by Chant, Zoe
That wasn’t cool. So it could jeer at him all through the fight, but he couldn’t say anything back.
Sky, Lindsay said. Fly. Get up into the air, where it can’t reach us. We’ll fire from the top down—maybe claw it, if we can.
He’d almost forgotten aerial maneuvers were possible for them. Good idea. I don’t know that it has a gun or anything else with a reach.
They spiraled up into the air, unleashing hell down beneath them in alternating bursts. Blue, white, blue, white, blue, white.
From below, there was that unearthly chopping sound again. The Mullen-thing’s laughter. It was even louder now than it had been before.
I have a bad feeling about that, Lindsay said.
The wings sprouted from the Mullen-thing’s back. They were enormous and leathery, a moth-like gray and brown in color, and they dripped with some kind of thick, clear fluid that sizzled as it fell on the ground.
It was acid. It was eating through the rock.
I hate everything about this, Boone said.
Lindsay grimly seconded that.
The Mullen-thing lifted off into the air. It was shaped different than they were—they were four-legged creatures built for flight and it was a two-legged, roughly human-shaped thing, its wing placement somehow awkward—but that didn’t seem to slow it down. It beat those wet, horrible wings slowly, in thunderous pulses, and hovered just as well as they did. Once it was aloft, it let out a piercing screech. A battle-cry?
The fight went on in the air. Boone thought they still had a narrow advantage here—the Mullen-thing could fly, sure, but it still had to get close to them to strike, and it was hard for it to hover and claw at them at the same time. Whenever it stopped to slash at them, it dropped a little. He didn’t know how much that would give them in the end, but it was better than nothing.
They both had a half a dozen claw marks on them, all dripping steadily with blood they couldn’t afford to keep losing. Lindsay had spent too much of her fire too early on, and now all she could manage were choky little blasts, short-range and weaker than before. Boone could feel himself getting to that point too: his chest felt like it was full of smoke, not fire. His wings ached from the constant hovering.
But they were wearing Mullen down. He was sure of it. The creature was moving more sluggishly than before, too, and its peripheral vision seemed more limited. Its attacks were wilder and less coordinated. It had been several minutes now since it had landed any kind of hit.
They were winning. They were paying like hell for their victory, but they were winning.
And then he heard the beating of dozens of wings.
Henry! Ursula!
But then the sound got closer. And with a horrible sinking feeling, he knew that those wings were not coming to their rescue.
The sound of them in the air was like wet laundry slapping on a clothesline. Not dragon wings.
Unchangeable wings.
They were flying down from the mountains surrounding the cove.
Mullen had led them straight to the Unchangeable’s home turf. And even with Eleanor’s warning, they’d taken the thing’s bait.
The Mullen-thing laughed again. “Run, if you want,” it said. “But we will always find you. You’ll turn on each other like you did before. We’ll find every last one of you until none of your kind is left, and then we’ll find all the others, all the other filthy shifters, and wipe them out. And then the humans and then the animals—until the whole world is clean. You can kill me, but you’ll never stop us.”
Boone could see them coming. They flew slowly, but they were traveling with the wind, and they would be here soon.
Take its advice, he said to Lindsay. Run. Go find Henry and Ursula, get them to take you with them when they leave. Maybe there’s something they can do, some way they can help you hide—
I’m not leaving you! she cried.
You have to. I’ll stall Mullen as long as I can.
Lindsay wasn’t having any of it. If you’re going down, we’re going down together. This isn’t just your decision, Boone. This is my city. I’m not going to leave it to these things. And you’re my—my whole heart, Boone. I’m not going to leave you either. She tilted back her head and issued a screeching mental call, crying out for Henry and Ursula, for other shifters, for anyone who could hear her. Telling the world that they were at the cove, besieged, and needed help. That an army was coming.
They might just run, Boone said. Running seems to be the general strategy. And we don’t even know that they can hear you at all.
I know, Lindsay said. But at least we tried. I feel better for trying.
So do I.
And if he had to die, he felt better for dying with her. He didn’t know that there was any point to continuing the fight. They had no chance now, none at all. They could try to stay alive for Lindsay’s reinforcements to arrive—if they would even come at all—or they could give in. He was tired and sore. All he wanted to do was lie down with her. To sleep in her arms, her human arms.
That dying desire sparked something in him.
Human. He was human. Human and dragon both.
The Unchangeable were only one thing. They could disguise themselves, but they couldn’t change their natures, not the way Boone and Lindsay could. They didn’t really know what it was like to be human.
In a way, neither did Henry and Ursula. Neither had Octavian (he’d had so little loyalty to his people, he hadn’t even really known what it was to be a dragon). Neither had Eleanor. They were all dragons first and foremost—they lived with other dragons, they had a secret dragon war to worry about. They weren’t part of the human world.
But he and Lindsay were. They were what Eleanor had promised they would be—something new.
New and powerful. That was what she’d said. What she’d prophesied.
Powerful.
In a war against change, they knew an incredible, total, physical and spiritual change better than anyone. They knew what it was like to have their lives overturned—and they knew what it was like to love that. They were everything the Unchangeable hated.
They kept on breathing fire at the Mullen-thing, but the fire was just a symbol. Henry had told them that much. What they really breathed out was change—that was what hurt their enemies.
So if they were really harnessing the forces of change, why did they keep thinking it had to look like fire? Why were they so married to this tradition, to this biological imperative? They’d already made biology into a total joke.
And they’d said they needed to shake things up.
He thought about Eleanor on the beach. Bleeding colors.
Lindsay, Boone said, as they watched the horde of Unchangeable fly towards them, I have an idea.
Chapter Twenty-Five
What Lindsay got from Boone in those fateful few moments weren’t words. Not really. In crunch time, with their lives on the line, he was still as much an artist as he was a soldier, and he thought in images.
With their minds in tune, that was no problem at all. It was like Lindsay was having a whole gallery’s worth of Boone’s paintings beamed directly into her mind. She saw what he saw; she felt what he felt.
She saw Eleanor dying under the boardwalk. It was easy enough to see how the monster had hurt her—it had hurt them too, after all. But Boone was focusing not on the blood but on the unearthly purple light that had drawn them down to Eleanor in the first place. What was it? What life force did dragons—or at least that dragon—have besides blood and fire? What magic had let Eleanor transform them?
More than that, what magic had she passed on?
Not prophecy. Lindsay was sure she hadn’t seen any of this coming.
But something. Henry and Ursula had known it. Hell, Eleanor had known it: she had promised her people that they would be extraordinarily powerful. Where was that power, and how could they get to it?
Nothing they hadn’t wondered before. They hadn’t had much time to experiment with whatever gifts E
leanor might have passed onto them. They barely knew how to be dragons, let alone super-dragons.
Some part of her wanted to give up. To fall down out of the sky and turn human again.
But you won’t, the dragon voice inside her said. It had an iron certainty that Lindsay had to admire. You will not give up on him, no more than he will give up on you. If you’re going to die, you’re going to die fighting, and you’re going to die together. You’ve never given up before in your life, and you’re not going to start today. Especially if today is your last day.
No. She wasn’t going to start today.
A wave of anger washed through her, revitalizing her. She paid attention to the images Boone was sending her, which had changed a little. Now he was trying to show her the two of them in bed, loosely tangled in her sheets. Her hair rumpled from sex. A pillow crease on his cheek.
We’re something wild, Boone said. They told us that. We’re something new. We’re the change the Unchangeable fear more than anything else, so why are we fighting them with the same old tricks dragons have used on them for generations? We have to have something else, something besides just outthinking them. Don’t you feel it?
Yes. It was something hard in the pit of her stomach, like a stone; something trapped in her chest, like a panicky heartbeat. Something she was holding onto that she needed to let go of.
But how could she learn to let go?
She had never liked the idea of giving up control. She had always wanted an organized, well-planned life—what she liked about wading into chaos was knowing that she could whip it into shape and straighten it out. She liked finding patterns in things that looked like messes. What was the pattern here?
Because there had to be one. There always was.
But sometimes you only found the pattern of the chaos from within the chaos. And just like that, Lindsay knew what she had to do—not to find her power, but to get to where she could recognize it. She needed Boone, who was better than anyone else at bringing her best self into focus.
She breathed out one final, sputtering gust of flame at the Mullen-thing, warning it to keep its distance until its reinforcements arrived, and plunged back down to the ground. She stepped back into her human shape. This time the change happened in a millisecond: she was human and she was dragon, and it was nothing at all to flip between the two. Like turning over a pillow.
She tossed her invisibility aside.
“Boone!” she called up into the sky. She couldn’t see him anymore, but she knew he was there. She could feel him in her heart. “Come down.”
She heard the enormous rustle of his wings as he joined her, and a second later, her Boone, her human Boone with his messy hair and his steady hands, was stepping out of the nothingness.
“So this is it, huh?” he said. He sounded rueful. “I did want one last kiss.”
He thought she had brought him down here to give up after all. He’d thought that, but he’d still come, even though it had to be against his nature to surrender. He’d come just so she wouldn’t be alone.
Lindsay shook her head. “We’re not having a last kiss. I intend to keep kissing you for a long, long time.”
He looked back up at the sky. The Unchangeable weren’t hiding themselves at all. Their gray-brown bodies, massed together, looked like an oncoming storm on the horizon. They couldn’t be too far away now. Minutes, maybe. “So what are we doing?”
“Relaxing,” Lindsay said. “Becoming what we are.”
She kissed him.
No, she couldn’t let this be their last kiss. Their last kiss needed to be when they were ninety, falling asleep together in bed. This was just a good kiss. She could taste the salt air on his lips, and she felt the unmistakable, overwhelming hunger of how he responded to her. He kissed her like he could never get enough.
The Unchangeable’s wings beat ever closer. Lindsay put her arms around Boone’s neck and went on her toes so she could reach him better. She turned her mouth against his jawline, pressing little kisses there. He stroked through her hair, saying her name over and over again.
It didn’t matter that the seaspray and breeze had left them damp and cold. It didn’t matter that a horde of monsters was pressing down on them. They were together. She could have made love to him right then and there, even with Mullen and all the rest looking down.
When they were together, they were unstoppable. Nothing was easier than giving into this.
She had become a dragon without meaning to, and then she had become a human when she’d stopped trying to, and she would become this, too. She would be the perfect weapon. This was just one more thing her body knew how to do.
There, some deep, satisfied voice said. She didn’t know if it was the dragon or just her whole heart, her whole soul. This is it.
“I’m yours,” Boone said. He brushed her hair out of her face when the wind blew it astray. “Whatever happens.”
“And I’m yours.”
It felt like something inside her had clicked into place, like two puzzle pieces had finally snapped together.
There was the pattern.
Together.
He felt it at the same time she did. They both knew what to do. This went beyond any kind of magic draconian telepathy. This was something else. Something deeper.
Boone held out his hands to her, and Lindsay laced her fingers through his. They held onto each other tightly.
And—together—they began to change.
This time, they went slowly, deliberately slowly. Lindsay let herself feel every instance of her skin hardening into dragon scales. She watched as her hands turned white and gold in Boone’s grip even as his own skin was turning a shining silver. She understood now that the only reason it had ever hurt was that she’d fought to stop it.
It felt wonderful now. This was a change she welcomed, one she was luxuriating in. She wanted the Mullen-thing and its army to see how totally she had given herself over to this mutation, this shift. She wanted them to watch the wings erupt from her back.
And aside from all that, she wanted to watch Boone. He was so beautiful like this. She could actually see the shimmer of gold coming off of his skin.
All her fear was gone. All her dread. She wasn’t certain they’d live—only the Unchangeable got to be certain all the time—but she was at least sure that they knew how to fight.
They rejoined Mullen where the creature still hung in midair. Its stony face was twisted into a look of unmistakable disgust, and Lindsay knew that it had seen everything she had wanted it to. It had been just as appalled as she’d hoped. Suddenly she felt almost sorry for the thing. There was so much beauty in the world that the Unchangeable were missing. It wasn’t just that they couldn’t grow or fall in love, it was that they couldn’t appreciate the jacaranda trees blossoming in the spring or the shifting colors of the sunset. They couldn’t even love the way the tide went in and out, lapping up against the shore and changing the shape of the beach. With so little to enjoy, no wonder they were vicious. No wonder they were horrible.
Lindsay had to fight them—everything she loved about the world was everything they hated and would destroy if they could—but she wished it could have been different.
Not that they would have appreciated anything being different.
“You are perversions,” the Mullen-thing said. “Abominations.”
Lindsay spoke, and this time, she knew Mullen heard them. She had made Mullen hear her. No. We’re just like everything else. We’re like everything except for you.
The Mullen-thing flinched back, recoiling in the air. “Stay out of my mind, dragon.”
She could do that. But she wasn’t staying out of the fight.
Now? she said to Boone. The Unchangeable were almost upon them.
Fire when you see the whites of their eyes, he said wryly.
Lindsay vaguely remembered that as some old wartime instruction for saving ammunition until you had a good, sure shot. Probably for the best. No matter how cool and calm
she felt now, it didn’t mean she had an unlimited amount of fight in her. She had already been down to the dregs of her wildfire.
So she’d take the advice, but it wasn’t going to stop her from a necessary nitpick: I don’t think their eyes have whites.
Boone smiled a draconian smile at her. It showed so many teeth that Lindsay got a visceral thrill out of how much it must have scared their enemies.
He said, Then now works.
They flew forward.
The word now rang back and forth between them like a bell.
At the sound of it, they both breathed out pure magic.
It looked like ribbons of light, Lindsay’s a pearly white and Boone’s the blue-black color of the sky at midnight. As the magic rushed out to meet the onslaught of Unchangeable, the two ribbons braided themselves together, making a shimmering fence in midair. It hung there, a glowing borderline.
The Unchangeable all pulled up short, unsure of themselves.
This place is protected, Boone said. He was pitching his voice in the same way she had pitched hers—he was drilling his thoughts into their minds. If you cross over, then you deal with us.
“We can deal with you easily,” one of them said.
Lindsay raised her head. Do it, then. You talk pretty big for someone still standing on the other side of the fence.
Do you know what will happen? Boone shot at her.
Nope, she said. Cheerfully enough, she thought, for someone who might be on the brink of death and disaster. I know what to do, but I don’t know what it does.
Good to know we’re both on the same page, Boone said, and the image drifted across to her of them kissing, her wrapped in his arms. For a second she could taste her own lips—his memory of them.
The Unchangeable launched themselves forward with a full-throated battle cry of a growl.
Lindsay and Boone’s ribbon wound tightly around them, holding them like a lasso.
Her heart was pounding. Her vision was going black at the edges like she was about to faint, but she didn’t have time to faint. They breathed out more magical light—this time it felt like Lindsay was scraping the very bottom of her soul to get up enough life for it—and this encircled Mullen too.