Zarek
I woke with no blood in my mouth and no bodies on the floor.
That was the first thing I noticed, before I noticed her, before I noticed the gold beneath my hip and the cold morning gray at the cave mouth. There were always bodies. The last time the curse had taken me clean — really taken me — I had come back to my human shape inside the practice yard with thirty-two of my own court dead around me. Hugh had counted them while I sat on the stones with my hands shaking and my mouth full of the taste of them.
There were no bodies today. There was only the girl.
She was lying on her side a few feet from me, sleeping. Then, even as I looked, she was not sleeping. Her eyes opened. They were dark and quiet and entirely too steady for someone who had just woken up in a dragon's
