Where Sleeping Dragons Lie (Skeleton Key) by Cristina Rayne, Skeleton Key Page A

more powerful and impressive than his earlier demonstration shot
out from Taron’s maw, instantly heating the surrounding air. Her lungs felt as
though they were being scorched when she involuntarily gasped.
    Her arms trapped once
again within Taron’s fist, Briana tried to protect her face from the heat by
pressing it closer against the smooth scales of a large index finger. Then the
brutal heat was suddenly gone, and another huge hand formed a cover over her
head, plunging her into darkness.
    “Speak of the Devil and
of course he comes,” Taron snarled. The sound of vigorously flapping wings reached
her ears even through the insulation of the hands around her, followed by a
violent jerk upwards that made her teeth snap together painfully. “Looks as
though that trip to England will be a tad bumpy, after all.”
    With both the skin on
her face and the lining of her lungs feeling tight and burning with pain,
Briana could only lay the side of her head against a few of his scales, squeeze
her eyes shut, and groan miserably, wondering if her face now resembled a boiled
lobster. She was also keenly aware of the skeleton key in her pocket digging
sharply into her upper thigh, reminding her mockingly of her agreement to help
Taron get back to his home world.
    Considering she had just
been in the middle of a freaking fight between two monstrously enormous dragons ,
she had come out of it relatively unscathed. How close had she come to becoming
a wet, chunky stain in the concrete by the huge boulder that other blue dragon
had thrown at her? She was damned lucky that she had come out at the other end
of a battle that included literal rivers of fire and rocks the size of a house
with nothing worse than what would probably amount to the equivalent of a
sunburn.
    Now would be a good
time for me to wake up , she thought with a choked laugh.
    Too bad the pain in her
body pretty much guaranteed she wasn’t asleep.

CHAPTER EIGHT
     
     
    For the first hour of the
flight, Briana endured sudden, stomach-churning drops and lightning fast
ascensions that made her nearly pass out with the added g’s of force. She even
thought she heard the crackling roar of Taron shooting fire from his mouth a
couple of times, which meant that they had yet to shake the blue dragon from
their tail.
    Then after a long while
of steady flying, Taron carefully maneuvered her a bit higher until she could
see a portion of one fiery-colored eye through a small gap between a couple of
the fingers he had cupped over her head for protection.
    “Are you all right?” he
rumbled over the sound of his wings flapping and the whistling of the wind as
they sliced through the air.
    “I am now that the horribly
bumpy rollercoaster ride seems to be over,” she shouted, unsure if he could
even hear her puny voice. How keen was a dragon’s hearing, anyway? “Was the
dragon that attacked us what’s-his-name that came looking for you in the bookshop?”
    “Cabak,” Taron growled,
the utter loathing in his voice practically tangible.
    Yep, he could hear her
just fine, which was a relief. At least if they could talk, it would take her
mind off her discomfort and the surge of claustrophobia she was beginning to
feel at being unable to move her arms and legs with very little light shining
through between his fingers.
    “I’ve managed to lose
him for now,” he said, “but that means we’ll have to take the long way around
to the castle.”
    “Won’t that be the first
place he goes looking for us?”
    “Only the Hildebrands know
that I own it. I used a fictitious name when I purchased it and haven’t stepped
foot in it since Cabak entered this world two years ago.”
    “Should we expect more
dragon-shifters to come after us?” Briana asked worriedly.
    “No—at least for the
moment. Until Cabak appeared before me, there were no other dragons present in
this world.”
    “That you know of,” she
said. “Just look at how many old myths about dragons we have all over