.”
“You think we’d know that, Sparks?” Rainor said. “Grayson and Thomas are humans, if you didn’t notice.”
“We haven’t exactly had much experience,” Delos admitted. “We did deliver Dalia, though.”
Rainor scratched his head. “With a textbook. And luck.”
“I did all the work myself,” said Grayson. “You all mostly just shouted things.”
“You don’t have doctors in Old Shore Port? Accoucheurs? Midwives?”
“Couldn’t find anyone willing to help us,” said Delos. “I tried.”
Shen shook his head. “By the Gods. Well, I can at least do what I can for you guys.”
“You know what to do, Shen?” I asked.
“I’ve helped with dragon delivery,” he said. “Read pretty much every book the Librarium has on it.”
“Why the fuck didn’t you say so to begin with, Sparks?!” Rainor said, throwing up his hands.
“Calm your nuts, Flame-o.”
“Flame-o,” Delos repeated, snickering.
“I don’t know anything about a human-dragon birth. The physical delivery can’t be the same, since they don’t have a dragon form they can shift to. So, we need to know details. How to do it safely. And if the medium ends up being the same…”
“The medium?” Altair asked.
“Live birth, like a human baby. Or an egg, like a dragon.”
“An egg,” Grayson muttered in disbelief. “Oh, no…”
Thomas appeared at the doorway, wrapped in a towel. “Thank you, Shen. I feel a lot better. You and I should get mated and leave this dumbass behind. Did I hear something about eggs?”
“Hey!” Rainor grunted. “I’m useful most of the time.”
“We might lay eggs, Thomas,” Grayson said. “Like a chicken in a coop. Plop. Oh, it makes me dizzy thinking about it.”
“What?!” Thomas clutched his stomach.
“There’s one thing that makes me think that’s the case,” said Shen. “Delos, you mentioned that Thomas’s belly had grown a lot since you left. Growing that fast probably means an egg. Flight-mate dragons have synchronized laying. So, Thomas is developing that egg to lay it in time with Grayson’s. Meanwhile, Grayson is waiting for Thomas to be able to lay his egg.”
“And when they’re laid?” Delos asked.
“Thomas’s will need time to develop. Grayson’s hatchling will wait, and they should both hatch around the same time. Did you seriously not know any of this? Raka has an excuse, his family is trash, but the rest of you dragons?”
The others shrugged. “Not a lot of great childhoods around here,” said Rainor.
Delos had food brought up from the tavern and all of us ate another dinner together. It’d only been one day, but I didn’t feel at all like a stranger in their group. Just the opposite—I felt as close to everyone else as I did to Delos. Shen was sitting next to Thomas at the other end of the table, laughing as Thomas and Rainor threw affectionate insults at each other. Oli had a little admirer in Dalia, and she’d taken to copying every single thing he did.
After dinner, we went through more firewater and shared stories in the living room while the kids played in the other room, and Soot looked like a furry black puddle in front of the fireplace. I cozied up to Delos, and he slipped his hand across my thigh and massaged my leg. Rainor was standing up on the couch, gesticulating as he told a story that had Thomas shaking his head and Altair slapping his knee. I leaned over and whispered in Delos’s ear.
“Do you think we could get the landlady to make up a cot for Oli?”
He looked at me in surprise, then said, “Of course.” Then he left a light kiss on my lips that had me grinning. Shen, who was sitting in the armchair next to Rainor, caught my eye and smiled.
When it came time to get Dalia ready for bed, Altair and Grayson excused themselves. Shen announced he was leaving, too.
“See you all tomorrow, bright and early,” he said, and then whispered privately to me with a grin, “Don’t wear yourself out too much.”
After Rainor announced that he was being forced to give Thomas a massage, they said good night and retreated to their room. Grayson and Altair gave permission to set up a cot for Dalia in the living room next to Oli’s, but the kids quickly pushed them aside and threw a bed of pillows onto the floor. Soot was the first onto them, claiming a spot and curling up with a big yawn.
“Let’s pretend this is a dragon’s lair,” I heard Oli say as I went into Delos’s room and closed the door behind me.
Delos was looking out the window, and I went to him and wrapped my arms around his waist and hugged him from behind.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Hm?” He slipped his hands over mine. “What?”
“Thank you for choosing to love me. You could’ve decided not to forgive me.”
“I don’t know if I had a choice,” he said, and when he realized how that sounded, he explained, “I mean that there’s no way I wouldn’t be able to love you. You’d once said that there are things you can’t escape from, no matter how far you go to get away from them, and we’ve got something connecting us that time and distance can’t break. Even after what happened back then, I couldn’t really commit to the idea of hating you. I still loved you the same, and that made life harder.”
“I wish I wasn’t so afraid,” I said.
He turned around and had me in his arms, and I pushed my face into his chest and let myself be drawn into his love. I held his face in my hands and kissed him, and he lifted me up by my thighs and swirled me onto the bed. I bounced on the mattress and Delos was between my legs, wrestling my pants off my hips, and my swollen cock sprung up from its restraint. He caught it in his palm and pulled his fingertips across the sensitive crests and waves rippling across its length to the ridge and taper of my tip. He let a gleaming band of saliva drip from his tongue onto my cock, and then used his hand to spread it across me until I glistened, and there was a wonderful tingling chill that came with it that seemed to make my cock pulse even harder until it was so incredibly stiff that I could hardly stand it. I needed to be released, but Delos took his time, pushing his lips softly against it, and my thighs, and then my balls. Sighing contentedly, he took deep breaths of me and I tilted my hips to move my cock with him, like the mast of a ship swaying in a churning sea, hoping to get him to just take me inside and relieve the pressure that was building up strong.
When he finally swallowed me down, I covered my mouth with my forearm and barricaded the moan before it could escape. The walls were thin; I could hear Rainor and Thomas’s muffled voices next door and knew they’d be able to hear me if I made a sound. I sank into the downy bed sheets like I was floating in a cloud as the pull of Delos’s throat closed around my cock, drowning me in bliss. Then I told him I wanted to please him too, that I wanted to taste him, and he moved on top of me with his cock over my mouth. I curled my tongue around his tip and pulled it along the underside of his shaft to his balls, then up to his entrance, and as I licked him there, I stroked him with my hand. He sucked me harder, murmuring as I filled his mouth, and I could feel his hole tighten every time I licked him or stroked him in just the right way. We were feeding each other with pleasure, trying to outdo and push the other to the next level, and when I couldn’t wait any longer, I murmured that I wanted him inside of me. He spun around and had my knees pushed back and ass up in an instant.
I held my thighs and he pushed his tip against me, his dragon shaft gleaming with slick precome in the lamplight. He entered with one fast jerk and then slowly sank his entire length into me. I couldn’t stop my eyes from fluttering back, and I bit the side of my wrist so hard I left a line of pink teeth marks. His eyes were locked to mine, searching deep, and I hoped he could see everything written in how I was looking at him, how much I wanted to be with him, and how hard I was fighting to just let go.
There was such deep and perfect pressure from his thrusts, and I took him to my chest and held him tightly, loving the comfort of his weight on me. Cold steam curled from our lips as we shared our breath, and the lines of sweat on Delos’s cheek turned to frost. I kissed him, licked the cold from his skin, and pushed my tongue against his. Held together, we were both rising towards our finish—I could feel his movements coming faster, straining harder, reaching even deeper than I thought possible. The perfect shape of his cock was heaven inside of me, and I was addicted to how he seemed to know exactly what my rhythm was, hitting just the right pace and just the right spot. I knew he was going to come soon, and so was I. His fingers pushed into my biceps, and his cock bulged, and I squeezed myself as hard as I could to keep him locked inside as he burst.
My cock went taut and erupted across his chest as my orgasm crashed through me, and then another, and another, driven by the intoxicating potency of his dragon seed.
He held me close for a while as we regained our breath, both of us too sapped to move. My body ached, and I was sore and satisfied. A minute later, the creak of a mattress came through the wall next to the bed, followed by muted groans. Delos and I looked at each other and laughed.
The next morning, I left with Oli to get him ready for his day’s lessons. We walked back to the Librarium, and I asked Oli if he wanted to show me the bakery he liked so much. He looked at me guiltily like he wasn’t sure if he was in trouble—the bakery was beyond the area he was allowed to explore, and I knew he snuck out of class to go there. I smiled at him and said, “I’d like you to show it to me,” and when he realized he wasn’t going to get in trouble, he grabbed my hand and pulled me along with the biggest grin on his face.
My heart fluttered as I stepped out onto the street that formed the boundary of the zone I’d arbitrarily told myself was safe, and with a few paces, I was in new territory. I’d hardly left the Librarium at all until now, and this felt almost as big a jump as the moment I decided to run away from home.
One step at a time,I told myself.
Oli was completely at ease. He led me through cramped alleyways and down streets, and he knew exactly where he was going. I told myself to ignore the little voice that wanted to scold him because he’d obviously spent far too much time getting to know these streets, but seeing just how happy he was to show me this place was enough to silence that nagging concern.
I bought us a freshly baked loaf of bread, along with a box of pastries for the others. We sat out front and ate two fruit pastries together, and Oli said that he’d only ever had a chance to try the bread since the owner would give him the imperfect pieces. He got strawberry on his cheek, and I licked my thumb and wiped it away for him.
“Oli, what do you think about Delos?” I asked.
“He’s nice,” he said, chewing on his pastry. “And he’s fun. Yesterday, we did air dives.”
“That’s good,” I said. “Would you like to see him more?”
Oli nodded, and then said, “Did you know him before you had me?”
“Yeah. I told you, we met coming here to Stonvale.”
“But he didn’t come with you.”
“No…”
Oli took a small bite, chewed slowly and thoughtfully. Then, with confidence that took me by surprise, asked, “Is Delos my papa?”
I looked at him, my heart pounding, but my expression still and calm. I reached over and took Oli’s hand. “Yeah. How did you know that, Oli?”
“I…just had a feeling,” he said, and then he smiled. “I could tell from the beginning.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How does that make you feel?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Good, I guess.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t able to introduce him to you sooner. To be honest, I never expected to see him again.”
“Because of our family?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“I want to keep seeing him,” Oli said. “Delos, I mean.”
I smiled, kissed him on the top of his head, and then tapped his nose with a frost-tipped finger. “I want that too. And there’s something I’d like you to do. Something that would make him very happy.”
I put my arm around him and whispered something into his ear, and he nodded profusely. I hugged him close, the both of us laughing together.
