‘‘More to the point, you are my mate, but to ensure that you are not, for lack of a better word, poached by another, I must claim you. Physically. After which, you will accept me and the sept, and only then will you be safe from everything but lusus naturae.’’

‘‘What do you mean, poached?’’ I asked. ‘‘Lusus what?’’

He took a deep breath. I was momentarily distracted by the feeling of his leg pressed so intimately between mine, but managed to wrestle my mind away from that to what he was saying.

‘‘Wyvern’s mates are rare. They are born—or in your case, created—to be the mate of a wyvern.’’

‘‘And?’’ I asked, waiting for the penny to drop.

‘‘Any wyvern,’’ he said.

The penny hit the floor with the impact of an atomic bomb. ‘‘You mean I’m not your mate . . . I’m any wyvern’s mate?’’

‘‘Any wyvern who does not yet possess a mate, yes. There are four wyverns in the weyr . . . two of them are mated, two are not, although we’re not quite certain about whether or not one of the wyverns is still alive.’’

‘‘So there’s another wyvern out there who could zoom along and . . . what? Grab me for his own mate?’’

Gabriel looked vaguely uncomfortable.

‘‘What? The other wyvern isn’t a man?’’

‘‘No, he is, it’s just . . . it’s a long story, one which I really don’t wish to go into right now, but the blue wyvern was challenged and overthrown by another wyvern, the true wyvern, so now you could say there are two blue wyverns.’’

‘‘You dragons are very strange,’’ I said, apropos of nothing.

‘‘And then there’s Kostya,’’ he said, his gaze a thousand miles away.

‘‘That’s the guy you want me to rob?’’

‘‘Yes. He claims to be the wyvern of the black dragons, but as such, they do not exist.’’

‘‘Great. So there are now three other possible guys on the snatch-and-grab list?’’ I asked.

He hesitated. ‘‘Possibly four, if Chuan Ren is not confined to Abaddon after Aisling threw her there.’’

‘‘Pregnant Aisling tossed a wyvern into Hell?’’ I asked, astounded.

‘‘She is a Guardian,’’ he said with a slight smile, his gaze returning to the here and now. ‘‘A very powerful one.’’

‘‘I guess so. But none of that explains why any of those possibly four other wyverns would want to pick me to be their mate. I mean, you and I . . . well, we kind of hit it off.’’